Arts and artisanal heritage

ChamRitual

Masked dance performed in the monastery courtyard in heavy brocade robes and carved or moulded masks — the wrathful protectors, the skeleton lords of the charnel ground, the black-hat dancers, the stag and the bull. It is liturgy, not spectacle: the sequence enacts the subduing of obstructive forces and ends with the destruction of an effigy. The dancers are monks under vow, the steps are prescribed in manuals, and the audience's participation is to watch, which is itself understood to confer merit.

Performed by: Monks of the monastery holding the festival. Occasion: The monastery's annual festival, on fixed days of the Tibetan calendar

JabroFolk

A nomad line dance from the Rupshu and Kharnak grazing grounds, danced in a linked row with a stamping step to a sung text and to the damnyan lute. Its rhythms are slower and heavier than the Indus valley forms, which is generally read as a difference between a dance done in boots on frozen ground and one done in a courtyard.

Performed by: The Changpa of the Changthang. Occasion: Losar, weddings, gatherings in camp

ShondolFolk

The Ladakhi royal dance, performed in full perak and sulma in slow circling formation to daman and surna. It survived the end of the monarchy by becoming a civic performance, and mass versions with hundreds of dancers are now staged at Leh.

Performed by: Women, in a large group. Occasion: Formerly performed for the king; now at public and state occasions

SpaoMartial

The hero or warrior dance, performed with sword and shield in a heavy stepped rhythm to daman and surna, with sung verses recalling campaigns. It preserves the vocabulary of a mounted and armed society that ceased to exist in the nineteenth century.

Performed by: Men. Occasion: Festivals and formerly military assemblies

Chabs-skyan tsesRitual

The dance of serving chhang, performed while carrying the pot and ladling — an etiquette turned into choreography, in which the order of service and the depth of the bow encode the seating order of the room.

Performed by: Women serving at a feast. Occasion: Weddings and formal gatherings

Mentok StanmoFolk

A dance associated with the flowering of the high pastures, performed in village grounds with sung exchanges between groups. It marks the point in the year when the herds move up.

Performed by: Villagers, particularly women. Occasion: The flower festival, at the turn of the season

The monastic orchestra

Not melody but ritual acoustics: the dung-chen, telescopic copper horns three to four metres long that produce a single low fundamental; the gyaling shawms that carry the melodic line; rolmo and silnyen cymbals that mark the structure; nga drums struck with a curved stick; conch, thighbone trumpet and hand bell. The ensemble accompanies Cham and the daily liturgy, and the parts are learnt from notation books held in the monastery.

Lha-nga

The sacred drum music played at village shrine observances and at the arrival of a lama or a procession — a slow, weighty pattern on a large frame drum whose function is to mark an occasion as consecrated rather than social.

Daman and surna

A pair of kettledrums and a double-reed shawm, played by hereditary musician communities — Mon and Beda — who are engaged for weddings, harvest, archery contests, the arrival of guests and the royal dances. The same instrument pair runs across the western Himalaya and into Central Asia and Persia; here it is the sound of a public occasion beginning.

Zhung-lu and the Ladakhi song repertoire

The formal song forms of the old court and the village — long-breathed, slow, sung solo or in alternating groups, with texts covering praise, marriage, harvest, the mountains and the passes. Much of the surviving repertoire was collected and broadcast in the twentieth century by radio in Leh, which is the reason it was written down at all.

Kesar recitation

The Ling Kesar epic, sung and narrated in long instalments over several nights by a bard, with the audience in a house rather than a hall. The Ladakhi versions differ from the Tibetan ones in incident and in place-names, having been localised onto Ladakhi geography.

The Cham cycle as ritual drama

Each monastery's festival is a fixed dramatic sequence with a cast, a plot and a resolution — the black hats, the protectors, the comic acharya figures who work the crowd between serious sections, and the final dismembering of a dough effigy standing for obstruction. The comic interludes are what keeps a six-hour liturgy watchable, and they are licensed to be crude.

The oracle traditions

At Matho, two monks are selected to be possessed by the monastery's protectors and, after months of preparation, appear at the Nagrang festival to perform feats and answer questions put by villagers. Village oracles, lhaba and lhamo, operate outside the monasteries as well and are consulted about illness, water and disputes. It is the region's oldest performance form and predates the Buddhist institutional layer over it.

Thangka painting GI-worthy Leh and the monastic centres

Painting as measurement: the grid fixes the proportions of each deity so that a thangka is correct before it is beautiful, and a painter's training is largely the memorisation of those proportions. The pigments are ground minerals — azurite, malachite, cinnabar, orpiment — which is why the colours in eleventh-century murals have not shifted.

Material: Cotton cloth sized with chalk and animal glue, mineral and earth pigments, gold. Technique: The cloth is stretched and sized, the figure laid out on a strict iconometric grid of proportional units, painted in flat mineral colour, then shaded and outlined, and finally mounted in a brocade surround with a covering veil.

Mural painting in the early temples Alchi, Mangyu, Sumda, Lamayuru

The murals at Alchi and its sister temples belong to an eleventh- and twelfth-century Kashmiri idiom — the dress, the jewellery, the faces and the architectural details in the paintings are those of the Kashmir valley of that period. They survive here because the buildings went out of ritual fashion and were never repainted, so Ladakh preserves the best evidence anywhere of a Kashmiri painting tradition that has not survived in Kashmir.

Material: Earth plaster, mineral pigment. Technique: Painting on dry plaster over a willow-and-mud armature, on interiors that get no direct sun.

Metal work of Chiling GI-worthy Chiling, on the Zanskar river

One village supplies a whole region's metalwork. Its families trace descent from Newar craftsmen brought from Nepal in the seventeenth century to cast the great copper-gilt Buddha at Shey, who then stayed — which is why a Ladakhi teapot carries details of form that belong to the Kathmandu valley.

Material: Copper, brass, silver. Technique: Raising and chasing sheet metal, casting, and silver inlay, worked to make ritual vessels, teapots, churns, chorten finials and jewellery.

Wood carving GI-worthy Leh, Sham, Zanskar

Constrained entirely by supply: nothing large grows here, so willow and poplar do structure, apricot does small close-grained carving, and any timber of size is either very old or was carried in. The chogtse — a low table that folds flat — exists because a household that may move, or that heats one room, does not keep furniture standing.

Material: Apricot, willow, poplar; imported deodar for large work. Technique: Low-relief and pierced carving of the chogtse folding table, door frames, window surrounds and monastery pillars and capitals, painted in mineral colour.

Pottery Likir and a handful of other villages

A shrinking craft, undercut by aluminium and steel vessels brought in by road; a few families continue, largely for ritual and chhang-brewing vessels that metal does not replace well.

Material: Local clay. Technique: Wheel-thrown and hand-built cooking pots, chhang jars and lamps, fired in simple ground kilns.

Thigma tie-dye GI-worthy Leh and the Indus valley

The region's only surface-pattern textile technique — Ladakh weaves plain and patterns afterwards, because a narrow strip loom does not lend itself to figured weaving.

Material: Nambu, natural dyes. Technique: Point-tying with thread before dyeing, in repeated bindings for multiple colours.

Pashm combing and hand-spinning GI-worthy Changthang and the villages that buy from it

A pastoral skill rather than a workshop craft, done by the herding household in the weeks when the goats shed. Efforts to build dehairing and spinning capacity inside Ladakh, so that more of the value stays with the herd, are recent and still small.

Material: Changthangi goat undercoat. Technique: Spring combing with a toothed iron comb, hand separation of guard hair, and spinning on a hand spindle or a small wheel.

Mani stone carving Throughout, on every approach road and village edge

Walls of carved stones, sometimes hundreds of metres long, built up over centuries as individual commissions — a passer-by pays a carver for a stone and adds it. They are walked past clockwise, which is why a mani wall in the middle of a road has traffic passing on one side only.

Material: River boulders and slabs. Technique: Chiselled relief lettering and figures, sometimes pigmented.

Wood-block printing of texts and prayer flags Monastic printing houses

The technology that kept the monastic libraries stocked. The same workshops print the five-coloured prayer flags, whose colours stand for the elements and which are strung to be worn out by the wind rather than maintained.

Material: Carved wooden blocks, cotton cloth, hand-made paper. Technique: A block cut in mirror image for each folio or flag, inked and pressed by hand.

Ladakhi apricot GI registered Nubra, Sham, the lower Indus and Kargil's Suru valley

The raktsey karpo cultivar — the name refers to its white seed — carries a geographical indication, the first granted for a Ladakhi product. It is selected for a sweet, edible kernel, so a single tree yields dried fruit, an eating nut and an oil, which is a great deal to ask of the only fruit tree that reliably crops at this altitude.

Material: Prunus armeniaca, local cultivars including the white-seeded raktsey karpo. Technique: Roof drying of whole fruit without sulphur, and hand cracking of stones for the sweet kernel and for pressed oil.