The first successful ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953 by a New Zealander, Edmund Hillary, and a Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, under a British expedition led by a Welshman, John Hunt became sparked off a wave of nationalist pride in Britain, New Zealand, Nepal, and India. Among these four countries, the Republic of India’s claim over having anything to do with Everest and its so- called “conquest” was the most tenuous. Her only links were the fact that Tenzing Norgay lived and worked in the hill town of Darjeeling and Sir John Hunt had served in the police near Calcutta in the 1930s. And yet, this did not stop many ordinary Indians from claiming the first successful ascent of Everest as an Indian achievement. This paper shows how Indians— elite and ordinary— claimed and understood this great mountaineering achievement and how popular demand from below forced the Government of India to walk a tightrope between assuaging nationalist demands at home and managing its relationship with the Kingdom of Nepal and Britain. Other governments had to perform similar tasks. This contradictory dynamic, I will show, centrally shaped the afterlives of the ascent. Overall, on the basis of a history of this “event” my paper suggests that in the 1950s which marked the high noon of Bandung spirit, the citizens of countries of the global South were far perhaps less committed to South-South and international solidarities than their governments.