The days are long, often hot, and your knees will be tested. In a small-scale grain agriculture, plowing and harvest are the most intense seasons of work. We bring millions of incredible fruits of barley and wheat by hand into the houses, to nourish the people all through the year. All the straw that comes with it is an essential source of food for the cows and dzo as well.
Twenty years ago, all the harvesting in Tar — and in Ladakh — was done by villagers, working in turn in each others’ fields. Working impossible hours, from the stories they tell us, singing yang sol to carry each other through. “It was very difficult,” many elders say, reflecting on those times.
Now Nepali farm workers migrate to Ladakh each August to join in the alfalfa and barley harvests. The families and young men we met this year are amazing, and humbling to work beside. We wished we shared more language; most people in Tar speak Hindi, well enough. The Nepalpa said that people in Tar offer them good food, pay them decently, and they work reasonable hours. It’s not like that everywhere; in some of the villages by the road, they tell us, conditions have gotten very bad. We learned that some of them plant rice in Nepal, travel to Ladakh to work in the fields, and then return to their homes for the rice harvest in the late fall. Even one harvest feels like a feat of endurance to us. It’s hard to imagine sustaining what they do.
After harvest, grain is laid out on the fields to dry, then turned the next morning, earth clinging to roots beaten off with sticks. Then carried, all to one field, where sheaves are laid against each other into pyramids called chok. It may be some time between harvest and threshing; grain dries well in the chok, and if rain should come the seeds, held up in the air, won’t sprout.
We harvested our wheat field — actually one of Kargopa’s fields, called Tagho Kir Kir because it is small and round– last of all. Every person in the village came to join. With so many hands, the work passed easily, joyfully; we drank tea as the sunrise swept across the village and around to us, and completed the work before breakfast. In the evening friends gathered with us again, to carry the grain in great golden bundles up the hill to the threshing machine. We are young, and strong enough; perhaps we could have done it all alone. But the gift of this kind of community support felt tremendous; so many people wishing us nourishment and well-being this winter, in the most direct way.
These days, virtually all the threshing and winnowing of barley and wheat happens by machine. It’s loud and intense, runs on diesel, and allows the community to get the grain separated and the straw chopped in a short span of time. This, in turn, means that young folks whose time is limited can come, and be an essential part of this work.
The machine breaks the field peas though, making them inviable for the next year’s seed. We helped several families thresh and winnow their peas and dal by hand, first pounding them with sticks and then tossing what’s left over and over into the air. The tool for winnowing is called a zar, which means hand; they are made of five carefully carved and bent pieces of rosewood, lashed together on a willow handle with strips of rawhide. There are only a few left in the village. Meme Tundup says that he has rose pieces dry and ready, but he hasn’t made a new one because they are falling out of use. We hope we can work with him this winter, and learn how.
Strangers from far away come to marvel at the beauty of the mountains and waters in Tar. We ask for their help; grandmothers and grandfathers take on the familiar stress and strain of the heavy work, and enduring it once again they watch the newcomers, feed them, and instruct them. I wonder about all the things they feel, seeing these changes pass across their fields. I wonder how much we all seem like children to them.
Harvest brings everyone out. Many young Tarpa came back to the village this August to see the work through. People from Nepal, Israel, the US, Korea, Canada, France, Vietnam, the UK, Germany, and other parts of Ladakh, all met on Tar’s fields and joined the efforts. Many hands are gold, a Ladakhi saying goes, Mi mangs laga ser. And also, many unskilled hands are many mouths to feed, and the burden of welcoming, nourishing, and teaching falls sometimes joyfully and sometimes heavily on the people of the village. This season and this wild mix of people makes us question what the future of farm work in Tar will look like; what brings benefit in the present, and what may make a sustainable pattern– of agriculture, tourism, and community– for a future in Ladakh.
I love the questions you ask at the end. What do the Tarpa want it to look like?