William Dalrymple’s Trans-Global ‘Spinal Tap’
Travel Blog • Eva Holland • 06.22.10 | 10:41 AM ET
Writing in The Daily Beast, William Dalrymple looks back on a nine-month book tour that, from the sounds of it, almost warrants a book of its own. Here’s an enumeration of his companions on the trip:
[A] smoky-voiced Tamil diva who is struggling to keep alive a dying sacred song tradition from the temples of Tamil Nadu on the southern tip of India; six Sufi mystics from a shrine in the badlands of Pakistan who sing the poetry of an 18th-century saint in a strangely haunting falsetto, and who between gigs have been fending off the Pakistani Taliban from taking over their home town; five dope-smoking Bauls, the minstrels of Bengal who travel from village to village teaching tantric mysticism through their songs; and a dancer and part-time prison-warder who is believed in Northern Kerala to be the human incarnation of the God Vishnu; he travels with his side-kick, a small-town taxi driver who has a second career as a theyyam make-up artist and drummer.
Dalrymple’s “City of Djinns” recently landed on our list of the 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time.
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