On Cultural Loss

A man who sets out to write about the ethos of a community must, at some point, wrestle with doubt, not least because the act of doing so invites criticism from those who believe it impossible to encapsulate the lived experiences of many within the confines of language. One might argue, for instance, that the attempt is reductive, that no single life can hold the measure of a people. Others will insist that to speak of a "community ethos" is to deny the individuality of its members, reducing them to an indistinct collective. Such objections are compelling but also paralysing. If we feared oversimplifying so much, we’d never speak of anyone or anything. So, I am willing to tread on this precarious path, to paint a picture of one of the communities I come from—a picture that is, at best, incomplete, but honest in its intention.

I was born into a marriage that was itself a sort of map of India—my mother’s people, Bengalis from West Bengal, where words bloom like flowers and art hangs thick in the air, and my father’s people, Kumaonis from the rugged folds of Uttarakhand, where mountain life is hard, and so the people learned to be soft-hearted. And as fate would have it, I came into this world in a third state, Uttar Pradesh, with its own rhythms and flavours. I grew up with many homes in me, layered like the soil of the plains after a flood.

The Kumaoni part of me carries the weight of the hills. In those mountains, life has a way of stripping you bare, sanding off the unnecessary. There’s a simplicity there—not of ignorance but of understanding—that the world will give if you ask gently and take only what you need. As Julie Andrews sang in The Sound of Music, the hills are perhaps alive. Not just as a backdrop but as a quiet presence, shaping the people who live under their shadow. Their festivals are unadorned but rich with meaning; their food is plain yet nourishing, speaking of a respect for the land that provides it. Even in the way they talk, there’s a rhythm that matches the slopes—unhurried, measured, thoughtful.

And like hillfolk everywhere, there’s a warmth that survives the cold. Kumaonis, by nature, are known for their warmth and hospitality. No guest is ever turned away; no traveller goes hungry. I remember visiting the small villages nestled in the hills and being welcomed with the simplicity of home-cooked meals that were as hearty as they were nourishing—dishes like bhatt ki churkani, made from local black soybeans, or the rotis cooked on an open flame. To sit for a meal with a bunch of hungry Kumaonis is to know that food, like life, is best shared.

But life in the hills has always been about more than survival. There’s a method in the way Kumaonis tend their fields, their forests, their rivers. They understand the land isn’t something to conquer but to live alongside as stewards. Every grain of rice, every drop of water is used, nothing wasted. This isn’t poverty—it’s wisdom, the kind that comes from watching the earth’s rhythms and knowing your place in them. Even after my family moved down from the hills, that reverence stuck. In our home, my grandmother fed every stray that came by—crows, dogs, monkeys, even the occasional mongoose. She believed that God sent all the hungry mouths and that it was our duty to feed them. Every morning still, my aunt carries on that tradition, feeding some twenty or thirty crows that, as if by clockwork, fly up to my house everyday. 

Yet, despite this simplicity, Kumaonis are anything but isolated in thought. Their philosophy is one of pragmatism, their spirituality instinctive rather than scholarly. They do not engage in the long-winded debates of the Bengalis, but their folklore and fireside stories are rich with lessons of perseverance and moral clarity. And this is where I think hillfolk everywhere must be kindred. There’s the same fierce hospitality, the same belief that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t fed yet. And there’s the same ache, too, when the hills start to empty out, when the young leave for cities and the old ways begin to fray.

For those of us who have left the hills, there’s a quiet grief we carry, like an old scar. We see the mountains changing—tourists flooding in, forests cut down for roads and hotels—and we wonder what will be left when it’s all done. The stories, the songs, the foods—will they survive the thinning of the hills? Yet even as we grieve, we hold on. In cities far from Uttarakhand, Kumaoni families still gather, still cook dubke and kaapa, still sing the old songs, teaching them to children who may never climb those mountains but will carry their spirit all the same.

In conversations with Kumaoni families, one can sense a respect for their homeland. But threaded through that reverence is a quiet sorrow, a kind of resignation, as if they know the land is slipping away from them, piece by piece, and there’s not much they can do but watch. They speak of the forests—once thick and alive, where every rustle carried a story—now broken by roads and girders, the old songs of the hills drowned out by the noise of machines. They remember the feel of damp earth beneath bare feet, the thrill of setting out with their brothers to hunt a rogue panther that had wandered too close to the village, or the simple wisdom of reading the skies—watching the poplar leaves turn over, their pale undersides flashing in the wind, a sure sign that the afternoon rains were coming.

It struck me, then, how hill folk everywhere seem cut from the same cloth. It’s why a show like The Waltons, set deep in the Appalachian Mountains during the Great Depression, speaks so tenderly to me. The Waltons lived in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, carrying the same kind of simple strength I’ve seen in Kumaoni families. They knew the land, loved it, and leaned on each other when times got hard. There was nothing fancy about it—their joys were small and honest: a good harvest, a shared meal, the soft murmur of voices around the dinner table. But underneath it all ran the ache of change, the same ache the Kumaonis feel now, as their hills begin to look less like the ones they grew up in. 

Cultural loss is neither entirely tragic nor wholly avoidable—it is simply the natural consequence of time's indifference. To insist that this loss is somehow unnatural, that it signals a moral failure rather than life’s inevitable course, would only make the tragedy seem larger than it is. We speak of vanishing traditions as though they were sacred relics stolen from us, but more often than not, they slip away because we no longer have use for them, or perhaps the will to bear their weight. A community’s identity, once forged out of necessity—its customs, its stories, its ways of living—grows brittle in the face of modernity’s conveniences, and eventually, it crumbles. There is no great villain in this narrative, no singular force to blame. And yet it’s a story worth telling, even if I can’t tell it perfectly. Because sometimes, even an imperfect truth is better than silence.

Image Source: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)