land of the
Author- Dawn-lit Mountains
Publisher- Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent Simon & Scuster, Rs 499
This book about Arunachal Pradesh engages without pretension. Well priced and produced, land of the Dawn-lit Mountains is worth a place in the bookshelf, writes ANUBHAV PRADHAN
Travel writing for long has had discovery as its central axis: From medieval courtiers and traders traversing the long Silk Route to intrepid Victorians exploring uncharted hearts of darkness, travel writing has sought adventure beyond the humdrum of ordinary life and sought to explain the truth of other cultures for posterity. The itch to challenge oneself fully and move out of one’s zones of comfort has remained a continuing characteristic of this genre, even though the globe has shrunk radically with air travel and the internet. Over the course of the past few decades travel writing — indeed, the possibility of travel — has often been declared dead, but the genre continues to thrive, attracting a cross-section of globe-trotters seeking thrill, challenge, and discovery.
Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent’s latest book may be seen as the product of just such an urge. Informed as much by a lingering Anglo-Saxon lust to tread bravely where no (wo)man has been before as by the desire to confront one’s one shadows, the unfortunately titled land of the Dawn-lit Mountains sees its narrator venturing onto a more-or-less solo biking — and occasionally hiking — circuit of Arunachal Pradesh. India’s eastern-most border state, Arunachal Pradesh has been the focus of constant territorial contestation over the past two centuries: First between the British Raj and the indigenous peoples, and then India and China. Unsurprisingly, the place which Arunachal occupies in the larger Indian imaginary is of a resource-rich region under active threat from Chinese aggression across occupied Tibet.
It is this caricature which Bolingbroke-Kent implodes through her book. Astutely highlighting the very real dearth of accessible public material on Arunachal, Bolingbroke-Kent positions her text as a remedial narrative shedding light onto an area of fabulous ethnic and ecological diversity. Very few Indians, and fewer outsiders, have travelled through Arunachal due to the Inner line Permit, a system of entry regulation which makes it impossible for outsiders to travel unaccompanied in the State for long durations. Utilising her network, Bolingbroke-Kent was able to subvert this regulation and defy a whole range of stereotypes to navigate through thick forests and over high mountain passes. The result, this book, is a narrative steeped in legends, spirits, adventure, history, and nostalgia.
Nostalgia, in fact, may be seen as a locus for both the text and the journey which inspired it. Bolingbroke-Kent acknowledges early in her narrative the desire to penetrate Arunachal — a territory largely unknown to the outside world — much in the tradition of the hardy explorers of the Raj. From chapter titles (“The Forgotten land”; “Searching for Shangri-la”) to stylistic registers (“remote, mountainous and forbidding”; “a fortress of rock, the formidable outline of their ridges”), the narrative thrives on nostalgia for a lost and redundant subjectivity: the fearless explorer cutting through danger to lay bright and open a land and people invisible to the world. The exotic, for example, remains pervasive as a category: The narrative starts in the crowded, pulsating heart of Kamakhya — a “cramped, ancient chamber...[pulsing] with the power of something beyond my understanding” — and repeatedly enacts its conceptual frameworks without much reflection.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the political history of Arunachal — and the North-East — is mediated solely through the prism of British imperialism. Bolingbroke-Kent refers repeatedly to British political officers and explorers who ventured into the region and left ethnographies of its many tribes. The area’s tryst with the Second World War comes more as micro-histories of individual pilots who lost their lives in the mountains than as the many tribes’ struggles and contributions to the war effort. The overarching impression one gets is of virgin territory unexplored and uncharted save for the endeavours of the imperial British: While snatches of dry humour repeatedly undercut this sensibility, the narrative does not, on the whole, reflect critically on the baggage of colonial epistemology which it evokes and enmeshes itself in.
Nonetheless, it is difficult to fault the narrative for these reasons. As a travelogue — and not a treatise — it works well: Written in the anecdotal, first-person style of much of contemporary travel writing, it engages without pretension. The story presented is fully through Bolingbroke-Kent’s eyes, and little claims to universal, objective values are made. References to events present and past are also substantiated with annotations, and a bibliography lends certitude to her discussions of regional history and politics. Significantly, the contours of this journey lend it the form of a quest: the narrative serves as a tool revealing the interaction between mind, body, and surroundings, and Bolingbroke-Kent’s conversations with her self form some of the most readable parts of the text. Accessibly-priced and well-produced, land of the Dawn-lit Mountains is worth a place in the bookshelf.
The reviewer is a doctoral candidate with the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia