“No former travellers having attained such a height on the Earth’s surface”: Instruments, inscriptions, and bodies in the Himalaya, 1800–1830

Abstract

East India Company surveyors began gaining access to the high Himalaya in the 1810s, at a time when the mountains were taking on increasing political significance as the northern borderlands of British India. Though never as idiosyncratic as surveyors insisted, these were spaces in which instruments, fieldbook inscriptions, and bodies were all highly prone to failure. The ways surveyors managed these failures (both rhetorically and in practice) demonstrate the social performances required to establish credible knowledge in a world in which the senses were scrambled. The resulting tensions reveal an ongoing disconnect in understanding between those displaced not only from London, but also from Calcutta, something insufficiently emphasized in previous histories of colonial science. By focusing on the early nineteenth century, often overlooked in favor of the later period, this article shows the extent to which the scientific, imaginative, and political constitution of the Himalaya was haphazard and contested.

Off the beaten track? Critical approaches to exploration studies

“…But explorers' bodies were not simply passive objects that could be controlled and disciplined. As Johannes Fabian (2000) shows, explorers regularly lost control of their minds and bodies (see also Fleetwood, 2018) These approaches demonstrate that nineteenth-century European practices of knowledge production were not the rational or disembodied processes they are often presented as. On the other hand, explorers could turn their own bodies into the objects of study.…”

“…The nineteenth century saw significant changes in the expectations that were placed upon explorers and resulted in the increased provision of scientific equipment to explorers in the field. However, the contingent and uneven nature of these efforts has also been noted (Fleetwood, 2018;Wess & Withers, 2018). As Withers, Rae, and Souch (2015) explain, instruments in the field were far from passive objects and often had a "liveliness" of their own.…”

Geography and “thing knowledge”: Instrument epistemology, failure, and narratives of 19th‐century exploration

“…In geography, the use of scientific instruments – chiefly hand‐held or manually operated devices for measurement – was important in the subject's empirical development in the 19th century, in association with instructional guides on how to observe and what to record (Driver, , ; Rae et al., ; Wess, ; Wess & Withers, ; Withers, ). Humans even regulated themselves, and their horses and wagons, to become instruments (Driver, ; Fleetwood, ; Raj, ). Nineteenth‐century terrestrial exploration had maritime parallels in new systems of measuring extreme weather (Naylor, ).…”