Seems Times Have Changed

Long back, when I was in school, Reader's Digest brought out a volume titled 'Discovery'. It was on the historic feats of exploration and adventure - an alternative title of the book was 'Adventures that changed our World'.

All adventurers were white men (about the only exception was Mrs. Florence Baker who accompanied her husband Samuel White Baker in his search for the source of the Nile. And there was also something on the ancient Phoenician voyager Hanno but Phoenicians are not exactly non-white!). There was NOTHING on the great medieval Chinese navigator Zheng He or on the namelesss Polynesian navigators who populated practically every island in the Pacific well before the Europeans 'discovered' them - and zilch or thereabouts on Arab or Chinese travelers like ibn Batuta and Al Beruni or Fa Hien and Hiuen Tsang - not to speak of Tamil seafarers who reached Malaysia and beyond.

Moreover, it was obvious that 'Discovery' was not the right title for a volume in which genuinely scientific explorers like Captain Cook, Lewis and Clarke or Vitus Bering had for company brave but disgusting characters like Vasco Da Gama (he certainly was disgusting from an Indian viewpoint) and Balboa. And some of the stories were, from any viewpoint, gruesome chronicles of invasion, loot and murder - 'Pizarro *destroys* the Incas', for instance.

But a chapter that caused special irritation was titled 'Hillary climbs Mount Everest'. No Tenzing! Even in the text, the Sherpa appears as little more than a trusty sidekick to the intrepid New Zealander. There was the photograph of a triumphant Tenzing on the summit (taken by Hillary) with the wistful caption 'Tenzing had never handled a camera before so Hillary could not get himself photographed atop the Everest'!

....

Cut to the present. Britannica has published a solid tome: 'Learning Library' for children. It contains among other things, short life-sketches of 30 or so prominent people, chosen from all over history (a very balanced collection; Gandhi is there and is neatly balanced by Jinnah - or was the balancing done the other way round?). I was surprised to see Tenzing in the list; Hillary does appear but not to play Crusoe to Tenzing's Friday; and there is a photo of the two mountaineers together, preparing for the climb of their lives.