BharatSangraha

Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills · Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt

The small things

  • A cuisine engineered around the absence of saltGundruk, sinki and kinema are all made without salt. In a range with no salt pan and a long history of salt arriving over passes at a price, lactic-acid and Bacillus fermentation did the work that brine does elsewhere — which is why the region's sourness is bacterial rather than fruit-based, and why the same techniques appear everywhere along the Himalaya at the same altitudes.
  • Why Darjeeling tea is a China bushThe Assam-type bush that built the plains industry failed at this altitude, so the ridge was planted with China-type Camellia sinensis var. sinensis instead. Cold nights, thin soil and steep drainage slow the plant down, and slow growth concentrates the aromatic compounds. The muscatel character of the second flush is associated with feeding by a tiny leaf-sucking insect, which stresses the bush into producing exactly the compounds the buyer is paying for.
  • The mountain nobody stands onBy convention, climbers stop a few metres short of Kanchenjunga's true summit. The practice dates from the first ascent in 1955, when the climbers halted below the top in deference to an undertaking that the peak's summit would remain untrodden, and most subsequent expeditions have kept to it — a religious protocol that has held for seventy years on an 8,586 m mountain.
  • Villages that are not run by a panchayatLachen and Lachung in north Sikkim govern themselves through the Dzumsa, an assembly under an elected pipon that fixes grazing movements, allocates work and settles disputes. It is one of very few functioning traditional local governments in India that operates in place of the standard panchayat structure rather than alongside it.
  • A script that turned ninety degreesThe Lepcha script derives from Tibetan but was rotated a quarter-turn when writing shifted from vertical to horizontal. The rotation left the eight syllable-final consonants sitting above the letters, so what are ligatures in Tibetan became diacritics in Lepcha — a writing system carrying the physical evidence of its own reorientation.
  • Cheese from an orphanage dairyKalimpong cheese and the Kalimpong lollipop both come from a dairy set up in the 1950s by a Swiss priest to fund a mission orphanage, using imported equipment for gouda and hand-rolled condensed milk for the sweets. The dairy closed in 1990 when his visa lapsed; former employees started their own units, which is why the products outlived the institution.
  • A Tibetan newspaper printed in a hill townFrom 1925 to 1963 the Tibet Mirror was set and printed at Kalimpong and carried up the trade route — for much of that period the only regularly published newspaper in the Tibetan language anywhere, produced in India because Kalimpong was where the caravan road, the printing press and the readership met.
  • Cardamom grown under nitrogenLarge cardamom is planted under Himalayan alder, which fixes nitrogen and returns leaf litter to the slope. The plantation therefore builds soil instead of stripping it, holds a steep hillside against erosion, and produces a cash crop under a canopy — an agroforestry system arrived at long before the word existed.
  • A hard cheese with an export market in dog chewsHard churpi, dried to the density of wood, has been rebranded internationally as a long-lasting dog chew and is now exported from Himalayan dairies in quantity. A herder's pocket ration that stayed edible for years turned out to have a completely unrelated global market.
  • One drink, refilledA tongba is charged once with fermented millet and topped up with hot water several times over an evening, weakening each round. The vessel is the measure, the straw is filtered at its base so the grain stays put, and the social convention is that the host keeps pouring — the drink is designed to be slow.
  • The organic conversionSikkim began phasing out chemical fertiliser and pesticide from 2003, completed the conversion of its farmland in 2015, and was formally declared India's first fully organic state in January 2016. Its policy took the Future Policy Gold Award in 2018, awarded by the World Future Council with FAO and IFOAM. The conversion covered around 76,000 hectares and roughly 66,000 farming families.

Small local details of Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (11)