Breaking Rocks and Barriers

by Sudipta Sengupta

English 268 pages 1 edition

‘These trips to the Himalayas developed in me a deep love for the mountains.’ A pioneering geologist and a mountaineer trained by Tenzing Norgay, Sudipta Sengupta is one of the first Indian women to set foot on Antarctica and one of only nineteen women so far to be awarded the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (1991). In Breaking Rocks and Barriers , she narrates her many adventures as a geologist studying and doing fieldwork in remote areas around the world–from unexpected encounters with snakes in the Jaduguda mines of Bihar and trekking across a ‘black glacier’ in Norway to being engulfed by a thundercloud in Sweden and being greeted by a flock of penguins in Antarctica. In between are memorable mountaineering experiences, whether it is the first women’s expedition to Ronti peak in the Himalayas in 1967 or the all-women expedition to an unexplored peak, which they were the first to climb and name. Sengupta writes fondly of the many people–strangers, fellow geologists, mentors, mountaineering enthusiasts–she met in the course of her life, of the friends and colleagues she lost, and provides a rare glimpse into what it meant to choose a career in science as a woman half a century ago.