Tales of Hazaribagh: An Intimate Exploration of Chhotanagpur Plateau

by Mihir Vatsa

WINNER OF 2022 SAHITYA AKADEMI YUVA PURASKAR

In January 2017, Mihir Vatsa, a young poet, gives up his life in the big city and moves back home to Hazaribagh, a small town on Jharkhand’s Chhotanagpur Plateau. Battling depression and uncertainty, he is seeking a ‘sanatorium’ amidst the sal trees and the temperate climes of home—just like the British soldiers and Bengali settlers and visitors before him.

Rejuvenated by the fresh air and lush landscape of his childhood, he spends the next three years exploring local landmarks and their fascinating history, and the deep, wondrous escarpments, the secret waterfalls and serpentine rivers of the plateau. Travelling partly on foot and partly in his trusted Alto, he encounters trees destined for death and waterfalls ravaged by mining; passes through Surajkund—the country’s hottest geological wonder—and Karanpura Valley— home to prehistoric humans ten millennia ago; and takes selfies with emus.

In between, he wonders what makes a landscape beautiful and how language shapes such notions; muses on the arbitrary boundaries of administration and government which, try as they might, cannot tame rivers and hills; and plumbs the archives of previous residents of the plateau and his own memory to understand his love of home. With empathy and in unhurried prose, Tales of Hazaribagh combines the best of nature, life, history and travel writing into an unforgettable portrait of a place and a journey back to one’s self.

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Top 10 non-fiction books of 2021— THEPRINT

This book is like Hazaribagh—it has a gentle gravity that keeps us with it as sleep does to dreams. Written to the speed of discovery, it moves gracefully through history, between the archive and experience, to leave us with a landscape that we will, from now on, remember like we do our bed. —SUMANA ROY

Vatsa's prose has three components that are vital for writing about a place and its people: love, earnestness and humility. This is a book that will be remembered.— HANSDA SOWVENDRA SHEKHAR

A new form of non-chauvinistic, deeply immersive writing.— THE HINDU

A leisurely journey, chronicled in admirably simple diction, but there’s something unmistakably heroic about it.— THE WIRE

Poignant and lyrical genre-defying book.— BUSINESS STANDARD

Goes beyond conveying the allure of Hazaribagh to underscore the redemptive potential of travel.— HINDUSTAN TIMES

Reads like a gentle, preternaturally wise voice from the future, telling us about the perils and pitfalls of our flawed, helter-skelter modernity.— MINT LOUNGE

What enriches the reader, hitching an imaginary ride along with Vatsa in his Alto, is the entire arc comprising characters, history, politics, environmental concerns and even literature that the journey covers — or uncovers.— THE TELEGRAPH

Genres: Nonfiction, India, Travel, Memoir, Asia

211 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2021

About the author

Mihir Vatsa is the award-winning author of travel memoir 'Tales of Hazaribagh: An Intimate Exploration of Chhotanagpur Plateau' (Speaking Tiger, 2021) and poetry collection 'Painting That Red Circle White' (Authors Press, 2014).

Reviews

[Rakhi Dalal · Rating 5 out of 5]

“These are the days of exile, of desiccated life, of dead souls. To come alive again, one needs a special grace, self-forgetfulness, or a homeland. Certainmornings, on turning a corner, a delightful dew falls on the heart and then evaporates. But its coolness remains, and this is what the heart requires always.”

Return to Tipasa, Albert Camus

Long after I completed reading Mihir Vatsa’s Tales of Hazaribagh, I found myself returning to this essay by Camus. It is my favourite from his collection of Lyrical Essays. A piece of writing that stirs my heart because it speaks of something I can only imagine and try to hold onto in my thoughts – a place you can always return to, a place whether your home or not but where even the smallest part of the land and its sky can make your heart grow fonder for life itself, a place where you not only return to the beginnings but also to that fount of repose which gives you sustenance, a place whose existence is an assurance of the invincibility of summer amidst the darkest of winters.

For Mihir, Hazaribagh is that place.

He returns to his homeland after few years in the nation’s capital, depressed and in search of a sanatorium. Towards the end of the first chapter he tells you that this book is about him and the Hazaribagh Plateau, about him in the Hazaribagh Plateau. It is about the land.

“In January 2017, I was no longer looking to ‘do something’ for Hazaribagh. The Plateau had only just opened up.

It was doing things to me.”

Subsequently, in the coming chapters, he accounts his exploration of different places of the land, embarking into places known as well as unknown. As he chronicles his journeys, his experiences, interspersed with anecdotes from his life, his admiration and even helplessness at times, while observing how with time certain places seem to be set for ruin, the reader is captivated by a sense of wonder.

This book is an account of the places he explores in Hazaribagh, yes. However for me, it is also a study into ways of looking at a place you love because it is your homeland. It is just not about its beauty or history, folklores or the unavoidable march towards ‘development’, but also about its agonies and vulnerabilities.

It is a piece of sheer beauty and is rendered poetically, with a fondness which washes over the reader as well.

I was awed by the writer’s love for his land, by his efforts for its preservation. And to admit very honestly, I even felt a bit envious for I haven’t yet known a place like that, a place I would know like the back of my hand, a place where I might feel at peace, a place I would like to rest, finally.

If there is one sentiment that this book deepens for me, it is that that the home never leaves you, no matter where you go.

[Sumallya Mukhopadhyay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tales of Hazaribagh, Mihir Vatsa

Simple, sensitive, sensuous

I have read this book twice in the last few weeks, and each time I finished reading, I was left with a sense of fulfilment.

I started observing my neighbourhood better - thinking of the crowning amaltas that blossomed yellow last spring, of the paths through Sanjay Van leading to the Gorakhnath temple, of aged men sitting in their regular corners, smoking the pipe.

Each setting conjures up a story of its own.

While I think of the stories that these places and people embody, I think of how Mihir listened to the symphony of his surroundings. And, I go back and re-read some passages to myself. I think of the Salparni and the waterfalls, of emus and strangers, of friends and forests.

The tales reside within you, and you slowly realise that simply reading the book makes you happy, perhaps a better human being too.

[Sookie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is this a thing for many people? A place they are able to intimately associate with having childhood dreams and memories intertwined with the geology of the place itself?

My father got transferred a bunch of times thus my childhood memories isn't tied to a place but to weather. I know, it sounds weird but we moved from a coastal city to a mining town to a hilly town to a moderately okay-ish city and then finally am here, in this dense, polluted city. I am almost envious of Mihir for the vividly narrated diaspora for having not traveled but lived and experienced as a child, and a teen.

the story is about coming home, traveling to place where dreams were built with a gentle voice and tons of info. quite enjoyable.

[Tanuj Solanki · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Vatsa's book it would appear that it takes two people to make the outdoors worthwhile: one who has experienced, and one who wants to experience. But repetition has its rewards, for knowledge, for memory, for experience. And so, sometimes, one person can play both roles. Becoming that person is partly what the book is about. Which is also to say that it is a book about repetition, about repeatedly going to a place and seeing -- really seeing -- what changes between seasons, years, and the conditions of the heart.

[Debasmita B · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never been to Hazaribagh, only nearby to other places in Jharkhand, but Mihir writes his hometown so beautifully, it wouldn't seem that I never went there. The emotional core he roots to the town yanks you there too. Before you know it, you are also hopping along in the many journeys to discover rivers, forests, and waterfalls. I love the honesty and affection with which he writes about the place.

The writing may not be completely polished in parts, the humour slightly inconsistent. I also did not like how there were antagonising mentions of Naxals but no reading into why certain areas are Naxal places. I would have liked a reading into the Naxals' history as well, with the town's. It didn't disrupt the flow of the book though. Once in, you are only concerned with the sal trees, rivers cutting through rocks, discovering waterfalls. But an objective look at those portrayed in negative light might have helped.

The book might have been easier for me to read because of my familiarity with the names and even the language. They weren't alien to me though that might be to someone completely unfamiliar with the area.

Not that it should matter. This isn't a book to be memorised for exams, it's a book for feeling. It's a love letter to a town and like all love letters, it has its flaws in pacing and writing, but at the end of the day, it makes you feel warm and happy.

[Amrendra Pandey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An inviting book. The account of exploration is brilliant. The book avoids presenting a sense of survey. It also thankfully does not aim to give an encyclopedic overview but maintains itself as an exploration, a personal one. The reader is not accompanied by a pedantic tour guide; he/she is with the author, who is there at the edge of a forest or near a river with some authentic tentativeness. While reading, I always felt the sense of 'let us see,' 'will find something' and not 'let me show you.' Voyaging and traveling is the aim, but it rightly keeps itself from the tyrannical sense of completeness. You see it throughout the passages of the book. It, for example, starts with clear and familiar details of a big city and then of a town, with the town's history and lucid depiction of the features of the landscapes. And in the very last pages, it reaches Lugu Buru, a place linked with some mythical stories. And it works very beautifully for me. The book ends in mystery and not in the (false) sense of knowledge. And it is pleasing to see that this entire experience would have worked as a balm to the author. In the last pages, a scene is described where our active role of imagination, which constructs the artificial boundaries and features, is made clear. The section is rightly named Territorial Trespassing. In many passages, present in Lake, Forest, and other sections, the sense of being into the Unknown, the gentle unknown, the one that invites you, is admirable. Some places have felt serene as well as enigmatic, the one being a village in the hills with well-kept roads. They all seem to make the entire plateau a sanatorium. Above all, this could be any natural place where you go with an open mind and a sense of wonderment.

[Shravasti Misra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young man from Hazaribagh comes back to his beloved hometown and rediscovers it. Tales of Hazaribagh is Mihir Vatsa's love letter to Hazaribagh as a homesick young man who comes back to learn with childlike as well as intellectual curiosity the detailed contours of his beloved.
The tenderness in its portrayal lends this book a lot of beauty. Mihir starts with a brief history of Hazaribagh - its nomenclature and how this beautiful little 'hill station' in the Chhotanagpur plateau was once a treasured retreat for the British. The lakes which are iconic markers of the place today did not exist once and were made by the initiative of Irish doctor John Coates who was posted in Bihar and stricken with the beauty of Hazaribagh. The lakes were not natural water bodies but plots of land excavated and left barren for the purpose of building a penitentiary which were later filled, connected and have now become synonymous with the place. Infact 'Hazaribagh National Park', as it is widely known, is also a misnomer. It is a wildlife sanctuary that still boasts significant biodiversity. I was as stunned as Mihir's companion to come across emus near a dying waterfall.
But the landscape is what gets the primary focus here, from charting waterfalls (from maps and myths) and rivers, Mihir occasionally zooms in and out to give us a geographic sense of Hazaribagh and its surrounding hills and plateaus. I am familiar with a few of these names, having grown up in the neighbouring state of West Bengal, but I was fully confronted with my ignorance despite this.
I have grown up next to the Chhotanagpur plateau but almost oblivious to it. I have seen parts of it of course, like the Ghaghra waterfalls mentioned in this book on a childhood trip to Jhargram, or pictures and accounts of Gumia when my uncle was briefly posted there. This book, in that sense, was also a little bit of sensitization for me. I am curious now about Hazaribagh and hope to see it some day. And I'm almost certainly going to pick this book up again then.
This was overall a beautiful read and I have a newfound appreciation for not just Hazaribagh but people who have to migrate from their idyllic hometowns to stifling big cities just to make a 'life' for themselves.
PS - Thanks Anusheela, for this lovely, lovely recommendation. I would not have come across this otherwise.

[Vampire Who Baked · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book provides a generous serving of the same feeling that that you get from ruskin bond's writing about his life in the hills, or bohumil hrabal's wondrous descriptions of a mythological folkloric czechia -- it's the same feeling that is variously described as hygge or sakoon or the cool side of the pillow in summer or the warm embrace of hot chocolate in winter. a very very healing narrative that acts like clear chicken soup in clearing out your modernity-clogged neural pathways but because it's such a unique and diverse narrative, it avoids any of the artifice or triteness that plagues a lot of literature in summary genres. indeed, this is a genre defying book -- part travelogue, part exploration of one's identity, part memoir and personal essay, but largely a critical examination of self via reflection of the self in one's native land's geography. that alone makes the book incredibly special.

having said that, the book does lose its way slightly, about three quarters of the way through -- the narrative meanders like the rivers it describes, and any line of inquiry starts getting entangled in the forest of references that the book is eager to cover but obviously cannot do justice to within the scope that it has to work within. the closest cousin to this book is the writing of robert macfarlane, whose scottish "walks-through-the-wilds" symphonies are composed in the same melodic scale, but just like macfarlane, it might have been good to avoid dropping names superfluously unless there's a point to it. while detail in description makes the writing feel more grounded and "real", it may happen that after the 56th village or river name that is mentioned exactly once in passing and never brought up again, the reader might lose faith that there will be payoff in following the story further.

nevertheless, this is an excellent book, crammed with delights and many many moments of inspired prose. as a hardcore urbanite myself (i literally mention "urbanism" in my tinder profile), i cannot lavish higher praise on this book than to admit that this book made me really want to visit hazaribagh.

go buy this book, read it and then read it again a few months later -- that would be my recommendation.

[Saurabh Sharma · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published in Business Standard.

Exploration and identity

Writing about “modernists of the streets” in The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City, Matthew Beaumont offers that “lost steps, paradoxically, are unlost, and only the steps that follow a specific, prescribed trajectory are lost.”

In 2016, Mihir Vatsa, a multi-award-winning poet and riverwalker, was working as a copywriter in Delhi. Seduced by a steady income, he found himself following a “prescribed trajectory”: A realisation that he’s getting ‘lost’. As a result, he not only began to hate the everydayness of life in Delhi, the city of Delhi but slumped into depression. In such a state, to borrow novelist Edward St Aubyn’s words out of context, what remains is “only the dumb language of injury and illness.”

With the hurt that he couldn’t explain, even to a doctor whom he ended up inviting to his hometown and the motivation of his friends who convinced him that he could “always return to the routine later,” Mr Vatsa returned to Hazaribagh, his hometown in Jharkhand. Over the years, travelling far and wide across the Chhotanagpur plateau, Mr Vatsa began documenting his love for the land, his “lost steps,” resulting in this poignant and lyrical genre-defying book.

Tales of Hazaribagh: An Intimate Exploration of Chhotanagpur Plateau is as much a confluence of historical narratives, geographical mappings, research findings and travel writing as it’s a memoir. Mr Vatsa notes in the book that he always wanted to “do something” for Hazaribagh, only to realise that “you don’t always need to do something for the town. That it can also do things to you.”

Mr Vatsa narrates both history and personal anecdotes with poetic charm making Tales of Hazaribagh at once an account of colonial-era stories and portrait of present-day Jharkhand, where, much to even Santhal writer Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s surprise, there are emu farms.

Located at 600 metres above the sea level, Hazaribagh — “the land of a thousand gardens, the land of a thousand tigers” — could have been the capital of India, as proposed by one G Hunter Thompson, Mr Vatsa writes. Its name, he argues, “was a conscious, creative intervention. It was coined by purposefully joining two words together. It is poetic, again, by default.” Mr Vatsa also points out that sketches by Captain Robert Smith and Sir Charles D’Oyly in the 1820s “remain the earliest visual documentation of Hazaribagh’s landscape.” For the latest ones, however, I would recommend Mr Vatsa’s indicative maps at the beginning of the book, which would explain why this place feeds the writer and that he belongs here like no other place.

Poetry lingers in Mr Vatsa’s prose unlike in any other travelogue I’ve read. Mr Vatsa is deeply invested in keeping a check on the arrogance of a naïve explorer getting in the way of his account. He changes terms often used in travel literature, such as “discovered” and “found” with “gathered,” thereby replacing “arrogance with fondness.”

Mr Vatsa, whose writing is committed to collectivising and not atomising, credits his mother, Maate, for the “profound inheritance” of travel. At the same time, he doesn’t fail to mention Bulu Uncle — the Padma Shri awardee and decorated historian Bulu Imam — and Mr Subhashis Das, a local researcher and megalithic researcher, among many other friends for being constant partners in the adventure to ‘gather’ waterfalls, memories, and rare moments of pure life.

During his travels, Mr Vatsa leverages technology to its fullest. He does not suffer the stubbornness and snobbery towards it that many historians suffer. Instead, he’s appreciative of technological advancements, noting how Google Earth, in the absence of “contemporary documentation,” helped him immensely during his expedition to Lotwa Dam and a river near Suraj Kund. But the use of technology to destroy the natural environment in the name of development disturbs him. Mr Vatsa talks about venting his fury on Facebook. He also takes a jibe at his social media activism, a millennial attitude that he calls “being cute” and performative, but he also suggests that at least his “performance was earnest.”

What he calls a “performance” is actually his unconditional love for the land, which he wants to preserve and see thrive. Explaining his obsession, he invokes a poet and former DC of Hazaribagh Samuel Solomon, who wrote: “Will this loveliness stay after we are gone?” This loveliness, this beauty, he offers is also a way to “look at its [Hazaribagh’s] history, and in postcolonial countries like India, this history is marred with violence, upon body, land and identity.” Many such intriguing observations and critical commentary beg the comparison of this book with Juljul, the lake in Hazaribagh, which Mr Vatsa writes is not only a “trickster,” but a “shape-shifter,” too.

[Rahul Vishnoi · Rating 5 out of 5]

First things first. This isn’t one of those sneaky travelogues that promises you stories about a land but saddles you with those of people. This here is ‘Tales of Hazaribagh’ not ‘Tales from Hazaribagh’. The star attractions are hills, lakes, rivers and forests. But can you really write the stories of a land if you don’t touch upon the people who live there? Vatsa keeps his part-memoir part-travelogue strictly about the nature and Hazaribagh but leans a bit into the people who dot this land. People like Tiger, the axeman, his friends keep coming at frequent intervals. An Alto keeps up a regular appearance.
Leaving a toxic city, Vatsa goes back home to Hazaribagh to nurse himself back to health and ‘gather some waterfalls’. ‘People mattered less,and asserted more’, he reasons. He missed the Sal trees, the water in the lake, the wind on top of the hill. His salubrious town.

Vatsa confesses that his story is unconventional since he isn’t journeying to unknown to earn his wings. He’s coming back home to reattach himself to his roots.

He repeatedly reminiscs about his friends, those who once accompanied him to the explorations but don’t find themselves bothered by that particular itch now that they are settled elsewhere for work.
Getting back home, he writes- ‘I could not take the bus. I was carrying Delhi with me. The city was packed in cartons, suitcases, backpacks.’
Vatsa’s observations about people and the place they dwell are spot on - ‘The landscape is dotted with dabba or box-like buildings and houses. Families with less money leave the brickwork exposed. Families with more money paint the houses white. Families with lots of money paint the houses in bright shades of green, orange or purple.’

He describes Hazaribagh as- ‘home to sneaky tigers, exotic rituals, and primitive tribes. Here, the tigers were more cunning.’ This is followed by a funny/creepy story about patriotic tigers lunching upon privileged firangs.

[Yashovardhan Sinha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mihir Vatsa is a poet and in this book he romances with a stretch of land- the Hazaribagh plateu, a part of Chota Nagpur.  His writing is very smooth but the book is almost entirely an introduction to the geography of the surroundings of Hazaribagh town. 


In my opinion, describing the physical features of any land is one of the greatest challenges of a writer. The geography may be very clear in his mind, but to be able to create as clear a picture in his reader's mind is a task that most writers fail at. That has been my experience as a reader. And here is a book devoted almost exclusively to describing escarpments, trails going north of this village, south from that hill, east of that stream or west from that turning. Vatsa may have found his way, but I was lost. 


I guess there are people who are interested in such stuff. After all Vatsa has been honoured with the Sahitya Academy Yuva Puraskar for this book. But it didn't work for me. I read it through because his writing style is engaging and I kept hoping that there would be some more history of the area or local legends about its wildlife etc. Sadly, that was missing. 

[Itswhilereading · Rating 4 out of 5]

These days I have been trying to understand places. I am not even a regular walker but I think about outside a lot when I am inside. I walk and walk because that is what slows me down. To walk is to move at a regular pace by lifting and setting down each foot in turn, never having both feet off the ground at once. There is so much rhythm in walking, that all my poems land on the ground first, as words find a crack between black tar and stare at this gap with curiosity, like crows at the passing bulldozers.


Tales of Hazaribagh is that ‘lifting and setting down each foot in turn’. A Zeitroman, the book is an intimate exploratory account of something which neither ends nor begins. Hazaribagh is pursued actively in conversations, anecdotes, histories, spectacular ordinariness amidst aids like, Google Earth, a prophetic grandfather who knows everything about everything, and confident young guides like Md. Danish Ansari. 



Divided into seven sections, each highlighting some topographical, much personal connections with the ecology of the place. This memoir captures the urgency to treat nonhuman life with dignity. The prose meditates on waterfalls, solitude, adventures that aren't solitary, and the many vagaries of this land. Apart from revealing geographical exploration, Vatsa is also interested in being mindful of words like beautification and conservation. Neither does it leave your mind.

I was beginning to notice the geography, making assumptions and conjectures about streams and rivers. As I was trained in literature, I knew the words context, critique, and problematic. I did not know the words topography, terrain and undulation. The land for me was still up and down.

There is an honesty about the absences, as the writing is aware of how these treks and loitering, are adjusting to the contours of a particular gender. In some places, the attire was altered; in some places, the dialect made it helpful for connections to develop. I wondered what the same place, loitering, treks would look like for women. And that is when we meet the author’s mother. 


Maate stuck to roads, they were her threshold. Beyond the roads, we wouldn't go. The hills with no roads were for me secret places, demanding exploration. The Hills with no roads were for her dangerous places, demanding seclusion.


It was with his mother and his relatives that Mihir Vatsa first discovered his waterfall at Salparni. When the family trip helps one discover an emu bird, a waterfall, I loved reading those parts. Conversations with guides, description of clouds, trees, the Canary Hill, are all going to stay with me.


In many places, the narrative haunts you, prods you, moving beyond the excitement of the adventure. It is like seeing someone solve a mystery. 

 
At a time when sensory curiosities are least of our concerns, this book prods many important questions on landscape, ecology, administration’s arbitrariness, while simultaneously giving a chance to dig deeper into the craft of place writing. This is evident throughout, but there is one which is my favourite: Towards the end of the book, in "Territorial Trespassing", Vatsa makes the reader craft a visual of Hazaribagh— 


Imagine blankness. Imagine two slanting lines, originating from the two top corners. They come down to join each other, but they do not meet. A while space keeps them apart. 


Keep much of this whiteness intact but paint a thin streak of blue through it. The witness that remains, imagine it as sand.  The blue is the water. The two lines that do not meet, imagine them as mountains. They are blue too but there is a different shade approaching green-not aqueous.


On both sides of the sand, put trees. put so many trees that they proliferate across the lines, muddying the precision. In the whiteness above the sand, imagine clouds. Draw them softly and draw them voluminous. The sun hides behind them. Now and then, you find the light struggling to push through for stop the clouds release it in diffused beams. 

I read this book traveling to Uttarakhand, Delhi, and Odisha. When gulabi thand is mentioned, I am taking quilts out in a large, dingy restroom in Lansdowne. When Gibraltar’s haunted manor is received with the reality of people actually living there, I am listening to black drongos on cheed trees, while trying to find out the whereabouts of a museum. Traveling on NH316 and crossing Barakhanda Wildlife Sanctuary, I see canals, mining locations interspersed with other towns, deforested blank spaces dotted with boards for the upcoming Shri Swami Narayan Mandir; 'forgetting' the fodder patches behind tall trees of Neem(?) along the highway. 


That we walk is not enough; how do we build a home with that walk, when it is so precarious, so sturdy in actively requiring effort, is something I learn with this book. The land for me is not up and down anymore. 

[Anjana Basu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tales Of Hazaribagh : An Intimate Exploration Of Chhotanagpur Plateau
Mihir Vatsa
Speaking Tiger
INR 450
Hazaribagh, the not quite hill station perched on the Chotanagpur plateau, the place of a thousand gardens, or a thousand tigers depending. Like other hill stations, Hazaribagh was put together by the British as a refuge from the heat and gradually became a town and part of an administrative belt fuelled by nearby collieries. Mihir Vatsa whose essays and memories won him a Sahitya Akadmi award for Hazaribagh Tales has put together a coming-of-hope story. A young ad man in Delhi he suddenly found himself overwhelmed by depression and after a visit to a psychologist came up with a unique means of therapy. He returned home seeking a sanatorium like the British and the many Bengalis who discovered the plateau and made it their home.
The result is an exploration of what makes Hazaribagh different to those who live there. Vatsa takes his readers through the ruins of houses and the shapeshifting magic of hills as he tries to explain what he has left behind to himself. Why is Hazaribagh Hazaribagh and what sets it apart from the soulless urban grind of Delhi? Possibly because there is no grind since most young folk take off and leave for the big cities. In an attempt at explanation, Vatsa travels up and down the roads meeting people and reliving experiences. His mental issues do not overwhelm his descriptions or his stories of past and present – the people who made Hazaribagh, forest officers, British administrations and the new Hazaribagh a deserted space in danger of being forgotten which he displays to friends or revisits with family. He writes “I loved myself through the plateau.”
There are flashes of humility and flashes of ego and all is not smooth with the writing as it takes on the unexpected character of the creepy roads Vatsa describes. Sometimes he veers off in a different direction from the expected and one has to accept the fact that one is following in the footsteps of a flaneur who is also a poet.
There is a remarkable ghost story of a ride in a rickshaw at night told with the right amount of chill. There are also drives with the threat of Naxalites at hand guided by sceptical villagers and tractor drivers. A place of no roads is in the process of being dug up to allow more tourist infiltration and possibly allow coal mining to follow its dark processes. Vatsa takes his friends through his explorations forests with Uncles and Aunties thrown in to make the narrative more childlike and whimsical. After all family excursions have their own magic, especially since his relatives have been longer in the region.
On occasion Vatsa’s language becomes precious – for example when he flounders over the waterfall at Salparni and combines it with the inarticulateness of poets who are lovers. This could of course be a hangover from being Hazaribagh’s Coffee Table book bhaiya – Vatsa had done his share of Government Coffee Table books to earn a living during his home rehab programme and lateral thinking was obviously part of the exercise. However he is no shirker when he describes the majesty of the Nisarga Waterfall or the ever changing wonder of the Canary hill. There he reveals his coffee table eye and the rhythms of his language.
The first draft of the book was written before the pandemic. Things have changed after that but wanderings in lonely places that are close at hand and the need for spiritual solace has only strengthened. Perhaps we need to discover what lies in our own backyards. Vatsa has returned to Delhi but presumably what Hazaribagh gave him and what he unfolds in the book are still there to light his way.

[Madhulika Liddle · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2017, Mihir Vatsa, living and working in Delhi, returned to his hometown of Hazaribagh in an attempt to shake free the depression that had gripped him in the busy and bustling national capital. This book, a part-memoir of Vatsa’s exploration of Hazaribagh and its surrounding areas, dates from that time. As he goes about in his Alto, deep into the forests and villages, chasing rivers and waterfalls, Vatsa explores, too, the history and the lore of the people of Chhotanagpur.

The easy way in which this book is written makes it imminently readable. The history of Hazaribagh is not a dry, chronological one; it is about how such landmarks as a trio of lakes, or a girls’ school, came to be. How the British developed this station as a sanatorium; how their successors in independent India have launched a campaign of sundarikaran. There is a ghost story; there are local myths and legends. There are loving but oh-too-brief descriptions of waterfalls and woods, rivers and streams, juxtaposed with the sometimes unsettling mentions of mamajis, of Naxalites and coal dust from the mines…

I liked Tales of Hazaribagh a lot. The way Vatsa weaves it all together makes this far beyond an introduction to Hazaribagh, a memoir of travels in the area, or even a guide to the Chhotanagpur Plateau. Since this is about Vatsa too, about his explorations and his finding of both the region and himself, it is (obviously) intensely personal. But what Vatsa succeeds in doing is to imbue even the less personal parts of the narrative with a spirit and a tone that puts his reader in the same space as Vatsa himself. The affection and warmth with which the place and its people (animals included, even emus) are described make it come vividly alive.

So much so that I, who have only ever seen the Chhotanagpur Plateau from a passing train, found myself feeling nostalgic about the place. Or at least telling myself, again and again, that I must visit soon.

[Shashank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleasantly surprised by how well the book turned out.Always good to read about the cities and towns that we/our relatives grew up in.Makes me wish for similar books on other cities and towns in India. Serendipitously I picked up the book while I was travelling through Deoghar, Sindri,Dhanbad etc while reading this book and finished it in Patna.The extra star is for making me love these places a little more(not that I needed a lot of help).

[Dhiraj Sindhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mihir Vatsa—a Reigning Master of River-Walking in Jharkhand—Provides an Authentic Portrayal of Being a True Wanderlust in his Travel Memoir—Tales of Hazaribagh, Where Goosebumps-Worthy Excursions Deep into Pockets, Cracks and Crevices of Chhotanagpur Plateau Lead to Environmental and Spiritual Awakening.

In Tales of Hazaribagh, the author traces the history, politics, culture and, most importantly, geography of the Chhotanagpur plateau through his exploration spree fuelled by his passion and love for the homeland and its natural heritage, but above all, the necessity to fill up the hollowness created by depression with something greater than one’s self. The first chapter, Sanatorium, sets the stage for upcoming expeditions by illustrating the evolution of Hazaribagh, which was once a military station where ailing soldiers came to recuperate because of its “salubrious” climate. Once the author returns to his sanatorium, the book takes no time to indulge you in excursions to hills, lakes, rivers, waterfalls, forests and escarpments with exciting anecdotes.

Mihir offers a nuanced portrait of the plateau that is rich in detail, and it speaks to the heart with prose dipped in empathy, a sense of possessiveness and unwavering conviction. Apart from engraving complex layers of geography, the words plumb the depths of historical, political and social chasms to extract unique narratives of people’s contributions to events and activities, shaping the plateau into what it is today.

Read the full review on my blog - https://bit.ly/3FjJNA6

[Nitish Chandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book came across like the warm rays of sun in a December morning. I felt like going back to my own town in Nalanda and exploring it again, right from the start. In the book Mihir writes about a very personal and intimate connection that he has with Hazaribagh, but still we all can see our own reflections in it. It brings a smile on your face every now and then. It's warm, personal, earnest, beautiful and written with a lot of heart. Well deserved Sahitya Akademi for this one. Thanks for this gem

[Debashree Tagore · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review of the book may be biased because the book is based on my hometown. I have to admit I was oblivious to the many wonders and beauty of my hometown and the neighborhood until I read the book. Written in very simple language, this book describes the Chhotanagpur Plateau in a way that never gets boring. You feel like you are with the author through his adventures and explorations. I honestly wish that the book was longer because I believe a lot more could have been written. This book is neither a historical account nor a geography textbook of the region, rather it felt a lot like fantasy.
While you are imagining the region with the author's words, you form an idea of the roads, rivers, and waterfalls. There are a few pictures of the region, but not of the regions that the author describes in most detail. So, one can not compare the imagination with the reality. I wish there were more pictures preferably at the end of each chapter, rather than being clubbed together.