Spiritual portraits, colliding worlds define India

Years ago, Goldman Sachs predicted that India's gross national output would quadruple in 10 years and, by 2050, overtake that of the United States. Today, India is on the verge of besting Japan to become the world's third-largest economic power. Which is why, despite staggering poverty, its consumption of cars and crude oil promises to soar to unimaginable magnitudes.

But what is India, exactly? Who are its people? As William Dalrymple shows in his strikingly colorful new book, to be Indian is to inhabit strangely colliding worlds, a profusion of identities with sharply defined regional variants. Nowhere is this more evident than in the country's spiritual life.

``While the West often likes to imagine the religions of the East as deep wells of ancient, unchanging wisdom,'' Dalrymple writes, ``much of India's religious identity is closely tied to specific social groups, caste practices and father-to-son lineages, all of which are changing very rapidly.'' Bollywood may try to persuade us that the Hindu epics are neatly homogenous -- that there is one `` `national' Ramayana myth'' -- but, in reality, Indian legends are interpreted in radically different ways depending on where you look in the country. Indeed, the historian Romila Thapar has argued that it is precisely Bollywood's (or colonialism's) model of ``syndicated Hinduism'' that threatens to drive India's self-contained cults to extinction.

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