If there has been an explosion of travel writing in the past few decades, it is because its most obvious attraction is in what it represents: escape. It is an escape from the monoculture of consumerism, packaged holidays in five star hotels and the extraordinary imperialism of fast food joints. Those of us who had a little money to throw around have been there and done that — and found there was nothing in it. So we want to go back to a world uncontaminated by the manifestations of modernity. It isn’t surprising then that all great travel writing is an attempt to “discover the past” before it is bulldozed off the planet. Colin Thubron, one of the great travel writers of our times, has done it again with his latest book on the solitary outposts of the world, To a Mountain in Tibet (Random House reprint, Rs 499), like his earlier books on central Asia, Siberia, West Asia and others
Travel writing is a beggar of literary forms: it borrows from the memoir, reportage and, most importantly, from the novel. Like the novel, it is a literary genre without rules, free from precept or precedent; it describes a journey but is also a philosophy expressed in images. Thubron is just that: he describes the physical journey to Mount Kailas that rises from Lake Manasarovar in western Tibet. It is the holiest mountain to Hindus, Buddhists and Jains, because according to the Puranas it is the abode of Shiva, a place where gods, humans and spirits meet to discuss the meaning and purpose of life.
Yet, at another and deeper level it is a long meditation on how different individuals and different cultures cope with the fact of mortality. At one level, it is that familiar story of how travellers from the West find spiritual consolation from eastern religions. But there is a personal touch to Thubron’s search for peace and solace: he had undertaken the journey to mourn his mother’s recent death, the last surviving member of the family and throughout the journey he is haunted by memories of her death and his dead sister and father. Along the high road, every rock seems to have a story, every view is bound with a visionary experience, “a forced field of intensified holiness”.
Over the years, Thubron, who has travelled to places beyond his own history and culture to write about them and about the journey, has perfected a technique in which historical reportage and social analysis flow into and out of his travel memoir. It is a mixed mode in which there is a little of everything for everyone: history and philosophy, laced with anthropology and local customs and, of course, contemporary politics.
But what distinguishes one travel memoir from another is language and style: Thubron writes with great elegiac precision as he negotiates the blurry line between personal memoir and vivid descriptions of one of the most spectacular mountain journeys of the world. And it is not just the sheer scale of the mountains and deep gorges that the traveller has to negotiate, they are also the most dangerous: over 50 percent of the pilgrims who are allowed in by the government quota every year to perform the parikrama around the lake fail to do so — and that after a rigorous medical fitness test and other facilities offered by the government and Chinese authorities.
In good travel writing, it is said, you can go on a world tour without leaving home. And you can do this because of the way language moves to describe those far off places, off the beaten track of tourists. Manasarovar lake, “created by the mind of Brahma is a full-blown paradise … alive with bathing celestials and seraphic music. Hindu pilgrims (the few who can make it on government quotas) pouring out libations to the shades of their ancestors, easing their souls into eternity”. Most travellers to Mount Kailas undertake the arduous trek “on account of the dead” because such rituals, it is believed, gives some solace to the bereaved. “But the tarpan’s truth is not my own.”
The centrepiece of the pilgrimage is the parikarma, or the ritual circumambulation around the lake. This practice, Thubron says, pre-dates Buddhism which is the reason why no mountain in Tibet matches the sanctity of Kailas. “Saturated with the mana of miracle-working saints”, the story goes that in the 12th century a great lama “searching the hearthstones on which to brew his tea, found none that he could use for all the stones around him were the self-manifest images of the Buddha, or inscribed with their speech”. The greatest strength of Thubron’s account is that he has researched all the myths and mythologies associated with the Mount and weave them in with descriptions of his travelogue.
Like his earlier books, this is a haunting and beautiful work, a rare mix of travel writing imbued with a philosophy on the simple art of living. In its evocation of landscape and variety of hill people, mystic and spiritual traditions of the east, it offers insights that many of us gloss over in our humdrum lives.
