Ahead-of-her-time, fearless and remarkable Alexandra David-Néel has been on my mind and bookshelf for the better part of last year. She wrote thirty-odd books in 101-years (1868-1969) — on philosophy, the occult, Tantric ‘Lamaism’, the landscape of the Himalaya and ‘Forbidden’ Tibet — and most of her oeuvre may be classified as travel writing, so it was ripe picking. David-Néel’s work emerged not out of academia and collated bookish knowledge, but out of personal journeys made through her adult life. Joëlle Désiré-Marchand’s biography of David-Néel is the rarest of travelogues: the sort that begins well before the traveller has shut the doors of her house, and is written only at the very end of a robustly-lived life. For David-Néel’s life was a series of ambitious journeys punctuated by a few reluctant pit stops during which she wrote ceaselessly, while planning her next voyage. With unmatched tenacity, luck, the willingness to break rules and (in no small measure) the ability to beguile and convince men who could be enablers, David-Néel traversed over and gained access to spaces that few people — especially white folks or women — had ever reached. Considering just how violently these spaces would be marked by time and politics, chronicles such as David-Néel’s are the last authentic, personal record that remains.
Amruta Patil is a writer and a painter whose books include the graphic novels Kari and Adi Parva