'The Himalayan Arc: Journeys East of South-east' review: Zero-shun game

An anthology on the cis-Himalaya is done in by its catch-all approach

The folds of the majestic Himalaya straddle an arc that stretches from Afghanistan in the north to Myanmar in the east. Man and mountain have had an intimate coexistence over millennia here, cloistered for the most part.

In recent years, however, geopolitics has superseded geography, with the central and eastern sections of the Himalaya becoming amphitheatres of contestation, muscle flexing and shadow-boxing between Asian rivals China and India. But beyond the hubris of territoriality and national boundaries lies the ordinary lives of peoples and their fate, conjoined to their spatial setting.

Does the frontier man share as acute a sense of nationhood as his counterpart from the hinterland? Is belonging to the mountains a supranational identity or a devious extrapolation of similar palates? Is ‘development’ a panacea or a paradigm best left at ascent point from the plains? It is when

The Himalayan Arc deals with such germane questions that it is at its riveting best. The attempt to put together a catch-all compendium on the cis-Himalaya — or as the volume would have it, ‘East of South-east’ — otherwise becomes a succession of some hits but several curatorial and commissioning misses.

One does stumble upon sparkling stories such as Meghna Pant’s ‘Boonthing’, in which a honeymoon trip to Nathu La ends up imparting a life lesson on love and compromise, or Chetan Raj Sreshtha’s deeply disquieting inquisition of the fickleness of human nature in ‘A Tranquil Tenure’. Jacqueline Zote harnesses Mizo folklore to end up smashing patriarchy in the subversive ‘The Other Side of the Looking Glass’.

Prajwal Parajuly’s twin memoirs on Darjeeling and Sikkim lay bare the disrepair of one and the prosperity of the other courtesy State neglect and Central largesse respectively. Manoj Joshi explains the high stakes in ‘Tibet, India and China’ while Sanjoy Hazarika bemoans the rigidity of the Radcliffe and McMahon Lines and calls for a return to older arrangements of mobility as essential to hewing a new economic architecture for the region.

The volume ticks all boxes, covering most of the region, opening with Nepal and going all the way to Myanmar. There’s even poetry and colonial-era photographs thrown in. But in the absence of an overarching theme other than geography, the information is discrete and unconnected, an assemblage of vignettes that doesn’t add up to a big picture. But it doesn’t help that more than half the collection is previously published material — the book cover certainly doesn’t hint at it. And to countenance the casual ‘Himalayas’ slipping through instead of the singular in an anthology on the arc is a tad surprising.

The Himalayan Arc: Journeys East of South-east ; Edited by Namita Gokhale, HarperCollins, ₹699.