Next week I’m going to Ladakh for a travel gig. Me neither — never heard of it. So I heaved out my Victorian world atlas and found it at the apex of India, northwest of Kashmir, and sharing a border with Tibet. Then I went online to find books about the place. Choice was limited. I bought A Journey in Ladakh by David Harvey (‘Extremely entertaining, a classy travel book and a palpitating fragment of a spiritual autobiography’ — David Mitchell, New Society); I bought Ancient Futures by Helena Norberg-Hodge (‘The book that has had the greatest influence on my life… about tradition and change in a remote corner of India that has never been subject to the brutality of the modern, global economy’ — Zac Goldsmith); and I bought The Road to Lamaland by ‘Ganpat’ (M.L.A. Gompertz), published in 1919, and therefore predating the age of the fatuous puff.
A Journey in Ladakh is a spiritual journey undertaken by a poet whose life, he says, was ‘full of confusion and distress of every kind’. To ameliorate that distress he cultivated an interest in Buddhism. He liked Buddhism’s ‘calm and radical analysis of desire, its rejection of all the self-dramatising intensities by which I lived, and its promise of a possible, strong, and unsentimental serenity’. Then he went to Ladakh, found a holy man, and wrote a sentimental book about it with page after page of intense, self-dramatising dialogue.
Ancient Futures — foreword by HH The Dalai Lama, introduction by Peter Matthiesen — turned out to be a sentimental Luddite romance disguised as anthropology. In short, it is an account of how the evil tentacles of western industrialisation penetrate the Himalayan vastness and tragically impinge on a hitherto idyllic agrarian society (Ladakh) which has no concept of tragedy and which recycles even its own faeces.
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