The beauty in our backyard
Most travel bloggers are eager to leave footprints all over the globe, but some stay in a place for months or years and chronicle its myriad facets. Among writings from the latter kind, I’ve enjoyed Himanshu Khagta’s Life in Spiti, Dave Prager’s Our Delhi Struggle and Mihir Vatsa’s Tales of Hazaribagh. They turned their blogs into books, Tales of Hazaribagh: An Intimate Exploration of Chhotanagpur Plateau being the latest. The book is unique in many ways. It features a place absent in most tourist itineraries — Hazaribagh, a town in Jharkhand. Located at a modest elevation atop the Chhotanagpur Plateau, Hazaribagh offered the British respite from the heat of the plains and came to be known as a ‘hill station’.
Vatsa grew up there, and returned after working and studying in Delhi. This results in a melding of perspectives: that of a long-time resident as well as a tourist. We learn not only about the landscapes and attractions, but about urban legends, folk tales and ghost stories.
The book is not just about the Chhotanagpur Plateau. It begins with the author’s homesickness in Delhi. His struggle with depression frames the narrative. This mix of personal essay, travelogue, geography and history chronicle cannot be pinned to a single genre; even the book jacket lists it as Non-fiction / Travel / Memoir. With chapters titled Lake, North, South and Territorial Trespassing, the book is arranged along somewhat geographical lines.
However, the attempt to bring together sundry reflections from a blog into a book occasionally feels contrived.
The whimsicality and free-flowing writing that make Vatsa’s blog delightful fumble in the straitjacket of a book. But once I got beyond the disjointedness, I found the book engrossing.
Vatsa’s compassion for the land and its people is evident. There is enthusiasm and curiosity, which drive the author to decipher topographical clues, venture into little-known and hard-to-reach places, and persist in the face of unnavigable roads and overgrown trails.
He even sought out the great-grandson of a colonial officer with connections to Hazaribagh and met him in
Tales of Hazaribagh: An Intimate Exploration of Chhotanagpur Plateau
Mihir Vatsa
216pp, ~450
Speaking Tiger
Scotland. The joy these encounters and Hazaribagh’s attractions inspire in him shine through in his writing.
Another endearing aspect is Vatsa’s humility. Despite extensively dwelling on himself, his friends and family, and his depression, he is never self-indulgent or self-aggrandising. He acknowledges how the “pleasure of exploration brings with it the arrogance of discovery”, and the challenge of detaching the two. Vatsa talks about his mental health struggles with candour. And the memoir does not overwhelm the travelogue. The author knows when to recede allow into the foreground the places he’s writing about.
The author seems self-conscious at times. Perhaps that’s why his usually crisp prose abruptly veers into the silly or overwrought. Take, for example, how amid a straightforward description of Hazaribagh Lake, he drops the line: “No less than the Khan Market of Delhi, I quip, to myself.” It’s not much of a quip and he doesn’t keep it to himself.
Thankfully, he more than compensates for these unexpected interludes. His descriptions of landscapes are so compelling that I wanted to put the book down and follow in his footsteps around the plateau. His rapturous account of a visit to Nisanlagwa Waterfall conjures its majesty and mystery.
Even the descriptions of coal mining’s depredations along the Bokaro River, and the deforestation of Canary Hill to build a road, are wrapped in eloquence.
We also learn about places that were once beautiful. Vatsa’s achievements go beyond conveying the allure of Hazaribagh. The book shifts the lens of travel writing from the “exotic” to the familiar.
While he wrote the first draft of this book in April 2019, it is remarkably relevant to the pandemic world. As travel restrictions limit us to exploring our surroundings rather than faraway lands, I hope there will be more such books that highlight the beauty in our backyards, and how industrialisation is changing them.
Vatsa also underscores how our physical environment impacts our mental health and the redemptive potential of travel or, more precisely, exploration. As he puts it, “I loved myself through the plateau.”
Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional