Nostalgia: Trekking up Memory Lane with Gaddi Shepherds
By, Vasant Saberwal
25 years ago I was sitting in the office of a senior forest official in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, talking about my desire to undertake PhD fieldwork amongst the Gaddi shepherds. I forget the officer’s name, but he was quite clear that I needed to find my way to Bara Bangahal. It is the gadh of Himachali pastoralism, I was told.
A two-day walk up the Ravi River in 1992 brought me on my first visit to Bara Bangahal. It was, and remains, a pastoralist gadh. Not because of the number of animals owned by Bara Bangahalis, but because the village ends up being the point from which herders from the rest of Kangra access the endless valleys and meadows in these headwaters of the Ravi. I spent two years, in and out of this iconic village, trying to understand the drivers of Himachali shepherding.
Trekking buddies from college were part of many of those trips, sometimes along for the trek, at others helping with fieldwork. In September of 2017, we were returning to Bara Bangahal, entering the valley via the Kalihani Pass, and expecting to exit it via the Thamsar Pass. We experienced all the usual highs and lows of 50-year olds trekking in the high Himalayan ranges — creaking knees, backs out of whack, incessant, cold rain, a brilliant sunset over snow peaks, seemingly endless climbs, mind-numbing descents. And then, five days into our trek, we turned a corner, and spread out below us, across the Ravi, in the shadows of the evening sun, and seemingly unchanged, was the village that defined so much of what I ended up doing in life.
Bara Bangahal is at once familiar and distant, both intimate and remote. After five days in Bara Bangahal, on my first visit, I finally took a bath in a courtyard surrounded by overlooking balconies, many with casual onlookers. I got used to soaping my behind in public. I spent a week with the worst loosies of my life, wondering how I would climb the 7000 feet to cross the Thamsar Pass, given I could barely make it to the woods for yet another round of watery crap. Nightfall with Mahajan, at a high camp, surrounded by his sheep, other herder camps across the valley marked only by their fires, like twinkling stars that had somehow fallen to earth, and Mahajan extolling the virtues of Curtley Ambrose as the best exponent of swing bowling in the world. A magical world entwined with the utterly mundane.
What would it be like to return after these many years? We descended to the river and crossed the bridge, turning left to head for the forest rest house we hoped to camp next to. It all looked so familiar, wooden houses with large courtyards tiled with slate, used to thresh the wheat or sun the rajma. Not a single house with either cement or steel girders, a straight-forward consequence of the exorbitant costs of transporting building materials — any materials — into this isolated village.
A woman was sweeping the courtyard. I didn’t recognize her. We turned down a small alleyway between houses and looked up to see five men sitting on a balcony. They were familiar but I couldn’t recall their names. We met a few herders whose names we knew — Mahajan was still there, rotund as ever. I had heard many years ago that Jeet Ram had died. Ritchu had shifted to the road head, Bir, and it turned out that there were many families that came up to the village only sporadically, on work or to attend a social function. Fewer families actually lived in Bara Bangahal.
Pawna had been a ten-year-old girl in 1992. She is now an activist fighting for herder rights to pastures that have been declared a part of a Wildlife Sanctuary.
As part of the documentation for a claim submitted under the Forest Rights Act, Pawna found there were only 22 families still herding. I hope to find my notes that will tell me how many Bangahali families were herding two decades ago, but presume there were many more at the time.
To herd or not to herd? That is a question that dogs (sorry) pastoralism all over the country. For the most part, pastoralism is remunerative. Goat and sheep prices are through the roof and where pastoralists have access to cold chains, as in parts of Kutch, they receive excellent prices for milk. But pastoralism entails long hours away from home, and often hostile receptions from communities they encounter on the move. On the climb up to Thamsar, we chatted with a Gaddi: “My neighbour gets home from the office at 5, his lady (wife) gives him a cup of tea and then the two of them sit and watch television for the rest of the evening. I spend eight months on the move, with no downtime, no family and certainly no television. But I do earn a decent income and not all of us have government jobs.”
Pastoralism is very unlike agriculture in that it is both lucrative and holds the potential for upward mobility. A herder who starts out with 50 animals can grow his herd to 100, maybe 120, over the course of 3 years. And that will earn him 30–40,000 a year. A bigha of agricultural land, by contrast, remains a bigha with nowhere near the earning potential. But herders all over the country today face challenges relating to access to forage, routine theft of animals from mobile rustlers, confrontations with communities competing for scarce forage, an indifferent bureaucracy and a younger generation’s aspirations that include spending an evening at home, watching television.
Are there ways by which pastoralism can be made more attractive? Failure to do so will almost certainly accelerate current disenchantment. And that would be a pity. Pastoralists across the country lend colour to our landscape, but far more important, they are productive members of society with few obvious alternatives in the jobless urbanization India is experiencing. In the end, herders will make their own choices, but will herders have real options to choose from, including the tough life of a nomadic pastoralist, or will their choices end up reflecting social norms that no longer see mobility as an acceptable mode of living?
Vasant Saberwal is an avid trekker, baker, and the Director of Centre for Pastoralism.
