THE SHEPHERDS OF NANDA DEVI SANCTUARY

WILLIAM McKAY AITKEN

A TREK PLANNED on the back of a postage stamp deserves to come unstuck, especially when the venue is Nanda Devi Sanctuary and the season mid-monsoon. I took a gamble on having a close-up view of Changabang and had no complaints when it didn't come off. The stream beyond the cave at Mulla Deodi1 swooshed down to hit the middle of the path, then spouted up six feet with the fury of a fireman's hose. Even Natha Singh, a Garth among porters, wasn't keen to try his strength against this coursing torrent. Besides I had made several other tactical mistakes.

 

I had strained my back trying to lug a double load across the flooded Helang nala. The journey by bus from Rishikesh to Lata took three days of blasting and bull-dozing and finally of abandoning transport. Then I foolishly allowed my younger porter Sangram Singh to talk me into trying to reach Dibrugheta on the first day's walk. We reached Malathuni by nightfall cold, wet and exhausted. Fortunately Natha's flocks were grazing downhill at Raja Kharak and my time spent learning about the shepherds' way of life was some compensation for not seeing Changabang.

I met about half a dozen Lata shepherds along the way in the Outer Sanctuary and camped with them for several nights. I have nothing but admiration for their tough and uncomplaining natures and was surprised to see just how much they have been misrepresented by the middle-class mountaineers (British or Indian) who seem to write a man off if he doesn't conform to limiting his patches to the elbows of his jacket.

In Lata I also met the first shepherd to get his domesticated goats into the Inner Sanctuary. Pratap Singh Rana had been my porter to the Sanctuary a year earlier and I can vouch for his initiative and persistence. In the summer of 1981 he pioneered a new route into the South Sanctuary avoiding the Ramani slabs by making a big detour — he claims — to nearly 18,000 feet on the slopes of Devistan to enter the sacred enclosure beyond the rockfall overlooking the confluence of the north and south Rishi streams. I gathered that this route added five paravs to the existing ten for the Lata-Sarson Patal trek.²

 

1981, in many ways has been a watershed for the Sanctuary. Suddenly notice-boards sprang up in July along the roadside from Kishikesh announcing the 'Nanda Devi National Park'. People living in the hills have got used to equating notice-boards with official wishful thinking and since many plans and names for the Sanctuary have been mooted recently little notice was taken of them.

However these boards have tragic implications for the Sanctuary, Copied as they are from the rules obtaining for Parks in the plains their prohibitively high entry and camera fees (Rs. 625/- per day for a firangi with colour camera 'ONLY') will serve the interests of shady characters, for which honest individual can afford porters and these exorbitant rates?

The irony is that if the labour used to erect the notice-boards had been diverted to manning the Sanctuary there would have been at least one less bharal slaughtered [in the wake of a foreign expedition and opposition to the domesticated goat's right to graze in the Inner Sanctuary, the age old preserve of the blue sheep.

The slaughtered bharal was but one casualty of the large foreign expedition in whose footsteps I followed. I was aghast when the porters pointed out the depleted stand of young birch on the way down to Dibrugheta. Last year they were untouched. Now they had been not only lopped (for fodder for the pack goats) but beheaded. The amount of ecological damage this will eventually lead to will be many times more than the peak fees this expedition paid to the Indian Mountaineering Foundation, and they were in the Sanctuary for three months.

It was the local men who informed me of the dead bharal and vandalized birch. They are caught in a cleft stick. They know their livelihood depends on maintaining the health of the area but two other large expeditions were queueing up at Lata and clamouring for goats. The answer seems to be to encourage the Tasker-Boardman type of expedition which blends with the environment and produces often more spectacular results than the imperial extravaganzas. Many well- off villagers of Lata admitted they went on these well-padded expeditions just to experience how the sahibs lived.

Another sinister development in the Sanctuary has been cultural vandalism and two images were stolen from the Nanda Devi temple in Lata while the old iron sword used to mark Dharansi pass was removed and reportedly sold to a foreign expedition in October 1980.

Personally I feel now that the Indian ladies have climbed Nanda Devi, the main peak should be declared inviolate for the next fifty years. Large expeditions can approach the East peak from outside the Sanctuary curtain. Only by some urgent and drastic action will the waning beauty of the Sanctuary be arrested. Most of these dangers were advertised by Lavkumar Khacher in 1977³ but some mountaineers were blinkered and gave no thought to those who have to follow.

 

Note that the Sanctuary's downward spiral has occurred within seven years. The shepherds have been using the Sanctuary for at least a hundred years without letting it run down. When will the mountaineering fraternity start putting something back into the Sanctuary? It doesn't cost a lot to plant a few trees though it's the attitude that matters.

I have given these sad details to prove that the locals show more feeling for their mountain goddess than those who consider them unworthy of a mention in their book of the climb. Having lived in a hill village I am unable to romanticize the life of a hillman. It is one long, losing battle with Nature but there are rewards even in fighting a hopeless struggle. It gives a man some inner strength and the daily quest for survival adds a cubit to the soul's stature, The Lata shepherds' code of self-respect is quite remarkable. Incidentally their sturdy brand of independence makes them scorn joining the 'paltan'. I suspect that a lot of the bad press they have received from the sahibs dating back to Graham in the 1880's was due not to a cringing nature but to the fact that they didn't cringe enough before authority. When Graham brandished his stick as prescribed by Victorian guide-books as the only way to admonish the lesser races, and the Lata men ran away in apparent terror (and incidentally leaving Graham stranded for his pains) I don't accept the notion that they were behaving like a pack of Sunday school children fearful of their lives. No doubt they wanted the unhappy sahib to believe they were afraid of his wrath, for no villager wants to get on the wrong side of the patwari. I imagine they performed a drama for the sahib's benefit and as soon as he was out of sight (and good riddance to all bullies) they would sit down for a smoke and forget all about small men from the plains.

Their sense of brotherhood is so strong that each of them thinks carefully about any action he may take and its effect on the 'biradari'. This makes for an unacceptable arrogance towards those lower on the village social ladder and causes a sense of impotence in social workers who wait for miracles.

In many ways they do not measure up to the ideal of the model citizen. Their attitude to the law can be contemptuous. When a busybody policeman stopped me for questioning outside the village (with no authority) my porters, who were following, chased him down the hill. Apparently it is not an unusual sight to see the majesty of the Law in full flight as when an excise inspector had to take to his heels from a band of enraged village women wielding the oaken poles they use to dehusk the paddy. Distilling is a way of life possibly vital for survival at that altitude. The other heating agent used in abundance is red chilli and one man will get through a sackful in a year.

At Eaja Kharak the rice was washed down with a gruel containing two large ladlefuls of red chilli. The shepherds consume rhubarb the same way. Like most hillmen of Uttarakhand they prefer rice in the morning and rotis at night. Because of the cold they can shift an alarming amount at one sitting. Their capacity to swallow sugar also appears limitless.

Apart from wool the only cash crop is potatoes which usually do well in the upper fields. Apples would do well if the transport was regular in the monsoon. Rice doesn't ripen much above 6000 ft and Lata is nearer 8000 ft. Even wheat doesn't like the altitude and coarser grains have to be relied on. Unlike Kumaon with its pan-chukkis on every stream, Garhwal has a great shortage. This is because the force of the Ganga and her affluents cause too much damage to the water- mills. Many outsiders forget that the Ganga is not a benign mother but a furious maharani disturbed from her slumber in heaven by the prayers of wretched Man.

The sheep are sheared twice a year, in the monsoon and again in winter in the bhabar. In the Sanctuary an animal will yield a kilo while in the bhabar only a quarter of that. Goats' wool is not a commercial proposition, though the shepherds have ways and means of weaving it into strong ropes and many other useful gadgets. Kalyan Singh in charge of a flock of 300 animals at Raja Kharak presented me with a beautiful collar with a hand-carved toggle he had made to bell his lead-goat. The presence of the shaggy goats is supposed to act as a psychological incentive to the sheep to grow even more luxurious fleeces.

He told me how most shepherds preferred to keep goats instead of sheep, though the sheep were a better economic proposition. Goats, like their shepherds, are independent-minded and know how to survive. Sheep will die from eating a certain poisoned plant while goats eat the same plant and are none the worse. When the animals fight among themselves the goats will always land on their feet while at least one of the combatant sheep will lose its footing and break its neck. Also goats will warn of danger and paw the ground to signal the presence of a leopard. Sheep will meekly submit to being carried away.

Leopards are a menace in the winter grazing lands in the terai. In the Sanctuary the flocks are too high for the bagh but not high enough for the tarua bagh - the snow leopard, which likes to stalk large, single, juicy male bharal around 16,000 ft.

Having said all this in favour of the goats I was amused to see how they funked crossing the log over the Dibrugheta nala. It took over two hours for a herd of 100 unloaded pack-goats to be coaxed across. Eventually the approach to the bridge had to be widened with another log and salt liberally strewn along their path. The large goats waited to the last and distrusting the slippery log decided to try and ford the stream. The bigger animals were powerful swimmers but only just made it against the surging current. A smaller animal was washed away and Bishan Singh raced alongside it downstream — easier said than done — to make a splendid rugby tackle just as the drowning goat was about to disappear over a waterfall. Each goat fetches 300 rupees on the market.

I had been impressed by the two young shepherds Bishan Singh and Hyat Singh who camped near the Dibrugheta cave. One always reads about how superstitious and afraid of ghosts the local men were. I suspect this is a missionary hand-out for after all even the British had to justify their enjoyment in the Himalaya by pretending to know more about salvation than their subjects.

In the event Hyat Singh slept alone with his flock of extra sheep in the middle of the alp while Bishan Singh slept with his flock of sheep down by the river. The rain never let up the three days & nights we spent there. A third shepherd Padam Singh arrived from Trisul base and I saw that these men though unafraid to travel alone usually preferred company. He stayed with us in the cave.

Having heard so much about the faithfulness of the Bhotia sheep dogs I was surprised to learn that Padam Singh's two dogs had deserted their woolly charges to follow a young boy (delivering salt for the licks) back to Lata. Even the loss of these important chowkidars did not perturb the shepherds.

All along the trail to the Sanctuary one can find rations and cooking utensils left unattended in caves. The villagers' code of honour will not allow them to walk off with another man's things. If however a man chooses to hide his rations in a hole then it is fair game for anyone who cares to rummage. My porters were expert at unearthing tinned supplies and on one occasion even produced a tent. The latter was re- buried. At Patalkhan the year before my porters presented me with a brand new paperback copy of The Golden Bough.

Recently when I challenged a townsman's description of my pahari friends as 'dirty, scruffy villains' we were both surprised to see how our attitudes could differ so violently. He had never got further than Lata because he was used to getting the better in any haggling. He was astonished to learn that I paid my porters in advance at a rate fixed by the headman. On such a dangerous trek what good is it to try and keep money dry in one's pocket? Trust, I found with these men, is repaid with trust. My porters looked after every detail and knowing I wanted to get into the Sanctuary used all their experience to get me there. Before we left the headman Jagat Singh told me the only problem I would have would be to get myself to the Sanctuary. The porters would do everything else, for I was now a guest of the village brotherhood, They chaperoned me over the Ramani slabs and extricated me from some dicey situations. Not once did they play up pr make any demand. We travelled as a team and on getting out alive I consider I had my money's worth. My host in Lata, Bal Singh Butola, loaned me money for my return bus fare to Delhi. As the owner of a flock of livestock worth a lakh of rupees he could afford to. The man who haggled would be unaware that he was dealing with someone of considerable means, who might go to the Sanctuary for darshan of the goddess as much as for the money.

The time I spent with Kalyan Singh and his goats near Dharansi pass will always be remembered because of that shepherd's refinement. Like most Garhwalis he was soft-spoken and he was describing in detail the route to Kailash-Mansarovar. His knowledge of the geography of Uttarakhand was formidable, for each year in beginning of winter he would take his flocks down to graze on forest land near Hamnagar at two rupees a head. (Grazing in the Sanctuary is free.) With his flocks he would cover about 15 km a day. On his own he would walk 50 km. His only sadness was that his son refused to be a shepherd and preferred to loaf around the village. I am grateful that I met the father for like the wildlife in the Sanctuary the shepherds of Nanda Devi with their rugged individuality are a threatened species.

Finally it needs to be said that the character and way of life of the hill thakurs illustrates the limitations of Mike Thompson's brilliant but academic essay on risk-taking.¹ The Nanda Devi shepherds are Hindus albeit rather unusual ones. (The priest of the Lata temple is a thakur and not a brahmin.) It would be a brave man who could give a definition of Hinduism to satisfy all its constituents and Mike Thompson's generalizations about this remarkable religion appear to be based on a handful of Hindus in Nepal. As well might a man describe the English after a short stay in Belfast.

As a race the Hindus are the world's most adventurous trekkers. The thousands of pilgrims who annually visit the Himalayan shrines from villages in the plains prove that risking one's neck in the mountains to have darshan of the gods is a basic feature of being a good Hindu. It may be the terrain rather than philosophy that makes the Lata men stand out as natural mountain guides.

 

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