Dervla Murphy has spent her life travelling. For over 50 years, she has been setting off on trips to unexplored parts of the world—from Madagascar to Baltistan to Ethiopia—with little more than the essentials.
She eats local food, stays in whatever accommodation is available, and travels the way the locals do. Her books chronicling her journeys have been published as travel classics. Of her many books, two—On a Shoestring to Coorg, and Where the Indus is Young—are now republished in India by Speaking Tiger.
These two books kind of make a pair—they chronicle journeys to South India and North PoK respectively. While Coorg is set in a fertile, pleasant land with comfortable living conditions, Indus chronicles an arduous journey in the remote Himalayan Karakoram range. In both, Murphy is accompanied by her young daughter Rachel, who is five and six years old respectively during the travels.
Coorg starts with the mother-daughter pair landing in Mumbai, and making their way southwards, up to Kanyakumari, before returning to Coorg to stay there for a couple of months. We have descriptions of Mumbai, Mysore, Goa, among others, as they pass through. Murphy’s encounters with most people are pleasant. The willingness of the random passersby to help her leaves an impression on her mind, as also the comfortable weather and the cultured behaviour.
Indus is set in very different terrain—the duo travel partly on foot and partly in jeeps, through extremely inhospitable climate, in the coldest season of the year, through Baltistan. Here, Murphy, despite herself, comments on a few people’s rudeness and hostility, as also the medieval attitudes towards women. She herself has a hard time procuring food and shelter. The tiny hamlets they pass through are barely surviving; illness and starvation is common, but the beauty of the mountain backdrops takes her breath away. She comes away loving the primeval landscapes.
The primary reason to read these books is Murphy’s narrative voice. Although travelling rough is very difficult, she brings positivity and a cheerful attitude to her account. She is forever ready to judge people as ‘handsome’ or ‘beautiful’, and the scenery as amazing. Even where she encounters trouble—such as her way being blocked due to landslides, or staying in uncomfortable quarters—there’s a sentence or two about it—and then back to how well the rest of the day went. Reading it, one is likely to feel the same wanderlust for these places, and see in their mind’s eye the panoramic landscape.
Sub-continental readers will feel they are seeing these places through two filters. First, by a foreigner who has her roots in a first-world country. The fascinated descriptions of Hindu rituals and festivals would feel off to someone who’s seen them first-hand all their lives. There’s also a section about how Indians and Pakistanis feel about Partition, and multiple asides about how close Indians are to their culture though they are poor, and so on. Funnily enough, there’s nothing about the British Raj that caused much of that poverty—the references are limited to the multiple guest houses and roads created by the British.
The second filter is time. These accounts were written in 1973 and 1974 respectively, and much has changed in the financial and social circumstances of our countries since then. Goa is no longer a simple, sleepy place, and the names of Gilgit and Skardu are more likely today to evoke memories of the bitter Indo-Pak conflicts and terrorists than the peaceful mountains described in the books. The modern-day reader will feel that sense of nostalgia for the quieter time gone by.
The one thing I missed while reading is the section of photos that usually accompanies such work. Possibly there were budget constraints. But Murphy does such a wonderful job evoking the places she visits that one is able to create a reasonable image in one’s mind.