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Literary Review
TRAVEL
Sounds of silence
LAKSHMI KANNAN
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Pack this book into your bag when you head for the Himalayas.
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Riding the Himalayas; Keki N.Daruwalla with photographs by Ashok Dilwali, Niyogi Books: New Delhi 2006, Price not stated.
First of all, what a frighteningly apt cover for this adventure! It shows the vehicle Scorpio as a tiny speck, winding its perilous way through treacherous bends, a fathomless gorge on the right, and to the left, craggy, towering mountains bearing do
wn from their intimidating height. What happens when an intrepid poet and writer joins a team of car rallyists, wildlife experts and photographers on a car trek that covered the Himalayas from the Siachen glacier to Kibitho, the easternmost point?
You get a book like Riding the Himalayas with an immensely readable narrative, sweeping up political history of the regions, along with the apocryphal stories and legends that cling like moss on some of the historic sites along with
the flora and fauna. All with his hallmark humour ranging from the friendly, the wry, to the stingingly wicked.
Authentic sources
An earnestly undertaken research takes us back into authentic source materials such as the Himalayan chronicles, 19th century travel literature, Himalayan Journals by Joseph D. Hooker, 1885, A Dictionary of Hinduism, B
uddhist Monks and Monasteries of India and others. The book disabuses any notions one may have about coffee-table books being top-heavy with dazzling pictures and watered-down copy smacking of touristy spiel. This paperback edition, however, restores the nice, old-fashioned virtues of travel taken as an inward journey, an education, if you will.
Ladakh and Kashmir, Garhwal and Kumaon, Nepal and Sikkim, Bhutan and the Eastern Himalayas — each has stories to tell. For instance, we get to know that the conflict between Sikkim and Nepal was largely due to the British. Claude White, then the Political Officer in 1899, stripped the Sikkimese king of his powers and the Gurkhas lost no time in trying to erase and deface the very history of Sikkim written in the Peminogtchi Monastery by the Lamas. How they wrote on sheets of Tibetan paper, and then painted them black to resist decay and how the plundering Gurkhas later ruthlessly used these sheets to roof their sheds as recounted in Hooker’s Himalayan Journals makes disturbing data. Meanwhile, little Bhutan is tucked a
way within its own time warp, marking its Year of the Water Sheep (2003) in a lunar calendar that has 360 days but no names for months!
Inevitably perhaps, the Daruwalla becomes the ‘voice’ of the adventure, but he functions under other sensitivities. He seems to fluctuate between a commissioned author’s need to articulate on behalf of his team and a certain reticence that pulls him back, wanting to lapse into a silence so congenial for the quietude of mountains. Quoting the lines of the seasoned traveler Marco Pallis, “There are perfections about which the only eloquence is silence” (Peaks and Lamas, Cassell & Company, London, 1939), he reluctantly puts pen to paper.
In much the same way, Daruwalla effects a certain distance while recounting the oft-repeated myths, legends and apocryphal stories, the beliefs and superstitions feeding the minds of a credulous local population. Running along the myths and legends are the many strands of faith, given the multiculturalism of India and its porous borders.
If the hallowed places of Badrinath, Arunachal, Pashupathinath temple in Nepal, and the haunting picture of the reclining Vishnu at Budhanilakanta Temple near Nepal leave a mark, the Buddhist trail is no less pervasive. The crew visits Lumbini, the birthplace of Shakyamuni (Siddhartha Gautama) and gets to see Kapilavastu. The thread of narrative follows the convoluted course taken by what is now identified as the old order of Tibetan Buddhism that believed in monastic retreat. Ancient gompas abound in the bleakest and icy corners of the Himalayan region showing Ashok Dilwali’s deeply textured photographs of young monks tucked away in monasteries. Kohima and Shillong bring them to Christian land with Nagaland and Mizoram having the most Christians (99 per cent). The picture of the Cathedral at Kohima is beautiful.
Stunning pictures
Ashok Dilwali’s pictures are stunning. Although his name is associated with mountain photography, his photographs of people and of sculptures are equally evocative. The picture of Maitreya Buddha leaps out of the page and outside, the mountains Annapurna from Pokhra, Kanchenjunga from the Tashi Point bathed in the gold of sunrise, the icy majesty of Sudarshan Peak from Gangotri, the blazing sunset over the Rapti stay with us long after we close the book. Pen meets picture in a rare photograph captioned “Turbulence meets serenity at Gangotri.” Look for it.
The concluding page has an imaginary description of what the Himalayas must have looked like 50 million years ago. The reader is recommended to visualise this for him/herself. Even with its diminished proportions, the Himalayas can be a humbling experience. Reclaiming his right to move towards a silence of the mind, Daruwalla remarks “you are in the shadow of some extraordinary presence.”
The next time any of us travel to the Himalayan region, we would do well to pack this book into our bags.
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