Dr. Tariq Rahman

Book Review

E.O. Lorimer,Language Hunting in the Karakoram 1st published 1938. Repr. (Karachi: Indus Publication, 2001), pp. 310. Price: Not indicated.

David Lorimer, retired colonel and once Political Agent of Gilgit, is considered an authority on the Burushaski language. He worked on Burushaski when he was still in service and then, after retirement, came back to complete his linguistic research with the help of a fellowship. His wife, E.O. Lorimer, accompanied him both times and this book is based on the second trip of fourteen months in 1934-35 when she made friends with the people of Hunza, the Hunzakuts, in a truly sincere way.

The book, despite its title, is not about languages though David Lorimer was conducting a serious study of Burushaski. However, while the husband might be ‘language-hunting’ the wife was doing something equally interesting---a study of the culture of Hunza. However, she does not write in the jargon of the professional anthropologist. Instead, she chooses to write in the style of a prose essay. She humanizes the subject by narrating the whole sequence of events like a story in the first person. Then she refers to human beings, whether servants or informants, in a highly personal, warm and human way. Thus, instead of making them abstract ‘subjects’ or ‘informants’ she makes them living human beings. Above all, since she narrates the whole journey both ways as well as the stay in detail like a story, she conjures up the world of the traveler, the researcher, the servants and the people of Hunza as a living entity. This is no mean achievement because most books by professional anthropologists, however rich in precise details they might be, fail to being the world of the people they describe to life.

E.O. Lorimer begins by describing how David wanted to go back to Hunza but his pension and savings were insufficient for the enterprise and it was only when he got a fellowship that he set out for his one-year research trip. (One wonders whether any Pakistani ex-officer---civil servant or military officer---has ever used his pension for research or whether anyone has had such a paucity of funds as the Lorimers appear to have had). Anyway, the husband and wife team went off to India and were soon on their perilous way to Hunza. The journey is described in vivid detail and it is so frightening as to make ones’ hair stand on end. The couple finally settles down in Hunza and Mrs. Lorimer, the author, starts making friends with the common people. She goes out to greet them politely and they start trusting her. She learns their language by actually talking to them and, as she gets ample opportunity for this, she picks up a tolerable knowledge of Burushaski. She is not a snob and is ready to understand and appreciate the common people. She describes their simple and poverty-stricken lives in vivid detail. She is so appreciative of them that sometimes one feels she may be idealizing them. She tells us that, unlike the people of India or Kashmir, the Hunza people have very few vices. They have hardly any major crime and their sexual morality is high without their having inhuman punishments like ‘honour killing’. They are dignified and cheerful and not superstitious. They are fun loving and love both singing and dancing. However, she reports that their ruler the Mir of Hunza, had prohibed men and women dancing together. They also drink wine though only on rare occasions and without evil consequences. They revere the Mir and the royal family and the Mir, in turn, is not oppressive. She also tells us that, despite paucity of water, the people are as clean as tidy as practicable. Their food is simple but, as it is not adequate, they are almost always near starvation during the spring when the previous supplies are running out. Above all, she tells us that women are more free and natural than anywhere else in India. Even in Nagir, which is a neighbouring kingdom, the women are less free. The people, she reports, are not superstitious or priest-ridden though they practice the Ismaili form of Islam.

Reading this account one is tempted to compare it with others. One recent account is by Stephen R. Willson of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. It is entitled A Look at Hunza Culture and was published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the National Institute of Pakistan Studies (Quaid-i-Azam University) in 1999. Willson’s style is that of a professional scholar which means that he gives far more organized knowledge but far less pleasure than Mrs. Lorimer. He confirms much of what the earlier author wrote but, surprisingly, without reference to her work. However, he tells us that drinking has now been prohibited and that the area is changing very fast because a road runs through it and schools have been established. He does not tell us much about the relative freedom of women here and in other areas but, on the whole, it seems that the area is not the kind of happy valley described by E.O. Lorimer.

E.O. Lorimer’s book eschews the learned words and details which scholarly anthropological works contain. However, for sheer readability and the magic of intimate human understanding I would prefer E.O. Lorimer’s book to any other I have ever come across as far as Hunza is concerned. Also, it is one of the few accounts I have read in which the writer, herself from a powerful and technologically sophisticated community, does not look down upon or patronize the community she studies. The publishers should be congratulated for bringing this almost forgotten account of Hunza to a new life.

Dr. Tariq Rahman