The Himalaya looms large in so many
aspects of contemplation – the highest point on our planet, set in the midst of
the Eurasian continent, the source of many of the world’s greatest rivers – the
Himalaya is perhaps as much a feeling as it is a geographical feature; an epistemic
phenomenon as much as an epochal phase of geological time. It’s both a barrier
and a bridge. Both bleak and barren, as well as vertiginously verdant, and, of
course, full of cultural complexity and diversity. The Himalaya is a heartland.
Its fascination is as multifarious as the shifting shades of sunlight passing
across the white faces of its eternally snow-clad peaks.
I’m not sure when I first became
aware of the Himalaya, nor what the original source of its saturation into my consciousness
was, but it was an interest which seems to have seeped deep inside my soul. I’m
certainly not the first person to have succumbed to its allure, nor will I be
the last. The indomitable permanence of this mountain range seems to have
echoed within me, reverberating as far back as I can recall. Like the Himalaya
itself, my interest in it – geographically, physically, culturally,
environmentally – has always seemed to have been there. I suppose I must have
first seen and heard about it on television programmes and in Hollywood films,
such as The Man Who Would Be King (1975), starring Sean Connery and
Michael Caine. I certainly read about it in adventure stories – I remember being
struck by one which I found in a children’s anthology about the first ascent of
Annapurna, though I’ve long since forgotten who it was written by. And, of
course, I clearly remember being taught about the Himalaya in terms of the
geological processes of its formation in geography lessons at school. Indeed, I
liked nothing more than drawing sectional diagrams illustrating how the
Himalaya arose from the processes of continental drift, plate tectonics,
subduction zones, etc. Attempting to imagine how innumerable strata of hard solid
rock could bend, buckle and crease under pressures which exert merely millimetres
of slow movement over immense tracks of time – millions of years in the making
– shaping and sculpting itself through the corrosion and erosion of the
elements into a magnificence and beauty that is simply awe inspiring.
Fossilised sea shells found at the top of Mount Everest. My jaw agape and my
mind agog at the unfathomable immensity and longevity of it all.
Later on, when studying
anthropology at university, I remember reading about The Political Systems
of Highland Burma (1977) in Edmund R. Leach’s book, first seeding a
fascination with the human cultural aspects of the Himalayan region, an
interest which has been extended more recently by James C, Scott’s The Art
of Not Being Governed (2009). These two books look at the smaller
communities who have largely lived beyond the reach, if not necessarily
completely beyond the notional bounds of state control – both a concept and a
geographical region now referred to as ‘Zomia’ (a term originally coined by
Willem van Schendel, derived from the common Tibeto-Burman root linguistic term
for ‘highlander’), something which has been much contested and debated within
academic circles in recent years.
The geography of the Himalaya has
clearly shaped the societal forms as well as the histories of the various
polities which have settled there and the cultural distinctions which have
evolved to unite or divide them. The topography, the climate, and the extremes
of altitude that some of these places attain, for the peoples who live there,
have certainly moulded and defined who they are and how they see themselves, as
well as how they have interacted with various interlopers, traders and invaders,
who have strayed acquisitively into their remote territories over the
centuries.
The library shelves devoted to the Himalaya
abound with a wealth of travelogues written over the last hundred years or so by
individuals who have sought to explore the region for all variety of reasons –
personal, political, economic, and scientific – all equally fascinated by the
terrain and the peoples: they recount the challenges of climate and altitude
encountered in scaling the highest peaks, simply “because they are there”;
intrigued and enchanted by the religion, the customs, and the kaleidoscope of
cultures found in the valleys folded between the Himalayan massif. Books by
travellers such as Sarat Chandra Das’s A Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet
(1902), Ekai Kawaguchi’s Three Years in Tibet (1909), Heinrich Harrer’s Seven
Years in Tibet (1952), and the many travelogues of the botanist Frank
Kingdon-Ward (to name only a handful). Many of whom have been compendiously
chronicled by writers with interests entirely akin to my own, historians such
as Charles Allen and Peter Hopkirk. More often than not, though, the people who
write about this region do so because they have been there and because they
have fallen under the spell of this magical place.
There is also a rich historiography
mapping various geopolitical perspectives of the region over the last fifty or sixty
years which is worth surveying in greater depth too. Owen Lattimore’s Inner
Asian Frontiers remains an influential work, having lit the way when it was
first published in 1940. Alistair Lamb’s several highly notable works, along
with Dorothy Woodman’s Himalayan Frontiers (1969), and Alex McKay’s Tibet
and the British Raj (1997), seek to triangulate the rivalries between
British-India, Russia, and China, laying down the more recent historical
background to current geopolitical disputes, problems rooted in the colonial
era which remain as areas of on-going contestation, particularly along the
borders between China and India, today. A topic which Bérénice Guyot-Réchard’s
more recent Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962 (2016)
re-examines – a book which, having heard Bérénice talking on this subject, sits
high up on my current wish list of books ‘to read.’
In many ways, in human terms, the
Himalaya can be viewed as a node or a nexus point, especially in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Seen as both a natural physical as well as a
social and political boundary, it is a place where civilisations and empires
met. But, like all boundaries and borders, despite its seemingly vast
dimensions, the Himalaya was and still remains a fluid and permeable place –
simultaneously constrained by its physical aspects, it channels human movement
whilst conveniently shielding the accessibility it provides, making it a hard
terrain to police and control. It’s often a case of geography and climate
thwarting the arbitrary ‘red lines’ drawn on maps; an immovable, mountainous
barrier which confounds attempts to define human jurisdictions; a place where
both notional and actual delimitations – of necessity – have ebbed and
flowed with the seasons, naturally moving with the earthly elements rather than
in accordance with official edicts.
The Himalaya isn’t a landscape
shaped by people; however hard they might strive to impose such conformities. Rather
it’s a place which ultimately people mould themselves to fit into – at least,
those who live there most successfully seem to have learnt how to do so – but
this hasn’t yet stopped the wider human world of bureaucratically-minded nation
states located along its peripheries from trying. Perhaps it is simply a case
of an unstoppable (yet all too mortal) force meeting an immovable (and
comparatively immortal) object, but carrying on regardless, unbowed by the
futility of its own actions and endeavours in such an unforgiving and
ultimately unyielding terrain. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why it
captivates me. It is a vast region of both great heights and unfathomable
depths. A place of great confluences and contradictions.
The Himalaya is a region where
people contend with enormous challenges. It’s a place where we can witness how
geological extremes have shaped the landscape and the environment, and, in
turn, where we can see how the extremes of landscape and climate have shaped
human beings. In a similar manner to the way in which I am fascinated by island
lives bounded by the oceans, so too I am intrigued by the ways in which
mountains mould the lives of those who choose to live (and/or travel) amongst
them, either by following or bisecting the parallel contour lines of their topographies.
As yet, I have only touched the
outermost fringes of the Himalaya myself, when in 2010 I travelled up into the
foothills of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands in Sichuan. But it was a tantalising first
taste which has left me wanting to return to range even further into the more
majestic heights of Tibet itself, as well as to the closely allied altitudes of
neighbouring Bhutan and Nepal. On that first trip I took Michael Palin’s Himalaya
(2004) as my amiable textual travelling companion, having already watched and
enjoyed his series of travel programmes which the book chronicles. But, the
next time I am able to venture back to this remarkable region, I know I shall
be taking a heftier – but no less amenable – tome as my ‘vade mecum’: – Ed
Douglas’s Himalaya: A Human History (Vintage, 2021).
This is a wonderful book. From the
first page you can tell that it was written as the fruit of a lifetime’s worth
of reading about, as well as travelling in, the region it describes; hence the
‘human’ element of this history is exactly that, a personal and a personable
view. It is written with a lovely fluid elegance; reading its first few
chapters it feels like the reader is trekking through the Himalaya with the
author as their own personal guide. Ed Douglas has a beautifully well-honed style
of writing which effortlessly imparts information unobtrusively alongside his
own anecdotes of travel through the region, and vice versa. It’s a subtle tour
de force in the craft of good writing. The kind of book which invites
revisiting and sustains re-reading. It combines the best of first-hand travel
writing and historical narrative in well balanced measures of each, using the
lightest of touches to combine individual immediacy with the broader, big-canvas
sweep of time and place – because, after all, to attempt to distil and narrate
the history of such a vast region and all its different peoples, a region as
old and as diverse as the Himalaya, is no mean feat.
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| Kathmandu, Nepal - c.1910 |
Clearly it is a terrain within which
Douglas is comfortably at home, roaming and writing as a mountain climber himself,
having first travelled to the Himalaya in 1995, he has spent much of his life
writing and reflecting upon mountaineering, having edited a number of
well-known climbing magazines, as well as the prestigious Alpine Journal
– the invaluable archive of which I am continually raiding (it is available
on-line here). Douglas’s love of Nepal shines through Himalaya: A Human
History, and, in many ways, it is Nepal which acts as a pivot to his
telling of the many stories which are rooted in the complex interrelations of
the broader Himalayan region, a vast area which extends out as much to the
Karakorum and the Kunlun as it does to the borderlands of Central Asia and the foothills
of India and China, as well as high up into the heart of the Himalaya itself.
Tibet, naturally, is the other main
anchor point of the book. Tibet’s apparent isolation in effect transmuting
through time into a magnet attracting Western adventurers, travelling both
individually and in the name of empires, seeking to bridge borders through
trade and conquest, making famous names for themselves along the way. From
George Bogle and Thomas Manning to Francis Younghusband, by way of various
Indian ‘pundits’, as well as a wide scattering of European and American ‘plant hunters’,
and a host of tenaciously persistent missionaries, outsiders were forever
attempting to follow in the footsteps of local Himalayan porters and the long
established postal and trade routes of caravans, hoping to reach the much
fabled ‘forbidden city’ of Lhasa – historical seat of the Dalai Lamas. Douglas
introduces and discusses these Western interlopers in depth, but he also
balances them with an eye to the lesser-known local actors – both those in
positions of power as well as those with more lowly and locally-based agency – who
both helped and hindered these attempts to open up the Himalaya to the insatiable
voracity of an increasingly globalising world.
Likewise, the later chapters of Himalaya: A Human History do not shy away from contemporary issues affecting the region – from the decades of political unrest in Tibet since 1950, to the growing concerns relating to the escalating environmental degradation now being caused by the modern-day mass-tourism overload of trekkers queuing up to reach the summit of Mount Everest; as well as the fractious on-going border disputes which have dogged diplomatic relations between China and India from the colonial era right up to the present day. Douglas peoples this latter part of his narrative with his first-hand interviews with Tibetan prisoners of conscience, individuals who have devoted their lives to fighting for Human Rights at great personal cost, and with the Sherpas of Nepal, who perform a vital yet dangerous role in facilitating wealthy foreign trekkers, as well as those people (such as the journalist, Liz Hawley), who have long resided in and watched both the slow changes and the rapid transformations which have overtaken the region in recent decades. This element of contemporary reportage lends Douglas’s book a sense of journalistic immediacy which most modern history books tend to fall short on in their closing pages.
Nowadays, a lot of academic attention is most
frequently directed toward the strategic and geopolitical importance of the
Himalaya, but taking a broader scope we see that the influence of the region
permeates much deeper into the complex processes of cross-pollination within
our shared world. Early on, a significant part of the outside interest in the
Himalaya was rooted in botany. Economic botany was an area of scientific
interest which burgeoned with Western Imperial expansion from the Eighteenth
Century onwards. Botanical Gardens were set up across the British Empire and
these institutions were a huge motor in driving the machinery of empire. They
sponsored journeys of exploration in which botanists, as well as some very notable
missionaries with penchants for plant collecting, sought out new species while
studying the effects of climate, altitude, soil chemistry, etc. Collecting and
cataloguing ‘herbarium’ (dried plant) specimens, surveying vast regions in
order to map plant locations, enabling them to return in different seasons at
different stages of growth in order to study the lifecycles of plants, as well
as collecting their seeds at the most feracious moment. These seeds were sent back to the botanical gardens as well as commercial plant nurseries, who
then capitalised upon them; refining and sending different strains to different
parts of the globe which could in turn propagate and capitalise further from
producing and selling various crops in greater quantities, or processing
derivatives from their fruits, fibres, oils and sap.
Rubber and tea were, of course,
perhaps the two most transformative in terms of both local ecologies and global
economies, along with the cinchona plant, from which the anti-malarial quinine
could be derived. Whole landscapes were biologically re-engineered as a result –
both in the Himalaya, in terms of the successful introduction of tea plants
from China – most notably in the hills around Darjeeling; and at home, in terms
of many of the flowering plants which we now unthinkingly accept as
quintessentially English – such as primulas and rhododendrons, which can be
found in the gardens of ordinary terrace houses as well as those of grand stately
homes across the UK. Taking the Himalayan blue poppy (meconopsis) found
in the forbidding terrain of the Tsang-po River region as a motif for all of
this activity, Douglas devotes a chapter to the fascinating endeavours of these
so-called ‘plant hunters’, who in many ways were perhaps the individuals who most
successfully managed to come to know the true essence of the Himalaya in a manner
which allied both the human and the natural worlds. One of my favourite books
on this topic is E.H.M. Cox’s, Plant Hunting in China: A History of
Botanical Exploration in China and the Tibetan Marches (1945).
Douglas’s Himalaya: A
Human History is a perfect introduction and an overview of a huge subject
area – both geographically and historically – an excellent book for orientating
oneself before setting off on more focussed and localised routes of enquiry. In
addition to some of the titles which I have mentioned above, some admirable companion
tomes to read on a regional trek of the Himalaya would have to include Sam Van
Schaik’s excellent, Tibet: A History (2011), and Andrew Duff’s, Sikkim:
Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom (2015), as well as Charles Allen’s, The
Prisoner of Kathmandu: Brian Hodgson in Nepal 1820-43 (2015). Travelogues
still continue to be written about the region by contemporary writers too.
Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake (1983) is one of my favourites,
recounting his journey hitching rides through Xinjiang and Tibet en route
home to India when he was a young student. Perhaps the best of late, though, is
Colin Thubron’s highly evocative prose, retelling a very personal journey he
made, following the pilgrims walking the sacred ‘Kora’ around Mount Kailas in, To
A Mountain In Tibet (2011). An excellent forum for keeping up-to-date with contemporary
writings upon a diverse array of topics relating to the Himalaya is via the ‘reading
lists’ which are regularly collated by the website: High Peaks, Pure Earth
(see here). This website is a fantastic resource which has been hugely supportive
and very helpful to me in my research over the years.
Mountains are, of course, the most essential and characteristic element of the Himalaya. And mountains seem to hold a special sort of fascination, a fascination which has written itself its own special chapter in the history of exploration (as well as several chapters of Douglas’s book). The Himalaya has often been described as “the third pole.” In terms of mountaineering, the region is home to some of the world’s most legendary and much fabled peaks. Climbing mountains whether for sport or science, either individually or as a part of an expedition team, is an immensely challenging activity which requires careful planning, reconnaissance, training and organisation. It provides an elemental test of skills and wills, testing limits both physical and psychological. I’m not a mountain climber myself, but ultimately, it seems to me that the desire (or perhaps the need) to climb mountains is a siren call to the soul. It’s not always the achievement of reaching the summit which is the most important goal. But still, the lure of scaling mountain peaks, scarps, ledges and ridges is perhaps found in the fact that they are otherwise inaccessible places which inspire a unique sense of fascination and wonder quite unlike that of other remote points on the globe.
While researching for my PhD,
leafing through the Foreign Office files at the National Archives in Kew, I
have often found myself inadvertently distracted into perusing the many notes
and letters relating to the British expeditions to Mount Everest (Chomolungma)
in the 1920s; forever fascinated by the speculation as to whether or not George
Mallory and Sandy Irvine disappeared perhaps having reached the summit, or
perhaps having fallen just short of it. There are many books both by and about mountaineers
from Mallory and Irvine’s day to the present, one of the most recent – which I
have duly added to my ‘to read’ list – is Mick Conefrey’s, The Last Great
Mountain: The First Ascent of Kangchenjunga (2020).
My fascination for this region is a fascination which is shared by many and one which is unlikely to fade from prominence any
time soon. Like a shimmering glimpse of Shangri-La – in many ways, though it might well be an all too predictable cliché to
say it: the Himalaya is like a vast and limitless library – a geographical and
historical labyrinth – both real and actual, as well as a labyrinth which has
been transmuted into texts and maps, photographs and films. It is a place which
once entered, enters the soul and never leaves. A region of both the earth and
the mind, a region which we will never exhaust through exploration or idle
dreaming.
~ * ~
Read my reviews of Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya, by Lachlan Fleetwood (Cambridge University Press, 2022) in The Alpine Journal, Vol. 126 (2022)
And of The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape, by Peter Bishop (The Athlone Press, 1989) on GoodReads
~ * ~
A Playlist of Ed Douglas's Interviews with Various Climbers
Read an extract from Himalaya: A Human History, by Ed Douglas
Ed Douglas's own Top 10 Books about the Himalaya
Ed Douglas talks to Sherpa Ang Tsering, member of the 1924 British Everest expedition
In Search of Shangri-La in a Lost Himalayan Kingdom, by Ed Douglas
Himalaya: The Human Story - The Compass: BBC World Service
Himal SouthAsian | 01 March 2023
~ * ~
Also on ‘Waymarks’
Betrayal in the High Himalaya – Sikkim & Tibet
Retracing the Silk Road
Reviews of Some Recent Histories of Asia
Language & Landscape in West China & Tibet
Peter Hopkirk – Historian of the "Great Game"
Mountain Climbing by Mistake
'Other Everests' - A New Research Network
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