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Paper short abstract

In Lahaul, Western Himalayas, mountains shape the valley’s cultural discourse, and the landscape is regarded as kin. In their worldview, ritual performances and oral traditions are living conversations with the land, sustaining ways of dwelling, memory, and cosmological intimacy across generations.

Paper long abstract

Amidst the lofty valleys of Lahaul, Western Himalayas, mountains shape the cultural discourse of the valley. Rivers carve their way through glaciers, Snow marks the rhythm of life, and Mountains are not distant landscapes but kin and guardians. In Lahauli worldview, rituals and oral traditions are living conversations with the land: ways of dwelling, remembering, and sustaining cosmological intimacy across generations.

This paper explores cultural practices like Kuns (New Year rites) and Gotsi (birth rituals), and oral genres such as Sugli (laments) and Ghure (narrative ballads) as forms of ecological and sacred storytelling. Through them, humans, mountains, rivers, animals, and ancestors meet in performance, creating shared meaning that binds together life, memory, and landscape. During Kuns, villagers offer prayers to Shikhara Appa, the “grandmother of the mountains,” reminding themselves that survival is tied to agricultural cycles. The Himalayan Ibex (Tangrol), once hunted for sacrifice, now appears in fragile effigies of snow, leaves, or paper: a gesture of care that honours the land while responding to ecological change. In Gotsi, the arrival of a child is woven into networks of kinship. Sugli turns grief into shared memory, and Ghure carry the pulse of seasons, binding work, ritual, and song to the rhythms of the valley. These practices reveal Lahaul as a generative site of knowledge, care, and connection. Here, storytelling is not about the mountain; it unfolds with it, sustaining relationships between humans, spirits, and landscapes, and offering a vision of cultural life where memory, ecology, and cosmology are inseparably intertwined.