Find the river: Discovering the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra in the age of empire

Abstract

Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead understood the region’s rivers in many different ways, influenced by sporadic deluges of data, competing forms of expertise, shifting imperatives of colonial political economy, unsettling encounters with various bodies of water, and heterogeneous Asian knowledge structures. Informants, infrastructures, and cosmologies of often-overlooked communities at imperial margins fundamentally reshaped European knowledge. Under these conditions, practitioners of spatial sciences came to thrive on the proliferation of models and objects of discovery rather than seeking definitive closure.

Making margins visible

“…Maps, although initially patchy and speculative, were the major desideratum of colonial administrators and scientists. Just as the tributaries of the Ganges were the cartographic focus in Kumaon and Garhwal, those of the Brahmaputra were in the uplands around Assam (Simpson, 2023b). In both areas, forays out of riverine valleys and into the surrounding mountains were relatively infrequent and arduous and were couched in British visual and written representations as heroic undertakings.…”