47.The Travels of a Sadhu in the Himalayas by Jaladhar Sen – a book review

Translated by Somdatta Mandal, this is a great turn of the century (1900) account, drawn later from diary notes made at the time (1890). Written originally in what the translator calls ‘conversational Bengali’, this modern (Indian) English version captures the sense that he is chatting with rather than reporting to the reader.

               I was won over to the story, and to its teller, within the first dozen pages, and struck by how like ‘us’ – and I’m an English European – he seems. There are similarities, I suspect, in his ‘Western’ Colonial education and my post-Colonial English one. Shared history, and, as an English speaker, which he seems to have been, a shared language, brings us together (as well as differentiating us!). My father was in India from 1941 to ’45, along with several thousand other working-class Englishmen (and Brits), who wouldn’t have chosen to go of their own accord, and whose lives – even without the trauma of combat – were changed forever. A bed, in our house, was always a charpoy, tea was char, and I was a chota wallah! Though I’ve conversed with fewer people from the sub-continent than I have lived years – I live deep in rural England – I could sense in the phrasing of this expanded journal the rhythms and cadences of the voices I have heard on TV and Radio, and perhaps, as well as I could with anybody from a century and more ago, could sense the character of the speaker, or rather writer, I was reading.

               His descriptions of the landscape through which he passes and the people who dwell within it, and of those he meets upon the road, seems as clear today as they must have been to him when he sat down to make his diary notes at the end of each day. You can enjoy it for the scenery. You can enjoy it for the sidelight thrown on religious and philosophical beliefs and arguments. I enjoyed mostly for the company of this warmly human travelling companion. The book reads as freshly as if it were imagined as it was being written, which, though in the original it was, in a translation made a century and quarter later, must be seen as quite remarkable.

               The cover illustration, by Abhiroop Dutta, is also pretty good. Published by Speaking Tiger Press, 2025.