Elphinstone, Geography, and the Spectre of Afghanistan in the Himalaya

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the "Elphinstonian episteme" in the context of the northwestern Himalayas, a region centered on the historical "entrepot" of Ladakh. The combination of cartographic, ethnographic and scientific practices exhibited in the Elphinstone mission of 1808-09 were repeated a decade later in the north-western Himalayas by William Moorcroft and George Trebeck, and were extended by two British boundary commissions in the 1840s. The results of these commissions were compiled in Alexander Cunningham's composite account, "Ladak: Physical, Statistical, and Historical" (1854), a text which has done for Ladakh Studies what Elphinstone's "Account of the Kingdom of Caubul" has done for Afghanistan Studies. This chapter surveys the place of geography within Elphinstone's, Moorcroft's and Cunningham's texts, before exploring how the assertion of borderlines within these geographical conceptions conflicted with indigenous understandings of territory. By comparing these texts, this chapter traces the development of colonial geographical knowledge. Not only are these texts fundamentally concerned with the construction of political space, they also reflect a specific hierarchy of information that reflects broader colonial understandings of territoriality.