MCADD is more than an archive. While the bulk of our collection brings together the published and unpublished work of others — explorers, surveyors, cartographers, naturalists — some of our most significant contributions are things we have made, discovered, or recovered ourselves. These are the Projects: original work by the PAHAR team that did not exist before we undertook it.
We invite researchers, readers, and enthusiasts to follow these ongoing efforts, contribute where they can, and share notice of their own work in progress. Correspondence with the editor is welcome at [email protected].
1. Himalayan Encounters: Returning the Past to Where It Belongs
Between 1854 and 1858, three German brothers — Hermann, Adolf, and Robert Schlagintweit — traversed the Himalayan belt from Assam to Baltistan and Ladakh, covering over 18,000 miles. They sketched constantly: mountain landscapes, glaciers, sacred shrines, village life, and high-altitude terrain that no artist had attempted before. Today, their surviving drawings are spread across several public institutions and private hands in Munich. The Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München (State Collection of Prints and Drawings) holds drawings deposited from the former Royal Cabinet in 1898. The Alpines Museum München (Alpine Museum of the German Alpine Clubs) holds drawings sold by Hermann’s heir in 1888 and later re-donated by the Schlagintweit family in 2013. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library) holds the brothers’ papers — the “Schlagintweitiana” — including 60 original drawings and 17 volumes of traced outlines with the brothers’ own notes. Members of the Schlagintweit family still hold important drawings in private possession. For over 160 years, none of these images had been seen in India — by the communities whose landscapes, temples, and lives they portray.
In 2015, PAHAR founder Prof. Shekhar Pathak stood in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung — possibly among the very first Indians to see these drawings at full resolution — and knew at once that they needed to come home. What followed was a decade of patient, determined work: securing permissions, building relationships across continents, and finally bringing high-resolution digital reproductions of 77 of these drawings to exhibitions in India — at the India International Centre in Delhi, the Doon Library and Research Centre in Dehradun, and CRST College in Nainital.
But this is only a beginning. Seventy-seven drawings represent a fraction of the surviving collection. PAHAR’s intention is to continue pressing for access to the remaining images — and to bring as many as possible before Indian audiences through further exhibitions. Beyond that, there is a third step that matters just as much: to make high-resolution reproductions freely available on the internet, so that any interested person anywhere in the world can see them. It is a simple matter of justice. These are not abstract landscapes. They are pictures of people’s homes, their temples, their mountains. Those people, and their descendants, deserve to see them.
Read the full story of Himalayan Encounters →
2. The Improved Uttarakhand Map
When Uttarakhand became a new Indian state on 11 November 2000, the first maps of the state appeared within weeks — sold by footpath vendors across the region. They showed only major roads drawn almost as straight lines, missed hundreds of place names, and got the mountain terrain embarrassingly wrong. The Survey of India’s own official map was, in the words of the team that would eventually correct it, “a pathetic example of mapmaking.”
PAHAR’s response was to simply make a better one. Working with cartographers, researchers, and local experts — and spending nearly three years securing clearance from the Survey of India — the team produced a first edition in 2004 that was ten times more detailed: accurate terrain, mountain paths that actually follow the curves of the hills, and the full richness of place names across the state. Around 2,000 copies were distributed to government offices, schools, NGOs, and institutions. Every copy was taken.
A second, improved edition has since been prepared — in both English and Hindi, incorporating years of feedback, corrections, and new survey data. It stands as one of the most comprehensive independently produced maps of any Himalayan state.
Read the full story of the Uttarakhand Map →
3. The Moorcroft Journal Transcription Project
William Moorcroft — surgeon, veterinarian, and Superintendent of the East India Company’s military stud — left behind one of the most extraordinary bodies of travel writing in Himalayan history. Between 1820 and 1825, he journeyed from Bareilly through Joshimath, Dehra Dun, Lahore, Kullu, Ladakh, Kashmir, Peshawar, Kabul, and onward to Bokhara in Central Asia. He wrote constantly: journals, letters, reports, observations on trade routes, plant life, politics, and local customs. The original manuscripts — thousands of pages of difficult handwriting — now lie in the British Library.
The edited volumes published after his death are, by the admission of scholars, pale shadows of the originals. PAHAR’s transcription project — led by Janet Rizvi (Gurgaon), Aurélise Bouquet (France), and a small team of dedicated volunteers — has now typed up virtually all of Moorcroft’s five years of travel journals. The first eleven journals followed Moorcroft’s own numbering system (Journal 1 through 11). After that, Moorcroft himself abandoned the numbering and titled subsequent journals simply by the places where each one began and ended — and PAHAR’s transcription team has followed that same system. These transcripts, painstakingly produced from manuscripts that have defeated many researchers, are available nowhere else in the world.
Volunteers are still needed for the remaining letters and reports. Each document is a self-contained unit — you can take on one without committing to the others. The work requires patience, a tolerance for difficult 19th-century handwriting, and genuine curiosity about one of the most remarkable travellers in Himalayan history. Write to [email protected] if you are interested.
Read more about the Moorcroft archive →
4. Solving the “Moorcroft Mystery”
In August 1825, William Moorcroft died in Andkhoi, Afghanistan — or so his travel companion George Trebeck reported. Moorcroft was buried there, the expedition ended, and that, for most historians, was that.
But in 1846, two French missionary priests — Huc and Gabet — arrived in Lhasa after a gruelling journey across Tibet. In conversations with local informants, they heard something remarkable: that a European named Moorcroft had lived in Lhasa for approximately twelve years, from around 1826 to 1838, before being killed by bandits on his way back towards Leh.
If true, Moorcroft faked his own death in Afghanistan, crossed into Chinese-controlled territory in disguise, and lived for over a decade in Lhasa — the most inaccessible city on earth — years before any acknowledged European entered it. Why? How? And is there any proof?
PAHAR has gathered every document, every witness account, and every secondary analysis of this question into one place. The mystery remains open. We would welcome any researcher with new evidence or a fresh perspective.