Who Speaks for the Himalaya?

The region is presented to the world by writers and researchers who have not been exposed to the local literature. As far as creative literature is concerned, the Himalayans still speak largely for, and to, themselves.

Before 1950, because Nepal was virtually inaccessible to foreigners, almost every visitor who passed through published an account of his or her experiences. The earliest book-length treatment (Col. William Kirkpatrick´s An Account of the Kingdom of Nepaul) appeared in 1811, and was followed by several others by visitors such as Hector Oldfield, Perceval Landon and Sylvain Levi. None of these were works of creative literature as such, though they are still referred to by students and researchers.

Because Nepal remained independent during the period of British rule in India, it merited very few mentions in the works of popular Anglo-Indian authors like John Masters, Paul Scott or Rudyard Kipling. Though Kipling wrote about "the little yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu" and described the "facts of Khatmandu" as the "wildest dreams of Kew", he never set fdot in Nepal. For Kipling, "Khatmandu" was useful in tortuous rhyme-schemes. It also represented something remote, unknown and exotic: "to the north of Khatmandu" probably sounded to readers of Kipling´s day like somewhere near the edge of the known universe. In most British colonial fiction, the Himalaya meant hill stations like Shimla or Darjeeling, or occasionally Kashmir.

The early British travelers to Nepal usually presented its people and culture in a positive light. This may have been because most of them visited the kingdom as representatives of the British Government in some shape or form, and because their relations with the Nepali rulers were generally cordial. This was particularly obvious during the latter half of the Rana period British travelers had few good things tosay about the culture of less pliant kingdoms. Ashley Eden´s book (Political Missions to Bootan) is still notorious in Thimphu for its withering attacks on Bhutanese officials, whom Eden found "boorish" and "insolent" when he visited in 1863.

Nepal in the West

The recent exponential growth of international tourism has inspired an avalanche flood of guidebooks and picturebooks, accounts of adventure and mountaineering, and a body of anthropological literature that has now assumed epic proportions. There are, for instance, at least a dozen book-length studies of Sherpa society and culture. But the scene is still one of poverty if you are looking for Western-authored fiction set in the Himalaya, or for travelogues or mountaineering books that possess literary merit.

In the first category, we seem to have only Han Suyin´s The Mountain is Young (1958), J.R.Marks´ Ayo Gurkha (1971), and a handful of novels by Greta Rana and a more recent clutch of fictionalised travelogues such as Pico Iyer´s Video Nights in Kathmandu. Suyin´s novel is set against the backdrop of King Mahendra´s coronation, which she herself attended. The heroine, Anne, is a shy English woman with a priggish English husband. Anne discovers her sexuality in sensuous "Khatmandu" through a liaison with an Indo-Nepali engineer. Suyin painted a lurid, exotic picture of Nepal, but her novel probably introduced the kingdom to a huge number of readers who had never heard of it before:

Frederic Maltby knew the bend of the road where he would suddenly see, and always with the same shock of happiness, the snow peaks, rosy in the early light, emerging above the near hills. Although from his bedroom window he could see them just as well, yet it was pleasure redoubled to meet them just at that corner, to see the lords of the snows towering incandescent pink in the early sky. I shall see them here again tomorrow, he thought, and felt himself fulfilled. He had been five years in the Valley, He would never leave it. Never would he go back to the plains. He would remain here until he died, lifting his eyes to the mountains in the morning and many times during the day. ´For the chief things of the ancient mountains, and for the precious things of the lasting hills…

J.R. Marks´ novel stands out from a mass of hackneyed Gurkha-inspired literature. It describes the life of Aitahang, aLimbu who joins the Brigade of Gurkhas and fights in Malaya. This is how Marks describes Aitahang´s preparations for departure from his home (Bhalu is his dog):

Aitahang did not sleep a wink before he left. Every half-hour after midnight he peered out at the moon, full and clear in the cloudless night sky, the monsoon just past. At last, when he reckoned it was two hours before dawn, he slipped down from the hayloft, still wrapped in his fur, whispered to Bhalu and entered the farmhouse. He opened the family chest, took out his new kukri and closed the lid carefully. Then he folded the fur, laid it on top of the box and laid his working kukri on top of that. This was the only way he could leave word that he had gone of his own free will. He could not have told his parents earlier; they would have forbidden him to go, and would have extracted his promise that he would not.

For a moment he stood in the darkness of the lower room, the familiar scent of pine-wood in his nostrils, hearing from outside the sounds of cattle shifting in the byre, and the clink of Bhalu´s chain-Through a crack in the window boards he saw moonlight flitter on the snows of Topke, and impulsively he stretched out his hand to the lid of the chest again, tempted to replace his new kukri and steal back to the hayloft beside his brother. No one would ever know…

The second category — mountaineering books and travelogues — is much more extensive. H. W. Tilman was the finest of mountaineering writers: Nepal Himalaya recounts his exploration of Jugal, Ganesh and Khumbu Himal during the late 1940s. The book is a masterpiece, full of laconic wit and offbeat allusions. Compare the following to the bald diary-like style of many other mountaineering books:

Our recent access of confidence was further undermined by the appalling prospect of the nextstage, from our camp on the rice stubbles of Gudel across an appallingly deep valley to Bung, and thence to another pass on the ridge beyond. Bung looked to be within spitting distance, yet the map confirmed and the eye agreed that we should have to descend some 3,000 ft. and climb a like amount to reach it. Profound emotion may find some vent in verse as well as in oaths; despair as well as joy may rouse latent, unsuspected poetical powers. Thus at Gudel, uninspired by liquor, for there was none, some memorable lines were spoken:

For dreadfulness nought can excel

The prospect of Bung from Gudel;

And words die away on the tongue

When we look back at Gudel from Bung.

The village of Bung, a name which appeals to a music-hall mind, provoked another outburst on the return journal because its abundant well of good raksi, on which we were relying, had dried up:

Hope thirstily rested on Bung

So richly redolent of rum;

But when we got there

The cupboard was bare

Sapristi, No raksi. No chang.

To disarm the hypercritical I might say that the ´a´ in chang, a Tibetan word for beer, is pronounced like a short ´u´,)

The neat houses and terraced fields of Bung, apparently rich in promise, covered several thousand feet of hillside. In Nether Bung they grew bananas and rice, in Upper Bung oranges and wheat. A sepoy had gone on to collect rice but on arrival the whole party scattered in search of provender like hounds drawing a cover. For ourselves we acquired nothing but a goat, worth about Rs 5, for Rs.l2, having been asked Rs.20. In order to secure the rice we had to curtail the march and make a late start. Next morning the jemadar, with bloodshot eyes and husky voice, as became one who had attended an overnight harvest thanksgiving, led the rice procession up to our camp in swaying triumph.

The Facts of "Khatmandu"

So, as far as creative literature (fiction, poetry, drama) is concerned, the Himalayans still speak largely for themselves. The problem here, though, is that they also speak mainly to themselves, and the percentage of outsiders who take an active interest in the local literature remains small. In my more cynical moments, I sometimes wonder whether a Nepali poet in Kathmandu actually reaches an audience that extends beyond the other Nepali poets of Kathmandu .Then I remind myself that nearly every educated Nepali I know appears to have written poetry at one time or another.

Other problems persist: very little 20th century Himalayan literature has been translated into English or any other language, and most of what has been translated is not available outside the region. It took me about eight years to complete an anthology of Nepali literature in translation (Himalayan Voices) and more than two years to find a publisher who would take it on. Most publishers seemed to assume that there would be no market for such a book because Nepali literature was unknown in the West. Authors of colourfully-illustrated travelogues probably do not face such problems.

There is also the problem of Western expectations. People can feel profoundly uncomfortable when you question then-preconceptions. Some years back, I read some of my translations from Nepali at a poetry evening attended by respectable ladies and gentlemen from the English Home Counties. The poems I read included Bhupi Sherchan´s "Monkeys of the Cold War":

A monkey with shit on his hands

Is eternally bothered by their smell;

In an orange grove it makes him breathless;

If he sees a rose, he blocks his nose;

Raising polluted hands, he tries to keep his body

From their hateful touch,

Then runs from wood to wood

With a scream of failure,

Wiping his hands on rocks and trees,

Dipping them into streams and springs,

Trying to be free of their stench.

At each attempt, he sniffs at his hand,

But finds that it smells even worse;

As if mad, he shakes down fruits and flowers,

Destroying sweet scents and sweet tastes.

Despairing at last, he sits on a rough rock,

Scrapes his hand hard there, then sniffs.

He scrapes and sniffs, and sniffs and scrapes,

And continues to scrape

Till his hand is useless.

When a nervous monkey´s paws start to stink,

Me lays waste to the garden

And maims his own hands.

It was mischievous to read such a poem to such an audience, perhaps.* [*All translations are the writer´s own.] But I felt that Lekhnath Poudyal´s "Last Poem" would probably make up for it:

God Himself endures this pain,

This body where He dwells.

By its fall He is surely saddened,

He quietly picks up His things, and goes.

And if not, I imagined that Devkota´s lyricism in Pagal would win them over:

Surely, my friend, I am mad,

that´s exactly what 1 am!

I see sounds,

hear sights,

taste smells,

I touch things thinner than air,

things whose existence the world does not know.

Stones I see as flowers,

pebbles have soft shapes,

watersmoothed at the water´s edge

in the moonlight;

as heaven´s sorceress smiles at me,

they putout leaves, they soften, they glimmer

and pulse, rising up like mute maniacs,

like flowers — a kind of moonbird flower.

I speak to them just as they speak to me,

in a language, my friend,

unwritten, unprinted, unspoken,

uncomprehended, unheard.

Their speech comes in ripples, my friend,

to the moonlit Ganga´s shore.

Surely, my friend, I am mad,

that´s exactly what I am!

You are clever, and wordy,

your calculations exact and correct forever,

but take one from one in my arithmetic,

and you are still left with one.

You use five senses, but I have six,

you have a brain, my friend,

but I have a heart.

To you a rose is a rose, and nothing more,

but I see Helen and Padmini,

you are forceful prose,

I am liquid poetry;

you freeze as 1 am melting,

you clear as I cloud over,

and then it´s the other way around;

you world is solid, mine vapour,

your world is gross, mine subtle,

you consider a stone an object,

material hardness your reality,

but I try to grasp hold of dreams,

just as you try to catch the rounded truths

of cold sweet graven coins.

My passion is that of a thorn, my friend,

yours is for gold and diamonds,

you say that the hills are deaf and dumb,

I say that they are eloquent.

But the response was one of polite incomprehension. This was not what they had expected to hear at all. These expressions of moral doubt, of political sophistication, of self-styled lunacy, surely could not come from the land of the Gurkhas and Sherpas!

Diverse Himalayan Realities

The lack of quality translations from Nepali is less serious now that it was ten years ago. However, what is available is still only the tip of what is there. And what of the modern literatures of other Himalayan languages? Scores of Tibetan Buddhist texts have been translated and published, but where are the Tibetan novelists and short-story writers? Literature has been written in Kashmiri since in the middle ages, but hardly any has been translated. Is Bhutan still a land of medieval minstrels and Buddhist bards, or does it contain writers of Dzongkha and Nepali who deserve to be heard?

The days when anthropologists conducted fieldwork with the help of an interpreter are long gone, and works in languages other than English are beginning to creep into their bibliographies. The Himalaya welcomes more than its fair share of researchers and advisors, but its diverse realities are still often presented to the outside world by people who have not been exposed to the local literature. So, although it may no longer be a case of the "wildest dreams of Kew", it may not be a case of all the "facts of Khatmandu" either. In 1945, Devkota published an essay, Pahadi Jivan ("Mountain Life"), which began like this:

On my journey to Gosainthan I saw mountains, but I did not see mountain life. What I saw on the way did not reflect it: apart from a few huts and a couple of bazaars I saw nothing but the forests, the hills and the path I was walking on.

 Men spend their lives high up here like birds, sometimes in the terraced fie Ids. In the winter there will only be the smooth realm of snow where sheepfolds and cattlepens now stand… Here, Mankind is blinded and numbed by the great frosty regime. Life springs up from the dust: smeared with a little of the dust of Spring time, it blooms, and then in the end it mingles once more with the dust. There are no greater problems here than eating and scratching a living. Here, ´home´ means four posts and a roof of straw that lasts only a couple of months, and social life rarely exceeds the coming together of four people. Man lives a shifting, wandering life in such a place, travelling in search of warm air and sunshine. The world is stingy, and Nature is tightfisted: if he is lucky the earth might yield a little maize and a few nettles.

Why did Man come up here? What pleasure, what happiness was he seeking? Did he come here just to eat thorns and to stand, rattling in the teeth of the wind, like a few frost-ravaged leaves? Was it to display his alienation? The children are illiterate, and their legs are bare. They dance and play like jungle creatures, and life is just subsistence, and the water that moulds the red clay.

Compare the tone of this with Tilman´ s jovial account of life in the high mountains. Again, compare Peter Matthiessen´s account of arrival in Pokhara (from The Snow Leopard) with Bhupi Sherchan´s satirical account of actually living there:

After midday, the rain eased, and the Land-Rover rode into Pokhara on a shaft of storm light. Next day there was humid sun and shifting southern skies, but to the north a deep tumult of swirling greys was all that could be seen of the Himalaya. At dusk, white egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the dark had come. Then, four mites above these mud streets of the lowlands, at a point so high as to seem overhead, a luminous whiteness shone— the light of snows. Glaciers loomed and vanished in the greys, and the sky parted, and the snow cone of Machhapuchare glistened like a spire of a higher kingdom. (Matthiessen)

Planes are coming, planes are going.

Coming with honeymoon couples,

Going carrying soldiers

Summoned to Kutch next morning.

Planes come, carrying tourists

To see the Fishtail mountain,

Planes go carrying baskets and trunks,

Ploughs and the Fishtail´s children,

Off to seek land in the plains.

Planes are coming, planes are going:

From a bench by the airfield a blind man drones,

"No milk comes from a bird, For a sad man there´s no home."

(Sherchan)