Kumaon · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya

The small things

A god who takes written petitionsAt 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 stepsThe 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 mountainIn 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 ruleThe 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 offA 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 eatsThe 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 yearThe 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 labourThe 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 oneJageshwar'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 harvestIn 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 landscapeKumaoni 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 valleyRangkas, 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.

Small local details of Kumaon — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)