Himalaya: A Human History, by Ed Douglas

Given the author’s goal of making the complex reality of the Himalaya and its people and realms familiar to Western audiences who are used to very specific stereotypes and cliches about the region and its people, it is to be regretted that this book is not well-suited to being a popular account. That is not to say that this is a bad book, it is in fact a very good book, just a book whose sprawling nature and whose haphazard organization and structure make it difficult to understand where the book is going. The author jumps all over the place, certainly between chapters and often within them, leaving little sense of coherence except for the fact that the people and places and things that the author writes about are all relating to the areas bounded by Northern India, Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. The author deals with such a wide expanse of subjects that he is clearly a master of a great deal of material, but it is somewhat overwhelming for someone who approaches this book without the sort of context that the author has. Few readers will consider this book to be more than a punishing grind to get through, and to fully enjoy what this book provides it will take very broad interests, ranging from political history to military history to having a distinct hostility to colonialism as well as Chinese and British imperialism (or even Nepalese imperialism). 

This book is over 500 pages long and is divided into 20 chapters. After a list of maps, the author begins by discussing the importance of religious pilgrimage to a particular part of the Himalaya, pointing out how even something like religious tourism represents larger historical and political patterns (1), before moving onto the origins of the Himalaya in the pushing going on between the Indo-Australian plate and the Eurasian plate. After that the author looks at the first explorers of the region–a jaunt into population genetics (3) as well as the lost kingdoms of the early Tibetan past (4). This is followed by a discussion of statebuilding in Tibet (5) and Nepal (6), as well as a few chapters that discuss the history of transportation and travel to Tibet, as well as its relationship and Nepal’s relationship with both China and British-controlled India (7-12), which include some discussions of the complicated mapping of the Himalaya as well as the trade that long existed in the area. The author discusses how it is that Tibet came to close itself off from much of the world (13), as well as the role of botany (14), mountain climbing (15-16, 18), and utopian philosophy (17) to the history of the region over the past three hundred years or so. This section of the book includes a diverse cast of characters that include Nazi mountaineers and social historians and a whole host of others, including spies and quirky thinkers of the theosophist tradition. The author writes, towards the end of the book, about the harshness of Chinese rule (19) and the resistance of Tibetan nuns, as well as the sad contemporary politics of Nepal (20), concluding with acknowledgements, a note on sources, a bibliography, and an index.

One of the notorious aspects of Himalaya studies is that there is a wide amount of information known about the languages, peoples, plants, geology, history, and culture of the region, but most of this information has not filtered down to the general population. Most people think that Tibet was always a close-minded places when it became that way mostly in the 20th century, especially towards the middle of the century, when the nation sought to preserve its identity in the face of rising Chinese and Western pressure. Many Westerners have a poor understanding of the nature of Buddhist, Hindu, and other local religions, and no knowledge of earlier traditions that are hard to uncover. The impact of Tibetan, Nepalase, Chinese, Muslim, British, and Indian imperialism has made it difficult to fully understand the complexity of Himalaya, each empire contributing to the destruction of what went before and seeking to paint the past in a light favorable to its own interests and which led to a denial of freedoms towards the many small minority peoples that can be found in a region that has both historically been a refuge from the turmoil of the surrounding areas as well as a prison of sorts whose punishing remoteness has made development expensive and difficult. It is little wonder, in light of these difficulties, that the Himalaya remains one of the poorest regions on the earth, and that good governance is hard to find wherever one looks, and where the solutions that areas have hit upon to earn money (like tourism) have done such harm to the natural beauty of creation that is to be found in the region with its complex dance of erosion and orogeny.