List of Maps

 

Himalaya and its region

Guge Kingdom and its sacred sites

Kathmandu region

Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet

Western Himalaya

Everest/Chomolungma region

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Pilgrims

 

The Earth asked Vishnu, ‘Why do you come in the form of mountains and not in your own form?’ Vishnu replied: ‘The pleasure that exists in mountains is greater than that of animate beings, for they feel no heat, nor cold, nor pain, nor anger, nor fear, nor pleasure. We three gods as mountains will reside in the earth for the benefit of mankind.’

In the late summer of 1995 I flew to India for my first experience of climbing in the Himalaya. The monsoon was still strong and in those days, a quarter of a century ago, parts of Delhi flooded more readily; many lower-lying streets were submerged in brown water. It was still raining as we drove north in a bus, stopping for a night in Rishikesh on the banks of the swollen Ganges. The Beatles studied transcendental meditation here in 1968 with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, turning on millions of young Westerners to eastern spiritual practices. ‘After I had taken LSD,’ George Harrison recalled, ‘a lingering thought stayed with me, and the thought was “the yogis of the Himalayas”…. That was part of the reason I went to India. Ravi [Shankar] and the sitar were excuses; although they were a very important part of it, it was a search for a spiritual connection.’ It occurred to me only much later that I had been lifted into the mountains on the last gasp of the same cultural tide, upstairs in my suburban bedroom in the early 1980s, listening to old Bob Dylan records and reading stories of my climbing heroes high in the faraway, mythical Himalaya.

Next day we reached the mountains, half-submerged in a torrential

downpour. The roads ran with water; mist clung to rock faces that overhung the roof of the bus. Heavy cloud shrouded the peaks. A mile or so from the village of Gangotri, in what was then part of Uttar Pradesh, the bus stopped abruptly. Huge granite boulders had tumbled down from a cliff above, loosened by the rain. It would take explosives and bulldozers to clear the way. For now, this was the end of the road. We peered up at the unstable slope wondering about the next rock fall, anxious to get going and out of the way. A number of lean and eager men surrounded the bus, grinning wildly, dressed in thin cotton shorts and shirts and holding plastic sheeting around their shoulders, their only protection against the rain. A price was agreed and our gear continued into the village on their backs. We followed, sheltering under umbrellas. It was as though I’d found a door marked ‘adventure’ and stepped through it.

The scale of the Himalaya is disorienting: not simply muscular but

steroidal. On that first expedition, the intensity of the mountains felt overwhelming, even oppressive. Everything was bigger than I had experienced before: the peaks themselves, the rivers, the rock falls, the avalanches, the glaciers, the legends and myths. From the plains of India, the range was like a white wall, a castle of impossible dreams, a rampart separating South and Central Asia, China from India. The clash of their competing interests in the mountains on their respective borders has usually been at the expense of the people who live there, with China now occupying Tibet. In 1962, the world’s two most populous nations had even gone to war in the Himalaya.

There are few places in the world where geography inspires the human

imagination to such a degree. There are longer mountain ranges: the Andes are the longest at seven thousand kilometres. But there are none higher. The Himalaya are themselves part of a vast highland region that runs in a crescent for four thousand kilometres from Kyrgyzstan in the west to Myanmar in the east and includes the Pamir, Hindu Kush and Karakoram ranges. Around four hundred mountains on earth exceed 7,000 metres and they’re all located here, including the magical fourteen that top 8,000.

The Himalaya range itself makes up the eastern two-thirds of this region,

an area of 600,000 square kilometres between the Indus in the west and the Brahmaputra in the east, at the same latitudes as the Middle East, North Africa, Texas and northern Mexico. The range is anchored at either end by two great mountains, Nanga Parbat in Pakistan and Namche Barwa where Tibet’s great river the Yarlung Tsangpo bends sharply south to become India’s Brahmaputra. The region includes part of the high plateau of Tibet, the highest and largest plateau on earth, five times the size of France and with an average altitude of 4,500 metres: the roof of the world.

The Himalaya’s diversity is astonishing and multifaceted. The western

portion, including the Indian regions of Ladakh and Zanskar, are semi-desert, dry and cold for much of the year. The eastern end, the watershed of the Brahmaputra, includes some of the wettest places on earth, with precipitation in excess of ten metres a year. Nowhere is this heterogeneity more marked that in the Himalaya’s vertical relief. For every kilometre you climb, average temperatures drop by more than six degrees Celsius. Altitude in this regard mimics latitude, meaning that with a few kilometres of altitude gain, you can travel the equivalent of thousands of kilometres in latitude, from the tropics to the polar ice caps. The amount of ice locked away in the glaciers of the Himalaya and Karakoram, now melting rapidly as the climate heats up, has prompted geographers to call the region the Third Pole.

Altitude, climate and scale are only the start. Like light scattering through

a crystal, the complex, three-dimensional shapes made by the mountains have immense implications for their natural diversity and the human populations that inhabit them. Many with no knowledge of the Himalaya assume the mountains are a natural wilderness, but they support a population of around fifty million, no less diverse than the landscapes they live in, a place where three of the world’s great religions – Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism – converge. Each Himalayan valley’s human history is intimately connected to its geography. Slopes that catch the sun or else are sheltered from the wind are more hospitable to life than neighbouring aspects that don’t. At a glance, you can see the difference between, for example, a shadowy gorge and a flat, sunlit piece of ground tucked in the lee of a ridgeline. The sheer scale of this landscape has an unusually intense impact on human activity, and ultimately physiology. Until very recently, the only way to get around was on foot or on the back of an animal. It’s quite something to greet the day in a village on a ridgeline in the middle hills of the Himalaya and look across a valley to the neighbouring village and know it will take most of the day to reach it, plunging thousands of feet down to the river below in the shadow of morning and then labouring up the opposite slope in the hot afternoon sun. Like everywhere else, water is of greatest concern, a life-giver and life-taker, but in the Himalaya it is architect as well, carving through the mountains, first as glaciers of ice then raging torrents of meltwater and rain, ripping them up, washing them away. Climbing is hard and unnecessary, a strange luxury. Mountains are places for gods, not people. Rivers are for both and of far more consequence and interest to those living in mountains than to those who merely visit them.

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We had come to the Garhwal region of the Indian Himalaya to climb

Shivling, a chipped tooth of white and gold that pierces the deepening blue of high altitude above the Gangotri glacier: ravishing and austere. For many climbers, not just me, it’s the sort of peak that provokes a yearning that’s actually physical. Since it was first climbed in the 1970s, some of the world’s best mountaineers have climbed new routes on Shivling’s steepest faces and ridges. When seen marked altogether on a photograph these lines look like spider’s silk anchored to the mountain’s fabric. Each thin strand contains stories of suffering and endurance, imagination and courage, the stuff of legend. Many of the mountains near it on the Gangotri glacier also have these lines of ascent and contain similar stories, passed on in books and films that in turn bring more climbers to this valley: pilgrims of a sort.

Yet whatever Gangotri means to climbers, it is sacred to hundreds of

millions of Indians for something else. The glacier’s hollow snout, now receding quickly, is known as Gaumukh, meaning ‘the cow’s mouth’, from which flows a milky stream: the source of the Ganges. The towering shape of Shivling is located at the centre of a sacred geography first mapped out in the epic Sanskrit poem the Mahabharata, which lies near the heart of Hindu culture and whose origins stretch back almost three thousand years. As it starts its 2,500 km journey to the Bay of Bengal, the river is called Bhagirathi. According to the Mahabharata, the mythical figure Bhagiratha, after whom the river is named, prayed for a thousand years for its waters to flow in order to expiate the sins of sixty thousand relatives who had perished under the curse of a great sage they had wrongly accused. Yet the goddess of the river, Ganga, remained in the heavens, at the centre of the universe, ‘the still point of the turning world’, unwilling to leave. Only the great god Shiva had the power to make her go, so Bhagiratha followed the command of Shiva’s counterpart, Brahma, to pray for one more year, this time living only on air. Only then was Ganga forced from heaven, rushing to earth on the jata, the matted dreadlocks of Shiva’s head, bringing life-giving water to the plains of India.

This story in the Mahabharata is told to five brothers, the Pandavas, who

really are on a pilgrimage. Like us, they were outsiders, spiritual explorers in an otherworldly part of India known as Devbhumi, land of the gods, far from the political frenzy of court life. Hinduism’s founding texts, the Veda, are actually centuries older still, and their geographical references, to the Himalaya or anywhere else, are thin on the ground. (In fact, their cultural focus is further west, between the Indus and Sutlej rivers.) But by the time of the Mahabharata, a poem that looks back to a lost age of heroic kings, Hinduism and the Indo-Aryan culture that produced it had firmly rooted itself around the Ganges. In the Mahabharata, the extreme landscape of the Himalaya, where the Ganges finds its source, is being drawn inside the narrative of Hinduism’s established and expanding culture.

The word ‘Himalaya’, Sanskrit for ‘abode of snow’, features regularly in

the poem, although there are other names for the mountains too: Shivalaya, the ‘abode of Shiva’, Himachal, or ‘mountains of snow’, and Himavant, the ‘mountain king’ who was father of Ganga. In India the word is used for the entire chain of mountains but in Nepal, where it is simply Himal, the name refers to a discrete group of mountains within that chain. The pronunciation of Himalaya has proved slippery, though. In Europe and North America stress now goes on the third syllable, but in Sanskrit it goes on the second. And languages that developed from Sanskrit – Hindi, Urdu, Nepali – all deal with the word slightly differently.

During the mid 1920s this vexed question troubled a senior Indian civil

servant called Geoffrey Corbett. From his office window in the hill-town of Simla, looking up from government papers on India’s commerce and industry, Corbett could see the Himalaya. Corbett had been a climber since he was a boy and would spend his leave exploring the mountains. Already a member of the famous Alpine Club, the first mountaineering club founded in 1857, he thought of founding a Himalayan Club; it wasn’t a new idea, but Corbett had the contacts and became the first honorary secretary. Yet how to say their name? Given that Corbett chaired meetings with officials from all over India, he paused in the middle of a discussion and asked them. He got a different answer from each linguistic background: Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. He put the matter to the languages adviser at army headquarters. The adviser concluded that Tibetans as well as Hindi and Urdu-speaking Indians stressed the first ‘a’ as long, especially Urdu speakers. The other syllables were up for grabs. In Nepal, it was simply Himal. In Hindi, it was more like Himalay. For India’s Muslim population it was Himaliya, a pronunciation declared defective since ‘Muhammadans’ were not the original inhabitants. The adviser suggested a stress mark on the first ‘a’ to guide English speakers: Himàlaya. Corbett also asked a friend, Brijlal Nehru, cousin of India’s first prime minister after independence. Their final conclusion was: ‘Hi’ as in ‘him’, ‘ma’ as in ‘father’, and ‘la’ and ‘ya’ as in the French word ‘le’. He summarised his findings in a paper published in the Himalayan Journal for 1929. ‘The common Anglicised pronunciation is Himalaya. But in recent years there has been a tendency among superior folk to say Himaiiya or Himaliya.’ The modern usage of ‘Himalayas’ is jarring to my ear, despite the instinctive English habit to pluralise Hindi words that are already plural: think ‘pyjamas’ and ‘chapatis’. Call it snobbery, but this book sticks with Himalaya.

The Mahabharata and the other great Sanskrit epic the Ramayana are

collectively known as the Itihasa, a Sanskrit word meaning ‘history’. Many scholars have peered through the mythological fog and tried to snatch at concrete details. For though the Mahabharata is not really history, it’s also not not history. For the five Pandava brothers, kings from the plains, as for the Indian civil servant Sir Geoffrey Corbett, the Himalaya performed two contrasting roles: as a place of spiritual retreat and separation from the world, but also a meeting ground, where radically different cultures met and traded on a long-established network of high mountain trails. The compilers of the Mahabharata – unified into the mythological figure of Vyasa, the Homer of ancient India – not only had a considerable geographical knowledge of this part of the Himalaya but also had knowledge of its different ethnic groups. Yet even two thousand years ago, the Himalaya represented nature untamed by humans: dark forests and raging rivers, a place for wild animals, tigers and bears. They were a place for ‘wild men’ too, who didn’t plough like the people of civilised nations.

In his monumental Himalayan Gazetteer, the Victorian-era Irish civil

servant Edwin Atkinson described how Hindu migrants settling in these mountains ‘leavened the manners and observances of the rough indigenous population’. That process of civilising mountain people fitted Atkinson’s narrative in which the British Empire was doing something similar, even as its wildness drew imperial adventurers to the forests and snowy wastes of the frontier. Rudyard Kipling chased that idea in his 1898 poem ‘The Explorer’:

Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges— Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!

Mountains have always been places for lowlanders to exercise their imaginations: full of demons or else sublime and adventurous. The abode of snow has offered a vast white screen on which to project the fantasies of all comers: exiled kings, foreign imperialists, spiritual seekers, self-important explorers, archaeologists, missionaries, spies, mapmakers, artists, hippies – and climbers. The Himalaya are shrouded in their stories, like monsoon clouds: stories of secret knowledge and new horizons, about somewhere at the end of things, somewhere beyond. These myths hardly ever recognised the complexity and richness of the cultures that developed there over millennia, as varied as the mountains that shaped them. Those cultures were either ignored or appropriated by outsiders looking to profit. That tension, between myth and reality, still tears at the Himalaya today. How these stories were made and then remade is one of the themes of this book.

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By morning the rain had stopped. Cloud was lifting from the earth like smoke. Ganga was thundering through her narrow valley, a broiling mass of water, thick with sediment, her roar underpinned with the more solid – and ominous – rumble of huge boulders being swept downstream with the force of water. The sound was a powerful reminder that the Himalaya are being washed away only marginally more slowly than they are being raised into the sky. We instinctively think of mountains as eternal, but they’re not. They are falling to bits and being remade like the rest of nature – like us.

A few of us decided to take our umbrellas and visit the small temple in

the centre of the village, to receive a blessing from the priest. Leaning out from the incense-rich shrine, he smeared a mark on our foreheads, right between our eyes, known as a tilaka. The temple was quiet, the crowds put off by the risks of the monsoon season. Normally, the village of Gangotri is thronged with pilgrims, especially in the two months before the rains start in July. Gangotri is one of a series of four pilgrimage sites in the region known as the Chhota Char Dham, that are visited as a circuit, Gangotri most usually being visited second. The other three are Yamunotri, source of the Yamuna river; Kedarnath, whose temple is dedicated to Shiva; and Badrinath, the holiest of all, its temple to the god Vishnu situated on the banks of the Alaknanda river, which later joins the Bhagirathi to become the Ganges. According to the Mahabharata, it was here at Badrinath that the god Krishna stood, on one foot, arms raised, for a hundred years, ‘living on the wind’.

If you want to imagine the spot where a demigod like Bhagiratha might

seek the assistance of Shiva, then our base camp below Shivling – Shiva’s Lingam, ‘phallic symbol’ of his divine creative force – would come close. The place was called Tapovan, literally ‘forest of austerity’, although there were only scrubby trees in the thin air at 4,400 metres. Tapovan is a term from the Mahabharata, denoting a place of spiritual practice. Every summer, a few yogis make the trek to meditate below the mountain. While there are many Tapovans, this one is famous, thanks to one of the world’s most beautiful mountains soaring overhead and the source of the Ganges a short distance below. When we put up our tents, planning to stay for a few weeks, three yogis were still in residence, living, like Bhagiratha, on fresh air, plus a handful of rice, sleeping in a rough stone shelter.

At night, the skin of our tents froze, the mountain spectral in the

moonlight. By day, we narrowed our eyes against the fierce sun of altitude, rubbing cream into our faces. A sadhu, an ascetic, would sit in its warm brightness, cross-legged on a flat piece of granite with the mountain above him, naked except for a small pouch of cloth at his waist, hollow-chested, head piled with his own version of Shiva’s dreadlocks, eyes closed in contemplation. He and I were both devotees. We were both enduring physical discomfort, both searching for something, although I could see the sadhu knew his metaphysical road better than I knew mine. I had no idea as I sharpened my crampons and packed my rucksack that I was starting a long climb towards a better understanding of these mountains.

Where did mythology end and reality begin? How and where did the

mountaineering stories of my youth fit into the broader history of the Himalaya? Climbers spend more time around government bureaucrats in the Himalaya than anywhere else in the world. But how did those governments come into being? How did the curious patchwork of nations that make up the Himalaya fall into place? Why was the Himalaya not all in either India or China? From the outside looking in, it occurred to me that while there were many Western books published on Himalayan geography, historians tended to break the region down into polities. That approach ignored the Himalayan region’s sense of itself: its shared culture and experience, a coherence ordinarily overlooked in Western accounts. Why was it that stories about climbing Everest were far more common than stories about the people who lived in its shadow? As though Scotland was being judged on its golf courses. What of Himalayan art and philosophy, politics and intrigue? My own narrow perspective shattered into a million ways of seeing. I wanted to reconcile what had brought me to the Himalaya with what I found there. I returned again and again, not just as a climber, but as a journalist and writer, always with questions. Yet every time I felt I was getting close to the top, the prize I thought I was reaching for receded again into the distance. Every time I changed my viewpoint, new horizons opened out, new summits beckoned. It was often an uncomfortable experience, and not just physically. The scars of colonialism reach high into the mountains, even in those regions that remained nominally independent. And I became acutely aware that climbing mountains was self-indulgence compared to the physical and psychological hardships many faced as a fact of life.

The yogis and seekers we met on the way to the mountain seemed part of

an eternal India, mystical and otherworldly, beyond the usual constraints of history. But just as I had been drawn there by stories of adventure, my own sacred texts, and by the example of my heroes, the ascetics and renunciates also had their inspiration; the minds of others had compelled them to come too. Tapovan is famous for its association with the Hindu saint Sri Swami Tapovanam (‘Sri’ being an honorific, and ‘Swami’ meaning guru, or teacher, literally ‘he who is with himself ’). Born Chippukutty Nair in 1889 to an aristocratic family in Kerala in southern India, Tapovanam went against his father’s dream that he become an important figure in the government and quit school, where he felt constrained by its limited spiritual outlook and the prospect of a dry, predictable career. After his father’s death, when Swami Tapovanam was still in his early twenties, he remained in Kerala, a poet and part of the local literary scene, until his brother had finished school. Then he left home for ever, following his dream of living the simplest life possible in that part of the Himalaya consecrated in the books he studied.

The winters he spent in Rishikesh, the summers in the high mountains,

anxious about bears in the forest but entranced with the landscape. Tapovan, above the treeline, where snow leopards roamed at night, was one of his favourite places to meditate. ‘My heart was filled with wonder and pleasure as I sat watching the golden-hued, rocky peaks called Sivalinga and Bhageerathi Parvat, rising on either bank, the long ranges of snow-clad mountains on both sides, dazzling in their silver radiance.’ The intense pleasure he took from his experience of the natural world shines through his writings. People flocked to hear him speak and several wealthy patrons offered to build him ashrams, but he preferred the forest and left the world as simply as he had lived in it, unlike the Beatles’ guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who died a reclusive billionaire in the Netherlands, giving interviews by video link, too frightened of infection to meet journalists in person.

Swami Tapovanam felt another strong link to this sacred part of the

Himalaya. East of Gangotri and his favourite meditation spots, on the other side of Shivling, are the Alaknanda valley and the the temple of Badrinath, greatest of the four pilgrimage sites on the Chhota Char Dham. According to the Mahabharata, it was from Badrinath that the Pandavas began their final, fatal expedition: the Swargarohini, the ascent to heaven. For Swami Tapovanam, sitting in this Hindu temple was like coming home. The head priest there is by tradition a Keralan, and the two could converse together in their mother tongue, Malayalam, in which Tapovanam had written his poetry as a young man. The tradition of a Keralan priest lies in the temple’s founding legend. Badrinath had once been the site of a Buddhist temple but legend tells how the Keralan spiritual philosopher Adi Sankara, living some time in the eighth century, found a black stone known as a shaligram – a fossilised shell representing Vishnu – in the Alaknanda river and used it to claim this auspicious place for Hinduism.

This was at a time when Hinduism was resurgent and Buddhism in

retreat. The details of Adi Sankara’s life are disputed. There are more than a dozen hagiographies. We’re not even sure when he lived. Like Swami Tapovanam, who took immense pride in sharing the same language and culture as his spiritual inspiration, Sankara was a sannyasi, an ascetic, living simply among the power places of India, and from the same tradition of Hinduism known as Advaita Vedanta. His philosophical difference with Buddhism centred on the fundamental conception of the soul. In Buddhism, such a thing is illusion. For Sankara it was real. For ordinary mortals, contemplating the cosmos from the roof of the world, the idea that your core self might survive physical death seems more comforting than the cessation of a mirage.

The story of Adi Sankara shows how the Himalaya was a contested space

in the first millennium, just as it was a thousand years later as the British Empire spread. Sankara lived after 543 ce and the fall of the Gupta dynasty, India’s golden age, an era of immense cultural and intellectual achievement, and religious tolerance too. Thereafter northern India had fractured into smaller kingdoms; competing narratives laid claim to places, like Badrinath, that were spiritually significant. The arrival of Islam in the subcontinent during the twelfth century only added to the pressure. Many of Sankara’s hagiographies were written during the fourteenth century as Muslim influence expanded. New political and religious interests pushed aside existing powers like tectonic plates, driving populations to seek refuge, often in the mountains, their backs against the highest wall on earth. Some of those refugees built new dynasties; others fossilised, preserving fragments of near-forgotten cultures that had elsewhere disappeared. The mountains could be a refuge or a trap, and sometimes both.

Until India’s border war with China in 1962, there were few motorable

roads high in the mountains, meaning that pilgrims were required to make an arduous trek at altitudes up to four thousand metres above sea level. The need to hire porters made it expensive, prohibiting many from making the journey. A woman who could afford it might hire a porter to carry her in a basket on his back, or else hire four to carry her on their shoulders in a more dignified sedan chair. Pilgrims were required to pay in advance, and there were dark stories of women being tipped out into the river, out of sight of the village, so porters could maximise profits in the short season. Poor sanitation and huge numbers meant dozens of deaths each year from dysentery. Lower down, in the forest, malaria took its toll. The country above these pilgrim towns, fresher and cleaner, remained largely the preserve of sannyasi and yogis prepared to endure the hardship of cold nights and thin air, living on milk from the goatherds that graze their flocks there in the summer months. After the war, India invested heavily in its Himalayan road network, changing the region for ever and opening the Chhota Char Dham to mass tourism. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus now visit each year and the government is planning to upgrade its infrastructure to bring even more. Gangotri and the other sites have become part of the restatement of India’s Hindu culture and a reinforcement of its nationalist origins.

The concept of mountains as places of perfection in an imperfect world is

a powerful trope in India, just as it was for a Western climber like me with a head full of Romantic ideas of the wild. In the age of Kali, the modern age of strife and noise, middle-class Indians increasingly view mountains as places to escape the petty compromises of day-to-day life and live more simply. The Puranas, a sprawling multivolume cosmic encyclopaedia written largely, but not exclusively, in the first centuries of the first millennium, has a great deal to say about the sacred geography of this spiritual wellspring. According to the Puranas, in these valleys are spirits, gandharvas, both good and ill, half animal or bird, enchanting the gods with their singing, as well as nature spirits, yaksha, mercurial, sometimes lecherous protectors of the trees and the wealth of the earth, and their cousins, the rakshasa, eating raw human flesh, born from the breath of Brahma. These mountains are the region of Swarga, or paradise, the home of the righteous. ‘Here there is no sorrow, nor weariness, nor anxiety, nor hunger, nor apprehension; the inhabitants are exempt from all infirmity and pain, and live in uninterrupted enjoyment for ten or twelve thousand years.’ At the centre of this cosmic landscape, we are told, is the mountain Meru, in the shape of a lotus seed, like an inverted, rounded cone, on its summit the city of Brahma, among its petals the abode of the gods, and projecting from its base, like the filaments of a lotus, many mountains. Meru is often taken to be Mount Kailas, high on the Tibetan plateau, poised between the Himalaya to the south and the Kun Lun mountain range to the north. The myth of Shangri-La – a hidden, paradisal realm located in the Himalaya – was the concoction of an English novelist, but it has its origins in texts like these.

In my long trek to understand the Himalaya, however imperfectly, such

mythology was a frequent stumbling block. How did it relate to the Himalayan world as it appeared to me, one of economic disadvantage, self-reliance and cultural complexity? Most ordinary people were focussed on survival and a better future for their kids, not sublime landscapes or perspectives on the infinite. And yet it was the latter that sold the place to tourists like me. There was no shortage of Himalayan voices, but these voices were often drowned out, displaced by those outsiders who thought their ideas about the Himalaya were more urgent or important. Himalayan people had even adopted these interpretations about their home in the mountains and then sold them back to the people who held them. There is an elegant illustration of this, one that mixes religion, commerce and colonialism, bridging the gap between the cosmic and the quotidian.

Among the Puranas is another work called the Manasakhanda, one that

is often cited when describing the Kailas region, partly because it has more useful information about the pilgrimage sites in this part of the Himalaya than any other text, but also because it’s so charming. Its chief focus is the segment stretching south from Mount Kailas and the sacred waters of Lake Manasarovar nearby. One story tells how Dattatreya, an ascetic who has renounced the world and now lives among the mountains, goes to Kashi, the city of light, more familiar in Europe as Varanasi. Here he talks with Dhanvantari, prince of Kashi. The pair are also both gods: the ascetic being an incarnation of Vishnu while the prince is god of ayurveda or health. The two discuss tirtha, or sites of pilgrimage, and the ascetic tells the prince at length about the wonders he has seen in Himachal. ‘He who thinks of Himachal, though he may not behold them, is greater than he who performs all worship in Kashi,’ he says. ‘In a hundred ages of the gods, I could not tell thee of the glories of Himachal … As the dew is dried up by the first rays of the sun, so are the sins of man by the sight of holy Himachal.’

It’s a beautiful text and much quoted not only in modern travel books but

more scholarly works too. Yet its origins are surprising. Those familiar with the King James Version of the Bible may hear its echo in these words, which are not a translation of the Manasakhanda but a précis, made in the middle of the nineteenth century by a British colonial official called John Strachey, who spent part of his early career as a district officer in the far north of India, bordering Tibet. While investigating the finances of pilgrimage centres in his local area, Kumaon, John Strachey came to know a pandit, or scholar, called Rudrapatta Pant, who showed him the text of the Manasakhanda, which was used by pilgrims as a kind of spiritual travel guide. Strachey translated passages from it into English. Many British colonial officials leavened their bureaucratic duties with more congenial subjects; Strachey’s was literature. Thus, when he submitted his notes on the economic value of pilgrimages for publication in Edwin Atkinson’s Himalayan Gazetteer, he included his own version of the Manasakhanda, based on Pant’s translation but revised from within his own literary and religious tradition, that of the Church of England.

So much for the translation. What of the original text? Beneath its

soaring imagery, there are interesting clues as to its origins. It contains, for example, no mention of Gangotri and Gaumukh, among the most sacred sites in the region, but ones that are strongly associated with Shiva. Then there is its linking of the goddess Ganga not with Shiva, as in the Mahabharata, but with Vishnu. These changes and omissions characterise the Manasakhanda as a Vaishnavite text, belonging to that strand of Hinduism that has Vishnu as supreme lord: an unusual perspective in the Himalaya, which is more often Shaivite. It is also notable that the recommended pilgrimage sites featured in the Manasakhanda were all in Kumaon, with none at all in neighbouring Garhwal. What might explain these biases?

For centuries through the medieval period, the Chand dynasty ruled

Kumaon, fighting a series of intense wars in the seventeenth century against the neighbouring kingdom of Garhwal. Some of the finest temples in the capital of Almora were built to celebrate Kumaon victories. By the mid eighteenth century, around the time Strachey and Atkinson believed the Manasakhanda was most likely written, both Kumaon and Garhwal had been taken over by the Rohilla, a group of Muslim Pashtun who had migrated from Afghanistan in the service of the Mughal emperors to settle in northern India. This region was in turn absorbed by the punchy new state of Gorkha, now Nepal, and then, twenty years later, when the British went to war with Nepal, by the East India Company. While the British restored the western part of Garhwal to Sudarshan Khan, son of the last king, the eastern part was merged with Kumaon and kept under direct rule of the British, where it would remain until 1947. Among the chief differences between Kumaon and the princely state of Garhwal was taxation. Revenues in Garhwal went to Sudarshan Khan. In Kumaon they went to the British. So it was at the least a fortunate coincidence that the Manasakhanda, a text which pilgrims would look to for travel guidance, effectively directed its readers to sites exclusively in Kumaon, where their taxes would end up in British coffers, while reinforcing the area’s Vaishnavite tradition. In other words, pandits in Almora, wishing to re-establish religious control after Muslim occupation and the tyranny of the Gorkhas, could not have had a more useful document, one that both suited the interests of the new occupying force but also let them go about their sacred business. And so a text that seems, at first glance, to be a simple expression of the eternal, unchanging appeal of the high Himalaya turns out to be a highly political document in a constantly shifting world of briefly held allegiances. That doesn’t make the words any less beautiful or, for the millions who have seen a Himalayan dawn, less true, but it does show how the Himalayan world has been simplified and glossed for the benefit of outsiders.

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The near-paradox of the eternal mountains as political fault-line is no less relevant now. Himalayan communities still struggle to maintain their identity in the face of competing strategic interests from Delhi or Beijing. Not long after our expedition to Shivling, this corner of India became its twenty-seventh state, a combination of the old Himalayan kingdoms of Garhwal and Kumaon breaking off from the larger state of Uttar Pradesh. Locals favoured the name Uttarakhand for their new home, a term used for the region in the Puranas; the Hindu nationalist BJP government in Delhi insisted on Uttaranchal, a ‘saffronised’ Hindu nationalist alternative that seemed less separatist. It was finally changed to Uttarakhand in 2007, three years after the BJP lost power.

Tensions like those in Garhwal and Kumaon have existed across the

Himalaya throughout history and no more so than today. On the far side of Nepal, a longstanding campaign to create another new state, called Gorkhaland, based on the hill station of Darjeeling in West Bengal, sees regular outbreaks of violence, most recently in 2017. From Kashmir in the west to Arunachal Pradesh in the east and Tibet to the north, the needs of locals are often at odds with the strategic interests of wealthier regions far away, and centres of power that in the past wanted Himalayan gold or musk now want hydroelectricity or border security. These days, rather than powerful armies, cultural identity, often in the form of religion and language, and protest are the favoured tools with which to defend those interests.

The Himalaya’s complex and uncertain political future lies in its

heterogeneous past: so many voices, so many traditions trying to be heard. And that rich and fragmented history is a consequence of the region’s astounding geography. It is impossible to understand one without the other. Extreme environments prompt unusual strategies for survival, and almost nowhere else is that relationship between geography and culture so starkly obvious than in the world’s highest mountains. As a mountaineer, the resourcefulness I’ve seen among local people in meeting the hardships of their day-to-day lives makes what most of us do there seem laughable. It is only by holding in the imagination an impression of the scale and challenges of the world’s highest mountains that their incredible human stories can be fully grasped. But how? And where to start?

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