Whose Himalaya is it?

In the Philadelphia Museum of Art is an 18th-century cloth painting that tells a unique story of Himalayan indigeneity. Measuring 14 feet long, the painting depicts a pilgrimage to Gosaikunda, a lake almost 4400 metres above sea level that is regarded as holy by Hindus and Buddhists, especially those belonging to the Tamang ethnicity. The painting is a cartographic representation of the pilgrimage to Gosaikunda from Kathmandu: the stupas and pagodas of the city give way to steep cliffs and finally the holy lake. Featured in the painting are aristocrats, pilgrims, ascetics, merchants, soldiers and porters, and women in their finery. Gods bow in reverence to the three streams that flow into Gosaikunda – perhaps a recollection of the lake’s mythical origins.

Anybody who’s been to Gosaikunda will marvel at the fact that the painting correctly depicts the Bhairav Kund and Saraswati Kund, smaller lakes that the waters from Gosaikunda flow into before becoming part of the Trishuli river. But beyond such topography, the painting also represents how the world appeared to indigenous communities living in the Himalaya – and in the Subcontinent. True pictorial representation of the landscape was regarded as secondary. “Seldom, if ever, does nature come to occupy the foreground,” writes the art historian B N Goswamy. The depiction of landscape is that of a “brief illusion of space, of planes being established in a methodical if not quite scientific manner.”

Instead, Southasian landscapes were imagined from a more cosmological perspective, wherein sacredness and temporal realities were conjoined even in political imaginations. As the historian Kyle J Gardner has shown in The Frontier Complex, pre-colonial borders between Ladakh and Tibet were shaped by local markers based on “cosmogeographies” that earmarked spaces for elemental deities, in what has been called “spiritual territorialisation”. Indeed, the differing perceptions of political boundaries in the Himalaya were one of the contentions that led to war between the East India Company and the Gorkha kingdom in 1814. The specifics of control of space – and subsequently the landscape – differed from settlement to settlement, based on political, spiritual and also commercial allegiances.

Part of imperialism’s lasting legacy are such artworks stored away in a museum across the world, far from the people to whom they belong.

Such indigenous modes of seeing are rarely found in contemporary Western popular writing about the Himalaya. Seminal new works have been published since the days of the scholars Tucci and Fürer-Haimendorf, early doyens of Himalayan studies, when Tibetan Buddhism was regarded as the lens through which Himalayan communities’ indigenous asymmetries and practices could be explained. What is particularly irksome is that the corpus of knowledge surrounding the Himalaya, especially that authored by indigenous scholars, has been steadily growing, yet Western narratives continue to reflect a limited worldview. In the Guardian’s 2016 list of “Top 10 books about the Himalayas”, not a single Southasian – or Himalayan – writer was represented.

Consider the landmark work by the political scientist Rahul Sagar and his team in building on the travels of the 18th-century gosain-monk Pran Puri. As Sagar has written, Pran Puri was a traveller par excellence, who travelled as far as Russia, Iraq and Oman, but whose feats were overshadowed first by him being an urdhwabahu, or an ascetic who had vowed to keep his arms raised at all times, then by political compulsions to keep his role as a carrier of diplomatic messages between Calcutta and Kathmandu and Lhasa quiet. Pran Puri was also misrepresented as a fakeer when he was in reality a gosain, a wandering monk who often engaged in trade and military matters. In fact, British officers began to disguise themselves as gosains soon after, but Chinese officials grew suspicious of such espionage and cracked down on these traditional channels of communication and trade. As Edward Said once wrote about colonial explorers, “Was there ever a native fooled by the blue or green-eyed Kims and Lawrences who passed among the inferior races as agent adventurers?”

Finally, with the British encouraging proselytisation in the Subcontinent and denouncing Hindu esoteric practitioners such as sanyasis and gosains, “Pran Puri’s austerities became evidence of ‘fanaticism and superstition’, and his travels ‘for forty years’ over ‘tens of thousands of miles’ became an ‘object of pity and disgust’”. An incredible bit of Himalayan history was thus overshadowed by colonial interpretations of the Subcontinent. This is a pointed reminder of the indigenous histories that have been buried beneath the weight of subjective colonial-era accounts.

Colonial conceptions of the Himalaya persist in the modern day, not just through popular narratives that emphasise colonial histories of the region but also in our own sacred imaginations of the Himalaya. One example is that of Kailash. The historian Alex McKay’s Kailas Histories: Renunciate Traditions and the Construction of Himalayan Sacred Geography shows that while Hindu traditions long regarded Kailash as the metaphysical home of Shiva, and Tibetan traditions suggest the mountain turned sacred less than a millennium ago, the physical mountain in Tibet gained prominence as the most sacred place of Hinduism only in the beginning of the 20th century. As McKay writes:

Most significant [in the modern conception of Kailash] was a British colonial official [Charles Sherring, deputy commissioner of Almora and in-charge of the Gartok trading post] trying to increase revenue in his obscure Himalayan district, and his construction was advanced by a self-promoting Swedish explorer [Sven Hedin] glorifying his own achievements. Their initial construction was then enhanced by a modernist Indian renunciate [Swami Pranavananda], one of a small group who responded to colonial modernity by reformulating Hindu sacred geography through a creative combination of the scientific and the visionary study of its earliest texts. The construction then took full form through the elegant writings of an erudite German Buddhist mystic [Lama Anagarika Govinda, born as Ernst Lothar Hoffmann], long-resident in the Himalayas.

The argument that the physical Kailash only became prominent in the modern era is also supported by 18th- and 19th-century accounts such as that of Pran Puri, who wrote that on Kailash’s summit grew a “Bhojpatra tree” while the summit itself was “said to be sixteen miles in height from the level of the plain”. Pran Puri, however, does not mention any Shaivic associations with the peak, despite gosain monks being Shaivites themselves. This suggests a necessary correction to our modern conceptions of sacred geographies in the Himalaya, and how the constituent sites evolved over time to become important pilgrimage centres today. More importantly, Kailash’s sacred history also suggests colonial imaginations need to be revised on several fronts, not least in light of the colonialists’ self-serving interests.

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“History has not been kind to Himalaya” – so begins the British historian John Keay in Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World. “Those acquainted with our spherical planet’s most spectacular protuberance have been tempted to appropriate it.” That is certainly so. The Himalaya has come to mean different things for each of the many civilisations that have come into contact with this formidable range. To Hindus, it is the home of gods; to Buddhists, its hidden beyuls promise shelter and salvation in times of need. The first European missionaries who made contact with Tibet, like the Capuchin monk Ippolito Desideri, saw Tibetan Buddhism as a “distortion of their own ‘culture’”. As Tibetan scholar Dagyab Kyabgön Rinpoche writes, “To enlightened Europeans of the eighteenth century, Tibetans were unenlightened barbarians … Buddhism, then, had the merit of having humanised the wild Tibetans and having lifted them onto a higher cultural plateau.” Then came the British Empire.

For the British imperialists, the Himalaya represented the last frontier. Motivated early on by possibilities of trade with Tibet, the British were quick to shift their sights. Warren Hastings, the East India Company-appointed governor-general, wrote in 1774 that Tibetans are “a simple, well-disposed people, numerous and industrious, living under a well-regulated government, having considerable intercourse with other nations … and possessing at home the principal means of commerce, gold and silver in great abundance.” This was just before Hastings sent off his secretary, George Bogle, on his celebrated mission to Tibet.

Within a century, the Himalaya would be crisscrossed by explorers – including Kumaoni “pundits” who traced key routes to Tibet, geologists, surveyors and military men like Francis Younghusband. Keay writes that Younghusband, during his 1903 invasion of Tibet, “had counted on gaining Tibetan compliance by himself infringing the convention” – the 1890 Calcutta convention between the British and Chinese, which promised the former reciprocal access to Tibet’s trading centres and created the borders between Sikkim and Tibet. However, it was a treaty Tibet never recognised, thus setting off Younghusband’s invasion. Those who were part of this much-publicised military mission included correspondents such as the Daily Mail’s Edmund Candler, who thought it “quite inconceivable that [Tibetans] who lived their entire lives in such squalor could be responsible for the intricate frescoes” of its monasteries, Keay writes.

Even before Younghusband’s fateful invasion, which continues to shape modern-day anxieties in the Himalaya, colonial adventurers of the likes of Arthur Conolly, Alexander Burnes and Richard Francis Burton had travelled across the mountains and high passes to create a romanticised notion of high-altitude spycraft, disguise and intrigue. The “Great Game” was made popular by Rudyard Kipling in his 1901 novel Kim, “whose heroes”, as Edward Said wrote in his 1987 introduction to the work, “belong to a startlingly unusual world of foreign adventure and personal charisma,” and contributed immensely to the “invention of tradition” as well as to the “orientalized India of the imagination”.

As readers, we are asked to take the hint: it was British science, and colonial conceptualisations of archaeology, surveying and natural history, that revealed the Himalaya to the world.

The British imperialist view of the region was best summed up in Lord Curzon’s triumphalist 1907 Oxford lecture, in which he defined the Himalaya – and Tibet – as a security buffer between Tsarist Russia and British India. As the former Viceroy of India proclaimed, “In Asiatic countries it would be true to say that [border] demarcation has never taken place except under European pressure and by the intervention of European agents.” For the British, then, the Himalaya came to represent the Empire, even when the Empire itself began to decay in the aftermath of the Second World War. The first ascent of Chomolungma, or Everest, in May 1953, was heralded as proof of “strength and courage” in the British people. The Spectator wrote after the ascent, “A Nation that can still produce men who climb to the top of Everest … is certainly not lacking in imagination and flair.”

This imperial obsession with the range is evident in Keay’s reading of Himalayan histories. Himalaya does not add to the discipline’s corpus. Instead, it chooses to reiterate the Eurocentric fascination with the mountain range – and desire for control over it – by emphasising the histories of the colonial explorers. In such a narrative, Himalayan histories are shaped by colonial encounters with indigenous beliefs, peoples and landscapes. While Keay’s inclusion of recent studies on Himalayan geology and paleo-archaeology provide new context to such readings, Keay centres his narrative on the lives of imperialists, whose journals form the basis of much of his text and whose writings have already been reproduced in innumerable works since the days of colonialism.

In doing so, Keay seems to absolve the Empire of its errors. For instance, Keay writes that, after the 1903 invasion, the “Himalaya’s virgin peaks and stark contrasts awoke a surge of compassion and a streak of mysticism” in Younghusband. Similarly, wherever indigenous people make an appearance, they are qualified by their association with the Empire. Thus we are told – with the necessary qualifiers – that “though Ram Singh [a surveyor provided by the Survey of India] was no archaeologist,” it was his account of the “lost cities” of Guge in western Tibet, “as related to [Captain Cecil Godfrey] Rawling that was destined to provoke a flurry of interest in an unlikely quarter of British India.”

Sure, one can argue that British imperialism introduced modern science to much of the Subcontinent, but as the historian Priya Satia has argued in Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire, “What we call ‘good intentions’ [of the Empire] were often instances of conscience management – a kind of denial – necessary to the expansion of imperialism and industrial capitalism in the modern age.” Keay waxes lyrical about the achievements of British scientists and explorers who were fed on existing local knowledge – for instance, about mastodon fossils – but were eager to present such knowledge to the world as revelation.

Keay also displays the orientalist fantasies about Tibetan Buddhism – and Southasian religions – that several historians from our part of the world have warned about. Thus the reader is confronted with statements such as this,

The Himalayas of our maps are not, then, the first Himalayas, nor are they the last. They’re the product of a sequence of birth and rebirth – in fact of reincarnation, not unlike the karma-regulated life cycles to which Himalaya’s Buddhist and Hindu inhabitants subscribe. Landslides and Indus floods are just part and proof of the ‘system’. The destruction they wreak in the here and now is laying the foundations of worlds to come.

Keay’s generalised view of the Himalayan political economy results in some basic omissions and errors, too. There is no record of the five-yearly Nepali tribute missions he describes to the Ming court in Beijing; rather, the tribute missions were sent to the Qing court. Nor is there any truth in the statement that the British decision to employ Nepali troops after the 1816 Sugauli treaty was based on pacifying the Nepali state so that it did not embark “on another round of Quixotic conquests.” In fact, initially, the rulers of Nepal were unwilling accomplices in Gurkha recruitment; until the First World War, only 2000 were recruited every year. Most would be persuaded to join by gallas, or recruiters, often without their consent, as in the case of Lachhiman Gurung, winner of the Victoria Cross and a soldier in the Second World War, who wrote, “In those days, one couldn’t say no to recruitment. My father had a tobacco habit, and when I went to buy some for him, a galla picked me up from the road itself. No one at home knew about this; it was only when a recruitment letter reached them that they found out.” (Translation my own.) It was Chandra Shamsher, the Rana prime minister of Nepal, who created the administrative structure required to raise the 60,000 Nepali men who would go on to fight on behalf of the British Empire in the First World War, a mobilisation that would see “considerable forced recruitment”.

Similarly, Keay’s narrative absolves the Empire of creating fault lines such as the McMahon Line, which remains a bone of contention between India and China in the eastern Himalaya. When talking about the Younghusband invasion as not solely an “Anglo-Tibetan affair”, Keay presents the participation of Nepali Gurkha soldiers, Sikkimese, Ladakhis and Bhotias as evidence that the invasion was an “all-Himalayan affair”. This is reductionism at its best, as it overlooks both the Empire’s pernicious alliances with autocratic Himalayan rulers, such as the Rana dynasty in Nepal, and its use of indigenous soldiers in military expeditions under British command.

Keay’s absolution of the Empire also results in statements describing the induced migration of thousands of Nepali labourers to Darjeeling and Sikkim as an infection: “Inclined to crumble, assailed from without and infected from within by Nepali migration, Sikkim now exists in little more than name and nostalgic remembrance.” That favourite adjective to describe Tibet makes its presence felt as well: “Rents paid in butter kept the lamps burning in countless monasteries and lesser domiciles, so ensuring a greasy black patina on every surface and imparting a rancid aroma to the entire population.” As the historian Tsering Shakya has written elsewhere, commenting on how Western writers have come to exotify Tibet, “Tibetans simply do not drink tea: it has to be qualified by adjectives, as in ‘rancid butter tea’.”

The corpus of knowledge surrounding the Himalaya, especially that authored by indigenous scholars, has been steadily growing, yet Western narratives continue to reflect a limited worldview.

As readers, we are asked to take the hint: it was British science, and colonial conceptualisations of archaeology, surveying and natural history, that revealed the Himalaya to the world. What the Himalaya gave to the world was Tibetan Buddhism, which Keay highlights in great detail, including in his account the foundations of the Tibetan Empire and the expanding political influence of the Dalai Lama’s Gelugpa sect. Language and historical analysis come together in lending the Himalaya a mythical status that its residents did not fully comprehend, and the “peculiarities of Himalayan Buddhism” could have been the result of a “light-headed euphoria” induced by the “lack of oxygen”. The Italian orientalist Giuseppe Tucci’s plunder of manuscripts and artefacts is regarded as “not pillaging but conserving”. The Tibetan people’s myth of their creation – via a union of the Avalokitesvara avatar Pha Trelgen Changchup Sempa, or “father monkey king”, and an ogress said to be an avatar of Tara – makes its presence felt in a chapter peculiarly titled “When Men and Monkeys Meet”. The chapter also details the discovery of the Denisovans on the Tibetan plateau, and comes to a conclusion more apt for the History Channel: “The ogres and ogresses could represent an ancestral memory of contact with, say, Neanderthals or some other primitive hominins whose presence may once have challenged that of Homo sapiens and resulted in the interbreeding recorded in the myth.”

It is a story the colonised have heard before. Keay’s Himalaya is the domain of white men such as Younghusband, Brian Houghton Hodgson, Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen, Sven Hedin, Francis Buchanan-Hamilton and George Mallory. It is they – and men like them – who were responsible for naming the great voids described in imperial maps as “unexplored”. The travels of non-Europeans such as the Japanese traveller Ekai Kawaguchi and the Indian ascetic Swami Pranavananda (“a wandering sadhu with no scientific training, scarcely qualified even as an amateur”) are contrasted with the better-funded Europeans’ explorations. Pranavananda’s multiple travels to Kailash are recounted in detail, along with his rejection of Hedin’s conjecture about the “discovery” of the headwaters of the four great rivers that emerge from around the Mansarovar basin – the Sutlej, Tsangpo, Indus and Karnali. On the other hand, Kawaguchi, the first Japanese recorded to have travelled to Nepal and Tibet, in the early part of the 20th century, is dismissed in a single line after being labelled a monk with a “poor sense of direction”.

In Keay’s Himalaya, indigenous settlers remain dormant for the most part of their history, with few contributions of note except for the esoterica of Tibetan Buddhism. It was only when the imperial officer arrived in the treacherous mountains in service of Queen and Country that the range’s significance could be imagined. Until then, the Himalaya – and Tibet, since in Keay’s reading the two are the one and the same – revelled in its “cherished isolation”.

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If Keay’s Himalaya ventures into the modern obsession with colonial-era explorers, the Norwegian anthropologist and travel writer Erika Fatland’s High: A Journey Across the Himalayas through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal and China (translated by Kari Dickson) is about present-day imaginations of the Himalaya. A travelogue that sits diametrically in contrast to Keay’s historical retelling, High leaves the reader convinced that visas and travel restrictions matter little when it comes to the weight of one’s passport. Fatland is a solo woman traveller who begins her journey from Kashgar in Xinjiang, perhaps one of the most restricted places in the world today; travels down to Pakistan’s Hunza, Swat and Chitral; crosses the border into India, going up to Srinagar and Kargil before touching base in Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim; and, after a tour of Bhutan and Nepal, crosses over into Tibet, ending up in Sichuan. Few Southasians today have the luxury of crossing borders with such ease.

The irony isn’t lost on Fatland. Before the advent of modern border controls, citizenship mattered little in the Himalaya, whose residents were constantly on the move. With modern geopolitical dilemmas, borders have never been “more rigid than they are now”, Fatland writes. History has severed the links between many Himalayan communities. Thus, as Fatland writes from Leh, “For people like me and the other foreigners who enjoyed a beer or a cappuccino at one of the panoramic cafés in Leh, the world has become more accessible than ever in the past decades, thanks to cheap plane tickets and passports that are welcomed everywhere. However, for the local people, who have been crossing mountains and valleys for centuries in order to exchange goods, the world has become smaller and full of restrictions, despite the fact that roads and means of transport themselves have never been better.” This self-realisation is perhaps at the heart of Fatland’s travelogue, a story of liminal people that live on the borders of the modern nation states that exercise sovereignty over the spaces they have long called home.

High is an account of such marginalisations, both of such places and those who live in these dots on the map. Fatland reminds us of the patriarchy that abounds in our Subcontinent – the lack of female agency in Pakistan’s Swat region, the enduring use of menstrual huts in Nepal’s west – but her recollection of such ills feels contrived, almost as if a readymade narrative of woe and despair has been prepared for her in anticipation. The die has already been cast even before she sets out on her travels. The Himalaya is a region full of troubles – political, economic, social and environmental – and Fatland is out to document as many as she can.

The critique here isn’t that the trafficking of Nepali women to the Gulf is to be condoned, nor the willingness of men like Muhammed, a Swat pharmacologist Fatland met on a minibus from China to Pakistan, to beat their wives. Rather, it is that Fatland goes through a variety of issues – domestic violence in Pakistan, human trafficking in Nepal, opium addiction in Arunachal Pradesh, Bhutan’s “happiness index”, polyandry among certain Himalayan communities, Tibet’s position vis-a-vis China – in a manner that suggests she has come specifically to enquire into them. Since the scenes she recounts have been set up by her local interlocutors, her presence awakens these stories – although, to Fatland’s credit, her enquiries can bring out the dark side of utopia. In Bhutan, for instance, the forced expulsion of Lhotshampas is presented as a contrast to the happiness index.

The cultures living in its valleys and plateaus were as dynamic as those anywhere else on the planet. It is colonial accounts, and popular imaginations based on them, that are the real barriers to entry.

Traversing such a broad landscape of socio-political issues means none of them can really be dwelled upon, leaving readers with only a superficial awareness. In working in such breadth, Fatland’s observations can also contradict themselves. She writes from Bhutan, “No culture is a museum … it is not a fragrant flower. It does not wither and die simply because it is exposed to exhaust and electricity.” But in the case of Sikkim with its lost independence – and the fate of other small Himalayan monarchies now subsumed by larger powers – Fatland suggests the inverse: “The inhabitants of these small kingdoms no longer have kings, but they do now have roads and hydroelectricity and a centralised school system. And in the process, something invaluable has been lost. Not only the local kings but small, isolated worlds, complete with sacred rivers and holy mountains, have been slowly erased from the map.”

Such is the nature of modern travel, which allows for immersion into foreign cultures on selective terms and with lightning speed. Customised itineraries create a travel experience according to one’s needs and desires – as well as sensibilities. “Off the beaten path” is an imaginary construct in an era where luxury camps can be set up anywhere and social media influence is the holy grail. So when Fatland writes that “No tourists go to Surkhet” in mid-western Nepal, she means travellers like her, not the aid workers who are frequent visitors to the town and whom Fatland is mistaken for. Perhaps one can also read this as a signpost for what “foreigner” has come to mean in economically deprived parts of the Himalaya today – an aid worker. Perhaps it also gives us insight into the choice of places and stories Fatland wishes to highlight.

As a travelogue, High is rather disjointed, with little but the author’s sojourns connecting its disparate narrative strands. It can be read as a picture of living on the periphery – not just of nations but also societies – but it rarely ventures beyond normative descriptions of the Himalayan world. This is best seen in its detailed recollection of Tibetan history to describe China’s claims on the plateau, but lack of similar background for other regions. Could this be because Tibet’s contentious history with China has been widely covered and the sources for such history are widely available, especially in Western languages? An axiom then presents itself: since Western historians like Keay emphasise colonial sources of Himalayan history, modern writers such as Fatland shape their perceptions based on such readings.

There are also lesser issues, such as calling the Newars “Newari people”, an incorrect etymological interpretation. To describe the town of Jomsom, gateway to Mustang, as now being replete with “towering apartment blocks” is sensationalist – although unplanned development and ill-conceived infrastructure will be the nemesis of every Himalayan town in years to come, as seen in the crumbling of Joshimath in Uttarakhand.

High emphasises the natural wonder of the Himalayan landscape in familiar terms – of longing and remembrance corrupted by modern dilemmas of development versus conservation – but rarely does it venture beyond the modern traveller’s outlook. What makes the travelogue readable is the brutal honesty of Fatland’s local interlocutors. In Humla, in western Nepal, as Fatland marvels over a landscape that reminds her of the Alps, she says, “It’s like being in Switzerland.” Her guide, Tsering, answers without delay, “I wish we were in Switzerland. Life is a chore here … It’s not easy to survive here.” And in Sichuan, Apple, her Chinese interpreter and guide, is almost reduced to tears after Fatland continues to enquire about Tibet’s political relationship with China. “It’s as though you’ve made up your mind and just want your opinion confirmed,” she says. “You know that you’re asking about highly political things? The Chinese don’t talk about things like that, and then you come along and obviously have your own views, and seem to be judging us. Why are you asking me about all this? … Stop it, just stop!”

The romantic isolation of Tibet continues to shape modern perceptions, often obfuscating the contested histories Tibet shares with China as well as Tibet’s histories with Southasia.

Fatland puts the outburst down to the way “successful dictatorships work: they worm their way into people’s heads, then sit there and guard against questions. Daily life is easier that way.” But if Fatland is aware of the scale of surveillance inside the Tibetan regions of China, should she not have been more sensitive to Apple’s concerns about asking questions? Apple’s response surely isn’t just limited to China’s authoritarian practices inside Tibet; it has to do with her own perceptions about survival and freedom – however limited that freedom may be.

In High, the marginalisation of the Himalaya is foregrounded, and stories about its unusual ways of living and contrarian belief systems are prioritised, as if to suggest the region is a wholly alien place that cannot be comprehended unless it is thought about from outside the box. Keay’s narrative, on the other hand, pushes the indigenous into the background. As he puts it, not so subtly, when concluding with the environmental degradation of the Himalaya at a time of climate change, “The concerns of the indigenous peoples should not be allowed to deter global anxieties.” Keay argues that Antarctica’s pristineness and universally binding treaties should be replicated in the Himalaya, though he acknowledges this is an impossible task because its “considerable population invariably contests political encroachment.” Keay is correct in that the Himalaya must be saved; but it requires saving as much from patronising narratives that consign indigenous populations to a footnote in the larger scheme of history as it does from bulldozers and the snow-melting carbon emissions that the Western world is largely responsible for.

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Both Himalaya and High represent how the Himalaya has come to be imagined in the modern era by those who don’t come from here. In the former, the Himalaya must be defined by its encounters with the colonial explorer, thus creating a template for travelogues such as the latter, where the Himalaya of contemporary times is again interpreted by its contact – and alignment – with Western norms and ideas.

Such texts continue to impose a normative view of the Himalaya dating back to the heyday of colonialism, even if unconsciously. A course correction has been attempted in Ed Douglas’ Himalaya: A Human History, which admirably places local histories first. As Douglas asks right at the beginning of his sprawling opus, “Why was it that stories about climbing Everest were far more common than stories about the people who lived in its shadow?”

Douglas attempts to correct the imperial reading of Himalayan histories by switching between disparate strands that show the interconnectedness of this world. A Human History is both a political history as well as a history of indigenous networks, a tale of how empires rose, fell and sustained themselves in the mountains, and a pointed reminder about imperial imaginations of the Himalaya. For instance, when he talks about trans-Himalayan trade, he reminds the reader, “If you measure success in turnover, then you could perhaps judge this Himalayan trade as trivial: in terms of the societies it fostered, it was vital.” Then, while talking up the contributions of the “pundits”, locals who were employed by the British during their surveys of the region, Douglas writes, “From the moment the British arrived at the foot of the Himalaya and began investigating Tibet for the purposes of trade and geographic knowledge, they relied heavily on such people, who were as often as not written out or down in published accounts.”

As Douglas arrives closer to the 20th century, the narrative begins to shape itself around familiar tropes of adventure, colonial exploration and mountaineering – perhaps Douglas’ past as a mountaineer has something to do with this. It raises the question: are Himalayan histories incomplete without stories of mountaineering? Even then, Douglas rightly puts the Sherpa community and local workers at the forefront, especially when talking about the risks and rewards of modern-day mountaineering – and he likens their working conditions with those of the millions of Nepalis working on construction sites in the oil-rich Gulf states.

If the Himalaya is to be saved from the depredations of climate change, it has to be saved by those who live here. For that, how we see the Himalaya has to change.

Douglas raises the 2014 avalanche on Everest that killed 16 Sherpas and the subsequent protests by locals against the low compensation provided by the Nepali state. “Western media tended to focus on the rich people who pay for the Everest industry but paid little attention to what was in effect an industrial accident … Yet those asking high-altitude workers to carry more than they should or accept more danger than necessary were Nepali, not foreigners,” he writes, pointing to the lack of regulations or safety standards in the climbing industry that reap millions for the Nepali state and climbing companies. Douglas concludes, “There was, however, another perspective on the Sherpa protests that spring: they reminded the world that although empires and distant populations had often treated its peoples with indifference or hostility, the Himalaya is a real place with its own history and cultures.”

Douglas over-emphasises Tibetans’ genetic adaptation to altitude and their ability to live in the Himalaya for extended periods that lowland populations could not match, and calls this “their greatest defence” until China arrived on the Tibetan plateau in the 20th century. While holding territory may have been difficult for the Dzungars, Gorkhas and even Dogras who sent expeditions onto the plateau, one can argue that securing Tibetan subservience, not subsumption, was the goal of such armies. Plus, lowland Newar traders from Kathmandu – whom Douglas, too, erroneously refers to as “Newari” people – lived and thrived in Lhasa and other Tibetan cities for years at a stretch. Similarly, he argues that “Tibetans, with their strong nomadic tradition, like to travel”. The nomadic predilection has to do with the plateau’s low agricultural productivity as well as the large diets required by cattle, and is also seen in transhumant communities on the southern face of the Himalaya.

Nonetheless, Douglas’ text is an exception to contemporary Himalayan narratives emerging from the Occident. He rightly contextualises the Western fascination with religious esoterica such as Shambhala by linking it to the concept of Eden: “European Romanticism fed on such stories of exotic fantasy and lost utopias, and colonial conquest made ‘the Orient’ a rich vein of material. Such imaginings had a pervasive influence on European perspectives of the East.” Douglas also reveals some extraordinary stories about Himalayan civilisations, including one on Tibetan medicinal knowledge of variolation – the practice of willingly infecting a person with a mild form of smallpox to grant them immunity against the disease’s more severe guises – before the arrival of Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine. In contrast to Keay’s opus about Western science permeating the heart of the Himalaya, Douglas contends that Tibetan civilisation was indeed curious about the world and adopted “new calendars based on Jesuit astronomy simply because they were better.” Early colonialists liked to patronise the Tibetans as being backward – but as Douglas writes, “The heliocentric solar system hadn’t quite yet percolated through but the notion that Tibetans refused to accept physical laws was simply wrong.”

Are Himalayan histories incomplete without stories of mountaineering? Even then, Douglas rightly puts the Sherpa community and local workers at the forefront.

A Human History stands in contrast to both Keay’s and Fatland’s expositions on the Himalaya, not just because it attempts to correct the longstanding colonial gaze on the Himalaya, but also as a rare contemporary work on the region that incorporates indigenous knowledge sources as much as it does Western ones. If the ways of seeing the Himalaya from the outside are to change, Douglas’ text can show us the way. In talking up the indigenous political histories of the Himalaya, he rightly imagines the region as a fluid and shifting world with “briefly held allegiances”, and points out how each culture – or empire – that has ruled here has had to “metamorphose, under pressure to conform to the demands of the world around them.” Narratives based on colonial accounts, however, imagine indigenous political spaces as fixed – both spatially and over time – because that’s how the colonialists saw them.

Of course, the modern states that have inherited colonial borders have also inherited much of the colonial gaze. As such, too often the Himalaya continues to be regarded as a liminal space located on the periphery of political power. The semiotics of imperialism have not really left; the India–China face-off in the Himalaya is routinely described as the “new great game”. The popular discourse, then, feeds into the continued militarisation of the Himalaya, and that trend is encouraged and reinforced by, for example, the Indian Army’s decision in 2021 to introduce a course on Tibetology for its officers. As the historians Swati Chawla and Madhura Balasubramaniam have argued, “Tibetology cannot be confined within the bounds of state interests and territorial conflicts on either side of the Tibetan plateau … Foregrounding the interconnections among Tibet and the Himalayan regions and their relationship with the Indian centre offers valuable perspectives into processes of state-making and the politics of nation-building.”

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This essay began with a cloth painting as an example of indigenous modes of seeing. The irony, of course, is that the painting cannot be accessed by Himalayan denizens except for a small world-travelling elite. The website of the Philadelphia Museum of Art lists the piece as having been “purchased” in 2000, but the who it was “purchased” from is left unknown. Nepal has banned exports of all old artworks since 1954. Perhaps we need to expand the remit of art repatriation, so far largely focussed on once-sacred sculptures whisked away from the Himalaya to foreign museums and collections, to also include manuscripts and paintings such as this one. This will reinforce the fact that indigenous Himalayan knowledge and imaginations preceded our world’s encounters with imperialism, that there were other ways of seeing that have been either intentionally or unconsciously subsumed and turned invisible, and that indigenous heritage can and must be recovered and reclaimed. Part of imperialism’s lasting legacy are such artworks stored away in a museum across the world, far from the people to whom they belong.

There is an argument to be made that some locals of the Himalaya have continued to encourage imperial imaginations of the region, as seen in travel operators’ exuberant appropriation of terms such as “Yeti”, “Shangri La” and “‘Potala”. The planned Visit Nepal Year 2020, before it was derailed by Covid-19, saw a multitude of yeti sculptures scattered across Kathmandu as a motif. Local elites within Himalayan societies have also continued to patronise marginalised indigenous communities – or, at worst, deny them full rights – displaying the same contempt once seen among imperialists.

The modern states that have inherited colonial borders have also inherited much of the colonial gaze. As such, too often the Himalaya continues to be regarded as a liminal space located on the periphery of political power.

Only when a fuller understanding of the Himalaya arises, built upon indigenous understandings of its historical evolution, political economy and patterns of interconnectedness, can such imagined relics be banished. The future of the Himalaya and its peoples requires a cohesiveness across states on issues such as development and infrastructure that are currently treated in localised isolation, but the region’s marginalisation means it rarely features in bilateral discussions except as a symbol. If the Himalaya is to be saved from the depredations of climate change, it has to be saved by those who live here. For that, how we see the Himalaya has to change.

For more than two hundred years, the Himalaya has been represented as a land full of esoteric meaning but with few contributions of note except in religion. The romantic isolation of Tibet continues to shape modern perceptions, often obfuscating the contested histories Tibet shares with China as well as Tibet’s histories with Southasia. The same, or worse, is true for any number of Himalayan peoples and their legacies of knowledge, trade, diplomacy and more. The fault lies in imagining the Himalaya as a formidable barrier that prohibited the interactions that make civilisations grow. But as we have seen, it is only from the middle of the twentieth century that the Himalaya metamorphosed into a barrier. Until then, and still afterwards, the cultures living in its valleys and plateaus were as dynamic as those anywhere else on the planet. It is colonial accounts, and popular imaginations based on them, that are the real barriers to entry.

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