THE FORGOTTEN NOMADS

In the higher reaches of Uttarakhand lies Nelang Valley that was once an essential trade route between India and Tibet. SHIVYA NATH travels to this obscure land and encounters tales as old as time.

-  SHIVYA NATH

BETWEEN A DEEP gorge and jagged, snow-dusted mountains, our driver Pawar ji cautiously manoeuvered our jeep on a narrow, broken strip of what was once a road. Thousands of feet below at the base of the gorge, I could see a turquoise river appearing deceptively calm. Suddenly, the jeep jerked to a stop at the edge of the gorge, and with it, my beating heart. A loose rock rolled down the mountain, narrowly missed our wheel, and tumbled soundlessly, in slow motion, into the river below!

That could've been us, I thought silently, as Pawar ji alighted from the car, and looked at the mountain and then the river. We solemnly resumed our journey towards Nelang, a forgotten valley on the south-western edge of the Trans-Himalayan Tibetan Plateau, in the higher reaches of Uttarakhand. I suppose I first unwittingly stumbled upon Nelang many years ago, while reading Seven Years in Tibet. In his memoir, Heinrich Harrer, the Austrian mountaineer, wrote about his escape from a British internment camp in Dehradun in the 1940s. He walked all the way to Lhasa in Tibet, crossing a precarious wooden walkway above the Jadh Ganga, the turquoise river at the base of the deep gorge we drove along.

I felt a chill run down my spine as I spotted remnants of a timber bridge, on a dangerously slender ridge of the mountain, with a free fall, hundreds of feet down into the river below. Built by the Pashtuns of Peshawar, this wooden pathway witnessed centuries of trade between Tibet, Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent. It was this bridge that the Jadhs, the semi-nomadic traders of Nelang valley, once traversed to trade with the northern Tibetan traders.