Much in vein that proved so affecting in his Murder in Melur, Stuart Blackburn's Into the Hidden Valley proceeds through finely etched details in vividly evoked scenes that carry the texture and look of northeastern India as only one who has lived there and spent extended periods of time among the people could muster. The historical context is the late nineteenth century English empire's intrusion into the tribal world for which it was not prepared, as the narrative brings together men and women swimming in the counter-currents of their own quite different universes, just as the two collide. On one side we see the newly minted Indian Civil Service officer struggling for honor and promotion, while on the other an Apatani shaman seeks a precarious survival. Blackburn has an eye and an ear for the people of both these worlds, and a storyteller's voice to convey the tale of their meeting. The location is India's northeast on the borders of Tibet and Burma, the territory is that of Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
Blackburn's strategy and his most striking accomplishment is in his plotting of the convergence of these two so-distinctly separate social nebulae in their incoherent collision. Each a fully developed social world with its own ritualized clockwork of social institutions and personal roles, gliding implacably on its own inertial gravity into the other.
This is how it worked, here recognized, portrayed, and evoked as only someone familiar with both of these universes could. As the bewildered individuals on each side collide in the at-once terrible and incomprehendible disaster of the colonial encounter. This is least-explored model for the continuing western imperial effort to bring the bring the rest of the world into conformity with our political system's economic interests, as those with the intimate knowledge of one lever of power or another scramble to stay afloat within their own world, while creating unfathomable havoc in the ones they cross.
Many years ago I remember the dull pain I experienced at my first viewing of François Truffaut's film, Jules and Jim, as the film ends in tragedy with a failed telephone call, as one of the main character's tries desperately, and in vain, to reach the other, who refuses to take his message, crucial though is. The scenario, as I remember it, has the frantic caller in one frame, and the one he's reaching out to, unable to answer in another.
I don't know at this moment if I remember it correctly, only that that was the meaning of the film for me at that moment: how impossible the world is when our communication is broken, how painful. Though that was over half a century ago and before I'd ever taken a step into the Indian subcontinent, the experience remains with me, as one that in many ways has colored my long years of searching there and here for an understanding of who or what we are in this world of so many different peoples and cultures. Each of us interpreting what we see in the language we know while so often communicating in words that have different meanings on one side and on the other. One's hand reaching out in hope taken by the other in fear, exchanges too multivalent to decipher: fractured communications.
The great success of Stuart Blackburn's venture into the hidden valley of the Apatani — and the slim records and photographs that survive of the imperial British intrusion there on which he constructs his tale — is to bring us enough understanding of the worlds colliding there at the end of the nineteenth century to feel the fracture as we witness the fallout on either side as the communications intended to bridge the gulf between them are broken or refused.
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