A physics student
who went walking

I am a doctoral researcher in Anthropology at IIT Gandhinagar. I work with indigenous communities of Western Himalayas with a critical climate change perspective on existing research, addressing pressing global challenges related to water security, sustainability, and community resilience. Most of my fieldwork happens in the villages strung along the Shyok river, Nubra Valley, Ladakh. I am currently working with the Balti communtiy who live in and along the glaciers. This arrangement produce a particular kind of cultural life and indigenous knowledge passed down over generations. The knowledge sytem has evolved by continous interation with stakeholders over centuries

I did not start out here. My first degree was physics. Then ancient history at JNU. Ethnography came third, and it stuck, partly because it let me keep looking at objects the way a physicist looks at a system: things that hold information if you’re patient. An irrigation channel. A polo stick. Apricots drying on a stone roof. A cupboard of copper vessels nobody actually drinks from anymore. These things carry arguments about who belongs and who decides, arguments people are not always free to make out loud.

The doctoral work circles three questions. How does a community keep its indigenous knowledge running when the climate stops matching the calendar built around it? What happens to heritage once it becomes something you can sell a visitor? And, underneath both of those: who owns the past, and the future?