Talk:Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab (1841)
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Discussion for: Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab (1841) • View • Links • Related changes
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How the book was read
Both volumes were read for this page on 15 October 2026 in the Digital Library of India scans that the infobox and references link (in.ernet.dli.2015.284643 for Vol. I and in.ernet.dli.2015.284642 for Vol. II), through the copies of the same files on Wikimedia Commons. The scans have no text layer. All 522 and 532 page images were put through OCR and the text searched for hemp, bhang, charas, ganja, narcotic, intoxicating, drug, opium and Yarkand. The title pages, the dedication, the preface, the contents and every passage the article cites were then read in the OCR text, and the hemp passages (Vol. I, pp. 57–58, 88 and 182; Vol. II, p. 442) and the title page were also read on the page images.
Page numbers
Vol. I has a preface paginated in roman numerals (to p. lvi) and a text paginated 1–459; Vol. II runs to p. 508. A bare page number in the references to Vol. I refers to the text; roman numerals refer to the preface. The dedication and the title page are unpaginated.
Who wrote the words
Wilson's preface (p. liii) says he re-wrote "almost the whole" from Moorcroft's journals and letters. The first-person narrative is therefore Wilson's composition from Moorcroft's notes. The account of the journey from Mandi to Kulu, the hot springs at Mani Karn and the course of the Parbati (Vol. I, pp. 172–179) is printed in quotation marks as an extract from Trebeck's journal (introduced on p. 171), so statements from those pages are attributed to Trebeck.
Dates not printed in the text
The treaty with Ladakh is dated in the text only as "the beginning of May", in the narrative that follows the party's arrival at Leh in September 1820; the article says "the following May". The arrival at Leh of the merchant connected with Aga Mehdi is dated only "in the middle of April", so the article gives no year. Wilson's preface dates Moorcroft's crossing of the Oxus on the way back to "about the 4th or 5th of August, 1825" and does not give the day of his death.
Momia and kshir ras
The terms are the book's, in the passage on the resources of the hills (Vol. I, pp. 57–58). The book glosses momia as named "from its resemblance to wax" and gives kshir ras as the name of the adulterated substance. The article does not equate either term with charas, since the book does not.