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Zanskari women during transhumance (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

I’ve decided that Arte is possibly the best TV channel in the world. Last night I happened to stumble across an amazing documentary by Marianne Chaud called Himalaya, la Terre des Femmes.

Marianne Chaud has previously made films about India and wrote her doctorate on popular theatre in the Himalayan Ladakh region. La Terre des Femmes is essentially a work of ethnography, made in 2007 during her long stay in the remote village of Sking in Zanskar valley at 4000m, a region of Kashmir where the culture is predominantly Tibetan.

Barley fields in Zanskar (Image: Paul A. Fagan, Creative Commons)

The film follows a summer in the lives of the villagers. The men have left for the season to find work in distant towns like Leh and Manali, and the women and children remain to herd the yaks, harvest barley and collect grass for animal feed in the coming winter.

Chaud is not just a bystander but an active participant in the film, and grows particularly fond of a 13 year-old sheperdess, who lives on her own with a herd of yaks. In the absence of men, the women speak openly of their life histories, their hopes and fears.

Farmhouse in Zanskar, with winter feed piled on the roof
(Image: bobwitlox, Creative Commons)

What develops is a compelling portrait of a people who live largely isolated from the modern world, and rely on centuries-old transhumance practices to live in such a harsh environment. The nearest town is 4 days walk away. Everyone, from 5 years old to 80 years old, works in the fields every day.

The only intrusion from beyond the valley is the occasional sound of an aircraft high overhead. The sheperdess asks Marianne, “Inside an aeroplane, how many carpets are there?” “Why carpets?“, responds Marianne. “So you can sit down of course!” laughs the sheperdess. In Zanskar, there are no chairs, because there are no trees, and no timber. The shepherdess has never seen furniture, let alone been in an aeroplane.

The Himalayas as filmed by Marianne Chaud are a long way from the “Lonely Planet” images of picturesque monasteries and prayer-wheels we’ve grown accustomed to. La Terre des Femmes is a gentle, human and intelligent film that ranks among the most beautiful things I’ve seen on television for a very long time.

One of the more unusual stories to emerge from the tsunami crisis was the tale of an Indian helicopter attacked by indigenous Andamanese on Sentinel Island with bows and arrows. And although there were early fears that large numbers of the Andaman’s indigenous population had been wiped out by the tidal waves, many are supposing that they were able to survive by reading the natural signals of tide, water and observing the behaviour of animals…

The image is bizarre, but arresting – the great steel bird of the 21st century confronted by the weapons of a culture that reaches back into the paleaolithic. When speaking about cultures and places far from our own, words like “unspoilt” or phrases like “the world’s last paradise” are to be avoided. However the Andamans and Nicobar Islands must surely be one of the few places in the world where we, with a postcolonial conciousness, can actually try to prevent the worst excesses of encroachment on indigenous peoples….

But amidst the human tragedy and our apparent insignificance against the forces of the universe, let’s remember that just occasionally, us humans can make and do some pretty amazing things (one of them is tabbed web browsing in Firefox) NASA’s two Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been crawling around the planet for a year, drilling, taking pictures and generally doing some interplanetary science. Both robots have lasted three times longer than their designed longevity of 90 days. Roll on the launch of Huygens into Titan’s atmosphere !