Stephen Alter on his love, concern for magnificent but fragile Himalayas

He’s an award winning author, naturalist and conservationist who has spent his life reading, writing and travelling the length and breadth of the Himalayas. An atheist born to missionary parents, he has been on countless pilgrimages, treading the footsteps of ancient travellers moved by the sublime nature of the world’s youngest and most restless mountains. An American passport holder, he feels more at home in Mussoorie, where he’s lived most of his life (his father served as headmaster of Woodstock School there) than anywhere in the States.

As I ready to e-meet Stephen Alter for coffee, I envy him his beautiful old cottage in Landour and the creative community of authors like Bill Aitken and Ruskin Bond and actors like Victor Banerjee and his cousin, the late Tom Alter, that has developed in his environs. He appears on the screen punctually at 11 am, coffee mug and a brownie from a local bakery by his side.

First, of course, congratulations are in order. Alter has recently been awarded the prestigious Mountain Environment and Natural History Award at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival 2020 in Alberta, Canada, for his 2019 book, Wild Himalaya. He accepts the accolades almost sheepishly. It is, I tell him, an incredible book not only for the depth of its research, but also because it bears testimony to the vast amount of fieldwork he has put in.

“For me, the journeys, the treks are essentially my first draft,” he agrees. “Before I put my fingers to the keyboard, my feet lead me into the narrative, which is why I’ve often said I write with my feet!”

He refers to his brand of writing as “geo-poetics” or passionate geology, which combines poetic lyricism with field experience and research. The book, more like a collection of essays, has a readable format. “I feel that there is a change in how people are reading these days,” he explains. “They read in snatches and that’s why I think short essays are increasingly the way to go.”

For Wild Himalaya, which encapsulates such a diversity of journeys across the length and breadth of the mountains, this format has worked well. It took four years since he first proposed the idea to Aleph for it to finally be published. Alter acknowledges that such rigorous research isn’t for everyone. “Other than a small grant, I paid for most of the journeys from my own pocket,” he says. “The Banff prize has been a huge validation, reaffirming that the energy invested in the book was worth it.”

The travel experiences he had along the way were worth it, too. In between sips of coffee, he describes a trek he undertook from Yamunotri to Gangotri. “Instead of one of the many well-marked routes, I chose to walk through the forest, shepherds guiding me towards my destination,” he says. “Exhausted, when I reached the top of a high ridge, I fell asleep under a massive oak.” He awoke to a sight that filled him with awe. “The beauty I’d been too exhausted to notice earlier, was overwhelming,” he recalls. “Clearly others had felt the divinity of this place, for I saw offerings placed around the old oak I had lain under.”

It is this mystic quality of the mountains that draws Alter. “Nature often affords glimpses of the sublime,” he says, “a feeling that places with powerful beauty and energy existed long before any religions were even conceptualised.” Just then, coffee and a plate of idlis arrives for me. Even as I eat my South Indian breakfast in New Delhi, it is as if I can actually see the word picture Alter has so eloquently drawn for me.

Our conversation turns from the sublime to the prosaic as Alter talks about the changes he has observed over the decades in his beloved Himalayas. “I’ve seen snow caps, glaciers and mountain streams visibly diminish before my eyes,” he says soberly. “But people living there contribute very little to this change.” The culprits? Unplanned development in the hills as well as consumer patterns in the cities.

He tells me how every time a new road is built, the debris left behind takes years to dissipate. And along every new road, houses, restaurants and shops spring up compounding the impact on the fragile hill ecology. “I’m not against all development, only this unplanned development,” he says. “For I’m afraid we’ve reached a point today when human beings are having a greater impact on the Himalayas than natural forces.”

Alter digs into his brownie as our conversation turns to how much the Himalayas can teach us — and how we seem to have learnt so little from them. Every year, these young mountains witness flash floods and landslides as they are still evolving. “Even accounts of nineteenth century travellers to the Himalayas refer to flash floods and landslides there,” he tells me. “If people actually learnt what the Himalayas are teaching us, they won’t build large hydroelectric projects, would they?” In the hydroelectric project above Uttarkashi, there have been at least three major floods, he says: “Yet, contractors are back at work days after the flood.”

For someone who avers he is more motivated by doubt, Alter’s abiding faith in the Himalayas is infectious. The Mussoorie Mountain Festival, which he founded in 2005 in conjunction with Mussoorie Writers, an association of authors and readers united in their love for the Himalayas, has grown by leaps and bounds. Held online this year, it concluded on December 9 and had a line-up of over 50 mountaineers, photographers, musicians, conservationists and writers.

In fact, not many know that Alter, now known for his non-fiction works like Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage Up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture (2001) and Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime (2014), which received the 2015 Kekoo Naoroji Award for Himalayan Literature — started his career as a fiction writer. “I’d published my first work of fiction, Neglected Lives, before I returned home to Mussoorie after completing my undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University, Connecticut,” says the 64-year-old.

Over the years, Alter has divided his time between Mussoorie and Colorado, teaching writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the American University in Cairo. India-born, Alter says he’s always been skeptical about identifying as American or Indian. As our coffee hour draws to a close, I muse that regardless of what his passport says, there are few greater authorities on the Himalayas than this pucca Mussoorie native.