How does a childhood spent in the Himalayas of Nepal and India shape a life and a love for the mountains of Scotland? How can fiction help us understand the complex, painful history of India’s Partition? I discuss all this and more with the award-winning author, Merryn Glover.

 

• Merryn’s nomadic “third culture kid” upbringing with missionary parents in Nepal and India
• The experience of attending an international boarding school in a North Indian hill station.
• The history of Indian Hill Stations like Mussoorie, from their origins in the British Raj to modern-day holiday destinations.
• Weaving the complex history of India’s Independence and Partition into her novel, A House Called Askival.
• The perspective of writing about India as both an insider to the international community and an outsider to the wider culture.
• How her childhood in the Himalayas influenced her love for her current home in the mountains of Scotland.
• Recommended travel books

You can find Merryn at MerrynGlover.com

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Merryn Glover, who is an award-winning author of fiction, nature writing, plays, and short stories. Welcome, Merryn.

Merryn: Hi there. Thank you for having me.

Jo: It’s great to have you on. You were born in Kathmandu and brought up in Nepal, India, and Pakistan. You have an Australian passport and call Scotland home after living there for over 30 years. Tell us more about that.

How did travel form such a backdrop to your life?

Merryn: Essentially, because my parents were working in South Asia, that’s how I came to be born and brought up there. It very much was my life.

Up until I was 18 and moved back to Australia to go to university, my father estimated that we’d probably moved 60 times. Some of those moves were backwards and forwards to the same locations or the same house, but it was very itinerant. In a lot of those locations, I didn’t necessarily have my own bedroom; it might be the curtained-off end of a living room, or I was often sharing with my big brother. It was very nomadic and it was just the life that we had. As a child, of course, you don’t think your life is unusual. It’s just the life that you have, and it’s only later on that you realize it is quite different to most people, particularly once I was back at university in Australia.

Jo: What did your parents do that you traveled so much?

Merryn: They were missionaries, in the old language, if you like, which tends to bring people out in hives.

They were working in linguistics, literacy, and Bible translation, primarily amongst one of the language groups in Nepal, but ultimately in quite a lot of locations in India and Pakistan as well. They were working a lot with local churches, local Christians, and in a lot of training, enabling them in their own literacy and linguistic work.

Jo: It’s incredible how much travel there is involved in that. When you remember being a kid, given you were moving around so much… I went to school in Malawi, in Africa for a while, and I don’t really remember it being different, as you said. How did you feel?

Did you feel different? Did you go to random schools? How was that experience?

Merryn: It was very varied. For the first seven years of my childhood, my parents spent a lot of time in a village in the hills of Nepal, and my mother homeschooled us when we were there. She was a qualified primary school teacher, so that obviously helped. She taught my brother and myself out on the veranda of the home that we lived in, in the village, for only a couple of hours every morning. After that, we were pretty free to roam and play.

When we were in places like Kathmandu, there were often small, mission-run schools that we attended, and you had quite an international mix of kids at those schools. Then when I was nine, I followed my brother to a boarding school in North India, in the mountains, and I was there till I was 18.

Interestingly, although boarding school means that you are away from your parents (and a lot of the time you are, and you’re dealing with homesickness and that sense of displacement), for some of the time, one or both of them were based where the school was, and we were day scholars.

On the other hand, being there for nine years, it became a place of continuity and consistency. It became like an extended family and a community, which I’m still incredibly close to. I’m still really close to those friends and a lot of the staff. It is this most extraordinary and very international community of people that I got to know through that school.

Jo: How interesting that you’re still close to them. And then you said you went back to Australia when you were 18. Did you just think everyone was so boring and provincial, or were you just wanting to be normal?

Merryn: We were based in Melbourne when I went back to university, and Melbourne is a very metropolitan city. For my parents’ leave, every three or four years, we would go back to Australia for anything from a few months to about 18 months when my dad was completing his PhD in Canberra.

Through the National University, there was accommodation for international students, and we were actually accommodated there. That was great for me because there were all these kids from Africa and India and so on running around in a big shared back garden. The primary school I went to in Canberra was in the area where all the embassies are, so again, it was relatively international by Australian standards.

But arriving back for university at age 18, university is a good time to make a transition because you’ve got a slightly more diverse mix of people. You’ve got mature age students and a fair international mix because that’s what Melbourne is like. You have people with varying degrees of relationship to Australia because of their own family heritage. Some of them more recently moved, some of them their families have been in Australia for generations, but they still have a strong Greek identity or whatever else it might be.

I was still probably one of the people with the weirdest accent. People thought I was American, which is partly because of the school I went to in India; there was a strong American influence in weird ways. It was an American-Indian accent mix; I don’t think any American would’ve owned it. Then some people thought I was Irish.

But at university, partly because of the course I did – drama, dance, and English – being different was quite cool at that stage. People just thought it was fascinating and wanted to find out more about it.

In contrast, friends I know who made that transition back to their parents’ country when they were 13 or 14 had a really hard time because that’s when you don’t want to be different. That’s when you really want to fit in and look and sound like everybody else. That is a really difficult time to change. So, for me, it was a good time to transition.

Jo: I’m really interested in this because my mum brought us back from Malawi when I was going into senior school, so I was about 11 or 12. As you were saying, 13 is a difficult time. For people listening who are thinking, “I want to travel with kids,” or “I want to go live somewhere else”… Looking back, I’m grateful for my time away; it was all positive in my mind.

Do you look back and think it was all amazing, or were there things that stick out in your mind as a terrible challenge? What can we do to encourage people to live somewhere else with children?

Merryn: I look back and I’m very thankful for most of it.

I think most of it was an extraordinary privilege.

Boarding school is a very mixed experience wherever you are, and that’s something that I explore in the book we’ll be talking about later, as quite a bit of it is set in a fictionalized version of the boarding school I went to. Although there were lots of things I loved about the school and I still love that community of friends that I’m very close to, just being away from your own family for that length of time when you’re still growing up is never going to be ideal.

But to encourage people, yes, it’s a wonderful thing to give children, if you can: the experience of other places and other cultures.

It’s very different now. When I was a teenager in India — I was born in 1969 — there was no internet. The only way you could keep up with fashion or music was when friends went back to America or Europe for their holidays and came back with cassette tapes or new clothes. There was a much greater gulf between my experience and that of my peers back in Australia, which in many ways, I was quite thankful for. I wasn’t brought up around television, and my life was much more about the context and the culture I was in, and the extraordinary beautiful places I lived in.

Whereas today, kids are not cut off wherever you take them. You’ve got the internet and access to their home culture, and they can speak easily to their grandparents or friends. In a sense, that’s almost a threat because it can prevent you from really embracing the place you go to if you’re too connected to home.

I sometimes feel sorry for people that travel these days because there might be this pressure to share everything on social media. Maybe we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to really soak up the place we’re in, to absorb it, enjoy it, and relate to the people you’re meeting on the ground, rather than being so constantly connected to everybody back home.

There are real pros and cons now. But I would definitely say to families that it’s a really rich experience. I’ve been interested in listening to this podcast in particular, where you’ve talked to people about the ‘third culture kid’ experience and people bringing up their own children in other cultures. There is now a huge amount of resource to help families navigate that in ways that support their young people.

In the world today, more than ever, we need to listen to and learn from one another. The best way we can do that is to get to know people who might otherwise seem different.

Once we have proximity and closeness to people—and often that means physical closeness, actually meeting somebody and chatting over a chai—we realize our shared humanity is much more powerful than anything that divides us.

Jo: Absolutely. And being in someone else’s country, when it’s not yours, means you have to be respectful and think about what’s important in that culture. I think that helps you appreciate that culture differently.

Merryn: Yes, I think that’s a really important attitude for people to embrace.

We should be careful not to treat other people’s countries like our playground—that because we’ve paid for a flight and a visa, we’re somehow entitled to use it like a theme park. It is their home, their country, their culture. It can’t be reduced to a few stereotypes and cliches.

There will be complexity, and it’s really important to learn how to be a good guest.

Don’t always try to beat people down to the cheapest price, and don’t necessarily wear things that might be appropriate in our own context.

Just do a little bit of homework to find out what is acceptable and courteous in that context, and it will really pay dividends in terms of people being glad to welcome you and looking after you well.

Jo: Let’s get into the book. Your novel, A House Called Askival, is set in an Indian Hill station.

Tell us about what a Hill Station is, and about Mussoorie?

Merryn: Yes, sure. I’d probably say, A House Called Askival.

Askival is actually the highest mountain on the Scottish Hebridean island of Rùm. It’s a Viking word; there’s Askival, Hallival and Haskeval, which sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings, but they are the names of mountains on the island of Rùm. You might wonder why there is a house called Askival in a story set in a North Indian Hill station, and that is partly because of the nature of what hill stations are.

They are towns, generally up in the mountains, that were set up pretty much during the time of the British Raj by the British to provide an escape from the heat and disease of the plains in the summer.

They were summer resorts they would go to, particularly the Memsahibs and the children. They were also locations for military cantonments and convalescent hospitals. A lot of boarding schools were gradually established there. There was an idea that if young girls were brought up in the heat of the tropics, it would negatively affect their development.

There had been a time when children were sent back to England or Scotland for schooling from a very young age, and we know Rudyard Kipling was absolutely miserable being sent back to England. But gradually, they thought if the boarding schools were up in the cool of the hills, this would not negatively affect these ‘delicate flowers’. So a lot of boarding schools were established up in the hills.

The most famous hill station people might know is Shimla in India. That is because the Viceroy would move his entire government from Delhi up to Shimla for the summer months because it was so hot to function in Delhi.

Because of that, Shimla was a place where people had to behave because it was official and the government was there. Whereas the Hill Station that my book is set in, Mussoorie, which is where I went to school, was the party town. It developed a reputation for being a bit loose because the Viceroy wasn’t there.

People didn’t have to behave, and they didn’t. There were lots of fancy hotels and balls and ice rinks and malls and bandstands. It was very much ‘the season’, like we hear about the season in London. In these hill stations, they would have their summer season. People would be promenading up and down the mall, and it was the place to be seen.

Jo: We should clarify, when you said ‘the mall’, did you mean a street that people would walk along or a shopping complex? Because Americans might be thinking of massive shopping complexes!

Merryn: No, it’s the street that people would walk along. It’s an English term, I guess, like The Mall that goes down to the Queen’s house, to the palace.

Jo: I’ve seen on TV that the hill stations are very green. Were there tea plantations at some of them as well?

Merryn: Some of them definitely. Darjeeling is another quite famous hill station and it had tea plantations. A lot of the ones further south in India had tea plantations as well. Mussoorie didn’t; they were very forested. They were often very well known for hunting, so that was another big pursuit in the days of the Raj, because of these forests.

Mussoorie, where I lived and my book is set, recently featured on an episode of Race Across the World. So if anybody wants to see it, you can catch it there. Mussoorie was called ‘Queen of the Hills’ because it was beautiful. It’s actually two sister hill stations, Mussoorie and Landour. Landour was originally named after a Welsh place, Llanddowror. It was a military cantonment and it still has quite tight protections around planning permission and cutting down trees, so it’s still very wooded and beautiful and not overbuilt, which is quite a mercy.

The reason the house in my novel is called Askival is because of this tradition in the hill stations. As these colonial bungalows were built by the Raj, they would name them nostalgically after home. The first and oldest house in Mussoorie is called Mullingar, named after a place in Ireland because it was built by Captain Frederick Young, an Irish military man.

The school that I went to was called Woodstock, not named after the rock festival in the US, but after a novel by Sir Walter Scott. In fact, there are several houses in Mussoorie named after Sir Walter Scott novels. This is what people did. Once the Americans started to build their places, there would be American names for their houses as well. So in my novel, the house Askival was built by a Scottish Army captain from the island of Rùm in the days of the Raj. His house is right at the top of the ridge, so he names it after the highest mountain on his island home, following that same pattern.

Jo: The book spans 70 years of history through three generations. British people in general may know about Indian history, but it’s complicated. There are elements of the British Raj, which you’ve mentioned, and the religious and cultural conflicts that have happened since.

How did you weave those elements of Indian history into your story, and how do they affect the sense of place?

Merryn: It’s very much the context of my novel. It spans 70 years, pretty much from India’s independence and partition from Pakistan to a contemporary timeframe, but with throwbacks to the freedom movement in India.

There are characters in the novel who have links and relationships with different aspects of that freedom movement. Although the central family in the novel is American, the father, James, his best friend is a South Indian Christian, Paul Verghese, and Paul’s parents worked closely with Mahatma Gandhi in the freedom movement. It was often by using characters and their stories that I was able to weave in elements of the actual history.

One thing that really interested me is that Mahatma Gandhi used to hold these prayer meetings all around India, trying not just to move the nation towards independence, but also to hold it together.

He was utterly heartbroken that partition happened. He was very pluralist and universalist in the way he tried to hold everyone together. I found out that he held one of his prayer meetings in Mussoorie. A Sikh man I knew, who went to my school many years before, had been at that prayer meeting. It was lovely to be able to hear his memories of it, and that prayer meeting is now in my novel, attended by my characters.

The story goes into the buildup towards independence. This hill station, Mussoorie, is in many ways on the fringes of what happened. But some of the troubles that were going on, mainly in the Punjab and through to Delhi, and of course in parts of the new Pakistan, spilled over into locations like Mussoorie. You had refugees, people rendered homeless who needed safe places to stay.

In the story, my American family’s cook is Muslim and needs to leave because it has become unsafe. The Muslims in the bazaar of Mussoorie—a lot of the merchants were Muslim—were coming under attack and felt the need to leave for Pakistan. The cook is in the process of trying to leave, and the family are helping him when a tragedy strikes, which is a major trigger for the action of the novel.

I was really interested to speak to people who had been in Mussoorie at the time and to realize that although it was geographically removed, it was affected by the troubles.

Some of the missionaries from Mussoorie traveled down into the refugee camps on the plains to support the medical work happening there, working with Indian colleagues. It was really interesting to be able to read people’s letters and diaries and hear their memories. When I was working on the novel, it was a while ago, and there were still quite a few people who had firsthand memories of that time. Of course, there are fewer and fewer people now with those firsthand memories. It was a process of doing that historical research and then working out how that could be woven into the lives of my characters.

Jo: For people listening —

You’ve mentioned independence and partition. Could you briefly explain them?

Merryn: Sure. Prior to British colonization, there was no single country called India.

There were multiple different regions and rulers of the Indian subcontinent. At the time the East India Company arrived in the early 1600s, the Mughal Empire was dominant, although within that there were some small, independent Hindu princely kingdoms.

Gradually, over the time of the British, the Mughal Empire declined. In 1858, control of the whole region was taken over by the British government. That was the beginning of what we now call the British Raj.

What triggered the British government taking over control was what has been called the Indian Mutiny or the First War of Independence, which was a rising up of the Indian soldiers, the sepoys, against their British overlords. So you had these ongoing pushes for independence from the British.

By the time they finally managed to secure that in 1947, there were a lot of difficulties within the populations in terms of securing sufficient rights and freedoms for the different ethnic and religious communities. There was particular concern amongst many Muslims that, as a numeric minority, their needs and interests would not be protected by the Hindu majority in a free India. That was the push of the Muslim League to have their own separate country, and that was the cause of Partition.

At the time, you had India as the central country, and then the Islamic state of Pakistan, which was West Pakistan and East Pakistan (which subsequently became Bangladesh).

Partition caused a mass migration. I think it is still considered the biggest mass migration in recorded history, with probably 14 million people attempting to get to the other side.

There was no law that they had to do that; there was no legal requirement that Muslims had to live in Pakistan and that Sikhs and Hindus had to live in India.

But there had been so much conflict and a sense that now we have this country of our own, the land should belong to the people of this religion. It caused an enormous outbreak of violence, with probably 2 million people killed. It was this incredible tearing apart of these countries, which in many ways has remained unresolved.

Jo: Even a few weeks ago they were threatening nuclear war with each other again.

Merryn: Yes, and the actual dividing line in Kashmir has never been really agreed, and Kashmir continues to be a place of ongoing tension.

The reality is that more Muslims stayed in India than ever moved to Pakistan. There is still a large Muslim minority within India. India remains a very diverse country in terms of ethnic and religious groups, but it currently has a strongly Hindu government with a strongly Hindu nationalist agenda, which continues to exacerbate some of those tensions.

Those religious and ethnic tensions were always a part of the Indian story, but they were undoubtedly exacerbated and probably exploited by the British in order to undermine a united freedom movement. It’s a lot of those themes that I’m interested to explore in the novel.

Jo: I heard someone describe India as being more like Europe, in that all these different ethnic groups, languages, and peoples who fought each other for generations are all supposedly grouped under one country name.

And the other thing about partition, as you said, was this time of upheaval; we often think of refugees going in one direction, but this was people going in opposite directions at the same time. Coming to the obvious fact that you are not Indian or Pakistani —

How does being an outsider—which I think gives a different perspective—affect your point of view?

Merryn: That’s a really interesting question. I suppose to some degree, I am not an outsider to a lot of the material because the core family in the book is a missionary family within India. That whole subculture is central to the story, and I’m exploring a lot of those themes.

Having been part of that international community, where some of my closest friends and roommates came from all these different backgrounds, in some senses I’m writing from an insider experience. But I recognize that I am obviously not of the ethnicity or the religion of many of the characters within the novel.

It does give me a different perspective. There’s no such thing as a neutral perspective, so I own that. I own the fact that I come from my own worldview and understanding, while seeking very much to listen to and learn from all the different perspectives I set out in the story.

I’m also clear that I’m not attempting to represent an entire people group or religion. These are characters, each with their distinctives. It’s a whole set of enmeshed stories. A book about Partition written by somebody born and brought up in India who is Indian by ethnicity will be a very different perspective. But I guess what is unique about the perspective I’ve brought is that it is a story grown out of a very international mix of people, a subculture within India.

Another section is set in 1984 when Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. That’s another thread in the Partition story, in a way, because there was a strong movement for an independent Sikh state called Khalistan in what is now Punjab.

The Sikh thread is important in terms of those tensions. After Indira Gandhi’s assassination, there was a big backlash of rioting and violence against the Sikh community, which many people understood as a reopening of the wounds from 1947. That experience in 1984 happened when I was back in Australia, but all my school friends were there, in Delhi, when it all broke out.

There are scenes in the novel that happened on a bus stopped by mobs, and that actually happened to my school friends. What that does is it takes a group of kids who are just being kids—they’re not looking at each other in those different categories—and suddenly the significance of those categories, and what it means to have a turban on your head, becomes a matter of life and death.

So my perspective, the particular angle I bring, is from within this very mixed international community trying to come to terms with these bigger tensions. The questions are around:

Can we live together in peace even though we are so different? How do we reconcile from wounds of the past?

I think sometimes these small microcosms, these small international communities that emerge, can help answer some of those questions.

Jo: Coming full circle, you now live in Scotland and have written other books. I believe you have written a novel, A Stone in the Sky, set in the Cairngorms mountains, and also The Hidden Fires, which is non-fiction about the same mountains.

How does this mountain life now echo back to your childhood? And is Scotland now home?

Merryn: Yes, the main thing my three published books have in common is mountains.

I love mountains, which makes sense having been born in the Himalayas and gone to school there, living at altitude for most of my growing-up years. One of the things I explore in The Hidden Fires, the non-fiction book, is a response to a book called The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, an Aberdeenshire author. Her book is about the Cairngorms and her love for them, and I was invited to write a response.

In my book, I acknowledge that when I first came to Scotland and people took me hillwalking, I had a major superiority complex. I was like, “You call these mountains?” because I’d been to the Himalayas, the highest and most iconic mountain range in the world.

For me, learning to get to know the Cairngorms was a slow-burn love story of coming to see how extraordinary, beautiful, and precious they are. In actual fact, at one time they were as high as the Himalayas, but they are so old that they have been worn down over time.

All that’s left is this granite core, and in all those nooks and crannies, there is an extraordinary richness of beauty. 25% of the UK’s endangered species live in the Cairngorms National Park, which is where I live. It’s a really precious, threatened, and beautiful environment. I’ve loved discovering them.

The Cairngorms are often described as ‘a slice of the Arctic in the UK’ because when you’re up there, the conditions, wildlife, and flora and fauna are like the Arctic tundra. In the winter, you can get winds of 100-plus miles an hour whipping over them, and people die.

People don’t realize that it is an extremely dangerous environment in the winter. You can get incredible whiteouts and there are real steep cliffs and drops. It’s one of the world’s high-class climbing places because of its challenging winter and summer climbing conditions. I’m not a climber, I should say. I’m just a happy hill walker.

For me, it was this discovery that actually this is an extraordinary mountain range. It is very different to the Himalayas, but very beautiful. I love being in mountains. I love that sense of height and perspective that they give you, the sense of beauty and wonder. You can have both the sense of being small in this vastness, but also the sense of how special it is to receive that, to be present to it, to be alive to it. That is something that has gone with me everywhere I’ve been.

Jo: I love that feeling of insignificance. I get it in historical places, like in Gothic cathedrals. I feel it anywhere where you realize that your life is really tiny, and it helps put everything into perspective.

You feel grateful for that moment. Against these mountains, as you say, which are so old, we just can’t appreciate the span of time or space as little humans. Some people don’t like that feeling, but it feels like that is something that you recognize as well.

Merryn: For me, it is both a feeling of being quite small in the vastness of it all, but that doesn’t mean your life doesn’t matter.

It’s that extraordinary paradox: although the universe is vast and time is vast and we are just a blink of an eye in it, each and every one of us is precious. I remember somebody once talking about how when a newborn baby is born, we often talk about it as a miracle. This person said, “And when did you stop being a miracle?” You never did.

I think it was Einstein who said you either treat the world like nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle, and I’m in the second camp.

The sense that actually everything, including each and every person, is extraordinary, special, and a one-off. Each moment we get to be here is a one-off. Particularly in mountain spaces or, as you say, cathedrals—and those Gothic cathedrals are often designed to give you a sense of the outdoors, ironically. The sense of height, the heavens, vast trees, skies, and stars—in a strange way, you’re inside, but they’re lifting you out. I find it’s the bringing together of the vastness and the preciousness of the fact that you exist, that you’re here, and that you do matter.

Jo: Fantastic. This is the Books and Travel podcast, so apart from your own books —

What are a few books you recommend that resonate with what we’ve talked about today?

Merryn: Yes, obviously, I’m a great lover of India books and things about the subcontinent.

The most famous one that also covers that history of independence and partition is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I actually read it when I had Hepatitis E in Kathmandu, which was a very strange state of mind to be in, but I just think it’s extraordinary.

There’s a novel about partition by the Indian author Khushwant Singh called Train to Pakistan, which is very much that insider perspective.

Kiran Desai’s book, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Booker Prize. Her mother, Anita Desai, is another extraordinary writer. That’s set in Darjeeling, so it’s another hill station story.

William Dalrymple has written lots of brilliant books about India. City of Djinns is his book about Delhi, also The Age of Kali, and then a whole series about the Mughal Empire and the East India Company. He’s one of the most eminent historians on India.

And if you want to know more about the Cairngorms, then Nan Shepherd’s book, The Living Mountain, has sometimes been hailed as the greatest work of nature writing in the UK. It’s very short, only 30,000 words, but you can return to it time and again and find something new. It is a small masterpiece.

Jo: Brilliant.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Merryn: My website is www.merrynglover.com. You can find me there. I’m on various bits of social media, but they’re not my favourite places to be. On my website, you can always find a way to email me, and I do always reply. I love hearing from people.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Merryn. That was great.

Merryn: Thank you, Joanna. Great to chat.

The post Writing Partition: Merryn Glover on History, Home, and the Hill Stations Of India appeared first on Books And Travel.