01/03/2017
Did Radhanath SIKHDAR ACTUALLY calculate Mt EVEREST's height? And was Sir George EVEREST opposed to naming the peak after him?
EXTRACTS from "EVEREST: Trekking Map and Complete Guide
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“Sir! I have discovered the highest mountain in the world!”
The year was 1852, and the “discoverer” Radhanath Sikhdar, an Indian officer working for the colonial administration's Survey of India department. Rushing into the office of Sir Andrew Waugh, Surveyor General, Sikhdar, the story goes, could barely contain his excitement.......But did Radhanath Sikhdar actually rush into Sir Andrew Waugh's chamber exclaiming he had discovered the highest peak in the world? The story, related by Sir Francis Younghusband, the English explorer who led the British mission to Tibet in 1904, has been dismissed by some Survey of India officers as folklore. Sikhdar, it has been pointed out, had moved to the Survey's Calcutta centre in 1849 while Waugh's office was in the department's Dehra Dun headquarters. It seems likely though that Sikhdar, a Bengali whom Sir George Everest regarded as 'his right arm', did the initial rough calculations in Calcutta (and a clerk in Dehra Dun possibly rushed up to Waugh with the communicated result). The final calculations, completed in 1856, were apparently conducted in Dehra Dun by John Hennesy, the Anglo-Indian chief computer posted there.
In 1865, Peak XV was renamed Mt. Everest by the Royal Geographical Society in London, on Waugh's recommendation. Sir George Everest was still alive and had earlier opposed the proposal, first mooted by Waugh in 1857, “in testimony of my affectionate respect for a revered chief, and to perpetuate the memory of that illustrious master of accurate geographical research.” Everest had pursued a policy of assigning all geographical features their local names; the name Everest (pronounced eve.rest), he said, “could not be written in Persian (then an Indian court language) or Hindi, and the natives could not pronounce it.”
But Waugh argued that the mountain had no known native name, dismissing the claim (rightly, it turned out) of the British Political Officer in Kathmandu, Brian Hodgson, that it was locally called Devadunga. The claim of three German brothers, all explorers, that XV had the native appellation of Gauri Shankar was also not accepted; the peak Gauri Shankar actually rises 56 km/35 miles to the west of Everest. Waugh must have known, though, that XV was called Jomolangma/ Chomolungma by the Tibetans, but it has been argued that that name referred to the entire Everest massif and not just the peak. The diary entry of the head lama of Rongbuk monastery in Tibet, south of Everest, is cited: “In the southern part…there is a mountain called by the general name Jomoglanma.”
The Chinese government today insists on calling Everest Chomolungma, a corruption of Jomolangma; the word is popularly translated as 'Mother Goddess of the World'. But the actual appellation, Jomolangma, refers to the 'Goddess of Long Life', the deity who rides a red tiger and is one of a group of five divine sisters Tibetans believe reside on five high mountains of the region.
In 1956, the Nepalese government thought up a name of its own for the world's highest peak: Sagarmatha, 'Head of the Sky,' or 'Head in the Sky'. Coined by the historian Babu Ram Acharya, the name however has few takers.
The first time Everest appeared in a map, it was labelled ‘Tschoumou Lancma’. Published in 1733 by the French cartographer Jean Baptiste D’Anville, the map was of Tibet and the location and name of the Everest massif on it was based on reports from a group of French Capuchin monks who were stationed in Lhasa between 1707 and 1733. The monks were probably the first Westerners to have seen Mt Everest. And since it is from Tibet that Everest’s true height and bulk can be best appreciated, the monks must have been greatly impressed."
