Reports and Short Notices

Abstract

Introduction This brief paper presents some preliminary results of a survey conducted among the transhumant Mon Pa pastoralists of the alpine terrain of Tawang, in Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern Indian Himalayas. The term Mon Pa is an exonym and means `the others' in Tibeto-Burmese. These primarily yak herders who are indigenous to the area also own some cattle, mules, horses and sheep and practice limited horticulture in their village lands, at around 3,000m. While Mon Pa men take their herds over long distances in search of pasture, women, children and the elderly remain throughout the year in these villages, tending some of their livestock and collecting firewood. Till quite recently, Mon Pa pastoralists, who are Mahayana Buddhists (Sarkar 1980) were polyandrous, and since herds are owned jointly by brothers, one herder can be replaced after a while by his brother. Thus, yak herds live in the forests and alpine meadows (Farooquee 1997) continuously, with the herders in charge rotating. With rapidly shrinking pastures and the breaking down of their exchange relationships with Mon Pa farmers of the Tawang region, who bartered grain for yak cheese, butter, and meat (Nanda 1981, Furer-Haimendorf 1982, Jha 1988, Duarah 1992, Farooquee 1997), the entire community is struggling against the severe impact of economic change. In order to maintain the regular barter system, Mon Pa pastoralists have had large herds of up to 145 yaks per household besides two or three heads of cattle, one or two mules and horses, and a few goats. To feed such a large stock of yaks, they have nomadised, and this environmental strategy has, in its turn, both enabled a sustainable pastoral economy and become the basis of Mon Pa pastoralist identity. The Area The Thingbu-Mukto division of Tawang district in Arunachal Pradesh where this survey was carried out, lies in the alpine zone between 3,100 and 4,000 m, well above the timberline. The mean annual temperature is below 6[degrees]C, with mean winter temperatures below -1[degrees]C (Champion and Seth 1965). The herbage of the high altitude eastern Himalaya is highly nutritious and can contain crude protein up to seventeen percent. It is very common to find the farmers here harvesting grass from the forest areas to feed their animals (Verma 1988). Some of the commonest plants found in the region are species of the genera Corydalis, Sorosis, Silens, Saussurea, Geranium, Geum, and common grasses in the alpine region are Poa, Agrostis, Calamogrostis, Yak grass, Festuca, Korbressia, Irish grass (Sundriyal 1995). Traditional Patterns of Pastoral Movement Mon Pa pastoralists rotate traditionally between a multi-pasture encampment used in mid- and late winter, spring and summer, and an encampment used in autumn and early winter. This system allows them to utilise a series of common grazing lands, while also providing an ample supply of ungrazed forage reserves for use in autumn and early winter on which the animals subsist through the long winters. They stay in each of these pastures for only as long as enough fodder is available here as calculated by them traditionally. This complex system of pasture rotation appears quite similar to that of the nomads of the Tibetan Plateau (Goldstein et al. 1990). Unlike, say, herders in non-mountainous arid zones, such as the Bedouin of Saudi Arabia who move opportunistically among very large areas of land in response to random and patchy rainfall (Perevalotsky 1987), these alpine herders have skilfully cashed-in on climatic and altitudinal variations spread across a spatio-temporal scale. They distribute their herds between different pastures in such a manner that they calve in winter when they move down closer to their villages after grazing in the alpine meadows in summer. Over the years, a certain ecological balance had been maintained and untill recently, there were no indications of overgrazing. Increasingly, however, there are indications of the degradation of these common resources. …