Darjeeling versus the Sunderban

It is surely true to say that Calcutta is not a premiere tourist destination. The city is better known for her poverty than for her spectacles and attractions. The sights and charms of Calcutta are underestimated, though: it is a wonderful city, especially in regards to its extensive colonial heritage. But that, in part, is the problem nowadays. Grand colonial architecture – either well-preserved or, more likely, in various stages of decay – is not relished by the progressive one-world post-colonial tourist. An English lady whom the author met there complained, for example, that the Victoria Monument – one of the most grand and best preserved instances of colonial architecture in the city, and a testament in marble to Queen Victoria, Empress of India - was “a bit Anglo-centric.” Well, indeed! If the contemporary tourist is squeamish about colonialism then Calcutta is bound to be a disappointment. As it happens, this writer has no such post-colonial sensitivities. Much of the best of modern India is British. And, to be frank, post-independence India is a rambling mess. Wonderful, but a rambling mess all the same. It is actually not hard to find Indians who feel the same, although they only say so quietly and have no place in the nation’s political or cultural discourse.

Similarly, the contemporary tourist does not care much for the achievements of man. In progressive Western ideologies today humanity is simply a blight upon the earth. It is a strangely self-loathing ideology. The contemporary progressive is not only ashamed of the history of their civilisation, they are ashamed of the entire species. Over the past generation humanist values have been displaced by a humanity-hating environmentalism that ends, finally, in nihilism. It is not hard to find so-called progressives today who will tell you in all earnestness that the earth would be better off without mankind and that mass annihilation by disease or war might not be such a bad thing. 

Tourists of this mind go in search of those remote corners of the globe that are untouched by human hands. Their assumption is that whatever man has touched is thereby polluted. Man is vermin. Only what is untouched is unspoilt. There is the tourist paradox that they themselves, by searching out such places, render them ruined, but this hardly occurs to them. People of this mind that one meets in Calcutta are busily organising treks into the Sunderban. This is the place where the many-fingered Ganges spreads across a wide plane and slowly empties into the Bay of Bengal. It is the world's biggest and densest mangrove swamp. Trips into the Sunderban are now big business. Post-humanist Westerners head there in search of that rare commodity, true wilderness. 

The Indians, for their part, find this curious. They tend to roll their eyes and smile to each other as if to say, "Stupid Western people, paying good money to look at a swamp!" Because, other than your post-humanist eco-tourist no one in their right mind would venture into the Sunderban. Certainly, traditional people - like the Hindoos - would not venture there unless they had to, and they would do so with fear. For them the Sunderban is not a place of wonders (to be valued because no human being has touched it) but to be feared (precisely because no human being has touched it.) Wilderness is feared by traditional man. It is only the commercial prospects of exploiting cashed-up Westerners that has persuaded Indian tour operators to offer tours there. 

The present author is reminded here of the PhD work of an acquaintance, Dr Brian Coman, who wrote at length about this issue. He describes the traditional attitude to nature and contrasts it with that of the new ideologies of ecology which are, as he says, profoundly anti-traditional in all their values and assumptions. The traditional doctrine is summed up in the adage: Where man is not, nature is barren. Traditional values seek a nature that is tamed and guided by human hands. Eden, after all, was a garden, not a jungle. There is a type of neo-primitivism that has taken hold of the post-industrial West, at least amongst its progressive elites, that reveres the jungle and despises the garden. This is what leads middle-class, well-fed, well-educated do-gooders to pay thousands of dollars to spend their holidays floating around in a swamp at the mouth of the Ganges. 

And in this context the present author is reminded of the degree to which he himself is pathetically traditional. His options after Calcutta were to travel on to the Suderban or to head into the highlands to Darjeeling. The choice was (a) a swamp or (b) tea plantations. As readers will be aware, he chose the latter. And he has to report - or confess - that Himalayan foothills crafted with tea gardens are a sight of unparalleled beauty to him. You can keep your smelly mangroves! Darjeeling is beautiful, and precisely because it has been shaped and nurtured and made lovely by human hands. There is a background of wild nature, namely the forests and especially the snow-capped mountains, but these are sacred, ethereal places full of spirits and demons and not a proper abode for man. Darjeeling abounds in natural beauty, to be sure, but it is enhanced by the tea gardens and the charming habitations of human beings. 

Darjeeling

The Sunderban

There are some eighty-seven tea gardens around Darjeeling. (They are called "gardens" rather than "plantations".) There are thousands of hectares of cultivation under camellia sinensis and lesser areas under the broader leafed camelia assamica. There are, no doubt, those who lament the fact that these gardens have replaced what were once native forests, since all that man touches is ruined, but this is not a sentiment the present author shares. There are those who think that wherever an Englishman trod in India is somehow defiled, and that colonialism was a relentless travesty and crime, but this too is not the view of this author. 

Overall, the British - and here we might distinguish them from other colonialists such as the far more rapacious Dutch and French and Portuguese - enhanced rather than defiled India. It was the English who brought tea to hills around Darjeeling and adopted Darjeeling as their favourite hill station. It is no tragedy that they did so. Certainly, this author does not feel any post-colonial shame nor, by extension, any post-industrial cringe about the way human hands have shaped the environment here. In any case, as indicated in previous posts, (see here) the author is a partisan for tea and tea culture (Teaism as Tanshin called it). He is taking this sojourn in Darjeeling to learn about tea cultivation and preparation and the finer points of tea culture. Let the coffee guzzling progressive class enjoy their untrammelled mangrove swamp. He is happy sipping tea in the colonial hotels of Darjeeling. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black