Alastair Lamb


Alastair Lamb is a diplomatic historian who has authored several books on Sino-Indian border dispute and the Indo-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir. He has also worked in archaeology and ethnography in Asia and Africa.

Career

Alastair Lamb was born in 1930. He entered the University of Cambridge in 1953 and graduated with a doctorate degree in 1958. His thesis was on the history of the British Indian border between the era of Warren Hastings and the 1904 British expedition to Tibet. He is a diplomatic historian by training.
In 1959, Lamb moved to British Malaya where he studied archaeological sites. Lamb was a Reader of History at the University of Malaya for nine years and was a Senior Fellow in the Department of History at the Australian National University for three years. From 1968 to 1972, he was a Professor of History at the University of Ghana. He was a Reader of History at Hatfield Polytechnic during the 1980s.

Honours

Lamb is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is also a council member of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Research

Lamb is recognised as an expert on the juridical and diplomatic history of the Kashmir dispute. In addition to his work on diplomatic history, Lamb has worked in archaeology and ethnography in Asia and Africa.
Lamb's doctoral thesis on the history of the British Indian border was published in 1960 by Routledge & Kegan Paul as the book Britain and Chinese Central Asia: The Road to Lhasa 1761 to 1905. The book was revised and published in 1985 under the new title British India and Tibet: 1766-1910 to include materials published after 1959 as well as previously-unstudied documents.
In the 1960s, Lamb studied Hindu and Buddhist sites in Kedah and southern Thailand in a series of papers.
When the China–India border dispute was getting critical in 1962, Lamb was conducting research in British archives in the Public Record Office and the India Office Library. Lamb has stated that he came across a number of documents in the archive which looked "rather different" from the versions published by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. Through the mediation of Dorothy Woodman, Lamb managed to meet a senior official in the Indian High Commission in London in order to bring these facts to India's notice. However, he states the official was least interested. The more he checked the published Indian documents, the more convinced he became of "distortions and misquotations". Thus he came to the "reluctant conclusion", he says, that the Indian government was least interested in the historical accuracy of its territorial claims. This motivated him to write The China-India border in 1964, where he claims he did his utmost to "play down the defects of the Indian published material". In 1966, he expanded the book into a large two-volume work titled The McMahon Line.
Certain aspects of Lamb's claims related to India-China, such as India being an aggressor or Lamb's claims on the Shimla convention, have been countered by Bertil Lintner's book, China’s India War. At the book launch of China's India War, Nitin A. Gokhale, an Indian security analyst, commented that "Alastair Lamb’s work on India as an aggressor in the region" had been debunked and that "hopefully, the shadow of Maxwell and Lamb can be removed from scholars’ minds when they look at China and Pakistan."
In 1966 Lamb also wrote his first book on the Kashmir conflict, titled The Crisis in Kashmir. This was soon after the Second Kashmir War. In 1991, after the start of the Kashmir insurgency, he expanded it into a larger volume titled Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy.

Reception

Journalist and scholar Andrew Whitehead cited Alastair Lamb among historians of eminence, whose work is however tarnished by partisan comment. Scholar Ian Copland has called him a "meticulous historian" with exhaustive research and eye for detail. Parshotam Mehra called him "a professional historian of great academic distinction". He stated that his work was thorough and painstaking even though it suffered from gaps in the presentation and interpretation.

''The McMahon Line''

Leo Rose called it a "special pleading" rather than a scholarly work, that presents the Chinese position extremely well. Lamb points out rightly than China had never ratified the Simla Convention that defined the McMahon Line but he dismisses the question of whether the British and Tibetan governments were competent to conclude an agreement. Rose also notes that Lamb seems annoyed at the fact that the Indian authorities do not follow the British imperial line, which he terms "out of place".
Parshotam Mehra, calling the two-volume work a "herculean effort", nevertheless labels it an "outright partisan attempt at demolishing the Indian case and thereby lending countenance to, and buttressing, the Chinese claims." The historian in Alastair Lamb is "fairly sound", he says, but frequently departs from being a historian to a "factionist".
Mehra's own later work, McMahon Line and After was judged by Leo Rose to be "more balanced and less advocative" than Lamb's.

''Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, 1846–1990''

T.C. recommends the book for those looking for an authoritative and detailed account of the Kashmir conflict. Ross H. Munro observes that Lamb has written an authoritative history of Kashmir. He unites his flawless scholarship with an interesting story. Munro sees that Lamb refutes India's claim on Kashmir and seriously indicts Indian actions, leaders and also his own countryman, Mountbatten. Victoria Schofield describes the book as an expansion of Lamb's earlier work with the use of newly available documents. Schofield states that Lamb has successfully identified the main issues and mistakes. Schofield finds that Lamb's work is so filled with facts that additional notes are provided with each chapter. Lamb also successfully shows the impact a few individuals have had on South Asia's history.
V.G. Kiernan recommends the book. Kiernan notes that Lamb is the top authority on the region and describes the book, like Lamb's previous ones, as very thorough, uninvolved and objective, regardless of the rare instance where India is treated with "little sympathy." Historian Hugh Tinker notices that Alastair Lamb explains Kashmiri political history in a "masterly style." Tinker points out that Lamb is known as the foremost authority on the region but also notes that his findings will not be accepted by Indian authors, who see Kashmir as a test of Indian secularism.
Copland observes that Lamb's analysis of the Kashmir conflict is the most detailed and describes his work as a "considerable feat of scholarship." Copland states that the problems in the book are "few and far between" and notes that this high calibre book's bibliography ignores post-1980 writings. Parshotam Mehra, on the other hand, points out that Lamb is unabashedly pro-Pakistan with several bones to pick against India, arguing for various ways in which Kashmir could have gone to Pakistan instead of India. He also points out how Lamb glosses over the culpability of Pakistan in the 1947 crisis as well as in later developments, facts which scholars such as Ayesha Jalal admit. Mehra concludes:
Prem Shankar Jha, in his Kashmir 1947: Rival Versions of History, tried to provide a detailed critique of the contentious aspects of Lamb's treatment of the Kashmir dispute, although David Taylor points out that while providing alternative readings on some points, Jha does not manage to entirely refute Lamb. Srinath Raghavan credits Lamb for discovering that Kashmir's Instrument of Accession was most likely signed on 27 October 1947, after the Indian troops landed in Srinagar, rather than 26 October, as official Indian history maintains. However, he states that in his later work, Birth of a Tragedy, Lamb "overreached" by claiming that the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir never signed the Instrument of Accession at all. He conveniently overlooked other letters where the Maharaja mentioned having signed accession.

Selected publications