Ochre Border – Spiti

THE OCHRE BORDER. A Journey Through the Tibetan Frontierlands. By Justine Hardy. Pp. 191, 4 colour plates, 16 b/w photos, 1 map, 1995. (Constable and co., London, L 10.95).

This book begins with promising to take readers to Spiti which, according to the author, ‘in an atlas it appears on the dotted line between the pink of India and the yellow spread of China.’ I do not know from where she gets these colours, but she amply proves that her knowledge about the area is certainly ‘pink’. Spiti is in the pink of India, part of India, and not between India and China.

With four companions she starts off ‘in search of something that most people believe no longer exists; a place cushioned from the outside world for seventy years.’ Nothing special happened in Spiti exactly 70 years ago or nearby this chosen date. It is an ancient civilisation. Again shades of ‘pink’. I immediately remember hundreds of Indians who have travelled there, thousands of persons — teachers, scholars, wildlife experts, soldiers, trekkers and mountaineers — have stayed there and roamed deep inside these valleys. Spiti has bus services, postal services, schools and many of the Spitians are working in the plains of India. Their contact with outside world is quite large.

If you are ‘a western explorer only’ syndrome type, then also we have several visitors to Spiti in this category: J.O.M. Roberts in 1940, Sir Peter Holmes and Trevor Braham in 1955-56, and even as recently as 1994 Paul Nunn climbing a high peak there. I have been four times to Spiti between 1983 and 1994. There are at least two books and several articles published about Spiti. She does not list them in the bibliography even. Instead we have several general guide books and Rudyard Kipling being listed. Kipling never wrote about Spiti, but only about Kinnaur.

She starts off for a trek to Spiti over the well-trodden Pin Parvati pass, crossed even by shepherds, and tells the readers about the dangers and that she is the first one to do so in seven decades. As she travels we are given a dose of everything about India; the drug scene, sadhus, theory of Karma, Buddhism, official language, buses, bon religion — everything except Spiti. She visits just one or two villages and two monasteries and returns. The real stuff these ‘pink-explorers’ are made of !

One seriously wonders whether the publishers have any knowledge of what they take on. Aren’t they supposed to inquire at least about the area they are publishing about or author’s credentials ? Don’t they have some duty towards things like correct facts, history, or at least about the paying customer ?

In the very villages she visited, Spitians were watching television, using solar-powered electric gadgets, had voted in the Indian elections and were quietly going about their business like that for centuries. They were not waiting to be ‘discovered’. Today they are laughing all the way to the bank (they have that institution also) with visits of such ‘explorers’.

The author mentions in the beginning and towards the end about a eight year old Buddhist novice who asks her ‘Do you read the books of Julian Barnes?’ Both have not read much of it and the author ends with a hope, ‘As long as there is the common bond that neither the young novice monks nor I understand the books of Julian Barnes, we may all perhaps progress together’. As long as one does not read such books about it, one can enjoy Spiti better.

Harish Kapadia