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shom's review
4.0
This is one of the book, that touches stranger tides and amalgams a throng of strangers in a bunch, bringing East, West and the middle in between, face to face with each other.
The year is 1510, half-a-century after Vasco da Gama made his first landfall in India, and plundered throught the kingdom of King Zamorin. Bengal is under the rule of the benevolent sultan Hussain Shah, where bhakti movement is spreading through the masses, yet the royal council is drowning in treachery. Four persons set out on individual journeys in the quest of enlightenment and bags of treasures. One travels to the end of the world, another meddles with the fates of kings, the third loses all he had and the fourth finds the ‘city of love’.
City of Love, tells the story of these four connected lives.
The protagonists in City of Love are Fernando Almenara, a Castilian trader fleeing persecution in his native land, Daud Suleiman al-Basri, a Moorish pirate driven by his desire for wealth and power, Chandu, a Shaiva-Tantric novice searching for salvation that eludes him, and Bajja, a tribal girl seeking spiritual freedom in 16th century India.
It is Bajja who stumbles upon the ‘city of love’, a metaphysical kingdom around which the book revolves. It is a land that exists in the realms of human consciousness nurtured by love, all possible kinds of it.
The kingdom, or rather the concept of ‘Prem Nagar’ or ‘Ashqabad’ that the book dwells upon, is central to the unconventional mysticism preached by the sufi, the baul, the tantrik and the freewheeling European Christian mystics, who converged on India at that time, giving birth to a parallel religion that flourished outside the dogmatic confines of Islam, Hinduism and European Christianity.
The book ends with a burst of faith (bhakti) and love after spanning diverse religious terrains, including tantrik rites.
Fantasy books, science fiction and classics shapes this enticing epic fantasy book.
A must read!
The year is 1510, half-a-century after Vasco da Gama made his first landfall in India, and plundered throught the kingdom of King Zamorin. Bengal is under the rule of the benevolent sultan Hussain Shah, where bhakti movement is spreading through the masses, yet the royal council is drowning in treachery. Four persons set out on individual journeys in the quest of enlightenment and bags of treasures. One travels to the end of the world, another meddles with the fates of kings, the third loses all he had and the fourth finds the ‘city of love’.
City of Love, tells the story of these four connected lives.
The protagonists in City of Love are Fernando Almenara, a Castilian trader fleeing persecution in his native land, Daud Suleiman al-Basri, a Moorish pirate driven by his desire for wealth and power, Chandu, a Shaiva-Tantric novice searching for salvation that eludes him, and Bajja, a tribal girl seeking spiritual freedom in 16th century India.
It is Bajja who stumbles upon the ‘city of love’, a metaphysical kingdom around which the book revolves. It is a land that exists in the realms of human consciousness nurtured by love, all possible kinds of it.
The kingdom, or rather the concept of ‘Prem Nagar’ or ‘Ashqabad’ that the book dwells upon, is central to the unconventional mysticism preached by the sufi, the baul, the tantrik and the freewheeling European Christian mystics, who converged on India at that time, giving birth to a parallel religion that flourished outside the dogmatic confines of Islam, Hinduism and European Christianity.
The book ends with a burst of faith (bhakti) and love after spanning diverse religious terrains, including tantrik rites.
Fantasy books, science fiction and classics shapes this enticing epic fantasy book.
A must read!
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