Centre for Historical Studies
School of Social Sciences
Invites to a lecture on
Stories that Mountains Tell
Tracing Landscapes of thee Central Himalayas
Vasudha Pande
University of Delhi
Room No. 326, COmmittee Room, CHS, SSS-III
30 August 2017, 3pm
Abstract: Mountains are often studied as backdrop and as unchanging nature that frames human history. This presentation will question this assumption and track changes made by humans in the landscapes of the Central Himalayas. We will find ‘the hand of man’ not only in the field terraces of the middle mountains but also in the pastures of the Upper Himalayas and the lush grasses of the Tarai.
Early anthropogenic change was through fire and stone tools made by foragers and pastoralists. By tenth century BCE, it extended to extraction of mineral resources. As metallurgical skills developed, trade linkages and large networks developed under the broad hegemony of the Kunindas. Archaeological findings show cultural connections with North India and the Trans-Himalayas. The link northward with the Trans-Himalayas suggests that the high Himalayas were not an impenetrable natural boundary. Contrary to popular perception, the southern connection was considered more deadly than the high altitude mountain passes, because of awl fever and malaria, endemic in the valley floors (up to 4000 feet) and the Tarai marshes.
Historicising helps trace agricultural beginnings to cultivation of buckwheat and millet in a primarily pastoral economy. This is followed by cultivation of rain fed rice, which leads to a spurt in population that helps clear densely forested valley floors and supports transplanted rice and terracing from around the fourteenth century. Agro-pastoral regimes in the mountains practiced transhumance and seasonal migration was an essential part of the entire chain of linked ‘mountain verticality’ (across different ecological niches). It was only in the second half of the twentieth century when this inter-linkage and mobility broke down that the agrarian system developed over millennia collapsed and is now almost defunct.
About the speaker: Dr. Vasudha Pande is an Associate Professor at the Department of History, Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi. Vasudha Pande has worked on a history of modern Kumaun, but has also complemented this with extensive research on Far Western Nepal. She has written on the divergent historiographies of Gorkha rule in Kumaun and Far Western Nepal, on the Gorkha State, folk traditions of Kumaun and also on the issue of borderlands –Kumaun, Far Western Nepal and Western Tibet. A Fellowship at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library helped her in tracing an environmental history of the Central Himalayan region. This paper is a part of the research conducted for the NMML project.
