Dear Reader,
I am not a fan of summers: the heat tends to reduce me to a bunch of nerves. So, now that summer has set in for good, I am trying to live in colder climes in my head by reading books about mountains. An author who has proved to be an invaluable companion in this endeavour is Parimal Bhattacharya. A bilingual writer of non-fiction in English and Bengali, Bhattacharya had the job I always wanted—he was a professor of English at the Government College in Darjeeling, West Bengal.
Two of his books, No Path in Darjeeling is Straight and Bells of Shangri-La: Scholars, Spies, Invaders in Tibet, are a magic-carpet ride to misty mountain roads and rain-soaked pine forests. While the setting is romantic, the people Bhattacharya talks about lead anything but romantic lives. No Path begins with a person, who was purportedly writing the history of Darjeeling, dying by suicide in a hotel room in the hill town: perhaps the relentless rains, the humidity, the endless fog, and the isolation got to him, Bhattacharya writes.
Bells of Shangri-La tells the story of another man from the Darjeeling hills, a tailor named Kinthup (1849-1915), who despite having the exciting job of a spy, died alone and forgotten. Employed by the British to glean topographical information about Tibet, he spent four years on an arduous mission to prove that the Tsangpo river of Tibet and the Brahmaputra of India are one and the same.
Where others failed, Kinthup succeeded, doggedly making his way through uncharted mountains in freezing cold and rain, braving bandits and slave-traders while gathering vital cartographic information with rudimentary equipment. Yet, when he returned to report his findings about the river, he was derided as a madman. The wife and son he had left behind had died. This desi James Bond did not get honoured with riches and accolades. Instead, he wasted away unseen, his life’s work rubbished by the British.
Kinthup’s story would probably have been different if he had not been a poor “native”. Western explorers become heroes, immortalised in books and movies. Take, for instance, the British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett (1867– disappeared in 1925), who led expeditions to find a lost civilisation in the Amazon rainforest. He was lionised in his day—his Amazon diary inspired Conan Doyle’s classic thriller, The Lost World, and Rider Haggard’s stories. American journalist David Grann’s 2009 book, The Lost City of Z, is based on his adventures. Its movie adaption—a rather tepid drama where everybody seems to be sleepwalking—is on Amazon Prime. Where screen adaptations go, Grann’s other book, Killers of the Flower Moon, has admittedly received better treatment.
Grann’s latest, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, is again a story of tumultuous voyages set against the backdrop of imperialism that will remind one of Melville and Conrad. But more important than its sensational murders, mayhem and cannibalism are the questions it raises about the project of the empire—the lies it perpetrated about the colonisers and the truths it suppressed about the colonised people, who, like Kinthup, were ultimately mere playthings in the imperial scheme. Read the review of The Wager by Ajay Saini here.
I feel grateful to Bhattacharya for giving Kinthup the recognition that eluded the explorer in his lifetime. And I also hope that Bells of Shangri-La gets the readership it deserves. Grann is a bestselling author in the West but a writer like Bhattacharya is hardly known, even in India. Pick up the book, you won’t be disappointed.
I will come up with more ways to beat the summer blues next time.
Till then,
Anusua Mukherjee
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