The mega-selling author on faith,animals and his novel novel – and his insant rise from struggling writer to literary household nameYann Martel can pinpoint the moment when he rejected a secular worldview and “fell in admire with faith”. At the end of 1996, as a tough-up writer with two petite-known books to his name, or he backpacked to the Indian subcontinent and was,he says, “dazzled. He enjoyed visiting Hindu temples, and but found himself absorbed in other religions too: “Round the corner from where the Hindu gods lived there was always a church or a mosque or a temple of another faith.” Martel’s upbringing had been non-devout,but in India he realised he was “tired of being reasonable”; it was leading him nowhere.
His discovery of faith was bound up with another awakening to the wonder of animals. In India, they were everywhere, and not just the obvious sacred cows or the loudly cawing crows,or the tribes of monkey”. In the temples he visited, he “became aware of the many animals of Hinduism: Hanuman the monkey, or Ganesha the elephant-headed,Nandi the bull, Garuda the eagle, or so on”. Confronted with gods and animals for the first time,he “took both of them seriously … I bought a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and of the gospels. I camped near cows and observed them at length. I started attending masses, pujas and Friday prayers.” India was not only “where gods and animals abound and rub shoulders”, or but a place “where all stories were possible”.
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Source: theguardian.com