Nain Singh Rawat

Nain Singh Rawat was born on October 21, 1830, in Milam, a high village in the Johar valley of Kumaon, close to the passes that lead from British India into western Tibet ^[1]. The valley belonged to the Shauka, or Johari Bhotia, a trading community whose caravans crossed the Himalaya each summer to exchange grain and cloth for Tibetan salt, borax, and wool. Children of Milam grew up around pack animals, mountain weather, and the Tibetan language, and many crossed the frontier before they were adults.

His father, Amar Singh Rawat, was known locally as Lata Burha. The family's trading connections meant that Nain Singh traveled into Tibet with relatives while still young, learning routes, customs, and enough colloquial Tibetan to pass unremarked in bazaars and monasteries ^[1]. That fluency, ordinary within his community, would later become a professional asset that no British officer could match.

His first documented contact with European science came in the mid 1850s, when the German brothers Hermann, Adolf, and Robert Schlagintweit passed through the region on a scientific expedition sponsored in part by the East India Company. Nain Singh and members of his family assisted them as guides and interpreters during travels toward the Tibetan frontier between 1855 and 1857, an apprenticeship in instruments and observation that set him apart from other hill traders ^[2]. Afterward he worked for a period as a schoolmaster in his home region, a post that earned him the honorific pundit, meaning a learned man ^[1].

By the early 1860s the Survey of India faced a stubborn problem. The trans-Himalayan territories of Tibet were closed to Europeans, and officers who tried to enter risked expulsion or worse, yet the maps of Central Asia could not be completed without observations from the far side of the range. Captain Thomas George Montgomerie of the Survey proposed a solution: train Indian men from the border districts, who could travel where Englishmen could not, in the essentials of route survey, and send them across the frontier in disguise ^[3].

Nain Singh and his cousin Mani Singh were recruited and brought to the Survey's headquarters at Dehradun in 1863 for two years of training ^[1]. They learned to take star sightings with a sextant, to read a compass concealed in a prayer wheel, to determine altitude by measuring the boiling point of water with a thermometer, and above all to walk with a fixed stride. Each man was drilled until his pace was uniform, roughly thirty three inches, so that two thousand paces equaled one mile. To count them, the surveyors carried Buddhist rosaries altered from the sacred 108 beads to 100, slipping one bead every hundred steps ^[3].

The recruits were given code names and their reports were kept confidential. Nain Singh appeared in Survey records as Pundit Number One, or simply the Pundit, and the title of his profession became the generic name for the entire corps of clandestine Indian explorers ^[3]. The disguise he most often adopted was that of a Ladakhi trader or a Tibetan pilgrim, identities plausible enough to survive scrutiny at checkpoints where discovery could have cost him his life.

His first great journey began in 1865. After an initial attempt through Nepal was turned back, Nain Singh entered Tibet from Kathmandu, attached himself to a caravan, and reached Lhasa in January 1866, living there for several months while secretly taking observations ^[1]. He fixed the latitude of the forbidden city, calculated its altitude at about 11,700 feet by boiling point readings, and observed the young Dalai Lama at a public audience. On the return march he surveyed a long stretch of the Tsangpo, the great river of southern Tibet, and traced the main trade route from Lhasa toward Lake Manasarovar. When he walked back into British territory in 1866 he had covered roughly 1,200 miles of previously unmapped country, much of it counted pace by pace ^[3].

A second expedition in 1867 took him into the goldfields of western Tibet. Traveling through the Thok Jalung mining district, at an elevation above 16,000 feet, he documented workings where miners lived in tents through brutal cold and dug gold from shallow trenches, one of the earliest reliable accounts of the region's mineral trade ^[2]. The journey added detailed knowledge of the upper Sutlej and Indus drainages to the Survey's maps.

His final and longest journey, in 1874 and 1875, ran from Leh in Ladakh across the Changthang plateau to Lhasa by a more northerly line than any previously surveyed, then onward toward Assam. The route crossed immense uninhabited tracts and strings of salt lakes, including observations around Tengri Nur (Namtso), and closed major gaps in the map of Tibet ^[1]. Exhausted and suffering from the strain on his eyes caused by years of observation in snow glare, he retired from active exploration after this expedition. Any honest list of Nain Singh Rawat achievements begins here: thousands of route miles surveyed, the position of Lhasa established, and the course of the Tsangpo charted for hundreds of miles ^[3].

Recognition came from the highest institutions of Victorian geography. The Royal Geographical Society in London awarded him a gold watch in 1868 for his Lhasa journey, and in 1877 conferred its Patron's Gold Medal, the society's premier award, citing the great extent of his surveys in Tibet ^[2]. Colonel Henry Yule, the geographer who championed the award, argued that no living explorer had added a greater amount of positive knowledge to the map of Asia. The Society of Geographers of Paris honored him as well.

The colonial government granted him the title of Companion of the Indian Empire and, more practically, a pension and a grant of land: two villages in the plains near Moradabad in Rohilkhand ^[1]. For a man born in a trans-frontier trading village, these were extraordinary distinctions, and they were noticed. His example drew other Johari men into the Survey, including his cousin Kishen Singh, code named A. K., who became a celebrated pundit explorer in his own right ^[3].

In later assessments, historians of exploration have placed the pundits' work among the most remarkable feats of nineteenth century geography, achieved without escorts, without official protection, and at personal risk that European explorers of the same era rarely faced ^[3]. Nain Singh Rawat facts that seem almost implausible, such as counting more than two million paces on a single expedition, are confirmed in the Survey's own published records ^[2].

Away from the survey routes, Nain Singh remained rooted in the world of the Johar valley. He belonged to a large extended family of Rawats in Milam, several of whom served the Survey of India: besides Mani Singh and Kishen Singh, his relative Kalian Singh also carried out trans-frontier work ^[1]. The family's collective service made the small Johari community disproportionately important to the mapping of Central Asia.

The work exacted a physical price. Decades of high altitude travel, poor food on the road, and constant use of instruments in harsh light damaged his health and his eyesight, which was a principal reason for his retirement after the 1874 to 1875 expedition ^[2]. In retirement he spent part of his time training younger surveyors at Dehradun, passing on the techniques of covert route survey to the next generation of pundits ^[3].

He was literate in Hindi and Tibetan and kept careful journals during his travels, recording not only bearings and distances but also trade, agriculture, and the daily life of the Tibetan towns he passed through. Extracts from his route reports were published by the Royal Geographical Society and remain primary documents for historians of Tibet ^[2].

After 1875 Nain Singh settled on the land granted to him near Moradabad, in the plains of the North-Western Provinces, far from the mountains where he had made his name ^[1]. His pension and villages gave him a security few men of his background could expect, and his advice continued to be sought by the Survey.

He died on February 1, 1882, at the age of 51, reportedly of a heart attack while visiting his estate ^[1]. His death closed the founding chapter of the pundit explorations, though the program he had proven viable continued into the 1880s and 1890s through men he had helped train.

For decades afterward his name circulated mainly in survey records and geographical journals, and in fiction: the character of the pundit surveyors informed Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim, which drew on the world of the clandestine explorers for its portrait of the Great Game ^[3].

Modern India has moved to reclaim his memory. In 2004 the Government of India issued a commemorative postage stamp honoring Nain Singh Rawat, and in 2017 Google marked his 187th birth anniversary with a doodle that introduced his story to a global audience ^[4]. A peak and institutions in Uttarakhand carry his name, and the state celebrates him as one of its most distinguished sons.

His scientific legacy is concrete. The positions, altitudes, and river courses he recorded stood in the maps of Tibet for generations, and his determination of Lhasa's location was confirmed within a close margin by later instrumental surveys ^[3]. Historians such as Derek Waller, whose study of the pundits remains the standard account, credit him with establishing the methods, the discipline of the counted pace, the disguised instruments, the coded journals, that made the whole enterprise work ^[3].

Any Nain Singh Rawat biography ultimately returns to a simple contrast: the empire that employed him could not enter Tibet, and he could. He walked into the closed heart of Asia carrying a rosary, a prayer wheel with a compass hidden inside, and a memory trained to hold numbers, and he came back with the map. Few explorers of any century have done more with less ^[2].