I first came across Shekhar Pathak’s name in the files of the Uttar Pradesh State Archives in Lucknow. The year was 1983, and I was working...
I first came across Shekhar Pathak’s name in the files of the Uttar Pradesh State Archives in Lucknow. The year was 1983, and I was working on a dissertation on the social history of forests in the Uttarakhand Himalaya. In those days the UP State Archives were well run; the files one ordered came to one’s desk fairly quickly, and with all their pages intact. On the inside back cover of each file was a list of all the scholars who had seen that particular document before. Studying the records of the Forest Department and the General Administration, I found that in some cases I was the first person to have ordered a particular file, but in most cases the second. The person who had got to these records before me was a certain Shekhar Pathak.
From Lucknow I went to my home town, Dehradun, then merely a district headquarters in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh – not the capital of Uttarakhand it was to later become. Here, I was directed to a living repository of Himalayan history named Captain Shoorvir Singh Panwar. A kinsman of the last Maharaja of Tehri Garhwal, he told me stories of peasant life in that kingdom...
