Hello everyone! It’s basically festive season from Diwali to new years so happy festivities folks - wherever you are! Here are some photos from a cold november twilight in Mcleodganj!
By the way, we recently had the 12th Dharamshala International Film Festival. We’re excited to catch up on some fantastic films like Joram, Mami Wata, The Buriti Flower and Ri. It always a proud feeling that our small town of Dharamshala is home to such amazing artistic diversity, that too all year round!
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you would’ve noticed history and geopolitics sprinkled here and there as a recurring theme.
From century old and international courts, significant Tibetan archival collections hosted Dharamshala, prehistoric cave paintings, ancient trading routes to biblical mountains - we too have tried to foreground the sheer richness of mountains near and far, with a focus on the Himalayan region.
This was perhaps a necessary reflective process, considering - well, that Dharamshala is a small place and building environment and law focussed work is still a very new thing in the Himalayan region.
Honestly, digging deep into the history and significance of hill towns such as ours helps us appreciate these places more and hopefully shows you a new side of mountainscapes.
A little while ago, we shared a perspective on thinking in terms of river basins and not necessarily national borders, and how places seemingly super far from each other might actually be deeply connected by rivers.
Well, we recently came across an unexpected billboard in Mcleodganj (half an hour drive uphill from Dharamshala):
We didn’t expect to see “written” signs of Nowrojee, a household name in town, since the owners decided to shut shop in the pandemic. Perhaps one of the oldest shops in the entire region, it is a pretty rare sight to see Parsi/Zoroastrian business in the Himalayas.
So we dug a little into the history of Nowrojee, the people behind it, their significance to Dharamshala and where they came from. Turns out, Nauser Nowrojee (great grandson of the founder) who ran the general store till his death in 2002 was born in Karachi in 1915, then a part of British India, and was instrumental in suggesting Dharamshala as an ideal abode to HH the 14th Dalai Lama.
Today, the ancient storefront and residence might be taken down by the new owners, who are apparently building a huge hotel just behind the what used to be the shop.
Here’s what the 1860s era building looks like today:
Here is an old photo of the beautiful heritage structure:
The interesting part to us is not that there exists an old heritage structure in a hillstation (that’s fairly commonplace) or that the owners are Parsi (who originally hailed from Iran) but that the family came from Karachi, which itself is on the Indus river basin. So it’s not just rivers that connect human settlements thousands of kilometers apart but also people and trade!
Another bit of trivia - the building that you see pictured above? It survived a mega earthquake in 1905 - another reason we need to closely study the architectural practises from way back when.
Mcleodganj is full of such stories - you’ll find trade and culture from across the planet here, from Tibet to Kashmir, Ukraine and Russia to Korea!
Anyways, that’s it for this edition folks - we’re going to leave you with a photograph of a scrumptious Bhutanese dish we found in Dharamshala called “Ema Datshi” (yet another import to sleepy Dharamshala)
Regards,
Himalayan Advocacy Center
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Postscript:
As you may know, we are a small non profit in the environment + law space located in the Indian Himalayas. We are completely bootstrapped! This means no foreign funding and no fancy headquarters - just a small community - of which you all are an integral part - in the long run we hope!
What’s more - we, at the Center, are determined to localise efforts for the planet, without compromising on the best that the law has to offer. If you have the means, and want to support a committed local undertaking, please do consider contributing to our corpus. We hope to pleasantly surprise you with detailed information on where you money has been spent!