There are no universals in the problems and solutions of the mountain situation, says a compelling book on Himachal Pradesh.
Two decades ago the renowned Indologist, Agehananda Bharati, wrote an essay entitled "Actual and Ideal Himalayas: Hindu Views of the Mountains". Bharati, an Austro-Hungarian Jew who spent youthful summers in the Alps and — later in life as a sadhu — some years in a Himalayan ashram, documented the attitudes and biases that plains and peninsular Indians held about mountains and their inhabitants. Most of their accounts were coloured by their own cultural experiences. In the superb book under review, certainly the best I have read on the Himalaya in many years, the other viewpoint of the Himalaya is expressed. Chetan Singh explores Himachal Pradesh from the perspective of the people living there —locals as well as resident colonials —in the context of both the modern state and its antecedents.
Today, Himachal Pradesh is full of surprises for the outsider. It has a low poverty rate, the second lowest among the states in India, high literacy as well as a comparatively advanced level of development. Refuting all the doom and gloom accounts of the degraded status of the Himalayan environment by ´exerts´, is the amazing increase in forest cover from 21 percent in 1970 to 30 percent in 1990.
Throughout the book, the author sifts, weighs, and documents in a meticulous fashion all the evidence on the environmental history of Himachal Pradesh. The book should be read for not only what it tells us about Himachal Pradesh, but also more importantly what it implicitly tells us about the Himalaya and mountain environments in general.