Deepali Sinha
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A brief biography
Deepali Sinha, who led first all-woman Himalayan expedition
➤ On returning from college one fine day in 1961, a teenage daughter in Calcutta asked her father : “What is mountaineering?” Deepali Sinha had wondered after signing up for a 32-day government-funded mountaineering course in Darjeeling. Five years later, she would find herself drinking sherbet served by Indira Gandhi before leading seven Bengali women — six of whom spoke neither English nor Hindi — to a 19,000-ft rocky Himalayan glacier.
➤ Bengali women “were expected to sing, dance, learn Rabindra Sangeet and get married after graduation” while Deepali grew up climbing fig trees, stealing mangoes and flying kites with boys. “My father was my first patron,” she says about Dr Debendra Chandra Sen, the doctor who taught his kids “there was no difference between boys and girls, rich and poor, Hindus and Muslims.”
➤ When the NCC student signed up for mountaineering, not everyone was on board. “She won’t get married when she returns,” worried her grandma while neighbours and relatives told her father: “What if she gets hurt or lost?”. “If anything happens, I will take care,” Dr Debendra reassured them.
➤ Excited, Deepali set off in 1961 for Darjeeling where a doctor pronounced her medically unfit for training at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute (HMI) as she weighed only 40 kg. “The doctor said if there was a blizzard, I would be blown away. I told him it wasn’t my fault that I was underweight,” recalls Deepali, who coaxed him to test her by giving her “a breathing test, a pulling test and sit-up exercises” instead. The appeal worked. A month later, she showed off her biceps to ‘dada’, her elder brother, Vishwadev.
➤ “My pet name is Kuku. In 1966, Vishwadev came home to say: ‘Kuku, I am going for an expedition’. I was worried about his safety. I started crying. ‘I want to go too,’ I said. “It’s only for men,” came the reply. So, to see him off, she sat in the train. When it began to pull away from the station, she refused to move. “That’s when I gave a hard bite to Vishwadev’s hand,” says Sinha, who soon collected names and addresses of Bengali girls who had trained at HMI and mailed them postcards to meet at her home.
➤ That’s how the first Indian all-woman’s mountaineering club called ‘Pathikrit’ was born. Its original plan was to climb the 20,000-feet high Nanda Ghunti peak in Garhwal. “Two sherpas from Darjeeling were staying in my house and we had started packing after submitting our plan to the Indian Mountaineering Federation in Delhi. Suddenly came a thunderbolt from the IMF.
➤ “Their letter said, ‘You cannot go for this expedition as at least 40 percent of the team should have advanced training to be permitted to go beyond 20,000 feet’. Seven of us had only basic training. We were all in a fix. People started crying,” says Sinha, who approached Congress leader Prafulla Chandra Sen. She requested him to “take a stern step and help us in this matter”, saying this would be the first-ever ladies’ mountaineering expedition from Eastern India. It was a simple, handwritten letter he wrote to “Indu” aka then PM Indira Gandhi that cleared the path for India’s first all-woman expedition.
➤ Deepali would go on to complete 12 expeditions. “Mountains can never be conquered. They can only be worshipped,” she says, distilling her learnings from each one. “You should respect nature, respect the sherpa and the local culture.”
➤ Seven years ago, Deepali joined two women from her 1967 Ronti team on a trip to the 13,000-ft Chandratal in Spiti Valley. The trio marked the 50th anniversary of their landmark expedition by creating another headline. “Inshallah, if I live until 2027, we will go to the mountains again to celebrate our 60th,” says the 72-yearold, who keeps herself busy with camping activities and seminars as the head of a non-profit that provides adventure gear and opportunities to underprivileged students.
Curated by Ketaki Desai with inputs from Sharmila Ganesan Ram
