Exploration and identity

Tales of Hazaribagh: An Intimate Exploration of Chhotanagpur Plateau

Author: Mihir Vatsa  

Publisher: Speaking Tiger

Pages:216

Price: Rs 450

Writing about “modernists of the streets” in The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City, Matthew Beaumont offers that “lost steps, paradoxically, are unlost, and only the steps that follow a specific, prescribed trajectory are lost.”

In 2016, Mihir Vatsa, a multi-award-winning poet and riverwalker, was working as a copywriter in Delhi. Seduced by a steady income, he found himself following a “prescribed trajectory”: A realisation that he’s getting ‘lost’. As a result, he not only began to hate the everydayness of life in Delhi, the city of Delhi but slumped into depression. In such a state, to borrow novelist Edward St Aubyn’s words out of context, what remains is “only the dumb language of injury and illness.”

With the hurt that he couldn’t explain, even to a doctor whom he ended up inviting to his hometown and the motivation of his friends who convinced him that he could “always return to the routine later,” Mr Vatsa returned to Hazaribagh, his hometown in Jharkhand. Over the years, travelling far and wide across the Chhotanagpur plateau, Mr Vatsa began documenting his love for the land, his “lost steps,” resulting in this poignant and lyrical genre-defying book.

Tales of Hazaribagh: An Intimate Exploration of Chhotanagpur Plateau is as much a confluence of historical narratives, geographical mappings, research findings and travel writing as it’s a memoir. Mr Vatsa notes in the book that he always wanted to “do something” for Hazaribagh, only to realise that “you don’t always need to do something for the town. That it can also do things to you.”

Mr Vatsa narrates both history and personal anecdotes with poetic charm making Tales of Hazaribagh at once an account of colonial-era stories and portrait of present-day Jharkhand, where, much to even Santhal writer Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s surprise, there are emu farms.

Located at 600 metres above the sea level, Hazaribagh — “the land of a thousand gardens, the land of a thousand tigers” — could have been the capital of India, as proposed by one G Hunter Thompson, Mr Vatsa writes. Its name, he argues, “was a conscious, creative intervention. It was coined by purposefully joining two words together. It is poetic, again, by default.” Mr Vatsa also points out that sketches by Captain Robert Smith and Sir Charles D’Oyly in the 1820s “remain the earliest visual documentation of Hazaribagh’s landscape.” For the latest ones, however, I would recommend Mr Vatsa’s indicative maps at the beginning of the book, which would explain why this place feeds the writer and that he belongs here like no other place.

Poetry lingers in Mr Vatsa’s prose unlike in any other travelogue I’ve read. Mr Vatsa is deeply invested in keeping a check on the arrogance of a naïve explorer getting in the way of his account. He changes terms often used in travel literature, such as “discovered” and “found” with “gathered,” thereby replacing “arrogance with fondness.”

Mr Vatsa, whose writing is committed to collectivising and not atomising, credits his mother, Maate, for the “profound inheritance” of travel. At the same time, he doesn’t fail to mention Bulu Uncle — the Padma Shri awardee and decorated historian Bulu Imam — and Mr Subhashis Das, a local researcher and megalithic researcher, among many other friends for being constant partners in the adventure to ‘gather’ waterfalls, memories, and rare moments of pure life.

During his travels, Mr Vatsa leverages technology to its fullest. He does not suffer the stubbornness and snobbery towards it that many historians suffer. Instead, he’s appreciative of technological advancements, noting how Google Earth, in the absence of “contemporary documentation,” helped him immensely during his expedition to Lotwa Dam and a river near Suraj Kund. But the use of technology to destroy the natural environment in the name of development disturbs him. Mr Vatsa talks about venting his fury on Facebook. He also takes a jibe at his social media activism, a millennial attitude that he calls “being cute” and performative, but he also suggests that at least his “performance was earnest.”

What he calls a “performance” is actually his unconditional love for the land, which he wants to preserve and see thrive. Explaining his obsession, he invokes a poet and former DC of Hazaribagh Samuel Solomon, who wrote: “Will this loveliness stay after we are gone?” This loveliness, this beauty, he offers is also a way to “look at its [Hazaribagh’s] history, and in postcolonial countries like India, this history is marred with violence, upon body, land and identity.”