photographs by Sharbendu De Text by Rishi Kochhar
01 November, 2019
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"text": "Dulusu and Lisangi Yobin rest with their youngest son, in the middle of the forest, in the Vijoynagar Circle, Changlang district. The Lisus believe in Christianity.",
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"text": "Lisus live inside the dense forests of Namdapha Nation Park, without access to roads, electricity, schools and healthcare. Reserved-park rules do not permit any permanent constructions. As a result of this, the 157-kilometre-long MV Road, which was sanctioned in the 1970s to connect the nearest town Miao with the last village, Vijoynagar, is still a mud and slush track unfit for vehicular commute. Vehicles cannot ply on this road and locals have to trek for between three and five days to reach Miao, walking anywhere between twenty-three and twenty-eight kilometres a day.",
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"text": "Lisu women trek towards Miao with their children on their back. They trek long distances each day, and, at times, halt midway inside the park. They use banana leaves to create a makeshift canopy, cook their food, rest for the night and set out on their journey early next morning. Many of them suffer accidents including insect and occasional snake bites. River crossings during the monsoon becomes particularly difficult with the high water levels and bamboo bridges swept away.",
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"text": "A Lisu resident from Ngwazakha village manning the nearest bamboo bridges in order to collect toll from the people who use these bridges to commute. Every year the community builds bamboo bridges, but the river washes them away every monsoon, locking the Lisus down in their respective villages. During monsoons, even if someone falls sick, there is no way to evacuate them to Miao for emergency medical treatment.",
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"text": "A dead buffalo in the middle of a grazing ground inside Namdapha National Park went unnoticed for some time.",
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"text": "A group of Lisus from Dawodi village bring a sick man to the Assam Rifles medical room in Vijoynagar for emergency care. The government set up a small health centre in Dawodi village but doctors are hardly ever present and medicines are often out of stock. Often, due to the paucity of seats in aircrafts and the low priority given to civilians in defence aircrafts, villagers needing to be transferred to larger hospitals are often turned away, leaving them to either die or to embark on a five-day trek through Namdapha National Park to reach Miao, the nearest administrative sub division with a hospital. Treks with patients take even longer than five days as the terrain is extremely arduous.",
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"text": "Without any electricity supply, the Lisus are solely dependent on solar energy. On sunny days, when batteries can be charged, they are able to watch television for a few hours in the evening, before the batteries dies Television and radio are the Lisus’ sole ways of staying connected with the world.",
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"text": "Vijoynagar, originally known as Dawodi, was inhabited by the Lisus. On 7 May 1961, Major Sumer Singh of Assam Rifles undertook the first Chaukhan Pass expedition and encountered the Lisus. He renamed the village Shidi as Gandhigram. Later, around November 1961, Major General AS Guraya, the IG of Assam Rifles at the time, made a visit and established processes for settling around 200 Nepali ex-servicemen in the Vijoynagar area. Lisu locals say that Major Guraya forced the Lisus to vacate their native lands at gunpoint in order to achieve this. Now the Nepali population has surpassed the total population of Lisus in Vijoynagar Circle. This has increased tensions between the two communities.",
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"text": "Two boys in Gandhigram village spend their time playing video games on their phone. There is no cellular network in this region and the entire area is cut off from telecommunications with the rest of the world. The village has no electricity, and has one satellite-phone service that charges C7 a minute. Most of the time, this service is also weather-dependent. In rainy weather, the batteries cannot be charged. Only a couple of houses in Gandhigram have generator sets, which they use sparingly. A litre of kerosene or petrol here costs around two hundred rupees each, and it has to be lugged by either the Chakma porters or by the Lisus themselves. Every year, the Lisus trek to Miao a couple of times to buy provisions, including salt, kerosene, petrol, cooking oil, spices and medicines. The journey back takes between three and five days. By the time these basic provisions reach the respective villages, their costs shoot up three-five times, depending on the distance. A kilo of salt, for instance, can cost upto two hundred rupees.",
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"text": "A family in Agohomu village breaks into mourning and anxiously attempts to revive a child, who is seriously ill and had fainted. In the absence of doctors and medicines, the Lisus have no other option but to resort to their traditional knowledge and faith. David Yobin serves as the local health volunteer, who, after receiving medical training organised by one of the Lisus, has been treating the villagers. The Lisu community is tightly knit, and they teach their children, treat their sick, bury their dead, mourn and celebrate together. However, a rising sense of frustration is now visible in the community.",
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"text": "A family enroute to Miao halts for the night inside Namdapha National Park. It takes them between three and five days of trekking through the forest to commute a mere 120-157 km. Such treks are particularly strenuous on women and young children. At times, they meet with accidents and suffer insect bites, and always face the risk of encountering wild animals. Over the years, the Lisus have sent their children to boarding schools in nearby towns outside the park. In the absence of formal schooling inside the park and neighbouring villages such as Gandhigram and Hazolo, most children grow up with little or no education, leading them to frequently drop out even when they do go to boarding school.",
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"text": "Villagers construct a government quarter that was sanctioned for a doctor’s residence. Oddly, these quarters have been vacant for a long time. The man in the foreground stands inside another quarter built for a government-appointed nurse to stay. It has been empty, and was occupied by Sharbendu De during his two-month stay in Gandhigram in 2018.",
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"text": "Ngwalidew from Gandhigram used to work as the local school teacher under the local MLA fund at a monthly salary of C4000. After his father passed away, he took charge of the education of his two sisters and sent them to a college in Changlang. He had studied hotel management in Kolkata and had even landed a job at a five-star hotel in Mumbai, but returned home since he could not afford the exorbitant living expenses.",
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} A MYTH IN LISU FOLKLORE figures two orphan siblings, Lecha and Secha, who live in a forest with other members of their community. In the face of an imminent flood, a bird perched on a tree tells the two to take shelter in a cave and seal its opening until the flood recedes.
They do this, but when, eventually, they emerge, they realise that the flood has swept away their village and they are the only survivors. Deciding to search for other survivors, they go separate ways, but are left alone until they cross paths again, when they are much older, and eventually marry to continue their race.
As the photographer Sharbendu De recounted this myth, he added that it “bears all the archetypal imprints that resonate with the Lisus even today: crisis, loneliness, endless wait and the quest for belonging.” Over the past six years, De has worked extensively on documenting the indigenous Tibeto-Burman Lisu community living deep inside the Namdapha National Park in Arunachal Pradesh, along the Indo-Myanmar border. The Lisu community and its ancestors, who were initially hunters and gatherers, are known to have migrated from the Yunnan province in China and settled in Namdapha long before the international boundary between India and Myanmar was demarcated, in 1969. (Lisus in India have been referred to by the name “Yobin.” One report records their presence since at least the 1940s.) Since then, they have managed without basic amenities and public infrastructure, such as schools, roads, hospitals, phone networks or electricity. The nearest town, Miao, is over a hundred kilometres away, implying that a trek of between three and six days, through dense forests, has to be undertaken if they want to buy essential supplies or medicines. According to De, Lisu society is self-sustaining, which works by being tightly knit. For instance, they often barter produce, extract forest produce and teach the community’s children together, and when one member of the community builds a house, a person from each house in the village volunteers at various points in the construction.
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