Reflections from the Field

This post is a bit stream-of-thought, but it just some ideas from my last experience in the field:

I am now in Dehradun and the heat is sweltering in comparison to the mountains. The high in the field would sometimes be 65 degrees, now I’m living in 90 degrees heat throughout the day. My friends in the Gangetic plains have it worse. It is around 103 degrees in Varanasi and Calcutta. But I don’t care, I lived through the -14 degree weather of the mountains and I feel like I deserve tolerable weather when I’m doing data entry.

My fieldwork ended much faster than I thought it would. I performed 50 surveys in Mandal Valley and then I needed about 60 in the high altitudes areas above Joshimath to make it to my goal. I went to some amazing villages with my new interpreter, Anju. Anju is Sarita’s cousin and she is a bit younger than Sarita, although not by much. Sarita was unable to work with me, because she is recovering from surgery. Anju was very excited to work with me, but she lacked the emotional maturity that Sarita and Vandana had. They were very good at asking women more information about their health history. Anju preferred to just be polite and ignore it. But Anju is much more of a natural athlete than my other interpreters, so we trekked to some great villages above the main road. They were usually 2-3 kilometers up hill. That might not sound like much, but the paths are just rocks and dirt, and it makes life very difficult for the people living there.

Villages above the road are completely different than the villages at the roadside. They have much less access to stores and sources of income. Probably my favorite village that I visited is called Ringi. Ringi is partly my favorite because it is not on the tourist trail. Some remote villages are either close to treks or have village home stays for tourists interested in their culture. Ringi is not anywhere particularly special, except that from it you can see amazing views of Nanda Devi. It is a poor village, and most of the houses are the old Garhwali style. These houses are made from clay bricks and timber. They are usually two levels with elaborate woodwork on the outside. I have pictures of these houses in my Picasa album. The interesting thing is that the patterns in these carvings look very Tibetan, similar to Bhotia weaving. This is just another example of how proximity to Tibet has influenced both groups. When Anju and I reach Ringi, we met two primary school teachers and the young students who were going to school. In the mountains, small villages just have a 1-5 class schools. The teachers spoke to me in Hindi and thanked me for coming to their village. I really felt like I was the first white person who had come to this village since 1962, when a Swiss guy did a survey of the area. Maybe people have been in and out since then, but I didn’t feel like that was the case. It was assuring to see how well I am treated even in villages that aren’t used to outsiders. A lot of women sat around and talked with us. They were very helpful and their husbands were very respectful and helpful as well.

            The sad thing about my fieldwork is that there are few women who I can really remember. Doing 200 surveys makes it impossible to remember everyone. I do remember certain women who were especially interesting. There was one woman in Ringi with broken shoes that kept interrupting everyone’s surveys with her own information. During her survey, she lifted her shirt to show me her scars from a recent gallbladder surgery. Gallstones are very common in this area, and many women have had them. It must be a genetic problem, because people here definitely do not eat a high-cholesterol, low-fiber diet. Other than this woman, I can’t really remember many of the faces or personalities from Ringi. I just remember that people were very kind.

            Ringi is 2,139 meters about sea level. (Thank you, Swiss guy for making so many topographic maps!) That’s about 7,000 feet. The other villages that we visited were up to 2,600 meters above sea level, which is about 8,500 feet. The higher elevation villages differ considerably from villages that are around 1,500-1,800 meters above sea level. Mandal Valley and Joshimath are in the “lower-altitude” range. The higher the elevation, the worse the facilities and the harder it is to make a living.

            During my recent field visits, I visited many villages that had no decent road near to them. Even the government roads are very bad, and transport is not made available. These villages do not have stores near them that sell basic necessities such as fresh vegetables and fruits. There are the occasional small stores that sell cigarettes, soap, and potato chips. It’s not that people wouldn’t buy fresh vegetables, it’s that most food will spoil by the time that it reaches these stores. One can buy produce in the larger towns of Joshimath and Tapovan, but it is much more expensive than it is in the plains. There is also a gas crisis in most of the hills. People cannot rely on timber for fuel, because they live in a national park. Therefore, they use gas; but gas is very difficult to get in many rural parts of India. On the days that gas is available, everyone from the village lines up on the road closest to them with their gas cylinders. I saw 60+ year-old-women with huge gas cylinders strapped to their backs.

            There is no doubt that living here has gotten easier in the past several generations. My interviews with women across age groups have demonstrated that there used to be many more health problems than there are today. The government is trying to bring schools and medicine to these areas. But I often wonder if the government is doing enough. Many of these people are limited because they live in a national park. Many are expected to make their living off of government jobs or tourism. These options have led to an increase in income. Nevertheless, the government controls how people interact with the forests around them, and prevents them from accessing materials and sources of food that they have traditionally used. Just as significantly, the national park system determines where roads can and cannot be created.

            Arguing with the government over natural resources is part of life here. One of my field sites is home to the world famous Chipko movement. The Chipko movement began when a local woman in the village of Rini ran out to the forests and began hugging trees to prevent trees from being felled. This movement has been romanticized over the years. It did not begin out of a modern sense of environmentalism, but as a way for a local community to stake a claim to their natural resources. As a result of the Chipko movement, the Nanda Devi area has gained international attention and it is now a UNESCO world heritage site. So now, the descendents of the Chipko movement still can’t use their own forests. Regardless of the current difficulties with the forest department, Rini’s inhabitants are very proud of the Chipko movement, but I was surprised at how little most young people can tell me about it.

            Despite the economic and social difficulties here, people seem much happier and healthier than the communities that I interacted with in Rajasthan four years ago. Women and children are generally treated very well, and it is very unusual for a child to not to be sent to school. Even though people live in a national park, they can still collect some natural resources; and the area is incredibly natural resource rich. Many men work as guides and drivers for tourists, which brings in money to the entire community. Therefore, the standard of living is slowly improving over time.

            Uttarakhand is a poor state, but it lacks many of the social ills that plague other poor states. Female infanticide is not generally tolerated in the mountains. Child marriage is taboo. Alcoholism exists, but the government heavily taxes alcohol. These are huge departures from Rajasthan, where the government overlooks child marriage and female infanticide, and it promotes government wine shops. I am about 100 times happier living in Uttarakhand than I ever was in Rajasthan. The environment is beautiful, the people are generally open and caring, and the culture is fascinating. The history here hasn’t been drenched in war and fighting over land, so the entire attitude towards life is so much more peaceful than in the plains states. Ending my fieldwork was extremely difficult. I wished that I could have worked for longer, but at a point my data just kept on repeating itself and I needed to stop. I hope that I’ll be able to go back to Joshimath with a group of students later this month. I will definitely go back before I leave India.

            Now I am in Dehradun and I’m working hard to get through some basic data analysis and writing. After my Fulbright is over, I will probably go to the trans-Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh. This area is a cold desert, entirely different from life in Garhwal. I’m excited to see a new place, but I don’t think that it will come nearly as close to affecting me as Uttarakhand has.