Books In Review The Colour And Mystery Of Old India

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 88, 15 April 1939, Page 10 (Supplement)

Books In Review The Colour And Mystery Of Old India

A TRAVEL book may describe for the reader famiiiar scenes in a familiar way, or in an unfamiliar way, or it may describe unfamiliar scenes in a familiar Aray. Seldom is it that such a book, devoted to travel in a country concerning which thousands of books have been written before, reward the reader by conveying experiences that will be to most people utterly strange—and exciting.

Mr. Philip Steegman, whose "Indian Ink" (Cobdon-Sanderson) is his first book, saw in India many things that every other Englishman has seen, but of these lie has little to say, and .that satirically. Having reached India, he wanted to learn what he could of the Indians, and not spend his time observing English men and women. This he found difficult, for among many of his Knglish acquaintances his interest in Indian people and life was deemed eccentric, deplorable—something against which he should be warned. He ignored the warnings, and at the cost of some unpleasantness went on his way. He is a painter, and he secured commissions to paint the portraits of Indian princes and other notabilities. In between times he went where fancy or curiosity took him. Or so he thought. But he records that a leprous fakir, whom he encountered in a bazaar, warned him not to go on a motoring excursion to the Taj Mahal, and then, later, said they would meet again ''in eight months, three weeks and two days' time." He heeded the warning; his companion, who did not, was killed. He forgot the fakir's second prediction, but it was fulfilled, in a remote part of Indiai to which he had had no intention of going when the prediction was made. Such happenings as these baffle the European mind—and help to give this book its charm.

But the most remarkable experience Mr. Steegman had was his visit to Nepal. Few other white men have been in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, for the simple reason that the Nepalese rulers wieh to, and do, exclude foreign influence. There are a few places in the world which very few Europeans have seen— Mecca and Medina and Lhasa are still closed—but these are cities and their gates are cloeed for religious reasons. Nepal is the only country whose whole frontier has always been inviolate, not only for religious reasons, but chiefly because the Nepalese people are immune to foreign influence and their natural barriers of swamps and walls of ice provide the means to keep foreigners out. The sacred Valley of Kathmandu and the mountain track leading up to it for seventy miles from the Indian frontier is the only part of Nepal which is at all known to the world, but not more than three score Englishmen and a dozen other Europeans have ever been there. The valley is about twenty miles long and fifteen miles broad, and that corner has always been the centre of cultural and political life. The rest of the kingdom, 500 miles long and 100 miles wide, is as completely closed and unknown as it was to the Emperor Asoka, who visited the valley in 250 B.C. It is a closed, self-supporting and wholly independent kingdom, owing no allegiance to any Power or to any other king but its own in Kathmandu. ... It lies hidden in those huge mountains, the last survivor of all the oldest cultures of the world; and now, by virtue of its wellstored strength and independence, it is the inevitable cradle of the ne>v world in Asia which is going through' the painful process of birth. Mr. Steegman gives a summary of the long history of Nepal, and then describes his own experence there. "The only thing I know for myself," he says, "is that I was immeasurably happy in Nepal, and that the Valley gave certain tilings to me which I could never have acquired in the world which brought me up." "Indian Ink" justifies the praise of Sir Hugh Walpole in a foreword—"an original first-hand work, creatively and individually alive."