Claiming Everest, Sharing Tenzing: Indians and First Successful Expedition to Mt. Everest

Details

22 July 2025/६ साउन २०८२ (मंगलबार, दिउँसो ३ बजे)
Claiming Everest, Sharing Tenzing: Indians and First Successful Expedition to Mt. Everest
Gaurav C. Garg, Assistant Professor of History, Ashoka University, India

Abstract
The first successful expedition to Mount Everest in 1953 was a multi-national achievement. It was a British expedition that was led by a Welshman with allegedly nationalist sympathies—John Hunt, and the peak was climbed by a bee-keeper from New Zealand—Edmund Hillary, and, a Nepal born Sherpa who had spent his working life in Indian hill town of Darjeeling—Tenzing Norgay. Predictably, as soon as the news of the expedition’s success reached the world, countries involved in the ascent raced to corner the credit for this achievement. However, of all the countries involved in this expedition, India’s claim of having anything to do with the Everest or the expedition of 1953, was the most tenuous. Mt Everest sat from her borders, and its only link with the climb was that John Hunt had served in the colonial police in the province of Bengal in the 1930s and Tenzing resided in Darjeeling. But this did not stop Indians—both ordinary and elite—from seeing the conquest of Everest as a national achievement. This talk highlights and analyses the ways in which Indians claimed the first successful expedition of Mt. Everest as an Indian achievement; the mountain itself as an Indian peak that should have an Indian name; and the consequences of these claims for both Tenzing Norgay and Indian mountaineering. The talk deliberates on the audacity of such claims, that is, what made Indians believe that claiming Everest as their own could stick and what it tells us about the geographical and political imaginations of early postcolonial Indians. In this talk I will argue that for Indians, the route to claiming Everest lay in claiming Tenzing to be an Indian citizen, a demand that shaped the rest of his life. Claiming Tenzing as an Indian however, strained Indo-Nepal ties and forced the Government of India to walk a tight- rope between managing expectations at home and its relations with Nepal and even Britain, abroad. How did the Government of India, and indeed Governments of Nepal and Britain coordinate among themselves to handle such pressures emanating from the people in their respective countries, forms the final part of the talk. 

About the Speaker
Gaurav C Garg is an Assistant Professor of History at Ashoka University, India. He took his PhD from the Department of History, New York University and prior to that he completed an MA in History from the Center for Historical Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University and a BSc. in Economics with Honors from Presidency College, Calcutta. Dr Garg is a historian of cities, mountains and modern South Asia. His first book entitled Agents of Inertia: The Pursuit of Business Interest and Calcutta’s Urban-Economic Decline, 1900-1970, will be published by the Cambridge University Press in Spring 2026. It is a history of the spatial politics of business elites in twentieth-century Calcutta and—to a lesser extent—Bombay. It shows how for a period of about seventy years, from the late nineteenth century to the late 1960s, Calcutta’s businesses emerged as one of the main obstacles to spatial change and infrastructural development in the city with devastating consequences. He is currently working on two new book length projects. The first, tentatively titled Foundations of Development is a history of the Ford Foundation in postcolonial India’s development and politics. The second is a global history of Indian mountaineering. The talk on Indian responses to the first ascent of Everest in 1953 is part of this research.