The book unfolds the geopolitical history, the changing social and political boundaries, the dynamics of social and cultural changes, and the psychological trauma of the multi-ethnic groups inhabiting the Himalayan kingdoms and the Northeastern regions of India during the mid-1960s, when complete disarray and instability prevailed in this mountainous region, and political map of the territory was being redefined. Every information furnished in the book becomes a must read for anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, historio-graphers, social geographers, and policy makers and planners. The book informs its readers as to how the author evolved field strategies to uncover the ethnic politics of the Namgyal Kingdom of Sikkim, the Wangchuk Kingdom of Bhutan, and the newly evolved democratic system of Nepal that led to publication of six monographs between 1975 to 2024. Therefore, from the viewpoint of ethnographic methodology in social science, the book offers a superb example. Above all, the language of the book is so lucid that it facilitates an everlasting memorable and romantic journey to anyone interested in knowing this otherwise difficult terrain.
Prof. Awadhedh Coomar Sinha (1942), trained in anthropology and sociology, conducted field study in Sikkim, Bhutan, and North East India and taught in the Indian and foreign universities. He was a Senior Fulbright Visiting Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA, was and an ICSSR National Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, Teen Murti House, New Delhi. He had authored about a dozen of books and his latest book with Prof TB Subba, Nepali Diaspora in Globalized Era, has been published by Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2016. His two books on the eastern Himalayan region: Dawn of Democracy in the Eastern Hmalayan Kingdoms (2019) and Federation of the Eastern Himalayan Kingdoms and a Grearter Nepal (2024) have been published by the Rutledge & Francis Co. and his next publication, Collaborators, Rebels and Traitors: Indian Frontier Reacts to the Indian Union (2024), has been published from Manohar Books, New Delhi. He is actively engaged in pursuing research on the culture, polity and society of the eastern Himalayan region.
On the face of it, the book FLYING BEYOND THE CLOUDS: A Social Scientist's Research on the Himalayan Kingdoms and the North East India, appears to be an exciting travelogue account of an academic warhorse in social science, but a prudent reading of it reveals that its not at all a leisurely sojourn of the author; quite the opposite, it contains exquisitely rich ethnography, worth emulating research methodologies, comprehensive and cardinal elements of anthropology, sociology, history, and psychology of the land and the people understudy. Once I began to read the manuscript, I was engrossed in it, immersed in it. The language of the volume is so lucid and literary that a reader would feel, as if, he himself is ' flying over the clouds' in the Himalayan Kingdoms and the North East of India. So did I feel.
In addition, while going through the pages, I was time and again, recollecting Claude Levy-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques (1970), as also, my own fieldwork for PhD, almost 51 years before in 1974-75 in the Bay Islands, discussed in my book Experiencing Anthropology in the Nicobar Archipelago (Sahay, 2021). The Author's first visit to the Northeast was in February 1964 as a team member of the fieldwork-cum-excursion trip of the Department of Anthropology, Ranchi University. Those were the gloomy days in the country in general and the Northeast in particular, because of the 31-days Indo-China War from October 20 to November 21, 1962, wherein India suffered a crushing and humiliating defeat at the hands of the Chinese army. Despite being a teenager then, I recall, I myself used to curse China and longed for the 'death to Chinese army'. Professor A.C. Sinha has so punctiliously described the gloomy atmosphere in the Northeastern states of those fateful days, that it very much corroborates the prevailing conditions discussed by Brigadier J.P. Dalvi in his book HIMALAYAN BLUNDER: The Curtain-Raiser to the Sino-Indian War of 1962 (1969).
The author first visited the Northeastern states (then NEFA) and Sikkim (then a Kingdom), as an inquisitive student of anthropology at the age of twenty-two during the mid-1960s. Today, He is in his mid-80s. Therefore, it is only Professor Sinha can tell how many times he might have visited the Northeast and the Himalayan kingdoms; as a researcher, as a State Guest of Bhutan, as an organiser of various national and international seminars and conferences, as a participant in conferences organised by different Northeastern universities, and so on during a span of a little over 58 years. During his entire course of fieldwork under different capacities, the author faced umpteen number of challenges and ordeals; but by sheer dint of his uncanny knack for anthropology, he tackled all such predicaments, and established the best of 'rapport' with all his respondents - cutting across the caste and class hierarchies.
Hindu (935)
Agriculture (118)
Ancient (1086)
Archaeology (753)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (910)
Biography (702)
Buddhist (544)
Cookery (167)
Emperor & Queen (565)
Islam (242)
Jainism (307)
Literary (896)
Mahatma Gandhi (372)
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