Crushed by the Blinding Weight of the Sun: The Great Game, the Seductions of Shangri-La, and the Impossible Present

Bhattacharya’s historical memoir Bells of Shangri-La marks a parallax paradox, one where personal memories and chronicled experience can fail to overlap. The Bengali scholar charts, and follows in, the footsteps of the first assaults—or cloaked cartographic sorties subsidized by India’s British Raj—upon terra incognita Tibet, the world’s final frontier. Writing in first-person, he is animated, and oft unduly influenced, by the personages who precede him to ‘the land of snows.’ Despite his discovery of the historical consequences of what Kipling christened the Great Game, namely the British empire's first inadvertent and then intentional engineering of the Fall of Tibet, the scholar-memoirist remains enamoured with the Romanticised place. Seduced, he dwells on the call of Shangri-La, a utopic place that, so Peter Bishop maintains, is not only geographically unlocatable but also imperially fashioned by the West. Yet, as a representative decontextualised pearl, Tibet still memorially materialises as a fantastical and all-but unattainable split space—one where fact and fiction can become indistinguishable, where the Modern can interpose upon the Edwardian, where the colonial can override the postcolonial, and where the historically silenced speak. Bhattacharya captures the disembodied voices that came to fashion the western mirage of Tibet, a beautiful (not just beautified) place where the likes of Alexandra David-Neel can encounter—despite Tibet being fashioned under Western eyes—the sublimity of what Mark Payne calls the postapocalyptic pastoral.