Geographic theft? How an ancient, revered mountain was made into a colonial landmark

Colonialism did not just seize land, but renamed it.

Mountains, rivers, cities and entire civilisations have survived conquest, only to find their oldest names erased from the global tongue. Mount Everest is a mountain the world knows by the surname of a British surveyor who never saw it, never climbed it, and reportedly never wanted it named after him in the first place.

What was Mount Everest called before the British?

Long before it became “Everest,” the mountain already existed in language, mythology and devotion. To Tibetans, it was Chomolungma / Qomolungma meaning “Goddess Mother of the World” and in Nepal, the mountain later became known as Sagarmatha, commonly translated as “Forehead in the Sky” or “Peak of Heaven,” though this name gained official prominence only in the 1960s. The mountain was never nameless. But empire has always had a weakness for renaming things it did not discover.

In the 19th century, the British East India Company embarked on the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. To map territory is to claim authority over it. Cartography was a political weapon back then.

The Survey began in 1802 and stretched across the subcontinent with astonishing precision. They measured angles, distances and elevations with obsessive rigour. And buried inside that imperial project was an Indian mathematician whose contribution was extraordinary but largely sidelined in popular memory.

Radhanath Sikdar was born in Bengal in 1813 and joined the Great Trigonometrical Survey as a computational prodigy. He was known for his brilliance in mathematics and geodesy at a time when Indians within colonial institutions were often denied intellectual recognition.

In 1852, Radhanath used trigonometric calculations to determine that “Peak XV” — as the British called Mt Everest then — was likely the highest mountain on Earth.

Notably, Radhanath never “discovered” the mountain. Nobody did, because millions already knew it existed. What he discovered was its relative height according to European scientific measurement systems. Yet even this achievement became folded into imperial mythology. The British administrative machinery absorbed the calculation, institutionalised the finding, and attached an English name to the peak.

That name came from Sir George Everest, the Welsh surveyor and former Surveyor General of India.

George Everest was not the man who identified the mountain as the tallest peak. Nor did he advocate naming things after himself. In fact, he opposed it.

His successor, Andrew Waugh, proposed the name “Mount Everest” in 1865 before the Royal Geographical Society. Andrew argued that local names were difficult to verify because Nepal and Tibet were largely closed to British access at the time.

Indigenous knowledge existed, but was treated as insufficiently standardised until validated by imperial systems.

Everest himself reportedly objected for practical and linguistic reasons. He believed local names should be retained whenever possible. He also pointed out that his surname could not easily be pronounced in Hindi or Persian.

The irony is that the British ended up mispronouncing his own name anyway.

George Everest pronounced his surname “Eve-rest,” with the first syllable sounding like “eve.” Modern English usage says “Ever-est,” flattening it into something he himself would barely have recognised.

So the mountain’s globally dominant name is: not indigenous, not chosen by local communities, not proposed by the man it commemorates, and not even pronounced correctly.

That alone feels like an accidental metaphor for colonial history.

Chomolungma carries theology, geography and memory inside it. The name evokes a living cosmology in Tibetan Buddhism and Himalayan spiritual traditions. Everest, by contrast, sounds administrative — a label stamped onto a survey sheet.

Yet the colonial name won internationally because empires controlled maps, atlases, schools and global publishing networks. Once Mount Everest entered European geography books, it became the official vocabulary of the world.

This is how empire survives beyond armies. It lingers in pronunciation, signage and textbooks. It teaches the colonised to speak back to themselves using imported language.

Today, China officially uses Qomolangma in many contexts. Nepal continues with Sagarmatha. But globally, Everest still dominates travel brochures, documentaries and summit fantasies.

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