AMONG ALL THE fabled gold mines of Tibet, the Thok Jalung mine in the Changthang plain of western Tibet – “a large desolate plain of which the prevailing color was reddish brown”, a Survey of India report noted – was the most well-known outside of the plateau. The Indian surveyor Nain Singh Rawat visited the mine in August 1867. The survey intended to map the Sutlej and the Indus’s eastern branches, as well as the gold and salt mines “east of Gar-tok and as far beyond as the Pandits could get in an easterly direction,” reported Captain T G Montgomerie of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. At Thok Jalung, the coldest place he had ever visited, Nain Singh recorded in his diaries:
Thousands of people gather around the gold mine during the day and get busy mining gold in their halves of the mine. Once the men and women get down to work, they come together as one and start to sing at the top of their voices as they mine. They sing so loudly that people from half a mile away can hear their songs.
Nain Singh Rawat today stands as the foremost among all the Indian surveyors employed as “pundits” during the 19th-century imperial rush to explore the Himalaya and Tibet. The decision to employ “Asiatics” from 1861 onwards, as Montgomerie wrote, was to “take advantage” of the native ability to “travel freely without molestation” outside the boundaries of the British Empire. The imperialists employed at least 21 pundits who undertook more than 50 expeditions between 1863 and 1899. Most had little or no formal education – with the notable exception of Pundit Sarat Chandra Das, the inspiration for the character Hurree Babu, the Bengali spy who trains the eponymous protagonist of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim – and were typically paid between 15 and 50 rupees a month, as much as a senior government clerk at the time. They traversed the Himalaya and Tibet, and also travelled far beyond, going as far as Mongolia in service of Queen and Country to bring back valuable scientific data and intelligence. These information-gathering expeditions marked the beginning of imperial expansion into the Himalaya, which is why non-colonised polities like Tibet and Nepal zealously guarded their borders against the Empire and its servants.
More often than not, the pundits relied on subterfuge to succeed. At Kerung, across from Tibet’s border with Nepal, the dzongpon, or local administrator, was ordered to send him back to Nepal – “for had I been going to Lhasa for horses I would not have taken this route,” Nain Singh wrote, “and, had I been a Bushahri, the route to Lhasa I should have adopted was by Mansarowar, and not this.” Nonetheless, Nain Singh persevered. He received permission to travel up to Pati Nubri, in central Tibet, but not before he signed a declaration stating that if he were found in Lhasa within the year, he would lose his life. The threat notwithstanding, Nain Singh eventually joined the tri-annual Lopchak tribute mission from Ladakh to Tibet, to arrive in Lhasa in January 1866. Then on his journey back, authorities at Dongpu village were not satisfied with his explanation that he was a Bhutia trader returning to Garhwal, in what is now the Indian state of Uttarakhand, via the Niti pass, for the passes were still snowed in.