Robert Drummond died in 1887 but Edmund Smyth was still alive when Webber’s book was published in 1902. He was an active but silent Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, apparently indifferent to the claims made on his behalf by others. But then he was, as Thomas Hughes had said, the ‘queerest, coolest fish’. Indeed, he left only one really solid piece of public evidence about his Tibetan travels, a ‘splendid specimen’ of a wild yak that is to be found stuffed and mounted at Leeds Museum.
Edmund Smyth seems only once to have ventured into public print. This was in the form of a letter published in the Proceedings of the Geographical Society for the year 1882 and written after Smyth had received a report – false, as it turned out – of the death from cholera of the great Bhotia explorer known simply as ‘The Chief Pundit’, Nain Singh Rawat. Perhaps it was in this context, as the man who selected the first generation of that remarkable group of Indian explorers known collectively as the Pundits, that Edmund Smyth wished to be remembered.
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The story of the Pundits has been told before, most notably and with the greatest artistic licence by Rudyard Kipling. In Kim the Pundits are linked inextricably with the political struggle between British India and Tsarist Russia known as the Great Game. In fact, the Pundits were never ‘players of the Game’ in the political sense, whatever Kipling and British public opinion in India may have wanted to believe. Secrecy, disguise and political subterfuge were certainly vital ingredients in their work, but the intelligence they gathered was essentially topographical and their masters were always the Survey of India.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the lack of accurate geographical information from beyond India’s borders had become very apparent. Nowhere was this deficiency more obvious than in the vast unexplored regions of Tibet, where the famous Chinese imperial edict – that no Mogul, Hindustani, Pathan or feringhi should be admitted – was now being enforced with ever-increasing strictness. But if Europeans and other foreigners were forbidden to enter Tibet there were certain groups of semi-Tibetans, such as the Bhotias, who could do so.
The Survey of India had made good use of Indian assistants for many years but it had never thought to train them beyond a certain level or use them in anything but a subordinate capacity. It was now proposed that a number of carefully selected men from the border areas be engaged on a modest salary of sixteen rupees rising to twenty a month, to be trained in all the necessary skills, given an appropriate cover and disguise and then sent off on various missions across the border. The first of these men came from Johar.
In 1861 Edmund Smyth had appointed Nain Singh Rawat, the sharpest of the three Bhotia cousins who had worked for the Schlaginrweits, as the headmaster of the government vernacular school in his home village:
In 1862–3 I was in correspondence with Colonel (then Captain) Montgomerie of the Survey of India – I think it was about an expedition I was going to make into Tibet – and hearing he wanted some trustworthy men to train as explorers in that region I strongly recommended him to engage some of these Bhotias, both on account of their sound knowledge of the Tibetan language and also because they had the entrée into the country. He asked me to select two and send them to him to be trained. I accordingly chose our friend Nain Singh, who was then employed as a Pundit (or schoolmaster) of the government school of Milum, in Johar, and the second man I chose was his cousin Manee or Maun Singh.
In 1863 Nain Singh and Mani Singh Rawat were sent down to the Great Trigonometrical Survey Offices at Dehra Dun, where they were first given practical instruction in such matters as taking latitude by sextant, direction by compass and height by boiling water. Then they began a more unusual course of instruction under the personal direction of Captain T. G. Montgomerie, a surveyor with a distinguished record of fieldwork in Kashmir. They learned to measure distances not with chains or perambulators but by being drilled by a sergeant-major with his pace-stick to take regular paces – two thousand paces to the mile and 31½ inches to each pace – with every hundredth pace being registered by the dropping of a bead on a rosary: not a standard Hindu or Buddhist rosary, which carries one hundred and eight beads, but a special Survey of India rosary eight beads short. They learned also to code their notes and measurements in the form of written prayers and to conceal them inside specially-adapted Tibetan prayer-wheels, and how to memorize details by constant repetition as they walked along, chanting them aloud in the way that Tibetans chant their prayers. They were taught how to assume all manner of disguises that would allow them to pass as traders or pilgrims or whatever role seemed best suited to the occasion. Finally they acquired their own professional working identities, noms de guerre that came usually in the form of a fairly simple sobriquet or by reversing the first and last letters of their names. Thus Nain Singh became known as ‘the Chief Pundit’ or ‘No. 1’ and his cousin Mani Singh as ‘the Patwar’ or ‘GM’ (from Mani SinG).
In the next few years Smyth sent other recruits from the Rawat clan to join this remarkable brotherhood of explorer-spies. Nain Singh’s second cousin, Kalian Singh, became known as the ‘Third Pundit’ or ‘GK’, and another rather younger cousin, Kishen Singh, was known as ‘Krishna’ or ‘AK’. It was this last cousin, Kishen Singh, who in time inherited Nain Singh’s mantle and rose to become the greatest of the Pundit explorers. Appropri ately enough, he was the son of Bir Singh, that other Bhotia brother who had helped Moorcroft and Hearsey so many decades earlier.
Partly because of the clandestine nature of their work, partly because that work has been regarded, since Indian Independ ence, as being in some way unpatriotic, the achievements of the Pundits have never been widely acknowledged. Yet it was through them that the outside world first gained detailed information about the Tibetan interior. When they entered the country only the Manasarovar area, one tiny corner in Western Tibet, had been mapped with accuracy. The rest of Tibet, all its river systems, its great lakes and vast mountain ranges, was still terra incognita, a blank waiting to be filled. At only one crossing point along its entire length had the course of Tibet’s main artery, been accurately determined. The Pundits’ first order was to put the Tsangpo clearly and accurately on the map.
Their earliest journey began in the summer of 1864; the same summer in which Smyth and his fellow-shikaris visited the sources of the Brahmaputra. In fact, as Nain Singh and Mani Singh made their way northwards from Milam they met Smyth coming the other way – a most inopportune meeting as it turned out, since the Tibetan border guards had been fully alerted. After conferring with Smyth the two cousins returned to Dehra Dun and made arrangements to enter Tibet by way of Kathmandu. However, this second attempt was equally unsuccessful; an unusually perceptive Dzongpon on the Tibetan border refused to believe that they were horse-dealers from the Punjab border-state of Bashahr. It was, he pointed out, not only the wrong time of the year for horse-trading but also the wrong place.
It was at this juncture that Nain Singh’s strength of character first began to assert itself. Mani Singh admitted defeat and set off across Western Nepal towards his native Kumaon but ‘No. 1’ hung on in Nepal and eventually talked his way back into Tibet, this time disguised as a Ladakhi trader, complete with pigtail. He and a servant named Chhumbel managed to attach themselves to a caravan bound for Ladakh that was heading north to the Great River, and then westwards along the Tasam, the Lhasa-Leh highway.
They reached the Tsangpo in August 1865, but it was not the happiest of occasions, for while the travellers waited to be ferried across the river in coracles they saw one of these unstable-looking craft overturn, drowning its three passengers. They crossed the river higher up and eventually arrived at the large monastery of Tradom, beside the Lhasa-Leh trade route. Here Nain Singh had to choose between sticking with the Ladakhi caravan as it made its way westward up the Tsangpo valley or making his own way independently downriver towards Lhasa. The temptation to take the easier course must have been great but Nain Singh resisted it; he announced that he was sick and
the caravan moved off without him.
It was too risky to think of going on to Lhasa without company so Nain Singh and Chhumbel sat it out at Tradom monastery and waited for another escort to come by. A month later a large body of traders from Ladakh appeared and Nain Singh introduced himself as a pilgrim in need of protection. The giving of such protection, as with alms or shelter, conferred merit on those who gave it so there were no objections to this most devout of pilgrims accompanying the caravan to Lhasa. Seeing him noisily immersed in his prayers by day and silently preoccupied with his curious rituals by night – always performed at some distance from the tents – the Ladakhis left Nain Singh undisturbed. Nor did they find it odd that while they covered some sections of the journey down the Tsangpo valley by boat their pilgrim preferred to pace steadily along the river bank.
After a long halt at Shigatse, Tibet’s second city and capital of the Tsang province, the caravan left the river and crossing over the mountains in bitterly cold winter weather arrived in Lhasa in January 1866. Nain Singh hired a couple of rooms on the top floor of the caravanserai where the Ladakhi traders had established themselves and from its windows took observations of the stars with his sextant, putting the Holy City firmly and indisputably on the map.
At first Nain Singh explored Lhasa without any fears for his safety, even securing a brief audience with the Gyalpo Rinpoche or Dalai Lama, a ‘fair and handsome boy’ of thirteen who clearly exercised no real authority at the Lhasa court. But after a month his funds began to run out and to supplement them Nain Singh started to give lessons in bookkeeping. This revelation of Western learning aroused the suspicions of two Moslem merchants who questioned him so persistently that he was forced to reveal his true identity. Soon afterwards he saw the Dzongpon of Kyirong riding through the streets of Lhasa – the same man who had penetrated the Pundits’ original cover as Bashahri horse-traders. These two events were followed by a third – the public execution of a Chinese monk – which convinced Nain Singh that Lhasa was no longer a safe place for him. To his relief he learned that the Ladakhi traders were almost ready to return to Leh with a consignment of Chinese brick-tea and would be happy to find a place for him in their caravan.
They left Lhasa in mid-April and for the first six weeks Nain Singh retraced his footsteps to Tradom monastery. West of the monastery the Tasam road never veered far from the river; it was a well-worn track marked at intervals by lapchas – which made the taking of compass bearings much easier for Nain Singh. A frequent sight that made a great impression on him were the special messengers galloping between staging posts, exhausted men with cracked faces and sunken eyes, often with wounds and sores on their bodies. This relay system was the key to Tibet’s security, for these messengers were required to cover the 800 miles between Lhasa and Gartok in twenty days and were forbidden to halt except to eat and change horses. The letters they carried were tucked inside their long-sleeved, all-enveloping chogas and closed at the breast with a special seal that only the official to whom the letter was addressed was allowed to break.
Early in June the caravan crossed the grazing meadows of Tuksum – seen in the far distance by Webber only two years earlier – where sheep, goats, horses and yak were gathered in vast numbers. From here they began a slow climb which took them to the head of the valley and the crest of the Maryum La. According to Captain Montgomerie’s account of the Pundit’s journey, based on Nain Singh’s notes and a verbal report, the road led ‘to the north of the main source of the Brahmaputra, and within sight of the gigantic glaciers which give rise to the great river’. Unable to leave the caravan route Nain Singh could only observe this source, which he fixed at ‘about north latitude 30½° and east longitude 82°’.
From the Maryum La the highway went down past the ten-mile-long Gunchhu lake and on to Manasarovar, where Nain Singh and Chhumbel left the caravan and crossed over the border to Milam. In due course Nain Singh reported to Montgomerie at Mussoorie, where the Survey had established a station on the Landour ridge. ‘The Pundit’ had been out of British territory for eighteen months.
From the Survey of India’s point of view Nain Singh’s journey was a triumphant vindication of Western scientific method and training, even though it owed far more to resourcefulness and courage than to anything else. But it was a method that worked – and was too good not to be tried again. Montgomerie saw an obvious and tempting gap of unexplored country between the territory that he himself had surveyed in Ladakh and that covered by Nain Singh and others since Moorcroft’s time in the Manasarovar region:
It appeared to me very desirable that this gap should be filled up, the more especially as it embraced a portion of what was said to be the course of the great river Indus, a portion, moreover, that had never been traversed by any European.
Montgomerie was aware that a number of Europeans – the Schlagintweits as well as Moorcroft and Hearsey – had travelled down part of what they had believed to be the main branch of the Indus, but he took a different view: ‘The information I have received led me to think that there was a large eastern branch of that river.’ The search for this eastern branch, as well as the exploration of the fabled goldfields that were said to lie beyond became the Pundits’ next objective.
By now Nain Singh and Mani Singh had been joined by the ‘Third Pundit’, a strapping young man named Kalian Singh Rawat. The three cousins chose to make their approach by way of Badrinath and the Mana pass and in the familiar guise of Bashahri horse-traders. After collecting a good stock of merchandise and asses to carry them, they crossed into Tibet in midsummer 1867 and in less than a fortnight had reached the Gartok branch of the upper Indus, known to the Tibetans as the Gartang Chhu. Skirting the tents of Gartok they climbed the mountains to the north-east and found themselves on a vast and desolate plateau known as the antelope plain. A grim six-day ride across this waterless tableland brought them to the banks of a large river flowing towards the north. Nomads camped nearby confirmed that they had reached the Senge-Chhu or Lion River – the name by which the Indus is known in Tibet.
Their satisfaction at having reached what was clearly the larger tributary of the Indus was cut short, however, by the hostility of the nomads when they announced that they were horse-traders from Bashahr. The nomad chief flatly refused to accept their story, for if they had been Bashahris, he said, they would never have dared to admit it. Some Bashahri traders had brought smallpox into Tibet the year before and as a result all travellers from Bashahr were forbidden entry to Tibet. The leader went on to assert, with devastating accuracy, that in his opinion they were Bhotias from Milam and very probably working with the British.
Concealing their shock as best they could the three Pundits tried to persuade the chief that, whoever they might be, they intended no harm. Eventually it was decided that Mani Singh would stay behind in the nomad encampment, together with the asses and their loads, while the other two explored further afield. At Nain Singh’s direction, Kalian Singh set off with one porter, with orders to follow the Indus south to its source – while the Chief Pundit himself crossed the river and set out northwards for the goldfields.
A hard four-day climb over a high snow-range brought Nain Singh out on a new plateau, a windy plain dotted with small piles of earth like ant hills – the excavations of the fabled goldfield of Thok Jalung. There is a curious story told by Herodotus of a great desert north of India inhabited by giant ants, who threw up nuggets of gold as they burrowed in the ground. Nain Singh’s visit provided some support for this story, for while there were no giant ants he did find large numbers of miners living with their families more or less permanently underground. Even as he approached the first diggings he could hear, but not see, the diggers singing in chorus as they worked. It was then high summer, but Nain Singh thought it the coldest place he had ever visited, with a chilling wind blowing ceaselessly across the 17,000-foot plateau. It was to avoid this wind that the goldminers stayed below ground, pitching tents inside their digs and sleeping in a most ex
traordinary position: ‘They invariably draw their knees close up to their heads and rest on their knees and elbows, huddling every scrap of clothing they can muster on to their backs.’ Despite their privations, Nain Singh found the miners and their families to be remarkably cheerful and always ready to break into song – and if their methods seemed a little crude that did not prevent them from digging up plenty of gold; even as he watched Nain Singh saw unearthed a nugget weighing more than two pounds.
While the Chief Pundit was visiting the goldfields of Thok Jalung, the Third Pundit made his way up the valley of the Senge-Chhu. The river’s course took him south-east for some distance and then swung round to the south, leading him directly towards Mount Kailas – but also into a region notorious as prime bandit country. Its reputation appeared fully justified when Kalian Singh’s porter was ambushed by three nomads. The attackers had been waiting for a moment when the two travellers became separated and when this happened they jumped on the porter and began to wrest his pack from him. Fortunately, Kalian Singh saw what was happening and came to the rescue; he swung one assailant round by his pigtail and threw him to the ground, whereupon the other two ran off.
A Mountain in Tibet Page 15
