Himaliyan Ecology Thesis

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TitleLiterary representations of the Himalayas from imperialist,postcolonial and ecological perspectives

Author(s) Cheung, Po-hau;_ ke ç

Citation

Issued Date 2015

URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/221023

RightsThe author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights)and the right to use in future works.



Abstract of dissertation entitled

Literary Representations of the Himalayasfrom Imperialist, Postcolonial and Ecological Perspectives

Submitted by

CHEUNG, Po Hau

for the degree of Master of Arts

at The University of Hong Kong

in July 2015

This dissertation examines the representational divide between the West and the local

population on the Himalayan ecology. Taking into account the ongoing development

of the discourse of ‘ecology’, this comparative study will address changes in the

representations from imperialist, postcolonial and ecological perspectives.

The Himalayas with their grandeur and abundance, have been fetishised by the West

as paradise and site for conquest. The obsession with uninhabited Himalayas due to

the growth of consciousness on the ecological well-being of the Earth has gone further

to idealising and mythologising the region. Postcolonial imaginations have risen to

challenge these representations by reasserting humans’ presence, and thereby their

responsibility in the Himalayan ecology. Besides, increasing global connectivity has

charted the course of the representations to global level. Far from reaching a balanced

and stable state, the representations hinge on the evolving Himalayan ecology, will

unavoidably continue to undergo transformation.

Words Count: 145



Literary Representations of the Himalayas

from Imperialist, Postcolonial and Ecological Perspectives

by

CHEUNG, Po Hau

BScoSc. H.K.

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirementsfor the Degree of Master of Arts

at The University of Hong Kong

July, 2015



Declaration

I declare that this dissertation represents my own work, except where due

acknowledgement is made, and that it has not been previously included in a thesis,

dissertation or report submitted to this University or to any other institution for a

degree, diploma or other qualifications.

Signed : _______________________________CHEUNG, Po Hau



Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my English Literature teachers in St. Rose of Lima’s College,Ms Kitty Lin and Ms K. Leung, for sowing the seed of Literature in my life. Thanks to

Ms Y. M. Tsang for being my Geography teacher for five years and made me fall in

love with it. I have probably been incepted with this dissertation topic since my earlier

school life.

I must extend my sincere gratitude to Dr. Paul Smethurst for tolerating my clumsy

outline and drafts, and procrastination. I am so grateful to have his guidance for his

knowledge and insights in the field are really exemplary.

It is so heartwarming to have some MAES buddies to walk through this with, and my

family, friends, especially Tsang Ming undoubtedly deserve special thanks forenduring my hermitic life for a while.

Finally, my greatest debt of all, owed to my father, whose perseverance has made this

happen.



Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 – Imperial Ecology 6

Chapter 2 – Deep Ecology 15

Chapter 3 – Postcolonial Ecology 22

Conclusion 32

Bibliography 35



1

Introduction

Literary ecology is first introduced in The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary

Ecology by Joseph W. Meeker in 1972. It refers to the study of biological themes and

relationships appearing in literary works. At the same time, it attempts to discover

what roles literature has played in the ecology of human species (Glotfelty, 1996).

William Rueckert coins ecocriticism in 1978 as ‘the application of ecology and

ecological concepts to the study of literature’ (Glotfelty, 1996, p.xx). The terms

literary ecology and ecocriticism are used interchangeably (Chisholm, 2011) despite

their different origins. Cheryll Glotfelty (1996) opines that both terms are restrictively

defined in a sense that they are either anthropocentric or science/ecology-centred. To

underscore the reciprocal relationship between human culture and the physical world,

Glotfelty provides what Greg Garrard calls a provisional definition for ecocriticism in

the Introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996):

the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.

While expounding on the choice of eco- over enviro- to the critique of environmental

literature, Glotfelty demarcates ecology from environment based on their disparate

views on the position of humans in nature. Environment, according to her is

‘anthropocentric and dualistic, implying that we humans are at the centre, surrounded

by everything that is not us, the environment’. This runs counter to ecology which

‘implies interdependent communities, integrated systems and strong connections

among constituent parts’ (p.xx). Thus, to Glotfelty, ecocriticism is the study of

environmental literature from an ecologically-conscious perspective:

all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is

connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. Ecocriticism

takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically

the cultural artifacts of language and literature (Glotfelty, 1996, p.xix).

However, this definition has exposed early ecocriticism’s shortcomings on two fronts.

Firstly, confining ecocriticism to the analysis of only language and literature is narrow.

Garrard (2004) has widened its scope to general culture by saying ‘the widestdefinition of…ecocriticism is the study of the relationship of the human and the non-



2

human, throughout human cultural history’ (p.5). In fact, the Association for the Study

of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) in America, which was set up in 1992 and

dominates academic discussion of ecocriticism, has in recent years expanded its early

focus from analysing western nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, wilderness

narratives and nature writing to include a more general form of cultural ecocriticism

through the studies of popular scientific writing, films, TV, art and other cultural

artifacts (Garrard, 2004).

Secondly, Glotfelty’s definition of ecocriticism has neglected the etymology of

‘ecology’1, which according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is first coined

by German biologist Ernst Haeckel (16 February 1834 – 9 August 1919) (“Ecology”).

Jill Didur (2011) disputes Haeckel’s ecology, saying it is tainted with racism because

Haeckel is an advocate of Lamarckism – ‘a discredited theory that argued behaviour

learned by one generation in a particular environment would be biologically inherited

by subsequent generations’ (p.60). Also, it is anthropocentric because it lays down a

foundation for humans’ deep-seated superior position over other species in the

universe. The anthropocentric and racist root of ecology challenges Glotfelty’s belief

that ecology has all along been promoting interdependence of all species in an

integrated ecosystem. More importantly, this revelation steers ecocritiques towards

revisiting the early environmental literature by looking into the underlying moral and

political orientations in the various cultural representations.

The early ecological critiques contributed by historians such as Lynn White Jr.,

Carolyn Merchant and Donald Worster reveal the anthropocentric undertone of

ecology. In The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, Lynn White Jr. (1967) has

attributed environmental problems fueled by the Industrial Revolution to

Christianity’s anthropocentricism. Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology

and the Scientific Revolution (1989) beefs up the argument by suggesting Francis

Bacon’s (1561 – 1626) utilitarian view towards nature plays a part. Worster (1994)

expands on this in Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, arguing that

1

OED defines ‘ecology’ as the branch of biology that deals with the relationships between livingorganisms and their environment. Also the relationships themselves, especially those of a specified

organism.



3

these biased views towards nature in Christianity and science, apart from giving rise to

‘imperial ecology’, breed the idea of ‘subversive Romantic ecology’ (p.30, 58).

For Garrad (2004), ecocriticism finds its origin in one of the founding texts of modern

environmentalism, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring . This text comes to function as a

‘synecdoche for a more general environmental apocalypse’ (p.2) going on in America

after the Second World War. It raises public awareness and academic interests on the

literary/cultural analysis of the environment in literature. The germination of

ecocritics is widely believed to be from the American and European academic circles,

the exemplars of whom include Jonathan Bate and Lawrence Buell.

Both Bate and Buell primarily centre on the wilderness and rural idyll and support for

aesthetic and pure nature free from human intervention. This chimes with Arne

Naess’s ‘deep ecology’, the philosophical foundation of which is given in The Deep

Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects (1986). It rejects the human-

centred approach of ‘imperial ecology’ and advocates biocentrism which stresses the

intrinsic value of every component in nature. It widens the discussion to the fauna and

floral of the ecosystem, and to alternative religions such as Buddhism. William

Cronon (1996) is, however, sceptical towards deep ecologists’ philosophy of the

purity of the wild as it wipes out human history by promoting an ‘uninhabited

wilderness’. Towards the end of The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting back to the

Wrong Nature, Cronon cautions against the idea of divorcing humans from nature

since it will save them from taking responsibility for causing environmental problems.

Rob Nixon (2005) in Environmentalism and Postcolonialism has lamented on the

domination of ecological critiques by Western, especially American, academics. By

way of explanation, he reveals that all of the twenty-five writers and critics of the

literary environmentalism cited in Jay Parini’s The Greening of the Humanities2 (1995,

October 29) in the New York Times are Americans. According to Elizabeth

DeLoughrey and George B. Handley in the Introduction to Postcolonial Ecologies:

Literature of the Environment (2011), ‘postcolonial ecology’ rises to guard against

this limited representation by engaging the local and often ‘inassimilable aspects of

2 This article is quoted by many supporters of postcolonial ecology as the ignition of the awareness of

globalisation on the role literature plays in mediating environmental knowledge.



4

culture and history’ (p.28) to address the range of social and historical issues, which

are inseparable from environmental problems, and chart the course of ecocriticism to a

global scale.

Most ecocritical studies concentrate on the Western environment, but in this

dissertation, I will divert to the study of the Himalayas to establish an alternative

application of the principles of ecocriticism. Although the focus will be devoted to the

literary representations of the Himalayas, some non-literature materials e.g. art,

documentaries, magazines, scientific writings will be analysed to form a

comprehensive picture of the representations. Referencing from the evolutionary

ecological discourses, this dissertation is divided into three parts: ‘imperial ecology’,

‘deep ecology’ and ‘postcolonial ecology’, to probe the changes in the representations

of the Himalayas.

The plan of the dissertation is as follows:

Chapter 1 focuses on ‘imperial ecology’ to highlight how imperial ecological

discourse such as anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism, has shaped the early Western

representations of the Himalayas. Influenced by Western aesthetic rhetoric chiefly the

picturesque and the sublime, earlier representations covered in this chapter, Lieutenant

George Francis White’s Views of India, Chiefly among the Himalayas Mountain

(1838), Joseph Rock’s articles in the National Geographic Magazine (1930), and

James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), try to confine the Himalayas within a familiar

representational frame. The human-centric discourse has sidestepped representation of

the other ecological components of the Himalayan ecosystem, which deserve deeper

concern.

Chapter 2 defines and explores ‘deep ecology’ as the endeavour to create a human-

free nature. Equipped with Romantic ecological discourse, Peter Matthiessen

‘emplots’ Western peopleless wilderness ideology in The Snow Leopard (1978)

through the continued use of Romantic techniques, idealisation and mythologisation in

the representations of the Himalayas. Although Matthiessen’s spiritual and soul-

searching pursuit in the journey is akin to the desire for personal transformation

prevalent in Romanticism, it is laden with deeper ecological concern. The attempt to



5

eradicate human presence in nature is however controversial and paves the way for the

discussion of ‘postcolonial ecology’.

Chapter 3, ‘postcolonial ecology’ will study the attempt of the Himalayan community

to reassert their cultural values by retorting the burgeoning Western representations:

from the early Romantic fetishisation to creation of pristine wilderness, and the recent

scientific literatures’ denunciation of local economic activities. Comparing Western

representations to Gang Yue’s Fragments of Shangri- La: “Eco-Tibet” and Its Global

Circuits (2010), Alai’s A Swarm of Bees Fluttering (2001) and the English translation

of the Nepali literatures from Himalayan Voices: An Introduction to Modern Nepali

Literature (1991), the Himalayan communities’ voices have put the representations of

the Himalayas into perspective. As a result, a revamped representation to narrow the

difference between Western construction and the local perspectives, through

delivering a balanced account of the inseparable ecological, social and economic

issues in the Himalayas, takes its place on the global stage.



6

Chapter 1 Imperial Ecology

The founding principle of ‘imperial ecology’ coined by Worster (1994) in Nature’s

Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas is derived from Francis Bacon’s argument

that through science and human management, ‘man would recover…the authority

over all other creatures he once enjoyed in the Garden of Eden’ (p.30). Furthermore,

Baconian ecology carries the Christian belief that ‘the world is made for man’ which

highlights the human-centric Christian force behind the formation of the imperial

ecological discourse. Nature as utility for humans is further supported by the staunch

belief of Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (1707-1778), otherwise known as Linnaeus,

that humans should fulfill their obligation to make ‘nature’s productions accrue to the

enrichment of the human economy’ (p.36).

Lynn White Jr. and Carolyn Merchant’s assertion that anthropocentricism and

utilitarianism leads to environmental degradation in the West is not entirely applicable

to the Himalayas due to the fact that colonisation brings about both environmental

improvements and backlashes. Nevertheless, Hilton’s attempt in Lost Horizon to set

up three abductees, Mallinson, Bryan and Miss Brinklow as foils for Conway exposes

Western human-centric and Eurocentric views in the imperial ecological discourse for

the purpose of exerting control over the Himalayas. Supplemented with Lieutenant

George Francis White’s lithographs and Joseph Rock’s articles in the National

Geographic Magazine, this chapter will also analyse the degree of success in the use

of Romantic aesthetic techniques in Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1960) to confine the

Himalayas under the orderly Western representations.

William Gilpin (1724-1804) introduces the picturesque into the English society in the

late eighteenth century and defines it as ‘a term expressive of that peculiar kind of

beauty, which is agreeable in a picture’ (Gilpin, 1786, p.x). A formula is devised to

depict the unity of a scene conveyed through the keeping of the near and distant views.

Gilpin further expounds that the picturesque is judiciously arranged to ‘strike even the

unpractised eyes’ (p.16). Associating the picturesque with sublime3 is the typical

3

The sublime is a Romantic sensibility introduced by Edmund Burke which refers to the intense andambivalent emotions evocated when confronted with the overwhelmingly untamed nature (Kennedy,

1996), especially that of the Swiss Alps.



7

Western Romantic traveller’s aesthetic repertoire for representing nature. These

Romantic techniques travel abroad, as shown in early British traveller Lieutenant

George Francis White’s literature and lithographs in Figure 1. These feature the

Himalayan picturesque from Views of India, Chiefly among the Himalayas Mountain

(1838):

The foreground was composed of a rich ridge, covered with timber, the

growth of ages, - and contrasting, by its dark foliage, with the barer

eminences around, which, rising in all directions, appeared as if the

tumultuous waves of a stormy ocean had suddenly been converted into

earth, while the forest, standing forth in the midst, looked like a peninsula

stretching far into the billows. Beyond this wild and confused sea, arose

in calmer majesty, those towering piles of unchanging snow, which, from

whatever point they may be viewed, can never fail to inspire sentiments

of awe and admiration’ (p.122, 125).

Figure 1 Snowy Ranges, from Tyne Marma, 1825. (p.123)

Conforming strictly to the formulaic depiction of the picturesque, White’s scenery is

spaced out with foreground, mid-ground and background disposition. The constant use

of ocean imagery, however, controls nature within a confined frame, inhibiting the

landscape from reaching out to the onlookers. Although the last sentence demonstrates



8

an attempt to convey the sublime, its detached tone suggests the Romantic technique

is overused, rendering it clichéd.

The limited representational variety in the picturesque’s prescribed formula, coupled

with the supposed unrepresentability of the sublime, presents a loophole for the

Himalayan landscape to escape the conformity of Western representation. In Lost

Horizon, the protagonist Conway endeavours to administer control over nature as ‘he

pondered, envisioning maps, calculating distance, estimating times and speeds’ (p.37)

at the outset of the kidnapping flight journey from India to Tibet:

Far away, at the very limit of distance, lay range upon range of snow-peak,

festooned with glaciers, and floating, in appearance, upon vast levels of cloud.

They compassed the whole arc of circle, merging towards the west in a horizon

that was fierce, almost garish in colouring, like an impressionist back-drop done

by some half-mad genius. And meanwhile, the plane, on that stupendous stage,

was droning over an abyss in face of a sheer white wall that seemed part of the

sky itself until the sun caught it. Then, like a dozen piled-up Jungfraus seen from

Mürren, it flamed into superb and dazzling incandescence…this fearsome

spectacle beyond the window pane was of different calibre; it has no air of

posing to be admired. There was something raw and monstrous about those

uncompromising ice-cliffs, and a certain sublime impertinence in approaching

them thus (p.37).

Different from White’s passive nature, the nature in Lost Horizon is attributed with

active roles of ‘compassing’, ‘merging’ and ‘flaming’ and constantly eludes Conway’s

representational grip. The Himalayas are compared to the ‘impressionist back -drop’

which highlights the inability of Conway to grasp the details of the landscape and the

course of the event. The mysterious landscape masked ‘in craggy silhouette’ as

‘nothing was visible but an opaque mist veiling an immense, sun- brown desolation’

(p.24, 25) further reinforces the unrepresentability of nature.

The Himalayan landscape in Lost Horizon is believed to have been inspired by Joseph

Rock’s articles on the Tibetan borderland of Sichuan and Yunnan in the NationalGeographic Magazine from 1920s to 30s. The photos shown in Figure 2 and the



9

description below, exhibit the Tibetan mountainous landscape represented in Lost

Horizon:

like a white promontory of clouds, we beheld the long-hidden Minya Konka

rising 25,600 feet in sublime majesty. I could not help exclaiming for joy. I

marveled at the scenery which I, the first white man ever to stand here, was

privileged to see…A truncated pyramid it is, with immense lateral buttresses

flanked by an enormous glacier many miles in length…‘The Valley of the Snow

Peaks’ into which the main glaciers of Minya Konka dischar ge, joins Buchü

Valley, and then as the Tsauku Valley, sends a torrent into the Tung River (Rock,

1930, October, p.413).

Figure 2 The first close-range photos of the mountain ranges near the roof of the world taken by Joseph

Rock and published in the National Geographic Magazine in October 1930 (p.403, 409)

Bearing National Geographic Society’s motto of educating the public through science,

exploration and storytelling, Rock embarks on several scientific journeys to study the

underexplored Tibetan landscape. Conway’s overwhelming experience when



10

confronted by the landscape mirrors the ecstasy experienced by Rock. Similarly, nature

manages to give Rock’s representation the slip, as his failure to remain detached is

probably one of the reasons leading to miscalculation of the Minya Konka4. The above

geomorphological account of the landscape also sheds light on Hilton’s scientific

picturesque5 depicting the altitudinal zonation layers of the agroecosystem in Shangri-

La:

The lower levels of forest and foothill the supreme good fortune of the

lamasery was everywhere to be realised. For the valley was nothing less

than an enclosed paradise of amazing fertility, in which the vertical

difference of a few thousand feet spanned the whole gulf between

temperate and tropical. Crops of unusual diversity grew in profusion and

contiguity, with not an inch of ground untended. The whole cultivated

area stretched for perhaps a dozen miles, varying in width from one to

five, and though narrow, it had the luck to take sunlight at the hottest part

of the day. The atmosphere, indeed, was pleasantly warm even out of the

sun, though the little rivulets that watered the soil were ice-cold from the

snows…but for some chance-placed barrier, the whole valley would

clearly have been a lake, nourished continually from the glacial heights

around it. Instead of which, a few streams dribbled through to fill

reservoirs and irrigate fields and plantations with a disciplined

conscientiousness worthy of a sanitary engineer. The whole design was

almost uncannily fortunate, so long as the structure of the frame remained

unmoved by earthquake or landslide (p.106).

The observation spreads out according to the distribution of the vegetation. This

diversified agricultural profile nurtured under the favourable climatic conditions

reveals a general outline of the interplay of ecological components in the Himalayan

agroecosystem. The use of engineering technology to tame the nature by construction

4 The National Geographic Society was sceptical towards Rock ’s measurement of Minya Konka with

30,250 feet, which is even higher than the 29,029 Mount Everest. The measurement was adjusted

downward to 25,600 feet in the publication of the Magazine. Swiss geographer Eduar Imhof has

established the elevation to 24,900 feet in 1930 (Heim, 1936).5 It refers to pictorial graph framed by columns of tabulated measurements giving precise altitudinal

readings for gravity, humidity, permanent snow, atmospheric pressure, light intensity, blueness of thesky, types of agriculture, and so on. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) advocates this form of

scientific assessments of landscape (Smethurst, 2013).



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of irrigation systems chimes with the attempt to structure nature for settlement. Yet,

the instability of the structure elucidated contrasts with the ‘unchanging’ landscape

discourse dominating White’s earlier representations of the Himalayas.

Even though science plays a role to re-enchant nature by uncovering its dynamic and

volatility (Smethurst, 2013, p. 97) as ‘the mountain wall continued to drop, near

perpendicularly, into a cleft that could only have been the result of some cataclysm in

the far past’ (p.66), it is kept at bay in Lost Horizon when Conway’s chaotic

subjectivity sets sail. After enduring ‘infernal wind’ in the desolation and being

escorted to Shangri-La where ‘thin air had a dream-like texture, matching the

porcelain- blue sky’ (p.47, 67), Conway has undergone transformation from initial

seizure by the intimidating Himalayas to gradual immersion into Shangri-La. He

experiences ‘an extraordinary sense of physical and mental settlement’ (p.124) in this

charming and quiet ‘fertile paradise’ (p.133). However, the various transient moments

of moonlight illuminating Karakal6 bring to light the unreality of the event (p.80, 164,

216). This unsettles Conway as he is confronted with the difficult decision to leave or

stay in Shangri-La. Despite feeling attached to the valley, Conway reverts to

Mallinson’s reality and leaves Shangri-La. Yet, his unyielding effort to return at the

end signifies contemporary world’s continuous search for Shangri-La.

Contrary to Conway who is overawed by the Himalayas and struggles for orientation,

the abductees – Bryant’s profound interest in the gold deposit and Mallinson’s

contemplation on the construction of a ‘winter sport centre’ (p.91), show how

rationality and reasons embedded in the imperial ecological discourse have moulded

Western attitudes towards nature. Linnaeus’ The Oeconomy of Nature promoting ‘the

mean of political administration of all the resources of a community or state for orderly

production’ (Worster, 1994, p.37) finds resonance in the British setup of hill stations7

in the Indian mountainous areas. Bringing the hill station into the scene, Hilton

juxtaposes the overwhelming Himalayan tableau from the airplane to the mediocre

Everest scenery from Tiger Hill, near Darjeeling in India (p.37) to satirise the feeble

attempt of the British to contain the untamable Himalayas. Since the intimidating

6 Karakal is Shangri-La patois for blue moon. It is the mountain overlooking Shangri-La (Hilton, 1960).

7

The hill station is originally set up as sanatorium in the mountainous areas in India where thefavourable climate resembling that of the British Isles is considered beneficial for the recovery of the

invalids (Kennedy, 1996).



12

Himalayas are an obstacle to the empire-building agenda of the British (Kennedy,

1996), to assert political control, the British sets up hill station with the English garden

features in order to domesticate the landscape.

The transplantation of English vegetation species and introduction of plantation

surrounding the hill stations such as Ootacamund and Darjeering where the English

picturesque is superimposed, echoes to a certain extent with Jill Casid’s (2005)

‘imperial picturesque’8 (p.14) coined in Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonisation.

Although transformation of the agroecology has brought about improvements to the

local economy, the environmental repercussion is palpable, such as deforestation for

making way for railway and access at the Himalayan foothills. Kennedy (1996) argues

that in response to environmental degradation, the British adopts conservation and

preservation approaches to protect the nature for their own consumption and in turn

safeguard the interests of the empire.

The inhabitants of Shangri-La masked under Mallinson’s ‘generalisation’ (p.82) in

Lost Horizon reflects Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism9, in which a sweeping

stereotype is generated to situate the coloniser as more superior than the colonised

(Said, 1978). Apart from categorising the Chinese / Tibetan derogatively as of the

same species as the Orientals, ‘those fellows are typically Orientals, you can’t get them

to do anything quickly and efficiently’ (p.82), Mallinson fetishises Lo-Tsen, a Manchu,

as in need of protection and even salvation, ‘she’s like a little ivory doll more than a

human being’ (p.112). This racist view resonates with the root of ecology which

establishes inherent supremacy of a certain race over others. The people are also

naturalised in Rock’s representation in the National Geographic Magazine (1930,

October), ‘ignorant of the outside world, these people seem entirely contented with

their hard lot. They are born, live, and die not only in the same skin, but, one might

almost say, in the same clothes, with those insect associates from which a Tibetan is

never free’ (p.414). Categorised as a part of nature, the natives are considered as the

8 A discourse used to justify hybridisation/transformation of colonised landscape through the material

transplantation of plants, enslaved African people, and machines in the Caribbean, as a programme for

improving the environment and rightful possession of the land.9 According to Said (1978), Orientalism is ‘a manner of regularised (or Orientalised) writing, vision and

study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly situated to the Orients’(p.142), ‘it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific

historical, intellectual and even economic setting’ (p.273).



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inferior other which underscores Eurocentric ideology embedded in imperial

ecological discourse. Despite Hilton evoking the civilised aspect of the Tibetans and

Chinese in Shangri-La, ‘they smiled and laughed as they passed the chaired

strangers…they were good-humoured and mildly inquisitive, courteous and

carefree…the pleasantest communities’ (p.107), the docile and amiable qualities of the

locals are not only favourable to rule of Western lamas, but also arguably match

Western idealisation of Tibet.

The locals are also viewed as heretic and immoral, and Miss Brinklow considers it a

divine Providence for her to evangelise and civilise them under the religious doctrines.

The vision of the High Lama Perrault10 to create a utopia where ‘the Christian ethic

may at last be fulfilled, and the meek shall inherit the earth’ (p.159) alludes to the wave

of the Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries visiting Tibet to preach the gospel of Christ

from the seventeenth century onwards (Ahluwalia, 1982). Miss Brinklow’s vehement

rejection of the evolution theory by which humans and apes share a common ancestry,

‘I think Darwin was far worse than any Tibetan (Tibetan believes humans are

descended from monkeys), I take my stand on the Bible’ (p.44), strengthens the

creationist anthropocentric view in Christianity. However, in Lost Horizon, after

assimilating into local religions such as Buddhism whose ‘prevalent belief is in

moderation’, the Christian lamas are made ambivalent about upholding Christianity

‘for “Te Deum Laudamus” and “Om Mane Padme Hum” were now heard equally in

the temples of the valley’ (p.140). The hybrid Shangri-La religion channels to Chapter

2’s discussion on deep ecologist’s belief that Buddhism is a salve for the contemporary

environmental problems.

In spite of being a utopia of hybridity, Shangri-La is but a construction imbued with

Eurocentrism. Alluding to Bryant’s remark ‘the whole game’s going to pieces’ (p. 125)

on the Wall Street Crash in 1929, Conway perceives it as equivalent to Britain’s

loosing battles on war and empire building. The war-weary Conway reflects Hilton’s

rejection of the empire- building frenzy and the imminent approach of war. Hilton’s

utopian aspiration is evident in the construction of the Shangri-La community, but it is

still entrenched with Eurocentric ideology. The effort to create Eurocentric profile of

10 A Capuchin friar from Luxemburg founded the Shangri-La lamasery in 1734 (Hilton, 1960).



14

the lamas to rule over Shangri-La ‘our best subjects, undoubtedly, are the Nordic and

Latin races of Europe; perhaps the Americans would be equally adaptable’ (p.150)

inevitably adds discriminatory tint to Shangri-La constructed in Lost Horizon. It is also

ironic that the lamasery’s display of hospitality is not imbued with the Chinese /

Tibetan culture, but with elements of Western civilisation such as English-speaking

lamas, central heating systems, Western hygiene and technology. The Shangri-La, after

all, is a colonial creation to fulfill Western imagination of the Himalayas.

The earlier representations of the Himalayas are saturated with colonial views as

shown in their conspicuous silence in Lost Horizon. The local inhabitants who do not

speak English, such as Lo-Tsen are not given voices throughout the story. They are

mainly represented through the gaze of the Westernised lamas and the abductees. The

absence of other biological components, such as animals in the story also strips the

Himalayan ecosystem of some important components. This paves the way for the

discussion of deep ecology in the next chapter, which presents a more comprehensive

Himalayan ecosystem with the introduction of various megafauna, and some

ecological problems encountering the Himalayas.



15

Chapter 2 Deep Ecology

The tenets of deep ecology are proposed in 1973 by Arne Naess, a Norwegian

philosopher (Hiltner, 2015). The foremost of these is the rejection of

anthropocentricism:

the well-being and flourishing of human and non-human Life on Earth have

value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are

independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purpose (p.49)

Deep ecology allies itself with Buddhism in the common belief in the intrinsic value

of all beings in the universe. In The Snow Leopard (2010), Matthiessen explains that

the ultimate attainment of ‘prajna, or transcendental knowing’ in Buddhism involves a

transformed understanding of relations with nature. Nature and humans are considered

equal, since the ‘higher consciousness or “Mind”’ is believed to be inherent in all

beings. Buddhism holds the view that this identification with the universal life has

kept man from inflicting harm upon other beings in nature. Deep ecology deviates

from imperial ecology on the assertion of human importance in the ecosystem. To

dispute the human-centric discourse which is largely blamed for contributing to the

dire environmental situation in the Himalayas, Matthiessen attempts to create an

accommodating account of the Himalayas by introducing components other than

humans to manifest the Buddhist respect for all beings in the ecosystem. He also

believes that by upholding Buddhist doctrine, nature and humans could achieve a

harmonious state, and environmental devastation could then be arrested.

Deploying the technique of reanimation, Matthiessen tries to reanimate the nature that

has long been silenced under imperial ecology. Alan Drengson, editor of The

Trumpeter , a deep ecology journal, states that a revival of medieval contemplative

tradition, which is set against anthropocentricism, will reconcile the human-nature

relationship. Christopher Manes (1996) quotes from Bill Devall, coauthor of Deep

Ecology and suggests that:



16

attending to ecological knowledge means metaphorically relearning ‘the

language of birds’ – the passions, pains and cryptic intents of the other biological

communities that surround us and silently interpenetrate our existence (p.25).

Through giving voices back to nature, Matthiessen discerns the embodiment of the

Buddhist doctrine in the Himalayan nature. Throughout the expedition, he interjects

voices of the Himalayas in his description of the natural landscape and uses metaphor

and hyperbole to help visualise the voices of the animals. For instance, the shrill of a

cicada is compared as ‘fierce as a sword blade shrieking…causes the spider webs to

shimmer in the sunlight’ (p.36). The Himalayas are also re-enchanted with spirituality

where the hoopoe is personified with the ability to attain spiritual knowledge in Sufi

mythology, while Matthiessen has likened Tukten’s expression to Buddha’s

‘enigmatic smile’ as the emblematic gesture of the unified nature of existence (p.36).

The intertwinement of human and non-human voices facilitating ‘an understanding of,

reverence for, and dialogue with nature’ (Manes, 1996, p.25) is advocated by deep

ecologists such as Henry David Thoreau and Gary Snyder as a way to reestablish the

broken relationships in the componential ecosystem.

However, Garrard (2004) has cautioned against misplacing animism as ecological.The local’s respect for nature should not be regarded as abstaining from utilising its

resources. Their coexistence with nature is largely grounded on practicality ‘with

considerable knowledge and skill but always within the terms of their own cultural

cosmos’ (p.135). Besides, in Buddhism, spiritual existence is more important than the

physical one, so to obtain enlightenment, one must ‘extinguish cravings’ (Matthiessen,

2010, p.27) and free oneself from fear of birth-and-death. The exclamation from the

lama in the Crystal Monastery, ‘No! Isn’t that wonderful?’, when he knows that

Matthiessen cannot get a glimpse of the snow leopard, can be interpreted as relief that

the snow leopard remains unseen or liberation for one’s ‘acceptance of what is’

(p.225). When positioning the snow leopard as a metaphor for the Himalayan

environment, the lama’s response could also be read as the acceptance of the current

situation, for ecosystem has its own negative feedback mechanism. The focus on

arresting environmental problems with strenuous efforts to reanimate the nature

renders the deep ecology’s understanding of Buddhism superficial.



17

As discussed in Chapter 1, imperial ecology founded on the principle of utility

legitimises human exploitation of nature for consumption. The British infliction of

ecological impacts upon the Himalayan foothills in India illustrates this argument.

Nature is perceived as secondary, for its value is measured in terms of its usefulness to

humans. Deep ecology’s concern on the excessive present human interference with the

non-human world and the rapidly worsening situation (Hiltner, 2015) is further

reinforced in The Snow Leopard where Matthiessen presents a grim prospect of the

Himalayas, whose ‘wilderness will certainly be gone by the century’s end’ (p.53).

Deforestation for fuelwood and slash-and-burn agricultural activities in Nepal have

led to severe soil erosion and deluge. Also, the loss of animal habitats has placed

many species on the endangered list.

Matthiessen’s representations of rural life are aptly placed for the explanation of

environmental problems in Nepal. Attributing Nepal’s deteriorating environment to

‘increasing population, primitive agriculture, and steep terrain’, he brings the

Nepalese rural community into the scene. The aggravated deforestation impacts

contributed by deep encroachment into the Himalayas are presented subtly in the

‘peasants who have walked for many miles to sell the meagre faggots on their backs’

(p.32). The country folk using animal manure for domestic purposes is also accused of

causing soil nutrient depletion while the future generation is held responsible as ‘one

day this boy and others will destroy that forest’ (p.31). As such, Matthiessen’s

attribution of the Himalayan environmental distress to overpopulation recasts one of

Naess’s principles of deep ecology that the flourishing of non-human life requires the

decrease of human population (Hiltner, 2015).

Echoing with his travel companion, a zoologist, George Schaller, who helps to

establish some of the world’s biggest wildlife reserves, Matthiessen opines that it is

crucial to establish wildlife sanctuaries to arrest ecological degradation in Nepal. As

reflected in the interview with Michael Bond (2007), Schaller discloses that the Chang

Tang Reserve in Tibet situated in the middle of nowhere where ‘there are no people at

all’ is the place worth fighting to preserve. His conscious attempt to ignore the loca l

inhabitants in The Snow Leopard as ‘he dislikes all these small villages’ and remarks

‘the fewer people, the better’ (p.36) en route to the Crystal Monastery - breedingground of the blue sheep, corresponds to the idea of ‘uninhabited wilderness’ reflected



18

in Thoreau’s famous saying, ‘In Wilderness is the preservation of the World’ (Hiltner,

2015, p.102).

In fact the blue sheep live in a de facto sanctuary under the protection of the Crystal

Monastery, ‘where the Buddhist lama had forbidden people to molest them’ (p.13).

This idea of confining the animals in a scientifically controlled environment for their

protection is in reality a farce. Although being able to capture the blue sheep by

confining them in voyeuristic lenses, Schaller ’s scientific inference of their origin is

far from presenting a conclusion on the evolution of the specie as revealed in the

frequent use of diction such as ‘perhaps’, ‘about’, ‘usually’ and ‘probably’ (p.232).

The credibility of science is further at stake as Schaller admits ‘that an animal (yeti)

unknown to science occurs here (in the Himalayas)’ and the legendary yeti may be

‘prematurely classified “extinct”’ (p.120, 121) because they may be another primate

species. Humans’ inability to grasp the unpredictable nature is also evident in the

elusive snow leopard which the expedition in the end fails to see. Nonetheless, both

Schaller and Matthiessen think that ‘it’s better if there are some things that we (they)

don’t see’ (p.223) for that means the snow leopard is still kept away from human

predators.

On the other hand, the advocate of undisturbed nature is not solely for ecological

concern, it is also created as an avenue for Matthiessen’s self -actualisation. The

birthplace of Sakyamuni is located in an undisturbed nature where there is ‘absence of

all sound, of even the simplest machinery’. Matthiessen goes further to mystify the

landscape by highlighting its unchangeability that ‘little has changed since the sixth

century B.C.’ (p.26). Buddhism flourishes in nature as the Buddha is born in the

‘kingdom of elephants and tigers’, attains enlightenment under the umbrella of the

‘Enlightenment Tree’, and preaches ‘on the hill of Swayambhunath, among the

monkeys and the pines’. Echoing with William Cronon’s assertion in The Trouble

with Wilderness; or, Getting back to the Wrong Nature (1996) that ‘wilderness is

often permeated with spiritual and religious values that reflect human ideals far more

than the material world of physical nature’ (p.109), inseparability of nature from

Buddhism is channelled in this unrealistic wilderness construction to keep in pace

with Matthiessen’s internal journey.



19

Contested by Cronon as a cultural creation, this myth of the purity of the wild, where

human existence is played down and eradicated to the extreme, is polemic. Alison

Byerly’s (1963) analysis on the National Park System in the United States provides a

framework for argument against the inception of a peopleless wildlife sanctuary.

Byerly considers it paradoxical to preserve the ‘untrammeled by man’ wilderness,

which has been in fact occupied by the indigenous population already. However, the

Himalayan bucolic idyll expressed through Western aesthetic technique reflects

Matthiessen’s religious ideals rather than recognition of the community:

I set off ahead, walking alone in the cool breeze of the valley. In the bright

September light and mountain shadow – steep foothill are closing in as the

valley narrows, and the snow peaks to the north are no longer seen – the path

follows a dike between the reedy canal and the green terraces of rice that

descend in steps to the margins of the river. Across the canal, more terraces

ascend to the crests of the high hills, and a blue sky (p.25)

Matthiessen consciously setting himself apart from the expedition highlights his

solitude and paves the way for his personal soul-searching journey. Alluding his

sitting posture against the wall and a tree to Sakyamuni’s Supreme Enlightenment

attainment posture when he observes the scenery, the picturesque idyll delivered

above is accentuated with religious and bucolic ideals as it is described as a ‘natural,

happy domain of man’ (p.24) where the village folks are ‘spared by old economies

from modern poverty’. However, this ideal lifestyle chiming with deep ecology’s

pursuit of simplicity risks being enmeshed with sentimentalism. As the rural poverty

and misfortune are constantly misappropriated with contentment, ‘the people smile-

that is the greatest miracle of all…one delights in the smile of a blind girl being

led…of a flute- playing beggar boy’ (p.22). Also, the natives are often related to the

ideals of Buddhism, ‘the simple and uneducated men comport themselves with the

wise calm of monks, and their well- being is in no way separable from their religion’

(p.41).

The fluctuating psyche of Matthiessen during the journey results in an unstable

representation of the Himalayas. Despite aspiring to the rural life that to him embodiesBuddhism, the natives’ responsibility for environmental degradation reveals a



20

dilemma in the representation. Schaller as a foil to guard against his idealisation of the

Nepalese community exemplifies the ambivalent feelings experienced by Matthiessen.

A blunt reality presented by Schaller breaks the spell of idealising rural poverty as

‘beggars will break their children’s knees to achieve this pitiful effect for business

purpose’ (p.30). The Sherpa are also doubtful on Matthiessen’s personal affection

towards Tukten, a Sherpa porter who is mythologised as ageless and ‘radiates that

inner quiet which is often associated with spiritual attainment’ (p.56). The Himalayan

community frequently escaping Matthiessen’s representations not only reveals its

complexity and instability, which is beyond the representations of the West, but also

renders his account questionable as he constantly falls into the pitfall of sentimentality.

Besides, the internal turmoil experienced by Matthiessen in the snow mountain

demonstrates how the Himalayan landscape strikes back and escapes his

representations. Confronted by the timelessness of the landscape where ‘many stones

hold fossils from the epochs when these summits lay beneath the sea’ (p.158),

Matthiessen’s past and present experiences commingle and haunt him with the loss of

his wife. The ‘hallucinatory whiteness’ (p.159) takes the advantage to unsettle him by

instilling him with doubts in reading Schaller ’s note of instruction for the expedition.

Overtaken by the ‘chaos of bright spires, utterly lifeless, without smoke or track or hut

or passing birds’ (p.161), Matthiessen leaps and bounds into the imaginary Shambala

where Lao-tzu vanishes into with his ox, in order to seek refuge from his eastern

thoughts. However, armoured with ‘“I” who is conscious of the void and stands apart

from it’, he is overwhelmed by the snow mountains and fails to discern its emptiness

embodies the existence of all beings, ‘Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as

a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness

without life or sound that carr ies in Itself all life, all sound’ (p.162). As such, the

active Himalayas represented have reversed their fate of being framed by humans in

both imperial and deep ecological discourses (Smethurst, 2013).

Deep ecology has been criticised by scholars such as Ramachandra Guha ‘for their

biocentricity, their emphasis on wilderness preservation, and their romanticism of

Asian religious traditions’ (DeLoughrey & Handley, 2011, p.21), and rootedness in

the American environmental and cultural history which makes it inappropriate to beapplied to the Third World. Misattribution prevails in the representations in The Snow



21

Leopard as the advocate of wildlife reserve under the banner of preserving and

conserving the nature ignores its possible conflict with the indigenous people’s

interests, while the locals are even being held solely accountable for the degradation

of their homeland. By mythologising and idealising the village life and religious belief,

Matthiessen has trapped himself in misrepresenting the Himalayan communities and

exposed his superficial understanding of Buddhism. Despite investing efforts to

reanimate the nature, voices of the Himalayas are largely behind the scene, only with

the utmost degree of simple English spoken by the porters, the Sherpa and the children.

To ascertain these criticisms, Chapter 3 will examine local perspectives with a view to

providing a more inclusive representations of the Himalayas.



22

Chapter 3 Postcolonial Ecology

According to Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt (2010), convergence of postcolonialism and

ecocriticism is an inevitability in view of the colonial legacy and the increasingly

globalised world:

Our world is locked in a dance of cultural, economic, and ecological

interdependence. This interdependence calls for a multiplicity of voices to

address the problems that our world faces today (p.3)

Ecological problems in the Himalayas epitomise the interdependence of the world as it

is intertwined with social and political problems in the local and global arena.

Deducing from Edward Said’s (1994) Culture and Imperialism that postcolonial

writing is ecologically framed and positioned as a process of recovery, identification,

and historical mythmaking ‘enabled by the land’ (p.78), postcolonial ecologies

initiated by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (2011) take on literary

imagination as the ‘multiplicity of voices’ to solve the contemporary ecological

problems. Ecocriticism has been criticised for being unable to address the postcolonial

senisbility as ‘many of the recent scholarship theorising the development of

ecocriticism and environmentalism has positioned Europe and the United States as the

epistemological centres’ (DeLoughrey & Handley, 2011, p.8). By deploying

postcolonial ecologies to the Himalayan context through engagement of the local

representations, it is argued that this will broaden the scope of ecocriticism and

hopefully narrow the representational gap between Western constructions and

perspectives of the locals.

By way of background, Chapter 1 has revealed how the escapist ideal ‘during a time

of war, economic depression, and intellectual pessimism’ (Yue, 2010, p.53) in the

West is conducive to the mythologisation of the Himalayas. As further elaborated in

Chapter 2, the idealisation of the Himalayan living ethos as Matthiessen’s personal

salvation has raised the concern of turning the indigenous ecology to simply providing

‘moral, spiritual, or financial redemption for the capitalist metropole’ (DeLoughrey &

Handley, 2011, p.19). Guha attacks these mythologisation and idealisation fordemonstrating ‘a lack of concern with inequalities within human society’,



23

dehistoricising nature, and overlooking more pressing environmental issues such as

the growing ‘overconsumption by industrial nations and by urban elites in the Third

World’ (DeLoughrey & Handley, 2011, p.21). This accusation is resonated by some

modern Nepali writers, whose literatures are collected in Himalayan Voices: An

Introduction to Modern Nepali Literature (1991).

The publication of The Half-closed Eyes of the Buddha and the Slowly Setting Sun by

Shankar Lāmichhāné (1928 – 1975) in 1962 flies in the face of popular Western

representations of Nepal. The short story comprises two monologues of a foreign

tourist and his Nepali guide. The tourist’s aspiration for an ‘unforgettable’ experience

is derived from the ideals in his bookish study of Nepal. He is instilled with the

imagination of the unchanging and mythical landscape where ‘hills forever cling[s] to

your sight’, ‘even now…the valley (Kathmandu) is filled with water 11’ (p.254). The

guide mocks the tourist, under the influence of ‘“Black and White” whisky’, idealises

a rural life being under the benevolence of the Buddha with half-closed eyes12. To

fulfill the request for an eye-opening ‘street and alleyway’ encounter, the guide

confronts him with Nepali rural poverty by taking him to visit a farmer’s paralysed

child. It is ironic that the high-sounding samyak gaze charaterising the Nepalis’ eyes is

beyond the comprehension of the guide, who instead identifies them as ‘devoid of all

emotion’. Postcolonial ecological discourse engages literary imagination of the locals

to banish the misrepresentations of the Himalayan way of life.

Postcolonial writing back engineered by Tibetan writer Alai (2001) in A Swarm of

Bees Fluttering has rewritten the journey of becoming a living Buddha in Tibetan

Buddhism. Alai deconstructs the myth of physical incarnation of the living Buddha in

Tibetan Buddhism by constructing a scene where the monks have mistaken the smoke

from the picnicking young people by the Sacred Lake as an auspicious sign and rush

to locate the incarnated living Buddha. This is also a postcolonial inception to

demystify Tibet as embodied in the Tibetan Buddhism. Alai’s Tibetan landscape lacks

the drama orchestrated in both Hilton and Matthiessen’s representat ions whereas a

sense of calmness prevails throughout the story, e.g. ‘the beautiful season on the

11 The Kathmandu Valley was a lake in the geological past. A famous Buddhist legend goes a deity

drains the lake for cultivation for the local inhabitants.12 The iconic dozing Buddha in Nepal is often perceived with a pair of enigmatic eyes to convey the

mysterious doctrines of Buddhism.



24

grassland faded quickly, and the falling flowers were replaced by flying snow.

Snowflakes fell everywhere across the vast, open country, which for a brief time had

been golden yellow. Still, there wasn’t the slightest feeling of melancholy’ (p.106).

Alai has redirected the spotlight from the megafauna, the rareness of which is highly

valued in Western representations, to the honeybees whose omnipresence is only

discernible to the most learned scholar, Geshe Laranba, who attains enlightenment in

the end. To connect the imperceptible but ordinary honeybees to spiritual attainment

breaks the spell of Western imagination that dramatic encounters with the Himalayan

landscape must be gone through in the process of enlightenment. Postcolonial

imagination has restored the Tibetan landscape and religion to its peacefulness which

runs counter to Western idea of grandeur.

At another level, postcolonial ecological reimagination of the Himalayas guards

against Western cultural imperialism. Gang Yue’s Fragments of Shangri- La: “Eco-

Tibet” and Its Global Circuits (2010) interrogates the exploitation operates through

the imposition of the ‘ecological and orientalising rhetorical strategies’ on the creation

of Shangri-La. Hilton’s Shangri-La imbued with Western culture and organised under

the colonial hierarch (see Chapter 1) is different from China’s ecologically friendly

Shangri-La. Citing a Chinese travelogue Lingxi chuifu (1999)13, written by Tang

Shijie, who attempts to reconstruct the imported Shangri-La, Yue demonstrates the

attentiveness of the Chinese intellectuals in reappropriating the postcolonial ecological

representations. For example, instead of just categorising the inhabitants as being

either Chinese or Tibetans, the multicultural Sino-Tibetan world set in Diqing Tibetan

Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan is represented to foreground coexistence of the

many distinct cultures. Unhindered by the binary of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in western

imperial ecological discourse, as it is non-existent in both Chinese and Tibetan

cultures, Tang has no difficulty to provide an ecocultural landscape of Diqing resulted

from the reciprocity of the diverse nature and culture. The ‘cross-fertilisation social

formation’ (p.61) arising from this postcolonial ecology dispels the threat of

homogenisation under cultural imperialism.

13 Translation of the title is provided as Spiritual Breath and Breeze: Searching Shangri-La from

Fiction to Reality.



25

According to DeLoughrey and Handley (2011), Larry Lohmann’s Green Orientalism14

is ‘implicitly foundational to the discourse of ecocriticism as an exportable American

intellectual development’ (p.19). This may sound too harsh a judgement on

ecocriticism, but earlier ecological discourses are proven to some extent imposing

demeaning colonial representations on the Himalayan communities. For instance,

imperial ecological discourse involves representations of the Tibetans and Chinese in

Shangri-La and Yunnan as fauna rather than human beings. Deep ecology’s avowed

anti-anthropocentricism has also rendered its representation biased towards local

inhabitants’ activities in the landscape as shown in Matthiessen’s positioning of the

Nepalese being responsible for the dire environmental situation. The discriminatory

representations are extended to contemporary environmental discourses15 as reveals in

Arturo Escobar’s (1996) argument against them for the poor have been admonished

for their presence, euphemistically called ‘overpopulation’ or for their ‘lack of

environmental consciousness’ (DeLoughrey & Handley, 2011, p.330).

The above representations’ attempt to make the Himalayan communities the scapegoat

has sidestepped the myriad causes and consequences of environmental problems.

Although the concluding remarks of the scientific journals collected in Kindlemann’s

Himalayan Biodiversity in the Changing World (2012) largely put the blame on the

local inhabitants for the decline in megafauna biodiversity, close reading illuminates

the adverse effect of the setting up of wildlife reserve:

In many chapters of this book, it was stressed that local inhabitants living close

to protected areas or other areas of high natural value are very poor and often

have to resort to (something illegal) utilisation of natural resources in the

protected areas. This includes collecting firewoods, domestic livestock being

increasingly grazed in protected areas, conflicts between domestic livestock and

wild animals (tahr deer and other ungulates, etc.) (p.216)

14 A postwar narrative of development that sets up and enforces, in fine Orientalist style, a dichotomy

between hungry, expectant, tradition-shackled Southern people and a modern, scientific, democratic

North. Under the North’s progressive leadership, the South will gradually be freed for better things

(p.19).15 Many scientific journals of the Himalayan environment adopt the recent discourses of biodiversity

and sustainable development to manage human activities by way of solution (Escobar, 1996).



26

Chapter 2 has analysed the self-deceptive discourse of uninhabited wilderness

embedded in the idea of wildlife reserve, the attempt to dispossess the indigenous of

their land in the name of preservation is disputed by scholars like Rob Nixon, Graham

Huggan and Helen Tiffin ‘as radically insensitive and culturally oblivious’ (Roos &

Hunt, 2010, p.4). Unearthing an indigenous painting in central Himalayan interior

depicting a ‘trapped thar (leopard)’ (Figure 3), Hāā (2005) conveys the ambivalent

feelings of the farmers towards leopard, which is reverent at one level and hostile at

another level. By way of inference, the farmers and leopards has coexisted for ages,

the accusation that the farmers are solely responsible for the dwindling number of the

species, is prima facie unjustified. Instead, the tension between the farmers and

megafauna surfaces with the setup of wildlife park leads to question of its legitimacy

and effect on the ecological community since its establishment has declared some

traditional farming practices illegal, and disrupted the original predator-prey

relationships in the Himalayan ecosystem.

Figure 3 A wall drawing from district Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh) showing grapevines, chulli (wild

apricot) and a leopard from Panorama of Himalayan Art

DeLoughrey and Handley (2011) opine that ‘Postcolonial ecology’s concerns are

differently inflected than mainstream American environmentalism’ (p.16) since it

aims to reassert human presence in nature. While the locals have been resituated to

their land by examination of the above pictorial representation, their deep-seated but

ambivalent relationships with nature testify their entrenched attachment to the land.



27

This aggravates their suffering from ecological problems in the Himalayas as clearly

shown in Mīnbahādur Bishṭa’s What’s in the Bastard Hills? (1983):

Springing quickly from its source,

it hurries here, and loiters there,

but never glances back;

instead, the river is kicking hard

against the sickly mountains

which stand like statues on its banks,

as it runs away, and leaves this land.

Young sons are walking out,

leaving the places they were born,

taking loved ones with them,

carrying bags, neatly tied

with red kerchiefs on their shoulders.

Khukurī knives hang from their waists,

dull and unpolished for years;

they tell their sick old parents

to look after homes, homes which are lifeless.

Soft petals of gentle flowers, tender leaves of green,

flying in every direction,

plucked up by unseasonal winds

blowing from unknown lands.

Trees stand bare and disfigured,

like soldiers on parade along mountain ranges.

Flocks of doves like destitutes are driven from their homes

by incessant storms, the deluge

which ends the longest drought;

their bodies are soaked by rain:

no hope of food to eat,no place for them to rest.



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Thus there is nothing in the hills

on which to pen a poem,

you could even say there is nothing there

for anyone to write;

it’s like the soldiers always say,

home for a few months’ leave,

“What’s in the bastard hills?”

Surely there is something here:

dying mothers, newborn babies,

springs shedding sorrowful tears,

pools frozen like heaps of stone,

absolutely still,

where the rivers have left some dirty water

and a few frog shops

as they give up hope and leave,

a few old people tending their homes,

awaiting their time,

some mountains with finished faces,

some trees felled in their youth.

And there are the cooing destitutes,

piercing the heart, shedding tears of blood:

flocks of doves.

The vulnerability of the locals to stand against the climatic anomaly such as the

‘unseasonal winds’, ‘the incessant storms, the deluge’ and ‘the longest drought’ has

brought to light the climate change issues. The whole Himalayan ecosystem is

displaced under environmental decay and the farmers are forced to leave their

homeland. This manifests the global climate injustice discourse in which the

Himalayan communities has been hit hard by global warming exasperated by the

excessive ‘American consumption, emission, and waste’ (DeLoughrey & Handley,2011, p.17). While the West’s confinement of the cause of ecological problems at



29

local level as shown in The Snow Leopard has been alleged by DeLoughrey and

Handley (2011) as shirking of responsibility on their contribution to the global climate

change, it also reveals the lack of global perspective in Western discourse when

analysing the problems.

However, internal economic development cannot be spared from accountability for

the ravaged Himalayan ecosystem. Lāmichhāné’s The Half-closed Eyes of the Buddha

and the Slowly Setting Sun sheds lights on the hardship of the farmers who ‘work and

sweat to pay off half the proceeds to someone in the city’ (p.256). This tension within

Nepal fueled by modernisation is incandescent in Hem Hamāl’s Village and Town

(1983):

If the town prospers

the country progresses,

so say the men of the town.

If it rains this year

the village will prosper,

so say the village men.

A man from the town

stops his car on the road

and asks, “How are the crops

in the village this year?”

A farmer comes forward to answer:

“The farming is not so bad,

but can the sweat of our labours

fill your motor car’s stomach?”

The poem is blatantly satirical towards the disparity between the rich and the poor in

Nepal. The disentanglement of the village from the development of the town and

Nepal’s prosperity has neglected the interdependence of all beings in an ecosystem.

The insatiability of modernisation is also emphasised as development is carried out at

the expense of the rural communities and nature. This echoes with Westernadmonishment of the local’s lack of environmental consciousness and management



30

expertise, and the West’s involvement is called for despite unwillingly in another

poem by Bishṭa, Thus a Nation Pretends to Live (1983):

Honoured friend,

this is Māchapuchare, that is Annapūra,

over there stands the Dhaulagiri range16.

You can see them with the naked eye,

you do not need binoculars.

Here I shall open a three-star hotel:

would you kindly make me a loan?

Dear guest,

this is the Koshī and that is the Gaak,

the blue over there is the Karālī 17.

You may have read in some papers

about the selling of Nepal’s rivers.

That was a lie, sir.

Those rivers have given our regions their names,

we plan to generate power from them:

could you give us some help?

Respected visitor,

this is Kathmandu Valley.

Here there are three cities:

Kathmandu, Lalitpur, Bhaktapur.

Please cover your nose with a handkerchief,

no sewage system is possible,

the building of toilets has not been feasible.

Our next five-year plan has a clean city campaign:

could you make a donation?

16 These mountains are seen prominently from Pokhara.

17 These are thr ee of Nepal’s most important rivers.



31

The petition to foreign aid donors, although it dampens the national pride, is better

than relinquishing sovereignty by surrendering the source of water and territories. The

landscape, apart from being the lifeline of Nepal, is highly regarded as a national

symbol as conveyed in the persona’s reverential tone when doing the introductions.

Although the condescending tone of the poem reveals the helplessness of Nepal to

fight for its own fate due to the lack of funds for developments and arresting

environmental pollution, their resolve to uphold the national dignity and their deep

attachment to the land are apparent in their endeavour to salvage the land despite its

ravaged state. This poem exemplifies the observation from Frank Stewart (2001) in

the Editor’s Note in Secret Place: New Writing from Nepal that what Nepal appeals to

through literary imagination, is an understanding of the country that would lead to a

just and moral relationship with the outside world.

The assorted postcolonial ecological imaginations in this chapter demonstrate that the

long impeded voices of the Himalayan communities are reaching out to the world

(Stewart, Upadhyay & Thapa, 2001) to reevaluate Western representations of the

Himalayas. The four texts chosen from Himalayan Voices: An Introduction to Modern

Nepali Literature share a common theme: to expose the interwoven social, economic

and ecological problems in poverty-stricken Nepal. They also highlight the problems

are beyond the control of the locals as the causes go beyond regional borders. As

supported by Michel Sierre, the predicament of Nepal, and by extension the

Himalayas displayed above, serve the purpose of postcolonial ecologies to raise the

awareness of the need for a global ‘collective ethics in the face of the world’s

fragility’ (DeLoughrey & Handley, 2011, p.27).



32

Conclusion

This dissertation has moved from Western proto-colonial representations of the

Himalayas to the locals’ twentieth-century contestations of those representations.

Against the background of global exploration expedition, European imperialists and

sojourners transport the imperial and romantic ecological discourses abroad, and the

anthropocentric connotation is evolved into Eurocentric when settled in the Himalayas.

Apart from being perceived as resources for exploitation by the West, the Himalayas

are also constructed as ‘Western environmentalist imagining of the East’ (Chou, 2013,

p.109). With the growth of deeper ecological concerns, the Himalayas plagued by

environmental degradations catch the spotlight of the world. However, Western

representations are in danger of toeing the line of misanthropy by idealising and

mythologising the Himalayas, and sidestepping the socio-economic issues in the

region.

React against Western constructions, the local perspectives surface with an increase in

Himalayan literature. These postcolonial imaginations work to re-present the

Himalayas and the complexity of the ecological problems they face. This creates

profound impact on the twenty-first century representations. As reflected in The

Himalayas of Natural World 2010-2011, broadcasted in the British Broadcasting

Corporation Channel Two (BBC Two), ‘an attempt to incorporate conservationist

advocacy, social commentary, natural history and science’ for a more ‘responsible and

accurate reporting’ is gathering ground in contemporary representations of the

Himalayas (Garrard, 2004, p.152-3). The synopsis of which is reproduced as follows:

Documentary looking at the wildlife of the most stunning mountain range in the

world, home to snow leopards, Himalayan wolves and Tibetan bears.

Snow leopards stalk their prey among the highest peaks. Concealed by snowfall,

the chase is watched by golden eagles circling above. On the harsh plains of the

Tibetan plateau live extraordinary bears and square-faced foxes hunting small

rodents to survive. In the alpine forests, dancing pheasants have even influenced

rival border guards in their ritualistic displays. Valleys carved by glacial waterslead to hillsides covered by paddy fields containing the lifeline to the East, rice.



33

In this world of extremes, the Himalayas reveal not only snow-capped

mountains and fascinating animals but also a vital lifeline for humanity.

The documentary promises to deliver a balanced spotlight on the biotic and abiotic

components in the Himalayan ecosystem where their interdependence is foregrounded.

The Buddhist doctrine is interjected constantly to convey the message that ‘all lives

are connected, each animal depends on one another and even become another’. Rather

than dwelling into the spiritual ideas, which are easily obscured with idealisation and

mythologisation, the documentary presents the interrelation of lives from the

ecological recycling perspective. The formation of the Yunnan tropical rainforest – the

‘mythical Shangri-La’ is scientifically explained as the interplay of the climate and

landscape. The floral wealth generated supports the diverse animal species such as the

songbirds feeding on plant nectars while the tropical monkey on fruits. The age-old

human dependence on nature in honey hunting, logging, paddy field farming is

recognised through the adoption of a neutral tone in the narration. The nutrient cycle

is completed when humans return to nature through the ritual of sky burial.

Instead of confining the scope of the representations to local level, the documentary

has charted to global territory because the Himalayan ecology is entangled with lives

across the globe. The regional political tension arising from melting of glaciers at an

unprecedented speed caused by global warming has raised the question of global

responsibility for regional problems. Towards the end of the documentary, the value

of the Himalayan plant species to global community for pharmaceutical purposes, and

the fact that its unexplored value is under the imminent threat of global climatic

change has called for increase in global sensitivity and cooperation. This global

connectivity is conducive to narrow the representational gap between the West and the

locals on the Himalayas, as exemplified in this documentary.

Literary ecology as a constant flux is demonstrated in the discussion of the changing

discourse of ecology in this dissertation. The idea that ecology will remain constant

after reaching a state of equilibrium is challenged as untenable by scientist Daniel

Botkin in Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century (1992),

since natural ecological systems are constantly fluctuating, and species includinghumans are adapted to these changes. Being a zone of instability with ever-changing



34

geological events going on, and encountered with rapidly changing environmental

conditions brought by global warming, pollutions and forest depletion, it is expected

that the representations of the Himalayas will continue to undergo changes and take

on new directions.



35

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Documents

Himaliyan Ecology Thesis