Joniawas, Rewari

Santosh Yadav was born on 10 October 1967 in Joniawas, a village in Rewari district of Haryana — a state whose sex ratio has long been among the worst in India, and where the birth of a sixth child who was a girl, after five sons, was not universally treated as good news. She was the only daughter in the family. She would become the first woman in the world to stand on the summit of Mount Everest twice.

Her early schooling was in the village. She later moved to Delhi for secondary education, and then enrolled at Maharani College in Jaipur. Her account of what set the course of her life is disarmingly simple: from her college room she could see people climbing in the Aravalli range, and she wanted to be among them.

What followed was a period of holding two demanding paths open simultaneously. She prepared for the Indian Administrative Service examination while living in a hostel at Noida, and at the same time trained at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering at Uttarkashi, the country's premier climbing school. Neither pursuit accommodated the other, and she pursued both anyway.

Her family and her social environment did not make this straightforward. Yadav has spoken about resisting expectations regarding how a young woman from her background should dress, behave and plan her life, and her position was consistently that if her chosen path was a rational one, the burden of adjustment lay with others rather than with her. Mountaineering is an unusual arena in which to make that argument, and it turned out to be an effective one.

In 1989 she took part in a nine-nation international climbing camp and expedition to Nun Kun in the Ladakh Himalaya, establishing herself within the international climbing community.

Everest, May 1992

In May 1992, at twenty-four, Santosh Yadav reached the summit of Mount Everest. She became the youngest woman in the world to have done so, a record that stood until 2014.

What happened on that expedition is at least as important as the summit. High on the mountain she shared her own oxygen supply with a fellow climber, Mohan Singh, and saved his life — a decision taken in the death zone, where oxygen is the difference between descending and not descending. She also attempted to help another climber, Saranjith, who was dying at the South Col; those efforts were unsuccessful. Both episodes are recorded and are, among mountaineers, the part of her record most often cited. Giving away oxygen above eight thousand metres is not a gesture. It is a calculated risk to one's own survival.

Everest Again, May 1993

Within twelve months she was back. In May 1993, climbing with an Indo-Nepalese women's expedition, she summited Everest a second time, becoming the first woman in the world to climb Everest twice.

She was not finished with the mountain. In 1999 she led an Indian expedition to Everest's Kangshung Face, the vast and technically formidable eastern wall in Tibet, and became the first woman to climb Everest by that route. In 2001 she led another team to the East Face.

The Kangshung is a serious undertaking by any standard — remote, avalanche-prone and rarely attempted, with a fraction of the traffic of the standard routes. Leading an expedition there placed Yadav in the small category of Indian climbers operating at genuine international technical level rather than on guided commercial routes.

Service and Environment

Yadav served as an officer with the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, the force responsible for India's Himalayan frontier and the institutional home of much of Indian high-altitude mountaineering. She balanced that service with her expedition career.

She has also been a persistent advocate on the environmental damage caused by mountaineering itself, and has personally collected around five hundred kilograms of discarded waste from Himalayan slopes — the abandoned tents, cylinders and packaging that decades of expeditions have left behind. It is unglamorous work and she has done a good deal of it.

She married Utham Kumar Lal in 1992, the year of her first summit.

Recognition

She received the Tenzing Norgay National Adventure Award in 1994, India's highest recognition for adventure sport, and the Padma Shri in 2000.

Her wider significance in India is as an argument. In a state where the birth of daughters has been actively discouraged, a woman from a Rewari village climbed the highest mountain on earth twice, opened a route on it that no woman had climbed, and gave away her oxygen to save a man's life at altitude. She has been used, inevitably, as a campaign symbol for girls' education and against sex selection, and she has accepted that role.

Joniawas is a small village in a district not otherwise known outside Haryana. Its most famous resident is a woman who was told what she could not do, and then went and stood on the summit of Everest twice to settle the point.