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The Himalayas, it is commonly agreed, stupefy the traveler first by the immensity of the unknown and then elevate his journey by offering an almost unclimbable challenge—the imaginative recording of what is seen and felt. Overwhelmed by the accounts of numerous narratives, Bill Aitken, a Scottish-born-Indian in the early 1960s, travelled from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to the Nanda Devi, once considered the highest Indian peak. He narrated his experiences in The Nanda Devi Affair (1994). In this journey, the text suggests, the climber’s inbuilt intensity of life—from sheer physical pleasures to calm resignation—is tested. This study intends to explore how the altitude’s transformative vigor allows the travelling subject to participate in “an interaction of the human and natural” (Bainbridge, 2016, p. 628), thereby offering a space in which the selfbefore-the-journey (pre-climb episteme) and the self-endowed with physical actuality negotiate a new understanding. The study offers an introspection on how the Nanda Devi helps the travelling identity realize a psychic evolution from the mere sensual excitement of a lured mountaineer to, what Aitken notes, “the elusive understanding of slippery psychic subtleties” (2004, p.189), thereby questioning and purifying the preconceived ideas of the traveler to achieve a sense of selfhood.

The Ascent Within: Transformative Agency of the Nanda Devi in Bill Aitken’s The Nanda Devi Affair