by John Keay
It is now upwards of twenty years since I commenced it [the Survey] on this grand scale [wrote Lambton], In this long period of time I have scarcely experienced a heavy hour; such is the case when the human mind is absorbed in pursuits that call its powers into action. A man so engaged, his time passes on insensibly&. I shall close my career with heartfelt satisfaction and look back with increasing delight on the years I have spent in India.
But there was to be no time for looking back. Aged seventy, he embarked on the 400-mile journey across the Deccan from Hyderabad to a new headquarters at Nagpur. Fifty miles short of his destination he died in his tent. ‘As he ever looked forward to dying, so he died, at his post’, wrote a later Surveyor-General.
Everest was to prove a worthy successor to Lambton in everything except constitution and temperament. Whilst Lambton was seemingly impervious to India’s climate, Everest succumbed to every fever going and was never free from ‘my old complaint’ – probably amoebic dysentery. His correspondence is filled with detailed bulletins. In 1824 he was paralysed for a time and had to be lifted in and out of his seat at the zenith sector. In 1835 his hip seized up and he recovered only after ‘the application of some hundreds of leeches – fomentations administered night and day – a due abstraction of blood from cupping – and a course of gruel diet’. Three years later he collapsed again.
I was attacked in November last near Sironj with a severe illness&. Dreadful rheumatic pains in my bones-fever-loss of appetite — indigestion — intestines totally deranged — stomach totally powerless – my strength entirely gone – the whole system apparently destroyed and forever undermined. I recovered gradually & but found to my indescribable dismay that my memory was in a great measure gone – that my mind was affected – that whatever I did or thought of during the day preyed on me at night – and worst of all I found myself oppressed by a dreadful foreboding of ill – a horror of being awake in the dark – an apprehension even whilst I was wide awake, of some spectre or monster of fancy coming to hold converse with me & I thought it would certainly end in madness.
Apart from five years home leave (1825–30), this state of perpetual convalescence was not allowed to interfere with the progress of the Survey; but it certainly contributed towards making George Everest one of the most cantankerous sahibs in history. When he took over the GTS most of Lambton’s assistants promptly resigned. Those who succeeded them were bullied and browbeaten unmercifully. Everest seemed incapable of sustaining any professional relationship other than as a vendetta. He chastised his native staff, berated local officials, and met every directive from Calcutta with a howl of protest. No man can have been less prone to misgivings about the importance of his work, and woe betide anyone who interfered with its smooth progress. Any dog or cat straying into his camp was promptly shot, and an officer whose horse presumed to neigh outside the Surveyor-General’s tent was threatened with a court-martial for insubordination.
But, if not exactly loved, Everest commanded great professional respect. No one could question his dedication. During twenty years as Superintendant of the GTS he carried Lambton’s triangulation from Berar through the wilds of central India and across the plains of the Ganges to Dehra Dun in the Himalayas. The line of triangles, stretching from Cape Comorin to the mountains, was the longest arc of the meridian ever measured, and of immense geodetic importance for calculating the curvature of the earth. This great arc was Everest’s most important achievement, and it has formed the backbone of maps of India ever since. But he did not neglect the rest of the skeleton – from the great arc, another series of triangles stretched east to Calcutta, and a third was started, east along the base of the Himalayas. These two were connected by further meridional series and a grid was thus thrown over a large part of north India.
All this was possible thanks to more accurate instruments, a much larger staff, increased expenditure and a number of innovations. Everest rejected Lambton’s chain for base line measurements in favour of the new compensation bars, which eliminated the stretch caused by expansion. The first time these bars were used was for the Calcutta base line measured in 1832. A sketch of the operation by James Prinsep, ever an enthusiast in such matters, shows the bars mounted in coffers and supported on tripods as in Lambton’s day; in the background can be seen one of the towers erected at each end of the line. Towers became an essential part of the survey in the plains of the north. With a heavy smoke and dust haze invariably covering the ground, and with no handy gopurams or hills, scaffolding towers of bamboo, seventy feet high, were erected, as well as some masonry towers for the more important trig stations. Even then, a clear view over a distance of fifty miles was seldom possible. Everest therefore introduced the use of heliotropes — mirrors reflecting the sun – for day working, and blue flares for night work. He also pioneered what he called ‘ray-tracing’ – fixed telescopes trained on the distant flares. The accuracy was now staggering. The difference between the Dehra Dun baseline as measured on the ground and as triangulated from a baseline on the great arc 400 miles away was just 7.2 inches.
Sir Clements Markham would hail Everest’s completion of the great arc of the meridian as ‘one of the most stupendous works in the whole history of science’. But, in terms of human endeavour as well as scientific achievement, the North-East Himalayan Series of triangles along the base of the Himalayas was scarcely less remarkable. Started by Everest it was completed by his successor, Andrew Waugh, to whom goes the credit for finally determining the height of the Himalayas and discovering the world’s highest point. According to Markham, the North-East Himalayan Series entailed ‘dangers and difficulties in the execution which were far greater than have been encountered in the majority of Indian campaigns’; it was ‘the most desperate of undertakings and the average slaughter was greater than in many battles’. Because the Nepalese refused to co-operate, the survey had to be carried through the dreaded Terai, a belt of jungle and swamp between the plains and the foothills. Between 1845 and 1850 five survey officers worked on this series. Of these, two died of fever, two were compelled to retire, and only Waugh survived. In one season alone, forty native assistants fell victim to the climate, and in another, an entire survey party had ‘to be conveyed in a helpless condition from fever to Gorakhpur’.
But somehow the series was completed, and from the principal trig stations it was at last possible to triangulate the precise position and height of the snowy peaks along the northern horizon. For as long as the British had been in India, the height of the Himalayas and their distance from the plains had been matters of avid speculation. From near Patna, John Marshall observed ‘very high hills to the north’ in 1671. They seemed more distant than ‘any object my eyes ever beheld’ — perhaps, he thought, as much as 300 miles away. According to travellers he had met, Armenians ‘which come from China and have travelled the most countries in the world & these Botton [i.e. Bhutan, by which he meant Tibet] hills are the highest hills they ever saw or heard of.
Sir William Jones first saw the Himalayas on his excursion to Benares.
Just after sunset, on the fifth of October 1784, I had a distinct view from Bhagalpur of the Chumalury peak [possibly Chomolhari in Bhutan], and the adjoining mountains of Tibet&. From the most accurate calculations I could make, the horizontal distance at which it was distinctly visible must be at least 244 British miles.
Taking account of other recent observations, Jones boldly asserted that ‘we saw from Bhagalpur the highest mountains in the world without excepting the Andes’. As so often, he had guessed right – but few in Europe would yet concede the point. Oddly, it was the mountain on the island of Tenerife that was then regarded as the highest, at least in the Old World: ‘the peaks of Nepal cannot be supposed to be less elevated than the peak of Tenerife’ ventured William Kirkpatrick in 1793. The next visitor to Nepal, none other than the ubiquitous Dr Buchanan, fresh from his route survey in Mysore, declared the mountains to be ‘of vast height’; with his companion, Major Crawford, he
attempted to measure eight peaks – ‘Result: 11,000 to 20,000 feet above stations of observation.’
Another man much intrigued by the subject was Henry Thomas Colebrooke, who succeeded Jones as the leading Sanskrit scholar of the day. In 1807, he measured from the plains the peaks of Nanda Devi and Trisul. After giving the basis of his calculations he agreed wholeheartedly with Jones’s verdict.
Two of these mountains will therefore be more than five miles in perpendicular height above the level of the plain on which I stood&. I must for the present postpone any further remarks or calculations until I can compare my observations with those of Major Crawford, who observed the same mountains in Nepal, and with the observations which have been made of the Andes in South America and of the peak of Tenerife & but I trust that I shall then be able to prove that the mountains of Tibet are not only higher than any in the ancient hemisphere but also in the known world.
By 1816, Colebrooke decided that the point was beyond dispute. He had just worked out that Dhaulagiri was 26,862 feet; the Himalayas were considerably higher than the Andes and might be declared ‘the loftiest range of Alpine mountains which have yet been noticed’. Surveyors working in the wake of the Gurkha war agreed, declaring that there were at least twenty peaks in Garhwal alone that were higher than Chimborazo, supposedly the highest of the Andes peaks.
But the armchair geographers at home were still far from satisfied. The trouble with all these computations was that they were based on observations made from positions whose distance apart had not been accurately determined. Until the base for the triangles to the distant peaks was either measured on the ground or itself trigonometrically established, the results had to be in doubt. This, of course, was where the work of Lambton, Everest and Waugh came in. With the completion of the suicidal North-East Himalayan Series, a network of unimpeachably accurate base lines extended right along the foot of the mountains. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, Waugh triangulated the heights and positions of seventy-nine peaks. Some had names, the rest were given numbers. The highest of all, measured at 29,002 feet above sea level, was No. XV. On Waugh’s recommendation, it was named, after his old boss, Mount Everest.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
An Idolatrous Affection
Vast as the output of British scholarship was during the raj, one has to cover many yards of library shelving before encountering any work that can be regarded as a classic. In the genre of memoirs and travelogues there are a few notable productions – Bishop Heber’s Travels for example; but somehow writers on architecture, sculpture, archaeology, geography, and even history, failed to produce much of outstanding merit. For the most part they confided their discoveries to the journals of the Asiatic societies, or incorporated them in official reports. When a separate volume was contemplated, the most influential literary format seems to have been that of the government gazetteer. It was as if the facts and discoveries should speak for themselves; the cake needed no icing.
But exception must be made for two monumental works written by Colonel James Tod. Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan and Travels in Western India, in spite of their different sounding titles, are really sister books. Both are part history and part travelogue; the second merely extends the field of enquiry to include Gujerat and thus cover the whole of western India. Together their 1500 pages of tight print occupied Tod for sixteen years. The general reader might find the plethora of unfamiliar names and places discouraging; the India specialist might jibe at Tod’s often uncritical approach; but neither could deny that here at last was a real classic, rich in instruction, resounding with conviction and eminently readable, a work that might worthily stand beside Gibbon and Carlyle.
The depth of Tod’s scholarship and the breadth of his vision are remarkable in a man whose education was undistinguished and whose career was as active and demanding as any. But still more surprising is his magnificent command of language and the deep sympathy for his subject which inspires it. The long rumbling periods, like distant thunder, somehow evoke the vast skies of the western deserts, the well-turned phrase echoes the simple harmony of a camel and rider silhouette. There is a wealth of classical and medieval metaphor which lends to the exploits described an added degree of conviction. Tod was writing from the heart. The Rajput clans, whose martial traditions constitute the bulk of Annals and Antiquities, had won more than just his sympathetic curiosity. ‘In a Rajput I always recognize a friend,’ he confided; and for Mewar, the most illustrious of the Rajput principalities (capital Chitor and later Udaipur), he felt both filial loyalty and paternal solicitude.
I look upon Mewar as the land of my adoption and, linked with all the associations of my early hopes and their actual realization, I feel inclined to exclaim with reference to her and her unmanageable children, ‘Mewar, with all thy faults, I love thee still’.
Tod’s close identity with a people who were not even a part of British India coloured his career as well as his books. Born in London, he came to India in 1799, aged seventeen, as a military cadet. Six years later he was assigned to the escort of the British Agent at the court of the Maratha chief, Daulat Rao Scindia of Gwalior. The Marathas were at this time masters of most of Rajasthan whose Rajput princes, spurned by the British and hopelessly divided amongst themselves, were proving an easy prey. In 1806 Tod made his first visit to Udaipur where he witnessed the final degradation of the Maharana of Mewar, scion of the Rajputs. The scene was one of horrifying intrigue. The Maharana, a weak but noble figure, was at the mercy not just of the Marathas but of various other adventurers; and outside his gates his natural allies, the Rajput chiefs of Jodhpur and Jaipur, were warring for the hand of his daughter and a share in the spoils. Swayed this way and that by evil counsellors he eventually consented to the murder of his lovely Kishna Kumari as the only way out of the impasse and the only chance of preserving Rajput independence. But no man could be found to deliver the fatal blow; and, in a scene tailor-made for Italian opera, ‘the flower of Rajasthan’ herself took up the poisoned cup and thrice drained it before ‘she slept a sleep from which she never awoke’.
Tod was so moved by all this that he seems to have resolved there and then to espouse the Rajput cause. But as yet there was little he could do; and, between 1806 and 1817, Mewar was ravaged by the Marathas as never before. Tod kept in touch with events through a network of informers covering the whole of western India. He became the East India Company’s leading authority on the region and when, in 1817, the Rajputs were finally accorded British protection, Tod was nominated as Political Agent in western Rajasthan. His return to Udaipur through burnt-out villages and overgrown fields was a funereal progress.
All was desolate; even the traces of the footsteps of man were effaced. The babool (mimosa arabica), and gigantic reed, which harboured the boar and the tiger, grew upon the highways; and every rising ground displayed a mass of ruin. Bhilwara, the commercial entrepot of Rajasthan, which ten years before contained 6000 families, showed not a vestige of existence. All was silent in the streets – no living thing was seen except a solitary dog, that fled in dismay from his lurking place in the temple, scared at the unaccustomed sight of man.
On a practical level, Tod’s mission was to win the confidence of the Rajput princes and to restore peace and prosperity which the country had not known since before the arrival of Islam. A measure of his success can be gained from the comments of Bishop Heber who passed safely through the western deserts only eight years later. By then Bhilwara was again thriving; it had ‘a greater appearance of trade, industry and moderate, but widely diffused, wealth and comfort than I had seen since leaving Delhi. The streets were full of hackeries laden with flour and corn, the shops stored with all kinds of woollen, felt, cotton and hardware goods’, etc. Everybody sang Tod’s praises, and Heber was told that the place had almost been renamed ‘Tod-ganj’ – ‘but there is no need for we shall never forget him’. It was the same story throughout the Rajput states.
We were continually asked by the kotw
als (village heads) after ‘Tod Sahib’, whether his health was better since he returned to England, and whether there was any chance of their seeing him again. On being told it was not likely, they all expressed much regret, saying that the country had never known quiet till he came amongst them, and that everybody whether rich or poor & loved him. He, in fact, loved the people of this country and understood their language and manners in a very unusual degree.
Tod’s achievement of political and economic reconstruction was one thing; but this espousal of the people’s manners and traditions was even more important. He recognized in the Rajputs the ancient warrior race of Hindu India. They were a feudal aristocracy as imbued with traditions of chivalry, and as fond of martial epics, as King Arthur and his knights. Tod pried deep into their history and, like Mackenzie, he found ample material. Not only were there ruins, inscriptions and coins but a wealth of literary and oral evidence, especially the poems of the bard, Chand, ‘the Rajput Homer, the Indian Ossian’.
As he explored the ruins of Chitor, Tod would be told tales of its heroic defences and tragic capitulations. In Udaipur, beside the waters of the Peshola Lake, he would sit in the Jagnivas lake palace and hear the epics of old just as had the princes of Udaipur two centuries before.
Here they listened to the tales of the bard as they slept off their noonday opiate amidst the cool breezes of the lake, wafting delicious odours from myriads of lotus flowers which covered the surface of the waters; and as the fumes of the potion evaporated, they opened their eyes on a landscape to which not even its inspirations could frame an equal; the broad waters of the Peshola with its indented and well-wooded margin receding to the terminating point of sight, at which the temple of Brinpoori opened on the pass of the gigantic Aravalli, the field of the exploits of their fathers.