What is it about?
Geographical fascination about Lhasa found expression in the Trans-Himalayan explorations by the Survey of India’s trained Pundits as early as 1865. The British administration was in urgent need of an entry into Tibet, and any endeavour, whether cartographic or linguistic, was welcome. An earlier explorer, Alexander Csoma de Körös having crossed into Tibet by foot in 1819, arrested as a spy, being dropped from British sponsorship, published his authoritative Tibetan Grammar and Tibetan-English Dictionary in 1834. Closely following in his footsteps in 1879, was yet another traveller and explorer, Sarat Chandra Das, whose Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet (1902) was accompanied by multiple publications on the religion, history, ethnology, and geography of Tibet. The interface between the emergence of Tibetan civilization, and the movement and translation of Tibetan texts, was accompanied by a parallel narrative of physical geography. Expanding on sites of sacred spaces, and interspersing it with cartographic literature, this article seeks to survey the cartographic-literary texts, map the sites of knowledge production by the different agents of survey, and build a timeline of the spatial representations of Tibet, by attempting to situate this in the broader movement of philosophy which attempted to harmonize the natural world with that of the religious world.
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Why is it important?
Science as a mishmash of military exploration, espionage, botanical explorations and geography, observation of culture, language and ethnography filled the terra incognita of the East India Company's knowledge reservoir. From these entangled journeys and their accounts, it is seen how frontiers between British India and Tibet, themselves became sites for both knowledge production. In their own ways, in their own time, these men of science shaped science as it were, by travelling, observing and generating a visual system which illustrates both the scale of the chronological canvas, and the complexity of overlapping peoples and ideas.
Perspectives
I hope this article is one among many attempts to show how trans-regional and transnational groups, earlier separated by geographic and temporal disjuncture, had active agency in the production of these sites of knowledge. A further investigation of this milieu with newer histories of circulation and networks, can be pivotal to our understanding of religious and cartographic histories of the Himalayas.
Oyndrila Sarkar
Presidency University Kolkata
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Visualising Spaces of Knowledge in the Himalayas: 1830–1917, February 2024, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004694330_008.
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