- The book, Breaking Rocks and Barriers, chronicles the life of Sudipta Sengupta, a mountaineer and geologist, with many firsts to her name.
- The author writes on her experiences as part of a few all-women’s mountaineering expeditions in the 1960s and extensive fieldwork as a geologist in India and across the world until the 1980s.
- It provides insights into the barriers women scientists have faced in the lab and on the ground.
On my social media feed, I often see pictures of women crisscrossing the country and the world, climbing steep mountains, swimming in the open sea, and doing fieldwork in remote villages and forests. But there was a time in India when venturing out into the world as a woman adventurer and scientist was rare and reserved for a privileged few.
In the 1960s, a handful of women, after getting higher education and the support of their families, became the first few to enter their field of study or go to certain places where only men were allowed previously. Sudipta Sengupta is one of them. A geologist and mountaineer, she embarked on a lifelong journey of learning, travel, and adventure, which she documents in her recent book Breaking Rocks and Barriers: Memoirs of a Geologist and Mountaineer (HarperCollins, 2024).
The book narrates Sengupta’s forays into the world of geology and mountain climbing, focusing on her travels, climbing expeditions, and geology fieldwork. A mix of a travelogue, field diary, and autobiography, the book also sheds light on what it was like to be a woman scientist and geologist in India in the 1960s-80s. The reader travels alongside Sengupta, a former professor of structural geology at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, as she narrates several long journeys where she climbs hills and glaciers, studies rocks, and carries heavy rock samples across various countries.
Off to a rocky start
Sengupta starts her story by telling the reader how parts of her childhood spent in Nepal and Kalimpong gave her a lifelong love for the hills. Her father, a meteorologist, ensured that she had a steady foundation in the sciences. Her mother encouraged her and her sisters to study, take up hobbies, and travel. Sengupta records her transformation from a shy little bookworm to a curious adolescent who impulsively decided to study geology after hearing about the subject at a college admissions interview. This decision opened several doors for Sengupta to witness the wider world – from studying rock faces in the Chota Nagpur Plateau in present-day Jharkhand to investigating how the Schirmacher Hills were formed over billions of years in Antarctica.
As a young college student, Sengupta became a part of the first wave of women who trained in mountaineering in India. She describes her time as a trainee at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute (HMI), Darjeeling, and the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering (NIM), Uttarkashi, while encountering leeches on trekking routes, hanging like a pendulum while climbing, getting lost on the trail and crying, witnessing an avalanche at Mt. Bhagirathi II and realising her own smallness in the vast and mighty Himalayas.
Sengupta also provides an account of her time at the Geological Survey of India, which she joined in 1969. She wrote her doctoral thesis while working full-time, using a typewriter, drawing figures by hand, and printing photos manually. From the lack of proper toilets to trouble finding accommodation during fieldwork, she recounts how hard it was to be a woman geologist then.
From 1973-78, Sengupta’s work took her to the U.K., Spain, Sweden and Norway. During a trip to the Caledonian mountains in Scotland, she recalls how she hitchhiked with her hammer in her shoulder bag to keep herself safe from unscrupulous men. The author also encountered life-threatening situations in the field. While studying structural relationships of different rock types in Norway, she got stuck on a rock ledge in the rain and almost sank into a bog, but she carried on her work undeterred.
The highs and the lows
One of my favourite parts of the book is where Sengupta puts on her professorial hat for the uninitiated and explains how the geological history of Earth is divided into four ages – Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. Some of her descriptions are reminiscent of the Netflix series Life on Our Planet, which shows the four billion-year-old journey of life on Earth. The book is an easy read, albeit with some geology and glaciology jargon scattered here and there, but it still flows smoothly with the information. Sengupta never gets stuck in explaining the technical details of her subject matter and instead focuses on her experiences in nature through her writing.
“From the beginning, the Earth has recorded her story in the layers of rocks. The job of a geologist is just like that of a historian – to find signs, interpret them, and build history. We document the evolution of the Earth’s crust. To a geologist, rock layers are like books written in an unknown language,” writes Sengupta.
The book also has a chapter on the first all-women’s mountaineering expedition from Bengal in 1967 to Ronti in Uttarakhand, for which the team had to approach the then PM Indira Gandhi for permission because HMI was reluctant to allow inexperienced women mountaineers to climb high peaks. Once approved, the trek began in Raini village, which occupies a significant place in environmental history as the birthplace of the Chipko movement. The village was also affected by a devastating glacial flood in 2021. In 1967, Sengupta encountered many landslide-prone slopes and saw frequent avalanches on the Ronti glacier. She draws attention to the fragility of the Himalayas and helps the reader understand how unabated tourism and dam construction are further endangering this landscape.
In a haunting chapter, Sengupta describes how all adventures may not end well. In 1970, she and her young women friends, decided to climb a peak in the Bara Shigri glacier in Lahaul, Himachal Pradesh. They named the peak Lalana, meaning “woman” in Bangla. The group set out from Howrah, reached Manali and slept on the floor in a room full of rats while they prepared for the hike. The climbing gear they rented included men’s climbing boots, which fitted them poorly. Despite many dangerous crevasses that lined the hiking route, the group reached the summit at 20,130 ft above sea level (ASL) and was thrilled at the prospect of sending news to their families in Kolkata.
But things turned grim as they descended. The six women had to split into two groups, with one trio staying back to pack up the camp and the other heading to fetch mules for the descent, which involved crossing a tricky water stream. The journey through the stream was disastrous – only one of the three women survived. Sengupta states that she found an account of only one attempt to climb Lalana since. In 2018, a team returned from the height of 16,000 ft ASL because it was a tough climb with multiple crevasses requiring much rope work and equipment.
The book also dwells briefly on the environmental and social consequences of geological exploration. Sengupta shares that many geologists are often concerned about how their work of finding metals and minerals can help a country’s economy but can also cause an ecological and public health crisis. “Uranium mining wreaks havoc on the health of the local inhabitants, especially children. During fieldwork, I was always worried when the Gieger counter beeped,” she writes. A Geiger counter is a device that detects and measures radiation.
Sojourns to the South Pole
Sengupta saves the most mesmerising tale until the very end – her journeys as part of the third and ninth Indian expeditions to Antarctica in the 1980s, when she became one of the first Indian women to set foot in the southernmost continent. In 1984, Sengupta was involved in the setting up of the Dakshin Gangotri research station, India’s first scientific base in Antarctica. Revisiting it six years later, she found it buried in the ice with only the roof visible. Later, the machinery was recovered from this station and transported to the Maitri research station, which succeeded Dakhsin Gangotri as the Indian research base.
This behind-the-scenes offers a perspective of the setting up of both Dakshin Gangotri and Maitri with a large team of scientists and defence personnel through a long winter full of blizzards. Even here, the wonder of scientific endeavour is accompanied by a cautionary tale. In 1990, a day after Sengupta helped four team members set up camp at Humboldt Mountains, she discovered that they died in their sleep overnight from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Looking back at her time in Antarctica, she discusses her worries about melting glaciers and rising sea levels. In the end, she hopes that policymakers will act on climate change. It would have been interesting to know her views on how scientists can participate in the climate movement.
Engaging and bold, Sengupta’s memoir is a front-row seat to a story of a life both risky and passionate, written by an earth scientist who defied all norms and created her own path. Breaking Rocks and Barriers celebrates a life lived on its own terms.
Banner image: Sudipta Sengupta standing on the Arctic Circle, Norway, 1977. Image courtesy Sudipta Sengupta.
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