We have begun a five day excursion (with driver and car) into the valleys and high mountains east and north of Shimla: the Himalayan Kinnaur region whose eastern edge runs along the Tibet-India border. We hope to visit mountain villages, the unique Hindu-Buddhist-local/folk temples of the region, and walk in the quiet clean air above the tree line.
Our route was once a main corridor for China-Tibetan-Punjabi trade caravans, a passage we will eventually follow up the Sutlej River valley, then higher up the River Baspa (now the site of a many kilometer-long hydro project), then higher still to villages set along the Rupin River in a valley filled with tiered apple orchards and surrounded by soaring sharp-edged, crystalline peaks, the highest of which cradle glaciers or are freshly snow-covered.
We climb from Shimla into deodar forests (‘wood of the gods,’ cedar, although to our eye pine-looking), driving white-knuckled along narrow rocky tracks that are cut, and still being cut, from sheer cliff sides, then descend into valleys filled with apple orchards and fields of cauliflower, tomatoes, carrots, dry rice and cabbage, then rise again through craggy narrow canyons until the mighty Sutlej River looks like a mere stream.
At midday we reach Hatu Peak (3100 metres) and the new Kali Durga temple where craftsmen are bringing to life in wood its gods, goddesses and guardian spirits. By nightfall we enter the village of Sarahan and its Bhimakali temple complex, its many saddle-shaped roof-lines like ocean waves, its sun and moon finials glinting golden from atop the roofs of paired temples towers that rise out of the waves. In the half-light, people are beginning to gather for evening prayers at the Kali shrine high in one tower.
Bhimakali, the local manifestation of the black-faced, blood-thirsty Hindu goddess Kali (Durga) is a powerful goddess indeed, powerful in harm, powerful to vanquish harm – a widely popular and risky goddess. The Sarahan form of Kali has for years been associated with human sacrifice (until the British intervened), including the sacrifice of a human every decade: human blood poured over Kali’s tongue, after which the body was dumped into a deep well inside the temple compound. Today Kali is still appeased with blood, but by putting to the knife a menagerie of birds, buffalo, sheep, goats, chickens and crabs. We read that the spectacle draws large crowds.
This evening we (uncomprehending outsiders) join 30 or so devotees seated in a small crowded space around Kali’s shrine, waiting, chatting; Bhimakali screened from view. Suddenly a sound pandemonium erupts in our midst … a man clangs a large brass bell, another hits a brass disk with a metal stick, another crashes brass cymbals again and again, a fourth blows resonant tones from a conch, and two more blast single notes on long s-curved and finely inscribed brass horns. It feels like an appeal, a beckoning forth. We’re here! We’re here Bhimakali! We’re ready to celebrate! We want to celebrate! We want your presence! Rising anticipation, the eyes of the man standing next to me widen, several seated women stare transfixed at the hidden effigy, a child is hushed, another calls for his father.
Bhimakali herself has been hiding behind a red and gold veil through which flickers, tantalizingly, mysteriously, the flames of candles being arranged by a busy priest, spirits alive and rippling, glimmering along the veil’s folds, like the finest magic show. Then that burst of music, at the height of which the curtain is drawn and people bow and pray, set forth offerings – coconut, cloth, money – until, moments later, the veil is drawn back. So quickly it is all over! The devotees quickly rise and make their exit, chatting excitedly down the stairwell, sounding satisfied. Bhimakali? Who knows. Tucked in for the night? Or marauding through the dark?
In the morning, far below our guesthouse window, uniformed school children are lined up in the school yard in military parade fashion, repeating some verses and singing in unison. They look towards the high concrete wall of their school, faded and stained into colourlessness, but with cautionary texts written in large block letters across its face. DISCIPLINE AND ORDERLINESS BE THE WAY OF LIFE. BETTER BE UN-BORN THAN UN-TAUGHT. BETTER BE UN-TAUGHT THAN ILL-TAUGHT. Later in the day we pass a sign on which “Sangla Valley Convent Schoool” wishes everyone a happy Independence Day, and publicizes itself thus: “We are academically rogreous.”
The road rises from 1900 to 2700 metres to the village of Kamru. We climb to the village’s “Hindu” temple where Buddhist prayer flags flutter and the majority Hindus maintain Buddhist funerary rites – although, I read, beliefs rooted in local spirits likely have more sway here than either Hinduism or Buddhism. We climb higher still to an several-tiered pagoda-style wood tower-fort, weathered, ancient and with more recently carved wooden doors, portals, walls and lintels covered in spirit and guardian figures along with wonderfully attractive, men and woman in naturalistic and folk styles, their sexual bodies fully apparent, humans in harmonious relation with floral and fauna.
I would like to learn more about the people and their lives in this place: the apparent visual ease with the sexual body in this “Hindu” temple, the suggestion of harmony between the human and the natural environment, these new-appearing and apparently sex-affirmative carvings amidst the weathered guardians.
(W. E. Buchanan, travelling this area in 1920, tracing the steps of a British military expedition 100 years before, writes this:
On the 4th September the Sangla fair was held, the deota being brought from the temple on the opposite side of the river to the little green just below the rest-house. The god was decorated with flowers, and, suspended on flexible poles, swayed up and down, while men and women in single file performed a slow movement round him to the accompaniment of drums, cymbals and trumpets.
First about twenty or thirty women in skirts and shawls, with their pigtails under their little circular hats, danced round the deota ; they were followed by about the same number of men in holiday attire, woollen coat and narrow trousers with red cummerbund, each carrying in a chudder on his back a load of blue delphiniums ; lastly came some thirty men and boys carrying poles, each with a bunch of ten or twelve ” lettuce ” flowers tied to it. And every man, woman and child wore the blue delphinium in hat or hair, and continued to wear it for days, until finally it dropped off.
The fair and dance lasted till about six o’clock in the evening, when the god was taken back to his temple across the river, and the villagers dispersed. )
We continue our own climb the Baspa Valley along the narrowest of cliffside roads, mostly rubble or dirt, now high over the river. There is barely a safe width for one vehicle; two must back up, shuffle about, inch along, daring the cliff edge to give away into the river, 1000 or so metres underneath us. By night we reach Rakcham village (3000 metres). Sleet hits the windshield. Our room has loose fitting doors and windows and no heating, Betty writes her journal in fleecy jacket, toque and gloves.
We wake to a rock-strewn landscape, glacier-dredged. The village sits between scree-covered mountain slopes, signs of tremendous monsoon generated rock slides. Nearby, the glacial Baspa River basin seems to flow with stones and boulders of every size. Many village houses still have the old timber-bonded style, white-washed dry stone and rubble masonry alternating with horizontal deodar or spruce beam to withstand earthquakes, all crowned with steep-sloped slate roofs. Other more recent houses look like state-issue: cement bricks and corrugated metal roofs.
The valley slopes are covered in apple orchards, each setting within a stone-walled patchwork of smaller fields and tiers of land that must have been so laboriously cleared of their rocky surface over many generations. We are told that the apple harvest rolls up the valley, with orchards at higher elevations being picked ever later in the fall. Where we are tonight the apples are still on the trees. Lower down they are already in Delhi, the boxes carried by humans, mules and horses up steep tracks to the nearest roadside, then loaded onto large Delhi-bound transports – which likely explains the bruised apples we bought in the big city. (Surprisingly, and apparently because of strictly enforced controls on the picking, boxing and shipment of apples, we can only buy individual “seconds” in these villages. No will sell or even give us any of those fresh delicious-looking apples off the trees!)
In the morning we rise further up the Baspa River valley to its last village, Chitkul at 3500 metres, set along the tree line. From here we walk along cattle and goat paths higher up the valley, only stopping when men in uniform appear at the last India border security post before the Tibet border.
Surprisingly, amidst this stone-strewn landscape, we are surrounding by a world of many colours: the scarlet and cranberry of wild sweet briar, the gold and orange of the willows, birches and hazels, an amber-coloured pasture seeming to flow in a slow s-curve between two mountains, the dark bronze of drying ogla or buckwheat stocks which would flowered pink a few months ago, the forest greens deep below us, the churning glacial blue of the Baspa even further down.
People here are busy gathering the harvest and preparing for winter which could set in any day now. At sunrise men walk towards the lower forests carrying six foot crosscut saws, cutting lengths of heavy firewood logs. High piles of these already begin to line village laneways.
Over the day, women and men in wool jackets, shawls and sweaters, bring home bundles of cut cattle feed and lighter fire wood on their backs, often at great distances and up and down steep tracks. The bundles often dwarf their human frames and make them stoop. A man our age leans his bundle against a stone wall, tucks his hands in his armpits and looks up towards the snowy mountain tops. (What are his thoughts as he looks towards those mountains? I so much wanted to ask him what it is like to live here, what it means to live here, to have this as home, the world.) Most people – many our age – walk at a steady pace that more than matches our own – and we carry very little.
In the woods, more feed has been yoked high in tree branches for winter retrieval above the expected snowfall. Rooftops and the broad stone fences are covered with drying sliced apple, cobs of corn, beans, red barley, wheat and nuts. We are told that villagers will make an apple-apricot brew for the cold winter. A woman grinds barley and wheat on a local, stream-driven grinding wheel. Another sorts dried walnuts for storage. Another is carding black wool, another knits winter wear. A tailor cuts material for wool jackets. Heavy blankets and sheep skins air along wood pole fences.
Cows, buffalo, goats and sheep are being moved closer to the village to be housed beneath the family’s living quarters and in small out-buildings. The air becomes sharply chilled as soon as the sun sinks behind the mountain ridges, now dusted in snow. Smoke curls from the roofs of several village houses. By sunset everyone is wrapped in shawls, wool vests, and thickening layers of pants, blouses and jackets. A few squat around small fires.
Betty tells the manager of our guesthouse that unlike other villages where smiles seem to come easy, people in these parts seem intent on their occupations, seem more worn, tired. He agrees: “They do have a hard life. Yes, people right now are working very hard.” Do they ever have fun together, we ask? What do they do during the winter? “There is time for enjoyment,” he says, “we have celebrations in September and again during the winter. People eat well then, they drink apricot-apple brew, rest, sleep. They know how to enjoy.”
Although the sunny brisk days here are perfect for hiking, we don’t look forward to the cold nights, perhaps zero to five or so degrees. Here we sit, wrapping our hands around steaming glasses of chai, Tom tucking a cold dinner plate under his jacket in the hopeless hope that it might warm just a little before food arrives. We are even thankful for the uncomfortably heavy duvets – and begin to dream of hot Kerala beaches.
We are finding that in this region, Hindu, Buddhist and local traditions of belief commingle into meaningful wholes from village to village, valley to valley. (This, despite the Hindu nationalists’ assertions that such things don’t happen and have never happened.) Carved dragons curl up the corners of temples, their heads peering towards the mountains. Temple doors contain lovely carvings of horn and drum players, women with birds and flowers, tigers, lions, spirit beasts, men, women and loving couples in their natural sexuality, venerated elders, gods and goddesses, brocades of flowers, curling tendrils of vines. Fringes of wooden skittles waver along the temple’s roof eaves, creating a soft muffled clatter, like many voices in quiet, far off conversation.
This is and feels like an ancient place, long inhabited, long a home to the ancestors of those we greet. “Ancient” in the lines and cracks of its weather-scored wood houses, the worn buttery surfaces of its stone steps, its worn and discarded grinding stones, its spirit carvings peering from temple corners towards the village and mountains, its day to day rhythms shaped so thoroughly by the seasons.
At the same time satellite dishes are everywhere. Many houses have a small solar panel perched on a nearby pole. A road sign thanks us for ‘Visiting our modern village’. Everyone it seems can pull out a cellphone from the most hard-worked clothes, chatting with a son in Delhi or an auntie in Brampton. And the apples themselves, plentiful cash in hand, have now tied the village to the larger market economy of cities far away. People are a moment’s distance from the global world and yet able to be so far away.
Curious how (apart from a reminders like the government’s “security checkpoint” on our path to the India-Tibet border and our Indian fare each mealtime) this does not feel like India at all. The land itself is vast, spacious, the elements powerful. Hindi is a second language in these parts. People, we are told, are quite content to carry on their own ways here. It makes us feel the great diversity of India, India as many Indias, the simplicity of the idea of “India” we brought with us.
We move on to the settlement of Kalpa, first down the steep narrow mostly dirt and gravel track to the Sutlej Valley floor, along the valley (given over to a vast, ugly and dusty hydro project, where we pass a large banner with the message WORK IS WORSHIP) then make a sharp nine-kilometre ascent to the busy market town of Rekong Peo, then higher still to the village of Kalpa (3000 metres) with its grand vistas.
Across the valley rise the three towers of the Kinner-Kailash massif – the highest Jorkaden Mountain (6473m) in the centre, the needle pointed Raldang (5500m) to the right, the sacred summit Kinner-Kailash (6050m) to the left, ‘jewel of snows’, the famous Meru, centre and origin of the universe, its crest like Vishnu’s luminous, flamey crown – each peak glowing in sunset rosiness, then crowned in brilliant white in the morning.
Our final evening, before the long drive back to Shimla, we ask the manager of our Apple Pie Guesthouse, half in jest, whether he actually makes apple pie. “I will try,” he offers, to our surprise, not believing him. But then, during breakfast, the same man appears, a broad smile on his face and pie in hand, the semblance of a Western apple pie, a kind of flat wandering turnover with a lacy crust on top … very tasty indeed thank-you, and exactly what we need to begin our white-knuckle journey home.
