We’ve always been curious to peek into the past and learn how today’s landscapes looked hundreds of years ago.To satisfy this curiosity, ancient artifacts, and paintings often prove to be helpful.One such painting has been opened to viewers that show India’s one of India’s most beautiful landscapes, from nearly one and a half centuries ago.
Himalayan quest from 170 years ago!
For more than a century, the Schlagintweit brothers and their Himalayan images lived mostly in European archives, libraries, and museum basements, known only to mountaineering historians and Alpine scholars.Now, for the first time, residents of India are getting a public glimpse into what the Himalayas looked like nearly 170 years ago, through the eyes of three German explorer‑siblings. An exhibition titled Himalayan Encounters: Hidden Views from 170 Years Ago brings 77 historic images of the upper Himalayan region to Delhi, offering a rare window into the colonial‑era survey of what the brothers called “high Asia.”
(Photo Courtesy: Alpine Museum, Munich)
What makes these paintings special?
In 1854, the East India Company (EIC) hired three German geologists, Adolph, Hermann, and Robert Schlagintweit, to extend the magnetic survey of the Indian subcontinent.According to a Hindustan Times report, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was already underway, and much of the “great arc” had been mapped, but the northern Himalayan stretches remained only partially explored. With Kashmir giving permission, Nepal delaying, and Sikkim flatly refusing, the brothers had to navigate a tricky geopolitical patch between British‑controlled territories and independent Himalayan states.Himalayan historian Shekhar Pathak told HT, the Schlagintweits were “the first Europeans to use the camera in their surveys in India, and also made paintings over very low‑resolution prints of their photographs.” They later published their results in seven volumes, combining maps, measurements, and visual records of the landscape.
A treasure of images comes home
Of the 77 images on display in Delhi, at least five are being shown publicly for the first time. These include a panoramic view of Dal Lake in Srinagar, framed by snow‑clad mountains, and a view of the Bogapani Bridge in present‑day Meghalaya, held up on wooden stilts across a rugged hillside. The rest of the collection captures rivers, temples, clusters of houses, and high‑altitude terrain from an era when the main goal of the colonial project was to map the entire globe, including the hardest‑to‑reach corners of the Himalayas.All the works on display are high‑quality prints of the Schlagintweits’ original paintings and early photographs, which form part of a larger archive of about 700 sketches of India and “high Asia.”
Bringing the paintings to India
According to the exhibition’s co‑curator Hermann Kreutzmann, the idea to bring these images back to India was born in 2015, when Pathak visited an exhibition at the Alpines Museum in Munich and saw paintings of Nainital, Badrinath, Kedarnath, Kanchenjunga, Ladakh, and Tibetan monasteries. He later said, “I was delighted to see this treasure of paintings, and immediately began dreaming of exhibiting some of these images in India.” reports Hindustan Times.The Schlagintweits’ surveys and maps became the foundation for later Meteorological and geological studies in the region, and their crates of rocks, minerals, plants, and ethnographic masks are now scattered across museums in Germany, England, and even Pakistan.
When and where to watch these paintings?
The traveling show will move from Delhi to Dehradun’s Doon Library and Research Center (May 1–9) and then to Nainital’s CRST Inter College (May 12–18), giving Himalayan‑region audiences an intimate encounter with their own past. In doing so, the exhibition not only revives the story of the Schlagintweit brothers, but also reminds viewers that the Himalayas are both a living landscape and a living archive.
