JOIN USThere are very many fascinating facets to the Himalayas. The world’s highest mountain range has often invoked images and feelings of tranquillity, silence, peace, magnificence and most of all, challenge. But the experience to a traveller or a resident of the Himalayas is largely personal, says writer Ruskin Bond.
Mountain peaks are simply there, serene and impervious to your love or hate. They will be there long after everybody is gone, he says, in the preface of the book Himalaya: Adventures, Meditations, Life, an anthology of stories, essays, musings about the Himalayas.
Over the years, many books and essays have been based on the Himalayas, and yet the enthusiasm and appetite for knowing, understanding the many aspects about the mountain range, is unending.
Edited by Ruskin Bond and novelist Namita Gokhale, the anthology is as fascinating as the mountains are. Himalayas, the mountain range, has offered a diverse range of experiences to people as varied as travellers, explorers, field biologists, scientists, farmers, residents, philosophers, pilgrims and nature lovers.
The book, therefore, is split into three segments — adventures, meditations and life.
Adventures, the first segment of the book, opens with a travel account of Fa-Hien, the Chinese Buddhist monk who travelled from China to India and Sri Lanka in AD 399-412. The essays that follow this are set in chronological order. One of the priceless gems included in this segment is the report of a route survey from Nepal to Lhasa, done by Pundit Nain Singh and his brother, who were employed by the British to conduct a secret survey of Tibet.
Of the many essays that follow include the ones by Heinrich Harrer, Austrian explorer and climber, from his famous book, Seven Years in Tibet; mountaineer Edmund Hillary’s account of his ascent to Everest, the world’s highest mountain peak; and British mountaineer Frank S Smythe’s musings about his travels through the Valley of Flowers.
English mountaineer George Mallory writes about his preparations for Everest during his 1921 reconnaissance trip to Everest. In 1924, during an attempt to climb Everest, Mallory and his partner Andrew Irvine disappeared on the North-East ridge, barely 800 feet from the summit. His body was found 75 years later. Was he the first to climb Everest? The answer to this would never be known.
In 1996, Jamling Tenzing Norgay, son of Tenzing Norgay, who summited Everest along with Edmund Hillary, made a successful attempt at Everest. Even as he reflects about this ascent, he dwells upon moments of his father’s famous climb that remains well etched in history. The first segment also includes an essay by traveller and writer Mark Twain from his book Following the Equator: A Journey Round the World.
In 1973, novelist and writer Peter Matthiessen travels to the Himalayas along with field biologist George Schaller. For Matthiessen, it was a personal journey in search of the elusive snow leopard, and to recover from the loss of his wife to cancer. His essay from his book The Snow Leopard forms a part of the Meditations segment of Himalaya.
This segment also includes essays by Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda, British army officer, explorer and spiritual writer Francis Younghusband, and author and religious scholar Andrew Harvey. The selection in this segment includes an excerpt from Hindi travel writer Rahul Sankrityayan’s biography on Swami Haridas, titled Ghumakkad Swami.
The third segment of the book, Life, opens with Ruskin Bond’s account of a night in a Garhwal village. Life in the mountains is not easy, he says. “Living in the mountains is not a romance for everyone. Wresting a living from the stony calcified soil does not leave much time for poetry and contemplation,” he says.
Travel writer Bill Aitken’s excerpt from his book Footloose in the Himalaya makes for an interesting reading, as he goes through myriad details of his sojourn through the pilgrim centres of the Himalayas.
The Life segment also includes an excerpt from former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s book, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru. He talks about his time during his stint at Dehradun Jail and how he gets to see so many creatures, creepy crawlies, birds and animals, including reptiles. “I came in contact with animals far more in prison than I had done outside. In prison I was grateful for their company,” he says in his musings on prison life.
The anthology is a delightful collection of writings from the deep past and the present that veritably take you up the mountains. And the musings are not merely about the beauty of the mountains, but extreme difficulties in the attempts at climbing some of the magnificent peaks in the Himalayas, reflective moments in writers’ sojourn through the mountain ranges, and life itself in these precipitous parts. A beautifully produced book, this anthology should definitely be a part of everyone’s personal library.
Himalaya
Edited by Ruskin Bond
& Namita Gokhale
Speaking Tiger
2016, pp 444
Rs. 799