Grotesque Lands: What Earlier Visitors Saw

Before it became "Shangri-La" to the world, Hill it seems, the Himalaya was the land of the grotesque. The earliest Western descriptions of the Himalayan region are, to say the least, unsatisfactory from an ethnographic point of view. Herodotus, the Greek historian of 5th Century B.C., thus described the goings-on in the Tibetan desert:."Great ants in size somewhat less than dogs, but bigger than foxes throw up sand heaps full of gold as they burrow. A warlike tribe north of all other Indians tries to steal it by filling their bags with sand and riding away at their best speed. Then the ants rush forth in pursuit…if it were -not that the Indians get a start while the ants are mustering, not a single gold gatherer would escape.".Only a little less bizzare, the Chinese Bud-dhist monk Hsuan-Tsang in the mid 7th Century made the following "report" on Nepal:."The climate is icy cold, the manners of the people are false and perfidious. Their temperament is hard and fierce, with little regard to truth or honor. They do not know the value of time and justice, and have not learning, but they are much skilled in the arts. Their body is awkward, and their appearance is ungainly and revolting.".Of the Kashmiris, Hiuen Tsang reported that "they are light and frivolous, and of a weak, pusillanimous disposition.".The first European account of Nepal comes from a Capuchin monk, Father Greuber. In 1661, he passed through Tibet and Nepal on his way back from China to Europe via India. More than a little disoriented, this is what the priest had to say:."There is another custom in this country of monstrous cruelty. If a sick man is near to death and no further hope of his living is entertained, they take him outside away from his house into the fields, and there throw him into a ditch already full of dying men. He there remains exposed to the inclemencies of the weather, without consolations of religion nor pity they leave him to die; afterwards his corpse is given to birds of prey, wolves,dogs, and other similar beasts to eat. They are convinced that the only monument of a glorious death is to find a resting place in the belly of living animals.".Next, the itinerant Father sets his sights on the fairer sex:."The women of this country are so ugly that they resemble rather devils than human beings. It is actually true that from a religious scruple they never wash themselves with water but with an oil of a very unpleasant smell. Let us add that they themselves are not pleasanter, and with the addition of this oil one would not say that they were human beings, but ghouls.".It must have been upon reading "ethnographic literature" such as this that Sylvain Levi, one of the most famous observers to visit Nepal in the 20th century, noted that "science gained almost as little as religion" from the 60 years presence of the Capuchin monks in the Himalayas. They apparently succeeded in converting no one.