Born c. 1849, Sikkim
Died ?
In the middle of the eighteenth century Great Britain took possession of much of the Indian subcontinent. During the next several decades British surveyors set about making accurate maps of India and the regions to its north, including the Himalayas. (By 1818 the project would be known as “The Great Trigonometrical Survey.”) The British felt that in order to keep their Indian holdings safe from the powerful nearby empires of Russia and China, they needed to expand their geographic knowledge, especially of the remote mountain kingdoms of Nepal and Tibet.
Getting that information was difficult, for the mountainous terrain made traveling treacherous. The surveyors also encountered hostile native inhabitants and, after a while, some countries closed their borders to them. In order to continue their mapmaking, the British began training Indians, disguised as merchants or pilgrims in order to enter forbidden areas, to secretly carry out their surveys for them. These Indians were usually well-educated men who received extensive training for their new lives as surveyors and spies. Thus they were called “pundit-explorers,” because “pundit” means “learned man” in Hindi (the language spoken in India).
Indian explorer Kintup, however, did not fit the profile of the usual pundit. An illiterate native of Sikkim, a kingdom bordering India in the Himalayas, he was untrained in the skills of surveying and spying. Still, after four long years and despite many obstacles—including being sold into servitude—he managed to complete the task assigned to him by the British Survey Department. He succeeded in investigating more of the Tsangpo, Tibet’s main navigable river, than had any previous explorer. He also proved that it was connected to the Brahmaputra River of northeastern India.
Given the code name K. P., Kintup made his first expedition into Tibet as the assistant to pundit-explorer Nem Singh. On the mission Kintup proved to be a hard worker and very reliable, and it was clear that he was ready to take on greater responsibilities. Unfortunately, his illiteracy kept him from traveling alone, for he could not record his observations. Therefore, on his second assignment he was paired with a Mongolian lama (Buddhist monk), and posed as his servant. Their mission was to travel to the Tsangpo River, which runs from west to east in southern Tibet. They were to find out if it was, in fact, the same river as the Brahmaputra, which flows through the Assam region of India.
Previous explorations of the Tsangpo, including one by pundit-explorer Nain Singh (c. 1832–c. 1882), had suggested that it was the only river in Tibet that was large enough to be the Brahmaputra. Still, the connection was not certain, for some 120 miles of the Tsangpo remained unexplored. Also unknown was how the river dropped from 10,000 feet to 500 feet in altitude in that short 120 miles. Did the Tsangpo descend sharply in what could be the world’s greatest waterfall (it does not), or did it move along in a series of rapids?
Efforts had been made to investigate the Tsangpo by traveling from the south—from Assam—but explorers had been stopped by hostile hill tribes. So Kintup and his companion were instructed to make their way to the Tsangpo by starting in Tibet (to the north) and attempting to follow it downstream instead. If that were physically impossible, Kintup was to relay a message to the British Survey Department. The pundit-explorer was instructed to send specially marked logs down the Tsangpo, and if they reached alerted workers on the Brahmaputra River in Assam, the connection between the two rivers could be made.
Kintup and the Mongolian lama left the city of Darjeeling in northern India near the Sikkim border in the summer of 1880. They crossed into Tibet by way of the Donkya Pass and traveled to a monastery near Lhasa, Tibet’s capital city. By March of 1881, after many delays, they reached Gyala Sindong, the farthest known point on the Tsangpo River. At the small village of Pemakîchung, Kintup observed a series of waterfalls. While he reported this to the Survey Department, the message was misunderstood, and for many years it was believed that the waters of the Tsangpo descended in one giant waterfall.
Unable to proceed any farther along the river there, Kintup and his companion were forced to travel through an unknown region of Tibet called Po Me. On May 24, 1881, at a town named Tongkyuk Dzong, the lama announced that he had to leave to take care of some business, and that he would return in two or three days. But he really traveled back to his home in Mongolia and was never seen again. Before leaving, however, he had sold Kintup to the head man of the village. The pundit-explorer was forced to work as a house servant for nearly a year, until he escaped on March 7, 1882.
His determination to complete his mission unshaken by the ordeal, Kintup headed back to the Tsangpo River. But in the town of Marpung, Tibet, he was captured by agents sent out by his former master; things again looked bleak for the pundit-explorer. Kintup begged assistance from the head lama of the local monastery, who agreed to rescue the explorer from his enslavement if Kintup would work for him. So Kintup became a servant in the monastery.
After four and a half months there, Kintup was given permission to make a pilgrimage downriver to the holy mountain of Kondü Potrang. He instead used the time to prepare some 500 logs that he intended to send down the Tsangpo River. Returning to the monastery at Marpung, Kintup then had to find a way to alert the Survey of India staff in Assam to look for the logs. The opportunity came—probably in December of 1882—when he was given two months’ leave to make another religious pilgrimage. This time he traveled to Lhasa, where he managed to find someone to carry a message back to India.
Kintup returned to Marpung and his life of servitude once more. He stayed in the monastery for nine more months, until the head lama—impressed by Kintup’s religious devotion— gave him his freedom. The pundit-explorer traveled to the place where he had hidden his logs. He was supposed to mark them by inserting metal tubes inside, but because he lost the drill he needed to do this, he tied the tubes to the surface of the logs with bamboo strips instead. He then released them down the river, at the rate of fifty a day.
Kintup also tried to follow the river downstream himself. He was able to get to within forty miles of the border of British territory before hostile native tribes stopped him. So he embarked on a return trip the same way he had come: back to Sikkim by way of Lhasa. He finally reached the offices of the Survey in Assam on November 17, 1884, four years after he had left.
On his return, Kintup learned that nobody had followed up on his message from Tibet, and that the logs that he had so painstakingly prepared had floated down the river unnoticed in Assam. His efforts went unappreciated; two years passed before anyone even bothered to take down his story. When an account of Kintup’s explorations was published, it was revealed that he had investigated more of the Tsangpo than had any previous explorer. What is more, some of the logs that he sent down the Tsangpo had later been discovered in the great river delta where the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers meet to empty into the Bay of Bengal. Thus Kintup’s efforts had proved that the Tsangpo and the Brahmaputra were, indeed, the same river.
Kintup was finally given a reward for his work. He served in a minor role in one further expedition for the British Survey Department. He then returned to his native village, and resumed his work as a tailor. The date of his death is unknown.
Baker, Daniel B., ed. Explorers and Discoverers of the World. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993.
Marshall Cavendish Illustrated Encyclopedia of Discovery and Exploration, Volume 12: The Heartland of Asia, written by Nathalie Ettinger. Freeport, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 1990.
Pear, Nancy and Daniel B. Baker. “Hari Ram.” Explorers and Discoverers. Detroit: U•X•L, 1998.
Waldman, Carl and Alan Wexler. Who Was Who in World Exploration. New York: Facts on File, 1992.
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