In 1923, W Heffer & Sons Ltd published an unusual book titled Servant of Sahibs: A Book to be Read Aloud. It is an autobiographical account of Ghulam Rassul Galwan, a Ladakhi native, who began his career as a servant and companion of European and American explorers in their expeditions through Kashmir and Central Asia. The famous explorer-writer, Sir Francis Edward Younghusband, introduces this book. Younghusband had written books on travels through Tibet and Kashmir, and Galwan served him as a pony herder on one such expedition. Servant of Sahibs is edited by the wife of the 'Sahib' to whom Galwan credits the task of "making him a man". It was this wife and husband duo, Mrs and Mr Barrett, who were responsible for laboriously assembling and editing Rassul's story. It is said that Rassul knew not more than a dozen English words when he met the couple and spent the next 14 years in toil.
Rassul had a story to tell yet little means of expression and his patrons guided him in writing this tale. "Sahib said to me: 'Rassul, you must remember. I will not let you go from my friendship until you learn English' Yes that promise got right. At this time by his kindly I learning this my style, which now I written as a book. No got any wrong in his matter'." Writing, rewriting and exchanging handwritten sheets, he delivered a manuscript.
Since most of the early history of Himalayan mountaineering comes from Westerners, Servant of Sahibs presents a remarkably original perspective. The book, written in broken English, is barely coherent. The Barretts helped teach Galwan English, but let him maintain the rusticness of a native, not imposing the King's English. Younghusband calls the book a way to "see their [the natives] ways of looking at things, and looking at us [the colonisers]."
A reading of Galwan's work, however, raises the question of whether it is indeed an extraordinary voice heard from the other side, or a well disguised product of colonial literature in the voice of the 'other'. An incidental study of an encounter between cultures – involving asymmetries of power and written during the throes of colonialism – the book faces a methodological problem. As cultural anthropologist Sherry B Ortner argues, since "it is usually the dominant party that writes the (hi)stories of the encounter, and indeed it often continues to be (other) dominant parties who interpret those texts," analysing and deconstructing them through a neutral lens becomes difficult.