But another possibility exists: to the esoterically minded, this world is but a stage and all of us, like it or not, must act various roles while reality runs a course, distinct and only sometimes overlapping, with all the acting and make-believe that we call ‘reality’. To act the role of the guru requires a back story of exotic travels and strange meetings. Whether you are a fake with nothing to offer or someone with something useful to offer, this back story of exotic travel is still required. I think Blavatsky knew that – she wasn’t simply a congenital liar – and once she had mastered the role she was highly productive. Her reading is vast – a true polymath – and her books contain unusual and interesting insights. Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888) belong to a less critical age – though it might be a useful springboard to further researches for those with much leisure time.
Gurus also have to be able to either fake, or do real, telepathic tricks.
There are many accounts of people (often Russian nobles) who claim Blavatsky could perform astounding psychic feats. I rather prefer this memory by a young American woman who provided accommodation in New York for Madame Blavatsky and had no interest in her spiritual work:
I never looked upon Madame as an ethical teacher. For one thing, she was too excitable; when things went wrong with her, she could express her opinion about them with a vigor which was very disturbing . . . In mental or physical dilemma, you would instinctively appeal to her, for you felt her fearlessness, her unconventionality, her great wisdom and wide experience and hearty good will — her sympathy with the underdog.
An instance of this kind comes to mind. Undesirable people were beginning to move into the street, and the neighborhood was changing rapidly. One evening one of our young girls, coming home late from work, was followed and greatly frightened; she flung herself breathless into a chair in the office. Madame interested herself at once, expressed her indignation in most vigorous terms, and finally drew from some fold in her dress a knife (I think she used it to cut her tobacco, but it was sufficiently large to be a formidable weapon of defense) and said she had that for any man who molested her.
3
The Pundit Found It
He can steal, but he can’t hide.
Balti proverb
The Great Game – the name given to the scramble for influence in the Himalayan region – was played out largely between two empires: the British and the Russian. The Russians sought access to a warm-water port, the British sought to control these ambitions. The pundits were the spies who could supply the information needed to advance these claims. I’ve already noted that a parallel, yet real, exploration of the Himalayas was going on at the same time as the imaginary theosophical one. Each saw itself as more important than the other. Neither could really explain itself in terms the other could comprehend. Later, we’ll see some figures who attempted such conjoining, most significant among them probably the nineteenth – and twentieth-century explorer and soldier, Francis Younghusband; though, in the end, he had to suffer an old age in which he became an object of affectionate ridicule for his beliefs about both the need to climb mountains and the need to connect to the greater reality behind such mountains.
Owing to the inaccessibility of Tibet to foreigners, its early exploration had to be carried out by natives or men who looked like natives – the pundits. The British, by virtue of their appearance and lack of knowledge of Tibetan, could not hope to pass as indigenes. Pundits, posing as holy men from India keen to see the places of pilgrimage in Tibet, had a much greater chance of success.
Mohamed-i-Hameed, the first pundit, set out from Ladakh in 1863 – the year Younghusband was born and only two years before Rudyard Kipling was born (it was Kipling who would immortalise the work of the pundits in his great tale of espionage, Kim).
Hameed was not to be as lucky as the later, better trained and equipped pundits. He managed to reach his target of Yarkand successfully, but Chinese officials had grown suspicious. Hameed managed to escape, but in hastening over the high passes of the Karakoram back into Ladakh, he died. His notes, however, survived and were eventually sent to one Captain Montgomerie stationed in the foothills of the Himalayas at Dehradun. Now a vast, sprawling, rather ugly town, it remains a centre of army training seventy years after the British left. Chastened by the mixed experience of Hameed, Montgomerie set up the ‘pundit school’ in Dehradun. Each new recruit was to spend two years rigorously learning the art of clandestine surveying while at the same time perfecting his cover story as a Buddhist pilgrim.
Why on earth did the pundits agree to risk their lives for this colonial power that squatted so uglily, we are led to believe, on their own land? Sir Richard Burton, himself a kind of early pundit – indeed, perhaps an inspiration for them – donned native guise and employed his unequalled mastery of Indian dialects to find out what the local Scindis thought about their British overlords. He would sanguinely comment to the effect that no Briton knew how much they were hated by the average Indian. I think I can interpret: what appears as hatred is nothing more than the extreme annoyance at being ignored. ‘Flatter a man and he may or may not see through you, but ignore him and he will hate you forever.’* Unlike the revered pundits, most Indians did not receive their due attention from their British overlords.
Travelling to Dehradun, I had a curious encounter with a German on the train. Misunderstanding the import of having a father born in the Himalayas, he believed (and I was fairly suntanned at the time) that I was an Indian travelling to see the birthplace of his old man. He talked to me with the sort of condescending tone reserved for . . . foreigners. He slowed up his speech, in case my English was not quite up to speed. By some sort of perversity, which I recognised now in Indians I had met, I sought to use the longest words and slang expressions that could not fail to identify me as a native speaker. But he had made up his mind and so I ransacked the dictionary and appeared no doubt as a strange native fellow intent on impressing clever German tourists . . .
The pundits’ reward, I hazard, was the best sort of attention – real and meaningful involvement. They would also get a pension and, if they died, their families would be cared for. In that sense, the British were fair taskmasters. But only the thought of at last being noticed, singled out, used – yes, but also trusted, rewarded with a handshake and a sincere thank-you for doing something that the mighty British man could not; to be accepted, in short, as an equal.
Therein, perhaps, lies a clue to the secret of the British conquest of the Asian subcontinent. Con/Quest or, more properly, a quest followed by a con. How a tiny minority ruled such a vast nation for so many years has always been a puzzle, yet it was no mere tyranny – had it been, the whole charade would have collapsed instantly. How do the popular kids rule? How does an otherwise repellent pick-up artist score with attractive women time and time again? They succeed by manipulating our desire for attention. Tyrants and bullies actually expend considerable attention on their victims. Indeed, it is one of the nasty facts of bullying that bully and victim are often codependent. The British con was to ration out their attention, not in terms of punishments but as a reward. This explains why the pundit schoolmaster and commander, Captain Montgomerie, who obviously loved his cohort of native-born spies, saw fit to publish not just their data, but also their secret methods in the journal of world exploration, the Royal Geographical Journal. This is where the first accounts of Burton, Speke, Livingstone and Scott would be published. By making the pundits’ work known in the same pages, alongside the great explorers of the day, Montgomerie was announcing their true status – they were, indeed, the equal of any of the aforementioned men. Yet many were known only by their initials. This is how they appeared in the RGS journal – the one concession to secrecy that Montgomerie made. He was gambling that no Chinese would read the journal, which was only available to Fellows of the Society. It was known that Russian intelligence availed themselves of its contents, but Montgomerie knew that the Russians had as much to gain as the Britis
h when it came to discovering the hidden topography of Tibet. It was only the Chinese, jealously guarding the gold mines and other treasures of Tibet, who would have been in a position to rumble the pundits as they plied their trade as pretend pilgrims.
Old soldier; a fierce patriot who nevertheless fondly remembers British military traditions
How to rumble a pundit? A simple test would have been to count their rosary beads. A pundit rosary had only 100 beads instead of the required 108. Each pundit knew exactly how many of their own paces added up to a measured mile (and a pace was two steps; it is too difficult to count every step when one is speedwalking over rough terrain, but easy enough if you simply record every time the right foot hits the ground). Each man had his own secret ‘pace number’, usually around 1,000 – a pace being about 5 feet and there being 5,280 feet in a mile. Montgomerie would have his men walk fast, slow and then at a run around the running track at the barracks in Dehradun. One of the early pundits, Nain Singh, had mastered an exact step of 33 inches which he used for surveying smaller distances. But over time, one’s natural pace evens out and once you know your ‘pace number’ it is an astonishingly accurate method of travel. When surveyors followed the routes of the old pundits, they found that they would be only a mile out in hundreds of miles of walking.
The rosary system allowed one bead to be moved every hundred paces. One complete circuit of the rosary would be around ten miles. A smaller string of ten beads attached to the rosary could record the total mileage per day.
Had the Chinese found out, they may have searched the staff of the pilgrim and found the top unscrewed to reveal a glass thermometer. This would be slipped into a boiling pot of water when the pundit was unobserved and the temperature recorded, thus providing an accurate measure of altitude.
The prayer wheel might also have been investigated. Inside, instead of a scroll of scripture written in the smallest hand, they would have found lists of numbers and directions. It was here the precious data was recorded. In hidden pockets within the pundits’ sleeves were bits of glass and mirror, which could pass as treasures perhaps, hoarded by a poor man. But these could be swiftly assembled into a sextant which could be used at night to crosscheck one’s position. An artificial horizon of mercury was needed to level the sextant – the mercury was carried in a cowrie shell and tipped into a begging bowl to form the flat horizon. Larger sextants were sometimes hidden in the specially constructed false bottom of a travelling chest.
A compass was a common enough item for a Muslim to be carrying, and the first pundit was a Muslim clerk already trained in survey work, but for a Buddhist to have a brass prismatic device made in Birmingham would have been a little too suspicious. The compass, reduced to a minimum size, was hidden in a screw-top to the prayer wheel assembly.
The pundit school’s first two graduates were the cousins Nain and Mani Singh. Nain was the thirty-three-year-old headmaster of a village school at Milam and had already guided with success a German expedition in the Himalayas.
In order to further protect their identity, they were forced to refer to themselves and to be referred to by their superiors as Pundit number one and Pundit number two, or G.M., which was arrived at by taking two letters from the name and reversing them for further obfuscation. Only when the pundits had long retired were their real names ever released. One realises that the apparatus of spying that appeared in Europe only in the early years of the twentieth century had its testing ground in the pundit travels of the nineteenth century in the Himalayas.
Nain Singh and Mani were extraordinarily successful in their adventurous spying. They set out in 1865 to settle many mysteries hinted at by the only existing map of Tibet – the so-called lama map instigated by Jesuits in the eighteenth century. Emperor Kang-hsi was impressed by maps of Peking made by Jesuit missionaries. He invited them to survey the whole of China, starting in 1708. He wanted Tibet included and the Jesuits trained two lamas to carry out their survey. Their data was incorporated in the finished map of 1717, which was eventually published in Paris in 1735 as part of d’Anville’s atlas. Alas, the lamas most definitely were using their prayer wheels and rosaries for their intended purpose and not as surveying aids: the lama map was a fanciful illustration of mysterious Tibet and hardly a single detail was correct. The rest of China was very accurately depicted and so it was assumed Tibet was too. The truth, however, would be found out the hard way, by the pundits as they criss-crossed the Himalayas counting paces and taking covert sextant readings.
Nain Singh’s disguise was one that most of the pundits would adopt – that of being a Bisahari. The Bisaharis were a Buddhist people living in British India in a valley near the hill station of Simla. They were allowed, on account of their religion, to come and go across the border with Tibet. They were also allowed to trade with Tibetans, and Nain Singh told those he met as he travelled through Nepal to the border that his aim was to travel to Lhasa and buy horses while also worshipping at the most prominent shrines along the way.
The border guards searched their belongings with great thoroughness. They assumed some sort of smuggling was going on as Bisaharis never travelled at this time of year to buy horses. They found none of the well-hidden survey instruments, but their suspicions were aroused. The Tibetan governor of that section of the border country refused them permission to travel: it was the wrong time of year and the route proposed was very unusual, not direct enough. They also had to dole out some precious funds for a poll tax that was non-refundable. There was nothing to be done but return to Kathmandu and try again. Here Nain and Mani split up to increase the chances of one getting through. Nain changed his disguise to that of a Ladakhi. Mani did not and either through want of determination or ill health failed to get over another high pass into Tibet. He returned to Dehradun to a disappointed official welcome. Nain carried on, charming a Nepalese caravan boss and making his way smoothly this time into Tibet, going in the direction of Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar. Crossing the Tsangpo in a dumpy leather coracle, three travelling companions were swept into the torrent and drowned. It was a reminder of the dangers ahead.
He now joined a Ladakhi caravan, which transferred their goods to coracles. He agreed to meet them 85 miles downstream at Shigatse, home of the second ruler of Tibet, the Panchen Lama. His excuse was that witnessing the deaths of his travelling companions had unnerved him; in reality, he needed to pace the entire distance to get the figures for the intended map of Tibet. Once at Shigatse, though he had no intention of getting so close to the rulers of Tibet, Nain Singh found himself forced by circumstance to be presented, along with other Buddhist pilgrims of the caravan, to the Panchen Lama, who was known for his powers of perception. Fortunately, this was a very young incarnation of the great man, a mere boy of eleven, who no doubt had other cares than unmasking fake pilgrims on mapping missions.
Nain Singh made it to Lhasa where he stayed for three months. He met the youthful Dalai Lama – the twelfth one – who was soon to die a not so mysterious death, almost certainly poisoned by the regent or possibly the Chinese Amban, the representative of the Chinese government in Tibet. Again, Nain Singh’s duplicitous charade failed to be detected, though two Muslim traders he became friendly with rumbled his disguise and demanded to know who he was. Instead of turning him in, they gave him money; his own reserves were running very low, what with the additional length of the whole venture. By this time he was getting wary of being detected. A Chinese man who had visited Lhasa without the right permission had recently been beheaded – on public order from Peking – so it was high time to escape back to India with his information. By taking surreptitious night sights with the sextant, he had fixed the latitude of Lhasa and its altitude through successive measurings of boiling water. Both were very close to the current accepted figures. He thought Lhasa 3,566 metres up; in fact, it is nearer 3,656. The latitude was right to within two minutes – less than two miles out. To further eke out his money, he gave lessons in the Hindu method of keeping acc
ounts to the Lhasa traders.
On the way back, he noted for Montgomerie the express mail service for official business in Tibet. Like the pony express in the United States, the messengers rode at high speed, changing horses at very short intervals to maintain this. To further incentivise their progress, their clothes were sealed shut with an official seal. Only the reader of the message was allowed to break it. The messengers were forbidden to undress en route, so each hard ride was a battle with accumulated grime and sweat, their skin usually raw from flea and lice bites.
For Nain Singh a more leisurely pace was needed – literally – as he had to walk every single step. When the leader of the caravan offered him a ride, he claimed that he had fallen hard as a child and this left him with a grave suspicion and fear of horses – horse-shit, of course, but by all accounts the silken-tongued pundit was an excellent yarn spinner, keeping the caravan men entertained at night as they sat round the campfire on the wind-whipped plateau.
Eventually, he was able to make his way alone over a high pass into India, where he was seized by bandits. They searched his wooden chest and took his tea but failed to find the sextant. Nain Singh made his escape at night and finally got back to Dehradun and Captain Montgomerie. It had all been a glorious success.
White Mountain Page 12