A01=Kirin Narayan
adolescence
anthropology
ashram
Author_Kirin Narayan
autobiography
biography
bombay
brother
Category=DNBA
Category=NHF
Category=QRVK
childhood
coming of age
eastern philosophy
enlightenment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
family
female authors
gender
gods
growth
guru
hinduism
holy men
india
indian women
journey
memoir
mumbai
nonfiction
pilgrimage
religion
seeking
siblings
sister
sociology
spiritual quest
spirituality
youth
Product details
- ISBN 9780226568218
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 Sep 2008
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In 1969, young Kirin Narayan's older brother, Rahoul, announced that he was quitting school and leaving home to seek enlightenment with a guru. From boyhood, his restless creativity had continually surprised his family, but his departure shook up everyone - especially Kirin, who adored her high-spirited, charismatic brother.A touching, funny, and always affectionate memoir, "My Family and Other Saints" traces the reverberations of Rahoul's spiritual journey through the entire family. As their beachside Bombay home becomes a crossroads for Westerners seeking Eastern enlightenment, Kirin's sari-wearing American mother wholeheartedly embraces ashrams and gurus, adopting her son's spiritual quest as her own. Her Indian father, however, coins the term 'urug' - guru spelled backward - to mock these seekers, while young Kirin, surrounded by radiant holy men, parents drifting apart, and a motley of young, often eccentric Westerners, is left to find her own answers.Deftly recreating the turbulent emotional world of her bicultural adolescence, but overlaying it with the hard-won understanding of adulthood, Narayan presents a large, rambunctious cast of quirky characters.
Throughout, she brings to life not just a family but also a time when just about everyone, it seemed, was consumed by some sort of spiritual quest.
Kirin Narayan is the author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels; Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon; and the novel Love, Stars, and All That. A former Guggenheim fellow, she is professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
