Dan Snow's History Hit - The Himalayas

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

The Himalayas is one of the most expansive and storied regions in the world. It's also a place that we're hugely dependent on, providing billions of people with fresh water. Because of its significance, civilisations throughout history have sought to conquer it. What forces have exerted control over 'The Roof of the World'? And what is it about this place that has fascinated outsiders for centuries? Dan speaks with John Keay, journalist and author of Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World to explore the intersections of culture, society and nature that makeup one of the world's last great wildernesses.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm talking about the Himalaya as the author of the new book. John Kay, legendary British historian, journalist and lecturer calls them and he should know because he's just written a book about the Himalaya, about exploring the roof of the world, about the history of the mountains, the people, the beliefs and attempts by outsiders to conquer and exploit them. Now, Himalaya means abode, the realm of snow. So perhaps I should change the name of this podcast to Himalaya, the towering abode of snow that dwarfs all who approach. Anyway, that's my hubristic flight of fancy.

I'll just get on with the podcast now. The Himalaya is such an extraordinary, such an exceptional part of the world. Nearly all the highest mountain peaks on earth, 50,000 glaciers. One third of all of us, of all of us human beings depend on the Himalayas for fresh water. It's almost as big as Europe and yet the population is scattered so thinly throughout the area. The geology is unstable as tectonic plates shift and clash beneath those mountains, driving them ever higher. And usefully, what a great metaphor, the borders, the political aspirations of neighbouring countries,

grind unevenly against each other in that region too. It's a part of the world that matters, folks. I hope you enjoy this podcast with John Kay. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. John, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for asking it. Tell me about the geography of the Himalaya. What are we talking? How big, how wide, how inaccessible, how high? The region I call the Himalaya, area basically if you look at a map of asia it's a great purple and white splotch in the middle it's ground over average height of 10 000 feet and it's vast east to west it's about two 2,500 kilometers. North to south, about 500 kilometers.

So there's this great purple-white splotch on the physical map of Asia in the middle of the continent, which is Himalaya. And it includes five or six of the world's highest mountain ranges and, of course, the great Tibetan plateau that's jumped up. It's like an empty quarter of Tibet, except that it's actually 83 quarters. So it's a vast area. The main mountain

turns, it's kind of swagged around this Tibetan plateau, around the base of it, in a sort of long arc. They include first of all the Great Himalaya, the highest mountain range in the world, then the Tarakorans, the even higher in places,

exactly the most glaciated, non-polar region in the world, and then the Hindu Kush, which of course is the mountain range in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, and the Kunlun, and so on. So there's all these various mountain ranges come together and form a sort of swag round the base

of the Tibetan platter. And does this very distinct geographical region, has it got a religious and political distinctiveness, or has it always been fragmented, divided up into people's living in valleys or external

empires nibbling bits off the edge? Yes, you're quite right. That certainly happened. But I mean, in physical terms, it is a unique ecozone. It's the only high altitude ecozone in the world. The only ecozone we have, which is entirely over 10,000 feet. But this vast area has, of course, been nibbled away, as you rightly say, by all its neighbors from time to time. Diffusion of Buddhism from India spread into what we're calling Himalaya.

Then Islam spread into the western extremities of Himalaya and eventually cried to a standstill in the mountains. Mongols and Maltese invaded from the north and the east. And, of course, nowadays the Chinese are busy grabbing what they prefer not to call Tibet. So it has been subject to an encroachment from all sides throughout history. And this is not only in political and military terms, but also, as you rightly suggest, in cultural terms. So that Tibet, for instance, became the last great kind of repository of Buddhist scholarship, Indian Buddhism's scholarship, long after Buddhism had been

extinguished in India itself. In this vast area, the main regions of settlement of population are usually on the fringes. And it's there that you have the greatest variety of, particularly in places like Nepal and Kashmir, the greatest concentration of religious shrines, of temples, of cultural artifacts, and so on, whereas the great Changchang, the great center of Tibet, is largely empty and has a very limited population. So for a place that's really pretty hostile in terms of a way of living, it has had an extraordinary number of

invaders or would-be invaders over the centuries. This has led to its fragmentation. If you look at the map, all the little states strung along the south of the Tibetan Plateau, Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal, Kashmir and Lidak, and so on,

Baltistan, Chitral. And these are the real centers of activity, of cultural life, of political life, which are rather in the center of the region, which, as I said, is largely uninhabited. And those states and principalities and provinces that you've mentioned, have they been traditionally hard to unify because of the geography? And therefore, has there ever been a kind of Himalayan empire or polity? The classic example, I suppose, is a 7th century Tibetan empire when Tibet rather amazingly had its own empire in such ways

which spread not only from what we now think of as Tibet but also through to places like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and also into western China. And this was quite a formidable empire founded by two of Tibet's earliest kings but it didn't last very long, about 200 years, so in the 7th and 8th centuries AD or so. And then the only sort of comparable construct of Langsikar was the Gurkha kingdom, which in Nepal in the 18th century, which again spread from Nepal, from the Gurkha kingdom up into Tibet. And also a lot of the Himalayan chain right through to what's now Himachal Pradesh in India. And this was quite a formidable political and military unit.

But again, quite shortly after the concert, there was a famous Anglo-Nepalese war in 1814 to 16, when the British invaded Nepal and virtually extinguished its militaristic tendencies. So these two short periods, the Tibetan Empire and the Gurkha encroachments, are the only examples I can think of of a Himalayan-based empire or political construct of any size and consequence. And what about religion? You've mentioned some of the religions that have permeated the area, but it seems that there are parts of that world in which the same religions claim or assign divine importance to certain features. And you've got Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, everyone seems to be drawn to the same places and mountains. seems to be drawn to the same places and mountains.

Yes, the original, or what's thought to be the original religion in most of Tibet was something called Pot, which is a precursor of Buddhism and was an indigenous belief system which accorded great importance to physical features, like the mountains, for instance. The mountains were nearly all personified or deified as individual deities, and deities could, like all deities, they could fight with one another, they could make love to one another, they could collaborate, and they could argue. So the mountains

became a very important, not just a feature of the landscape, but a feature of the cultural landscape, a feature of the way of thinking in the region. And pilgrimage is one of the most distinctive features of the whole of Mali. And this isn't just Buddhist or Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage to martyrs, whether Hindu pilgrimages in Kashmir to Harman Kharib, there is even some small Islamic pilgrimage activities in what's now northern Pakistan. small Islamic pilgrimage activities in what's now northern Pakistan. So the landscape

is very much a part of the belief system of all the peoples of Himalaya. And it's just as pilgrimage is, it's a characteristic creature of the region

for as long as we know anything about it. You listen to Dan Snow's history we're talking about the Himalayas or the Himalaya all coming up. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Himalayas or the Himalaya. All coming up. We try to bring you cold, hard facts on Gone Medieval,

but January is all about mysteries. Impossible riddles from medieval history that defy efforts to solve them. How did the presence of a mysterious saviour from the East turn into devastation? What secrets does a book written in an unknown code hide? Did kings and princes really die when history has assumed they did? I'm Matt Lewis and in January we'll see how close we can get to answering the unanswerable and ask how these mysteries might be solved in the future. mysteries might be solved in the future. popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of pilgrimage, tell me about some of the remarkable outsiders that you chart in your book that have become fascinated and bewitched by the Himalaya

and have helped to open the area up to study and conquest and development by the outside world. Yes, the most interesting, of course, I think, were some of these sportsmen Yes, the most interesting explorers, I think, were some of these sportsmen. They were basically interested in shooting specimens of the outlandish animal forms of one size, the great wild yak, the great Marco Poto sheep, the world's largest sheep. The wild yak is the world's largest bovine creature. So sports were a great attraction, particularly for British travelers in the region. But a lot of these sportsman explorers were also quite receptive to local culture and quite interested in it. from people who'd served on the infamous Young Husband Expedition of 1904 when British Indian troops invaded Tibet

and when really the modern period of Tibetan history begins. So a lot of these people came as conquerors or part of this military expedition and then reappointed to assignments of one sort or another in Himalaya and came quite knowledgeable from one particular area. There's a famous man called Bailey. He was always known to his friends as Hatter, H-A-R-T-E-R, Hatter Bailey. And I can only assume that's because they thought he was as mad as a Hatter. He certainly was a most extraordinary man,

and he was a crack shot and tremendous wildlife collector and a great explorer. And one of his assignments was to draw up what became known as the McMahon Line between northeast India and Chinese territory in eastern Himalaya. working out where the natural frontier was in terms of the ethnic divide, in terms of the mountains and so on, where the natural frontier would run. As part of that exercise, he was working with a surveyor in the remotest southeastern corner of Tibet, which is quite unlike the rest of Tibet,

even though it's incredibly wet for a start. It has very high rainfall, and there's cloud cover, and a lot of snow, and it's very, very difficult to run. It's also where the great river of Tibet, the Sangpo, cuts right through the Himalayas to emerge in northeast India, in Assam, as the Brahmaputra.

And so this Hathor Bailey fellow, one of his great expeditions was to try and discover how this river found its way through the mountains. Was it in a succession of amazing waterfalls or cataracts, or did it actually burrow underneath the mountains? And the case for St. Clair becoming the Brahmaputra was quickly solved, but how the river actually cuts through theya was an issue of geographical interest. And while he was there, he was taking this, what would come in a more like frontier, further and further west from Chinese territory to Bhutan. And in the course of this, he lit on one particular peak, which happened to be one of the most sacred of all Tibet's pilgrimage sites.

one of the most sacred of all Tibet's pilgrimage sites. And while he was in the sanctuary surrounding this peak, he saw a stag that he just couldn't resist. So he shot this stag, and his men were immediately horrified, and there's all sorts of terrible disasters that would have come to the expedition. And they insisted on him performing the pilgrimage, which is basically a circuit of the higher parts of the mountain, by way of penance for this terrible sacrilege that he'd committed. And so you end up with this sportsman actually performing an act of expiation

in the form of a Tibetan pilgrimage to make up for his terrible crime of killing. What turned out to be what's called the Sykeum Stag, and that's actually probably the last known record of this particular animal, because it was extinct by the middle of the 20th century. Characters like this interest me. You know, he was a sportsman. He was interested in securing trophies

of natural history specimens and so on, but he was also intrigued by the whole question of the relationship between the Himalayan peoples and their terrain and the mountains themselves and how important these natural creatures, mountains in particular, are to the Nakhubani system. I loved Alexandra David-Niel, if that's pronouncing her name right.

Yes, that's right. For a nice secret, Alexandra David-Niel, if that's pronouncing her name right. Yes, that's right. For a nice secret, Alessandra David-Niel, she was one of the most unlikely, but also extremely well-informed travel explorer. She was actually French, so she's not called David-Niel, as some people think, but David-Niel. And she had been an opera singer. She performed at the Hanoi Opera.

Those were the days when Vietnam, even and China was French, of course. At some point in her 20s, she had been attracted to Buddhism, and she went to live for a time in Sikkim in the northeast of India and made one or two short excursions into neighboring bits of Tibet. And then her harp theme set on getting to Lhasa. She saw Lhasa as offering sublime deliverance. She would be a pilgrim

like all the other pilgrims and she would join them and try to reach the forbidden city or wooden capital of Tibet. And this she performed from China actually, from Sichuan in western China. She joined a group of pilgrims who were visiting a peak on the border called Kao Kapo.

She went round the peak. You do a very good runation around the mountain with your peg, if ever. And she broke away with this young lava, who was her constant companion, and struck out for Lhasa. Now, that itinerary is incredibly confusing. She didn't really hold with place names and distances and bearings and so on. And so it's very difficult to trace her exact route. But she and her companion, this young Lava,

set off from the Chinese border in, I think it was about October, and they reached Lhasa in 1924 in time for the New Year celebrations which happened usually in about February. So there was about a four month

march through in the most appalling terrain. Of course travelling just as Tibetan pilgrims then had to beg their way effectively. They got into Lhasa and where I'm detected by the British representatives looking out for people who had broken the British embargo. I'll travel into Tibet, and they were actually discovered

and were actually sent pathing down to Calcutta. Not only were they French, but they had no authorization whatsoever. They needed to have authorization either from the Tibetan government or from the British to get it to Tibet in the 1920s. But as I say,

her itinerary is a bit frustrating because you can't really tell exactly where she is. She makes a very few placements, but she comes up with all sorts of fascinating insights into Tibetan way of life. She was a great one for the mystical side of Tibetan Buddhism.

And so she spent a lot of time observing unexpected rituals and seeing miracles and generally becoming quite an authority on Tibetan Buddhism. And this sustained her afterwards because from India she went back to France and she became a tremendous celebrity. I'd spent really the rest of my life writing books about Tibetan Buddhism and living on the income that they generated.

She lived to 101. She died in 1960-something, I think. An amazing figure. She was also very, very small. She thought that was Ben Plantage in Tibet, because no one ever noticed her. Because unlike most Europeans, she wasn't taller than Tibetans.

She was much smaller. Alexandra David-Neal is still a revered figure in Buddhist circles, and her books are still published. She was a great scholar. She wasn't particularly interested in the wildlife like Hatter Bailey. She wasn't interested in the politics either. She was just interested in obtaining this sublime deliverance

which she thought would be achieved by reaching Lhasa. And she obtained a lot of Buddhist texts which weren't available in India, which was also quite interesting. So an amazing woman. There are one or two other female figures in the story, but she's by far and away the most outstanding and the most ripped. What's happening strategically there today, it sits between three spheres of influence,

of three want-to-be great powers, India, China, and Russia, and its former satellites, although I know that's an expression that could be changing day by day. We've seen border disputes in 2020, 2021 between China and India. We've got instability now, it looks like, across the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. This is going to become a contested area. Yes, it's still a very contested area. Actually, the real friction nowadays is really between the Indians and the Chinese. It's an incredibly long frontier, if you clue to bet in China, the China-India frontier.

It's fast and, of course, accordingly difficult to ride most of the way. There are several kind of pressure points from an extreme northeast. The Indian state of what's called Arunachal Pradesh, the most northeastern state in India, almost the whole state is claimed by China. They don't think that Arunachal Pradesh is part of India at all. And it's a bit the same at the other extremity of the mountains in the western Himalaya, in Ladakh, which is just the Indian bit of Tibet next to Kashmir, where again, Indian and Chinese forces have, in the last year anyway, have come to blows.

And again, the frontier is disputed. So this is a main source of friction between India and China. But there are others. Well, first of all, India and Pakistan have disputed large parts of what used to be northern Kashmir. The Pakistanis, I mean, they're building an enormous dam on the

Indus River in what they call the Gilgit-Baltistan region. The Indians claim that this is actually part of the old Kashmir state, which they now claim as theirs in Taito. And so, Pakistanis have great difficulty raising the This is actually part of the old Kashmir state, which they now claim as theirs in total. And so Pakistanis have great difficulty raising the money to build this colossal den. And in fact, of course, the Chinese have come to their rescue and are happy to embarrass the Indians any way they can. And so the project is being funded largely by China as part of its China-Pakistan economic corridor,

which itself is part of Mr. Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, which is a very elastic construction. It seems to revolve just about anywhere the Chinese have strategic or economic interests. So the section between India and China China the tension between India and Pakistan then there's all sorts of uncertainties there's about

I mean Russia was conceived by the British as being the main threat to the region but that has subsided very

much I mean as you say in the Russian satellites places like Tajikistan Uzbekistan Kazakhstan

Kyrgyzstan so on all now independent and none of that poses a particular threat to the region because it's still very much subject to good relations with Russia or Russian influence. So that's not such a problem. But China, India, and Pakistan, India, are all disputing large chunks of Himalaya. That makes it very difficult to impose any kind of international supervision of what is, as I said, this absolutely vital high altitude unique because they have the only

one in the world. John, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. What is the name of your book? The book is called Himalaya, Exploring the Roots of the World. The Roots of the World was an Arabic term for the whole region. Nowadays, we normally call it Himalaya. Himalaya, in Sanskrit, means snow, and alia means a boat. So it means a boat, as they say, the ladders mode, the realm of snow.

Well, we're talking about the realm of snow on the right podcast here. That's what I like. Thank you very much, John Kay, for coming on the pod. Thanks.