Life in the mountains is more difficult than life in the plains as landforms influence the weather making it colder as one goes higher. So, our lives are a little harder as compared to other regions. This is especially true for our elders, and we have to be strong and brave, physically as well as mentally, to face these challenges.

My village name is Kumdok, which is in the eastern part of Ladakh. Ever since I began to walk, I have helped my mother with herding, and during this time she showed me different kinds of wild animals. When I was young, I would get excited, but now it is a common sight, just like seeing any other animal. Even with rock art, I clearly remember when I first spotted it. It was while we were herding, and I asked my mother about it and she told me a brief story about the lives and activities of previous generations of people.

I was curious as to who had created this art, and my mother told me that in the era of her grandparents and great grandparents there were no books, copy pencils or pen and schools, so people carved these drawings onto specific boulders, probably to pass the time or to develop their skills.

For my further studies, I had to leave my village and even go outside of Ladakh. It has been quite a long time since I visited the place where I saw the rock art and where my mother and I went to graze the animals. And when I came back to my village, almost all the livestock were extinct, so people gave up domesticating sheep and goats.

I looked for a job in the city and joined the one NGOs which is based on nature conservation in Ladakh.  I have now been to different places for field surveys with different researchers, and interacted with various people from different villages and researchers studying wildlife and the arts, and collected stories and listened to their experiences. I even started putting more effort into exploring these things myself and would like to share what I learnt from my field surveys.

Rock art has already begun to disappear because of development like construction of roads and lack of awareness among younger generations about this kind of art. There are various things we can learn from rock art, such as the evolution process, what kinds of domestic and wild animals we had in our region over time as well as the different ways of using animals for transportation. Through my mother’s stories and my own interpretations, I inferred that it is mostly the men that would go hunting and the women would take care of the household chores.

Art and symbols were used as a means of communication locally. Archery used to be a daily activity, but now is only an occasional game. Exploration is very important in life. We must study both modern science and indigenous knowledge, and I have learned a lot of things during my field surveys as well as from different indigenous people.

Rock art is very important because it represents the earliest form of creativity of the human mind. And it is also a shared heritage that links us to our powerful ancestral world and the magnificent landscape of the past. If we do not collect folk stories from our elders, then we will not be able to get this knowledge through Google or books.

 Sherab Lobzang is from Kumdok village, which is eastern Ladakh. He worked on wildlife conservation in Ladakh from 2017 to 2022, and then I got the opportunity to join Coexistence Consortium Fellowship for two years.