2025/05/16 by Nicholas Green · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Philippine History and Culture #Adventure Sports and Sensation Seeking #Sport and Mega-Event Impacts
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/03086534.2025.2502550
Through an analysis of the correspondence surrounding the creation of the Himalayan Club, a mountaineering club and learned society founded in Simla in 1928, this article examines attitudes towards exploration and mountaineering amongst the elite of British India in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Club’s founding members, Kenneth Mason, a prominent member of the Survey of India, and Geoffrey Corbett, the Secretary of State for Commerce, wrote a circular letter to dozens of their friends and acquaintances seeking advice and opinions relating to the creation of a mountaineering club in India. Analysing the extensive archival material related to Corbett and Mason’s circular letter, this article argues that nostalgia for a supposed golden age of heroic exploration, alongside anxieties about the future of the Empire and the fitness of future imperialists led many within the European political, military, and academic elite in India to valorise mountain climbing. Furthermore, the article argues that for many members of this elite, who had lived and worked in India prior to the First World War, mountaineering was seen as a salutary phenomenon which could help to produce a better calibre of imperial official in the face of increasing pessimism about the fate of the Empire and disillusionment with contemporary realities.