Himalaya from 170 yrs ago on display for 1st time: India’s first glimpse of work by German explorer-siblings

KAshmir said yes. Kingdom of nepal delayed gift its consent. Sikkim refused unlimited. In 1854, the eastward republic of india Company (EIC) found itself in a fix. It had hired three German geologists – brothers Adolph, Hermann and Robert Schlagintweit – to complete the magnetic survey of the Indian subcontinent. A portion of this pioneering scientific mission was done, but the north, particularly the entire Himalayan region, was still left to survey.The 19th century was rife with the colonial project of knowledge-gathering. New tools aided calculations greatly, and trade offered an impetus for European countries to send scientific emissaries to hitherto unknown parts of their captured colonies. The Schlagintweit brothers had gained a reputation for meticulous and prodigious research in the European Alps, prompting Alexander von Humboldt, the venerable German explorer-researcher, to convince the Prussian king to lean on the British trading company to hire the trio.EIC stuck its neck out: the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was already underway, and the great arc of India was already mapped under its one-time chief, Sir George Everest. What’s more, some parts of the Himalaya remained out of reach due to the region’s geo-political situation. What, then, could three brothers possibly offer?As it turned out, quite a lot – and Delhi’s residents will be the first in the world to view some of the Schlagintweit brothers’ results.Starting Wednesday, 77 images depicting the upper Himalaya region from 170 years ago will be on public display. Of them, at least five will be publicly exhibited for the first time. They include a panoramic view of the Dal Lake in Srinagar with serene snow-clad mountains in the backdrop, as well as of the Bogapani Bridge held up ingeniously with stilts placed strategically on the surrounding ridges, in what is now the state of Meghalaya.Other images show rivers, places of worship, hamlets and terrain from an era when the main impetus of the colonial project was a scientific mapping of the whole globe, including its most difficult to reach terrains.All works on display are high quality prints of paintings made by the Schalgintweit brothers, who captured some of the first photographs and images of the Himalayan terrain and its far-flung habitations. The brothers produced around 700 sketches of views in India and “high Asia”, as they referred to the area.“The German scholars were more independent and thought about making a fully scientific-based atlas of the globe,” said eminent Himalayan historian and founder and managing trustee of PAHAR foundation, Shekhar Pathak. “The Schlagintweit brothers were the first Europeans to use the camera in their surveys in India, and also made paintings over very low-resolution prints of their photographs. They published their findings in seven volumes,” he added.Between 1854 and 1858, the intrepid Schlagintweit brothers travelled separately on horseback, by foot, and sometimes, in boats, traversing first parts of southern India and later, most of the Himalayan belt from Assam to Ladakh and Baltistan, from the Himalayan rimlands and the Khasi hills to the trans-Himalaya and Bhutan. They were accompanied by tens of assistants, both British and Indian, to help them with the survey. Chief among these assistants were nephew-uncle pair Nain Singh Rawat and Main Singh, whose knowledge of the local languages and terrain greatly aided the brothers. Rawat and Singh later joined the Survey of India, and the former was the first Survey employee to visit and survey Tibet, albeit disguised as a monk.The geo-political situation made it necessary for the Schlagintweit brothers to employ some degree of guile, too.In 1855, Hermann reached the British part of Sikkim, which was situated between the independent states of Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan and tried to sneak into Eastern Himalaya. However, vigilant Nepali officials thwarted his efforts. Later that year, he undertook a foray into Bhutan to the administrative centre of Taklung Dzong, where once again, he was prohibited from continuing his journey towards Tawang and Tibet. Thereafter, Hermann concentrated his efforts on exploring the Brahmaputra.Adolph and Robert had a little more luck. In March 1855, they travelled up the Ganga Valley on the Great Trunk Road, hitting first Nainital, then walking through the Nanda Devi region to Milum, hoping to reach Tibet – which was known to keep foreigners out. At some point, the brothers went their separate ways. Adolph, not one to give up easily, went to Ngari Khorsum in disguise, and Robert, the youngest and least experienced of the brothers, went to Badrinath, Kedarnath and Garhwal.By February 1857, Hermann and Robert were ready to return home. They had traversed the Kunlun Mountains and discovered that the Karakoram was part of the main Himalayan watershed. Adolph, meanwhile, had gone up to Gilgit and studied the vast glaciated areas of Mustagh. Together, the trio had a collection that numbered hundreds of crates, bearing rocks, minerals, zoological and botanical samples, ethnographic masks, drawings and sketches, records, reports, maps and journals among other things. Robert was tasked with sending crates of the Schlagintweit collections back home via sea. Adolph, however, decided to delay his return to Europe. This decision proved to be fatal. In August 1857, he was beheaded in Kashgar in East Turkestan, under suspicion of being a Chinese spy.Not only did their surveys and maps served as an important basis for later meteorological and geological studies, but through the course of their four-year travel – which also covered south and central India – they accumulated a huge collection of zoological, botanical and ethnographical specimens that are now housed in different museums across Germany, England and as discovered recently, even Pakistan, where 50 masks made by the brothers to depict the different people they met in the Himalayan region, were found in the Lahore Museum’s collection in 2017.The places where Robert’s crates ended up across Europe is a story in itself. A significant portion of the paintings and drawings were preserved in the Bavarian State Library, the Alpines Museum in Munich as well as the National Graphic Arts Collection (State Collection of Prints and Drawings) in Munich. In 1997, the Schlagintweit family trust donated a large number of paintings from the private family collection — preserved by descendents of the fourth brother, Emil, who was a Tibetologist, but did not travel with his brothers.In 2015, Pathak was invited to speak about Pundit Nain Singh Rawat at an exhibition organised at the Alpines Museum, where several artefacts, maps, masks, measurements and recordings of the Schlagintweit brothers were displayed. It was during this visit that he first saw some of the Schlagintweit paintings of Nainital, Badrinath, Kedarnath, Kanchenjunga, Ladakh fort and Tibetan monasteries. “I was delighted to see this khazana of paintings, and immediately began dreaming of exhibiting some of these images in India,” he said.“No one knew of these pictures in India. The idea was born to bring them back to the place where they were made, and especially for scholars to see how the people and the landscapes looked nearly 170 years ago. It took 11 years for us to get the funds. We will donate these prints to PAHAR, which will be permitted to use them for educational purposes,” Hermann Kreutzmann, co-curator of the Indian exhibition said.Hermann Kreutzmann, author and professor of human geography at the Free University in Berlin, was instrumental in organising the Munich exhibition with curator Stephanie Kleidt in 2015. He will also deliver a talk on the Schlagintweit brothers and the context in which they conducted their research.Himalayan Encounters: Hidden Views from 170 Years Ago will be on display at the India International Centre, Annexe, 40 Max Mueller Marg from April 21 to April 28. The exhibition will travel to Dehradun and Nainital, where it will be displayed at the Doon Library and Research Centre from May 1 to 9, and the CRST Inter College from May 12 to 18, respectively.