Ladakh
Helping a culture choose its future
An Interview With Helena Norberg-Hodge, by Robert Gilman
One of the articles in Being Global Neighbors (IC#17)
Originally published in Summer 1987 on page 18
Copyright (c)1987, 1997 by Context Institute
For more than a decade, Helena Norberg-Hodge has been helping Ladakh, an isolated Himalayan culture, to preserve its strengths and choose carefully from the West as it modernizes. In 1986 the Ladakh Ecological Development Group (of which she is the director) was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (also known as "the alternative Nobel Prize") in recognition of their remarkable work.
For more information about, or to contribute to, this important project, write to The Ladakh Project, Open Space Institute, 122E. 42nd St. Rm. 1901, N.Y., NY 10168.
– Robert Gilman
Robert: Helena, what is the story of Ladakh?
Helena: I think Ladakh was one of the last cultures on the earth to come in contact with Western culture. It is on the Tibetan plateau, surrounded by high mountains, and culturally Tibetan. Over the centuries it had very little contact with the outside world because of its remoteness. Then in the modern era, when tourists and western influence reached many places, Ladakh was closed off for political reasons. It is presently part of India, and since it was so sensitive strategically, no foreigners were allowed to go there. When the Chinese invaded central Tibet, a road was built by India to protect Ladakh, but it was still closed to the outside world. Then for some reason in 1974, the Indian government decided to open it up to foreign visitors, and I went out with a documentary film crew and came in contact with this culture. I think probably the closest approximation would be something like the Spanish coming to Hopiland.
I had previously been in touch with a very remote tribe in a place called San Cristobal de las Cartas in Chiapas. Those people seemed very unchanged, and I was very impressed by them, a sort of very deep dignity and rootedness in their own way of being and doing things. But they didn’t exhibit the same incredible openness and joyousness that I found among the Tibetans and Ladakhis, and I now attribute that lack of openness to the influence of western culture, which became increasingly more threatening to them.
So it was quite an experience to come in touch with the Ladakhis in 1975. Their way of life had of course been changing over the centuries, but evolving out of their own principles, out of their own environment, and on their terms.
Robert: How did you get involved?
Helena: Well, I came as part of a film team to help do an anthropological documentary, but my training was in linguistics, and I immediately became fascinated by the place and by the language, which was very challenging and very difficult. The spoken language hadn’t been written down and analyzed in any meaningful way before, so I became involved in that, and I eventually did a thesis on the Ladakhi language. For the first two years I worked on that, travelling all through the region, collecting folk stories. It’s quite a large region, about the size of Austria, but the population is only 100,000. They live in isolated small villages, so I covered most of the area where I was allowed to go as a foreigner.
I was the only foreigner to speak the language, and in a sense I was an ambassador from our world. Suddenly these people saw all these westerners coming in who looked so incredibly rich and seemed to have a life of total leisure. I found myself often explaining that yes, we did have these things, but we didn’t have the incredible peace of mind and happiness that they did. I was trying to give them a more balanced and realistic picture of our life. Gradually I became more involved in the broader issue of cultural change, and I think I developed, relatively speaking, an insider’s understanding of some of those changes. I started bringing them more information, informally at first, so that they wouldn’t become overwhelmed and feel totally inferior.
Robert: What were some of the ways that you did that?
Helena: Well, initially it was simply by talking and telling stories about our way of life, which gave them a fuller picture. When I first went, in the early days, I found people who thought of themselves as very rich and literally said so. They very proudly served their own food and played their own music and wore their own clothes. I came to a particularly beautiful village in the early days, and just out of curiosity I asked a young man to show me the poorest house in the village, and he thought for a minute and then he said, "We don’t have any poor houses." Eight years later, I heard the same young man saying to a tourist, "Oh, if you could only help us Ladakhis – we’re so poor." Within eight years his self-image had changed dramatically, literally from one extreme to the other, because of the contact with western tourists and the sense that this other way of life was