A Fire Over Mount Everest: Revisiting India's landmark 1984 expedition

A Fire over Mount Everest

by Siddharth Kak

Published by Penguin

248 pages  ₹499

 

A Google Gemini query on the number of books written about Mount Everest yielded this unsatisfactory answer: “Well, over 100 dedicated books.” It is impossible to determine the “exact total number,” Google said, because the genre is “forever expanding”.  A Fire Over Mount Everest is an important addition to these growing numbers. This is film-maker Siddharth Kak’s account of the first mixed Mount Everest expedition of 1984, which put the first Indian woman, Bachendri Pal, on the world’s highest summit. 

Kak, of Surabhi fame, is no David Breashears, the accomplished mountaineer-film-maker whose movie Everest was an all-time IMAX hit. He came to produce a film about this historic achievement on a whim, driven by a penchant for plunging headlong into risky ventures. His switch from a Tata Administrative Services job to documentary film-making was one such. Some years later, he spied a small item on a national expedition to Mount Everest (29,031 feet) featuring seven women. “It struck me, in a eureka moment,… a film on a global phenomenon like Mount Everest,… dedicated to placing India’s first woman on Everest, was a really cool and exciting adventure to capture in a documentary film.”  

He was undeterred by his zero mountaineering experience, let alone filming at high altitude. With characteristic audaciousness — he was 36 years old at the time — he leveraged his Stephanian contacts to gain a meeting with HC Sarin, former defence 

secretary and head of the Indian Mountaineering Federation, and convinced him to grant official permission for a mountaineering novice to film the expedition. 

Instead of basking in the self-congratulatory glow of a successful summit expedition and a National Film Award, Kak offers a warts-and-all account — achievements, honourable actions, struggles, fears, poor management, sexism, internal politicking, chicanery, the lot. He hints at foul play that resulted in the loss of rare footage of a storm breaking over the Everest summit. But most significantly, this book suggests that had the expedition been managed better, at least three Indian women would have summited Everest in 1984. 

Yet Kak writes without rancour, his matter-of-fact prose enhancing the credibility of his story. At the time, Indian mountaineering was dominated by the army, and this expedition too was led by Colonel (later Brigadier) Darshan Khullar, with Lt Colonel Premchand as his deputy. The dominance of armymen meant that women played a secondary role. Yet some of the women selected for the expedition were accomplished mountaineers. Two of them, Rekha Sharma and Chandra Prabha Aitwal, were the first to summit the far more technically challenging Nanda Devi (25,642 feet) in 1981. But as Kak writes, “Casual misogyny was apparent. Even though the primary aim in the 1984 expedition was to put India’s first woman on the summit, the women were not involved in training or strategy and played only a supporting role to the men. Even in summit parties they were following the men.” Given gender mores of the time, this asymmetry was not questioned. As Kak points out, “Military operations are based on an unquestioned chain of command. …And women are seen in a supporting role but in all of life.” 

He writes owing to a shortage of equipment, Aitwal, who was named in the first two summit parties, was ordered by Col Premchand to sacrifice her bid at the last moment in favour of Rita Gombu, daughter of Nawang Gombu, Tenzing Norgay’s nephew and the first man to summit Everest twice. The next day Rita, who was — incredibly — not roped to her support member Phu Dorji or Sherpa Ang Dorji, had to turn back 100 metres below the summit on the latter’s advice when the weather deteriorated. Instead of staying with her on the descent, Ang Dorji turned back to complete his own summit bid. Phu Dorji, meanwhile, surged ahead to become the first Indian to reach the summit without supplemental oxygen. In chasing personal glory, both abandoned Rita to make a perilous solo descent – a shocking dereliction of mountaineering ethics for which neither was reprimanded. The next day, lack of communication by Khullar cost Rekha Sharma, waiting on the South Col (26,000 feet), her summit bid. Finally, it was Bachendri Pal who summited Everest a week after being buried under a midnight avalanche at 24,000 feet. 

Nine years later, Kak records how Pal imbibed the lessons of the 1984 expedition. That year, an Indo-Nepalese women’s expedition led by herself and Rita Gombu broke seven world records. Among them: The highest number of women (eight) from a single country to summit Everest; the only woman to summit twice (Santosh Yadav); and the youngest woman to summit (Dicky Dolma, 19). 

Kak does not neglect to point out that the Indian expedition followed “the highest traditions of humanitarian response” by diverting resources to rescue a Belgian team stranded on the summit after attempting the first traverse of Everest, ascending the challenging west ridge and descending from the south ridge. This rescue was sparsely reported at the time, and it assumes greater significance when compared with today’s commercial era when too many people ignore the pleas of dying mountaineers, callously stepping around them to reach the top. 

This absorbing and revelatory book goes beyond the expedition to trace the post-Everest trajectories of the protagonists and is an invaluable account of the realities of the pre-commercial era of Everesting. Kak’s candid description of his fear-filled solo traverse through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall is up there with the best of mountaineering literature. The chapter “Black Everest,” on the degradation of the Himalayas, should be standard reading for every moneyed amateur contemplating a splurge to “conquer” the world’s highest peak. The book deserved better production values than an un-indexed paperback edition with few photographs of the expedition or of the mountain, an odd flaw in a book written by a film-maker.