KALIMPONG, India

For several weeks in January, 14 Colby students and their professors joined the river’s flow almost every morning as they made their way a few miles from the peaceful farm where they stayed to the bustling streets of the market town below. The community, located less than 100 miles from a high mountain pass that connects India to Lhasa, Tibet, served as an important gateway for trade between those nations during the first half of the 20th century.

The adventure of being on the road—of slowing down and using all one’s senses to take in the sounds, smells, and sights—is something that can’t be imagined, or read about in a book, or substituted with virtual reality.

And it’s one reason why these students traveled thousands of miles to experience this particular place in person. They weren’t tourists passing through in search of a dramatic view or an exotic photo for Instagram, but academic adventurers seeking to experience Kalimpong in a way that is deliberate and thoughtful, curious and intentional.

If more questions are sparked than answers found, that’s part of the point.

“This place is so deeply interesting, and deeply beautiful, and also the intersection of so many different things,” said Daniel Catrambone ’26, a psychology and English double major from Chester, N.J. “It’s really kind of a one-of-a-kind experience.”

A long journey

On that second flight, after the airplane rises through the capital city’s dense smog and turns to the northeast, the shining bank of clouds just visible through the left-side windows sharpens into a range of the Himalayas. The jagged mountain peaks jut fiercely into the vivid blue sky.

From Bagdogra, there remains a queasy, nerve-racking, two-and-a-half-hour-long drive on a road that winds through verdant forests, past villages, and up the Teesta River Valley, before the destination is reached: Kalimpong.

Colby students have been making this trek to the foothills of northern India for nearly 20 years, drawn by a Jan Plan course that over time has changed its name, location, department, and pedagogical goals.

In earlier years, the course was not accessible to students who received financial aid, but the interdisciplinary, writing-intensive course is now available to all Colby students because of assistance provided by DavisConnects. In recent years, DavisConnects has expanded study-abroad and other global opportunities, making it possible for students to experience the world in new ways.

With increased access, the course has proven popular, with nearly 100 students applying to participate this year. To be selected, students had to share how their coursework led them to apply and then respond to questions about the themes of the course. The three professors leading the program interviewed the finalists in person.

Asking big questions

The name of the course’s current iteration, Environmental Writing in the Himalayas: Practicing the Arts of Unmastery, was inspired by Unthinking Mastery, a book by postcolonial scholar and writer Julietta Singh. In the book, Singh argues that the drive toward mastery, the need to know, to control, and to determine outcomes, is inherently connected to colonialism, power, and violence.

During Jan Plan in 2023, Sammie Chilton ’25 kept thinking about the book, which she had read in Walker’s critical thinking course. Chilton’s association between the book and the course resonated for Walker, Braunstein, and instructor Brian Shuff, who co-teach the Jan Plan.

“The class is about unlearning a way of thinking that privileges end results over the process of learning itself,” Braunstein said. “We are learning about who we are as learners, about our biases, privileges, and ways of perceiving and relating to the human and non-human world.”

According to Shuff, this kind of approach can lead to more questions than answers, which is part of the process. “When you’re lost, your senses get more aware. You get sharper,” he said.

But that’s not to say the course is simple, soft, or “free of empirical undergirding,” Braunstein said. The opposite is true.

“This pedagogical mode asks us to be highly diligent, critically attuned, and cognitively nimble,” she said. “At the end, we come to understand what we should have been asking all along.”

Writing at the top of the world

Students are evaluated on their civic engagement and participation in writing, sharing, and class discussions in Kalimpong, as well as a final project that creatively engages the questions considered throughout the course. This year’s projects included poetry, short stories, a soundscape, a screenplay, a website, and much more. The breadth and scope of final projects reflect the depth of the experience, the professors said.

For Walker, who helped launch the College’s new concentration in literature and the environment, the Jan Plan course offers myriad opportunities for learning through writing. His expertise is in environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary field that emerged from a recognition that people must respond to climate change and other ecological emergencies in ways other than through the lens of technology and science.

“Climate change is actually a cultural problem,” Walker said. “This is a problem with lifestyles, consumption, the way that we view our relationship to the natural world. And so the environmental humanities start from the observation that if these are culturally caused problems you also need to incorporate cultural analyses and solutions as part of the mix.”

But how do you understand another culture? The Jan Plan in India, which provides a “crystal-fine” distillation of many of the lessons taught on campus, can help. Writing creatively and reading literature set in a part of the world that has faced many political and environmental upheavals broadens perspectives and gives clarity.

Greeting the day

“In a lot of our day there’s a lot of loudness, whether it’s talking with other people or just the sounds around us. So having that silent, meditative part is a way to think, reflect, and set myself up for the day,” said Julia Welsh ’26, a global studies and economics double major from Portsmouth, N.H. “Not to mention the views. It’s just really beautiful to look around and see these mountains and the sunrise. It’s really amazing.”

On a couple of mornings, the hikes are much shorter and lead to a homey, delicious destination: a small farm nearby where the farmers invite the group to help milk the cow and prepare and enjoy freshly made chai. Some students gather fodder for the livestock while others kindle a fire in the chulha, a traditional clay stove where the milk, tea leaves, and spices are heated and transformed into something ambrosial.

Roshi Pani ’24, an economics and mathematical sciences double major from Bhubaneswar, India, said the experience feels rich. For her, the concept of ‘unmastery’ has fundamental significance.

“I think it’s about unlearning a lot of the power structures,” she said. “It’s really unlearning so many presumptions you have about people from different social classes, castes, backgrounds, animals, plants. It’s been really fun to engage with nature and community in such a close way. Even going on a hike every morning at the break of dawn.”

From animal care to opera

One day, the students helped at an outdoor spay-and-neuter clinic for Kalimpong street animals, assisting veterinarian Dr. Deo Prakash Pandey and his staff by comforting the dogs as they woke up from anesthesia.

At night, the group bundled up in a chilly rooftop cafe to learn about a recent environmental disaster. A glacial lake high in the mountains overflowed its banks last fall and caused a flash flood on the nearby Teesta River, killing people and erasing infrastructure down the river valley. The disaster was connected to climate change and was as predictable as it was terrible, according to geologists. Three months later, the traces of the flood were still fresh in the valley.

The celebrated Indian writer Prajwal Parajuly, who grew up near Kalimpong, spent three days leading an intensive writing workshop with the students, who shared drafts of fiction they had written while in India. The Center for the Arts and Humanities funded Parajuly’s workshop.

On another memorable day, the class visited a Tibetan cultural center for an opera and dance performance that swirled in a kaleidoscope of sound, color, and whirling motion. Tens of thousands of Tibetans who fled their homeland after the 1959 uprising against the Chinese occupation settled in India. Cultural centers like this one help ensure younger generations don’t lose their identity as Tibetans. “We are a civilization in exile,” an official at the cultural center told the group. “But Tibetan culture and identity is very much intact.”

Previously, he had asked the professors if it was okay to speak frankly with the students—the modern history of Tibet can be a fraught subject. He didn’t want to step on toes. Not to worry, Walker said. “We are a community of curious learners. We want to hear it all.”

Embracing the spirit of play

For the STEM-oriented student, the search for a new perspective is part of what drew Benjelloun to India. For her and many of the Colby contingent, embracing playfulness was a surprising bonus. Play, the subject of a two-year theme of the Center for the Arts and Humanities, is something that’s being taken seriously at the College right now.

“I think it’s really easy for students to be really perfectionist and competitive—not even with each other, but with themselves,” said Isabel Grimes ’25, an English major from Brookline, Mass. “And so I think this trip has been a good opportunity for us to play.”

It felt especially important because of her unique health situation. For the last five years, she has lived with an autoimmune disease she contracted after encountering waterborne parasites while camping in Montana. Grimes was in and out of hospitals and on powerful immune-suppressing drugs before shifting to a more holistic approach to her health.

The thought of going to rural India for several weeks, far from her doctors, was both alluring and nerve-racking. Alluring won.

“I didn’t want to live a small life,” she said.

A time to reflect

“I feel like everyone’s really tired, but it’s a good type of tired because you feel like you’ve done something, and like you’re learning,” said Kai Goode ’24 of North Woodstock, N.H., an environmental policy major with a minor in economics. “We journal a lot, and we always share. We have a sharing circle at night, and it’s a time for us to be reflective and vulnerable as a group, talking about things that were hard for us. Things we learned that were new.”

Rural India can be a place of extremes: cultural richness and wealth inequality, natural beauty and problematic infrastructure. For Western eyes, it does not always look like an easy place to live. But looks can be deceiving.

“I think a lot of times we have such U.S.-centric perspectives, and we always like to compare. That’s just human behavior. But India is a different culture,” Khatri said. “Such a diverse and chaotic society. You have to look at it through India’s lens. It’s very chaotic, but there’s no other way India would run. This is the only way. And the strength of India, I would say, is structured chaos.”

Structured chaos. There’s chaos in the Teesta River still finding its new level and beauty in the warm smiles of the villagers who live near the farm. There’s chaos and also beauty on the roads, the rivers that lead down to Kalimpong town, and in the high, cloud-shrouded mountains that, even when not visible, loom over the region.

On the day that the students leave, an Indian teen who lives in the village and gets to know them every year confesses that she will cry, even though she always promises herself that she won’t. But it’s okay, she said. Everyone cries that day, from the joy of making new friends and the sadness of leaving them behind.

Perhaps that’s another kind of unmastery: the act of bravely opening your heart to a new place and the people you meet there.