Tibet. Important map showing the route of the Pundit Nain Singh from Ladakh to Assam.

Nain Singh Rawat is probably the best known of the “Pundits” or Learned Men, to which that roughly translates in Sanskrit. This was an elite group of hardy explorers usually recruited from the foothills of the Himalayas to participate in the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. They were specifically trained for these endeavours and given specialised, sometimes secret equipment to help survey the land. Probably the most famous of these pieces are the “Buddhist Beads” or a Buddhist bracelet or necklace which would normally have 108 beads but the Pundit version had 100 beads. Supposedly, they were trained to walk with a stride measuring one yard and for each one hundred steps that the Pundit took, he would flick one of the beads. Due to their ancestry, the Pundits were able to travel and survey areas of the Himalayas which would be difficult to access for Europeans.

Nain Singh took part in five expeditions with the first being in 1865-6 and the last in 1874-5. This map records the route of Nain Singh in his last expedition from the Leh, in Ladakh, the northernmost territory of India, through the Tibetan Plateau and finally arriving in Mangaldai (Mangaldoi) in Assam, on the banks of the Bhramaputra River. During this expedition he recorded the position of the Tibetan Lakes, noted latitude and longitude of multiple landmarks, kept notes on the disposition and customs of numerous groups in the High Plateau and was the first Pundit to record a second visit to Lhasa.

As a result of his momentous expeditions, he was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Patron’s Medal.

This map shows the route and extent of Singh’s extraordinary last expedition to Tibet in 1874-5. It was used to illustrate its report in the Geographical Journal of 1877. Original colour. [IC3030]