On a wing and a wheel

During the 75-odd years of Soviet rule, Transoxiana simply vanished from the radar screen of travel writers. Before the Soviet occupation, the region was Great Game territory and a fertile ground for intrepid travellers like William Moorcroft, Bokhara Burnes and our own Mohan Lal.

It was only after the Soviet project capsized that travel writers once again started heading for places like Tashkent, Bokhara and Samarkand. The new republics were keen to rediscover their past. So old monuments and heroes were taken out of the attic, dusted and put out for public display once again.

The black hole that remained was the Soviet era. How did these places and people, with a deep sense of culture and history, survive those years of oppression? What were Bokhara and Samarkand like under the reds?

If these questions haunt you, you could turn to Jaswant Singh's book. Some time in the 1980s, years before he found work as a minister in the union cabinet, Singh was afflicted by wanderlust. So he decided to do what every travel writer wants to do: trace the steps of Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty and descendant of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane (Amir Timur). (His famous visit to Kandahar is not a subject matter of this book, though it finds mention in his earlier book, A call to Honour: In Service of Emergent India.)

Singh's account may be short (visits to Tashkent, Samarkand, Bokhara, Ferghana and Kokand, as well as three half-journeys to Almaty, Ashkabad and Khiva have been wrapped up in just 153 pages), but it gives a good account of life with all its frustrations in Transoxiana (present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) during Soviet rule.

The pages are peppered with incidents from history and notings of famous travellers. Singh uses his wit, which one thought had been blunted by the cut and thrust of years of parliamentary debate, to good effect. His affection for the people of the land, mostly Muslims, is there for all to see, though he is a top leader of a largely Hindu party.

Britta Das' book, on the other hand, is about a year spent in a remote corner of Bhutan. Tibet, Bhutan and the kingdom of Mustang in Nepal were the least explored Himalayan regions. Tibet was the first to fall when the British sent the Pundits (Nain Singh, Kishan Singh, Sharat Chandra Das, Khintup and others) to gather intelligence on the forbidden land. And after Younghusband's armed expedition to Lhasa in 1903, no secret was left to reveal. Next was Mustang, raided badly by backpackers of all shapes and smells.

Only Bhutan (derived from Bhot-ant or land's end for Bhot) held out. Apart from Guru Rinpoche's walk through the country in the 8th century, there is no serious account of travel in the country. Suspicious of foreigners, the Himalayan kingdom would not allow more than 9,000 tourists every year. (The number is being raised now, I have been told.)

Buttertea at Sunrise is a journey of love. In spite of the initial culture shock that all Western travellers to the region get, Das falls in love with the hospital where she works, the small town of Morang where the hospital is located and the people of Morang. She goes on to marry an Indian doctor working at the hospital. It is a warm and engaging story of personal discoveries.

The contrast between two travel books can't be sharper. While one is about a land with a violent and traumatic past, the other is set in a forbidden kingdom that does not want too many visitors. Singh is a high-profile politician, Das an unknown Canadian physiotherapist. Singh travels on a whistlestop tour from Tashkent to Samarkand, Bokhara, Ferghana and several other places, Das is content to stay put at remote Morang in Bhutan.

At the end, you wish Singh had spent some more time at each of the places he visited and Das had ventured out of Morang to explore the other possibilities in Bhutan. That would have been the perfect cocktail.

---

TRAVELS IN TRANSOXIANA IN LANDS OVER THE HINDUKUSH AND ACROSS THE AMU DARYA Jaswant Singh
Rupa & Co
Price: Rs 395; Pages: 153

BUTTERTEA AT SUNRISE A YEAR IN THE BHUTAN HIMALAYA Britta Das
Rupa & Co
Price: Rs 195; Pages: 312