On 17th of October 2017, Google decided to put up a doodle to honour Nain Singh Rawat on his 187th Birthday. Who was this man of whom I knew not? I started looking into the various articles on the internet, wrote a piece then but never went on post. Fast forward to early 2026, post returning from a wonderful experience at Sikkim, got to hear a podcast (Books and Us) done by a close friend, Ranjit Monga, where during the conversation with Pema Wankchuk, the author of Khangchendzonga- Sacred Summit, he broached the topic of the pundits. This got me reading on the subject once again and was amazed at the revelations which connected me back to the work done eight years ago.
The Background
In the late 1700s, the British
East India Company undertook a series of surveys in undivided India to obtain
precise geographical knowledge about the territories it would rule. The series
of surveys collectively undertaken was known as the Great
Trigonometric Survey of India. It was credited with having been the first real effort
to plot the vastness of the subcontinent from the north to the south and measured
the heights of many Himalayan peaks including Everest, K2, and Kanchenjunga. By
the 1850s, the British East India Company’s sway over India was near
completion, they feared the Russian expansion from the North. The Tibetan
region stood between the two powers. The British needed intelligence
information on the region. However, Tibet forbade the entry of foreigners; it
closed all its political borders and trade routes including the trade roads
through Nepal via India to safeguard their gold fields. So, the office of the Great Trigonometric
Survey of India, Dehradun, devised an ingenious plan to recruit a few local
school teachers, who were referred to as pundits to survey the trade
routes running from Nepal to the Tibetan region. These pundits disguised
as lamas, traders and merchants, could venture deep into Tibet and Central Asia
without arousing suspicion.
At the Survey’s Dehradun
headquarters, the pundits were trained to use the sextant; they were
taught celestial navigation and to gauge altitude by measuring the temperature
of boiling water. They were trained to measure distances, storing data and
concealing instruments in the most ingenious ways. The pundits, with a
poetic bent, often turned their observations into poems and recited them during
their travels. Here are some tales of the heroic pundits who risked
their lives on foreign soil in the most difficult terrain and yet achieved
great success. This was also the time when Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, was on
the British throne and ruled the waves.
Nain Singh
Nain Singh was the man from the
Kumaon Hills. In 1863, post his selection, he went to the Great Trigonometrical
Survey office in Dehradun to undergo training for two years. In 1865, Nain
crossed into Tibet from Nepal along with a party of traders. As luck would have
it, one night the traders slipped away with his money for the trip and he was
left stranded in an unknown land. Fortunately, he still had his box of
instruments that were concealed in a box with a false bottom. The instruments
included a sextant, a thermometer, a chronometer and a compass plus he had a
rosary which had hundred beads instead of the usual hundred and eight. Nain
would slip one bead for every hundred steps he took and, in a prayer-wheel,
slipped pieces of paper in which he recorded compass bearings and distances.
Nain Singh begged his way across
the terrain and in January 1866 he entered the Forbidden City of Lhasa where he
even visited Dalai Lama briefly. He would quietly go to the roof of the inn
where he stayed to use his sextant to determine the latitude by measuring the
angular altitude of the stars. He used his thermometer to record the boiling
point of water and, using his scientific calculations, was able to estimate
that Lhasa was at an altitude of 3420 metres which was just a hundred metres
lower than the more recent measurement. After some time, Nain left Lhasa and
headed west for 800 kms along River Tsangpo. After two months, he slipped back
into India in October 1867 via a sacred Mansarovar Lake.
While on his second voyage, Nain
explored western Tibet where he stumbled across the gold mines of Thok Jalung. In the summer of 1874 Nain Singh was sent to
survey a route from Leh to Lhasa by a much more northerly path than the one he
had taken in 1865. This was Nain’s third and final clandestine penetration into
Tibet. Nain Singh's route now took him on to new places including the great
lacustrine plain of central Tibet that were virtually unknown to the world till
then. Although he retired from exploration, he continued to serve the Indian
government with the training of younger explorers.
Nain Singh was awarded a gold
medal from the Royal Geographical Society. Colonel Yule, addressing the Royal
Geographic Society at the time of its presentation of the medal, said of Nain
Singh, " His observations have added a larger amount of important
knowledge to the map of Asia than those of any other living man." In
2004, the Government of India released a stamp in honour of Nain Singh.
Kinthup
When the British were surveying the Himalayas, they were sceptical about the origin of the Brahmaputra. Some said it was the same as the Tsangpo river from Tibet, and some claimed that both the rivers are different. The British surveyors in 1880 hired a Chinese lama and a pundit called Kinthup, a Sikkimese Lepcha, to figure out the truth. Both of them were supposed to be on a pilgrimage in Tibet. The plan was Kinthup had to throw 500 specially marked wooden logs into the Tsangpo. Men appointed by Survey Official, Captain Harman, were going to keep a watch in the Brahmaputra for the logs. If the marked logs reached India, both rivers could be declared one and the same.
The journey started in August,
1880 and soon the lama and Kinthup reached Lhasa. Lama being a fun-loving man, was
not too happy about walking so much and
facing the rugged terrain of Tibet which was covered in snow most of their journey.
Soon, at a place called Thun Tsung, the lama fell in love with the wife of his
host. The husband of the woman found out about this misadventure, and as
compensation, the lama and Kinthup were made to pay everything they had to save
their lives. In the next town, the lama sold Kinthup as a slave and rode off on
a horse with all the instruments they had for survey.
For seven months, Kinthup had to
work as a slave in Tibet. He used to cut grass and sew clothes for most of the
time and, one day, he escaped. Unfortunately, his master found him but before
he could harm Kinthup, the poor pundit ran into a monastery nearby,
flung himself at the head lama’s feet and begged for mercy. The head lama
purchased him from his Tibetan master for fifty rupees. Kinthup lived in this
monastery for five months before he was given a temporary leave to make a
pilgrimage. However, instead of the pilgrimage he promised to do, he made his
way once again down the Tsangpo. At one isolated part of river, he began
cutting down wooden logs of specific size and marked them. He hid these logs in
a cave beside the river, and then he returned to the monastery once again.
It was long past the decided time
for events of his mission and, therefore, he was worried if Captain Harman’s
watch for the logs had been called off. He had to send a message to India that
they should watch for the logs. Trudging through heavy snow for two months, he
reached Lhasa as only the capital of Tibet was connected to India. At Lhasa he
met a man from Sikkim to whom he gave a letter which was addressed to the
Surveyor-General informing him of the plan to throw fifty logs a day for ten
days in the tenth Tibetan month of the year. He again went back to his
monastery and patiently waited for the tenth month when his master, the head
lama of monastery, set him free for his good behaviour after nine months. He
could now freely carry forward his mission.
In the tenth month, at a place
called Bipung, he threw 500 logs in ten days into the Tsangpo. He worked one
more month in Tibet to earn money for his return to India and, finally, reached India in September, 1884. That was his
five long years of journey for one mission. After his return, Kinthup found
that his letter to the Surveyor-General had never been delivered. No watch had
been kept for his logs and, perhaps, they just drifted away without anyone
noticing them. For the worst, Captain Harman had also died, and nobody believed
in the adventure of Kinthup. He was a just a man with stories, and only after
about thirty years, the British equipped with better technology could find that
everything Kinthup told them was nothing but the truth.By this time Kinthup was
nowhere to be found. Sometime later in early 1900, he was traced to Simla where
he was presented with a thousand rupees as a mark of recognition and reward by
the British for his services.
Sarat Chandra Das
On the fringe of Darjeeling town,
where the Hill Cart Road winds into a thick urban sprawl, is a neighbourhood
known as Lhasa Villa. It is an old derelict cottage where a century ago, a spy
once lived. He was Sarat Chandra Das. Born in 1849 in a middle-class Bengali
family in the Chittagong district of East Bengal, Sarat Chandra Das studied
civil engineering in Calcutta. Even before he had obtained the degree, he was
appointed the headmaster of Bhutia Boarding School in Darjeeling. Coming from the
Gangetic plains, young Sarat Chandra was captivated by the beauty of the
mountains. He explored the hills around the town and made a trip to the
neighbouring kingdom of Sikkim.
Ugyen Gyatso was an assistant
teacher in the school. He was a lama from the Rinchenpong monastery in Sikkim
that was affiliated to another monastery in eastern Tibet. Ugyen procured a
passport for Sarat and accompanied him to Tibet. For the secret mission, Sarat
Chandra’s salary was raised from one hundred and fifty rupees to three hundred
rupees a month. Sarat Chandra went to Tibet twice; first in 1879, for four
months, and then in 1881, for an extended stay of fourteen months. Sarat
published a book, in 1902, Journey to Lhasa- The Diary of a Spy. For the
book, he had used much of the classified materials to prepare two reports for
the intelligence and survey departments.
In Tibet, Sarat befriended, Lama
Sengchen Dorjechen who had an avid interest in Western science. Through Sarat Chandra, the lama procured many
small things like smallpox vaccine, a photographic camera, magic lanterns and
even a complete lithographic press. While Sarat Chandra studied Buddhist
literature in the lamasery’s library, Sengchen took a sabbatical from his
ministerial duties to learn arithmetic and English from him. He had even begun
to write a handbook on photography in the Tibetan language.
Sarat Chandra was taken by the
Tibetans as one among the long line of scholars who had brought new knowledge
and wisdom from India, the land of the Buddha. He, too, had seen Tibet as a
high and dry repository of priceless ancient texts and belief systems. The
fascination and respect were mutual and he returned with two yak-loads of rare
books and manuscripts, splendidly pulling off a mission fraught with great
hardship and danger. He was feted by the British government for this, was sent
to China as part of a diplomatic mission and he became quite a name in the
Himalayan explorers’ circuit.
But there was a dark aftermath. Soon
after Sarat Chandra returned to India, his true identity and the purpose of his
mission came to light in Tibet. The people who had hosted him and assisted him
inadvertently during his stay were charged with sedition. They were arrested,
mutilated and thrown into dungeons. Sengchen Dorjechen was drowned alive in the
river Tsangpo.
This lucidity and precision in
describing a little-known land helped the British in what was known as the Francis
Younghusband expedition there in 1903. The British forces easily defeated the
poorly armed Tibetans with Dalai Lama escaping to China. This also drew a
curtain on a fascinating chapter of espionage that had continued for most of
the nineteenth century. Overnight, men like Sarat Chandra became redundant,
forgotten, a relic from the past. Some say the it was Sarat Chandra Das on whom
Rudyard Kipling based the caricature of an English-educated Bengali spy in the
figure of Hurree Chunder Mukherjee in his novel, Kim.
In the autumn of his life Sarat
Chandra Das was a bitter man, recounting in his autobiography the raw deal he
had been given by the British government. Sarat Chandra embraced Buddhism with
zeal, wrote abundantly on spiritualism and founded the Buddhist Texts Society.
A year before his death, he visited Japan accompanied with Ekai Kawaguchi, a
Japanese monk and a Tibetologist like him. Sarat Chandra’s home in Darjeeling,
named Lhasa Villa, was a most sought-after address for the scholars of the
world who had anything to do with Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.
Last Word: Wishful
thinking of my friend Ranjit who remarked, someone should make a movie on
these ‘pundits’ whose life is no less remarkable than the spies glorified in
movies. I thought over the suggestion and realised that there will be no
one attempting to make the biopics for these real-life heroes and spies who mostly
worked silently behind the scenes and never went berserk with the killings and
bombings of the reel-life heroes. They will never be glorified as the Bonds of yesterday
and the Dhurandhars of today. But for me, just getting to know about these pundits,
and being able to share their stories with you, makes me feel honoured.
SS
References: Various articles
and pictures from the internet and podcast by Ranjit Monga- BOOKS AND US-
Khangchendzonga- Sacred Summit- S3 Ep1 with Pema Wangchuk https://open.spotify.com/episode/47U9W2gwMaXvnrgrR6mHxL?si=l7E7MzYJQayGp_cluhfCAA
