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No Path in Darjeeling is Straight: Memories of a Hill Town Parimal Bhattacharya

No Path in Darjeeling is Straight: Memories of a Hill Town Parimal Bhattacharya book

No Path in Darjeeling is Straight: Memories of a Hill Town Parimal Bhattacharya

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For a few years in the early 1990s-at a time when the embers of a violent agitation for Gorkhaland were slowly dying down-Parimal Bhattacharya taught at the Government College in Darjeeling. No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight is a memory of his time in the iconic town, and one of the finest works of Indian non-fiction in recent years. Parimal evocatively describes his arrival, through drizzle and impenetrable fog, at a place that was at odds with the grand picture of it he had painted for himself. And his first night there was spent sleepless in a ramshackle hotel above a butcher’s shop. Yet, as he tramped its roads and winding footpaths, Darjeeling grew on him. He sought out its history: a land of incomparable beauty originally inhabited by the Lepchas and other tribes; the British who took it for themselves in the mid-1800s so they could remember home; the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway-once a vital artery, now a quaint toy train-built in 1881; and the vast tea gardens with which the British replaced verdant forests to produce the fabled Orange Pekoe. In the enmeshed lives of his neighbours-of various castes, tribes, religions and cultures—lived at the measured pace of a small town, Parimal discovered a richly cosmopolitan society which endured even under threat from cynical politics and haphazard urbanization. He also found new friends: Benson, a colleague whose death from AIDS showed him the dark underbelly of the hill station; Pratap and Newton, whose homes and lives reflected the irreconcilable pulls of tradition and upward mobility; and Julia and Hemant, with whom he trekked the forests of the Singalila mountains in search of a vanished Lepcha village and a salamander long thought extinct.
Product details
Languages:
Published: English, Original: English
ISBN10:
9386582341
ISBN13:
9789386582348
Weight:
290 g
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