Nain Singh Rawat

Nain Singh Rawat, the greatest of the 'Pundit' explorers, walked into forbidden Tibet disguised as a pilgrim and mapped it with a prayer wheel, a rosary and steps counted by the thousand. He fixed the position and altitude of Lhasa and traced the great river of Tibet for the first time.

He was born in 1830 in Milam, a Shauka (Bhotiya) trading village at the head of the Johar valley in Pithoragarh, whose people crossed to Tibet every summer with the salt and wool trade. That inheritance of language and high passes made him the Survey of India's perfect instrument when Tibet was closed to Europeans.

Trained to walk a measured pace of exactly two thousand steps to the mile, he counted them on a modified rosary of a hundred beads, hid his survey notes in a prayer wheel, and read the stars and boiling point at night. Between 1865 and 1875 he reached Lhasa twice, mapped some 2,000 km of the Tsangpo's course and the road from Kathmandu, always at mortal risk had he been discovered.

The Royal Geographical Society awarded him its Patron's Gold Medal in 1877, an extraordinary honour for an Indian in that era, and the government granted him land and a pension. He died in 1882. Modern India has put him on a stamp, and his Johar valley, from Munsyari up to Milam, still tells his story.