Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India By William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury, £20

India abounds with millions of strange, suffering and spiritually insane lives. William Dalrymple has chosen to focus on nine such lives in this book. The idea, he explains, came to him on a trek to Kedarnath in 1993, as he was swept along by “a great sea of Indian humanity” — “farmers, illiterate labourers... urban sophisticates…all rubbing shoulders like something out of a modern Indian Canterbury Tales.” While Dalrymple was used to the idea of such a ragtag assembly of Indian pilgrims, he wasn’t quite prepared to meet someone as fascinating as Ajay Kumar Jha, a young naga sadhu. A sales manager with Kelvinator and an MBA from Patna University, Jha renounced his affluent career to embrace the life of an ascetic.

Sixteen years ago, Dalrymple might have been baffled by these revelations, but, as he confesses, he “was to become used to” such phenomena in the course of his travels for this book. So, when Dalrymple introduces someone like Tapan Sadhu, alias Tapan Goswami, erstwhile householder and now a “feeder of skulls” living in the crematorium in Tarapith, his sketch is informed more by dispassionate curiosity than by a sense of wonder at oriental exotica. Dalrymple avoids cheap thrills, offering his “collection of linked non-fiction short stories” as a way of understanding the anomalies that underlie religious experience in a rapidly changing India: “Does India still offer any sort of real spiritual alternative to materialism, or is it just another fast developing satrap of the wider capitalist world?”

Ironically, the chief weakness of Dalrymple’s otherwise excellent book owes to the lack of a common thread of argument that could have made the work structurally coherent. In its present form, Nine Lives makes up an important compilation of narrative journalism, but falls short of being a book. In his bid to “keep the narrator firmly in the shadows” and privilege the voice of his subjects, Dalrymple has often ended up documenting in great detail without commenting on the material closely enough. As a result, it seems as if Dalrymple believes in everything that is told him: seldom does he allow a healthy scepticism to complicate the tales of miracle, and sometimes of self-aggrandizing wonder, that his subjects tell him. Dalrymple may have conceived this work as an Indian Canterbury Tales, but he fails to come anywhere close to the chiselled irony of Chaucer’s narrator.

Consider one of the themes to which almost all of Dalrymple’s storytellers return: the power of religion and rituals to break down walls between human beings, high- or low-born, rich or poor, male or female. For instance, Hari Das, the theyyam dancer from Kannur, claims to be transformed into a god once a year. Such is the force of the divine possession that even Namboodiri Brahmins prostrate themselves before a Dalit like him, who works as a well-digger and jail warden in his human form. Like Hari Das, Rani Bai the devadasi, and Mohan Bhopa, a village bard and faith healer, are all too cannily aware of their unique distinctions that earn them, however briefly, the reverence of social superiors. While Dalrymple’s sojourn with Rani does hint at the fragility of her self-esteem, his account of Hari Das performing before an enthralled audience is a bit precious. Dalrymple seems rather too willing to give credence to Hari Das’s unfailing ability to be divinely possessed.

Yet Dalrymple is not beyond asking sharp questions, and can be quite unsparing at that. “The Daughters of Yellamma”, a chapter on the devadasis of Belgaum, begins with Rani Bai, a seasoned practitioner of this traditional sex trade endorsed by religion, candidly talking about the occasional, but real, pleasures of her work. “Who does not like to make love,” she asks, especially with “a handsome young man… who is gentle”? It is evident from the playful chemistry between Dalrymple and Rani Bai (who, at one point, calls him fat) that a bond of trust had grown between them. Dalrymple’s long conversations with Tashi Passang, the Tibetan Buddhist monk who had taken up arms to defend his homeland, or his interview with a Jain nun, hint at unspoken, and perhaps unspeakable, truths. Such silences are rich with possibilities. In contrast, his meeting with Lal Peri Mastani in a Sufi shrine in Sehwan ends up being a fairly standard account of the decline of syncretic religions in the subcontinent. The final chapter on the bauls of Birbhum is the most tedious, where everyone seems to be saying pretty much the same things over and over again.

There are some strange gaps in Dalrymple’s narrative. Tapan Sadhu’s story, as Dalrymple tells it in the introduction, does not make him sound quite like the man who reappears in “The Lady Twilight”. Dalrymple never returns to his earlier reference to Tapan’s plan of giving up tantra and moving to New Jersey to live with his sons.

However, there is a more serious omission. It is understandable that not many travel-writers have the gift of speaking a host of Indian languages. But it is not clear why Dalrymple does not, even once, acknowledge his interpreters in the text. His silence suggests, quite deceptively, a direct link between him and his subjects sans any mediator. In that case, does the narrator, in spite of Dalrymple’s best intentions, remain “firmly in the shadows” after all?