homage to baltistan

4-16-10

50 Years Later, He’s Still Immersed In Himalayan  Lore

By JIM KEVLIN : EAST SPRINGFIELD

OK, you may have missed John Travolta when he and wife Kelly Preston were in Cooperstown for Cal Ripken’s induction in 2007.
And maybe you never ran into James “The Sopranos” Gandolfino while he was partnering with Jim Johnson in The Vines restaurant in Oneonta.
But how many people around here can claim almost meeting the Faqir of Ipi?
And that just scratches the surface of the stories you will hear if you spend an afternoon with Jim Hurley, who was vice consul at the U.S. Consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1955-60.
After a series of life adventures, he settled in Springfield Center in 1991 – moving to East Springfield a decade later – to operate James Hurley Books, a 2,000-volume collection on Kashmir in general and, in particular, the Baltistan province.  Also, explorer Aurel Stein, whose  discoveries include “The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas” in western China.
How about this story.
In 1960, Hurley and an acquaintance he’d met hiking the Baltistan passes – plus two high-altitude porters – attempted to climb K12, a never-vanquished (until 1972) 24,370-foot tall peak.
Jim got as far as 21,000 feet, where he and his fellow climber had to traverse a 45-degree rock face.
“Bohot khatnach, sahib,” his porter told him, “Very dangerous, sahib,” and Hurley made the decision to turn back, although his companion continued on.
“If I fell, he could catch me.  But if he fell, I couldn’t hold him,” Hurley reasoned.  “We” – he and his porter – “wound ourselves down the spine.  I had to see some green.”
Or this culinary story.
In Lahore, the food was hot, hot.  But Balti food was milder – lots of vegetables – and Hurley enjoyed it quite a bit. 
With one exception:  Goat head.  His experience was with one that had been cooked 24 hours until it was “almost gelatinous.”
“I didn’t find that too great,” Hurley said.
Or stories about the people he met.
He maintained an ongoing conversations with “The Frontier Gandhi,” Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who was in jail in Lahore when Hurley first met him.  He became friendly with Khan’s sons, later prominent in Pakistan – Ghani, as a poet; Abdul, as a politician – and might have (but didn’t) marry one of their sisters.
Another pal was Abdur Rauf, a sub-editor at the “very good” Pakistan Times.  He would stop by Hurley’s after the paper was put to bed, and the two would debate partition, the Cold War and other burning issues of the day until the wee hours.
Hurley also had a chance to confer with General Nimo, the Australian then in charge of the U.N. peacekeeping forces tasked with keeping the Indians and Pakistani armies apart.
And another time, on a wooden saddle, he rode through the night from the Balti capital, Skardu, to the nearest airport to meet Eric Shipton, the famed mountaineer involved in a number of attempts on Everest.
James Hurley was born in 1929 and raised in Holyoke, Mass., along with five younger sisters.  He joined the Navy in 1946, and after a two-year stint attended Boston University, then Columbia, where he was “a bit of a Joe College,” managing the glee club and writing for the newspaper (under fellow student Max Frankel, later editor of the New York Times.)
As his college years neared their end, he happened to attend a lecture on Kashmir at the National Geographic Society, and was smitten.
He graduated in 1953, joined the State Department, and in 1955 arrived in the Pakistani capital.  A young single man among married colleagues – he was also the consulate’s assistant economic officer – he traveled quite a bit on the job.
His colleagues included Jim Spain, later an ambassador and author of “The Way of the Pathans.”   Another became Nancy Dupree – her future husband wrote “Afghanistan,” considered the best work on that country; their Dupree Foundation in Kabul has been in the news lately.
Since there was no consular office in Peshawar, the administrative capital of the FATA, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (which included Baltistan), Hurley found himself there with some regularity.
As soon as he earned some leave, he hopped a DC-3 from Rawalpindi to Skardu to begin his adventurous treks.
Skardu was the mud-hutted capital of a very poor region, overseen by a Pakistani political officer; the subsistence farmers couldn’t have survived without government subsidies.
Hurley stayed that night at a Dak Bungalow, one of a series of government rest houses maintained across Pakistan; then, with knapsack and tent on his back, headed up the Skora La pass.  By the time he left Pakistan five years later, he had spent four such summers.
Meanwhile, his wanderings had also introduced him to the Kesar Legend, an epic about a legendary king that had been passed down by oral tradition over many centuries.
As a guest of the Rajah of Kapalu – there were six valleys in the region, each with its own rajah – Hurley convinced him to assign a local scribe to write down the local version of the heroic poem.
When Hurley arrived back at the end of that summer’s wanderings, he was presented with five notebooks of tightly written script; they are now owned by the New York Public Library’s oriental section.
By his departure in 1960 – he hitchhiked through Afghanistan (where the U.S. Consulate at Kabul blocked his meeting with the Faqir of Ipi) – he had accumulated four tons of books, 500 volumes.
They were packed and put on a bullock cart, but were so heavy the wheels sank into the mud and a truck had to be called in.  Eventually, the collection ended up in storage in Virginia.
Hurley went to London, determined to become the foremost Western scholar on Kashmir.  After a disastrous love affair, he returned stateside as the 1960s’ riots were under way.  He stayed in New York, did community work in Bedford Styvesant, founded the Brooklyn (now Long Island) Historical Society, and developed what became the Weeksville Heritage Center, celebrating one of the first communities of free slaves.
He married twice, and has a grown daughter in Philadelphia.
He became a reference archivist in the city archives, then the first archivist of the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission – where, among others, he met Cherry Valley’s Kent Barwick.  Attending a session at NYSHA – Fred Rath became a friend – he fell in love with the area and, on retiring, moved here, and his books – moved to New York from the Virginia barn 10 years before – followed.
“I didn’t know anyone but Fred,” said Hurley.  “He introduced me to Willis Monie.  Willis gave me the advice to start a book business.”
Highpoints included a recent sale of 12 of 13 volumes by the Swedish explorer Sven Hendin, sold for $6,000 to a customer in Beijing.  The Arthur Paul Collection at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, has been a particularly good customer.
He’s in the process now of selling his whole collection.
“Despite all the people we’re losing and the money we’re spending,” he said, sadly, “there’s not a lot of interest in reading about the people who I found so interesting and attractive.”