ON THE TRAIL OF GENGHIS KHAN
An Epic Journey through the Land of the Nomads
Tim Cope
Bloomsbury
Genghis Khan created the world's largest land empire. At its height in 1279, it stretched from the eastern extremity of Mongolia to the river Danube in present-day Hungary. Mongolia, Transoxiana, Kazakhstan and the northern edges of Persia made up Genghis Khan's empire. The empire was huge, but its inhabitants perhaps numbered not more than 20 million, the population of our Mumbai.
What made the spread of this empire in such a short time possible was the Mongol mastery of the horse. The animal was first domesticated here and this saved the equine species from extinction. The Mongol horsemen, hordes as they were called by the Europeans in the medieval times, travelled as much as 400 km to 500 km a day, as Marco Polo wrote in his travel notes. This intrepid traveller and scholar from 13th century Venice has left the most penetrating account yet of Mongolia and China.
Young Australian writer Tim Cope followed this trail of Genghis Khan in the summer and autumn of 2004 and this is his account of that journey. His fascination with Genghis Khan's empire probably came from his love of horses. The Mongols lived and died on horses. To relive the times of Genghis Khan, Mr Cope travelled, mostly on horseback but sometimes by jeep, some 10,000 km across the Eurasian steppe.
To relive a period as it was at a particular moment in history can be a memorable experience. Several travel writers have done it lately. A friend at Columbia University undertook a journey that Marco Polo had done 800 years ago. Noted British travel writer Colin Thubron recently travelled along the famed Silk Route from the ancient trading city of Xian in eastern China to the Black Sea. Reading it, I could imagine a silk brocade merchant from China, a carpet maker from Bokhara and a shawl weaver from Kashmir, all going to their final destination, Angora (present-day Ankara), from where they sent goods to Venice and Amsterdam. On the way, they did good deal of drinking and whoring in the taverns along the Bosphorus.
Mr Cope travels from Khorkhorin, the ancient capital of Mongolia, to the Danube, traversing through the vast expanse of Mongolia and Kazakhstan. He travels as a Mongol horseman did in the cavalry of Genghis Khan. For him, the Mongol is innocent, close to nature, as Kim was to Rudyard Kipling. There is a little of this patronising attitude in his account. He wants to show that the Mongol Empire was not tyrannical as the European, particularly Russian, historians depicted in the 18th century, the time when the Europeans constructed their idea of the Orient. On the contrary, Mr Cope thinks the Mongol Empire was tolerant, decentralised and very well administered.
He travels through two of the least-travelled parts of the world, Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Deserts, grasslands, mountains and few spots of water fill this bleak, desolate landscape. He describes them well, though the sheer vastness and bareness of the land should have inspired him to say something moving. Perhaps the greatest of the travel writers of the last century, Bruce Chatwin wrote magnificent accounts of the Somalian desert and the Argentinean Pampas.
There is the Gobi desert in Mongolia that, not too long ago, was dreaded even by people who lived there. But the Gobi figures little in Mr Cope's Mongolian travels. There is Kazakhstan, an area of unimaginable expanse. Even today with modern means of travel it must appear inaccessible to travellers. It is larger than all of Europe. Mr Cope's description of Kazakhstan is good. But it gives little feeling of space. It is like talking about Mt Everest as if it were just another mountain.
Mr Cope laments the disappearance of the nomadic culture in Kazakhstan and in much of the Eurasian Steppe. Of course, he is right to say that Stalin by his forced collectivisation in the 1930s destroyed the nomadic culture of the Mongols. But Stalin or no Stalin, could a nomadic culture have survived in the face of the onslaught of modernisation? Nomadic cultures in Somalia, Sudan and other sub-Saharan African countries have all disappeared with the coming of modern technology and its accompaniment, the market economy. Modernisation dissolves traditional communities, whether of Mongol horsemen or the tribes of the Andaman Islands. Let me add here that the czars were as racially prejudiced and hostile to the nomads of the Steppe as was Stalin. The last czar, Nicholas II, thought of himself as the defender of Christendom against the "yellow' hordes.
Travel writing is an old genre of writing. Great travellers from the distant past - Al-Biruni, Ibn Batuta, Marco Polo - or those from the recent past - Gustav Flaubert, Mark Twain and V S Naipul - have left some great accounts of the lands to which they travelled. By that yardstick, Mr Cope has a long way to go.
The reviewer is with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
wariavwalla@yahoo.com
