# Kumaon (कुमाऊँ)

> A hundred stone temples in a deodar grove, a god who takes petitions on legal paper, and a pulse economy that runs on black soybean because nothing easier will grow at that angle.

Kumaon is what you get when a settled hill society builds continuously in one idiom for a thousand years and is never quite conquered long enough to lose it. The Katyuris left temple clusters at Jageshwar, Baijnath and Katarmal; the Chands built Almora on a ridge and made Nanda Devi their tutelary goddess; the Gorkha occupation of 1790–1815 and the British administration after it changed the tax structure and left the ritual calendar alone. What holds it together now is a language with no official status, a floor-painting tradition every household still practises, a food economy built on bhatt and gahat because the terraces face the wrong way for anything easier, and a migration rate that has emptied more villages than any policy has refilled.

- Source: https://bharatsangraha.com/regions/kumaon
- Language: en
- Tier 1 macro cultural realm: Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
- Tier 2 cultural region: Kumaon
- Indigenous scope: The ridge-and-valley country drained by the Kali, the Gori, the Saryu, the Ramganga and the Kosi, from the sal forest and gravel bhabar at the foot of the hills up to the glaciers under Nanda Devi, Panchachuli and Nanda Kot. Its western limit is a watershed — where streams stop draining into the Ramganga and Saryu and begin draining into the Pindar and the Alaknanda, Kumaoni speech gives way to Garhwali within a day's walk, and the temple plans, the drum patterns and the words for the same pulse all change with it. In the east the Kali runs in a gorge, and beyond it Kumaoni shades into the Doteli of the far-western Nepali hills without any break a speaker would notice. Northward the region ends where the monsoon is cut off by the Great Himalayan crest, in the Johar, Darma, Byans and Chaudans valleys, where the language becomes Tibeto-Burman and the crop becomes buckwheat and barley.
- Overlapping administrative units: Uttarakhand
- Tier 3 micro-regions: Terai–Bhabar (Sal forest, seasonal swamp and the porous gravel apron below the hills); Middle Kumaon Ridges (Lesser Himalayan ridges and basins between roughly 900 and 2,400 m); Johar & Darma (Bhotiya) (Inner and Trans-Himalayan valleys above 3,000 m)
- Languages: Kumaoni, Hindi, Rung languages (Darmiya, Byangsi, Chaudangsi), Tharu and Buksa in the terai

## Terrain and eco-zones

Vertical, like Garhwal, but slightly drier and with a longer, gentler autumn. The bhabar at 300 m is subtropical and hot; the ridge towns at 1,600–2,000 m have mild summers and light winter snow; the outer Himalayan ranges hold snow from November to May. Rainfall is heaviest on the southern-facing outer ridges around Mukteshwar and Nainital and falls off sharply in the inner valleys behind the crest. The south-facing slope carries pine and the north-facing slope carries oak, and a village will be sited on one or the other for reasons of water and fodder rather than of view.

**Landforms:** Bhabar — a gravel apron where hill streams disappear underground, and the terai swamp where they re-emerge, Lesser Himalayan ridges running roughly north-west to south-east, terraced on both flanks, The Nainital lake basins, formed in a tectonic depression along a fault line rather than by glaciers, Ridge-top settlement pattern — towns on the dhar, fields on the slope, water in the gaad below, Alpine bugyals and the Great Himalayan wall of Nanda Devi, Nanda Kot, Panchachuli and Trishul, Glaciers — Milam, Pindari, Kafni, Sundardhunga and Namik, all reached on foot up long valleys

**Rivers and waters:** Kali (Mahakali or Sharda) — the eastern gorge river, joined by the Gori at Jauljibi, Gori Ganga — the Johar valley river, out of the Milam glacier, Saryu and Gomti — meeting at Bageshwar, the ritual and market centre of the middle hills, Ramganga (west and east) — the Corbett river and the drainage that defines the region's western flank, Kosi and Suyal — the Almora rivers, both now seriously depleted in the dry season, Gaula and Nandhaur — the Nainital and Haldwani drainage into the bhabar, Pindar — rising at the Pindari glacier and running west out of the region, which is precisely why the watershed above it is a cultural boundary

- **Winter** (November–February, -5 to 20 °C by altitude): Snow on the outer ranges, clear air, and the season of weddings and of jagar. Households live off stored grain, and the high valleys are empty because their people have moved down.
- **Spring** (March–April, 8–26 °C): Buransh flowers red on the middle slopes and pink higher up; kafal ripens from April; Phool Dei opens the local year. Forest fires in the chir pine belt are now a routine part of this season.
- **Summer** (May–June, 15–32 °C): The hill stations fill, the flocks move to the bugyals, and the Bhotiya families move up to their summer villages. Water scarcity in the ridge towns peaks now.
- **Monsoon** (July–mid September, 18–28 °C): Paddy transplanting, the hurkiya baul work songs, and landslides. Roads to the inner valleys close without notice, and the leeches make walking unpleasant.
- **Autumn** (Late September–October, 8–26 °C): The clearest and most reliable weather of the year, and the season of the Nanda Devi and Uttarayani fair cycle's harvest end.

**Best time to visit:** Mid-March to mid-June and late September to November. October gives the best Himalayan views of the year from any of the ridge towns. Avoid mid-July to mid-September for anything beyond the main roads.

## History

## Foodways

The Kumaoni kitchen is drier and more pounded than the Garhwali one across the watershed. Both grow the same millets and the same pulses, but Kumaon leans on black soybean where Garhwal leans on black gram, cooks more of its pulses down to a thick chudkani or a ground dubke rather than to a pourable dal, and puts a pounded salt chutney on the side of almost everything. The other constant is the vessel — the bhaddu, a heavy lidded bronze pot in which rajma and pulses are cooked slowly over embers, and which is credited locally with a flavour no pressure cooker reproduces.

**Primary cooking medium:** Mustard oil, pressed in village ghanis and now mostly bought in, Ghee, eaten ceremonially at Ghee Sankranti and used sparingly otherwise, Bhang (hemp) seed, ground for its own oil into chutney and pisyun loon, Chyura — Indian butter tree fat from the lower valleys of Pithoragarh, solid at room temperature and used where dairy fat is short

**Dominant sour agents:** Buttermilk, the base of jholi and the daily cooking liquid, Galgal, the coarse hill citrus, and lemon, Timur, the numbing Himalayan prickly ash used in chutney, Amchur and dried apricot in the high valleys, Tamarind only where the plains kitchen has come up the road

**Spice register:** Seed-led and deliberately narrow — jakhiya, coriander seed, turmeric, cumin, a fierce small local red chilli and a great deal of garlic pounded raw. Kumaon uses more asafoetida and more coriander seed than Garhwal and almost no whole garam masala outside meat cookery. Against Kangra or Kullu it uses far less dairy, and against the Bhotiya valleys above it, far less salt-butter tea.

**Staple grains and carbs:** Mandua — finger millet, the winter staple, made into roti with boiling-water dough, Jhangora — barnyard millet, for kheer and for the year the rain fails, Rice on irrigated valley-bottom terraces, called talaun, Wheat on the better upland terraces and throughout the bhabar, Buckwheat, barley and amaranth above 2,500 m, Bhatt and gahat treated as grain rather than as garnish, and eaten daily

**Preservation:** Sun-drying on slate roofs — colocasia leaf, radish, gourd, greens and whole pulses, Pisyun loon, salt pounded with herbs, which keeps for months and seasons anything, Fresh butter clarified to ghee, and buttermilk soured deliberately for jholi, Pickles of lingda fern, timur, galgal and green chilli in mustard oil, Seed grain, chilli and gourd hung in baskets in the hearth smoke through the monsoon

### Bhatt roasting and grinding
Black soybean is dry-roasted in an iron kadhai until it splits, then either cracked coarse and simmered with a flour slurry into chudkani, or soaked, ground wet on a stone and cooked into dubke. Roasted first and ground second is the sequence that makes a pulse taste of smoke rather than of pulse, and it is the Kumaoni signature.
Also found in: Garhwal

### Pisyun loon, the pounded salt
Salt is pounded on a silbatta with garlic, green chilli, turmeric, hemp seed or coriander until it turns into a dense, oily paste. It works as condiment, preservative and portable seasoning at once, keeps for weeks and travels in a leaf packet, and it is the reason a Kumaoni field lunch needs nothing else.
Also found in: Garhwal

### Bhaddu slow-cooking
A lidded, narrow-mouthed bronze or brass pot buried in embers, in which rajma, gahat and bhatt cook for hours with almost no water loss. The metal and the shape do the work a pressure cooker does with force, and the difference is audible in how the household talks about the two.
Also found in: Garhwal, Kullu & Mandi

### Gharat milling
Water-driven horizontal-wheel mills on diverted channels, grinding cold and slow. Finger millet flour goes rancid fast and gharat flour is held to keep longer and taste sweeter; the miller was paid in a measured share of the grain, so no cash entered the transaction.
Also found in: Garhwal, Kullu & Mandi, Kangra & Dhauladhar

### Malu-leaf setting
Sweetened khoya is packed into a cone rolled from a fresh leaf of malu, the wild bauhinia creeper, and left to cool and set in it. The leaf perfumes the sweet and is also the wrapper, the plate and the disposal. Singori is the result, and it cannot be made outside the leaf's range.
Also found in: Garhwal

### High-altitude drying and hearth-smoking
Above 1,500 m thin dry air and hard ultraviolet dry vegetables hard within days, and what cannot be sun-dried is hung above the hearth to take smoke through the monsoon. In the Bhotiya valleys meat and cheese are dried in the cold air the same way, on the Tibetan model rather than the Indian one.
Also found in: Garhwal, Ladakh & Zanskar, Kinnaur & Spiti

## Dishes

A daily plate of millet roti, one pulse and one green, and a ceremonial plate of rice, singal, ghee and jaggery that appears at weddings and deity festivals. The two Kumaoni foods that everyone outside the region has heard of — bal mithai and singori — are both Almora bazaar sweets rather than village cooking, which is a fair description of how the region reaches the outside world.

### Bhatt ki churkani (भट्ट की चुड़कानी)
Black soybean roasted until it splits, then simmered with a slurry of rice or wheat flour into a thick dark dish eaten with rice. Chudkani is the coarse version and dubke the wet-ground one; households are firm about which they make and mildly rude about the other.

### Dubke (डुबके)
Black gram or black soybean soaked, ground wet on a stone and simmered with jakhiya and asafoetida into a smooth, heavy dal. Eaten over rice with a spoon of ghee, and unambiguously winter food.

### Gahat ki dal and gahat ke paranthe (गहत)
Horse gram cooked thin and dark, or ground and stuffed into a paratha. It is a winter pulse credited in household practice with breaking kidney stones — a belief widespread enough that the crop is grown partly for it.

### Aloo ke gutke (आलू के गुटके)
Boiled potato in thumb-sized pieces tossed in mustard oil with jakhiya, red chilli and coriander seed, and eaten with bhang ki chutney. The default breakfast, travel food and guest food of the hills.

### Bhang ki chutney (भांग की चटनी)
Hemp seed roasted and ground on a stone with lemon, green chilli and salt. The seed carries no intoxicant; the plant is a field-margin weed and the seed is gathered rather than farmed.

### Pisyun loon (पिस्यूँ लूण)
Salt pounded with garlic, chilli, turmeric and one of several herbs or seeds into an oily green or ochre paste. Every household makes a slightly different version, and a good one is a reason to visit a particular aunt.

### Kappa (कापा)
Green leaves boiled, chopped and set with a slurry of ground rice, then tempered — the Kumaoni counterpart of Garhwal's kafuli, made from the same logic with a different name and a slightly thinner finish.

### Jholi (झोली)
Buttermilk turned with gram flour and turmeric and tempered with jakhiya, fenugreek and asafoetida. The everyday sauce, made from what remains after the butter has been churned out.

### Bhaddu ka rajma
Small hill rajma cooked in a lidded bronze bhaddu over embers for hours until the skins go soft and the liquor thickens by itself. The Munsiyari and Harshil beans are the ones people ask for by name.

### Sisunak saag (सिसूण)
Stinging nettle cut young, boiled to disarm it and cooked as a green or a thin soup. Free, abundant and, once cooked, one of the more nutritious things growing on a Kumaoni field boundary.

### Singal (सिंगल)
A batter of semolina or rice flour with curd and banana, piped into hot oil in a ring or a horn and fried. A festival and fair sweet rather than an everyday one.

### Bal mithai
Khoya cooked down until it darkens and caramelises into a fudge, cut into cubes and rolled in tiny white sugar balls. It is an Almora bazaar invention, and its keeping quality is why it is the sweet that leaves the region.
Where to try: Lala Bazar and the Mall in Almora.

### Singori (सिंगोड़ी)
Sweetened khoya, often with coconut, set in a cone of fresh malu leaf, which scents it as it cools. It keeps for a day or two at most, which is why it stayed a local sweet while bal mithai travelled.
Where to try: Almora, made fresh and sold the same day.

### Ghughute
Wheat-flour dough figures — birds, drums, pomegranates — deep-fried and strung with an orange into a necklace for children at Uttarayani, who then call the crows to eat them.

### Buckwheat and barley roti of the high valleys (फाफर)
Above 2,500 m the flour changes. Buckwheat, barley and amaranth roti eaten with dried greens, chhurpi-type hard cheese and butter tea in the Rung and Shauka valleys — a Tibetan-facing plate on the Indian side of the crest.

### Festival and sacrificial meat
Goat at deity festivals and weddings, cooked in an iron kadhai with jakhiya, turmeric, chilli and a great deal of garlic, and distributed by household share. In the high valleys meat is also dried in the cold and kept through the winter.

**Staples:** Mandua and jhangora roti, Rice on the talaun terraces, Bhatt and gahat, Buttermilk and pisyun loon, Wild and cultivated greens

**Sweets:** Bal mithai, Singori, Singal, Jhangore ki kheer, Khaja and gulgula at fairs

**Street food:** Aloo ke gutke with bhang chutney at every bus stand, Bal mithai and singori in Almora, Singal and jalebi at the Uttarayani and Nanda Devi fairs, Momos, now universal in every hill town and unarguably a recent arrival

**Drinks:** Buransh — rhododendron flower juice, pressed in spring, Buttermilk, Salted butter tea in the Bhotiya valleys, Jaan, the fermented millet or rice brew of the high valleys

## Dress and textiles

The Kumaoni marker is not a garment but a piece of cloth and a set of gold. The rangwali pichhora — a yellow ground with a red central device — is drawn or printed for a married woman and worn at every rite that matters, and the nath, the large gold nose ring, is the single most expensive object most hill households own. Above the crest the wardrobe changes entirely to Bhotiya wool, and below it in the bhabar the dress is plains dress.

### Rangwali pichhora
A large cloth dyed yellow with turmeric, marked with a red roundel at the centre and filled with concentric motifs — swastika, conch, bell, sun — drawn in the same visual grammar as aipan. It is thrown over the head and shoulders, and its presence tells you the occasion is auspicious before anyone speaks.
Worn by: Married women
Worn for: Weddings, namkaran, deity festivals, every auspicious rite

### Ghagra and angadi
A gathered skirt with a fitted upper garment and a head cloth, in cotton for summer and coarse wool for winter. Now largely worn by older women and at ritual occasions, having been displaced by the salwar kameez and the saree.
Worn by: Women
Worn for: Everyday and ceremonial

### Pankhi and thulma
The woven woollen shoulder wrap and the thick napped blanket — the two objects that make an unheated stone house survivable, and both originally Bhotiya trade goods traded down the valleys.
Worn by: Men and women
Worn for: Winter, everyday

### Bhotiya coat, boots and cap
Heavy woollen coats, woven sashes and knee-high boots with hide or plaited-wool soles, cut on a Tibetan rather than an Indian pattern — a wardrobe assembled for snow and for walking loaded.
Worn by: Shauka and Rung communities
Worn for: Everyday above 3,000 m

### Topi and kurta-pyjama
A woollen cap with kurta and churidar in the hills; the black cap became a marker during the statehood agitation of the 1990s and stayed one.
Worn by: Men
Worn for: Everyday

### Thulma and pankhi
Sheep wool spun on a drop spindle and woven in narrow strips on a backstrap or pit loom, then joined. The thulma is thick and heavily napped for bedding; the pankhi is finer and worn. Both were trade goods before they were craft products.

### Dan and chutka
Bhotiya floor rugs and pile carpets in strong geometric registers, woven from local wool with natural and, more recently, chemical dyes. Motifs are shared with the Tibetan plateau, which is where the design vocabulary came over the passes with everything else.

### Rangwali pichhora cloth
Traditionally drawn by hand on plain cloth with turmeric and red pigment for a specific woman and a specific occasion; now mostly screen-printed and sold ready-made, with the hand-drawn version surviving in conservative households and in revival work.

### Munsiyari and Johar wool
The wool of the high-valley flocks, historically supplemented by pashmina and raw wool brought over the passes from Tibet. When the passes closed the raw material supply halved overnight, and weavers turned to mill yarn brought up from the plains.

**Jewellery:** Nath — the large gold nose ring, its diameter and weight a statement of household standing, Guloband — gold plaques stitched to a velvet band worn tight at the throat, Hansuli — a rigid silver or gold torque, Chareu and paunji — heavy silver anklets, Murkhli, kundal and bali — ear ornaments, Pauncha and dhagula — wrist ornaments in silver

## Arts and artisanal heritage

### Chholiya — martial
A sword-and-shield dance performed in front of the groom's party by men in white and red costume, moving in paired combat sequences to dhol, damau, turi and ransingha. It is a stylised armed escort — the wedding party is being protected, historically from actual raiding — and it is strongest in Champawat, Pithoragarh and Almora.

### Jhora — folk
A linked-arm circle dance that grows as people join it, moving in a slow anticlockwise shuffle to a sung call-and-response. There is no audience and no performer — the dance is the crowd, and a large jhora at a fair can run to hundreds.

### Chanchari — folk
A slower and older circle form associated with the Danpur country behind Bageshwar, sung in a characteristic long-breathed line with the hurka keeping time.

### Chhapeli — folk
A courtship duet danced with a mirror and a handkerchief, quick-footed and flirtatious, sung to hurka and manjira. It is the one Kumaoni form built around a couple rather than a circle.

### Jagar — ritual
Night-long invocation in which the jagariya sings the deity's story to hurka and thali until the deity arrives in a human vehicle, who then dances, is questioned and answers. Golu, Bholanath, Kalbisht, Airy, Haru and Saim are among the deities called. It functions as therapy, arbitration and court of appeal, and it is entirely current.

### Hurkiya baul — ritual
A ritualised work performance in which the hurkiya stands in the flooded field singing a heroic ballad while the transplanting crew works to his rhythm and answers his lines. The song sets the pace of the labour, and the drummer is paid out of the crop.

### Hilljatra — ritual
A masked agricultural pageant of ploughmen, oxen and the fearsome Lakhiya Bhoot, which came into Pithoragarh from the Sorar country across the Kali and is performed on both sides of that river to this day.

### Malushahi
The Kumaoni epic — the ballad of Malushahi, a Katyuri prince, and Rajula, the daughter of a Shauka trader of the Bhot valleys, sung over nights by hurkiya bards. Its plot is the trans-Himalayan trade route itself, from the Katyuri capital up through the Johar valley to the Tibetan marts, which makes it the most geographically literal love story in the Himalaya.

### Nyoli
A solo song of longing named after a hill bird, sung in a high, open, unaccompanied voice with long held lines. Traditionally sung alone while grazing or cutting grass, and its texts are almost always about distance.

### Bair and bhagnaul
Sung repartee performed at fairs — two singers alternate improvised verses in a fixed metre, each answering and attempting to outdo the last, with the audience keeping score. It is a competitive form and the reputations are real.

### Hurka, dhol-damau and masakbeen
The hurka — a small hourglass drum squeezed under the arm to bend the pitch — is the Kumaoni instrument, carried by the jagariya and the hurkiya. Dhol and damau serve processions, the ransingha and turi announce them, and the masakbeen, a bagpipe adopted from military bands, has become standard at weddings within living memory.

### Bedu pako baro masa
A courtship song from the Almora country, arranged and popularised by Mohan Upreti and his colleagues in the 1950s, which became the effective anthem of the region. Its opening image is agricultural — the wild fig ripens all twelve months and nobody wants it, while the kafal ripens in Chaitra alone — and everyone in Uttarakhand can finish the line.

### Ram Lila of the Kumaon towns
The Almora and Nainital Ram Lila are sung throughout in classical raga rather than spoken, a nineteenth-century local development in which the entire cycle is performed as music theatre. It is distinct enough from plains Ram Lila that it is studied separately.

### Hilljatra
The masked agricultural pageant of the Pithoragarh valleys, brought from the far-western Nepali hills, enacting the plough, the pair of oxen and the buffalo-demon in a village courtyard after transplanting.

### Parvatiya Kala Kendra and the Almora stage
The mid-twentieth-century institution through which Kumaoni folk material was arranged for the stage — Mohan Upreti and Brijendra Lal Sah's work made ballads like Rajula Malushahi performable as productions, and put the region's music on national platforms.

### Aipan (GI-worthy)
Practised by women, taught mother to daughter, and still drawn on doorsteps at every festival across the middle hills. Its geometry — dots joined into grids, lotus registers, and the specific chauki designs — is shared with Mithila and Rajasthani floor arts in principle and with nothing in detail.
Material: Geru (red ochre wash) and biswar (soaked ground rice paste)
Technique: The surface is washed with red ochre and the design drawn freehand in white rice paste with the last three fingers — no brush and no stencil. Each pattern belongs to a specific occasion and place — the threshold, the household shrine, the seat under a bridegroom, the vessel for a namkaran — and drawing the wrong one is a category error rather than a matter of taste.

### Tamta copper work (GI-worthy)
The Tamta artisan community of Almora has made the gagar water pot, the cooking vessel, the temple bell and the ritual lamp for generations, supplying Garhwal as well as Kumaon. Aluminium and steel destroyed the cooking-vessel market; ritual and decorative work is what remains.
Material: Sheet copper and bell metal
Technique: Sheet raised and beaten over a form with a graded set of hammers, joined, annealed, and tinned inside for cooking. Vessels are finished by hand-scraping rather than polishing, which leaves the facet pattern visible.

### Likhai woodcarving (GI-worthy)
The carved doorway is the display surface of a Kumaoni house, and Almora's old bazaar lanes still show hundreds of them at first-floor height. As with Garhwali tibari carving, dismantled panels now move into the antiques trade faster than new ones are cut.
Material: Deodar, tun and local cedar
Technique: Deep relief carving on door frames, jambs, lintels and window screens — dense registers of lotus, creeper, deity figures and geometric bands, cut with chisels and finished without varnish.

### Ringaal basketry (GI-worthy)
Working equipment rather than decoration — the doko is still how a load moves where no vehicle goes. The craft is held by specific artisan communities and is under pressure from plastic on one side and from restrictions on ringaal cutting on the other.
Material: Ringaal, the dwarf hill bamboo of the 1,000–2,500 m belt
Technique: Culms split into strips by hand and plaited or coiled into carrying baskets, grain bins, winnowing trays, mats and lidded boxes, without nails or adhesive.

### Bhotiya wool weaving (GI-worthy)
A craft that lost half its raw material and all of its market in the early 1960s and rebuilt as a cooperative economy, most visibly at Munsiyari. What is sold as Bhotiya wool now is often mill yarn worked by hand, and the difference is worth asking about.
Material: Sheep and goat wool, formerly with Tibetan raw wool and pashmina
Technique: Hand-spun on a drop spindle and woven on backstrap and pit looms in narrow widths, then stitched into blankets, wraps and rugs. Geometric registers are counted rather than drawn.

### Katyuri and Chand stone temple carving
A tradition of building many small temples in a cluster rather than one large one — Jageshwar alone has well over a hundred — which produced a distinctively Kumaoni skyline and a distinctively Kumaoni idea of what a temple site is. The masons' lineages are gone; the buildings are protected.
Material: Local grey stone
Technique: Small nagara-form shrines with a curved shikhara and a crowning amalaka, assembled dry from dressed blocks, with sculpted door jambs and river-goddess figures at the base.

## Folk songs

### Rajula Malushahi (Kumaoni)
The love of a Katyuri prince for the daughter of a Shauka trading family from the high valleys, and the journey he makes over the passes to find her. The ballad follows the trade route exactly, which is why it is also a document of the trans-Himalayan economy.
Sung at: Sung over successive nights by hurkiya bards

### Jagar (Kumaoni)
The genealogy, wrongs and powers of a local deity — Golu, Kalbisht, Airy, Haru, Saim — sung to bring it into a human vehicle so that it can be questioned. Functional text, sung for as long as it takes.
Sung at: Night-long deity invocation

### Nyoli (Kumaoni)
Separation and longing, in a high unaccompanied line named after a hill bird.
Sung at: Sung alone while grazing or cutting grass

### Bair and bhagnaul (Kumaoni)
Improvised competitive verse between two singers, each answering the other in metre until one runs out. Subjects range from love to theology to the failings of the other singer.
Sung at: Fairs

### Hurkiya baul (Kumaoni)
A heroic ballad sung by a drummer standing in the flooded field, with the transplanting crew answering the refrain and working to the beat. The labour and the song are one performance.
Sung at: Paddy transplanting

### Chhapeli (Kumaoni)
Courtship, sung and danced as a duet with a mirror and a handkerchief.
Sung at: Fairs and celebrations

### Jhora and chanchari (Kumaoni)
Circle-dance songs in call-and-response, whose texts move between seasonal description, teasing and local news, and which lengthen as more dancers join.
Sung at: Fairs and village festivals

### Bedu pako baro masa (Kumaoni)
A young man's song of longing, built on the contrast between the wild fig that fruits all year and is not eaten and the kafal that ripens for a few weeks and is. Arranged for the stage in the 1950s and now the region's unofficial anthem.
Sung at: Originally courtship, now everything

### Kafal pako, main na chakho (Kumaoni)
The tale behind a bird's call — a girl left to guard the kafal, beaten by her mother for eating what had in fact only swelled overnight in the dew, who dies and returns as a bird crying that the kafal ripened and she never tasted it. The bird is heard for exactly the weeks the fruit is on the tree.
Sung at: Told and sung in the kafal season

### Ghughuti rhymes (Kumaoni)
Children's calls to the crows, sung while offering the fried dough necklaces made for the day. A rhyme with a job — the crow is being invited, and the winter is being sent off.
Sung at: Uttarayani, mid-January

## Dialect and oral traditions

Kumaoni is a Central Pahari language, sister to Garhwali across the watershed and continuous with the Doteli of the far-western Nepali hills across the Kali. It has no official status, no medium of instruction and no settled orthography, and most of its speakers are bilingual in Hindi from primary school onwards. Its internal divisions are named after old parganas rather than districts, because a pargana was a basin and a basin is what people married and traded within. Alongside it, and unrelated to it, the region holds a set of Tibeto-Burman languages in the high valleys and Tharu and Buksa in the terai.

### Khasparjiya (Central Kumaoni) — Indo-Aryan, Central Pahari
The Almora and Nainital register, and the one broadcasting, publishing and the stage settled on as standard Kumaoni.

### Kumaiya — Indo-Aryan, Central Pahari
The Champawat and Kali valley speech, from the Chand dynasty's original seat — often described as the oldest-sounding Kumaoni and the closest to Doteli across the river.

### Soryali and Askoti — Indo-Aryan, Central Pahari
The Soar valley around Pithoragarh and the Askot country above it, in contact with both the Rung languages upstream and Nepali speech across the Kali.

### Danpuriya — Indo-Aryan, Central Pahari
The Danpur country behind Bageshwar, up towards the Pindari glacier — the variety carried by the chanchari songs, and the one closest to the Garhwali frontier.

### Rung languages — Darmiya, Byangsi and Chaudangsi — Tibeto-Burman, West Himalayish
Spoken in Darma, Byans and Chaudans behind Dharchula by communities who ran the Tibet trade. Rangkas, the related language of the Johar valley, is no longer spoken — the Johar Shaukas shifted to Kumaoni within a few generations of taking up trade and education on the Indian side.

### Tharu and Buksa — Indo-Aryan, distinct from Kumaoni
The languages of the terai communities who lived in the malarial belt before it was cleared, and who were displaced within it by post-1950s settlement.

#### Indigenous terminology

- **Aipan** (ऐपण): Ritual floor and wall drawing in white rice paste on a red ochre ground, made freehand with the fingers for a named occasion and a named place in the house.
- **Biswar** (बिस्वार): The soaked, ground rice paste used to draw aipan. It has to be made fresh, it dries chalk-white, and it washes off — the impermanence is part of the practice.
- **Talaun and upraun** (तलाऊँ / उपराऊँ): Irrigated valley-bottom land and rain-fed upland terrace. The distinction sets the crop, the value and, historically, the standing of the household that holds it.
- **Dhar and gaad** (धार / गाड़): Ridge and stream — the two axes of the entire settlement pattern. Villages sit on the dhar or on the slope between the two, and hundreds of place names end in one or the other.
- **Bhaddu** (भड्डू): The lidded, narrow-mouthed bronze pot used to cook pulses and rajma slowly in embers. Passed down, and still asked for by name at Almora's metal shops.
- **Pisyun loon** (पिस्यूँ लूण): Literally ground salt — salt pounded on a stone with garlic, chilli, turmeric and herbs into a paste that keeps for weeks.
- **Hurka and hurkiya** (हुड़का / हुड़किया): The waisted hand drum whose pitch is bent by squeezing the lacing, and the hereditary singer-drummer who plays it at jagars, transplanting and fairs.
- **Jagariya and dangariya** (जगरिया / डंगरिया): The singer who calls the deity, and the person into whose body it comes. Neither role is chosen; the dangariya in particular is identified by the deity.
- **Kham** (खाम): The four clan divisions at Devidhura between whom the Bagwal is fought. Membership is inherited and determines which side of the ritual battle a man stands on.
- **Kafal** (काफल): The box myrtle, which fruits red-purple for a few weeks from April, cannot be transported far and is therefore the definition of a seasonal, local pleasure.
- **Ghughuti** (घुघुती): The hill dove, and by extension the fried dough figures strung for children at Uttarayani and offered to the crows.
- **Thulma and dan** (थुलमा / दान): The thick napped wool blanket and the Bhotiya floor rug — the two things every high-valley loom made.

#### Sayings

- "Pailag" — literally: I touch your feet — The standard Kumaoni greeting to anyone older, answered with "jeeti raye, jaag raya" — live long, stay awake. The reply is a blessing rather than a greeting, and it is not optional.
- "Bedu pako baro masa, kafal pako chaita" — literally: The wild fig ripens all twelve months, the kafal ripens in Chaitra — What is always available is not what is wanted. Sung as a love song and quoted as a proverb, and the first line of Kumaoni most outsiders can produce.
- "Kafal pako, main na chakho" — literally: The kafal has ripened, and I did not taste it — From the folktale of the girl beaten over fruit she had not eaten. Said of an injustice discovered too late to correct, and heard as an actual bird call each spring.
- "Pahad ka paani aur pahad ki jawani, pahad ke kaam nahin aati" — literally: The mountain's water and the mountain's youth are of no use to the mountain — The line that frames every conversation about migration in the region. Both run downhill and neither returns.
- "Golu ke darbar mein" — literally: In Golu's court — Said of a matter that has gone beyond human arbitration. Golu Devta's shrines take written petitions, and the phrase is used exactly as one would use a reference to a court of last resort.

## Places

### Jageshwar, Almora
More than a hundred stone temples of the seventh to twelfth centuries standing together in a deodar grove on the Jataganga, with the Dandeshwar group a short walk downstream. The grove is temple property, which is why a stand of very old deodar survives in a district that lost most of its forest to the timber trade. Local tradition counts the shrine among the jyotirlingas, a claim other sites contest.
Best time: March–June and September–November

### Baijnath, Bageshwar
The Katyuri capital's temple group on the Gomti, with a celebrated stone Parvati image in the main shrine. The dynasty's name for its seat, Kartikeyapura, survives only in inscriptions; the temples survive in the open, beside a river the town still bathes in.

### Katarmal Sun Temple, Almora
A ninth-century sun temple on a ridge above the Kosi, oriented so that the early sun reaches the image, with more than forty subsidiary shrines around it. Its elaborately carved wooden doors were removed to a national collection after a theft, and the site is now quiet enough that visitors often have it to themselves.

### Bageshwar, Bageshwar
The Bagnath temple at the meeting of the Saryu and Gomti, and the ground of the Uttarayani fair, which was the great trade meeting of the middle hills — Bhotiya wool and salt from above, plains cloth and metal from below. In January 1921 the fair became the site of the mass renunciation of coolie-begar, forced portering, when the registers were thrown into the river.

### Almora, Almora
The Chand capital from the 1560s, laid along a saddle with a paved bazaar running the length of it and carved wooden doorways at first-floor level down both sides. The Nanda Devi temple in the town holds the region's biggest September fair, and the town's twentieth-century roster of visitors and residents is disproportionate for its size.
Best time: October–November and March–June

### Binsar, Almora
A banj oak sanctuary on a ridge that was the Chand rajas' summer seat, with an unbroken view along something like 300 km of the Great Himalaya from Zero Point — Chaukhamba, Trishul, Nanda Devi, Nanda Kot and Panchachuli in one arc on a clear November morning.
Best time: October–November

### Kausani, Bageshwar
A ridge village above the Kosi valley facing the Trishul–Nanda Devi wall. Gandhi stayed here in 1929 and wrote part of his commentary on the Gita; the ashram that grew around the house is named for it. Sumitranandan Pant was born in the village.
Best time: October–November and March–May

### Nainital, Nainital
A lake in a tectonic hollow, developed as a hill station from the early 1840s and, from 1862, the summer seat of the North-Western Provinces' government. The Naina Devi temple at the head of the lake is a Shakti Peeth. The landslip of September 1880 killed more than 150 people and produced the flat ground now called the Flats — the town's playing field is the debris.
Best time: March–June and September–November

### Mukteshwar, Nainital
A ridge at about 2,300 m with a Shiva temple at its crest, the cliffs called Chauli ki Jali below it, and a government veterinary research institute established here in the 1890s because the altitude and isolation suited the work.

### Ranikhet, Almora
A long forested cantonment on a ridge, the regimental centre of the Kumaon Regiment, with a golf course laid out in a natural saddle and pine and oak in every direction. The recruiting relationship between these hills and the infantry is one of the region's largest single economic facts.

### Champawat, Champawat
The Chand dynasty's first capital, with the Baleshwar temple group in a fine early stone idiom. The valley below was the range of the Champawat man-eater, a tigress credited with 436 human deaths before she was shot in 1907.

### Devidhura, Champawat
The Varahi Devi temple where the Bagwal is fought each Shravan full moon between four khams, with cane shields and, formerly, stones. The stated object was to draw blood equivalent to one human life; the stones have been replaced with fruit and flowers in recent years by administrative direction.

### Patal Bhuvaneshwar, Pithoragarh
A limestone cave near Gangolihat, entered by a narrow descending passage, in which the formations are identified with an entire pantheon and read in a fixed order by the attending priest. Numbers admitted at a time are limited by the width of the passage.

### Golu Devta shrines at Chitai and Ghorakhal, Almora, Nainital
The shrines of a deified local ruler who judges. Petitioners write their case on judicial stamped paper and tie it up with the thousands already hanging; those whose matter is resolved return and hang a brass bell. Both sites are curtained in paper and metal, and both are entirely in current use.

### Munsiyari and the Johar valley, Pithoragarh
A ridge town facing the five-peaked Panchachuli wall across the Gori valley, and the base of the Johar country whose Shauka families ran the Tibet trade and produced the Survey of India's Tibetan explorers. The Milam glacier lies a long walk up the valley, past villages that are still occupied only in summer.
Best time: April–June and September–November

### Pithoragarh and Askot, Pithoragarh
A wide green bowl of a valley — locally called a small Kashmir — with a Chand-era fort above it, and Askot above that, the old marchland seat whose name comes from the eighty forts it was said to command. This is the staging point for Darma, Byans and the Kailash Mansarovar route.

### Adi Kailash and Om Parvat, Pithoragarh
A peak and a lake in the Byans valley treated as a counterpart of Kailash on the Indian side of the crest, and a mountain face on which snow lodges in a pattern read as the syllable Om. Access is by permit and by a road that has only recently reached this far.
Best time: May–October

### Pindari, Kafni and Sundardhunga glaciers, Bageshwar
Three glacier heads at the top of the Danpur valley, reached on foot from Loharkhet and Khati through oak, rhododendron and bugyal. The Pindar rises here and runs west — which is why the ridge above this valley is the boundary between two languages.
Best time: May–June and September–October

### Jim Corbett National Park, Nainital
India's first national park, established in 1936 in the Ramganga valley and renamed after Corbett in 1957. Sal forest, grassland chaurs and the reservoir together carry one of the densest tiger populations anywhere. The bhabar gravel below it is why the rivers here vanish and reappear.
Best time: November–June

### Jauljibi and Dharchula, Pithoragarh
Jauljibi sits at the meeting of the Kali and the Gori and holds a November fair that was, for centuries, the exchange point between Bhotiya traders, hill farmers and Nepali merchants. Dharchula upstream is a town divided by the river, with its counterpart on the far bank, and the two halves have traded and intermarried for as long as anyone records.

## Festivals

- **Uttarayani and Ghughutia** (Makar Sankranti, mid-January): Children string fried dough figures with an orange into a necklace and call the crows to eat them at dawn. The Bageshwar fair on the same day was the trading meet of the middle hills and, in 1921, the site of the public renunciation of forced portering. Fairs run at Bageshwar, Rameshwar and along the Saryu.
- **Bagwal at Devidhura** (Shravan full moon, July–August): Four khams fight a ritual battle in the temple courtyard behind cane shields until the officiating priest judges that blood equivalent to one life has been shed, at which point it is stopped. Stones were the traditional projectile; fruit and flowers have replaced them under administrative order in recent years.
- **Harela** (The first day of Shravan, mid-July): Seven or nine grains are sown in a basket indoors ten days ahead and kept dark; the pale shoots are cut on the day, worn behind the ear and set on the household shrine. Kumaon keeps more than one Harela in the year, and the Shravan one is now also the state's tree-planting day.
- **Phool Dei** (The first day of Chaitra, mid-March): Girls go door to door scattering rice, jaggery and the year's first flowers on thresholds, singing the phool dei refrain, and are given grain and sweets. It is the local new year and a flowering census at once.
- **Nanda Devi melas at Almora and Nainital** (Bhadrapad, late August–September): Images of Nanda and Sunanda are made fresh each year from banana stems, worshipped for several days and then immersed. Nanda was the Chand dynasty's tutelary goddess and is claimed with equal force across the watershed in Garhwal, which is the clearest evidence that the two regions share a religious world they otherwise distinguish.
- **Ghee Sankranti (Olgia)** (The first day of Bhadrapad, mid-August): A day on which ghee must be eaten, and a lump of it is pressed onto the heads of children. It falls when the crop is standing and the milk is at its best, and it was also the day craftsmen and tenants brought gifts to their patrons — which is what olgia means.
- **Khatarua** (The first day of Ashwin, mid-September): Bonfires of pine and cucumber vine lit at dusk at the turn into autumn, with children carrying burning torches. Explanations for it vary and none is settled; the fire and the date are what everyone agrees on.
- **Hilljatra** (Bhadrapad, after the transplanting): The masked agricultural pageant of the Soar and Kumaur villages of Pithoragarh — ploughmen, a pair of oxen, and the Lakhiya Bhoot in a horned mask. It came from the far-western Nepali hills and is performed on both sides of the Kali.
- **Syalde Bikhauti at Dwarahat** (Baisakh, mid-April): A spring fair at Dwarahat in which participants from surrounding villages strike a stone in the town in a prescribed manner, followed by processions and a market. The ritual is old and the explanations offered for it disagree with each other.
- **Jauljibi and Thal fairs** (November (Jauljibi) and Baisakh (Thal)): Trade fairs at the river confluences of Pithoragarh, drawing hill farmers, Bhotiya traders and merchants from across the Kali. They were the exchange points where high-valley wool and salt met plains cloth and grain, and they continue as fairs long after the goods stopped coming over the passes.

## People

- **Nain Singh Rawat** (1830–1882) — Explorer and surveyor: From Milam in the Johar valley. Trained by the Survey of India to survey clandestinely in Tibet, he walked routes in the disguise of a trader, counting a fixed pace on a rosary of one hundred beads and hiding notes in a prayer wheel, and fixed the position of Lhasa and the course of the Tsangpo. He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal in 1877. His cousin Kishen Singh worked the same way over even longer routes.
- **Badri Datt Pandey** (1882–1965) — Journalist and political leader: Led the campaign against coolie-begar, the forced portering demanded of hill villagers, which culminated at the Bageshwar Uttarayani fair in January 1921. He also wrote Kumaun ka Itihas, still the standard local history, and was known as Kumaon Kesari.
- **Govind Ballabh Pant** (1887–1961) — Politics: From an Almora district family. Premier and then Chief Minister of the United Provinces and Uttar Pradesh and later Union Home Minister, he was among the principal advocates of state reorganisation on linguistic lines. Awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1957.
- **Sumitranandan Pant** (1900–1977) — Poet: Born at Kausani. A central figure of the Chhayavaad movement in Hindi poetry, whose landscape imagery is drawn directly from this ridge. Received the Jnanpith Award in 1968.
- **Jim Corbett** (1875–1955) — Hunter, naturalist and writer: Born in Nainital and raised at Kaladhungi in the bhabar. He shot a series of man-eating tigers and leopards across Kumaon and Garhwal, then argued for protection and photography instead, and India's first national park was later named after him. His books are also an unusually close record of hill village life.
- **Uday Shankar** (1900–1977) — Dance: Established his India Culture Centre at Almora between 1938 and 1942, bringing classical, folk and modern teachers together on one campus. Zohra Sehgal, Guru Dutt and Shanti Bardhan were among those who passed through it, and its influence on Indian stage dance far outlasted its four years.
- **Mohan Upreti** (1928–1997) — Composer and theatre director: Arranged Kumaoni folk material for the stage and, with Brijendra Lal Sah, built the Parvatiya Kala Kendra. His setting of Bedu Pako Baro Masa turned a courtship song into the region's anthem, and his production of Rajula Malushahi put the Kumaoni epic in front of national audiences.
- **Girish Tiwari 'Girda'** (1945–2010) — Poet, singer and activist: The voice of the Uttarakhand statehood movement and of every forest, dam and liquor agitation before it. He wrote in Kumaoni and Hindi, sang his poems rather than reciting them, and functioned as the movement's public conscience for four decades.
- **Shekhar Pathak** (b. 1950) — Historian: Historian of Uttarakhand and of the Chipko movement, founder of the journal and collective PAHAR, and initiator of the Askot–Arakot Abhiyan, a long transect walk across the hills repeated at ten-year intervals since 1974 to record what has changed.
- **Shivani (Gaura Pant)** (1923–2003) — Novelist: Wrote a large body of Hindi fiction rooted in Kumaoni domestic life, with women's interior lives and hill households at its centre. Her work carried Kumaoni idiom into mainstream Hindi readership.
- **Mahadevi Verma** (1907–1987) — Poet and essayist: Not from the region, but she built a house at Ramgarh in the Kumaon hills and wrote there for decades. Her essays on hill women and village life are among the sharper outside accounts of the society she settled in.
- **The Johar valley's expedition porters and guides** — Mountaineering: The Johar and Darma valleys supplied the load-carriers, guides and high-altitude workers for a century of Himalayan expeditions, from the early Nanda Devi attempts onward. Individual names appear in expedition accounts more often than on title pages, which is itself part of the record.

## Freedom fighters

## Shops and premises

- **Khim Singh Mohan Singh Rautela**, Almora (Lala Bazar): Bal mithai and singori One of the two names most often given when you ask in Almora who makes the original bal mithai, and one of the reasons the Lala Bazar lane smells of caramelising khoya all day.
- **Joga Lal Shah**, Almora (Lala Bazar): Bal mithai, singori and chocolate The other name people give. The disagreement about which is better is a settled local pastime.
- **Panchachuli Women Weavers**, Munsiyari: Hand-spun and hand-woven wool — shawls, blankets and rugs from high-valley flocks A women's weaving enterprise built on the Johar valley's wool tradition after the trade that supported it ended. Worth visiting for the workshop rather than only the shop.
- **The Tamta copper workshops**, Almora: Beaten copper gagar water pots, cooking vessels, lamps and temple bells Buy from the workshops rather than the display shops if you want to see the hammering. Cooking copper is tinned inside; ritual copper is not.
- **Sakley's**, Nainital (Mall Road): Old-fashioned bakery, pastry and confectionery A survivor from the hill-station era, and a useful marker of what Nainital's shopping street used to be.
- **Bageshwar Uttarayani fair stalls**, Bageshwar, since 1921: Copper, ringaal, wool, iron tools and hill produce, once a year in January The date given is not the fair's founding — it is far older — but the year it became a political event, when the coolie-begar registers went into the Saryu.
- **Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam counters**, Nainital, Almora, Munsiyari, Pithoragarh: Rest houses, permits and route information for the inner valleys The practical first stop for Darma, Byans and the Adi Kailash route, all of which need permits and none of which should be attempted on a casual plan.

## How to reach

**By air:** Pantnagar Airport (PGH); Naini Saini Airport, Pithoragarh

**By rail:** Kathgodam (KGM); Haldwani; Ramnagar (RMR); Tanakpur (TPU)

**By road:** The Haldwani–Bhowali–Almora road, the main artery of the middle hills, Almora onward to Bageshwar, Chaukori and Munsiyari for the Johar country, The Tanakpur–Champawat–Pithoragarh road, the approach to Dharchula and the Kailash Mansarovar route, Kathgodam–Bhimtal–Mukteshwar, and Haldwani–Ranikhet via Kosi, Ramnagar for Corbett, along the bhabar edge

**By water:** No navigable water. Boats on Naini, Bhimtal and Sattal lakes, and footbridges across the Kali and Gori gorges

**Getting around:** Shared taxis and buses run from fixed stands at Haldwani and Kathgodam, largely through the long-established Kumaon Motor Owners Union network, and leave when full. Distances are short and journeys are slow — Kathgodam to Munsiyari is about 275 km and a full day. The inner valleys beyond Dharchula need permits, and roads there close for landslides for days at a time between July and September.

## The small things

### A god who takes written petitions
At Golu Devta's shrines at Chitai and Ghorakhal, petitioners write out their case on judicial stamped paper — the same paper used for an affidavit — and tie it to the shrine, where it hangs among tens of thousands of others. Those whose matter is settled return and hang a brass bell. The shrines are curtained in paper and metal, and the language people use about them is procedural rather than devotional.

### The men who mapped Tibet by counting steps
The Survey of India could not send British surveyors into Tibet, so it trained Johar valley Shaukas who already had the passes, the language and the trading cover. Nain Singh Rawat walked with a fixed pace, counting on a rosary shortened to a hundred beads, carrying a thermometer to measure altitude by boiling point and notes rolled inside a prayer wheel. He fixed the position of Lhasa and traced the Tsangpo, and received the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal in 1877.

### A lost nuclear device on the region's highest mountain
In 1965 a joint American and Indian expedition carried a plutonium-powered listening device up Nanda Devi to monitor Chinese missile tests and abandoned it near the summit ridge in a storm. It was never recovered. The sanctuary around the mountain has been closed to visitors since the early 1980s for ecological reasons, and the device is the subject of a recurring and unresolved public argument about the headwaters below it.

### A ritual battle with an accounting rule
The Bagwal at Devidhura is fought between four inherited khams behind cane shields, and it does not end at a time or a score — it ends when the officiating priest judges that blood equivalent to one human life has been shed across all the participants. The stones were replaced with fruit and flowers by administrative order in recent years, which changed the projectile and left the accounting intact.

### Aipan is drawn with the fingers and washed off
A red ochre wash goes down first, then the design is drawn freehand in white rice paste with the last three fingers — no brush, no stencil, no pattern book. Every design belongs to a specific occasion and a specific surface, and none of it is meant to last. The impermanence is why it survived as a living practice while permanent decorative arts in the same houses did not.

### The fig nobody eats
The region's best-known song turns on horticulture. Bedu, the wild Himalayan fig, fruits through all twelve months and is left on the tree; kafal, the box myrtle, ripens for a few weeks in spring, bruises within hours, cannot be shipped and is therefore the thing everybody wants. What is always available is not what is valued — a proverb about desire that is also an accurate statement about hill fruit.

### A bird that calls for a few weeks a year
The kafal season brings a bird whose call is heard locally as "kafal pako, main na chakho" — the kafal has ripened and I did not taste it. The tale attached to it, of a girl beaten over fruit that had only swelled overnight in the dew, is told across the hills, and children are told to listen for the bird in exactly the weeks the fruit is on.

### A trade fair that abolished forced labour
The Uttarayani fair at Bageshwar was the great annual exchange between the high valleys and the plains. In January 1921 it became something else — a mass meeting at which villagers publicly renounced coolie-begar, the unpaid portering demanded of them by touring officials, and threw the registers into the Saryu. The system did not survive it.

### A hundred temples instead of one
Jageshwar's builders put up more than a hundred small shrines in one grove over several centuries rather than enlarging a single temple. The result is a site that reads as a stone forest inside a deodar forest, and a stand of very old deodar that survived the timber trade only because the grove was temple property.

### The drummer who sets the pace of the harvest
In hurkiya baul the drummer stands in the flooded paddy field singing a heroic ballad while the transplanting crew answers the refrain and plants to his beat. He is paid from the crop. The song is a labour technology — it synchronises a line of people bending in mud, and the ballad's length measures the field.

### Two words that describe the whole landscape
Kumaoni divides land into talaun, the irrigated flat by the water, and upraun, the rain-fed terrace above it, and locates everything by dhar and gaad, ridge and stream. Land value, crop, caste geography and half the place names in the region follow from those four words, and a conversation about a village can be conducted entirely in them.

### A language that lost its valley
Rangkas, the Tibeto-Burman language of the Johar valley, is no longer spoken. Its community prospered in the Tibet trade, took to Kumaoni and to English education earlier and more thoroughly than its neighbours, and shifted language within a few generations. Darmiya, Byangsi and Chaudangsi in the neighbouring valleys are still spoken — the difference is not distance but how completely each valley's economy turned.

## Cross-border corridors

### Bhotiya Trans-Himalayan Trade Corridor (crosses an international border)
Spans: Uttarakhand, Tibet Autonomous Region, Nepal

Grain, jaggery, cloth, sugar and metal goods carried north over the Unta Dhura, Lipulekh and Darma passes from Johar, Darma, Byans and Chaudans; rock salt, borax, raw wool, pashmina, livestock and Tibetan turquoise carried south to the Jauljibi, Thal and Bageshwar fairs. Goods moved on sheep and goats in paired bags, and the trade ran on inherited partnerships between named families on either side of the passes rather than on contracts.

Divergence: The traffic effectively ended in the early 1960s when the border closed, and it ended within a season rather than a decade. The Shauka and Rung communities on this side were classed as Scheduled Tribes and moved into farming, weaving, government service, education and the army, with a remarkable concentration of civil servants emerging from Johar in particular. Their Tibeto-Burman languages lost their working domain and one of them, Rangkas, is gone. On the Tibetan side the same routes were absorbed into an entirely different state.

### Central Pahari Speech Continuum (crosses an international border)
Spans: Uttarakhand, Nepal

Kumaoni, Garhwali and the Doteli of far-western Nepal form a chain in which every village understands the next and the ends do not understand each other. The jagar, the hurka, the terracing vocabulary, the pisyun loon and the deity-possession complex are continuous across the whole span.

Divergence: Kumaoni and Garhwali are separated by a watershed, not a frontier, and differ mainly in phonology, in the names of the same dishes and in temple idiom. Across the Kali the difference is institutional rather than linguistic — Doteli is written, taught and counted in Nepal, while Kumaoni has no official status, no medium of instruction and a census figure most linguists regard as an undercount.

### Kali River Corridor (crosses an international border)
Spans: Uttarakhand, Nepal

A river that joins rather than divides. Dharchula and its counterpart across the water function as one market town; the Jauljibi fair each November draws traders from both banks; Hilljatra came into Pithoragarh from the Sorar country on the far side and is danced on both; and marriage, labour migration and pilgrimage traffic have crossed at the same footbridges for centuries.

Divergence: The Indian bank has a road, a permit regime and a border force; the Nepali bank has neither the road nor the checkpoints. The same families therefore live under two administrative logics, and the practical result is that the fair and the footbridge do the work the border posts do not.

### Nanda Devi Corridor
Spans: Uttarakhand

One goddess held in common by two speech regions that agree on very little else. Nanda was the tutelary deity of the Chand rulers and has her great melas at Almora and Nainital; she is equally the goddess of the Garhwal side, whose Raj Jat carries her from Nauti to Homkund under the mountain that bears her name. Song, procession form and the banana-stem image tradition move across the watershed with her.

Divergence: Kumaon's observance is an annual urban mela with fresh images made and immersed; Garhwal's is a rare, enormous, long-interval walking pilgrimage. The same goddess is honoured by a town fair on one side of the ridge and by a two-hundred-kilometre procession on the other.

### Terai and Bhabar Descent Corridor
Spans: Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh

The seasonal and then permanent movement of hill households down to the bhabar and terai — winter grazing, then winter residence, then migration outright once malaria was controlled in the 1950s and 60s. Kumaoni speech, aipan, Harela and the whole festival calendar are now practised in Haldwani, Rudrapur and Ramnagar as much as on the ridges above.

Divergence: In the hills these practices sit in the landscape that produced them; in the terai they are performed by a population living beside Punjabi settler farmers, Bengali refugees resettled after Partition and Tharu and Buksa communities who were there first. The result is a Kumaoni culture with a plains address, and a generation whose Kumaoni is spoken at home and nowhere else.

### Katyuri Temple Idiom
Spans: Uttarakhand

A single architectural grammar — small stone shrines with a curved shikhara and an amalaka finial, built in clusters, with sculpted river goddesses on the door jambs — running from Jageshwar and Baijnath through Katarmal and Bageshwar and continuing west across the watershed to the Adi Badri group in Garhwal.

Divergence: Kumaon has the denser and better-preserved concentration, because its temple sites sat in inhabited valleys and stayed in continuous use; Garhwal's equivalents are fewer and its later religious building energy went into the high pilgrimage shrines instead. The same masons' vocabulary, two different histories of patronage.

## Sources

- [Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board](https://uttarakhandtourism.gov.in/)
- [Archaeological Survey of India — Dehradun Circle](https://asi.nic.in/)
- [Census of India 2011 — language tables](https://censusindia.gov.in/)
- [Geographical Indications Registry, India — registered GI list](https://ipindia.gov.in/registered-gls.htm)
- [Sangeet Natak Akademi — documentation of Himalayan performing traditions](https://sangeetnatak.gov.in/)
- [Uttarakhand Forest Department](https://forest.uk.gov.in/)
- [Corbett Tiger Reserve, official site](https://www.corbettnationalpark.in/)
- [Survey of India](https://www.surveyofindia.gov.in/)
- [PAHAR — People's Association for Himalaya Area Research, Nainital](https://pahar.in/)

_Last reviewed 2026-08-30._