Travels in Kashmir and The Panjab

This translation was of considerable significance for a British audience. Not only did Travels in Kashmir and the Panjab offer a detailed account of a region which remained largely unknown in Europe, but it was also published against the backdrop of the first Anglo-Sikh war, when the Victorian press carried detailed coverage of the East India Company’s efforts to annex Punjab and extend British Paramountcy on India’s north-west frontier. Von Hugel’s contribution to the extension of European knowledge of South Asia was formally recognized in 1849 when Britain’s Royal Geographical Society awarded a Patron’s Gold medal to Von Hugel ‘for his enterprising exploration of Cashmere’. Von Hugel’s travelogue has an encyclopaedic quality, as he attempted to collect information on a vast range of issues and topics, from the region’s natural history to the ‘character’ of its various populations, from fluctuations in the climate and atmospheric pressure to detailed discussions of lake Dal and Ranjit Singh’s court at Lahore. Since Kashmir had been absorbed into Ranjit Singh’s kingdom in 1819, both the Maharaja and Sikhism are prominent and recurrent themes in Von Hugel’s work.