Book review: Lachlan Fleetwood,Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya

Lachlan Fleetwood’s book is a wonderful new addition to the scholarly literature on the Himalayas. Using the huge but often overlooked trove of colonial-era European naturalists’ and surveyors’ journals, reports, memoirs and scientific papers on the Himalayas, Fleetwood shows how the science of mountains are related to geopolitics and colonialism. In 1800, the Himalayas were not recognised as the world’s highest mountain ranges. How did they achieve this status in 1856? What happened in the intervening years that led to this paradigm shift in the geological sciences? How was this connected to imperialist knowledge production on the part of the East India Company, which was ruling India then?

The author clarifies that he is making an intervention in studies of global science in terms of how scientists tried to understand mountains in the framework of commensurability they developed. Verticality became increasingly important in global science in the mid-nineteenth century as scientists were keen to define earth’s topography through roundness as well as altitude. But it was inextricably woven with imperial decisions regarding unstable frontiers. Scaling heights for conquest (used for survey and measurement and demarcation of territorial control) was related to the impulse to conquer people and territories.

Chapter one probes how European attempts to measure the Himalayas were fraught with many tensions, between the objective of making global science on one hand, and the insecurity of frontiers, imperial competition and reliance on local labour, on the other. The author emphasises that ‘insecurity is thus intended to signal a relative lack of knowledge and the threatening nature of this lacunae’ (p. 52). Therefore, insecure frontiers and the need to map them formed the impetus for imperial knowledge-making, including scientific discovery. Conversely, imperial acquisition of new territories allowed travel and science of the mountains. Empire and science were entangled in different ways. Imperial rivalry—between British India, China and Russia, meant that scientific explorations and measurements often had to be curtailed midway in order to avoid diplomatic tension. Empire entered also in the actions of naturalists and explorers who were not paid or commissioned by East India Company to do so. It was a prevailing loyalty to and pride about Europe that served as motivations for many dilettante surveyors.

Chapter two looks at ‘embodied instrumental practice’ (p. 69) in measuring the Himalayas in the nineteenth century. Even as colonial explorers and surveyors tried to match their findings to a global standard and wrote about the use of sophisticated instruments of measurement, they also included extensive descriptions of the physical challenges and difficulties with native guides they faced. Having precise instruments were not enough to establish veracity and objectivity of results in the global community of scientists, as their methods were considered not suitable to the scale and topography of the Himalayas. Further, imported instruments broke, and had to be repaired by local craftsmen to an imperfect form, or had to be improvised by British surveyors to fit local conditions. The chapter also looks at writing practices in the field, exploring relations between memory and field-writing, and how timely inscription and note-taking were important to assert authoritative data.

In chapter three, the author extends this point by looking at the ‘politics of bodily comparison’ as European surveyors compared their bodies’ responses to high altitudes and their experiences of altitude sickness with their Bhotiya, Tartar and Lepcha guides, and these entered their written accounts, forming the basis for comparisons with other mountain regions and generating medical topographies that rendered the Himalayas as peripheral and aberrant spaces. For instance, the premise that altitude symptoms would be lower in the Alps than in the Himalaya, and in temperate than in tropical mountains. The author draws on Zomia theory and James Scott’s ‘friction of terrain’ to show how in Himalayan mountain science, rather than topography, it was cross-cultural labour relations that shaped the way altitude sickness was recorded in travel accounts (p. 107).

Chapter four gives an interesting account of how fossil bones called ‘Bijli ki har’ or lightning bones sold as talismans and ammonites, called ‘Chakar futteer’ venerated as Salagram [a fossil ammonite] already circulated between mountain and lowlands, and East India Company employees collected these as geological specimens by tapping into the pre-existing networks. In cases where the objects were not already part of routes of exchange, such as calcareous deposits, Himalayan monks and local guides supplied their location to Europeans. Fleetwood uses Fa Ti Fan’s notion of cultural borderlands to show how overlapping belief systems, including Hindu cosmology and geological science (a Western cosmology), could confront and place limits on each other (p. 131).

While imperial explorations relied on local expertise and familiarity of terrain to ascend mountains, these knowledges were later subordinated or erased in records/documentation. By reading surveyors’ accounts of measurement against the grain, one can recover the role of local guides, porters and brokers. Chapter four is thus about the role played by South Asians in Europeans’ collection of specimens, but it is also about how these material specimens were used to incorporate the Himalayas into a universal scientific discourse of geology.

Chapter five is about the role of Himalayan botanical specimens in the making of company gardens, while chapter six tells the story of how plant and animal geographies of the Himalayas were used to compare it with the alpine world, thereby, making the Himalayas compatible with a European imagined framework of a vertical globe.

The conclusion sections in each chapter provide illuminating reflections and summations. There is some confusion of arguments as the author tries to mix different topics together. It is true that field-writing and instruments both form technologies of mountain science, but they are awkwardly combined in chapter five leading to a confusion of the argument. In my view, this chapter makes a simple and fundamental point about scientific objectivity being arrested by subjective human and environmental factors, and mountain science only served to drive home this point. The author is pointing at the physicality of mountain science which is different from other field-based sciences in lesser altitudes which interrupts the performance of technologies of global science. The state looms large in embodied instrumental practice, as labour and material had to be purchased from company grants and field-books had to be submitted for reimbursement. Both altitude and empire confounded attempts to strictly stick to a golden global standard, and improvisations had to be done.

In some parts of the book, a topic is introduced without delving into its depths. Thus, hill stations are cursorily referred to in chapter three, and could have just been footnoted. Regarding the chapter on gardens, the author seems to realise its lack of fit and provides too many justifications for including it in the book. But overall, this is a fascinating read, and should be read not only by academics but by everyone interested in the Himalayas.