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The debate was settled when Henry Yule, the author of Hobson-Jobson, called him the “Pundit of Pundits”. The year was 1876 and the members of the Royal Geographical Society were divided on who should be given that year’s gold medal. Yule’s powerful advocacy settled the issue in favour of Pundit Nain Singh, the intrepid surveyor who travelled to Tibet not once but thrice in disguise and returned with a wealth of information on the forbidden kingdom of the lamas. His first journey was from Nepal to Lhasa, the second through the Mana Pass (in Uttarakhand) to the gold mines of Thok Jalung, and the third and final one from Ladakh to Lhasa – all on foot.
The Pundit (he was called Pundit though he was not a Brahmin because he was a teacher in a local school at the time he was recruited by the British for survey work) was trained at Dehradun. All his steps, whether going up or down, always measured the same. So, by counting his steps, he could calculate distances. In this he took the help of his prayer beads which had 100 seeds and not the usual 108. His dress had secret chambers to hide maps and currency. These could also be held inside his prayer wheel. He could tell the altitude of a place by checking the boiling temperature of mercury, which he hid inside his walking stick. Till the 1960s, a whole mountain range in Tibet was named after this great explorer.
He, fortunately, happened to be an avid writer of diaries, noting down every detail of the things he saw and heard in his journeys. Many of these diaries were supposedly lost. Sekhar Pathak, along with his wife, Uma Bhatt, managed to resurrect several, not all, of these diaries and put them all together in a book in 2006. Asia Ki Peeth Par (On Asia’s Back) combines analysis and research superbly to take one back to those times.
It’s a must read for all enthusiasts of The Great Game. That’s not the only favour I thank Pathak for. For several years, I had been searching for a book called Beyond Bokhara written by Gary Alder. It is the story of another 19th-century veterinarian-turned-explorer, William Moorcroft. But the book was simply not available. Some websites abroad had listed it but weren’t prepared to ship it to India. Recently, I found the book on Indian websites. It was a dream come true. The author, in his note on the Indian edition, said he had been persuaded by three people to reprint it: the first was Pathak.
