Getting to the Heights of Mt. Everest ft. Radhanath Sikdar

 Well, if you ask anybody around, What is the highest peak on this planet? The answer will directly hit Mount Everest. But, if you ask, Who established it as the highest peak on this planet? Who measured? And there will be a great silence around. And it is just an example of people’s reaction to people who do great things. But, that’s not what we should focus on, we should focus on “How can one get the answer on the first click”. 

Well, it all started with man’s hope to get grip over others of his own species (i.e. colonization). In 1802, British infantry officer William Lambton started The Great Trigonometric Survey to survey the entire Indian subcontinent with precision in scientific scale, under the blessings of the East India

Company. And this was a truly long project taking around 69 years to just complete. And the project is worth the time. Oh c'mon, at least the british empire was not that foolish to continue a project for such a long time, even after considering all the costs, unless they see the profit. And yes, it was there. 

This project was not only important for british empire, but also equally important in the field of mathematics and the science of measurements. It was for the first time that the section of an arc of longitude was accurately measured and it is also responsible for the development of a theory called isostasy by measuring something called geodesic anomaly.

It was the project that was important from the discovery point of view. It was the project that shattered all the previous records of highest peak heights, slowly. It was the survey where records of highest peaks were established and shattered, even without allowing the information to diffuse across the globe, or at least the whole british empire. Records were being recorded and shattered. It was the project that is responsible for including a major number of quality peaks in the world in our database.

But, deep inside this project there lies something dark. The hate of “then Britishers” for the black people, their insatiable greed for fame, their ignorance toward the “doer” man, their ability to crush  black people to get whatever they wanted. And it is one of the main causes, why there is silence around, on the question of who established the peak as the highest?

Well ,the name is Radhanath Sikdar, born in Bengal Presidency (Gondolpara, Chandannagar, near Kolkata) of British India. A brilliant student, one of the first two Indians to read Newton’s Principia and numerous other great mathematical works of all time. With his grip in his subject, he easily secured a job as a computer, and on further assessments, his skills prevailed. And this made his journey from meeting to being Everest’s best colleague smoother. And obviously, there was a reason, and that is his skill. After Everest, A. S. Waugh was appointed the superintendent of this survey, and under his observation, Radhanath Sikdar measured the highest peak in this world, which perhaps he would have never seen.

Well, let’s peek at the history that is a result of man’s greed for fame and resources, and their “who cares” tendency to achieve that. 

There were some rules for naming the peaks in the Great trigonometric survey, which refers to naming with roman numerals, and regional names afterward. And that is it. You will find names of peaks in Indian subcontinent as local names. Well, those were rules, but who cares, when they have greed for fame, when Sikdar calculated out the height of peak XV all those rules were shattered.  Mt. Everest, named after George Everest, a British officer, and the name seems no native.

Sikdar's skills were appreciated by both Everest and Waugh, but he was no exception for their hate for black people. And there are instances where Sikdar was fined for protesting against colonial administration citing the poor working condition on survey ground. In another recorded instance, the preface was excluded from the third edition of the ‘Survey Manual’ (which proved an immensely effective tool for this survey), just because it had the name of a black man- Radhanath Sikdar. -This particular instance is titled ‘robbery of the dead’ (by that time Sikdar was dead) by a paper ‘Friend of India’ (now, ‘The Statesman’) in 1876.

And there are numerous other instances out of the  record, for sure.

And all those instances are the accumulated reason for why we don’t know the person who made the peak the highest.

This whole story of Radhanath Sikdar tells us a tale of how much appreciation the black people got for their skills, and how much humiliation they have suffered silently. This story also tells us how advanced black minds were treated and underrated at the peak of colonization.

And this whole thing reminds me of a quote by american historian John Henrik Clarke, where he said “Europeans not only colonized most of the world, they colonized information about the world”.