Although Nepal’s earthquake last April visited our television screens with images of seismic devastation, the disaster has probably had little impact upon the prevailing western impression of this country. For many the mountain state remains steadfastly exotic and remote.
This is not just a consequence of those sublimely unattainable Himalayan peaks. For generations Nepal was a source of western fantasy that bordered on the obsessive and carried an undercurrent of late-imperial eroticism. What had so stirred European appetites was the long-standing Nepalese policy of playing hard to get. A short, bitter conflict in 1814–1816 with the East India Company inspired its militant Gurkha elite to pursue the rigorous exclusion of all foreigners.
It was not until the 1950s that the country relented on its self-imposed purdah, by which time Nepal beckoned the modern world as a last frontier for high-octane mountain adventure and fresh, often drug-fuelled spiritual fulfilment. While something of this misty Shangri-La-like fiction still clings to Nepal, it should truly be blown away by Thomas Bell’s wide-ranging, deep-delving, clear-headed exposition of all things Kathmandu.
Technically this is a travel book, in the sense that its heterogeneous contents on a foreign country are bound together by a free-roaming first-person narrator.
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