Bachendri Pal: The Village Girl Who Became the First Indian Woman to Summit Everest

At around 12:30 a.m. on May 16, 1984, an avalanche tore through Camp III on Mount Everest at 24,000 feet, burying the tents of India's Everest expedition. More than half the team was injured or too shaken to continue. A 29-year-old schoolteacher's daughter from a Himalayan village, who had been fighting her own family for years just to be allowed to climb at all, kept going.

One week later, on May 23, 1984, Bachendri Pal stood on the summit of the world's highest mountain — the first Indian woman to ever reach it.

Timeline

• 1954 — Born May 24 in Nakuri village, Uttarkashi district, Uttarakhand, one of five children in a Bhotiya family.

• 1943 (before her birth) — A flash flood destroys her family's home in the Harsil Valley, a hardship the family rebuilds from before she is even born.

• ~1966 — At age 12, climbs a 13,123-foot peak with school friends during a picnic, sparking her interest in mountaineering.

• Early 1970s — Completes her B.A., then an M.A. in Sanskrit and a B.Ed. from D.A.V. Post Graduate College, Dehradun, against her family's wish that she become a schoolteacher instead.

• Trains at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering, Uttarkashi, and works as a mountaineering instructor with the National Adventure Foundation.

• 1984 — Selected for “Everest '84,” India's first mixed-gender Everest expedition (6 women, 11 men).

• May 16, 1984 — An avalanche buries Camp III; more than half the team withdraws due to injury or exhaustion.

• May 23, 1984 — Reaches the summit of Mount Everest at 1:07 p.m., becoming the first Indian woman to do so, a day before her 30th birthday.

• 1984 — Awarded the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian honour, the same year.

• 1993 — Leads the Indo-Nepalese Women's Everest Expedition, an all-women team, to a successful summit.

• 1994 — Leads an all-women rafting voyage roughly 2,155 km down the Ganges from Haridwar to Kolkata.

• 1997 — Leads the first Indian Women's Trans-Himalayan Expedition, covering roughly 4,500 km from Arunachal Pradesh to the Siachen Glacier.

• 2019 — Awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest civilian honour.

Early Life

Bachendri was born in 1954 in Nakuri, a village in the Garhwal Himalayas of what is now Uttarakhand, to Kishan Singh Pal, a trader who carried goods to Tibet by mule, and Hansa Devi. Money was tight and the family had rebuilt from a flash flood that destroyed their home years before her birth. Like most girls in her village, she was expected to leave school early to help at home and eventually marry — a path she quietly refused, studying at night to keep up her education until her determination won her family over.

Her first taste of the mountains came at 12, when a school picnic to a nearby peak turned into an unplanned overnight stay after the group couldn't descend before dark. She was undeterred. She went on to earn a B.A., then an M.A. in Sanskrit and a B.Ed. — becoming one of the first women from her village to hold a postgraduate degree — while her family continued to push her toward a teaching career instead of the mountains she loved.

Achievements

After training at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering and working as a climbing instructor, Bachendri was selected for India's 1984 Everest expedition — the country's first attempt to send a mixed-gender team to the summit. When an avalanche buried Camp III and forced more than half her team to turn back, she pressed on with the remaining climbers, reaching the top on May 23, 1984, in temperatures near –40°C, and spending 43 minutes at the summit before beginning the descent.

She didn't stop at the milestone. In 1993 she led an all-women Indo-Nepalese team back to Everest's summit. In 1994 she led an all-women crew rafting over 2,000 km down the Ganges. In 1997 she led the first Indian Women's Trans-Himalayan Expedition, an eight-woman team covering roughly 4,500 km and more than 40 mountain passes from Arunachal Pradesh to the Siachen Glacier. She later founded and led the Tata Steel Adventure Foundation, training a generation of mountaineers — including Arunima Sinha, who became the first amputee woman to summit Everest after losing a leg in a train attack, and whom Bachendri personally trained and supported.

Challenges

Bachendri pursued mountaineering in a conservative rural community where girls were expected to leave school early and where her own family actively opposed her choice of profession, wanting a stable teaching career for her instead. She trained and competed in a field with essentially no women in it in India at the time. The 1984 expedition itself nearly ended in disaster: the avalanche that struck Camp III injured much of the team and forced a majority to abandon the climb, leaving Bachendri and a small remaining group to complete the ascent under extreme cold and high winds with no guarantee of success.

Legacy

Bachendri Pal's 1984 summit is widely credited with opening Indian mountaineering to women in a way that hadn't existed before — not as a single exception, but as the start of a pipeline. The women's expeditions and training programs she went on to lead directly produced some of India's subsequent mountaineering milestones, including Santosh Yadav (first woman to summit Everest twice) and Premlata Agarwal (first Indian woman to complete the Seven Summits), both connected to programs Bachendri helped build.

She was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the achievement and has continued advocacy work well past the climb itself, including launching a fitness initiative for women over 50 after her own retirement, built on the same argument she'd been making her whole career: that neither age nor gender defines what's possible.

Sources

Wikipedia: Bachendri Pal. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Bachendri Pal.” Free Press Journal, “Bachendri Pal Birthday Special.” The Better India, “How Bachendri Pal Became the First Indian Woman to Climb Mount Everest.” Feminism in India, “Bachendri Pal: The First Indian Woman To Climb The Mount Everest.” EBNW Story, “Bachendri Pal: First Indian Woman Who Made History By Conquering Mt Everest.”

Related Women

Mary Kom — another woman who broke into a field with no precedent for Indian women, six world boxing titles built the same way Bachendri built her mountaineering legacy: one summit, one fight, at a time.

Neerja Bhanot — a contemporary of Bachendri's generation whose courage under extreme, life-threatening conditions became a defining moment of the same 1980s decade.