Intense and intimate
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Decimated by development, the Bhotias have the desire to survive, but who will be their patrons? SUSAN VISVANATHAN reflects after watching a film on the community.
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A Bhotia caravan in a scene from the documentary.
MANJU KAK, well known for her intense and often acerbic short stories, has now produced a short documentary, "They Who Walk the Mountains", with a talented team. Interestingly, it offsets the academic work she has done on "Indo-Tibet Routes as Public Sphere".
The film focuses on the Bhotias and was shown on Uttaranchal Day at the India International Centre Delhi, in January. It raises many questions about the survival of marginalised communities. The film asks how people become bereft of their traditional knowledge and surplus.
Needs
The people ask the State (through conversations with the filmmaker,) for all that they most require: communications, literacy, education, health facilities and commercial opportunities.
Once the Bhotias were significant traders, carrying Chinese porcelain, tea, silk, carpets, shawls, borax and saffron and precious wool across mountainous routes for sale in the Indian market; food grains and consumer goods went from India to Tibet. But the route was closed because of hostility between India and China, and the border was sealed.
In 1992, after 33 years, the Lipu-Lekh Pass (the route of the Kailash-Mansarovar pilgrimage) was reopened. For Bhotias of an older generation, it was an emotional moment to meet old friends across the border again.
Things could never be the same of course, but what Manju Kak documents is the intensity of a historical bonding. The film is intensely made, with an intimacy that readers of Kak's fiction will recognise. She brings you very close to the people and their emotions.
For those who have no hope of climbing the Himalayas, for whatever reason, the essential aesthetic facility of documentation is to let you feel the greenness of the woods and valleys, the bleakness of mountains, and the mirror of waters and sky. She is a scholar devoted to the work of Nikolai Roerich, and the intensity of the love for the mountains, comes through in this work.
Important questions
The film raises important questions of "dominant communities". It uses local people's voices to discuss their interpenetration with caste society, their ability in the past as wealthy traders to control the artisanal castes and those whom they put to work for them in servitude (which is even today remembered by those who laboured). It raises important political questions relating to the family planning programme, and political and economic representation/propaganda to limit the size of the family, which contests the logic of reservation and representation by number.
It addresses the paradox of the Bhotias being referred to as a buffer tribe — those who profess to be Hindus, while the syncretism of traditional tribal gods (Gabla is the high-God) and borrowed Tibetan ritual sets them apart from the upper castes of Brahmins and Thakurs.
Survival in doubt
Decimated by development, the Bhotias have the desire to survive, but who will be their patrons? Are the State and the middle class consumers able to prevent the decline of indigenous artisans and craftspersons? Who will understand their traditional aesthetic drive for collecting and selling beautiful stones and fabrics, for building the objects of daily use, their love for spinning and weaving, their nurturing of music and dance?
Knowledge is clearly caught in the memories of people in relation to their habitat, and once the habitat is destroyed, the risks of surviving culturally are very high.
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