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The modernisation of Ladakh was initiated in the 1960s by the Indian government with the construction of a road in the region, in order to defend its borders from China and Pakistan. Prior to the intrusion, it had been a quaint, hilly area detached both culturally and linguistically from the mainland. Ladakh is one of the most sparsely-populated regions in India and its culture and history are closely related to those of Tibet.
Since the early 1960s, the number of immigrants from Tibet have increased as they fled the occupation of their homeland by the Chinese. Even though the major portion of the Ladakhis are Buddhists, there is a considerable Muslim population in the valley. An amalgamation of different ethnicities and religions has engendered an interesting miscellany of cultures in Ladakh. Since Ladakhi society is a pre-literate one, its history and the stories of its people have been passed down orally since ancient times.
Morup Namgyal, affectionately called “the Song-Collector of Ladakh”, walked hundreds of miles throughout his homeland, touring villages and documenting their folk songs. Through this journey, began his lifelong efforts to preserve Ladakh’s vanishing folk songs. Morup Namgyal has spent over 40 years archiving those songs. He also co-founded The Lamdon Society comprising of a group of artists and social activists committed to preserving the Ladakhi culture. In the early 1970s, they founded The Lamdon School, which broke from the government curriculum and introduced Ladakhi as the language of instruction. Over 2000 children are educated at Lamdon, the region’s most vital force for the preservation of Ladakhi culture.
Despite such endeavours, it has been extremely difficult to preserve the Ladakhi culture in all its splendour. However, Morup Namgyal had relentlessly tried to do so, for which he had got the Padma Shri in 2004.
Interestingly, this man’s story was first brought under the spotlight by an American from Seattle whose tryst with the mountaineous kingdom of Ladakh was in 2001. Erik Koto, a documentary filmmaker, had gone on a cycling expedition across the Aksai Chin plateau in Western China, which had been a part of Ladakh for centuries. It was later invaded and occupied by the Chinese during the 1962 Sino-Indian war. He returned to Ladakh in 2008 for taking part in a volunteer project at the non-profit Lamdon school. It was during this volunteering session at the capital city of Leh that he came to find out about the man, Morup Namgyal.
He conducted a thorough research on him, and came back to Ladakh the following year for filming a feature-length documentary on Morup’s life as a folk singer and social activist. He had to make eight trips to Ladakh for this ambitious venture. Erik Koto says, “ I began to think of each trip as a mini expedition, and took to bringing two or three of everything…if something failed in Ladakh, there was no chance of getting a replacement.”, reports The Quint.
Shooting for the documentary had not been an easy task; in fact, it had been a pretty daunting one. He had to encounter blizzards, floods and dust storms, as well as extreme weather conditions while shooting for the documentary. There were frequent power cuts which made things difficult for the single-man crew.
It took around four years to shoot the entire documentary amidst such difficult circumstances. The film, which was named “The Song-Collector of Ladakh”, evoked the traditional culture of Ladakh in contrast to the looming threat of cultural homogenisation in the region. However, at the heart of the film was Morup Namgyal, the man behind it all.
The documentary had its world premiere at Mountainfilm Telluride, a film festival in Colorado, U.S.A., dedicated to “celebrating the indomitable human spirit”. The film took home the Indomitable Spirit Award, awarded annually to the film that best represented the vision to “dream big and dare to fail”.
The film documents the various stages in Morup’s life through his tryst as a singer, to his proactive role in establishing The Lamdon School and archiving the oral histories of Ladakh. The film explores Namgyal’s musical experience through the articulation of his thoughts, hopes, fears and songs, as told in interviews and observational filmmaking. There is a series of footage of musical performances engaged in by Namgyal’s family, especially his ten-year old grandson, Stanzin ‘Nono’ Samchok. One of the ways in which Erik had explored the sense of change in Ladakhi society is by drawing up an analogy between Nono and Morup’s perspectives. The film shows how the younger people of the valley had slowly been distanced from the old songs and ways of life in Ladakh. However, even though it is a story of loss, it does not succumb to being one of nostalgia.
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