The Silverfish

The below blog was first presented in a session of the “Fragments from the Archive” series moderated by historian, Samira Sheikh, the fifth Obaid Siddiqi Chair at the Archives for 2025–26. The premise of the series is rooted in the idea that every collection is full of surprises. Whether it’s a stray letter, notes on a forgotten experiment, an old map, or a photograph with scribbled margins, these fragments only reveal their secrets when we put in our skills and labor to interpret them. By gathering people from across the campus, the Fragments from the Archives series tries to practise this work collectively, bringing diverse perspectives to bear on small pieces of the past.

At first glance, doesn’t it seem like a typical field image from the 1970s? Men with binoculars and cameras, an all-male group of researchers in the foreground of a barren landscape. Let’s zoom in now: there are soldiers in uniform, military jeeps, and also what appear to be barracks in the background.

Now, for me, as an archivist, a photograph is never really just an image, but a puzzle that I compulsively need to solve. Where was this photo taken? What was the project? When was it taken? 

The “where” and “what” were comparatively easier to discern because the photograph came in a file titled “In Ladakh for Cranes” which gave a visual narrative of a bird survey set in the cold deserts of Ladakh, focused on finding and studying the Black-necked Crane. The file entered the Archives at NCBS along with the papers of Prakash Gole, an ornithologist and environmentalist who established the Ecological Society in Pune in 1982, known as the “Crane Man” among colleagues. The “when”, however, proved much trickier. Prakash Gole had done multiple expeditions in Ladakh in search of the Black-necked cranes. The first was in 1976, when he accompanied Sálim Ali and was funded by the International Crane Foundation through the US National Appeal of the World Wildlife Fund. 

However, it was not successful in locating nests of the crane. Hence, Gole traveled again to Ladakh in the spring of 1978 to locate and study breeding pairs. Correspondence from 1983 outlines planning for yet another expedition. Ultimately, without precise date stamps, archival honesty requires us to embrace the ambiguity. And hence the archivist notes down that these images capture a window of fieldwork between 1976 and 1983. However, we know that Gole accompanied Sálim Ali in the first expedition in 1976 as mentioned in the reports on the Black-necked crane. Hence the images above can be likely dated to 1976.

Now that we have a date range, we can turn to the broader context of the project. It happened in one of India’s most geopolitically sensitive regions, right near the India-China border. Areas like Chushul and Hanle in Ladakh, where the team was searching for cranes, are very close to the Line of Actual Control with China. Civilian access to these regions was, and still is, tightly controlled. So, scientific teams had to move under army oversight, sometimes with direct escort or logistical support. 

There were other reasons for this army oversight. As Gole notes in one of his reports:

So, the Black-necked crane survey in Ladakh might have been a project conducted under watchful eyes, not just of the birds, but of governments, funders, and military institutions.

Meanwhile, the crane itself added another layer of geopolitical complexity. As Gole observed in his report:

Because access to the Chinese and Tibetan breeding grounds was restricted, Ladakh became a crucial area to study the species. So when in the 1970s, road connectivity improved in Ladakh for military transport and travel restrictions eased, ornithologists grabbed the opportunity to study these elusive birds.

Yet, Gole recognised the irony:

The images include sightings of the Black-necked Crane, often photographed from a distance, set against Ladakh’s stark landscapes.

But some of the images also depict the human landscape, including local communities, monasteries, and herders. Upon further study, one learns that these photographs weren’t taken by Gole or his team but were collected as souvenirs. 

These were photographs by Syed Ali Shah, stamped as such on the reverse. Syed Ali Shah ran a small studio-cum-shop in his house in Leh and was one of the three studios (Dijoo and Lalit Photo Studio being the others) known for their photographic portraits and pictorial coverage of Ladakh in the 1940s to 1980s. Originally from Kashgar in Turkestan, Shah himself became stranded in Ladakh after borders hardened and travel routes closed following the Chinese consolidation of the region. His story mirrors that of the Black-necked Crane in some ways, both of their lives being shaped by political borders.

Alongside these souvenir images of Ladakh’s human landscape, Gole’s own photographs document moments of interaction between the research team and local communities. The expedition members seem to have spoken with villagers, monks, and herders. However, these photographic documentations are often without names or individual stories. Much like earlier colonial ethnographic photography, they transform lived environments into objects of observation. The camera records people mostly as indicators of place and culture, rather than as collaborators in knowledge production.

So in the end, what do I take away from these images? 

For me, it shows the complex encounter between science and state, between people and nature, between curiosity and caution. It also shows that scientific fieldwork is not only about negotiating landscapes, but also geopolitics. And sometimes, a single file of photographs can open a window onto all of that.

Why did this image or the file of images interest me?

This idea of the bird as a “border object”, something that moves across national boundaries, but also gets caught up in political and territorial claims like the people of the region as we saw in the case of Syed Ali Shah, is what drew me to this file. People and birds become tools in the “larger affairs” of the State. Like the same bird being “discovered” in Western science by Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky in 1873, on the Tibetan plateau during the British-Russian “Great Game”. Explorers like Przhevalsky used science as a cover for imperial mapping and reconnaissance. The crane finally became a part of his scientific collections, which act as statements of imperial presence.

Hence, the Black-necked Crane is a kind of quiet ambassador, a species that ties together questions of ecology, national identity, conservation, and state control.

Border object : Arjun Sharma and Swargajyoti Gohain use the concept of border object to show how non-human actors like the Black-necked Crane help make visible the networks of power/knowledge embedded in everyday bordering practices of communities and in state technologies of demarcating frontiers and controlling borders, as they become objects that mediate between conservation science, security and development, identity politics and community natural resource governance (Sharma and Gohain, 2024).

The Great Game was a rivalry between the 19th-century British and Russian empires over influence in Central Asia. The two colonial empires used military interventions and diplomatic negotiations to acquire and redefine territories in Central and South Asia.

References:

Lewis, Michael. “Scientists or Spies? Ecology in a Climate of Cold War Suspicion.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 37, no. 24, 2002, pp. 2323–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4412243.

Sharma, Arjun, and Swargajyoti Gohain. “Black-necked Crane as Border Object: Interspecies Politics in Himalayan Borderlands.” Territory Politics Governance, vol. 13, no. 8, Oct. 2024, pp. 1068–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2024.2401447.