Bill Aitken (1934 – 2025): Man of the Mountains

From the 1970s to his death on April 16, Bill Aitken lived in Mussoorie. He was 90. Scottish by birth, and a naturalised Indian by choice, he arrived in India in 1959. Fittingly, he came not by air, but by road, following a route which many a hippie had attempted, but only the resilient few, like Aitken, completed. He “hitch-hiked round this fabulous world wearing the kilt.” Over the next 50-odd years, he would write nearly a dozen books on India. Each of them filled with the brio of an adventurer but with the sensibility of a hermit. He wrote of Zanskar and Nanda Devi, the Indian railways and Sri Sathya Sai Baba. In Seven Sacred Rivers (2000), he embarked upon an unusual pilgrimage, following India’s main rivers, from Himalayan glaciers to the bedraggled foothill towns. In an interview he described himself as “a Sufi Scotsman, a lapsed monk, a tireless traveller, a prolific writer.”

Aitken was born in Scotland in 1934. In a 1980 interview to Malcolm Tillis, he said, “Our back yard ran straight up to a mountain 1,375 ft high.” Here he would sit “listening to the drone of the universe and watching the sheep.” He was “anti-social from an early age” and thus hated cities and loved mountains. His father was a coppersmith, but he was educated at Leeds University where he studied comparative religion under a Baptist minister. His interest in Hinduism was first sparked here. Always inclined towards Gandhian thought and practice, he joined the Vinoba Bhave movement, while Vinoba Bhave was walking across India collecting land for the landless. Aitken walked with him for six weeks through Assam. For several years he lived in the Himalayan ashrams of Kausani and Mirtola, working in the kitchen, and learning how to make round chapatis, when initially they were shaped like “South America or Iceland”.

There aren’t many video interviews available of Aitkens but in one titled ‘The Kapadia Interviews’ (2024), we see a man of deep emotion and passion. He weeps when talking about the mindless destruction that man wrecks on man. He bursts into laughter when he describes that his entire Scottish town was involved in the “making, drinking, stealing of whiskey.”

Aitken’s breakthrough in Hinduism which he describes in Seven Sacred Rivers occurred in Allahabad, when a Punjabi printer he was staying with took him for a morning bath to the Ganga. His host doused himself in the river, oblivious to the dirt and muck. Aitken hesitated. The man replied, “It’s not the water that’s filthy, it’s the dirt!” That is when Aitken jumped in too. He said in an interview,  “And from that moment I’ve never had typhoid or those things. I’ve had immunity — psychic immunity. You can’t stay in India on boiled water; you have to come round to the Indian way — if you get a bug, it’s for a purpose. It’s easier to live that way, too.”

It was the mountains that held Aitkens in their thrall. To read The Nanda Devi Affair, (1994), today is to witness both his awe and understanding for the high ranges. Always spiritually inclined, even as a young man the mountains meant more to him than a god in a church. He writes, “Somehow the peak exuded belief whereas the local church and its works invited ridicule for the way it stifled any passion for enduring things.” He writes poignantly about the “brotherhood between man and mountains” emphasising that humans need to be willing to take the risk to move off uncharted paths to appreciate the true beauty of the Himalayas. Nanda Devi, “essentially royal and feminine” summoned him in a way that he could not refute.

Aitken’s last book Sri Sathya Sai Baba—A Life released in 2004. But to revisit his early books, on rivers and mountains and travel today, is to appreciate the author and the wonders of our own country anew. It is to see the mountains as the “visible bridge linking earth to heaven.”

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