The Viceroy's Artist

Somewhere in the foothills of the Himalayas, a sixty-two-year-old English painter falls off his sketching stool. Overweight, asthmatic and prone to attacks of epilepsy, Edward Lear is nevertheless on a mission – to paint the mighty Kanchenjunga for his patron, the Viceroy of India. Lear is an oddity, an outsider, simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the world the British have built in India. Even as he battles the fatigue of travelling on pony carts, jampans and trains, Lear reflects on thos