Himalaya Bound Page 6

  While accurate figures of how many people remained in the park, even on a part-time basis, are elusive, there are hints. As this book was being finished in 2015, Rajaji, which has still not received its final notification as a national park, was declared India’s newest tiger reserve. This has brought new attention to its Van Gujjar residents, who will most likely have to leave the park in the near future, and who will need to be compensated as required by law. According to the forest department, there are 182 families that will need to be settled. According to the Van Gujjars, there are nearly 1,600. SOPHIA, which is working to get an accurate count in order to help facilitate settlement negotiations, estimates the truth is somewhere in the middle, between six hundred and seven hundred families.

  On the one hand, it’s clear that a significant number of Van Gujjars retained a presence in the park. On the other, it’s clear that many left. And, if you believe the stories told by the tribe, it’s equally clear that virtually no families went of their own free will. In survey after survey of Van Gujjars—including those conducted by researchers who advocated moving the nomads out of Rajaji—when asked if they would prefer to remain in the park with no interference from the authorities or leave it and settle in a village, literally every single respondent said they would rather stay in the forest.

  During the week between my first trip into the Shivaliks and when I returned to embark on the migration, I paid a visit to Gandikhatta, where 878 former forest-dwelling families now live. Instead of camps camouflaged within a rugged jungle, I found homes organized along roads on a flat, open swath of land. Small fields were covered with golden wheat that rippled in the breeze. There was very little livestock. The houses, at first glance, looked similar to traditional Van Gujjar dwellings, but with a couple of profound differences: in the wilderness, the huts have wide doorways, but no doors; at Gandikhatta, the huts not only have doors, they have locks on the doors. And the windows were not large open gaps, but small holes which let in some light but were primarily designed to keep springtime heat out—and when I was there, the day was brutally hot.

  I sought out a man named Mullah Noor Alam, who was related to Dhumman through the marriage of one of his sisters. Sitting on charpoys inside his hut, he told me that he had lived in Rajaji National Park. He hadn’t wanted to leave, but once the forest department got serious about clearing the forest of nomads, they began physically assaulting Van Gujjars, fining them, and sometimes seizing their buffaloes. Eventually, Mullah Noor Alam decided he had better accept the offer to move to Gandikhatta, or he might get thrown out of Rajaji anyway, and receive nothing.

  Once he’d settled in the village, his buffaloes began to get sick. He tried to take them back to the forest, but he couldn’t afford the bribes the rangers allegedly demanded of him. He returned to Gandikhatta, where all but one of his animals died from a combination of heat and illness. They hadn’t had any shade, he said, since the cattle sheds that a corrupt government-hired contractor had built had fallen down after only a few months, and the Van Gujjars themselves couldn’t obtain the materials to rebuild them on their own.

  The government, he continued, had been “stepmotherly” in virtually every way that it had built the village, using poor construction materials and techniques. Roofs had blown off in monsoon storms, he said, and since a number of the huts had caught fire, it was decided that it was too risky to supply them with electricity, so they had none.

  Whenever Mullah Noor Alam talked about his former life in the forest, his eyes lit up and a smile of fond recognition crossed his face, as though he was thinking of a dear old friend. He still seemed confused about why he and his tribe had been kicked out. “We never harassed the deer or elephants or any other animals,” he said. “We would tell the rangers about everything that was going on in the park, so it was harder for the poachers to operate. Now, without us, the forest is less secure, like a house with an open door. Life in the forest used to be great . . .”

  But the constant confrontations with the authorities had made it too difficult, he said. Looking on the bright side, he added with just a hint of sour grapes, daily life at Gandikhatta wasn’t nearly as strenuous as it had been in the Shivaliks, and his children could go to school, so they had a chance at a better future.

  “Sometimes,” he told me, with a sparkle returning to his eyes, “I remember the freedom of the forest. Here, we have to be more diplomatic, more careful. In the forest we lived behind a curtain and we could be ourselves . . .” His voice trailed off. “But I’ve adjusted to this,” he continued, “and now that I’m here, I feel I should just accept it and not remember the old life.” The light in his eyes dimmed again. Before I left, he said, “You know, to be a Van Gujjar you must keep buffaloes, and live in the forest, and take them to the mountains in summer. We don’t do any of this anymore. Soon, we will not be Van Gujjars—we’ll just be Gujjars.”

  Though I hadn’t seen enough yet to form an empirical opinion, based on logic alone, I had to agree with his conclusion. If you take away the central element of any culture—in this case, buffaloes—it will undergo radical changes. And Gandikhatta already felt like a completely different world than the one behind the veil—or curtain—of the forest.

  I told Dhumman about my experiences at Gandikhatta, and he nodded gravely, saying, “Ji, ji.” When I mentioned the fact that the entire time I was there, not one person had offered me any chai, or even any water, he and Jamila, who was listening in, laughed knowingly. “That’s a big problem with the settled Gujjars,” she said. “They’ve forgotten the importance of hospitality.” There was a hint of pride in her tone, an inflection of satisfaction that the forest Gujjars still knew how to welcome visitors respectably.

  As hard as it had been on the Rajaji nomads to leave the wilderness and settle down, Dhumman explained that things could turn out much, much worse for his family and the others who might be banned from Govind National Park. “At least the families in Rajaji were given houses and some land,” he said. “We are being offered nothing.”

  The forest department of Uttarakhand claimed that because the nomads of Govind wintered in the state of Uttar Pradesh, they were not residents of Uttarakhand—thus that state’s government had no responsibility for their welfare. The Van Gujjars were depicted as interlopers, as invaders from another state taking advantage of Uttarakhand’s precious resources, so Uttarakhand owed them nothing. This argument disregarded the fact that these families spend about the same amount of time in Uttarakhand as in Uttar Pradesh. And the storyline about this nomadic invasion from outside conveniently ignored the reality that Van Gujjar migratory routes and grazing areas hadn’t changed in decades or, in many cases, centuries; what had changed were the lines on the map of north India, when the state of Uttarakhand was created less than ten years earlier. Before 2000, Dhumman’s family spent the entire year within the state of Uttar Pradesh, whether in the jungles or the mountains. How can one invade a place where one has always lived?

  “If our meadows are taken and we’re not given any compensation, where will we go?” Dhumman asked rhetorically, implying, “nowhere.”

  In theory, the Van Gujjars of Govind should have had nothing to worry about. In 2006, India passed the Forest Rights Act, which guaranteed the rights of “traditional forest dwellers” to live on and use the lands they have long relied upon for subsistence, even inside national parks. It was a major shift in India’s approach to conservation. The only areas from which forest dwellers could be banned were zones designated as ‘critical wildlife habitats’—none of which were established in Govind.

  The forest department’s threat to block migrating families seemed like a blatant violation of the Forest Rights Act but, since Uttarakhand had been slow to implement the law, park authorities completely disregarded it. In fact, its impending implementation seemed to energize them to push the nomads out of Govind while they could cynically argue that they were in a legal gray area, and still operating under the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972
.

  Despite believing that the law was on his side, Dhumman knew that that might not matter. If the Van Gujjars challenged their eviction in court, the process could take time, and they—and their buffaloes—didn’t have much to spare. Besides, he had seen what had happened in Rajaji even after the forest department was forbidden from coercing the herders to leave.

  The best thing he could do at the moment, he decided, was to pause for a little while along the Asan River and hope the park authorities were bluffing. In the meantime, he and Yusuf would try to come up with an alternative plan for the summer, in case their nightmare came true.

  The days along the Asan River moved to a steady rhythm. The buffaloes were milked in the morning, then moved into nearby fields where they browsed on the stubbly remnants of wheat that had been hand-harvested by farm laborers. Dhumman and Yusuf were usually with the herd, along with a rotating crew of their children, while Jamila and Roshni managed the camp. At midday, the heat battered us with crushing force, surging near 120 degrees. The buffaloes were brought to the river to keep cool while the families sheltered under their tarpaulin covers and dozed off in a stupor. As the sun’s fury relented in late afternoon, the animals were taken out to the fields to eat again.

  On our first afternoon at the Asan, after the day’s cruellest hours had passed, I waded across the knee-deep river with Sharafat to the field where his father and uncle had already led the buffaloes. Rather than steering the animals from pasture to pasture, here the goal was to keep them in one place—a plot of land that had recently been gleaned—and out of others—the surrounding plots that were still flush with uncut grain, and in which the buffaloes expressed an intense interest.

  I’d only gone to see what the herders were doing and spend time around the animals, but within a few minutes Sharafat handed me his lathi, then disappeared, thrusting me suddenly from the sidelines into the action. Namith had stayed at the camp, so I looked directly to Dhumman for instructions, which were communicated in hand motions and facial expressions.

  Along with Yusuf, Mir Hamza, Gamee, and Bashi, we established a perimeter, and when any of the animals seemed intent on chewing their way into the patches of waist-high wheat outside of their designated grazing area, it was our job to convince them otherwise. For the most part, the buffaloes moved so slowly it hardly looked like they were moving at all—until, as if from nowhere, an entire line of them suddenly seemed about to breach the border. Sometimes a half-hearted wave of a lathi was enough to turn them around, while other times we had to dash swiftly to cover gaps in our defenses, shouting and vigorously swinging our sticks. When a buffalo ignored our verbal warnings, a solid whack on its hide would encourage it to turn around. In the field in which they were grazing, there was also a huge heap of threshed wheat piled high in the center, so we had to guard the middle as well as the edges.

  It was fun; we were like a team playing zone defense in a weird kind of sport, in which the other team was made up of large, hungry beasts with horns. Though it occurred to me that any of these animals could easily break me in half with a quick lunge of its head, the buffaloes were so generally compliant—like good kids who get caught trying to get away with something they know they shouldn’t be doing—that I wasn’t afraid of them. Or perhaps I was just being naïve.

  As the sun began sliding towards the tilted ridgeline of the Shivalik Range, which sculpted the western and southern horizons, the colors of the sky were washed out in a fog-like haze. We moved the herd in a well-organized, almost single-file formation back to camp, splashing across a shallow section of the river. Coming from the opposite direction, I saw Sharafat and Appa, along with Yusuf’s sons Hamju and Chamar, approaching the tents. They were each bent over beneath gargantuan piles of straw-colored grass that towered over their heads and practically engulfed them. It looked like they were being attacked—and swallowed whole—by haystacks. They’d bought the grass from a fodderwala, and had carried their loads for about a mile. All of the grazing, it turned out, was a mere appetizer before the buffaloes’ main course. They needed to eat as much as possible to keep their strength up for the journey that, hopefully, lay ahead.

  As I sat in the cooking area watching Jamila’s hands expertly roll and slap balls of dough into chapatis, Bashi, the eleven-year-old girl, sat down beside me. She told me that I’d done an excellent job out in the field; she had seen that I was watching the buffaloes carefully and had understood what they were doing. I’d be a good herder in no time, she said, adding that she’d personally teach me more the next day. She was so sincere, so visibly pleased with my efforts, that it seemed like, of the two of us, I was the child being praised by my elder.

  After dropping their huge loads, Appa and Sharafat came over to join us, brushing grass off their shoulders and out of their hair. They sat with me and Bashi, and Jamila took a break from her chapatis to pour us each some tea. While we drank, Sharafat asked me what got me interested in migrating with them in the first place.

  I told them that I had a great love for mountains and deserts, as well as an urge to explore, so when I travelled to foreign countries, I often found myself hiking for days or weeks through remote regions where tourists rarely tread. I had been a wilderness guide in the United States for many years, I explained, so as long as I had my pack, a map, a compass, and a little bit of luck, I could live in and travel through the backcountry quite safely. Often—whether in Mongolia, Morocco, Jordan or elsewhere—the only other people I encountered were nomadic herders, and I was always greeted with great hospitality and plenty of tea. I said I thought that because nomadic people are often strangers in whatever land they are moving through, they have strong traditions of welcoming strangers and opening their homes and tents to them—more so than settled people, who may see strangers as a threat to property that they need to protect. My friends nodded in agreement.

  “Maybe I was really drawn to nomadic people,” I said, ‘because when I’m walking, I’m happy, and when I’m in the wilderness, I’m happy, so I have a natural affinity for nomadic life.” The more time I spent with nomads, I continued, the more interested I became in learning about them and writing about them—from their age-old traditions to the ways in which they deal with a world that is changing rapidly around them. And one thing I’d always wanted to do was to experience a migration from start to finish. My friends nodded again. “But why come with us, instead of going with someone else somewhere else?” Appa asked.

  In part, I explained, I liked the idea of migrating with people who lived their whole lives in the wilderness rather than with herders who spend half the year or more in towns or villages; plus, I was intrigued by the fact that they had water buffaloes, which to me seemed more interesting than goats, sheep, or cows. But also, I said, very few Americans had heard of the troubles that Van Gujjars or other nomads were having with the establishment of national parks, and it seemed like an important story to tell. “Mmmm, mmmmm,” Appa murmured, agreeing. And, I added, trekking up to a meadow in the Himalayas sounded amazing, compared to just about anywhere else I could envision migrating—I imagined it had to be absolutely beautiful. “It is,” Sharafat confirmed. “You’ll love it up there,” said Appa. “It’s very, very special.”

  After dinner, Dhumman, Yusuf, Roshni, and Gamee performed namaaz, chanting and prostrating beneath the sparkling night sky. I’d seen scenes like this in many countries I’d travelled to, and guessed that of all the world’s religions, Islam probably has the most followers who regularly pray outside.

  The form of Islam practiced by Van Gujjars is moderate and tolerant. Prayer regimens are flexible—some days people choose to pray five times, while other days they pray less or not at all. Traditionally, they tend to believe that Allah is just one name among many for God, and that the names that other religions use for the Creator are equally—or almost—as good. They’re generally not overly attached to the idea that their conceptions of God, or their ideas of how to worship, are the only legitimate ones—though th
ey do look askance at atheists. When I explained, for example, that I don’t pray, but that I connect to something that might be called divine when I spend time in the mountains or the desert, they understood, since for them, God and the natural world are inseparably intertwined. When Namith said he was a complete non-believer, they thought that was strange—but they didn’t try to convince him otherwise, and they never proselytized to either of us.

  Still, over the last twenty years, and even just over the last three or four, Van Gujjars have grown more religiously conservative. Thanks to the media coverage surrounding the Rajaji conflict, Islamic activists were alerted to the existence of this little-known Muslim tribe living in the hills not far from Dehradun and Haridwar. Preachers went into the forest to teach the Van Gujjars about Islam, and the Van Gujjars, who knew very little about formal religion, met them with open ears, since they wanted to be good Muslims. Once the Rajaji families were settled in villages, they became even easier to reach and to influence. For a time, money flowed in from Middle Eastern countries to build a mosque in Gandikhatta (which, when I visited, hadn’t been completed).

  In the villages, Van Gujjars were taught passages from the Koran, as well as rules to live by, including the need to eat meat on Bakra Eid (Eid al-Adha)—which repulsed many of these lifelong vegetarians, for whom slaughtering animals was abhorrent.

  During the few years that I’ve known them, Dhumman’s family has grown noticeably more observant. When I saw them in 2012, Jamila was praying regularly, as were Appa and Sharafat—neither of whom prayed much at all during the 2009 migration. One of the Van Gujjars’ core beliefs is that life is primarily driven by destiny or luck—which can easily be understood to mean “written by Allah.” Though they’re not absolute fatalists and certainly see an important role for human agency, many big events and most end results, good or bad, are viewed as being directed by forces beyond their control.