Himalaya Bound Read online

  Perhaps, the thinking went, given enough time, the Van Gujjars would leave the forests on their own. Or, if the forest department really did want them out of Govind and other areas, and had to offer compensation packages as required by the Forest Rights Act, the nomads would more readily make a deal.

  Yet despite how difficult and angst-filled the migration had been, and how uncertain the future appeared, some of my friends could neither be scared into abandoning the wilderness nor voluntarily accepting any kind of compensation in exchange for settling down. Appa, the only one in the family with actual experience of living in a village, who had told me it was like being in prison, wholeheartedly resisted the idea. “Our people have been going to the mountains forever,” she insisted, passionately. “We have always migrated. Gangar is our home! No one should be able to stop us from going there.” And she was not alone in thinking this way. Firoz, Dhumman’s friend who had been stuck on the road waiting with his herds and his family for permission to enter Govind, was among those of the same mind.

  When I asked Jamila what she thought they would do the following spring, where they would go, she shrugged and said, “We will go where it is written for us to go.” I’m pretty sure she meant “by Allah”—though she might have been thinking of the forest department.

  After another freezing night spent half-sleeping in a smoky tent, morning broke sunny and clear. I had some chai, and as everyone went off to do whatever they needed to do—lead the buffaloes out to pasture, fetch water, work on the hut—I packed my bag for the last time. I left out a few items that I thought my friends might find useful, such as a nearly indestructible plastic water bottle, a few heavy-duty resealable plastic bags, and a couple of small carabiners. I handed them to Appa, who had stayed around the tent with Salma, Yasin, and Jamila, and she accepted them with thanks. Then I gave my polar fleece jacket to Jamila and asked her to give it to Dhumman, in case he didn’t return to the tent before I had to hit the trail. She said she knew he’d like it, but she expected him back in a few minutes, so I could give it to him myself.

  As a special send-off, Appa cooked up a dish made from milk, sugar, atta, gud (jaggery), and maybe a couple of other ingredients. It tasted like a sweet porridge. The smell drew Sharafat, Goku, and Gamee over from the big hut, and Akloo and her kids over from the little hut, everyone eager to share in this rare treat. For a few minutes, it was like a goodbye garden party, though instead of a manicured lawn it was held in a Himalayan meadow, and instead of being dressed in fine attire, the guests were wrapped in woolen shawls saturated with the smell of old campfire. In other words, it was hard to imagine a better kind of garden party. As spontaneously as it had begun, it was over. Sharafat, Goku and Gamee went back to working on the hut, and I walked over to Yusuf and Roshni’s tent.

  Not one for drawn out farewells, I tried to keep it short, but couldn’t refuse a cup of tea when Roshni offered it. Beaming with warmth, she wished me a safe journey home. Yusuf urged me to come back and migrate with them again the following spring—hopefully to Gangar. He wanted me to see their real Himalayan home.

  I looked at my watch. It was already after nine o’clock. I‘d told myself I needed to leave by 9:30, since I had to hike about twenty miles to the trailhead at Sangam Chatti, and I wanted to get there before the daily buses to Uttarkashi stopped running sometime in late afternoon. I shook the little hands of Rustem and Djennam Khatoon—my two smudge-faced hiking buddies from the Dunda Mandal Hills—and waved and said goodbye to Fatima, who was sitting with tiny Halima cradled in her arms. I walked out of the tent with Yusuf by my side.

  Everyone else in Yusuf’s family was out doing things that needed doing, so I wasn’t able to say real goodbyes to them. It felt odd that my intense and intimate experience with these people wouldn’t be wrapped up with a neat and final moment of closure. I hoped no one would be upset that I vanished before having a chance to exchange last words and handshakes or hugs. It was only sixteen months later, when I would go back to visit these families again, that I realized what they seemed to know at the time: that goodbye didn’t have to be a big deal, that closure was irrelevant, since our relationships were not coming to an end; I could leave the mountains, leave India, and not return for a year or two, and it would seem like we had only parted for a few hours.

  I said goodbye to Yusuf one last time as we neared Dhumman and Jamila’s tent and watched him stride off over the rolling grasses with the familiar bounce to his step and his lathi tucked under his arm.

  I stood with Jamila and Appa outside their tent. Sharafat and Goku, who were working on the chhappar nearby, came back over once more to wait with us. I hoped Dhumman would return before I left but, knowing well how his plans were prone to changing at the last minute, there was really no guessing when he might be back. I couldn’t wait for him.

  In my halting Hindi, I told Jamila that her family was wonderful and that I would never forget them. She smiled and laughed, as though what I’d said was at once obvious and ridiculous, and told me to come back and see them soon. I hugged Sharafat and shook hands with the women, looking each in the eyes in a way that I hoped could convey my fondness for them better than I could in words. “You are our brother,” Appa said with a sad smile. Dhumman didn’t arrive.

  I shouldered my pack and told my friends I would surely visit again, then turned and headed away from the camp. Despite one strange but deeply-held superstition I have, which is rooted in the Biblical story of Lot’s wife and the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, when I reached a hill from where I knew I’d have a perfect vista of the huts and the tents and the family that had taken me in so completely, I couldn’t help it. I looked back.

  I moved quickly across the rolling alpine grasses, dropped over the pass, and zigzagged down the steep switchbacks that cut through the treeless bowl. I entered the tight canyon and passed the spot where the dead tree had fallen on the young buffaloes. After crossing the creek several times, I walked through our Dodi Tal camp, around the little lake, and beyond. Without pausing, I passed Manji, and continued descending along the main trekking route, just as we had done when we’d gone to fetch more supplies. But this time, as each step brought me closer to the river, closer to Sangam Chatti, closer to the road, I knew I wouldn’t be hiking back up.

  I pushed on, awash in memories of my friends, with the ache of their absence wedged in my chest and the pleasure of the trail beneath my feet.

  EPILOGUE

  The following year, as the spring of 2010 approached, Uttarakhand’s forest department once again declared that the Van Gujjars and their buffaloes would be banned from the meadows of Govind National Park. Dhumman, Jamila, and the rest of the family were thrust into a familiar and difficult dilemma. As much as they discussed the subject, they had no idea whether the park authorities would ultimately back down and allow their tribe into Govind, as they eventually did in 2009, or whether they would follow through on their threat.

  Recalling the physical and emotional hardships of the migration of 2009, when I travelled with them, Dhumman, Jamila, Yusuf, and Roshni agreed on two things: that they would not return to Kanasar, and that before packing up and leaving the Shivaliks, they would decide where, exactly, they were going—whether to their traditional meadows or somewhere else.

  As April neared, the forest department showed no signs of weakening its resolve. Feelings of insecurity gripped the Van Gujjars’ jungle deras. My friends had little faith that the gates to Govind would swing open at the last minute, and they were not eager to endure the kind of tension they’d experienced on the road last time, waiting and praying for mercy from those in positions of power.

  After much deliberation, my friends settled on a radically different approach than they had chosen in 2009. Dhumman and Yusuf made arrangements with a farmer near Kalsi—at the edge of the plains, where the Yamuna River emerges from the mountains—to stay near his fields from April through September, and to purchase fodder in bulk at reasonable rates. They wouldn’t even
try to go to the high meadows.

  As it turned out, by the end of April, not long after the families reached Kalsi, Uttarakhand’s chief minister, Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, made a surprising decision to intervene on behalf of the nomads, ordering the forest department to let them into Govind National Park. Unfortunately for my friends, they had already committed to the deal that they had made to stay at Kalsi and would have lost substantial amounts of money had they bailed out on it.

  While camped for months near Kalsi, their fodder expenditures were offset by the ready access they had to markets where milk sold for decent prices. Financially, they more or less broke even. The heat, they said, had been unbearable, and they doubted whether all of their buffaloes would have survived had they not been able to spend hours immersed in the river each day. Otherwise, life at Kalsi was easy. In some ways, Appa told me, it had been too easy: since they hadn’t travelled up and down to the Himalayas and hadn’t spent the summer active at high altitudes, they and their animals were noticeably out of shape when they returned to the jungles of the Shivaliks. After a relatively sedentary few months, the buffaloes had a harder time moving through the hills, and Appa and her brothers and sisters found it more difficult than usual to climb trees and lop leaves. Even before that summer had ended, Dhumman and Jamila agreed that they would try to head back to their ancestral meadows at Gangar the following year, no matter what.

  They successfully returned to their traditional summer meadows in 2011, and in subsequent years with no real problems. While the forest department has not stopped the Van Gujjars from reaching Govind National Park, neither has it granted them official permission to enter it. The government insisted it was acting only out of humanitarian concern, not because it was compelled by the Forest Rights Act, or any other law, to let the nomads in. In fact, Dhumman said that when he, Yusuf, Alfa, and other permit-holders went to pay their summer grazing taxes, the authorities took their money but refused to issue them the paper permits and receipts that would prove they made their payments. It appeared to be an exercise in the same kind of logic that impelled Dhumman to pay his grazing taxes at Gangar when he was really at Kanasar, but in reverse: by withholding the receipts, as far as the written record was concerned, there were no nomads in the park—even though they spent the entire summer there.

  Dhumman and Yusuf were sure that this was part of a forest department plan to show that Van Gujjars had abandoned their meadows, and were hence abdicating their ability to assert claims under the Forest Rights Act, which has not yet been fully implemented in Uttarakhand. Manto agreed with their suspicions, but reassured them that such a ploy would have no impact on how the Forest Rights Act was applied, since the only thing that mattered was whether a family could prove their ancestral use of the land dating from at least seventy-five years prior to December 2005; in other words, as far as the Forest Rights Act was concerned, it didn’t matter one bit if it looked on paper like the meadows had been empty as of 2011.

  Despite several seasons of minimal hassles on the migration, my friends aren’t convinced that their problems are over, nor are they confident that their ability to access their summer pastures is truly secure. Though they feel like the immediate danger has retreated a bit, they take it year by year. They know that their fate is largely reliant on the whims of people and agencies that they’ve learned they can’t always trust. The only thing that might be able to change that is the proper implementation of the Forest Rights Act—though there is no telling when that will happen, and no guarantee that the Van Gujjars will ultimately be covered by it, though they meet all of the criteria as laid out in the law.

  My friends’ lingering insecurities seem entirely justified. In April 2015, just before publication of this book in India, I asked Namith to speak with Uttarakhand’s chief wildlife warden, D.S. Khati, who I was having trouble reaching by phone from the United States. I wanted to get an update on the forest department’s current position concerning the Van Gujjars’ right to enter Govind National Park. Namith reported that Khati told him that, while no decision had been made to block the nomads in 2015, neither would the forest department officially issue their seasonal grazing permits. Khati added that he, personally, opposed their presence in the park. He reiterated the old argument that Van Gujjars who winter in UP have no rights to use forest lands in Uttarakhand, and he went even further, denying that Van Gujjars are a traditional migratory community, because old documents that bolster the claims of the tribe refer to “Gujjars” not “Van Gujjars.”

  In fact, Khati’s attitude toward the Van Gujjars goes against current conservation trends. Over the past several years, the global conservation community has begun to embrace the possibility that nomadic herders can be important partners in environmental protection projects. Various United Nations agencies—including the UN Environment Program (UNEP), the UN Development Program (UNDP), and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)—along with major international NGOs—such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)—now support a diverse array of collaborations between tribes and environmentalists.

  As these organizations consider how to achieve international goals for both economic development and ecological sustainability, which are often opposing aims, they have concluded that “many traditional land management practices have proven to be more economically viable than more ‘modern’ alternatives, whilst simultaneously providing conservation benefits.” Pastoralists in particular, they note, often create economic value—their livelihoods—in ways that are environmentally sustainable by maintaining “herding strategies that mimic nature.” Put simply, if the idea is to encourage economic growth without harming the planet, it’s looking more and more as though traditional and indigenous herding communities are already part of the solution. Additionally, with their intimate knowledge of their ancestral lands, they have been welcomed as key players in innovative efforts to protect endangered species that live in their territory, from snow leopards in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, to lions in the Kenyan savannah.

  In other words, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to the scientific establishment and to conservation groups, including many of those who have been accused in the past of promoting “green imperialism,” that nomadic herders are not the indisputable threat to the environment that they were once assumed to be. While there may be certain situations in certain regions in which traditional herding methods are no longer sustainable, due to the impact of contextual factors such as climate change, industrialization, or overpopulation, much closer scrutiny must be applied on a case-by-case basis before writing off nomadic pastoralism as ecologically destructive. After all, these communities generally treat the environment as though their lives, and their futures, depend upon it, providing a lesson that those of us in the developed and developing world would be wise to pay attention to.

  On a more personal note, I have been back to see my Van Gujjar family three times since I hiked out of the Himalayas at the end of May 2009.

  On my first visit, in October 2010, Namith and I once again took the bus from Dehradun to Mohand, then found a ride in the back of a milk truck along the rutted road that is the informal boundary between the forests and the fields. Though I had only been here twice before, the journey felt surprisingly familiar, as though the details of the route had been permanently imprinted in my memory. We got out of the truck at the same spot in the middle of nowhere as we had on our previous visits, and began hiking toward the hills, up the wide, rocky rao. This time, there was water flowing in it, and there were several spots where we had to wade across a gently-flowing, calf-high stream. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky, and it was hot, though not as brutal as it had been when we’d come in April of the previous year.

  I was excited but nervous, eager to see my friends, though uncertain as to what our reunion would be like. Would it feel as natural, as normal, to be with them again as it had during the migration? Or, now that we were no longer engaged in an all-consumin
g activity with a shared goal, would it feel different, more awkward for my long absence?

  As we neared the high, steep bank atop which Yusuf’s dera sat, we saw three small children watching us through the trees. Before I had a chance to guess who they were, one of them called my name, surprising me by how quickly they recognized me, and from such a distance that my features couldn’t have been very distinct. But then, of course, not many people come hiking up this rao carrying a backpack.

  Our reception couldn’t have been more perfect: Yusuf and his family were thrilled to see us—and they were busy preparing to perform an improvised veterinary maneuver on a horse with an infected leg. So, after the hugs and handshakes and smiles, but before we could sit together and share chai, the horse had to be wrestled and held to the ground while a treatment involving herbs and a red-hot patal blade was administered.