Literary travel has come of age in the century since Robert Louis Stevenson took off with a mule in the Cevannes in 1879 and critic Paul Fussell grounded it as a genre in his fascinating 1980 study titled . Resident deities of modern travel writing have often been erudite Englishmen of privileged background, like Robert Byron and Wilfred Thesiger. Byron’s emblematic The Road to Oxiana (Fussell called it the ‘Ulysses’ and ‘The Waste Land’ of the travel book) and Thesiger’s Arabian Sands represent high-water marks, not only in travel writing, but in English letters. Their mantle was in turn donned by such gentlemen travelers as the uniquely intrepid Patrick Leigh-Fermour, and later by Eric Newby, Colin Thubron and Bruce Chatwin, with Paul Theroux (though much later) playing the American party-pooper in what essentially has remained an upper-class British clique.
The latest of these thrill seekers is ‘professional’ Australian explorer and documentary filmmaker Tim Cope, who roughed up 10,000 miles on horseback along the Eurasian Steppe, aided with his family of horses (memorably named Taskonir and Ogonyok) and a devoted Kazakh dog called Tigon running by their hooves. Of a different class than his illustrious predecessors, Cope’s objective is to relive the trail blazed by Genghis Khan and his successors from Mongolia to Hungary. If Cope lacks the acidulous wit that seasons Byron’s best, his narrative is marked by an absence of the condescension that occasionally colours the latter’s work. Cope, fluent in more than half-dozen Central Asian languages, attempts to unravel the Mongolian empire by traversing modern-day Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Russia, through the Carpathian ranges and ending his journey along the banks of the Danube in Hungary.
His account is a magnificent encomium to nomadic life and the equestrian age and offers graphic insights into the clash between sedentary societies and dynamic nomadic culture since 1240 CE. Cope’s travels are instructive in bringing depth and dimension to Genghis Khan and his successors. He shows them to have been sophisticated empire builders with a strong sense of organization and administration and not merely as stereotypical bloodthirsty savages intent on pillage and plunder as perceived by medieval Western travelers like Giovanni Carpini and William of Rubruck, who viewed Mongols from the prism of their Catholic faith. Along the way, he charts the appalling effects on nomadic steppe life in modern times wrought about by Bolshevik utopia and Stalin’s brutal push for industrialization.
A shatteringly poignant vignette is Cope’s encounter with Ferona, a 93-year old babushka in the village of Dumaniv in the Ukraine, who learned to read at 83. Ferona movingly recounts the horrors of the ‘Holodomor’ authored by Stalin, the artificial Ukrainian famine and forced collectivisation of 1932-33 which starved seven million Ukrainians to death. A parallel tragedy visited the Kazakhs between 1928 and 1931, where the forced collectivisation programme implemented through the agency of Filip Goloshchekin (a Russian dentist turned politico named Secretary for the Kazakh republic) claimed more than two million lives and led to a mass exodus of the Kazakh populace into China besides abruptly ending the nomadic way of life.
Memories of this man-made Zhut (in Kazakh, a particularly harsh winter leading to severe losses in livestock) have proven too painful for present-day Kazakh nomads to talk about, observes Cope. A sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy ensured that the travails of the Kazakhs continued without respite through the Krushchev era and well into that of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Atomic tests carried out with scant regard for the lives of Kazakh nomads have led to thousands of children being born with genetic abnormalities — one casualty among them being Guanz, the 10-year-old son of Cope’s Kazakh guide, Aset. Coupled with this, Western Kazakhstan’s oil boom has led to further erosion in traditional nomadic lifestyle. This brutalisation is glimpsed again in the author’s travels through the Crimea, where lakhs of Crimean Tatars, after having borne the brunt of the Nazi jackboot, were deported by Stalin in 1944 on suspicion of collaboration with them.
In recording a Russia riven with endemic corruption after the fall of the Soviet Union and in ferment during the so-called ‘colour’ revolutions, Cope’s narrative invites favourable comparison with Kapuscinski’s Imperium , though less through any outstanding use of irony than by direct, heart-rending reminiscences by his cast. And what a cast it is! No mere clutter of featureless ethnic puppets, Cope’s nomadic guides, their families, his beloved animals, customs, rituals, the sights, sounds and smells of the great steppe come wafting through the pages of his book. His precise descriptions of an often monotonous landscape, the reboundings from the slough of despond and his skilful melding of professional triumph with personal tragedy anchors his epic narrative in the grand tradition of classic adventure whose forebears include Defoe and Stevenson.
The imagery is nothing short of scintillating and Cope proves a dab hand at evoking the wonders and travails of the steppe; be it a dreary trudge through Lake Balkash in freezing conditions or while sighting the near-extinct saiga in Kalmykia, “backlit by the sun…looking like a set of glowing amber pincers”. Then, there are humorous reflections on “legitimate” nomadic customs like wife stealing or horse rustling. As befitting the most memorable literary travel, the narrative is often shot through with apposite bursts of comic relief; as when lack of pasture led to the Timashevsk Mafia in Russia acting as his deus ex machina and a Beckettian encounter with two Russian drunks in the godforsaken ghost town of Akbakai in Kazakhstan.
His vignettes are genuinely affecting without being factitious, while his ardour recalls those Thesiger’s privations in Arabia’s Empty Quarter or that of Eric Newby’s discomfitures in the Hindu Kush. All through, there are incisive ruminations on the precariousness of nomadic culture and as Cope attempts to trace connections to the Mongol spirit across Eurasia with an archeologist’s tenacity. He reflects that Kalmyks seem more conscious of their nomadic heritage than Mongols, but paradoxically wonders whether the preservation of this idyllic lifestyle is now the province of the educated urban folk of these regions. He asks whether Hungarians are conscious of their nomadic roots at all and finds at journey’s end that for those who are, the Mongols, Huns, Scythians and Magyars “coalesce into a broad brotherhood of horseback, nomadic peoples.”
More importantly, perhaps, Cope’s fascinating account provocatively beckons the armchair tourist to travel like a 21st century Marco Polo.
