Jul 25 2025 to Jul 25 2025 6:30 p.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Even by the early 1900s, Tibet remained largely unexplored. The area around Mount Kailash, in south-western Tibet, came to be better understood through the explorations of the Swede Sven Hedin, who, during an expedition between 1907 and 1909, discovered—among other things—the sources of the Brahmaputra, Indus, and Sutlej rivers. He measured the depth of Lake Manasarovar and also became the first white man to circumambulate the sacred mountain. Thirty years later, Swami Pranavananda explored the region and went on to publish articles and books that credibly criticized Hedin’s identification of the rivers’ sources, offering, for the first time, an informed Asian perspective on Tibet’s geography.

This session retraces the journey of these two travelers— a Swedish explorer and an Indian ascetic— whose visits to the sacred Kailash-Manasarovar region in Tibet, decades apart, transformed it from a place of myth to a well-understood reality. Through archival material accessed for the first time, juxtaposed against contemporary pictures, this visually rich talk examines the debates that arose between the two, to recreate the story of how the modern understanding of this sacred landscape came to be.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

Speaker

Milan Moudgill
Photographer & Graphic Designer
Milan Moudgill graduated from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, where he studied Visual Communication and specialised in Graphic Design. He has been practicing as a freelance designer in New Delhi for the last two decades, more recently also serving as visiting faculty in design colleges in and around Delhi. Photography is a hobby that he mixes with his love for traveling in the mountains. He has organised and led high-altitude treks in the Himalaya for over a decade, and in that period was commissioned from time to time to shoot and write for National Geographic Traveller and Outlook Traveller. Milan has shot film stills for ‘Monsoon Wedding’, ‘Vanity Fair’, ‘The Namesake’ and ‘A Suitable Boy’. Photography for the Kailash-Manasarovar project was undertaken between 2002 and 2007.