The lure of these mountains....

That the best boarding schools in Bengal were in the mountains is a home-grown truism that has been in circulation for almost a 100 years now. The British only intended to set up a sanatorium in Darjeeling, an accessible resort like town where the Europeans, lashed by the tropical heat and plagued by its unfamiliar ailments, could escape to for a ‘change’. The missionaries would naturally follow soon after, and soon they would establish some of the best educational institutions in pre-independent India. In Bengal, it wasn’t Darjeeling alone, but Kurseong and also Kalimpong too, small hill stations with glorious views of Mount Kanchenjunga that became school towns.

Thirty years ago, I went to one such school myself, but only for a fortnight. The stern behaviour of the wardens and matrons was new to my eightyear- old life, the code of strictness a sky that followed me wherever I went. Long before snoopgate, those who studied in boarding schools were alert to the omniscient gaze of supervising and scolding eyes. A ‘senior’, that category which is part of the obedience maintenance mechanism that drives the boarding school disciplinary apparatus, told me, ‘Look at that mountain. That is the Kanchenjunga. It is watching you’. For years, from the foothills of the Himalayas, in Siliguri, where I lived, I would look at the mountain range with a subdued sense of anxiety, and even trepidation, if I was up to some mischief.

When I took up my first teaching job in Darjeeling, I began to partly understand what George Mallory might have meant when he said ‘Because it’s there’ of his impetus to climb Mount Everest. For when my colleagues and I tired of teaching and grading and perhaps also of each other, there was only one destination we wanted to visit–the mall, especially what is called the ‘back mall’ by locals, and from where we hoped we would see the Kanchenjunga. In those four years, the Kanchenjunga gradually changed from an authoritarian figure watching over my actions to someone more liberal, even liberatory, at times also an accomplice. It brought elasticity to our lives and allowed us to do things beyond the curriculum of middle-class living. I have to confess, almost like a naive romantic, that it made us new to ourselves.

Watching Satyajit Ray’s 1962 film Kanchenjunga after nearly two decades since I last watched it, it was of that disobedience that I was reminded. The film is quite extraordinary for its obedience to the unities of time, place and action: the action takes place near the mall in Darjeeling, and everything happens in the space of a day, actually half-a-day. A wealthy family from Calcutta is taking a holiday in Darjeeling. The patriarch, a man feted with a title by the British rulers before independence and now with a well-paid job in an important position in Calcutta, tells a fellow mate at the hotel that this is his 70th day in Darjeeling this time, but he hasn’t been fortunate in getting even one glimpse of the Kanchenjunga. That is how the film begins, and through the next 100-odd minutes we see him waiting for a sighting of the mountain range, his daughter placing a bet on that, as if that view would be a life changing one, a necessity before they return to their humdrum lives in a tropical city.

In this, they are like pilgrims. This secular tourism, this need for the Kanchenjunga to reveal itself to the visiting tourist at least once like a piece of epiphany, provides the scaffolding of Ray’s film.

Monisha, the youngest daughter, studying English Honours at Calcutta’s Presidency College, is being wooed by a well established Bengali man. Her father hopes that this would lead to marriage, and his endorsement of this possibility is now common knowledge in the family. Monisha goes for a walk with Mr Banerjee, but not before he admits to losing a bet about the Kanchenjunga making an appearance on the final day of their excursion. She refuses to accept the bar of chocolate, saying that there is still time–who knows, the Kanchenjunga might show up after all.

There are other characters, none without problems. The man whose share of problems seems to be the least is Monisha’s maternal uncle– a widower, he only wants to find a bird whose call he has heard. That will make the amateur ornithologist happy. There is another uncle in the film–he once gave private lessons to Monisha’s brother. Now he wants Monisha’s father, his former employer, to give Ashok, his unemployed nephew, a job. Monisha’s brother-inlaw discovers that his wife has been having an extramarital relationship. No one in the film is, therefore, quite ‘at home’.

We are aware of two forces working simultaneously–the Jane Austen-like push that would lead to the marriage between Monisha and Banerjee; the other is the pull of the Kanchenjunga, the mountain peak still invisible, becoming a kind of magnetic centre. By the time the film ends, many conversations and conclusions have been made: we realise the unsuitability of the materialist Banerjee as husband for the rather sensitive Monisha; we have also been witness to an awkward conversation about wealth and entitlement between the unemployed Ashok and Monisha; Monisha’s mother, silent throughout the film, sings a Tagore song at the sighting of the Kanchenjunga; Ashok has also, after helpfully fetching a red muffler for Monisha’s father, refused a job offer from him; and Monisha’s sister, after tearing the letters that her lover had written to her, returns to her marriage.

Ray structures all these incidents towards a seemingly final resolution that these isolated human events, together, might lead to the appearance of the Kanchenjunga. Yes, quite like a prayer. But in this case, the prayer is not so much a plea as rebellion. Monisha’s dominated mother decides to put in her feeble lot behind her daughter’s decision; Ashok later confesses to Monisha that he now regrets refusing the job offer, and that if it had been Calcutta, he would not have been able to take that decision. Ashok accepts that there is something about the mountains that abetted this private rebellion. Monisha’s sister is rebelling against her old self too, but it is Monisha, timid in her outward behaviour, who ‘rises’ like the Kanchenjunga, a fact that makes Mr Banerjee ‘lose his bet’.

What is it about the Kanchenjunga that makes this unexpected interface with rebellion and a leap towards a freedom of the self possible? Is it Kanchenjunga, then, that abets the people’s movement for the formation of the state of Gorkhaland?