Himalaya Bound Read online

  For Sharafat

  CONTENTS

  Family Tree

  Map of Migration Route

  1Into the Forest

  2Over and Out of the Hills

  3Waiting by the River

  4Under Arrest

  5The Fork in the Road

  6Not the Life of a Fool

  7The Forest Gate

  8Many Days to Dodi Tal

  9The Storm

  10The End of the Trail

  Epilogue

  Selected References

  Acknowledgments

  FAMILY TREE

  1

  INTO THE FOREST

  In a one-room hut in the middle of the forest, Dhumman knelt and prayed, facing west, towards Mecca. Performing the ritual prostrations, his shadow rose and fell upon a mud-plastered wall that glowed in the flickering light cast by a crackling cook fire and a single kerosene lamp. His rhythmic chanting filled the hut with a low, resonant hum. It was two o’clock in the morning.

  Sitting on the dirt floor next to an earthen hearth, Dhumman’s twenty-two-year-old daughter watched the morning chai simmer while she was churning butter—pulling back and forth on a rope that was wrapped around a wooden spindle, which sloshed vigorously in a narrow-mouthed pot filled with milk. Her teenaged brothers and sister, awakened by the demands of the day much earlier than usual, moved sluggishly around the hut, as though caught in the tendrils of lingering dreams. With their feet, they gently prodded their youngest siblings, who were still asleep on the floor. It was time to pack the bedrolls. It was time to get going.

  The voice of their mother, Jamila, acted like a tonic, snapping her children out of their drowsy trance. At her request, the two eldest boys, flashlights in hand, left the hut to fetch the pack animals. Meanwhile, Jamila methodically placed the last of the family’s belongings into saddlebags of thickly woven horsehair, which she then tied shut. When the young men returned, they carried the bags outside and loaded them onto the two horses and three bulls that they had parked by the door. Dhumman interrupted his prayers to issue instructions to his sons, reminding them to make sure that everything was properly balanced and well secured on the animals’ backs. The brothers, aged nineteen and sixteen, looked at each other and rolled their eyes; they knew perfectly well what they were doing.

  In the darkness of the jungle, cowbells clanged, crickets chirped, and monkeys howled in the trees.

  The mood in the hut was charged with the same kind of tension and excitement that families typically feel just before leaving on a trip. But there was nothing typical about the trip this family was about to take. Well aware of this, Dhumman closed his devotions by asking Allah to ease the difficult journey on which they were about to embark. Though he had travelled this route every spring since the year he was born, and was intimately familiar with the myriad challenges his family and their herd of buffaloes normally face on their annual migration, he had reason to fear that this year—2009—would be unusually tough.

  Dhumman and his family belong to the Van Gujjar tribe and, like all Van Gujjars who are still able to practice their traditional way of life, they are nomadic water buffalo herders. They live year-round in the wilderness—never in villages—grazing their livestock on the vegetation that grows in the jungles and mountains of northern India. The tribe spends winters, from October to April, in the Shivalik Hills—a low but rugged range that arcs through parts of the states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh. Amid the dense forest, each Van Gujjar family settles into a base camp; every day, from their huts of sticks and mud, they roam over gnarled sedimentary topography, through a tangle of deciduous trees and shrubs, feeding their buffaloes on the abundant foliage.

  In the month of March, however, heat begins to sear the Shivaliks. By mid-April, temperatures soar to 115 degrees. The creeks that snake through the range run dry. As though baking in an oven, the forest canopy turns brown. Leaves wither, die, and fall from the trees. The once-verdant hills go bald. With little left for their buffaloes to eat or drink, the Van Gujjars must move elsewhere to survive. They pack their entire households onto horses and bulls and hike their herds up to the Himalayas, aiming for high alpine meadows that are flush with grass throughout the summer.

  They stay in the mountains until autumn. Then, with temperatures plunging and snow beginning to fall, they retreat back down to the Shivaliks. By the time they reach there, usually in early October, they find the low hills bursting with life once again, the thick forest canopy regenerated over the previous months by the moisture delivered during the summer monsoon, the water sources recharged. With plenty to sustain their animals, they stay in the jungle—each family often returning to the very same hut that they occupied the previous winter—until springtime temperatures drive them back to the Himalayas. This migratory pattern—up in spring and down in autumn—has been practiced by Van Gujjars in this part of India for many, many generations.

  It’s believed that the first Van Gujjars came to the Shivalik region, probably from Kashmir, some 1,500 years ago. No one knows exactly when or exactly why, but some in the tribe say their people were invited by the local raja; he’d been travelling in Kashmir and was so impressed by the Van Gujjars, their buffalo herds, and the high quality of their milk, that he asked them to come live in his kingdom.

  Other Van Gujjars may tell you that they themselves are of royal blood. Once upon a time, they say, a prince fell in love-at-first-sight with a beautiful Van Gujjar woman who was herding buffaloes in Punjab. He asked her to marry, so she moved to his kingdom, bringing some animals with her. But when winter turned to spring, her buffaloes couldn’t tolerate the smothering heat: they fell ill, and a few died. Alarmed by their suffering, the new princess did what her family always did during summer—she led her little herd into the high mountains to escape the swelter. When the prince begged her to return, she refused, choosing her animals over her husband and his riches. The prince couldn’t bear to be without her, so he gave up his throne and joined her. From then on, they lived together in the forests, where the buffaloes—and the princess were happiest.

  Their descendants, the story goes, are one of the largest Van Gujjar clans.

  Today, an estimated thirty thousand Van Gujjars still dwell in the wilderness, moving seasonally between the Shivaliks and the Himalayas. They still speak their native dialect, Gujari, which is a linguistic fusion of Dogri (a Kashmiri tongue) and Punjabi.

  Though changes are beginning to penetrate into their secluded forest realm—with severe cultural consequences in some places—the essence of their traditional herding lifestyle has remained largely intact through the centuries.

  From the earliest days of my career as a freelance writer and photojournalist, I’ve found myself naturally drawn to covering stories about nomadic peoples. In part, this was a holdover from my childhood fascination with Lawrence of Arabia and his relationship with the Bedouin; in my youthful imagination, I pictured myself in Lawrence’s place, sitting under the tents of exotic strangers, with one foot in their tribal world, one foot in the Western world, and feeling perfectly comfortable in both. Later, as I encountered nomads first-hand during my travels to the Middle East and Central Asia, I quickly developed great respect for them and their way of life, and became intrigued by how their age-old cultures survived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I also sensed, in a vague kind of way, that my fellow citizens of the modern world could probably learn a thing or two from nomadic people about how to live on Planet Earth.

  From the moment I’d first heard about the Van Gujjars, I’d wanted to document their spring migration into the Himalayas. It sounded like an incredible undertaking: entire families marching with herds of water buffaloes into the highest mountains on earth. And it
also seemed as though the tribe was on the cusp of irreversible change; that perhaps within a generation or two, far fewer, if any, Van Gujjars would still live in the forests, the seasonal migrations would cease, and their traditional way of life would fade away forever. Already, over the previous six decades, many Van Gujjar clans had been driven out of the jungles by government policies; today perhaps 80,000 of them live settled in villages in Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh, with little connection to their ancestral ways.

  There was something else that intrigued me about the Van Gujjars, too: the most immediate threat to their forest-dwelling, migratory lifestyle seemed to be the establishment of national parks. In the name of protecting wildlife habitat, these nomads were being pressured to abandon the wild lands on which they had lived for countless generations, to settle in villages, and to give up their buffalo herds. To my American ears, this sounded counterintuitive and strangely ironic, since national parks are meant to preserve things that are fragile and endangered, but in this case they were also threatening something fragile and endangered—the Van Gujjars’ unique culture. The tribe’s troubles, I saw, were wrapped in modern ethical dilemmas, which raised some compelling questions about what it means to be human on this planet.

  I first met Dhumman, Jamila, and their children at their camp in the Shivalik Hills, in early April of 2009. Knowing it would be insane and inappropriate to simply show up in the Shivaliks and expect that a nomadic family would invite a random stranger to tag along with them on their migration into the Himalayas—eating, sleeping, walking and talking with them, day after day, week after week—I contacted the Society for the Promotion of Himalayan Indigenous Activities (SOPHIA), a small non-profit organization based in the city of Dehradun, which works with the Van Gujjars. I explained to its director, Praveen Kaushal (known to all as Manto), that I wanted to document the spring migration, and asked if he thought it might be possible. He assured me that it was, and told me to come to Dehradun in early April. Meanwhile, he’d think about which Van Gujjar family might be best for me to travel with, and would ask them if they’d take me along. He chose Dhumman and Jamila and, since they trusted Manto, they were open to the idea.

  Manto also introduced me to someone who was willing to translate for me, since I hardly spoke any Hindi. My translator, who shuns the spotlight, has requested that he remain “humbly anonymous” in this story, so I will call him Namith, a pseudonym, and only mention him from time to time.

  Dhumman, Jamila and their kids had met several foreigners through Manto before, and they knew the Swedish anthropologist, Dr. Pernille Gooch, who had spent significant amounts of time with a set of Dhumman’s cousins while researching her doctoral dissertation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. So, while it was highly unusual for an American to walk into their camp in the jungle, I wasn’t like a pale-skinned, camera-carrying, alien emissary from another world making first contact with a lost tribe. Which was good: I’ve been in places like that before, where children had burst into tears at the sight of a strange creature with a backpack entering their village, where even some adults had hidden behind trees, peeking around the trunks until they were sure of who—or what—I was. True, in all of those cases, trepidation quickly evolved into warm welcomes and offers of food and shelter, but my fast acceptance by the Van Gujjars was certainly smoothed by the other outsiders who had crossed their thresholds before me.

  About a week before the migration began, I went into the Shivaliks to meet Dhumman and Jamila for the first time. Aside from simply introducing myself, I wanted to make sure that they truly felt all right about my joining them, and to ask if there was anything that I needed to know in advance.

  I took a bus from Dehradun to Mohand—a village in Uttar Pradesh near the border with Uttarakhand, through which the highway linking Delhi to Dehradun passes. Small shops line both sides of the road for about one hundred yards, and Van Gujjars from the surrounding forest are often seen there picking up basic supplies or selling milk. After asking around, I found a milk merchant—who was not Van Gujjar—who was going to be driving past the part of the forest in which Dhumman lived, some ten miles west of Mohand. I hopped in the back of his battered white Mahindra pickup truck and settled in among the empty metal milk containers, which rattled violently as we maneuvered along a partially paved track that ran along the base of the Shivalik Hills.

  The road was like a borderline between two very different worlds. To the left, a patchwork of villages, farms, and fields covered the fertile plains between the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers. To the right rose a forested wilderness that cut a serrated profile against a hazy sky; it looked like a rugged no-man’s-land, and if I hadn’t known about the Van Gujjars, I would have assumed that no man—or woman or child—lived there.

  One of SOPHIA’s field workers, named Nazim, waited for me along the road at a place that seemed like nowhere. We hiked a couple of miles up a wide, dry streambed—called a rao—following a dusty footpath worn among countless rounded stones. There was no water, and no shade to shield us from the scorching sun. Long after I was completely drenched in sweat, we turned up a tiny tributary that carved a narrow cleft through the hills. The foliage overhead was still mostly intact; it felt liked we’d entered a tunnel. After another half-mile, though I hadn’t yet spotted Dhumman’s camp, I knew we were close, thanks to the ferociously barking dog that announced our arrival; fortunately, it was tied up by the time we got there. And the tea fire was already lit.

  The camp, called a dera, was in a small clearing alongside a dribbling creek, at the bottom of a canyon framed by steep, tree-covered slopes. The family’s rectangular hut was made of sticks and logs lashed together with vines and plastered with mud. Overhead, a four-sided thatched roof rose to a peaked center ridge. Atop the walls, at about shoulder height, were wide window spaces—but no glass. And there was a large doorway, but no door. This home was always open to the sounds, smells, and breezes of the forest around it. Sometimes, I was told, animals might drop in for a visit: on more than one occasion, a deer had dashed into the hut, seeking shelter from a leopard that was pursuing it.

  Made completely from natural materials, the hut felt like an organic part of the jungle. There was no plumbing: the family fetched water from a spring that trickled out of the hillside, while the buffaloes drank from a trough-like pool that Dhumman had dammed in the creek bed. There was no electricity and no phone service, no motors or machines, and no road leading to their dwelling. I was overcome by that profound sense of peacefulness that permeates places with no artifical noise.

  Inside the hut, I found a single room. A partial wall separated the kitchen area, where Jamila and her older daughters cooked over fire on a hearth of rock and dirt. There was no furniture at all. The family slept on home-made bedrolls stitched from rice sacks, which were thinly stuffed with grass; at night, these would be laid out side by side on the hard adobe floor, everyone snoring and coughing and dreaming together. Now, a couple of the bedrolls were spread for Dhumman, Jamila, Nazim, Namith, and me to sit on.

  Dhumman was tall and lean. His face was sharply sculpted, his eyes dark and steady. A black beard hung from his jawlines and came to a point under his chin, while his moustache was precisely trimmed to a pencil-thin line. He wore a black vest over a button-down shirt, and a plaid lungi around his waist. On this day, he wore a Muslim skullcap over his close-cropped hair, but he sometimes wore a white turban that, among Van Gujjars, is only worn by lambardars—tribal leaders who are part of a council that mediates disputes and tries to resolve problems. Lambardars don’t inherit their positions, but are chosen by the community based on their character. Dhumman, I would learn, had a reputation as a wise, reasonable, and honorable man.

  Like typical Van Gujjar fathers, he was the undisputed head of his household. His ideas could be questioned, especially by Jamila—whose thoughtful opinions he valued—but once he made a decision, that was that. He captained his family firmly but gently; everyone understood his expectations and fo
llowed his rules, at least while he was present. When he wasn’t around, things loosened up: a relaxed mood settled over the children, and even over Jamila, who was more naturally easygoing than her husband.

  Like all Van Gujjar women, Jamila wore a salwar kameez, a nose ring, a few bangles around each wrist and—often but far from always—a colorful, loose-fitting headscarf, beneath which her long hair was tied in a single braid. Her face had an ageless quality to it; with few wrinkles or creases, she seemed like she could have just as easily been in her early thirties or her late forties. Her hands, however, were rough and calloused, looking capable and reliable. While her eyes gleamed with intelligence, I quickly came to see that her smile was the true window to her soul. She was quick to laugh, even during the stressful circumstances we would soon encounter.

  We drank sweet, milky chai and talked. Dhumman and Jamila seemed perfectly happy to have me join them. Dhumman’s only concern was whether or not I’d be able to handle the hard living on the road. I told him about some of my previous projects, including one that took me a thousand miles through the Sahara Desert on a camel, and his doubts were quelled. He said he thought they would leave the Shivaliks after another week, so he suggested that I stay for the night, then return to Dehradun, then come back again for the migration. He promised to let me know a day or two before their departure, either by sending a message through someone else or walking out to a place where his mobile phone would have a connection.

  The plan sounded perfect, and I was relieved. I’d flown to India based entirely on faith that someone I’d never met—Manto—would be able to introduce me to forest-dwelling tribal nomads who would welcome me along on their spring migration. There had been no guarantees, and I was half-prepared to arrive in the jungle and for the Van Gujjars to have no idea who I was or what I was doing there, or for them, on second thought, to decide that it would be too much trouble to put up with a foreigner and his translator on the long journey to the Himalayas. Beyond my relief that everything seemed to be falling into place, I sensed from this first meeting that I was in very good hands, though it would take some time before I could truly appreciate how fortunate I was that Manto had suggested I travel with this particular family.