Deepa Anappara: “Women explorers were considered to have loose moral values”

I guess I’ve always been interested in Tibet and I also like Rudyard Kipling kimEven though the representation of Indians in the novel is difficult for you to read as an Indian, I think there was quite a bit in the book that I found interesting, and especially the stories of the spy surveyors, so it was always something that was on my mind. I never thought I’d write about it, but then when I moved to the UK, I came across this account by an Englishman about a trip to Tibet in the 19th century, and how he was helped by two Indians, who he describes as his servants, and these two guys essentially kept him alive during this expedition in the 19th century, because he had no knowledge of this land. This is a very unfavorable scenario if you are not used to it. The average altitude in Tibet is over 13,000 feet; The air is thin and you’re not getting enough oxygen, so it was very obvious that he was flailing, and they literally saved him several times from danger and from falling into rivers, and actually there’s a photo of him at the beginning of the book where he’s with these two Indian guys, and he credits them with saving his life.

Also, he’s very racist in his language and how he describes Indians and Tibetans, and he talks about flogging one of these guys because he didn’t polish his shoes properly, and he talks about how you have to punish hard, but not too harsh, so that the natives are taught how to behave appropriately and what is expected of them, and I was really interested in that power dynamic where you completely depend on the Indians for your survival. Dependent, but at the same time you don’t see them as your equals… I wanted to write about that: to go on a trip that was completely dependent on the Indians’ knowledge of the landscape, but at the same time really condescending towards them and patronizing and in many ways racist. So, when I started researching travels in Tibet, I found stories of Indian spies like Nain Singh Rawat and Kinthup, who were trained by the British Survey of India to use their bodies as survey instruments, so essentially they were taught to move in a certain way so that each movement was exactly 33 and a half inches. So, if you count 2,000 steps, that’s about a mile, and that’s how they mapped the whole of Tibet. In the 19th century, Tibet was known as the Forbidden Kingdom because Westerners could not visit the country, so for the British, this was their way of avoiding those rules and prohibitions. They would just send Indians to map the area. The Indians would come back with information and then make maps.

I was thinking about that story and why he did these dangerous missions and what was the driving factor that motivated him, was it just money, was it something his family had done for a long time? I think that was the point when I started working on this novel. I just want to also quickly say that once I started looking at the exploration of Tibet in the 19th and early 20th century, I found that there were many women who also traveled to Tibet, people who described themselves as women explorers and they were wearing very restrictive clothing, so they didn’t even have proper clothing to climb the mountains. This did not stop him from traveling to Tibet. In the novel you also have the story of a woman named Catherine who wants to be the first woman or the first European woman to reach Lhasa. It’s all based on true stories and what we can find in the historical record, but obviously a lot of it was created through my imagination as well.

You mentioned restrictive clothing that female explorers did not mention in their accounts, so how did you see this difference in Katherine’s characterization?

I think they had to present a certain view of the world, so they had to be true to the time. If you were a female explorer, you were essentially traveling without a chaperone, so you could be seen as a woman with very loose morals, which in the Victorian period, certainly for English women, was not something they could easily live with. It’s quite clear that they couldn’t be completely honest about what they were wearing.

A big question that I had in mind was what were they doing if they were menstruating, and at that time, before sanitary pads and tampons, how were they managing? There is not a single mention of it in any of these female explorer accounts. So, on account of that, they’re behaving very much like men, so there’s some discrepancy between what they’re telling us and what might have actually happened. You have to rely on your imagination, and you have to think about what that experience of being a woman is, and how they might have climbed the mountains, what they might have done during that particular time, and how honest they might have been, and what they might have told their family at home?

One of the interesting things I discovered was that if they met someone in England who knew someone back home – there was always the danger that gossip could travel six months back to England via steamer – so they were very conscious of how they presented themselves to the world. When writing to Katherine you’ll find that there are brief excerpts from her journal, and you see what she’s said, and then we get her point of view where we see what she’s really experiencing. What I wanted to do in the novel was to look at what the experience was, and how that particular experience is reflected in this fictional character’s writing. I wanted to talk about the difference that we couldn’t really see but that was clearly there at that time.

How different was the research process for this novel compared to your previous novels?

The records have been very carefully prepared by the British, they had a very definite understanding of how they wanted to present the Empire to the world, so you see mentions of atrocities being erased or they may have been downplayed. Subaltern studies historians have written a lot about it. For example, the people are described as savages, not as people who are protesting some injustice. So, when you are reading the archive, you have to look at what is depicted there and what might have actually happened. That was one of the main challenges: to locate the Indian consciousness in these essentially English archives, and then to try to read between the lines and find out what has been erased and what has not been said.

You traveled to Tibet just after completing the first draft of your book. What changes did you have to make to the draft after your visit?

What was surprising to me was that the description of the landscape in my novel was accurate, in that I was so dependent on the explorers’ accounts, I didn’t feel the need to change any of them. In Tibet, today you can travel only as part of a group. It opened my eyes to what kind of little issues can arise, or how people help each other, what makes you angry after spending two weeks with a person. Some of those aspects became clear as I traveled to Tibet as part of a group tour.

There were some very minor changes in the description of the landscape after my visit, and I think perhaps one of the main changes was the relationship that Tibetans had with the landscape. Because you see the lakes, the rivers and the mountains, refer to them as mother and father, that’s part of the name in Tibetan, and I found that very inspiring. what we call circumambulation Around Mount Kailash, Tibetans call it blankAnd if you’re walking it’s a three-day trek, but many Tibetans actually do prostrations every step of the way, so it’s 52 kilometers, the elevation at the highest point is about 18,000 feet, and they’re bringing their hands together, they’re prostrating, and then they’re getting up, and then they’re prostrating again, and just watching them do it at such a height where I can barely keep a foot forward I am also… It is a very difficult journey that they were undertaking. And they are praying not just for themselves but for the world. I found that part of it really inspiring, and I think it informed how the landscape is depicted in novels.

Simar Bhasin is a literary critic and research scholar based in Delhi. Her essay ‘A Tale of Resistance: Desire and Dissent in Selma Dabbagh’s Short Fiction’ was awarded ‘Highly Commended’ by the Wasafiri Essay Prize 2024.