(c) Billy Frank
As part of our mission to undertake research on the Society’s Collections and to make them more accessible, we have awarded four Wiley Research Fellowships for 2022. We’re speaking to each of our Research Fellows to find out more about their projects and the latest is Jonathan Westaway (UCLan).
How did you come to be interested in your current research?
I wanted to explore the British imperial construction of Sherpas as a ‘mountain race’ uniquely adapted to high-altitude labour. This idea has its roots in the racialised policies of empire, in particular the development of theories of ‘martial’ and ‘mountain’ races. Post-colonial critics of empire have long argued that the racial logic of co-opting certain racial groups to the project of empire was central to the ‘divide and rule’ policies of the colonisers.
My research examines racialised discourses that profiled Nepalese recruits to Gurkha regiments as uniquely suited to mountain warfare and examines how both military logic and environmental-determinist arguments shaped the emergence of the Sherpa identity as a ‘mountain race’ in British India. Narratives around Sherpa suitability for high-altitude labour emerged in the early 1920s as part of the British efforts to climb Everest. My research examines this in the context of the active frontier warfare that threatened the very existence of British India at the time. Gurkha regiments were engaged in a particularly brutal form of border warfare in the Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 and subsequent warfare on the North-West Frontier.
The research takes a micro-historical approach, examining the lives of Gurkha officers and NCOs who participated in the Everest expeditions of the 1920s and 1930s, in particular the lives and careers of Brig. Gen. Charles Granville Bruce and Major Charles John Morris. My research explores how the logic of frontier warfare in mountain regions, colonial violence and the homosocial intimacies of regimental life shaped discourses around the fitness of Nepalese recruits for both mountain warfare and mountaineering labour.
What made you apply for a WDA Research Fellowship?
I am currently Principal Investigator on an AHRC research network Other Everests: Commemoration, Memory and Meaning and the British Everest Expedition Centenaries, 2021-2024, working with our project partners the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and the Kendal Mountain Festival. One of our key objectives as a network is to establish how we might go about researching the hidden histories of indigenous high-altitude labour in the Greater Himalaya region. Expeditionary archives are critical in piecing together fragmentary biographical details of early Sherpa mountaineers and expeditionary photographs enable us to use visual ethnographic techniques to reconstruct the individual agency and identity of early indigenous high-altitude workers.
How does your project sit within your wider research interests?
My research has examined the governance of the mountainous trans-border regions of British India and the knowledge practices that rendered Asia legible to colonial administrators. I have been particularly interested in the ways in which travel writing, photography and film were incorporated into repertoires of surveillance techniques by the agents of the imperial security state in British India and how mountaineering, geographical exploration and surveying were implicated in the process of ‘seeing like a state’.
Both Charles Bruce and John Morris help us think about the ways in which violence, embodiment and intimacy shaped approaches to the construction of martial and mountain races and their application in colonial governance and knowledge-gathering practices. Charles Bruce led the 1922 and 1924 Mount Everest expeditions and had been instrumental in developing strategies that both weaponised and technologised Gurkha bodies for military and exploratory work at altitude, approaches that were subsequently to be applied to Sherpas. John Morris’s homosexuality, and his long-term relationship with his Gurkha orderly, informed much of his travel writing and photography with coded counter discourses against empire and a Queer sensibility.
I wanted to ask questions such as: to what extent can we detect a tension between desire and mastery in Morris’s vision of Highland Asia and its peoples in his 1922 Everest photography? How does Morris’s homosexuality and his relationships with indigenous lovers inform his representational strategies and ways of seeing indigenous subjects? Like his great friend E. M. Forster, to what extent did John Morris experience India via intimate same-sex relationships with indigenous colonial subjects?
What are you hoping to find in the digital archives?
I am particularly interested in reconstructing the biographies of army officers and colonial officials who were critical in managing expeditionary labour on the Mount Everest expeditions. Seconded because of their familiarity with transport logistics and language skills in Nepali and Hindustani, their experience would inform some of the paternalistic efforts of the Himalayan Club, founded in 1928, to regulate, insure and protect indigenous expeditionary labour in the region. I am also undertaking a survey of John Morris’s photographic works in both the RGS and in his papers held at the American Heritage Centre at the University of Wyoming, Lander, USA.
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