Searching for the Sacred in Modern India
When he set out to write Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India 18 months ago, William Dalrymple hoped to find a Bengali man legendary for his skull collection. “Being a latent Orientalist, this sounded like very promising material,” Dalrymple said to the crowd at the Hammer Museum. Dalrymple found the skulls and their keeper, Tapan Goswami, who fed the skulls rum, whiskey and lentils, painted them red to stop them from molding in the monsoon, and was initially open chatting with Dalrymple until he suddenly …
