News > Deepali Sinha, mountaineer who led India's first all-women expedition

Deepali Sinha, mountaineer who led India's first all-women expedition

In 1961, a teenage daughter in Calcutta asked her father: "What is mountaineering?" Deepali Sinha had wondered after signing up for a 32-day government-funded mountaineering course which was to take place in Darjeeling. Five years later, she would find herself drinking sherbet served by Indira Gandhi before leading seven Bengali women -- six of whom spoke neither English nor Hindi -- to a 19,000-ft rocky Himalayan glacier called Ronti.