Research

I am at present working on the documentation of a previously unrecorded, but impressive chorten in north-western Arunachal Pradesh in the valley of the Nyamjang-chu, just to the south of the Bhutan-India-Tibet frontier. This work began in the 2000s when I was the British Museum representative on a project run from SOAS and directed by Dr Stuart Blackburn, ‘Tribal Transitions. Cultural Change in the Eastern Himalayas’. This was a collaborative project with Arunachal University and a local cultural project run by Moji Riba, Director of the Centre for Cultural Research and Documentation.

This project resulted in important publications by Stuart Blackburn, published by Brill. These deal with the orally-transmitted texts of the Apatani which are especially important on account of the origin myths embedded in them. Although I visited the Apatani and Nyishi areas of Arunachal, I worked mostly in the Monpa region, close to the Tibet frontier. The Monpas are Buddhist, following Tibetan traditions. 

My work for the project was concerned with collecting examples of contemporary material culture: block-prints, prayer flags, basketry, hand-made paper and textiles which are now visible via the online database of the British Museum. I also spent time documenting pilgrimage and presented an exhibition at the British Museum on this work. I later published an article on the Bangajang pilgrimage in the mountains to the immediate west of the Se-la pass. Here, there is a series of lakes connected with the goddess Dorje Phagmo. We also organised a museum skills workshop in Itanagar, the capital of Arunachal Pradesh. 

In the period of the project I several times visited the valley of the Nyamjang-chu to the west of Tawang and gathered data on the chorten at Gorsam, but never published this. On my recent visit to India (winter 2022/23) I was fortunate in being able to visit Arunachal again and this has inspired me to finally gather this data together, bring it up to date and to put it in the public domain. This may be in the form of a long article, or perhaps a book.

In both iterations of this research I have benefitted enormously from the friendship and help of my guide in the Northeast, Rajan Dowerah (see wordofmouthtours.in). In Tawang and around Gorsam, our local guide was the indefatigable Pasang Tsering.