Monday, September 4, 2000
Journey to Ladakh - Part 10
Conclusion
Rasik Shah
Rasik Shah was born in the Indian diaspora in the colonial apartheid type society of Kenya. Having grown up in a multi-lingual, multi-racial society, he studied law in the London of the early sixties and went back to Kenya, practising as a criminal lawyer. He migrated with his young family to Canada in 1974 and practised law in Vancouver till 1995. He leads trekking tours to the Garwhal region of India and overland jeep safaris to Ladakh years. He writes full time now, leading trekking tours as a hobby. He has published short stories and articles at the following sites:
1. "The Ngong Hills" at www.dorsai.org/~tjhubsc/ngong.htm
2. "At the Dentist's" at www.es.co.nz/~treeves/rasik.htm
3. "The Discreet Charm of Nairobbers" at: www.litnet.mweb.co.za
4. An article on magical realism at: http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu
5. The Display Suite at: http://www.mweb.co.za/litnet
Links to his other travel and trekking articles can be found at:
http://www.sawf.org/rasik
He has written a novel set in Kenya and is now putting together a book on Trekking in the Indian Himalayas.
He plans to lead a trekking group to Gaumukh, the source of the Ganges in September, 2000. (See his articles on the Gangotri-Tapovan trek in the previous issues of Sawf), and a jeep safari to Leh, Ladakh overland from Shimla via Lahaul and Spiti in the summer of 2001.
Please address any queries to him at: rshah132@home.com
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We are in Leh finally, settled in the comfortable Hotel Mandala. We spend the first few days exploring the small city. It is August and the days are bathed in brilliant sunshine, the air at 12,000 feet crisp and refreshing. The evenings and nights get chilly, but we have mountains of blankets to cover us at night, in addition to our sleeping days.
Our party splits into small groups and everyone is free to go where they please. It is a very pleasant town, Leh, and the people are friendly. Everyone smiles and I soon learn to greet people with the greeting "Tashi delaiy!", that I had picked up in Tibet. What is noticeable is the presence of Ladakhi women in all walks of life, wearing the traditional long gowns, proficient, running businesses, helping in the family farm or garden. Fertile land is scarce, and every inch of cultivable land around houses, anywhere in the Indus Valley, is used for growing vegetables, fruits or flowers. These are a hardy people.
I cannot do better than quote extensively from the book "Ancient Futures" by Helena Norburg-Hodge, the Swedish woman who has spent at least sixteen summers in Ladakh. It is a book which I urge anyone interested in modern Ladakh to read. Here is how, Peter Matthiessen (of "the Snow Leopard" fame) introduces the land in his introduction in "Ancient Futures":
"Ladakh, under Karakoram, in the trans-Himalayan region of Kashmir, is a remote region of broad arid valleys set about with peaks that rise to 20,000 feet. It lies in the great rain shadow north of the Himalayan watershed, in a sere land of wind, high desert, and remorseless sun---- Ladakh for the past one thousand years has been an enclave of Tibetan Buddhism---
"---In the very grain of Ladakhi life are the Buddhist teachings, which decry waste, and encourage the efficient husbanding of land and water - a frugality, as Helena Norburg-Hodge points out, that has nothing to do with stinginess (also decried in Buddhist teachings) but arises, rather, from respect and gratitude for the limited resources of the land. Water is drawn carefully from glacial brooks - one stream may be reserved for drinking, the next for washing. Indeed, it is pains-taking attention to each object and each moment that makes possible this self-sustaining culture that nonetheless provides Ladakhis with much leisure time."
Helena Norburg-Hodge operates an Ecology Institute, housed in an elegant building at the northern edge of the town. They have a very good library containing lots of books on the environment and ecology. There is also a shop that sells lots of handicrafts and locally made things.
Soon, the rest of my group had flown back to Delhi and I spent a few weeks on my own in Leh, spending time at the Institute of Ecology every morning, reading up on ecology and books on Monoculture by Vandana Shiva. -----------------I ran into Helena herself at the Institute and arranged further meetings with her. I met Sonam, a young man who was actively involved in developing some self-help schools that would promote Ladakhi-oriented educational programmes. I got myself invited to spend a couple of days at a self-help school building project that was in operation outside Leh, in a rural area.
In Ladakh generally I was very impressed by the women. They were hard-working members of society, confident and capable, good at running businesses, not the least self-conscious, capable of holding their own. This was in marked contrast to the shy, repressed ways of women in the rest of India, and speaks to Ladakhi society's openness, its free and easy going social structure.
Here is a passage from "Ancient Futures":
"One of the first things that struck me on my arrival in Ladakh was the wide, uninhibited smiles of the women, who moved about freely, joking and speaking with men in an open and unselfconscious way. Though young girls may sometimes appear shy, women generally exhibit great self-confidence, strength of character, and dignity. Almost all early travelers to Ladakh commented on the exceptionally strong position of women.
Anthropologists looking from a Western perspective at formal, external structures might get a misleading impression, since men tend to hold the public positions and often sit separately from women at social functions. However, from my experience of several industrial societies, I would say that women in Ladakh actually have a stronger position than in any other culture I know. Once I understood the society more from the inside, as it were, I became aware that the differences in roles did not necessarily mean inequality. I sensed a dynamic balance; it was difficult to say who had more real power, men or women."
And a little further on:
"Most significant of all for the status of women in Ladakh is the fact that the 'informal' sector, with women at the center, plays a much larger role than the 'formal' one. The focus of the economy is the household; almost all important decisions to do with basic needs are settled at this level. So women are never forced to choose between being with their children and playing an active part in social and economic life. As I mentioned earlier, there is little need for communal decision making. Thus the public sphere, in which men tend to be the leaders, has less significance than in the industrialized world."
Talking about women, it was my luck to be at the Ecology Institute one morning when Vandana Shiva turned up, to address a meeting of Ladakhi elders and leaders about the new GATT treaty and its sweeping patenting procedures under which life forms could be patented and under which the big multinationals would patent, for example, traditional medicines by virtues of making a slight alteration such as adding a gene to the source of the medicine such as the neem tree, and force the locals to pay for their own traditional medicine to which they always had free access. I was moved by Vandana Shiva's passion and eloquence and the way she moved the audience. She was here to lobby the people of Ladakh against the Indian Government ratifying the GATT treaty, because it would mean sacrificing the interests of the people to the big money-machines that corporate giants had become. I believe Vandana Shiva did succeed in fighting back the ratification of the GATT treaty by the Indian Parliament.
Here was democracy in action. The reality that Ladakh was an important, participating member of the Indian polity, that its voice would be heeded to in matters that concerned Ladakhis, was reflected in the recent decision to grant Ladakh a lot of internal autonomy by giving it the status of a "hill council". Hitherto Ladakh had been part of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, dominated by an educational agenda, for example, that required the teaching of Urdu as a second language in the schools, not Ladakhi. The English alphabet, for instance, would be taught by reference to names of animals, etc, unknown in Ladakh, such as "E is for Elephant".
The curricula at schools is being changed by the new Ladakhi leaders and a whole series of self-help schools were being built. The two days that I spent in a rural spot helping with the building of a self-help school reminded me of what I had heard about the early kibbutz days in the development of Israel and the co-operative, pioneer, collective spirit of the people. Everybody joined in helping with the cooking, cleaning, washing dishes, etc. The evenings ended with communal dances or singing.
I would like to mention one more name in the context of women involved with modern Ladakh. Cynthia Hall is a modern young woman from Canada. Before visiting Ladakh I had attended some meetings of a society called Friends of Tibet in my town of Vancouver, Canada. Friends of Cynthia Hall asked me top take a package of goodies for Cynthia Hall in Ladakh, were she had been a volunteer worker for a couple of years in a Tibetan Refugee Camp, outside Leh. I had brought the package with me and one fine day I packed it in my daypack and started on the long walk south of Leh, to the Refugee Camp where Cynthia Hall was working. It was a sunny, bright day, with the midday sun beating on my head. I had a good, white cotton hat to protect me. The outskirts of Leh had major arterial roads that led south, full of garages and service stations that catered to the vast numbers of Tata trucks that dotted the landscape. Truly, Ladakh was no more an isolated enclave. The traditional society was under assault, accelerated by the Chinese advances into the area in the early sixties, when the Indian Government was caught napping. The Chinese had already built a road through the Aksai Chin area in north- east Ladakh, cutting off a whole chunk of territory from Ladakh and claiming it as part of China. Since then the Indians have built roads into Ladakh from other parts of India and trade and transportation between Ladakh and other regions have increased dramatically, bringing "development" and "Westernization" into Ladakh.
Anyway, to go back to Cynthia Hall, I was pleased to visit her at her quarters in the Refugee Camp and deliver the packages of gifts to her. She showed me around the new, solar-heated daycare center for babies and young kids. It had helped keep the young ones warm while the parents went to work or other chores, cutting down the mortality rate of young children drastically. Cynthia also showed me the new solar heater that she had procured for the Camp from Canadian charities. I asked how long she would stay in Ladakh. She was to spend five years in Ladakh, including the cold winters when the temperature could drop to forty degrees below zero and the heating available was rudimentary!
Now Ladakh has been one of the few preindustrial, traditional societies in the world that has survived intact until recent times. We all take it for granted that the industrial model of the world, driven by production, consumption and profits is the legitimate one to follow for all the world. Here is Helena Norburg-Hodge:
"Mainstream Western thinkers from Adam Smith to Freud and today's academics tend to universalize what is in fact Western or industrial experience. Explicitly or implicitly, they assume that the traits they describe are a manifestation of human nature, rather than a product of industrial culture. This tendency to generalize from Western experience becomes almost inevitable as Western culture reaches out from Europe and North America to influence all the earth's people.
Every society tends to place itself at the center of the universe and to view other cultures through its own colored lenses. What distinguishes Western culture is that it has grown so widespread and so powerful that it has lost a perspective on itself; there is no "other" with which to compare itself. It is assumed that everyone either is like us or wants to be."
The other cultural fact about Ladakh is that the people have developed a culture of dance and ritual drama over the long winters and one catches glimpses of these developed forms in the summer festival events that are staged every year.
Most Westerners have come to believe that ignorance, disease, and constant drudgery were the lot of preindustrial societies, and the poverty, disease, and starvation we see in the developing world might at first sight seem to substantiate this assumption. The fact is, however, that many, if not most of the problems in the "Third World" today are to a great extent the consequences of colonialism and misguided development.
Over the last decades, diverse cultures from Alaska to Australia have been overrun by the industrial monoculture. Today's conquistadors are "development," advertising, the media, and tourism. Across the world, "Dallas" beams into people's homes and pinstripe suits are de rigueur. This year I have seen almost identical toy shops appear in Ladakh and in a remote mountain region of Spain. They both sell the same blonde, blue-eyed Barbie dolls and Rambos with machine guns."
I was to witness the dichotomy between traditional and "modern" ways dramatically one morning, when walking in the streets of Leh I came across a gross poster in a shop advertising "Godfather" beer with a backdrop of a white woman in bikinis undulating around on a beach.
Anyway, to get away from the schizophrenic city of Leh, Barbara Kapelli, the only other member of our party still remaining in Leh, and myself hired a taxi to take us to Alchi, about a hundred kilometers to the East, on the road to Kargill. We hoped to see the murals in the ancient monastery at Alchi. The road wound through verdant valleys and brown rocky mountains along a river and we were soon in Alchi. Here we were led to the inside of the 1,000 year old monastery and we witnessed some of the most marvelous murals, reminiscent of the art of the Ajanta caves.
Alchi Monastery |
Wheel Of Life - Alchi |
I would like to end this series with a meditation on the Wheel of Life mural at Alchi. In Buddhist cosmology, the world is always in continuous flux, forever changing and impermanent. Life continues taking many phenomenal forms, before reaching enlightenment in a state of Nirvana, a realization that conflict and strife form the surface of all living in samsara, forever marking our worldly existence.
Rasik Shah is leading a trek to the source of the Ganges and Tapovan this year in September. There will also be an overland jeep safari of Ladakh in the summer of 2001, going via Lahaul and Spiti. The Ladakh series will continue. See past issues of Sawf magazine for the articles on the Gangotri and Tapovan trek.
For further details or inquiries please e-mail him at: rshah132@home.com
In India his trek and tour organizer is:
Neelamber Badoni
Trek Himalaya Tours Pvt. Ltd.
The Upper Mall, Jhulaghar
MUSSOORIE (UP) INDIA
Ph. 011-91-0135-630491
Telefax: 011-91-0135-631302
E-mail: trekhimalaya@vsnl.com
Or:
neelubadoni@rediffmail.com
Credits
- Photographs taken by Rasik Shah and Chris Friesen.
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