Writings in Monochrome

When the travel bug bites, first buy a guide book, or buy them all. A review of travel tomes.

The preface to Donald Maclntyre's Hindu-Koh: Wanderings and Wild Sport on and beyond Himalayas, opens with a curious apology: "The subject of Himalayan travel and sport is now so old a story, that an attempt to create further interest in it is an almost hopeless undertaking". That was in 1889. The author was writing even before the spate of publications on Tibet that was to follow the Younghusband expedition little more than a decade later. Travel books about the Himalaya in those days had the burden of rousing from cold the interest of armchair adventurers who had little hope of seeing these exotica for themselves. The recent reprinting of the book (New Delhi, AES, 1993) is perhaps justified by the grim truth that the subject is again hopelessly exotic: no long because readers cannot afford the passage, but because the fairyland of forest and steppe with wall-to-wall big game has gone forever.

Books about Himalayan travel for those who don't go there are still written, but they're not about hunting. One of the commonest idioms nowadays is the Inner Journey, also known as the Voyage of Self-Discovery, that is conspicuous in varying concentrations in numerous books and magazine articles. For the Himalayan region, the genre may have been pioneered by Peter Matthiesen's The Snow Leopard. The quality of this kind of writing naturally varies considerably, but the prevailing idea is that of the physical journey as a metaphor for coming to terms with private affliction. Self-discovery seems to be resonant with the spirit of the Himalaya. Hindu literature (written, for the most part, by people who lived in the plains) speaks lushly of the Abode of Snows. Tibetan travelogues, in the form of pilgrims' autobiographies, tend to be more prosaic. Typically, the roads are long and difficult, and the hard-pressed writer has to cross many miserable passes to reach squalid villages only to be set upon by bandits and bitten by big dogs. But here, too, nature is vulnerable to revelation. All sacred mountains are shorn by visionary pilgrims of their individual character and reduced to much the same crystal stupa roofed with rainbow tents and ringed by divinities who mass there like clouds.