Between Heaven and Earth: Exploring the layered life of the Indian hills

Between Heaven and Earth: Writings on the Indian Hills

by Bulbul Sharma and Ruskin Bond

Published by Speaking Tiger

464 pages             ₹799

 

For plain-dwellers like me, the mountains have a singularity to them — an old, wise sage who talks in a deep, booming voice, unhurried by the smallness of human time, alive since perpetuity, and destined to remain so. Perhaps you find them sublime. Or haunting. Or meditative. Or simply, meditatively simple.

 

But beyond the singular impressions they may lend to an outsider, mountains, too, have a secret life of their own — like your parents, friends, lovers, like yourself. Like spring hides the callous winters within itself, the mountains, too, hide colours, shades, stories, cultures, and rituals waiting to reveal themselves, one at a time, if you're patient enough to stay.

 

Between Heaven & Earth: Writings on the Indian Hills,  edited by Ruskin Bond and Bulbul Sharma, collects those stories — stories written by residents, admirers, and trespassers alike. Memoirs, travelogues, nature writing, culinary pieces, poetry, spiritual accounts, letter exchanges, sociocultural commentaries — the genres sprawl as wide as the ranges themselves.

 

The anthology’s staggering diversity and breadth aptly capture the staggering diversity and breadth of the Indian hills. “What is it about the hills that draws us to them again and again? Their age-old silence, their brooding quality at dusk, or their sparkling, sunlit hillsides at dawn?” Sharma asks in the introduction. The answers, as the compiled pieces prove, are many.

 

The modern Indian hill station cannot be understood outside the colonial project that invented it. In her essay, Shaswati Talukdar writes, “In order to make colonialism viable in this alien land, the landscape itself had to be domesticated. In other words, ‘mountains’ had to be turned into more manageable ‘hills’.” Or, as Emily Eden perceptively (and self-indicatively) observes in a letter to her sister, “Twenty years ago no European had ever been here, and there we were, with the band playing the ‘Puritani’ and ‘Masaniello,’ and eating salmon from Scotland, (…) we 105 Europeans being surrounded by 3,000 mountaineers, who, wrapped in their hill blankets, looked on with what we call our polite amusements, and bowed to the ground if a European came near them. I sometimes wonder they do not cut all our heads off, and say nothing more about it.”

 

Elsewhere, Stephen Alter describes, “In many ways Landour was like a small town in middle America — Winesburg, Ohio, transported to the first range of the Himalayas.” Tempting though it is to romanticise this era and its orderliness, Raaja Bhasin reminds us, “Many Indians still look back at Simla before 1947 as, simply, a wonderful place. Few remember that the average Indian was almost an outcaste in this colonial stratosphere and, more likely than not, was a porter, rickshaw-puller, petty trader or clerk.”

 

But the view from the outside has seldom been the view from within. The romance of the hills has largely been a visitor’s luxury. Life in the hills is hard — was always hard — made worse by colonial extraction and, after Independence, by the euphemistically named “development” that followed, with blind exploitation dressed in the language of progress compounded by crushing overpopulation. As Pushpesh Pant writes, describing the hilly delicacies of his childhood, “The hill man’s everyday fare was incomparably Spartan — bare sustenance to keep body and soul together, belonging to a realm where taste did not matter.”

 

And yet, against this relentless churn of progress, the mountains remain indifferent. Against the weight of all that history, the mountains carry a persevering stillness. We are here today, we shan’t be tomorrow, but the hills shall stay on. It’s this steadiness, this beautiful inconsequentiality of time that makes them feel like an antidote to modern life. Rumer Godden finds it settling into her, “This sense of hurry and press is slipping away; the hours of this afternoon have spun themselves out into a length that promises that the days will all come round evenly and long.”

 

Within these pages, the hills speak in many voices. Travellers: “The only way to travel is to surrender, and that is how it was on the road to Kulpa…” writes Vijay Prakash Singh. Observing poets: “In the faint light of the new moon in the dark forest, a small waterfall had encircled a tiny rock like a necklace,” composes Abanindranath Tagore. Those who've made the mountains their home: “Many intelligent people in the mountains make simple errors of judgement. The point about trusting instinct is that when we fall back on our own animal cunning, it proves more useful in a tight corner than wisdom borrowed from an alien source,” writes Bill Aitken. 

 

And those who’ve left that home behind: “Your town still lives in the broken city. It will go with you, wherever you go, this ‘moveable feast’. This hill is in your blood. This is not nostalgia, it is Love. 

 

Nostalgia is the memory of splendour; Love is splendour,” muses Dhruba Hazarika. Chroniclers of local hauntings: “Should you see three little children — two boys and a girl — riding the seesaw in the park at Char Dukan after the lights have come on in the nearby Church, please just let them be. They mean no harm,” advises Ganesh Saili.

 

Read this anthology the way you’d walk a mountain trail. Why choose a destination? Why hurry? Let the mountains be more than a mere backdrop. They are scarred and steadfast, left behind and carried forward. Between Heaven & Earth captures the complicated, many-voiced life of the Indian hills. The sage, after all, does not offer easy lessons. Neither does this anthology.

 

The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world. Instagram/X: aroomofwords