RECOLLECTIONS OF A SURVEY OFFICER IN INDIA

Abstract

To one brought up in Switzerland the call of mountains had always been irresistible, so in 1908 I counted myself lucky in being posted for my first field season in the Survey of India to the party which was that year to plane-table the Nilgiri Hills of the Madras Presidency. The ultimate goal was the Himalaya, not to be achieved for many years, and I well remember my feelings of acute jealousy when Kenneth Mason succeeded in joining the Kashmir party a year or two later. Still, there were compensations even in South India. The party moved southwards into Travancore the following year, and it fell to my lot to tackle a mysterious blank marked on the quarter-inch “Atlas” sheets of India “High waving mountains covered with impenetrable forests and overrun by wild beasts”. This was the catchment area of the Periyar Dam constructed some seventeen years previously by Col. Pennycuick, R.E. (if I remember rightly), for the purpose of diverting some of the monsoon rainfall of the Western Ghats to the dry Tinnevelly side of the watershed. The dam had formed a narrow many-armed lake running 21 miles into the “waving” mountains and ending at the fringe of the “impenetrable forest”. To that extent the communications problem was solved: by the use of dugouts. These the younger generation of the small jungle tribe living on the lake border had learnt to make and to paddle. I spent two interesting if lonely seasons there, first triangulating alone and then plane-tabling with a “camp” of eight Indian surveyors. The lake area was open country, if you can call 10-foot elephant grass open. Against Forest Department orders I more than once set a match to the grass in the evening and found several square miles clear for work by next morning. This simplified getting about, but the charred grass stalks made one black from head to foot. Apart from my own men I met no one whose language I could speak during those two seasons except some tea-planters from Pirmed on one occasion, my “O.C. Party”, Sackville Hamilton, who came to inspect, and Stoehr of the Sapper batch above me who came to shoot an elephant.