In this ‘Bookshelfie’ blog, we are delighted to feature book recommendations from current parent Dr Mallinson. He shares five books that have inspired him, and his love of India and the Himalayas.
At school I was made to read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. I remember enjoying it at the time, but it didn’t occur to me that it had stuck with me until many years later when I reflected upon what in my childhood might have given rise to my fascination for India. It can’t be a coincidence that Kim is a novel about an English boy travelling around India with a holy man: that is precisely what I went on to spend many years doing. Kipling is seen by some today as a controversial figure. He did indeed harbour some colonial prejudices about certain aspects of Indian society, but anyone reading Kim – which Nirad C. Chaudhuri called the ‘the finest novel in the English language with an Indian theme’ – cannot but discern his deep love and fascination for the country. I have recently listened to Kim as an audiobook, read by Sam Dastor, and it was a revelation. I usually think audiobooks are a poor second, but he brings the dialogue and characters to life so well that he improves upon the experience of reading it oneself.
Kim and his lama travel to the Himalayas and my remaining books are non-fiction works about the greatest mountain range on earth. In my gap year in 1988, as well as India and Nepal, I went to Bhutan. Information about that remote mountain kingdom was very hard to find in those pre-internet days. Luckily for me, shortly before my trip Katie Hickman published Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon, a vivid account of her journey on horseback across the country, which encouraged me to adventure into its farthest-flung valleys.
Christina Noble’s Over the High Passes is one of few books I’ve read more than once. She lived with the Gaddi shepherds in northwest India for a year, spending six months far from civilisation on the high mountain pastures where the Gaddis graze their flocks during summer. I have since spent twenty autumns in the same region, flying paragliders and often landing up high to camp with the same shepherds. Their tough life looks appealingly simple to us, but it is becoming almost impossible as India becomes so populous – their winter grazing in the plains has all but disappeared – and they all want their children to go to college and get easier, more dependable jobs. Christina Noble’s book is an affectionate first-hand portrait of a tough but friendly people and their vanishing way of life.
Two historical accounts of the Himalayas are among the best books I have ever read. Wade Davis’s magnificent Into the Silence tells the story of the first attempts on Everest by Mallory, Irvine and others. It opens far from the mountains, in the trenches of the First World War. The Everest pioneers had all endured unimaginable horrors, which gave them an attitude towards danger and death that made them face the suffering and hazards of high-altitude mountaineering with superhuman stoicism and determination.
Looking for escape during the first lockdown I read Kate Teltscher’s The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama, and the First British Expedition to Tibet. I can’t imagine any book transporting me further. It is an account of the first forays into Tibet by the British in the late 18th century, after which the Chinese closed it off to outsiders and nobody got there for another hundred years. A brilliant combination of the finest scholarship and gripping storytelling, it paints a picture of a world more remote and more different from ours than imagination could ever conjure.
