In the Philadelphia Museum of Art is an 18th-century cloth painting that tells a unique story of Himalayan indigeneity. Measuring 14 feet long, the painting depicts a pilgrimage to Gosaikunda, a lake almost 4400 metres above sea level that is regarded as holy by Hindus and Buddhists, especially those belonging to the Tamang ethnicity. The painting is a cartographic representation of the pilgrimage to Gosaikunda from Kathmandu: the stupas and pagodas of the city give way to steep cliffs and finally the holy lake. Featured in the painting are aristocrats, pilgrims, ascetics, merchants, soldiers and porters, and women in their finery. Gods bow in reverence to the three streams that flow into Gosaikunda – perhaps a recollection of the lake's mythical origins.
Anybody who's been to Gosaikunda will marvel at the fact that the painting correctly depicts the Bhairav Kund and Saraswati Kund, smaller lakes that the waters from Gosaikunda flow into before becoming part of the Trishuli river. But beyond such topography, the painting also represents how the world appeared to indigenous communities living in the Himalaya – and in the Subcontinent. True pictorial representation of the landscape was regarded as secondary. "Seldom, if ever, does nature come to occupy the foreground," writes the art historian B N Goswamy. The depiction of landscape is that of a "brief illusion of space, of planes being established in a methodical if not quite scientific manner."
Instead, Southasian landscapes were imagined from a more cosmological perspective, wherein sacredness and temporal realities were conjoined even in political imaginations. As the historian Kyle J Gardner has shown in The Frontier Complex, pre-colonial borders between Ladakh and Tibet were shaped by local markers based on "cosmogeographies" that earmarked spaces for elemental deities, in what has been called "spiritual territorialisation". Indeed, the differing perceptions of political boundaries in the Himalaya were one of the contentions that led to war between the East India Company and the Gorkha kingdom in 1814. The specifics of control of space – and subsequently the landscape – differed from settlement to settlement, based on political, spiritual and also commercial allegiances.
Such indigenous modes of seeing are rarely found in contemporary Western popular writing about the Himalaya. Seminal new works have been published since the days of the scholars Tucci and Fürer-Haimendorf, early doyens of Himalayan studies, when Tibetan Buddhism was regarded as the lens through which Himalayan communities' indigenous asymmetries and practices could be explained. What is particularly irksome is that the corpus of knowledge surrounding the Himalaya, especially that authored by indigenous scholars, has been steadily growing, yet Western narratives continue to reflect a limited worldview. In the Guardian's 2016 list of "Top 10 books about the Himalayas", not a single Southasian – or Himalayan – writer was represented.