INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR LADAKH STUDIES
Henry Osmaston (1922-2006): a tribute
Henry Osmaston crossing the sTongde La Pass, Zangskar, in 1980
We regret to report the death of Henry Osmaston, the President of the IALS. Henry died of a heart attack at his home in the English Lake District on the morning of 27th June. He had lived a particularly active and creative life, working simultaneously on a multitude of different projects right until the last moment. He was 83.
As I compare notes with Ladakh friends after Henry’s death, the same kinds of phrases keep recurring: “a true gentleman”, “a wonderful man”, “one of those people that you were truly glad was out there in the world”, and of course “the IALS will never be the same without him.” It won’t be the same. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. Henry himself embraced change. The best tribute that we can give is to allow the association to continue to evolve, while retaining his spirit of friendship, mutual support and enthusiasm.
Henry was born on 20th October 1922 in Dehra Dun, northern India, where his father was serving in the Indian Forestry Service. His uncle Bertram Osmaston, another Forestry Service officer, wrote two pioneering articles on the birds of Ladakh in 1925 and 1926; and a cousin, Gordon Osmaston, conducted several expeditions into the Himalaya in the service of the Indian Military Survey. Henry came to see these family links with the Himalaya as precursors to his own research in Ladakh. However, in the first part of his life, his own career took him in entirely different directions.
Henry went to Oxford University in 1940 to study Forestry, and then served in the British army from 1942 to 1947. After demobilization, he returned to Oxford for a further year. By the time that he had completed his studies, India was already independent, and there was no prospect of his working there. He therefore applied successfully for a post in the Ugandan Forestry Service, and married his wife Anna shortly before setting out for Africa in early 1949. All four of their children—Amiel, Janet, Nigel and Charlotte—were born in Uganda. Henry’s family was always at the centre of his life, and he wrote warmly of the support that he had received across the generations from his grandmother to his “ever-tolerant wife” and grandchildren.
During his time in Uganda, Henry began his investigations into the geomorphology and history of climate change in the Rwenzori mountains, thus preparing the way for his D.Phil research back at Oxford in 1963. After completing his thesis in 1965, Henry took up a post at the Department of Geography at Bristol University, while simultaneously launching on a second new career as a Somerset dairy farmer.
According to Henry’s own account, his opportunity to visit Ladakh came about through a lucky chance. One day, during a boring university meeting, he noticed that his colleague John Crook was doodling in Tibetan script. Ever curious, Henry wanted to know why. It emerged that John had made an exploratory trip to Zangskar in 1977, and was planning to go back there with a multidisciplinary team of Bristol specialists and Indian colleagues. Henry joined the team as a farming expert.
Henry and his colleagues spent the summers of 1980 and 1981 in Zangskar, conducting a comprehensive survey of life in the valley before conditions were changed for ever by the construction of the new motor road from Kargil to Padum. Their research culminated in the publication of Himalayan Buddhist Villages (1994), a major collective volume edited jointly by John and Henry. Henry’s particular contributions were the chapters on geology, agriculture, the Tibetan calendar, weights and measures, and the environment.
The first of what was to become a series of conferences on Recent Research on Ladakh took place in Konstanz in 1981 at the instigation of Detlef Kantowsky and Reinhard Sander. Patrick Kaplanian and Claude Dendaletche organized the second conference in the series at the University of Pau in early 1985, and Henry presented a paper on Zangskari farming: I recall being particularly impressed by the comparisons he drew between milk yields in the Himalaya and at his own farm in Somerset.
The third Ladakh conference, which was organized by Gudrun Meier and Lydia Ickw-Schwalble, took place in 1987 in Herrnhut in what was then still the German Democratic Republic. It was there that Henry proposed the formation of the IALS. His suggestion was partly inspired by his earlier experience with the Uganda Mountain Club, which had proved an effective vehicle for obtaining grants for improving access to the mountains. Henry’s proposal was happily accepted. He himself then took on the dual role of Honorary Secretary and Treasurer, and produced the first pioneer editions of Ladakh Studies.
His immediate task was to organize the fourth Ladakh conference which took place in Bristol in 1989. Henry himself contributed a paper on ‘Farming, nutrition and health in Ladakh, Tibet and lowland China,’ drawing on research in all three regions. The fifth Ladakh conference was supposed to take place in Ladakh but, for a variety of reasons, this proved impractical, and an interim Ladakh colloquium took place at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in 1991. However, the sixth conference eventually took place in Leh in 1993. Henry co-edited the proceedings of the fourth and fifth conferences with Philip Denwood, and the sixth with Dr Nawang Tsering. This task included the tortuous process of producing camera-ready copy on his word-processor, as well as dealing with the Indian publishers.
Henry took part in the seventh IALS conference in Bonn (1995), though without reading a paper. At the eighth conference, which was held in Aarhus (Denmark) in 1997, he resigned from his original post of Honorary Secretary/Treasurer/Editor. However, he was unanimously elected IALS president, both in recognition of his past services and because no one was willing to envisage the future of the association without him.
Henry continued to be actively involved with the IALS throughout the last nine years. He took part in the Leh conference in 1999, combining this with a memorable camping expedition to Rupshu. Family commitments prevented him attending the 2001 Oxford conference, but he returned to Leh for the 11th colloquium in 2003. By then he was 80 years old, and this was to be his last visit to Ladakh. He sent a warm personal message to the Kargil colloquium in 2005, recalling his first visit to the region more than 20 years earlier, but his doctors advised him against attending in person.
We in the IALS knew Henry best for his interest in Ladakh, but this was only one of many enthusiasms. His first published article, shortly after arriving in Uganda, was in the Empire Forestry Review on the subject of “Photogrammetry without funds”; and the second in the Uganda Journal was on “Termites and their uses for food.” His recent activities include joint authorship of an important book on Tropical Glaciers (2002) as well as a History of the Uganda Forest Department 1951-1965 (2003), and an article on “Quaternary glaciation of the Bale Mountains, Ethiopia” (2005). Shortly before his death, he had completed his last major project, a completely revised edition of his Guide to the Rwenzori Mountains, first published in 1972. Mountains had always been an important part of his life: he had spent the night before his 65th birthday sheltering from a particularly severe blizzard in Tibet.
Henry was conscious of his place in the history of his family, of his various professions and of the many places with which he was associated. His writings include a series of personal and family memoirs, and he was keen to put not only his papers but also his family inheritance in order. I remember travelling with him on a London bus, bearing the skin of a crocodile that one of his forebears had shot in India, and that was now on its way to a final resting place in the Natural History Museum.
At the same time, Henry was never anything less than completely contemporary. In the early 1960s he must have been among the first geographers to use a computer to analyze his thesis data. In the 1970s and 1980s he seized with delight on the research possibilities of satellite imagery. In the 1990s and 2000s he was a prolific user of the Internet. One of his last services to the IALS was to organize the re-launching of the IALS website.
Most of all, Henry was contemporary in the way that he engaged warmly with people of all ages and cultures on equal terms. Latterly, he had a habit of making pre-emptive apologies for deafness and for forgetting people’s names. It is true that he needed a hearing aid. His grey beard gave him an air of distinction. However, his most striking characteristics were not old age and venerability, but youthful enthusiasm combined with an insatiable curiosity about people and things. Henry was unfailingly generous in the encouragement and support that he gave to younger researchers on a whole variety of subjects. The IALS as it stands today is an important part of his legacy. He has set an example for us all to follow.
John Bray