Number of words: 1,943 The massacre was triggered off by the most trivial incident. Some rations and a bottle of whisky were stolen at the village of Rotung, ten miles east of Kebang, and Williamson told the villagers that he would require satisfaction on his return. He and his party then crossed the Dihong into … Read more

Number of words: 563 In unadministered frontier areas and Indian native states the authority of the British Raj was usually vested in the political agent or the political officer. His powers were limited, so his effectiveness as an administrator was largely dependent on the degree to which he could impose his will on peoples who … Read more

Number of words: 508 The Rawats of Johar valley claim that their ancestors were part of the large-scale Hindu exodus from Rajputana following the invasion of Mohammed Ghori in the twelfth century. In about 1680 a leading member of the clan named Hiru Dham Singh went on a pilgrimage to Kailas-Manasarovar. He took with him … Read more

Number of words: 131 It was now obvious that no further progress could be made either up the river itself or along its banks. They had learned enough about the Abors to realize that the perpetual state of feuding that went on between one Abor village and its neighbour and between one Abor clan and … Read more

Number of words: 551 Bedingfield’s fellow gunner was given a more challenging commission, which was to explore the ‘perfect blank’ that lay upriver from Rungpore. Making his way up the Brahmaputra in a Bengali country boat by a laborious combination of sailing, poling and towing from the bank, Philip Burlton eventually came to an area … Read more

Number of words: 528 Throughout the period of British rule, India’s North-East Frontier, the province of Assam bordering on Tibet and Burma, was regarded by those who served there as the forgotten frontier. It was known for its tea gardens and for very little else. In 1865 one of India’s leading newspapers summed up the … Read more

Number of words: 890 Even in the strictest geological terms Kailas stands alone, being the world’s highest deposit of tertiary conglomerate – a vast pile of cemented gravel laid down in the period immediately preceding the arrival of early man and then thrown up into the sky. It has four clearly-defined walls that match the … Read more

Name of words: 456 Twenty million years ago Tibet lay at the bottom of the sea. The manner in which it was shaped into its present commanding position in Central Asia has been described as an epic in the long history of the formation of the earth’s crust. Caught between two approaching land masses, the … Read more

Number of words: 624 This mystery was centred on the belief shared by a large slice of humanity that somewhere between China and India there stood a sacred mountain, an Asian Olympus of cosmic proportions. This mountain was said to be the navel of the earth and the axis of the universe, and from its … Read more