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The Himalayas have captivated the imagination and interest of humankind for centuries. The more we explore, the more we learn. India's rich history, society, and culture, are deeply influenced by the world's tallest mountain range. After all, before modern travel, the Himalayas were the most important gateway to India, for people, goods and ideas. This rare and invaluable record of the youngest mountain range in the world is back in print after a century. The extensively detailed information on every district, food habits, customs, influences, as well as the people and their vocations will provide a new perspective to a whole new generation of young readers. The aim of this publication is to make Atkinson's rich data accessible once again to researchers so that we can continue to refer to this rich source of information in our continued work to conserve the rich natural resources and ecological heritage of the Himalayas which stand frighteningly threatened by fast paced and largely unplanned development.
The first reference to demonstrate how birds survive the high-altitude Central Asian Flyway and the threats to this unique migration.
A rare look at the history of Himalayan peasant society and the relationship between culture and environment in the Himalayas. Himalayan Histories, by one of India’s most reputed historians of the Himalaya, is essential for a more complete understanding of Indian history. Because Indian historians have mainly studied riverine belts and life in the plains, sophisticated mountain histories are relatively rare. In this book, Chetan Singh identifies essential aspects of the material, mental, and spiritual world of western Himalayan peasant society. Human enterprise and mountainous terrain long existed in a precarious balance, occasionally disrupted by natural adversity, in this large and difficult region. Small peasant communities lived in scattered environmental niches and tenaciously extracted from their harsh surroundings a rudimentary but sustainable livelihood. These communities were integral constituents of larger political economies that asserted themselves through institutions of hegemonic control, the state being one such institution. This laboriously created life-world was enlivened by myth, folklore, legend, and religious tradition. When colonial rule was established in the region during the nineteenth century, it transformed the peasants’ relationship with their natural surroundings. While old political allegiances were weakened, resilient customary hierarchies retained their influence through religio-cultural practices.
The present volume throws light on various dimensions of the Himalayan life and cultrure.There are twelve chaptres in the book Where various facets of the Himalayan culture,viz,the needed ethnographic reseaches,institurions of polyandry,cultural zones and fronties of the Himalayas,the sacred comlexes of the Himalayan,shrines urgent anthropological researches,enviromental studies,reliogion.highland culture,tribal straification,land-holding pattern.etc.have been scientification discussed by the specialists and experts of the Himalayan studies.
Drawing from extensive archival work and long-term ethnographic research, this book focuses on the so-called Bhotiyas, former trans-Himalayan traders and a Scheduled Tribe of India who reside in several high valleys of the Kumaon Himalaya. The area is located in the border triangle between India, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR, People’s Republic of China), and Nepal, where contestations over political boundaries have created multiple challenges as well as opportunities for local mountain communities. Based on an analytical framework that is grounded in and contributes to recent advances in the field of border studies, the author explores how the Bhotiyas have used their agency to develop a flourishing trans-Himalayan trade under British colonial influence; to assert an identity and win legal recognition as a tribal community in the political setup of independent India; and to innovate their pastoral mobility in the context of ongoing state and market reforms. By examining the Bhotiyas’ trade, identity and mobility this book shows how and why the Himalayan border region has evolved as an agentive site of political action for a variety of different actors.
In the fifteenth century, the princess Chokyi Dronma was told by the leading spiritual masters of her time that she was the embodiment of the ancient Indian tantric deity Vajravarahi, known in Tibetan as Dorje Phagmo, the Thunderbolt Female Pig. After suffering a great personal tragedy, Chokyi Dronma renounced her royal status to become a nun, and, in turn, the tantric consort of three outstanding religious masters of her era. After her death, Chokyi Dronma's masters and disciples recognized a young girl as her reincarnation, the first in a long, powerful, and influential female lineage. Today, the twelfth Samding Dorje Phagmo leads the Samding monastery and is a high government cadre in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Hildegard Diemberger builds her book around the translation of the first biography of Chokyi Dronma recorded by her disciples in the wake of her death. The account reveals an extraordinary phenomenon: although it had been believed that women in Tibet were not allowed to obtain full ordination equivalent to monks, Chokyi Dronma not only persuaded one of the highest spiritual teachers of her era to give her full ordination but also established orders for other women practitioners and became so revered that she was officially recognized as one of two principal spiritual heirs to her main master. Diemberger offers a number of theoretical arguments about the importance of reincarnation in Tibetan society and religion, the role of biographies in establishing a lineage, the necessity for religious teachers to navigate complex networks of political and financial patronage, the cultural and social innovation linked to the revival of ancient Buddhist civilizations, and the role of women in Buddhism. Four introductory, stage-setting chapters precede the biography, and four concluding chapters discuss the establishment of the reincarnation lineage and the role of the current incarnation under the peculiarly contradictory communist system.
The soaring peaks of the greatest mountain range on Earth have long drawn visitors from around the globe, and one of the most famous of the 19th century was British adventurer and scholar Laurence Waddell, who spent most of a decade and a half exploring the nations that cling to the sides of the mighty mountains, learning the ways of their peoples, and sharing his experiences with Western readers. Here, in this 1899 classic of Himalayan travel, Waddell introduces us to the challenges of traveling in the region, takes us on visits to Nepalese and Tibetan tea gardens, journeys to monasteries, palaces, and temples, and much more. Beautiful photos and drawings complement Waddell's exciting and gripping tales-he offers some of the first "evidence" for the mysterious creatures known as "yeti," for instance-and make this an essential work for anyone drawn to the dangerous beauty of the Himalayas. British archaeologist and Orientalist LAURENCE AUSTINE WADDELL (1854-1938) also wrote The Buddhism of Tibet or Lamaism (1894) and Lhasa and Its Mysteries (1905).