The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia

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On a September day in 1863, Abdul Hamid entered the Central Asian city of Yarkand. Disguised as a merchant, Hamid was in fact an employee of the Survey of India, carrying concealed instruments to enable him to map the geography of the area. Hamid did not live to provide a first-hand account of his travels. But he was the advance guard of an elite group of Indian trans- Himalayan explorers-recruited, trained, and directed by the officers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India-who were to traverse much of Tibet and Central Asia during the next thirty years.

Derek Waller presents the history of these intrepid explorers-Nain, Mani, Kalian and Kishen Singh, Mirza Shuja, Hyder Shah, Ata Mahomed, Abdul Subhan, Mukhtar Shah, Hari Ram, Rinzing Namgyal, Ugyen Gyatso, Nem Singh, Lala and Kintup-who came to be called 'native explorers' or 'pundits' in the public documents of the Survey of India. In the closed files of the government of British India, however, they were given their true designation as spies. As they moved northward within the Indian subcontinent, the British demanded precise frontiers and sought orderly political and economic relationships with their neighbours. They were also becoming increasingly aware of and concerned with their ignorance of the geographical, political, and military complexion of the territories beyond the mountain frontiers of the Indian empire. This was particularly true of Tibet.

Though use of pundits was phased out in the 1890s in favour of purely British expeditions, they gathered an immense amount of information on the topography of the region, the customs of its inhabitants, and the nature of its government and military resources. They were able to travel to places where virtually no European could venture, and did so under conditions of extreme deprivation and great danger. They are responsible for documenting an area of over one million square miles, most of it completely unknown territory to the West. One of the first books to be written about them, The Pundits is a work of exceptional scholarship.

Derek J. Waller was professor emeritus of political science at Vanderbilt University, where he was a faculty member from 1969 till his death in 2009. He pioneered the study of the Communist Chinese system of government at Vanderbilt and developed the university's International Studies Program in London, also serving as director of Vanderbilt-in-England. He was the author of The Government and Politics of the People's Republic of China (1981).

I first became aware of the activities of the pundits in the course of relatively casual reading about the history and politics of Tibet. I discovered that many authors had referred, but only rather briefly, to their exploits. This book will, I hope, go some way toward assigning to these Indian explorers, and to the British officers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, their rightful place in the history of the exploration of Tibet and Central Asia.

A number of libraries and archives have been vital in supplying material for this book. I should like to give particular thanks to the staff of the India Office Library and Records; the Jean and Alexander Heard Library of Vanderbilt University; the Library and Archives of the Royal Geographical Society; and the British Library. I am also pleased to acknowledge assistance from the library of the University of Leeds, the archives of the Royal Society, Cambridge University Library, and the Public Records Office.

The staff of the National Archives of India in New Delhi were helpful in allowing me to see many volumes in the Dehra Dun series of the Survey of India Records. Unfortunately, the government of India does not permit inspection of all the volumes in this series (or, at least, it did not when I visited the archives in 1981).

The fifth and final volume of Colonel R.H. Phillimore's Historical Records of the Survey of India, 1844-1861 (Dehra Dun, 1968) is a difficult book to come by. The work was apparently never actually issued, and only a few copies, which were sent out in advance of publication, are known to be extant. I must therefore express my gratitude to the Royal Engineers Corps Library at Brompton Barracks, Chatham, who kindly made a copy of volume five available to me.

A number of people were generous in their comments on various sections of the manuscript. For their assistance, I am indebted to Gary Alder (who also provided me with copies of some documents), Felicity Browne, Scott Colley, Faith Evans, Peter Hopkirk, and Nicholas Rhodes. In addition to commenting on the manuscript, Nicholas and Deki Rhodes also provided a great deal of information concerning Rinzing Namgyal and Ugyen Gyatso and gave me illustrative material on these two explorers, some of which is reproduced in the text. I also thank Henry Brownrigg of London, owner of the surveying instrument inscribed to Nain Singh, for allowing it to be photographed.