William Dalrymple, who wrote so magically about India in ‘City of Djinns’, returns to the country in a series of remarkable essays.Featured in its pages are 15-year-old guerrilla girls and dowager Maharanis; flashy Bombay drinks parties and violent village blood feuds; a group of vegetarian terrorists intent on destroying India’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet; and a palace where port and cigars are still carried to guests on a miniature silver steam train.Dalrymple meets such figures as Imran Khan and Benazir Bhutto; he witnesses the macabre nightly offering to the bloodthirsty goddess Parashakti – She Who Is Seated on a Throne of Five Corpses; he experiences caste massacres in the badlands of Bihar and dines with a drug baron on the North-West Frontier; he discovers such oddities as the terrorist apes of Jaipur and the shrine where Lord Krishna is said to make love every night to his 16,108 wives and 64,732 milkmaids.‘The Age of Kali’ is the fourth fascinating volume from the author of ‘In Xanadu’, ‘City of Djinns’ and ‘From the Holy Mountain’.
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William Dalrymple. The Age of Kali: Travels and Encounters in India
The Age of Kali. Indian Travels & Encounters. William Dalrymple
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Age of Kali
Postscript
In the Kingdom of Avadh
The City of Widows
Warrior Queen: The Rajmata of Gwalior
Postscript
East of Eton
The Sad Tale of Bahveri Devi
Caste Wars
Postscript
Sati Mata
Two Bombay Portraits
Finger-Lickin’ Bad: Bangalore and the Fast-Food Invaders
At the Court of the Fish-Eyed Goddess
Under the Char Minar
Parashakti
At Donna Georgina’s
Up the Tiger Path
Postscript
The Sorcerer’s Grave
Imran Khan: Out for a Duck
Postscript
On the Frontier
SEEK HELP FROM ALMIGHTY GOD
BETTER ALONE THAN IN BAD COMPANY
Blood on the Tracks
Benazir Bhutto: Mills & Boon in Karachi
Postscript
Glossary
Index
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
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To JOCK
who saw the point long before I did
.....
Everyone I talked to that week in Patna agreed on one thing: behind much of Bihar’s violence lay the running sore of the disintegrating caste system.
One of the worst-affected areas was the country around Barra: the Jehanabad District, to the south of Patna. There, two rival militias were at work: the Savarna Liberation Front, which represented the interests of the high-caste landowning Bhumihars, and the Maoist Communist Centre, which took the part of the lower castes and Untouchables who farmed the Bhumihars’ fields. Week after week, the Bhumihars would go ‘Harijan hunting’, setting off in convoys of jeeps to massacre ‘uppity Untouchables’, ‘to make an example’; in retaliation, the peasants would emerge from the fields at night and silently behead an oppressive landlord or two. The police did little to protect either group.
