Photo: Tim Malyon.

International SQUALL

Travellers In Another Place: The Himalayas

The Nomads of Ladakh live a hard life on the vast expanses of the Changthang plateau. The Chinese invasion and western tourism have both taken their toll. Words and pictures by Tim Malyon

Squall 12, Spring 1996, pp. 49-50.

One of the harshest places to live on this planet is the Changtang plateau - fifteen to sixteen thousand feet high, the same as Mont Blanc, vast expanses of flatland interrupted only by lakes and snow mountains. Wild asses, yak, sheep and goats graze the meagre grass.

Rare birds like the Black Neck Crane lay their eggs in Summer around lakes like Tso Kar, ‘The White Lake,’ so-called because of its salinity. Much of the plateau lies in the shadow of the Greater Himalaya range whose sharp white outline is visible on a clear day far to the south. To the North are more mountains, then the Taklaman and Gobi deserts. Rain and snowfall is relatively low. But the Changtang is cold, and huge winds howl uninterrupted across its emptiness. During long winters - the big freeze starts in September and continues through to May - the temperature regularly drops to minus 40C.

Aside from a few small villages, often surrounding an old Buddhist monastery, the people are nomads living in drafty, black yak hair tents. They burn dried dung for cooking - yak dung is said to be the best - there are no trees. Tibetans or of Tibetan culture, they are entirely dependent on their animals - yak, sheep, goats and horses. Powerful Tibetan mastiffs guard the flocks at night from wolf packs and snow leopards.

This way of life, nomadic pastoralism, is the only sustainable existence on the Changtang. Crops don’t grow because the season is too short and the soil too meagre to support cultivation. Camps consisting of several families are moved and satellite camps established so pasture land is not exhausted. Animals, wool, dairy products including yak butter, and salt are traded in Summer for peas and barley, grown in villages perched on the edge of the plateau.

Tashi Lhamo is 44, a refugee Tibetan nomad. In 1959, the same year as the Dalai Lama, she fled Tibet with her family - the Changtang Plateau straddles the border between India and Chinese occupied Tibet. The western, Indian part of Changtang is occupied by Ladakhi nomads, Tibetan by culture, politically Indian. The introduction of a commune system by the Chinese, so nomads no longer controlled their own flocks, as well as suppression of religion, forced abortions and forced ‘ contraception’ (for contraception read sterilisation) caused many Tibetan nomads to flee their native land. They took their chances on the Indian, Ladakhi edge of the plateau, as well as going south. Many died.

“Tibet has big pastures, so there was no difficulty with grazing,” Tashi Lhamo told me. “But on the Indian Changtang there is a problem, because too many people came from Tibet.” The animal population almost doubled, putting severe strain on the ecology of the area.

There’s another problem with the western, Indian Changtang plateau. Snowfall there is more than east of the border. When the snow comes and blocks the high passes, many camps are utterly isolated. In 1990 Tashi Lhamo’s husband died of lung disease. And her infant daughter, Tsering Choedon, rolled into the fire, badly burning one side of her face. No medical help was available.

Too much snow also starves animals no longer able to graze the meagre grass buried beneath. In 1992 Tashi Lhamo lost her last pony. Unable to transport her heavy yak hair tent any longer, she traded it for a lightweight, cold, canvas tent. Then in the winter of 19931994 she lost sixty sheep and goats from her herd of one hundred, barely on the edge of subsistence. The nomad community with which she lived usually moves four times during the prolonged winter period to find new pastures. With only forty sheep and goats she could no longer sustain herself. So, in October 1994, Tashi finally realised she would not make it through the next winter and moved with her two daughters to the Tibetan refugee camp of Choglamsar, near Leh, the capital of Ladakh. She arrived on 31st October, Halloween.

Her room is still arranged like a nomad tent, woollen saddlebags lining the walls. She refers wistfully to the Tibet she left behind as “the place where many flowers grow”. She wants to return, “when there is independence and the Chinese have gone”. Her son, Dhondul Jigmet’s education was sponsored by an English family. When he heard that his mother had been forced off the Changtang, he had four months left at university before graduating. He wrote an agonised letter to Choglamsar camp. “I really feel I should quit university and come home to look after my family.” He was persuaded not to, graduated, and is now teaching in the Choglamsar Tibetan Children’s Village school.

Changtang’s most precious product is Cashmere wool. The fine, soft, inner goat wool is combed out in June. There are few places in the world, principally the Himalayas and Mongolia, cold enough to produce such wool. Historically the raw ‘pashmina’ from western Changtang nomads was bought by Kashmiri merchants and then processed in Kashmir - dehaired, carded, spun and woven. With the violence in Kashmir, and Ladakh’s increasing political autonomy, the trade has opened up. Now nomads receive a much better price for their wool.

And the military has opened a road across the Indian Changtang, passable between June and October. It’s the world’s second highest motorable road after the nearby ‘highway in the sky’ across the Ladakh Mountains to the Nubra Valley. The Changtang road affords nomads easier trading opportunities.

When Kashmiri merchants came to buy wool, they often bartered other goods at inflated prices to the nomads, for whom a journey to the nearest town was a major undertaking lasting several weeks, or even months. Now the journey to Leh, Ladakh’s capital, once a major staging post on the old ‘ silk route’ to China, is a matter of days.

The road has also opened up the area to western tourists. Tourism - jeep and trekking groups - sometimes brings cash through hire of horses, sale of dairy products, work as guides, cooks, ponymen. (Although such is the greed of the tourist industry that Tibetan and Ladakhi ponymen have often not been paid for months of work.)

During the Summer little tea stalls, often run by Tibetan refugees, spring up along the road, anywhere there’s water. Buses, trucks and jeeps stop. But then tourism and the attractions of a ‘modern’ lifestyle draw some nomads away from their traditional culture, just like education does, especially when it lends no value to traditional beliefs and skills, or teaches nuclear physics not animal husbandry. If too many young people migrate, the culture becomes unviable. If they go away, learn, and return with appropriate skills and value for their own culture, like Tashi Lhamo’s son, then it can grow and develop healthily. Nothing remains the same, even here. Change is the only constant. And change can sometimes be guided.

On the Ladakhi Changtang, appropriate skills often means appropriate technology skills. A project designing appropriate fuel-efficient smokeless stoves for nomads’ tents has involved close collaboration between Tibetan refugee metal workers in Choglamsar Camp, the nomads on the Changtang, and westerners. Cynthia Hunt is the co-ordinator in Ladakh for Appropriate Technology for Tibetans, a London-based charity which funded much of the project.

“We spent a lot of time out in the Changtang, with John Nightingale, who owns a stove refurbishment business back in Devon, and Dorje Namgyal, who is in charge of the metal workshop in Choglamsar refugee camp where we make the stoves. We went from tent to tent, interviewing people and asking them their impressions of the stoves they already used and what needed changing. Then we designed several prototypes and sent them out last winter to the Changtang. People all sent back their monitoring reports. We’ve had to make some slight adjustments to the prototypes, but basically by designing the stove according to their expressed needs, we came up with a model that fitted.”

The stoves have eliminated smoke within the tent, are designed to take the size of cookpots used by nomads, give out great heat for very little fuel, and crucially, are light and strong enough to be carried on a yak’s back. Full-scale production is now under way.

Photo: Tim Malyon.

Lighting also: nomads can no longer afford to burn clarified butter to light their tents - the traditional method. Some nomads buy and transport kerosene to their camps, but it is expensive and smoky. Cheap diesel, purchased from truck drivers on the road is one solution, but in confined tents the smoke from open wick lanterns is suffocating and laden with particulates so it’s hard sometimes to see the other side of the tent. Lung and eye diseases are taking an increasing toll.

Due to its position in the rain shadow of the Greater Himalaya Range and high annual rate of sunshine, Ladakh, especially the Ladakhi Changtang, is an ideal location for solar power. The local electric company is state-run and has invested heavily in appropriate modes of power generation, especially for remote areas. It is just embarking on a programme of supplying solar-powered lighting to the Changtang nomads. Equipment - lights and solar boards - is supplied free of charge. And the company is investing heavily in training so that nomads can repair their own lights.

Everyone who receives a light pays a one-off fee of Rupees 200 (£4) or Rupees 5 (10p) per month to cover payment for the maintenance person. Wangchuk Kalon, from the Social Work and Research Centre, Leh, has been contracted to run the training programme: “Our own gut feeling and experience told us that this scheme would only be workable and sustainable if it is controlled by the community. The person who maintains the lights must be within easy reach, selected by the community and paid by the community, so he or she is under their control.” A special type of solar lantern, less fragile than other solar lights, has been developed for the nomads.

Some change involve promoting ancient skills. Tibetan medicine is an effective amalgamation of Indian Ayurvedic medicine, Chinese medicine, ancient local medical knowledge and indigenous psychiatry, often involving meditation and guidance on lifestyle. It’s widely respected throughout Ladakh. A local development agency, Leh Nutrition Project, with finance from Save the Children, is training young Ladakhis from Changtang and other remote areas in basic Tibetan medicine and preventative care so that the most common ailments can be avoided or treated before they become too serious. Tashi Lhamo’s husband might have lived if he’d received help in time. The aim is to train sufficient health workers so all communities have access to indigenous health care. It’s a sustainable community programme, the brainchild of a local Tibetan doctor, Tsewang Smanla, and developed with local communities who choose a health worker to train from amongst their own.

Once trained, communities support the health worker in whatever way they can, as in the traditional system, where training usually passed down from father to son. Doctors never charged for their services and in return received community help with ploughing and harvesting - an indigenous National Health Service. A similar system operates within the nomadic community where one doctor, or ‘amchi,’ might serve four or five communities. Each community will look after a number of animals, herding them with the rest. They’d be the amchi’s animals, from which he would receive income or produce - wool, various dairy products, meat, skins. Whenever the amchi visited the village, he’d be fed. Whenever he came to the area to collect local medicinal herbs, he’d be fed. In return, medical care for all, free of charge at the point of delivery.

The Changtang nomads live together in families, but also come together in camps as communities. Community is a crucial concept, to them, to the Tibetans in Choglamsar refugee camp, to most Ladakhis, including Jigmet Namgyal, head of the state electric company.

Somehow it’s hard to imagine privatised UK electric companies supplying all travellers in their area with solar lighting and training sufficient numbers to maintain them. But then community coherence has long been crucial for survival within Ladakh, especially the Changtang. People also naturally understand that co-operating with nomads to maintain good health and a sustainable lifestyle is better and cheaper in the long run than them being forced off the land with all the attendant problems of extreme poverty, homelessness and urban ghettoisation. We need to redevelop a similar attitude in so-called ‘developed’ nations, to travellers of all description, and to all cultures which promote co-operative self-help. Because the Changtang nomads are definitely DIY.