Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer Reissued
Posted: May 12th, 2011 | 1 Comment »Not quite sure why now but Patrick French’s biography of Sir Frances Younghusband, who obviously conquered Tibet and all that for the Empire, has been reissued. Never mind why, it’s a good book and worth a read so worth a plug. As usual no review here but publishers blurb below as ever.
Soldier, explorer, mystic, guru and spy, Francis Younghusband began his colonial career as a military adventurer and became a radical visionary who preached free love to his followers.
Patrick French’s award-winning biography traces the unpredictable life of the maverick with the ‘damned rum name’, who singlehandedly led the 1904 British invasion of Tibet, discovered a new route from China to India, organized the first expeditions up Mount Everest and attempted to start a new world religion. Following in Younghusband’s footsteps, from Calcutta to the snows of the Himalayas, French pieces together the story of a man who embodies all the romance and folly of Britain’s lost imperial dream.
……….When Oscar Wilde declared that the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it he was probably attempting to provoke epater les bourgeois as the French might say. There is also a less respectable one might even say a perverted kind of revisionism called negationism from the French le negationnisme a term first introduced by Henry Rousso the specialist on WWII France Le Syndrome De Vichy etc. which describes the process of rewriting history by minimizing denying or simply ignoring essential facts while exaggerating or overstating those supportive of one s argument..What made many in the Tibetan world stand up and pay attention to Professor Melvyn Goldstein s A History of Modern Tibet 1913-1951 The Demise of the Lamaist State when it appeared in 1989 was the unmistakable impression the book gave even in the preliminary flip-through-the-pages that here was a radical reinterpretation of Tibetan history.