Zorawar Singh

With the advent of WhatsApp started the great integration. Or reunion we may say. Old class mates, friends from the old neighbourhood, colleagues - everybody started to form small groups and talk about good old days as if we all hate the present. Although the most people talk in those forums, mostly male members, are jokes, some random photo or video, and rarely about anything actually to do with the common interest of the group. One such group is formed by the alumni of the college I attended, to do my engineering. A senior alumnus has a passion for photography and posted links to a few photography competitions he entered. His photographs are exceptional, and naturally, some alumni suggested why doesn't he start a blog. These days everybody is trying to write something - including me. Anyway, one of the alumni, while asking about the blog, cited a site, suggesting a blog about that theme. The blog was by a certain Amardeep Singh, and that's where I first heard of Zorawar Singh.

It was a captivating tale. When a story starts with finding human skeletons by a lake in the Himalayas at a high altitude, you cannot stop reading. If it was a book, I've have used the adjective 'unputdownable'. A general in Maharana Ranjit Singh's army, Zorawar Singh was ranked a General at an early age, he carried out successful expeditions in Baltistan and Tibet, winning strategic locations from Afghan and Tibetan armies, which still is of geo-political significance for India's borders with Pakistan and China. The most important one was, of course, Ladakh valley, which the author's claims would otherwise have been a part of China at present. The blog was perfectly paced, rich with details about General Zorawar Singh's exploits at such high altitude and inclement weather situations. The time span covered is from 1835 to December 1841, when Zorawar Singh had fallen in the hands of the Tibetan army.

It was a captivating piece of history. Yet, what inspired me the most was the ending phrase - Not all those who wander are lost. I've heard it before but put into the context of the expeditions of General Zorawar Singh in the vast emptiness of the Tibet valleys made the phrase a thousand times more profound. Considering the blog is mainly a photo blog, presenting snippets of history with many pictures taken by the author, the phrase delved into the realms of imagination, the other side of the Himalayas, Silk Route, gateway to the Central Asia. Parts of the world I'm immensely interested about. Amardeep's blog rekindled the passion for exploring the world off the beaten track. And somewhere I felt a pang of jealousy for him, for successfully pursuing his conquest of following the footsteps of General Zorawar Singh, trying to solve a mystery learned from a school teacher thirty years back. And finally learning that those skeletons date back to 9th century meant that he actually found something he Wasnt looking for, reminiscent of the ending of The Alchemist. His wanderings have certainly not been lost, and I'm just playing my part to spread the tales of his amazing expedition.

Thinking about the conquests of General Zorawar Singh made me think of the history from another perspective. Looking at the landscapes snapped by Amardeep, paired with the description of Zorawar Singh's expeditions in the treacherous terrains evoked the expeditions of Hannibal through The Alps, and Leonidas as Thermopylae, or in more recent times Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose reaching Aizawl through Burma. The expeditions led by extraordinary men are characterised by going against the tide, almost like a lone ranger. Yet, the annals of these significant deeds remained silent in the Indian history books. Maharana Ranjit Singh and his regime have been barely touched when I completed my history curriculum, but nearly 25 years later, education curriculum is certainly more biased than ever before. At least the regional schools provide some exposure to the regional history, and let's hope that the significance of General Zorawar Singh is not forgotten in his own land, although the Tibetans remembered his valour by making a cenotaph in his memory after he was fallen in 1841. So let's raise a toast to General Zorawar Singh, and to all those souls driven by the wanderlust, those who wander but are never lost…