A pictorial biography of the Himalayas

We have all grown up with Ashok Dilwali’s photographs of the Himalaya, from the panorama that you’ll find in every Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam hotel to coffee table books on ‘spiritual’ India. To finally see the fruits of his 40-year career of wandering with a camera across the great range in the beautifully designed Inspired by the Himalayas is a joy. Dilwali cites the bewitching paintings of Nicholas Roerich as his guiding principle, and some of the photographs in this collection do approximate the unearthly light and sudden transcendence of Roerich’s best work.

Dilwali has travelled extensively across Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh, and images from these places make up the bulk of this collection. But his haunting portraits of a moonlit Kanchendzongkha and a solitary skeletal birch on a Gulmarg snowfield are equally exemplary. Many of his best images focus not just on the mountains but also on the sky, and his shots of a spectacular sunrise behind Nanda Devi or the cover shot of dusk on Kufri transported me with the sheer sense of otherness that this talented biographer of the Himalaya captures so well.