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.

On the morning of April 6, 1942, residents of Visakhapatnam saw unfamiliar aircraft circling over the city before sirens disturbed the peace. Japanese warplanes launched from the Imperial Japanese Navy light aircraft carrier Ryozo descended on strategic installations near the port, one of the most dramatic wartime incidents on India’s east coast.

The bombardment lasted only a few hours. Yet its impact permanently changed the city.

More than eight decades later, remnants of that turbulent period can be seen in Visakhapatnam. Some are hidden beneath overgrown vegetation and extended neighborhoods. Others emerge unexpectedly along the shoreline after monsoon erosion and low tide. Together, they tell the story of a port city that found itself on the front lines of World War II.

Historian and historian Edward Paul, who has extensively documented Visakhapatnam’s wartime past, says that fears of Japanese occupation deeply affected both the administration and the city’s residents. “There was a fear of Japanese occupation of the port city of Visakhapatnam, both in the minds of the officials responsible for the security of the city as well as in the minds of the people living in the city,” he says.

That fear shaped the city in the early 1940s.

When war came to Vizag

World War II began in Europe in 1939, but in early 1942 The conflict spread deep into Asia After the Japanese advanced from Malaya, Singapore and Burma. British officials feared that India’s eastern coastline might be vulnerable to Japanese attack.

Visakhapatnam, with its port and strategic location midway along the east coast, quickly gained military importance.

According to Edward Paul, Army, Navy and Air Force contingents began arriving in the city from 1940 onwards. Air raid precaution systems were introduced, trenches were dug, bunkers were constructed and civilian evacuation exercises were conducted. A coastal defense flight was established in the city in February 1942, one of six such units established on the Indian coastline, the others being based at Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, Karachi and Cochin. This unit had come into existence barely a few weeks before the attack.

On April 6, 1942, the fears became reality.

Vizag’s concrete walls bring back memories of World War II threats

That morning, in the south, Kokanada was bombed by a single-engine aircraft, becoming the first city in India to be attacked by air. The Hindu Mukund Padmanabhan recorded in his book The Great Flap of 1942: How the Raj Stunned a Japanese Non-Invasion, Published in 2024. Visakhapatnam was attacked thrice in a single day and suffered heavy losses.

Ryujo’s aircraft, operating as part of Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s carrier force in the Bay of Bengal, attacked in three separate waves. The morning attacks were directed at ships entering the city’s port. In the early afternoon, the first wave of five Type 97 bombers from Ryujo attacked the port. Another attack took place in the evening. A ship docked in the harbor carrying approximately 350 kilograms of explosives narrowly escaped the raid, a disaster that has gone largely unrecorded in popular memory.

The human cost was significant. One bomb fell directly on a shelter in the shipyard, killing five and injuring at least 40, bringing the total to at least eight in the day-long raid. Edward Paul says that after this, panic spread rapidly in the entire city. “Before the next sunrise, two-thirds of the people fled to the suburbs on bullock carts, bicycles or any means of transport available to them,” he notes.

Mukunda Padmanabhan also records in his book that the exodus from Visakhapatnam had begun months before the bombing and that the raid of April 6, 1942 had led to the evacuation of the city.

Rumors, evacuation plans and fear gripped many towns and cities as the British administration struggled to respond to possible attacks by the Japanese.

Comment | Forgotten in India after fighting the world’s trenches

pillbox along the coast

The least documented wartime remains in the city are pillboxes scattered along parts of the beach.

These small reinforced concrete defensive structures were built as part of British coastal defense preparations during World War II. Many remain partially buried under sand deposits and coastal vegetation.

One such pillbox on the beach road is rarely encountered after the monsoon season, when soil erosion occurs. Residents say the remains become more visible during low tide, providing a glimpse of wartime defenses that have otherwise disappeared beneath the city’s changing coastline.

In recent years attention has also been drawn to the neglect of these wartime bunkers and pillboxes, many of which are unmaintained and not preserved.

naval shore battery

One of the most visible surviving wartime institutions is the Naval Coast Battery under Eastern Naval Command.

Its origins date back to 1940, when British military authorities sought to establish coastal artillery positions to defend Visakhapatnam against a possible Japanese invasion.

Edward Paul states that the army needed a clear location along the seashore for heavy artillery and eventually identified a coastal area occupied by fishing settlements. The residents were relocated under wartime emergency rules and moved to a nearby area known as Kotha Jalaripeta.

This position became home to the 5th Indian Heavy Battery, equipped with six-inch guns. Historical accounts trace the evolution of the establishment from a wartime coastal defense unit to the present day Naval Coast Battery functioning under Eastern Naval Command. Although access to the operational complex is restricted, the battery still stands as a direct institutional link to the city’s wartime history.

Forgotten Fortifications

The city’s wartime remains are not limited to the beach.

In recent years, reinforced concrete structures discovered near the Daspalla Hills have attracted the attention of historians and heritage enthusiasts. It is believed that these structures served as wartime defense fortifications or gun emplacements towards the Bay of Bengal.

Researchers studying the site noted similarities between the structures and military observation or artillery positions used during World War II.

Visakhapatnam once had an extensive network of trenches, bunkers and defense posts built during the war years. As the city expanded into a major urban centre, most of them disappeared.

Some remains survive quietly in institutional complexes, port complexes and inaccessible corners of the city.

AU and the war years

Andhra University was one of the consequences of Japanese bombing.

Within days of the air raid, military officials requisitioned university buildings and lands for wartime purposes. The institution was forced to shift its academic activities outside the city.

Edward Paul says, the university transferred most of its departments to Guntur in April 1942, while the chemistry department was operated from Madras.

“For three years, the university was based outside Visakhapatnam and all their buildings were used by the army,” he said. The university returned to the city only after the war ended in 1945.

Comment | Remembering the war, remembering the forgotten Indians

submarine under the bay

The coast of Visakhapatnam also holds memories of the underwater warfare of World War II.

Apart from the wreck of PNS Ghazi, the remains of Imperial Japanese Navy submarine RO-110 are believed to lie in the Bay of Bengal near Rambilli. The submarine was sunk by depth charges on or around 11 February 1944 by the Royal Australian Navy corvettes HMAS Launceston and HMAS Ipswich and the Royal Indian Navy sloop HMIS Jumna during Allied anti-submarine operations in the area.

Laid down at Kawasaki-Kobe Shipyard in August 1942 and launched in January 1943, RO-110 operated from Penang, Malaya, and was deployed for patrol duties in the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. During her third and final war patrol, the submarine attacked the Calcutta-bound Allied convoy JC-36 and fired two torpedoes at the British merchant ship Asphalion before being tracked and sunk by escorting warships off the Visakhapatnam coast. Japanese naval records later declared the submarine lost and all 47 personnel aboard were believed to have been killed.

The presence of underwater submarine wrecks near the coast underlines the strategic importance of Visakhapatnam in the larger area of ​​the Indian Ocean conflict during World War II.

Andhra Pradesh: Brave pilot of World War II flies into oblivion

cherish memories

This port remains the centerpiece of Visakhapatnam’s wartime story.

During the war years, the port came under military administration due to its strategic importance to Allied operations in the Bay of Bengal. Edward Paul states that the port, originally administered by the Bengal Nagpur Railway, was taken over by the War Department in 1942 and remained under military control for about four years.

One of the few surviving memorials of the April 1942 raid is a plaque commemorating those killed in the harbor shelter attack. Mukund Padmanabhan says the Visakha Museum also displays the casing of the 250 kg unexploded bomb recovered after the attack, which, in his words, has become a “tourist attraction”.

Modern Visakhapatnam is often defined by its ports, shipbuilding facilities, naval establishments, pharmaceutical industries and technology corridors. Yet beneath that rapidly changing urban landscape lie quiet memories of a period when the city stood on the edge of global conflict.