Himalaya Read online

  If you want to imagine the spot where a demigod like Bhagiratha might seek the assistance of Shiva, then our base camp below Shivling – Shiva’s Lingam, ‘phallic symbol’ of his divine creative force – would come close. The place was called Tapovan, literally ‘forest of austerity’, although there were only scrubby trees in the thin air at 4,400 metres. Tapovan is a term from the Mahabharata, denoting a place of spiritual practice. Every summer, a few yogis make the trek to meditate below the mountain. While there are many Tapovans, this one is famous, thanks to one of the world’s most beautiful mountains soaring overhead and the source of the Ganges a short distance below. When we put up our tents, planning to stay for a few weeks, three yogis were still in residence, living, like Bhagiratha, on fresh air, plus a handful of rice, sleeping in a rough stone shelter.

  At night, the skin of our tents froze, the mountain spectral in the moonlight. By day, we narrowed our eyes against the fierce sun of altitude, rubbing cream into our faces. A sadhu, an ascetic, would sit in its warm brightness, cross-legged on a flat piece of granite with the mountain above him, naked except for a small pouch of cloth at his waist, hollow-chested, head piled with his own version of Shiva’s dreadlocks, eyes closed in contemplation. He and I were both devotees. We were both enduring physical discomfort, both searching for something, although I could see the sadhu knew his metaphysical road better than I knew mine. I had no idea as I sharpened my crampons and packed my rucksack that I was starting a long climb towards a better understanding of these mountains.

  Where did mythology end and reality begin? How and where did the mountaineering stories of my youth fit into the broader history of the Himalaya? Climbers spend more time around government bureaucrats in the Himalaya than anywhere else in the world. But how did those governments come into being? How did the curious patchwork of nations that make up the Himalaya fall into place? Why was the Himalaya not all in either India or China? From the outside looking in, it occurred to me that while there were many Western books published on Himalayan geography, historians tended to break the region down into polities. That approach ignored the Himalayan region’s sense of itself: its shared culture and experience, a coherence ordinarily overlooked in Western accounts. Why was it that stories about climbing Everest were far more common than stories about the people who lived in its shadow? As though Scotland was being judged on its golf courses. What of Himalayan art and philosophy, politics and intrigue? My own narrow perspective shattered into a million ways of seeing. I wanted to reconcile what had brought me to the Himalaya with what I found there. I returned again and again, not just as a climber, but as a journalist and writer, always with questions. Yet every time I felt I was getting close to the top, the prize I thought I was reaching for receded again into the distance. Every time I changed my viewpoint, new horizons opened out, new summits beckoned. It was often an uncomfortable experience, and not just physically. The scars of colonialism reach high into the mountains, even in those regions that remained nominally independent. And I became acutely aware that climbing mountains was self-indulgence compared to the physical and psychological hardships many faced as a fact of life.

  The yogis and seekers we met on the way to the mountain seemed part of an eternal India, mystical and otherworldly, beyond the usual constraints of history. But just as I had been drawn there by stories of adventure, my own sacred texts, and by the example of my heroes, the ascetics and renunciates also had their inspiration; the minds of others had compelled them to come too. Tapovan is famous for its association with the Hindu saint Sri Swami Tapovanam (‘Sri’ being an honorific, and ‘Swami’ meaning guru, or teacher, literally ‘he who is with himself’). Born Chippukutty Nair in 1889 to an aristocratic family in Kerala in southern India, Tapovanam went against his father’s dream that he become an important figure in the government and quit school, where he felt constrained by its limited spiritual outlook and the prospect of a dry, predictable career. After his father’s death, when Swami Tapovanam was still in his early twenties, he remained in Kerala, a poet and part of the local literary scene, until his brother had finished school. Then he left home for ever, following his dream of living the simplest life possible in that part of the Himalaya consecrated in the books he studied.

  The winters he spent in Rishikesh, the summers in the high mountains, anxious about bears in the forest but entranced with the landscape. Tapovan, above the treeline, where snow leopards roamed at night, was one of his favourite places to meditate. ‘My heart was filled with wonder and pleasure as I sat watching the golden-hued, rocky peaks called Sivalinga and Bhageerathi Parvat, rising on either bank, the long ranges of snow-clad mountains on both sides, dazzling in their silver radiance.’ The intense pleasure he took from his experience of the natural world shines through his writings. People flocked to hear him speak and several wealthy patrons offered to build him ashrams, but he preferred the forest and left the world as simply as he had lived in it, unlike the Beatles’ guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who died a reclusive billionaire in the Netherlands, giving interviews by video link, too frightened of infection to meet journalists in person.

  Swami Tapovanam felt another strong link to this sacred part of the Himalaya. East of Gangotri and his favourite meditation spots, on the other side of Shivling, are the Alaknanda valley and the the temple of Badrinath, greatest of the four pilgrimage sites on the Chhota Char Dham. According to the Mahabharata, it was from Badrinath that the Pandavas began their final, fatal expedition: the Swargarohini, the ascent to heaven. For Swami Tapovanam, sitting in this Hindu temple was like coming home. The head priest there is by tradition a Keralan, and the two could converse together in their mother tongue, Malayalam, in which Tapovanam had written his poetry as a young man. The tradition of a Keralan priest lies in the temple’s founding legend. Badrinath had once been the site of a Buddhist temple but legend tells how the Keralan spiritual philosopher Adi Sankara, living some time in the eighth century, found a black stone known as a shaligram – a fossilised shell representing Vishnu – in the Alaknanda river and used it to claim this auspicious place for Hinduism.

  This was at a time when Hinduism was resurgent and Buddhism in retreat. The details of Adi Sankara’s life are disputed. There are more than a dozen hagiographies. We’re not even sure when he lived. Like Swami Tapovanam, who took immense pride in sharing the same language and culture as his spiritual inspiration, Sankara was a sannyasi, an ascetic, living simply among the power places of India, and from the same tradition of Hinduism known as Advaita Vedanta. His philosophical difference with Buddhism centred on the fundamental conception of the soul. In Buddhism, such a thing is illusion. For Sankara it was real. For ordinary mortals, contemplating the cosmos from the roof of the world, the idea that your core self might survive physical death seems more comforting than the cessation of a mirage.

  The story of Adi Sankara shows how the Himalaya was a contested space in the first millennium, just as it was a thousand years later as the British Empire spread. Sankara lived after 543 CE and the fall of the Gupta dynasty, India’s golden age, an era of immense cultural and intellectual achievement, and religious tolerance too. Thereafter northern India had fractured into smaller kingdoms; competing narratives laid claim to places, like Badrinath, that were spiritually significant. The arrival of Islam in the subcontinent during the twelfth century only added to the pressure. Many of Sankara’s hagiographies were written during the fourteenth century as Muslim influence expanded. New political and religious interests pushed aside existing powers like tectonic plates, driving populations to seek refuge, often in the mountains, their backs against the highest wall on earth. Some of those refugees built new dynasties; others fossilised, preserving fragments of near-forgotten cultures that had elsewhere disappeared. The mountains could be a refuge or a trap, and sometimes both.

  Until India’s border war with China in 1962, there were few motorable roads high in the mountains, meaning that pilgrims were required to make an arduous trek at
altitudes up to four thousand metres above sea level. The need to hire porters made it expensive, prohibiting many from making the journey. A woman who could afford it might hire a porter to carry her in a basket on his back, or else hire four to carry her on their shoulders in a more dignified sedan chair. Pilgrims were required to pay in advance, and there were dark stories of women being tipped out into the river, out of sight of the village, so porters could maximise profits in the short season. Poor sanitation and huge numbers meant dozens of deaths each year from dysentery. Lower down, in the forest, malaria took its toll. The country above these pilgrim towns, fresher and cleaner, remained largely the preserve of sannyasi and yogis prepared to endure the hardship of cold nights and thin air, living on milk from the goatherds that graze their flocks there in the summer months. After the war, India invested heavily in its Himalayan road network, changing the region for ever and opening the Chhota Char Dham to mass tourism. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus now visit each year and the government is planning to upgrade its infrastructure to bring even more. Gangotri and the other sites have become part of the restatement of India’s Hindu culture and a reinforcement of its nationalist origins.

  The concept of mountains as places of perfection in an imperfect world is a powerful trope in India, just as it was for a Western climber like me with a head full of Romantic ideas of the wild. In the age of Kali, the modern age of strife and noise, middle-class Indians increasingly view mountains as places to escape the petty compromises of day-to-day life and live more simply. The Puranas, a sprawling multi-volume cosmic encyclopaedia written largely, but not exclusively, in the first centuries of the first millennium, has a great deal to say about the sacred geography of this spiritual wellspring. According to the Puranas, in these valleys are spirits, gandharvas, both good and ill, half animal or bird, enchanting the gods with their singing, as well as nature spirits, yaksha, mercurial, sometimes lecherous protectors of the trees and the wealth of the earth, and their cousins, the rakshasa, eating raw human flesh, born from the breath of Brahma. These mountains are the region of Swarga, or paradise, the home of the righteous. ‘Here there is no sorrow, nor weariness, nor anxiety, nor hunger, nor apprehension; the inhabitants are exempt from all infirmity and pain, and live in uninterrupted enjoyment for ten or twelve thousand years.’ At the centre of this cosmic landscape, we are told, is the mountain Meru, in the shape of a lotus seed, like an inverted, rounded cone, on its summit the city of Brahma, among its petals the abode of the gods, and projecting from its base, like the filaments of a lotus, many mountains. Meru is often taken to be Mount Kailas, high on the Tibetan plateau, poised between the Himalaya to the south and the Kun Lun mountain range to the north. The myth of Shangri-La – a hidden, paradisal realm located in the Himalaya – was the concoction of an English novelist, but it has its origins in texts like these.

  In my long trek to understand the Himalaya, however imperfectly, such mythology was a frequent stumbling block. How did it relate to the Himalayan world as it appeared to me, one of economic disadvantage, self-reliance and cultural complexity? Most ordinary people were focussed on survival and a better future for their kids, not sublime landscapes or perspectives on the infinite. And yet it was the latter that sold the place to tourists like me. There was no shortage of Himalayan voices, but these voices were often drowned out, displaced by those outsiders who thought their ideas about the Himalaya were more urgent or important. Himalayan people had even adopted these interpretations about their home in the mountains and then sold them back to the people who held them. There is an elegant illustration of this, one that mixes religion, commerce and colonialism, bridging the gap between the cosmic and the quotidian.

  Among the Puranas is another work called the Manasakhanda, one that is often cited when describing the Kailas region, partly because it has more useful information about the pilgrimage sites in this part of the Himalaya than any other text, but also because it’s so charming. Its chief focus is the segment stretching south from Mount Kailas and the sacred waters of Lake Manasarovar nearby. One story tells how Dattatreya, an ascetic who has renounced the world and now lives among the mountains, goes to Kashi, the city of light, more familiar in Europe as Varanasi. Here he talks with Dhanvantari, prince of Kashi. The pair are also both gods: the ascetic being an incarnation of Vishnu while the prince is god of ayurveda or health. The two discuss tirtha, or sites of pilgrimage, and the ascetic tells the prince at length about the wonders he has seen in Himachal. ‘He who thinks of Himachal, though he may not behold them, is greater than he who performs all worship in Kashi,’ he says. ‘In a hundred ages of the gods, I could not tell thee of the glories of Himachal . . . As the dew is dried up by the first rays of the sun, so are the sins of man by the sight of holy Himachal.’

  It’s a beautiful text and much quoted not only in modern travel books but more scholarly works too. Yet its origins are surprising. Those familiar with the King James Version of the Bible may hear its echo in these words, which are not a translation of the Manasakhanda but a précis, made in the middle of the nineteenth century by a British colonial official called John Strachey, who spent part of his early career as a district officer in the far north of India, bordering Tibet. While investigating the finances of pilgrimage centres in his local area, Kumaon, John Strachey came to know a pandit, or scholar, called Rudrapatta Pant, who showed him the text of the Manasakhanda, which was used by pilgrims as a kind of spiritual travel guide. Strachey translated passages from it into English. Many British colonial officials leavened their bureaucratic duties with more congenial subjects; Strachey’s was literature. Thus, when he submitted his notes on the economic value of pilgrimages for publication in Edwin Atkinson’s Himalayan Gazetteer, he included his own version of the Manasakhanda, based on Pant’s translation but revised from within his own literary and religious tradition, that of the Church of England.

  So much for the translation. What of the original text? Beneath its soaring imagery, there are interesting clues as to its origins. It contains, for example, no mention of Gangotri and Gaumukh, among the most sacred sites in the region, but ones that are strongly associated with Shiva. Then there is its linking of the goddess Ganga not with Shiva, as in the Mahabharata, but with Vishnu. These changes and omissions characterise the Manasakhanda as a Vaishnavite text, belonging to that strand of Hinduism that has Vishnu as supreme lord: an unusual perspective in the Himalaya, which is more often Shaivite. It is also notable that the recommended pilgrimage sites featured in the Manasakhanda were all in Kumaon, with none at all in neighbouring Garhwal. What might explain these biases?

  For centuries through the medieval period, the Chand dynasty ruled Kumaon, fighting a series of intense wars in the seventeenth century against the neighbouring kingdom of Garhwal. Some of the finest temples in the capital of Almora were built to celebrate Kumaon victories. By the mid eighteenth century, around the time Strachey and Atkinson believed the Manasakhanda was most likely written, both Kumaon and Garhwal had been taken over by the Rohilla, a group of Muslim Pashtun who had migrated from Afghanistan in the service of the Mughal emperors to settle in northern India. This region was in turn absorbed by the punchy new state of Gorkha, now Nepal, and then, twenty years later, when the British went to war with Nepal, by the East India Company. While the British restored the western part of Garhwal to Sudarshan Khan, son of the last king, the eastern part was merged with Kumaon and kept under direct rule of the British, where it would remain until 1947. Among the chief differences between Kumaon and the princely state of Garhwal was taxation. Revenues in Garhwal went to Sudarshan Khan. In Kumaon they went to the British. So it was at the least a fortunate coincidence that the Manasakhanda, a text which pilgrims would look to for travel guidance, effectively directed its readers to sites exclusively in Kumaon, where their taxes would end up in British coffers, while reinforcing the area’s Vaishnavite tradition. In other words, pandits in Almora, wishing to re-establish religious control after Muslim occupation and
the tyranny of the Gorkhas, could not have had a more useful document, one that both suited the interests of the new occupying force but also let them go about their sacred business. And so a text that seems, at first glance, to be a simple expression of the eternal, unchanging appeal of the high Himalaya turns out to be a highly political document in a constantly shifting world of briefly held allegiances. That doesn’t make the words any less beautiful or, for the millions who have seen a Himalayan dawn, less true, but it does show how the Himalayan world has been simplified and glossed for the benefit of outsiders.

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  The near-paradox of the eternal mountains as political fault-line is no less relevant now. Himalayan communities still struggle to maintain their identity in the face of competing strategic interests from Delhi or Beijing. Not long after our expedition to Shivling, this corner of India became its twenty-seventh state, a combination of the old Himalayan kingdoms of Garhwal and Kumaon breaking off from the larger state of Uttar Pradesh. Locals favoured the name Uttarakhand for their new home, a term used for the region in the Puranas; the Hindu nationalist BJP government in Delhi insisted on Uttaranchal, a ‘saffronised’ Hindu nationalist alternative that seemed less separatist. It was finally changed to Uttarakhand in 2007, three years after the BJP lost power.

  Tensions like those in Garhwal and Kumaon have existed across the Himalaya throughout history and no more so than today. On the far side of Nepal, a longstanding campaign to create another new state, called Gorkhaland, based on the hill station of Darjeeling in West Bengal, sees regular outbreaks of violence, most recently in 2017. From Kashmir in the west to Arunachal Pradesh in the east and Tibet to the north, the needs of locals are often at odds with the strategic interests of wealthier regions far away, and centres of power that in the past wanted Himalayan gold or musk now want hydroelectricity or border security. These days, rather than powerful armies, cultural identity, often in the form of religion and language, and protest are the favoured tools with which to defend those interests.