Tintin finally meets Chang in Tintin in Tibet (Left) and Zhang Chongren (Right)

One of the most compelling things about Tintin in Tibet is its unabashed demand on our capacity to put faith in prophetic visions. At the beginning of the book, Tintin has a nightmare about his friend, Chang, lying injured in a snow-covered land. This fearful vision turns into a moment of truth the very next morning, as Chang’s death in a plane crash is reported in the Daily Reporter. Despite repeated warnings from others, Tintin remains unshakeable in his resolve to save Chang and sets out for the Nepal Himalayas. As he embarks on this unusual quest to rescue a friend he believes to be alive, the readers, too, are required to take a leap in the dark.

Friendship is irrational — affection between friends often defies logical behaviour. The conflict between reason and emotions informs the core of the book. (Captain Haddock, who opposes Tintin’s ‘foolish’ plans to save Chang all along, cannot give up on him. Even more, at a crucial point in the narrative he is ready to sacrifice his life to save Tintin.) “The accident happened days ago,” Tintin tells an incredulous Captain Haddock, “but yesterday I saw Chang alive…calling for help, but alive!” Suddenly Tintin’s dream — he calls it “a sort of premonition” — becomes more real than the news of his friend’s death. Chang becomes alive because he is imagined to be so. And the world around suddenly seems to be full of signs that affirm his conviction.

As the Captain tries to dissuade Tintin from his foolhardy enterprise, a Pekinese dog, also called Chang, is scolded by its mistress for speaking to Snowy, “a common mongrel”. Then a chambermaid lets out a roaring sneeze, “Chang” and apologises, “I’b got a terrible cold id by dose.” Telepathy overwhelms Captain Haddock’s reasonable argument. Tintin’s faith in his instincts proves more substantial than evidences.

In the course of his adventures, Tintin is faced with a series of provisional endings each time he faces resistance from a number of people: first, the airport manager, fiddling endlessly with a rubber band, dismisses the possibility of Chang surviving the crash; then the sherpa, Tharkey, refuses (initially) to accompany Tintin to the site of the crash; and, finally, there is the Captain, who gives up on the mission several times but cannot abandon young Tintin either. These false endings are overcome by new beginnings. Faith wins over reason again and again; selfless love conquers self-protection. The grand beginning comes at the very end — heralding a new phase in Chang’s life, as also in his friendship with Tintin.

For Hergé, too, Tintin in Tibet (his favourite Tintin) was about new beginnings. The idea for the book was suggested to him by one of his assistants, Jacques Van Melkebeke, in 1954. Before the album was serialized in Le Petit Vingtième between 1958 and 1959, Hergé was himself living a nightmare. His marriage with his first wife, Germaine, was breaking up. He dreamt he was surrounded by a white, featureless world, friendless and alone. These haunting visions made their way into Tintin in Tibet, into the stark, snow-bound landscape along the ardous journey that Tintin undertakes to rescue his friend, and in the desolate time that Chang spends in the cave, kept alive by the yeti’s hospitality. There is even an allusion to Germain in the furtive reference to the Nightingale of Milan, Bianca Castafiore. Captain Haddock’s outburst, on hearing the porters play Castafiore’s coloratura on their radio, captures Hergé’s increasing disaffection with his wife.

The most important human presence in the book is, of course, Chang, modelled on Hergé’s friend, Zhang Chongren, with whom he had lost touch during the Fifties. The book was thus a personal tribute to a ‘lost’ friend, who became a street-sweeper during the Cultural Revolution, and met Hergé several years after the book was first published in 1960. Beyond the autobiographical aspect of the book, it was also recognized and appreciated as a major introductory volume on Tibet, in the way it remained attentive towards that country’s culture, life and traditions. Not only was it voted as the greatest French-language graphic novel, Tintin also became the first ever fictional character on whom the Dalai Lama bestowed the Truth of Light award in 2006.