Opinion With Hugh Gantzer’s death, the passing of an era of textured travel writing

Hugh Gantzer and his wife Colleen came of age as travel writers when the world was still encountered second hand — when access to distant places was limited and when journeys retained the gravity of occasions. What animated their work was an insistence that places revealed themselves slowly, through conversations and contradictions, through the chaos that animates metropolises or the quiet that lingers in the countryside. They wrote of these as one might speak to a fellow traveller — offering readers the confidence that the world could be approached thoughtfully rather than consumed in a big greedy gulp. Hugh’s death, two years after Colleen’s, marks the passing of this older era of travel writing, one that resisted grand gestures in favour of a textured narrative.

Initially commissioned by the India Tourism Development Corporation to produce a travel guide on Kerala, they went on to create dozens of travel books, several television documentaries and countless newspaper columns over the decades. Even as Hugh’s career as a naval officer carried him across the country, they made their home in Mussoorie, embedding themselves in a loosely gathered community of artists and writers — among them Ruskin Bond and Stephen Alter — bound by a shared belief in writing against haste, in attention as a defining principle.

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As travel increasingly narrows into bucket lists and curated reels, the legacy the Gantzers leave behind is less a matter of nostalgia than of courtesy: To look closely, listen carefully. And to remember that a life on the road carries both the authority of having been there and the humility of knowing that no journey is ever the whole story.