Each day weaves its own tale, and no two days unfold alike in the Mandal Valley. The Mandal Valley is like any central Himalayan valley, rich and teeming with small villages, its air soaked in the mystical scent of its culture and tradition. The landscape of the valley is a gradient of human agricultural activity merging into the surrounding forest. It is the southern entry point to the adjacent Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary (Srivastava et al., 2020). Every morning, the villagers in this valley would take up their daily chores. A script was followed. Cleaning up the cowshed and tending to the cows, walking to the forest to collect wood, dry grass, and fodder, heading to the village market or Gopeshwar, the nearest town, or working the agricultural fields. In Mandal valley, there were a handful of activities likely to happen as the day unfolded. And yet, every day would unfold in different ways. Like the villagers, we too subconsciously followed a script. We, the authors, represent the researchers working in Mandal Valley as part of the Himalayan Langur Project (HLP)[1], a conservation research group that focuses on examining the behaviour of wild Himalayan Langur groups (Nautiyal et al., 2020). Virendra was interested in understanding the travel paths of the Himalayan Langur and how their movement shapes their interaction with the humans. Aarjav, conducting ethnographic research, explored how conflicts shaped environmental research practices around commonly held forests.
While our identities vastly differed from those held and enacted by the locals, our lives unfolded in relation to the lives of the community, the more-than-human lifeworlds, and the landscape. In this essay, we attempt to briefly reflect on the affective nature of our relationships with the locals as outsiders/researchers in the Mandal Valley. Our essay engages with discourse around decision-making when the social and the ecological interact in a frontier landscape impacted by climate change (Khatri et al., 2024). We highlight the uncertainties and affective nature of the interactions between science and social structures in the Himalayas. In doing so, we hope to elicit reflections on the practice of fieldwork and the idea of place-making in a community to conduct science (Baviskar, 1995; Joshi et al., 2024).
Our fieldwork involved following a long-studied troop of the Himalayan Langur (Semnopithecus schistaceus). Ideally, we would track the langur troop from the morning, starting at the trees where they had fallen asleep the night before, and follow them until evening, when they would stop at a new group of trees to sleep in. But a full day of uninterrupted research seldom happened. Our research mandate was dictated by various interactions between us, the researchers, and the langurs, the community, and the broader environment. This troop of langurs lives in this heterogeneous matrix of agricultural land, small roadside hotels, small villages, fruit orchards, and the jungle that surrounds all of it. In the prior evening, a team member would report the last-sighted location of the troop to the whole team. Tracking this sleeping site helped us predict the potential direction and areas to which langurs could travel the next day.
We would usually wake up before dawn. The first step would be to take a weather check. During winter, we would start when it was still dark outside, the morning still crisp with cold air. Sunlight would not reach the houses and farmlands in the valley before nine a.m. In the summers, we would leave early in the morning again, before the searing sunlight crawled over the eastern peaks into the valley. The monsoon brought its own challenges, and we would get delayed in the morning because of pouring rain that would start sometime in the dark of the night. This season brought utmost frustration and uncertainty, for hiking and following the langurs becomes tedious on the slippery rocks and pathways of the forest. Even if weather played ball, the possibilities of whether research could be performed, if data could be collected, and potential forms of conflict that could disrupt our fieldwork, relied on where the troop chose to travel after exiting the sleeping sites. An uncertainty pervaded everyday tasks, and our decisions would be geared to minimize our visibility and avoid interaction and conflict with the villagers in Mandal.
In Mandal Valley, agriculture takes place on the valley floor and on the slopes. Agriculture gradually mixes with the surrounding forest. With such proximity to forests, wildlife criss-cross this anthropogenically modified landscape in all directions. Image provided by the authors.
Mandal Valley lies in the Garhwal region in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. Uttarakhand is home to some of the most impressive Himalayan peaks and gorgeous river valleys, ancient trading routes and cultures, and dotted with mystical Hindu temples, each with their wealth of folklore and mythological importance. The remoteness of these temples, and the magnanimity of nature that surrounds them, only adds to their mystical appeal. The most famous is the group of four Hindu temples, known as Char Dham or Chota Char Dham. Since the 1970s, and more so after its inception in the year 2000, the state of Uttarakhand has aimed to become synonymous with tourism. Its overarching goal has been to develop tourism as a source of revenue and employment. Thus, in a clever confluence of religion and tourism, Uttarakhand has branded Char Dham as a product that attracts millions of Hindu pilgrims and tourists every year (Auckland, 2017). This has also ushered new investments from both the government and private partners in the name of development. The Char Dham travel route is entirely situated in Garhwal and passes through Mandal valley. This influx of tourists, whose number proportionately increases during the Char Dham season, brings revenue and hopes of prosperity to Mandal valley.
The social and environmental conditions in Mandal Valley are a result of its rich biodiversity and cultural heritage, developmental aspirations, and a slowly fading agrarian identity. The village of Mandal, in this valley, was where the Chipko movement was born under the local leadership in 1973 (Guha, 1989). It was a time of heightened awareness and ecological consciousness, which was based on nature-culture relations that made up the pahari (from the mountains) identity. Mandal village also sits en-route the state highway that connects Badrinath to Kedarnath, two of the four Char Dham. Here, development has gained pace over time, emerging from national and state level desires to grow the tourist economy within the Himalayan region. The recent push of the right-wing Indian government to commodify the Char Dham pilgrimage circuit has also fueled developmental aspirations in the region. Increasing traffic passes through this state highway, which is the only road that passes through Mandal. Thus, families who have agricultural fields or property at the roadside, have constructed hotels, restaurants, and convenience stores on this land, realizing the potential income to be made from the tourists. This trend can be seen throughout the Indian Himalayan region, where the pahari identity is being continuously redefined in relation to the broader socio-political movements.
Authors like Agarwal (2005), Govindarajan (2018), and Mathur (2021), have talked in-depth about the malleability of pahari identity. While the primary interest of Mandal’s inhabitants has transformed into catering for tourists, this valley has not lost its historical, environmental, and cultural identity. Indeed, these tenants of pahari identity might have helped Mandal and many other villages in the region gain their touristic appeal. In comparison, climate change has put agriculture as an economic activity under undue stress, and the influx of ideas, lifestyles, and capital has given rise to new aspirations, which have diverted attention away from the promise of an agrarian livelihood. The social and cultural fabric, traditionally spun around agriculture as a way of living, has started to crack at the seams. With dwindling crop yields, and a transition to a cash-based market, it has become difficult for the people to get by. Catering to pilgrims and tourists has thus rapidly grown as an alternative, and dominating, means of earning a livelihood. Alas, income from tourism depends on the proximity to the state highway, thus creating differential incomes and friction among the village families.
Besides being a pitstop in the Char Dham pilgrimage, this region has been of keen interest to environmental and wildlife researchers, naturalists (Barve et al., 2016; Dixit, Joshi, & Barve, 2016; Ishtiaq & Barve, 2018; Nautiyal et al., 2020), and backpackers (Gairola, 2021). These groups open alternatives for the employment of local people, as field guides and assistants. We researchers were one such group that lived in Mandal throughout the year, unlike tourists and pilgrims who would only stay for a couple of days. The Char Dham would close during the winter months from November to April and the major source of income from pilgrim-tourists would dry out. At this time, only a handful of tourists, usually from the lower plains, wanting to see and experience the snow, would make the trip up to Mandal. On the other hand, we, as a research group, would provide consistent employment and business to only a few families in Mandal. This gave rise to a unique, and at times uncomfortable power dynamic between the researchers and the local community. The impact of the tourist economy seeped into our relationships with the community members and the boundaries of where research could be conducted. As such, Mandal is an active site of friction (Tsing, 2005). We experienced these frictions and were the cause of many as well due to the selective employment we generated. These frictions emerged as we, the environmental researchers and the outsiders, situated ourselves in the valley and interacted with the villagers and the more-than-humans, through our daily conduct, research practices, and movements.
The vibrant green of late monsoon months in Mandal Valley. The valley floor is laden with Kharif crops, mainly Ragi (finger millet) and rice. Forests on both sides roll down to the valley floor. Two Himalayan langurs from our study troop dry themselves on a cliff. Image provided by the authors. Photo Credit: Ashu Tomar/Himalayan Langur Project
Some days, as we walked to the last sighted location of the langur troop, a couple of looks, warm greetings, and curious and sly “All set to see the monkeys today?” comments awaited us. We would try to get to the langur sleeping site before they started their daily movement. This did not mean that the day would be smooth riding. Often, the langur troop that we followed entered agricultural fields, as the troop moved from one forest patch to another. This large group trampled and fed on the crops as they passed through the fields. The villagers would often blame the researchers for luring the langurs into the fields. Such occurrences have increased over the course of HLP’s research in the valley. Such conflicts strained and soured the relationship between the researchers and the villagers. Agricultural fields and areas near village became “no-research” zones. The movement of langur troop, thus, dictated the success of research on a given day. If the langurs moved to the agricultural fields or crossed the village, no data could be collected for a couple hours or more. In those moments, we would either wait, patiently hoping that the langurs would move to a “researchable zone”. Friction and conflicts were shaping research, and in turn, the science that was ultimately going to be produced.
The relationship between the villagers and the researchers was fragile. Apart from three field assistants hired from the community, most villagers showed little interest in the rationale of our research project. Occasionally, the villagers would suspiciously inquire about our work if they saw us with binoculars and notepads at the roadside, watching langurs crossing from the forest into the fields. Most, however, would look at us with a subtle sense of otherness as we followed the langurs. This feeling of not being welcome came and went in ebb and flow. In this essay, we attempted to reflect on the roots of these sentiments, discovering that understanding them requires examining historical subjugations, market-driven policies, and State influences that steadily enclosed the forest from the community.
As we followed the primates and interacted with the community of Mandal, we engaged in the practice of kin-making with the locals as well as the more-than-humans present in the valley. Mandal Valley continues to manifest in these relationships and the way they crisscross daily in a myriad of ways. It is here, in this valley, that we attempted to make place, with a mandate to do scientific research. Our scientific research mandate was different each day, for no two days were ever the same in Mandal Valley.
Notes
[1] The Himalayan Langur Project, established in 2014, studies two habituated Langur troops in Mandal valley. At HLP, research is focused on studying behavior and ecology, gut-microbiome, movement and cognition, and vocalizations of Himalayan Langurs, contributing towards holistic conservation practices through research. To learn more about the project, check the project website – https://www.himalayanlangur.com/ and the Youtube Channel – youtube.com/@thehimalayanlangur
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Shreyasha Paudel.
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