No better way to turn 70 than in the Darjeeling hills
Christopher Booker launches his eighth decade in India with a spot of street cricket, a return to his mother’s birthplace and a salute to a country reclaiming its historical pre-eminence
I recently made my own first visit to India for a mix of reasons. Naturally I was keen to see a country like no other, with its wealth of half-familiar history, culture and natural beauty. More personally, having marked my 65th birthday by taking my two sons up Kilimanjaro (as I recorded in the Spectator at the time), I wanted to celebrate my 70th rather more modestly by taking them to see the sun rise on the highest mountains in the world, and to track down my mother’s birthplace in the hill town of Nainital. But not least, having recently heard so much about India’s spectacular economic awakening from my son Nick, who is planning a chain of hotels across the country, I wanted to see this extraordinary renaissance at first hand.
Almost everyone’s experience of the strangeness of India is a mass of unforgettable visual impressions. One for me was the abundance of trees and India’s amazing fertility, from the steep, forested foothills of the Himalayas to the broad avenues of New Delhi and the palm-fringed beaches of Goa (in one monsoon day last summer Bombay had 40 inches of rain). One reason why India is like nowhere else is summed up in the fact that it is the world’s only ‘sub-continent’. A hundred million years ago it was a vast island floating north across the Sea of Tethys. Such was the impact when it crunched into the land mass of Eurasia that it pushed up the greatest mountain range on the planet, rising nearly 30,000 feet into the sky.
In a sense this unique continent-within-a-continent is not a single country. Thirteen times the size of Britain, with 22 official languages, it is an agglomeration of nations, unified as much as anything by two legacies of the Raj. One is its lingua franca, English, the only way national politicians and advertisers can address all their fellow-citizens from the Punjab to Tamil Nadu. The other is the universal obsession with cricket. We arrived just after India’s victory in the Twenty20 World Cup had set off nationwide celebrations (‘chakde India’, ‘come on India’); and we saw and sometimes joined in games of street cricket everywhere from a Calcutta courtyard and a Goan beachfront to a jungle clearing 8,000 feet up in the hills (‘jangal’ incidentally is merely the Sanskrit for wilderness, which can be anything from a tiger-infested rainforest to the deserts of Rajasthan).
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Stephen Jenner
May 24th, 2008 12:47pmIt has always been one of my ambitions to visit India, especially Darjeeling; I have been buying my tea direct from three or four internet tea merchants in Darjeeling, though as Christopher says it fetches a high price, but is absolutely divine. I always look forward to receiving my cotton wrapped parcels with their exotic stamps and labels.
It is fantastic to note that the Indians are doing so well in the global market, and it makes me feel really quite depressed to think that our stupid government cannot see over the EU parapet what is really happening; shame on them for abandoning the Commonwealth arrangement which was possibly the most peaceable way of unravelling the British Empire.