Sacred India (Lonely Planet Pictorial) (Hardcover)

Amazon.co.uk Review
Sacred India is a close-focus view of spirituality in India, with a very God-is-in-the-details approach. Lonely Planet tackles a bafflingly large subject with admirable grace in this loosely structured, accessibly sized coffee-table book. A florid painting of Ganesh, a hundred capped heads bowed in prayer, weather-beaten flags whipped in the Himalayan wind: all are diverse glimpses of India's spiritual cultures. India's four major religions, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism and Buddhism are gathered in an impressionistic collage of vibrant photos and text. Christianity, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, as well as tribal religions and gurus are also covered in smaller sections. The book's photos are lavish in colour and pungently evocative--but decidedly not opulent. They excel at the intensely personal (a lotus flower, a turban-swathed camel trader, a Muslim woman reading the Koran), but their zoomed-in style sometimes falls short of capturing the sense of awe and grandeur we like to associate with religion. Sacred India offers brief glimpses of a wide-ranging and multi-coloured land; but unlike the fable of the blind men and the elephant, the picture formed in the mind's eye from these richly textured details will be greater than the sum of its parts. --Jhana Bach

Synopsis
From a humble postal worker performing puja for the safe passage of a parcel to people who believe they are gods, religion suffuses every aspect of daily life in India. This book explores the presence of the divine in the mundane, through breathtaking photography and the equally intriguing s