The Himalayas are more than a formidable mountain range. They constitute a spiritual, cultural, geological, geopolitical, botanical, zoological, ethnological, linguistic and an artistic phenomenon. The Himalayas have a perennial character that belongs to entire India—it is at once unapproachable yet universal. Physicist and botanist Sir J C Bose used to wonder during his childhood from where the Ganga descended. The intuitive reply he got was that from the locked hair of Lord Shiva. As a grown-up man, Sir Bose ventured into Uttarakhand to discover the source of the Ganga. What he saw at Nandadevi and Trishul massif was a supernal site of the glaciers. He understood the metaphorical truth of the river descending from the locked hair of Lord Shiva. He went as a scientist, returned as a seer. That is the magic of the Himalayas.
The Himalayas have loomed over the Indians since time immemorial. But they became a subject of exploration, expedition and documentation since the British times. It is indeed a challenging task to quantify all aspects of the mountain range. But Himalayan Bridge, edited by Niraj Kumar, George van Driem and Ambassador P Stobdan, is an appreciable enterprise. The cover shows a stylised ford with a ball rolling over it. The ball shows Indian and Chinese standards in yin-yang mode. The Himalayas are indeed hedged between two great political powers, fortunately not culturally incompatible.
It features 24 essays divided into five segments contributed by experts on various subjects. His Holiness Gyalwang Drukpa’s essay traces the legacy of the ancient Vajrayana master Naropa in the Himalayan region. Renowned linguistic van Driem shows how the eastern Himalayas have served as a cradle for ethnogenesis of a number of major language families like Uralo-Siberian and East Asian languages. The essay by late Pema Dorjee, the renowned Tibetan physicist, describes Sowa Rigpa, the traditional system of medicine, in the Himalayas.
Nitin A Gokhale, strategic affairs writer, tells why Siachen is so vital to India’s security. Niraj Kumar and Chingngaih Baik discover a pattern in textile, text, terracing and territoriality of the eastern Himalayas to weave Pan-Himalayan identity. The costume patterns become a figure of thought. Prof. Jyoti Prakash Tamang demonstrates how the food culture of the Himalayas is unique, rather a blend of soybean-alcohol-consuming Chinese culture from the north and milk-vegetable-eating Hindu culture from the south. Namrata Neog documents various challenges to the tradition of Kangra miniature paintings. While the Vaishnavite dance form of Manipur is considered classic, Sinam Basu Singh describes a host of pre-Vaishnavite dance forms and post-Vaishnavite derivatives.
Namrata Goswami has tracked the drug and arms flow in the volatile eastern Himalayan region. Tsering Choldan’s essay on the Buddhist identity politics in democratised Nepal makes an interesting reading on a less-known subject.
Stobdan’s essay delineates the scope for cooperation between India and China in the Himalayan region. Akhilesh Suman, in a similar vein, feels that attempts to find military solutions to politico-territorial problems in the region would be futile. Iftikhar Gilani probes the reason behind alienation of the Kashmiris, and sees regional councils as effective instruments for empowering them.
In the concluding chapter, Swami Paranand Tirth has delved into the sacred geography. He describes the mythological and esoteric significance of a number of Himalayan peaks. The western knowledge production, as J C Bose says, follows a categorisation approach. The knowledge, compartmentalised, is pursued ad infinitum. Thus there is eternal pursuit (sadhana) but no realisation (siddhi) of the integral truth. But this book with its integrated approach has not lost sight of siddhi while doing diligent sadhana.