Name: Bachendri Pal
Born: 24 May 1954, Nakuri, Uttarkashi
State: Uttarakhand
Sport: Mountaineering
Early life
Bachendri Pal was born on 24 May 1954 in Nakuri, a village in the Uttarkashi district of what was then Uttar Pradesh and is now Uttarakhand, into a family of modest means. She first climbed a mountain at the age of 12, reaching the top of a 13,123-foot peak on a school picnic with her classmates. Her parents were reluctant to send her to college, but her school principal persuaded them to, and she became the first girl from her village to graduate. She went on to take a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in education, and along the way won a rifle-shooting competition against male and female competitors alike. She then joined the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, where she was named best student of her course and marked out by her instructors as, in the phrase used at the time, “Everest material”. In 1982, while still training, she climbed Gangotri I (21,900 feet) and Rudugaira (19,091 feet), and around the same time took a job as an instructor at the National Adventure Foundation, which ran a mountaineering school for women.
Everest, 1984
In 1984 Pal was chosen for Everest ‘84, India’s fourth expedition to the mountain, one of six women among a team of seventeen climbers. The group flew to Kathmandu in March and began its ascent in May. On the night of 15-16 May, an avalanche struck Camp III at around 24,000 feet while Pal and her tent-mate were asleep; she later described being jolted awake by the impact and then finding herself buried in cold, compacted snow. More than half the team was forced to withdraw through injury or exhaustion in the days that followed. Pal continued, and on 23 May 1984, at 1:07pm local time, she reached the summit, at 29,084 feet, alongside the Sherpa sirdar Ang Dorje and other climbers, in winds of around 100 kilometres an hour and temperatures as low as minus 40°C. The summit itself offered barely enough room to stand, with a sheer drop on every side, and the climbers anchored themselves with their ice axes before allowing themselves to take in the view.
She became the first Indian woman, and the fifth woman in the world, to reach the summit of Everest, before making the descent safely back to base camp, and returned to India to congratulations from the President, the Prime Minister and the industrialist J. R. D. Tata among many others.
Later expeditions
Pal went on to lead a series of all-women expeditions. In 1993 she led the Indo-Nepalese Women’s Everest Expedition, in which eighteen climbers reached the summit, seven of them women. In 1994 she directed the Great Indian Women’s Rafting Voyage, in which 18 women rafted 2,155 kilometres down the Ganges from Haridwar to Calcutta over 39 days, and in 1997 she led the first Indian Women’s Trans-Himalayan Expedition, an eight-woman trek of 4,500 kilometres across more than 40 mountain passes that reached Indira Col at 20,100 feet. She later headed the Tata Steel Adventure Foundation, training generations of mountaineers, and took part in relief work after the 2013 north India floods. She led the Tata Steel Adventure Foundation for many years, and the company gave her a formal farewell in 2019 when she stepped back from that role. She wrote an autobiography, “Everest – My Journey to the Top”, published by the National Book Trust, in which she wrote candidly about the avalanche and the fear that came with it.
Achievements and awards
First Indian woman to climb Mount Everest (1984); Padma Shri (1984); Arjuna Award (1986); National Adventure Award (1994); honorary doctorate from Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University (1997); Virangana Lakshmibai Rashtriya Samman, its first recipient (2013); Padma Bhushan (2019); Uttarakhand Gaurav Samman (2021).
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
