Читать книгу The Secrets of Spies - Weldon Owen - Страница 52

PANDIT NUMBER ONE

To preserve secrecy, pandits

were referred to by numbers

rather than names. The most

famous of them, Nain Singh

Rawat, was assigned as Pandit

Number One. Born into a

mountainous village in the

Himalayas, Nain Singh had

already traveled through

Tibet and was familiar with its

language and customs. He was

hired by the British and given

the mission of conducting a full

survey of Tibet—a journey of

1,580 miles (2,540 km) that took

eighteen months. He spent three

months in the Tibetan capital of

Lhasa and even met the country’s

ruler, the Dalai Lama, all the while

gathering intelligence

about a place

virtually unknown

to Westerners.

He also managed to

survey the Thok Jalung

goldfields before fears

for his safety led him

to slip out of Lhasa

and return to India.

THE GREAT GAME

53

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

As part of the geographical survey of India, the British used locals from the

Indian border states in areas where Europeans would have been denied entry.

Although the survey was a genuine mapmaking operation, its agents on the

ground were also expected to supply any useful intelligence they could find.

The mountainous country of Tibet was forbidden to Europeans on pain of

death, and it was here that the agents—called pandits or “owners of

knowledge”—were most effective.

The pandits were typically disguised as Buddhist holy men, and were given

a modified Buddhist rosary with one hundred beads (instead of the usual one

hundred and eight), which helped them count out the regular steps they used

to measure distances. They were trained in the use of sextants (hidden in their

travelers’ chests), and had compasses concealed in their prayer wheels, which

were also used to hold scrolls of paper for recording measurements.

Those pandits who were caught by the authorities faced an

uncertain fate, but those who returned brought

back valuable information.

Above: Nain Singh Rawat