Nain Singh Rawat
Nain Singh (* 1830 in Milam, Kumaon division, Uttarakhand, India, † February 1, 1882 in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh ) was an Indian Pundit in the 19th century, large parts of Tibet to the British-Indian Great Trigonometrical Survey Office Survey surveyed. In particular, he became known for an accurate determination of the location and altitude of Lhasa and the measurement of large parts of the Yarlung Tsangpo River, the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra.
Life
Nain Singh was born in 1830 in the village of Milam in the high altitude, the homonymous valley in the east of Nanda Devi. He came from a family belonging to the Bhotiya. With his father he had often been in Tibet and had learned to read and understand Tibetan. The brothers Schlagintweit had him and his cousin Mani Singh already hired for their tours in Western Tibet. He then worked as an elementary school teacher, to Captain Thomas George Montgomerie in 1863 employed him as his native explorers (native explorer ) for the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Tibet, Nepal and other countries of Central Asia were shut for Brits and other Europeans as traders and pilgrims from the Himalayas were largely able to cross borders freely. Montgomerie therefore formed from locals in simple surveying techniques and trained them to make uniform steps and to count them over long distances. Thus, they should secretly surveyed the routes covered, so that the British could make new maps of Tibet from their records, what they were significantly intessiert for supremacy in Central Asia as part of the Great Game.
Travels
After training in Dehradun, the seat of the Great Trigonometric Survey, crossed Nain Singh 1865 Nepal and came with different caravans to Shigatse, where he took part in Wangchug Trashilhünpo monastery to a mass audience of the then eleven year old Panchen Lama, Panchen Tenpe. In January 1866, he came to Lhasa, where he remained until April 1866, observed, explored the area and took part in a mass audience with the Dalai Lama, the then ten-year Thrinle Gyatsho. Although his true identity of two Kashmiri merchants is detected, the betrayed him for unknown reasons not the local authority; Singh was able to continue his stay unmolested. Finally, he returned along the Yarlung Tsangpo and Lake Manasarovar in western Tibet back to India and met the end of October 1866 again in Dehradun.
On his second voyage, in 1867, Singh came again to Western Tibet, crossed the Satluj, went to Gartok over to the eastern source of the river Indus and visited the legendary gold mines of Thok Jalung. Here, Singh noticed that the gold miners dug only in near-Earth layers for gold because they believed that it would be a crime against the earth, to dig deeper, and deeper trench that would deprive the soil of its fertility. On another route, he returned late November 1867 back to Dehradun.
From 1873 to 1875 he went to Leh in Kashmir on a much more northerly route than his last trip across the Chang Tang to Tengri Nor and Nam Co and from there to Lhasa. Fearing discovery, he had to immediately move on to the Yarlung Tsangpo, followed him down the river to Zêtang in Shannan Prefecture, crossed the Himalayas and finally reached in Udalguri in Assam again British territory.
Nain Singh's later life
Nain Singh finished out his service as an explorer. However, he remained the service as a trainer of other native explorers connected at least to 1879. He received a pension, and shortly afterwards a piece of land with the resulting revenue. He retired to his birthplace, Milam, where he spent the summer as he pulled on his land in the warmer level in winter. He died on 1 February 1882 in Moradabad, probably from cholera, in his early or mid- fifties.
Honors
The Royal Geographical Society awarded him a gold medal and the French Société de Géographie a gold pocket watch that was presented to him on 1 January 1878 in Calcutta by the Viceroy Lord Lytton.
The India Post announced on June 27, 2004 issued a stamp block in honor of the Great Trigonometrical Survey with a mark of Nain Singh.