Kaleidoscope world

William Dalrymple in the ruins of the Zafar Mahal, the summer palace of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, in Old Delhi. Dalrymple says the city changed his life. Photo / Getty Images

Before you drink from a skull, you must first find the right corpse.

Thus begins The Lady Twilight, a chapter in British writer William Dalrymple's latest book, Nine Lives, which profiles the multi-faceted spiritual paths of nine people in India.

The collection opens with the story of a lovely young Jain nun slowly starving herself to death, an ascetic who carries a peacock fan to gently brush the path ahead so she will never hurt a living creature. The Lady Twilight, on the other hand, depicts the Bauls, devotees of the tantric goddess Tara, who appears to have an insatiable appetite for blood sacrifice.

To meet Tara's followers, Dalrymple, who has lived near New Delhi for more than 20 years, had to enter her holy place, a cremation ground populated by mad and marginalised people at Tarapith in Bengal.

"Tarapith is an eerie place, with a sinister reputation," he writes.

"In Calcutta I had been told that it was notorious for the unsavoury tantric rituals and animal sacrifices which were performed in the temple. Stranger things still were rumoured to take place after sunset..."

"They were a wild bunch," laughs Dalrymple on the phone from New Delhi.

"In many ways that was as bizarre as it gets, feeding the skulls and all that kind of thing. In another way, it's an amazingly sane solution to the problem that exists all over the world. In New Zealand and Britain, we would probably lock up our mad people and give them Prozac or electric shocks, or they'd end up like so many people begging outside supermarkets. In India, they go to the cremation ground, which isn't a bad solution."

Dalrymple admits that when he first went to Tarapith in 2003, he did feel unnerved.

"I thought it was very eerie. I arrived in the evening and didn't know anyone there and there were all these mad people loping around with their skulls. I had the impression it was a very crazy place. Then, revisiting it again for Nine Lives, going with someone who was friends and neighbours with these people was a completely different experience. There was an odd domesticity."

Dalrymple's friend at Tarapith was Manisha Ma Bhairavi - Ma - a woman in her 60s, "quietly spoken, with gentle, vulnerable eyes". As they sat in her little hut talking about evil spirits, curing skulls and Tara's lust for blood, her dreadlocked partner sat nearby, a radio glued to his ear, calling out the cricket score for a test match between England and South Africa.

Tarapith may have been strange and other-wordly but it was relatively small-scale. Try the Baul religious music festival at Kenduli for mass hysteria, Dalrymple suggests.

"It makes any other religious ceremony in the world look like a Rotary Club dinner - a gathering of 25,000 shrieking madmen."

As for the blood sacrifices, usually goats, demanded by Tara, "That doesn't go on so much any more," he says. "But I went to another big tantric temple in Assam two weeks ago and they sacrificed a buffalo. That's a serious sacrifice. There was a huge ox head sitting on the floor of the goddess' chamber. My kids were horrified. I'm inured to it now but I was intrigued to see how alarmed my kids were."

The Nine Loves project was a departure for the Scottish-born writer whose previous books - In Xanadu, From the Holy Mountain, and the magnificent historical volumes White Mughals and The Last Mughal - have generally dealt with aspects of the Muslim world.

"I had an unformed idea on doing something on Indian religion, particularly on Hinduism, which is an area I had ignored," he says.

"Most of my work in India has been on Indo-Islamic culture and on the Mughal north-Indian culture. It's a huge gap in my writing and Hinduism is obviously the faith of the majority of people here. I suppose the breakthrough came when I set off to do the article on the devadasis [the prositute women dedicated to the goddess Yellamma]. That started life originally in a commission from the Bill Gates Foundation to write about Aids in India.

"Finding that thing of doing just one single person rather than writing about a faith or an institution - just having one person tell their story - was how I ended up writing that piece. It helped frame the book, give it a form and a backbone. After that, the whole thing came together."

The story of Rani Bai, a woman "dedicated" to Yellamma by her parents when she was just 6 years old, is a tragic one. Her two daughters have died of Aids, and Dalrymple later found out that she also had the disease. Her story, told in the chapter The Daughters of Yellamma, describes how the devadasis were once highly revered in a practice which dates back many centuries.

In today's India, the attitudes have completely reversed. Dalrymple's portrayal of Rani Bai as he sits with her in a tea shop, the men "undressing her with their eyes ... loudly speculating at the relationship she might have with me, her cost, what she would and would not do", is devastating.

"Of all the stories, that was the saddest," says Dalrymple. "But what was lovely about her was she was always struggling to give herself dignity and status. She was incredibly optimistic and yet everything was being shut down around her."

How does he, a white British man, manage to win the trust of the people he talks to?

"It just takes time. There were all sorts of other interviews which began and which" - he laughs - "ended very quickly. To get those nine people who were prepared to talk, I interviewed hundreds who didn't feel like telling their personal story. There was an amazing story about a jihadi from Kashmir who'd been a middle-class boy, he'd been at college and then he had seen his mother and aunt raped by Indian security forces. He went off across the border to Pakistan and had been radicalised and ended up in some of the al Qaeda camps in Kandahar.

"He then changed his life, revolted by the violence he saw and he became a Sufi in Sri Lanka. I tried really hard with him but it just didn't work out. He wasn't willing to give the kind of detail which one would need for the story."

Dalrymple, the son of a baronet and a distant relation of Virginia Woolf, would seem an unlikely candidate to end up living near New Delhi in a rented farmhouse with his wife, artist Olivia Fraser, their three children, and a goat called Gilbert. He first visited the Indian capital when he was 18, during his gap year between school and Cambridge University's Trinity College, where he studied history.

"I didn't particularly want to go [to New Delhi]," he recalls. "It was an accident. I wanted to go to Iraq and dig on a Pharaon site but that fell through, so I ended up going with my best friend, who'd got a job in India."

Dalrymple spent nine months working in a Mother Teresa home then returned to England to complete his degree.

"I wrote a book called In Xanadu when I was 22 and I worked for six months on a paper and thought it was not for me. Then I came back. I love it. It's the capital - it's got all the things you need - book shops, concerts, libraries, social life, media. It's the New York of India. There are times of screaming frustrations with this place but it has remained a fixation and it changed my life."

City of Djinns, Dalrymple's book about his first year of living in New Delhi with his new wife Olivia, introduces the lucky reader to his Sikh landlady, Mrs Puri, whose business empire included the Gloriana Finishing School, India's first etiquette college.

Dalrymple and his wife soon discovered Mrs Puri was made of stern stuff when their flat's water supply was cut off. He writes, "There is no water in our flat this morning, Mrs Puri."

"No, Mr William, and I am telling you why."

"Why, Mrs Puri?"

"You are having guests, Mr William. And always they are going to the lavatory."

Despite such obstacles, the Dalrymples and Mrs Puri remain great friends, but sadly their regular driver during that year, Mr Balvinder Singh of International Backside Taxis, another memorable character in City of Djinns, has vanished, says Dalrymple, probably gone back to the Punjab.

Dalrymple's gift for bringing colourful people and places to life in his books is balanced by an impressive ability to come to grips with the swirling politics of the Indo-Pakistani region. In the extraordinary collection of essays in The Age of Kali - Kali being the final stage of the Hindu cosmology, "an epoch of strife, corruption, darkness and disintegration" - he reports on issues troubling India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan and he ventures into the border area of the Swat Valley, now jihadi territory.

Among adventures described in The Age of Kali, he gets permission, at great risk, to visit a Tamil Tiger camp in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and discovers their training video library includes Predator, Rambo and The Magnificent Seven. In Bangalore, he uncovers the reasons behind a farmers' uprising against Kentucky Fried Chicken, and investigates a murder at India's oldest public school. His writing is staunchly non-judgmental but, occasionally, he slips just a little - most often when he describes the shrieking conversation at middle-class parties, as in Two Bombay Portraits:

"Hi-ee!"

"I love your Dior sunglasses."

"Thanks. Oh golly - I'm so hung over!"

In the book he also travels around with Imran Khan during the former cricketer's campaign trail and reveals some hair-raising examples of Pakistan's multiple levels of corruption - which leads into a fascinating piece written in 1994 on the imperious Benazir Bhutto and her Macbeth-like family. In her bedroom, Dalrymple discovers Bhutto's favourite reading material was Mills & Boon and she was a sentimentalist fan of songs like Tie a Yellow Ribbon Around The Old Oak Tree. The "other Benazir Bhutto," he writes, "is a very different kettle of fish."

When I spoke to Dalrymple, he was about to travel to Afghanistan to continue research into his next project, a history of the First Anglo-Afghan War, which started in 1839 when an army of 16,000 East Indian Company troops marched into Kabul. They were completely trounced, with only one British soldier surviving.

"They marched into Afghanistan on the basis of sexed-up intelligence. It was a completely unnecessary war and the Afghans turned on them and one single Brit managed to get out," he says. "In that area you very much get a sense of history repeating itself over and over again. I have just been in the archives in Lahore and the headings could have come straight out of a modern newspaper: 'Wah-habi Rebellion in Swat', 'Tribal Insurgency in Baluchistan'."

He can no longer visit the Swat Valley in Pakistan's north-west border. It is now full-blown Taleban land.

"That was such a gorgeous area, I spent many happy weeks trekking there but it's now a major militant centre, I'm afraid," he says. "I have been back there but I don't feel comfortable, no. You take your life in your hands when you go there.

"In that whole area people are incredibly hospitable but they've been fiercely radicalised by the changes in the region's politics over the last few years - and remember we have British and American troops raining drone missiles down on their relations not far away. They have very good reasons to be angry against the West."

As he said, it's history repeating itself over and over again.

* William Dalrymple is a guest at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 12-16; see writersfestival.co.nz.