Opinion With Hugh Gantzer’s death, the end of the road for old-fashioned travel writing

Travelling well into their late 80s, stopping only with the start of the Covid pandemic, the Gantzers are credited with about 3,000 articles, a dozen books, and a number of TV shows, including the ’80s series Looking Beyond With Hugh & Colleen Gantzer on Doordarshan, a show that made them household names.

In 2025, they were awarded the Padma Shri. When informed about the award, Hugh is said to have replied he would have to decline if it was just for him. He was assured the award was for both him and for Colleen, posthumously. “They always wrote together and I always found it remarkable. I used to ask them, ‘What, does Hugh write the first sentence and Colleen the second sentence’?” laughs Alter. “It was a wonderful collaboration and that is what is memorable, that the two of them spoke in one voice.”

A former Navy officer, Hugh’s postings took him all over the country, cementing his love for travel. As a commander in the Navy, his days and travels in Kerala resulted in an abiding interest in the state. It led to the Indian Tourism Development Corporation commissioning them to write a book on Kerala in 1974. So, they took off on their Vespa with their 12-year old son Peter. That journey put them firmly on the road for ever.

“In those days Vespas were imported from Italy and my father had bought one from the Canteen. We travelled through Kerala, my dad riding the scooter, mum behind him, and then there was a duffel bag on the carrier behind, on which I rode. Dad would tie me and mom together with a rope to ensure I didn’t fall off from the back. That was my first experience of the craziness of the travel they used to do,” laughs Peter, who divides his time between Coonoor and Mussoorie. On another trip through Tamil Nadu, Peter remembers his parents starting their day as early as 4 am to get sunrise shots and ending it only at night, after each had spent at least an hour-and-a half writing about their day in their diaries and comparing notes.

Even as Hugh, who was born in Patna in an Anglo-Indian family, along with Colleen, who he married in 1960 and who shared his love for travel, set roots in Mussoorie, where his father who headed the survey of Bihar and Orissa had made home, they continued to branch away in all directions. From the Himalayas to south India, from Sri Lanka to China, they travelled across the country and world, discovering and documenting what they saw. Through the ’70s, they contributed columns regularly to The Illustrated Weekly and The Indian Express, among other publications.

Travelling on invitations by tourism boards and destinations alike, their writing followed a more traditional template, never really meandering off the chosen path. As Alter says, “They were certainly more traditional travel writers in the sense that they had a set destination, they visited the place, looked at everything from the natural history to the cultural aspects and then wrote about it… whereas travel writing has evolved to a point where not everybody has to have a specific destination, and you can write about some of the things that an earlier generation ignored, whether it is personal encounters, personal thoughts or things that you see out of the corner of your eye rather than straight in front of you,” says Alter.

A vital presence in Mussoorie, Hugh was vocal in championing the hill station’s cause. As founder of the Save Mussoorie Society and the Surahit Himalaya, he fought to stem its slide into unplanned and unregulated development. “He and Colleen fought for the town, against limestone quarrying,” says Landour-based writer Ganesh Saili who knew the Gantzers for over 50 years. Theirs was an important voice in stopping quarrying in the area.

After the death of his wife, Hugh continued living at their over 150-year-old OckBrook Cottage in Mussoorie, the hill station they chronicled in many of their writings and in Mussoorie’s Mythhistory, a book of 12 surreal stories that blended fact and fiction.

Hugh, along with Colleen, will be remembered for their travel writing but there was more to their literary pursuits than just that. “I think one of the things people don’t remember about them is the series of thrillers they wrote under the pseudonym Shyam Dave. Those were published years ago and whenever I met them I would ask them to reissue those books because they were the first mysteries and thrillers being written in India in English,” says Alter.

On Wednesday, Hugh Gantzer was laid to rest at the Camel’s Back Cemetery, a corner of Mussoorie that has enlivened many mysteries and spooky tales.

The writer is national features editor, The Indian Express.

devyani.onial@expressindia.com