‘The Last of Earth’: Deepa Anappara’s novel makes readers engage with the subversiveness of desire
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“This was the way the world worked. The white man had a want, and to sate it brown men gave up their lives.”
At first glance, Deepa Anappara’s The Last of Earth is a meticulously researched historical novel, critiquing the imperial project of expansion at the cost of native lives. Set in the politically fraught years of the Great Game, the period of intense rivalry between Britain and Russia over control of Central Asia, it traces the journeys of two sets of travellers, navigating the Himalayas in 1869, to get to Tibet, the Forbidden Kingdom, the legendary meeting place of heaven and earth. Balram, a schoolteacher in a small hamlet in the northern hills, trained in the role of a geographical surveyor, leads an expedition to study the Tsangpo in Tibet.
While Balram’s men face increasingly escalating challenges in a landscape that resists intrusion, Katherine Westcott, a 50-year-old woman traveller, is attempting a quest of her own – to get to the city of Lhasa and see the fabled Potala Palace, breaking a few gender stereotypes along the way. Tibet, its terrain, its unique positioning in history, its defiance of the imperatives of coloniality, and the quotidian rhythms of its people, becomes the canvas that...