Words: Ameyaa Mallik
Images: Ameyaa Mallik

Image caption: The pastures open into a wide vantage point, revealing the snow peaks above and the dense forests from which we climbed. The children run between stray cattle roaming through the abundant grass.

20 March 2026

“...in living with the Van Gujjars, I came to understand musafiri as more than getting from one place to another. Musafiri functioned as a practice in which abundance is measured not by accumulation but by moving in step with what the land provides.”


Ameyaa Mallik

The cross-hatched husk roof kept us protected from the pouring rain, while the empty space where the door should have been let in the sound of loud, chirping thrushes and the smell of slowly wetting soil. As the sun began to set, Javed stepped outside the hut to recite the azan, the call to evening prayer. On the cusp of being coarsened by puberty, his voice, still gentle, spilled down the mountain valley, and the musical highs and lows of the call, together with all of us huddled around the warmth of the slow-burning hearth, held back the nipping Himalayan chill.

For over a thousand years, the Van Gujjars have lived as nomadic buffalo herders across the western Himalayan region of North India. In 2025, I worked briefly with the NGO organisation, The Society for Promotion of Himalayan Indigenous Activities, which led to my initial introduction with the Van Gujjars. Thereafter, throughout the summer, I visited the Van Gujjars living across the densely forested mountain areas of Uttarakhand and the jagged, seasonal riverine plains of neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. I carried with me very little, including a duffel with an extra pair of pants, a camera, a pocket diary, and questions about subsistence ways of living – hugely accustomed to, yet deliriously critical of, my own urban lifestyle, as I was. The camera in this process became what it had always been: not a tool for documenting the chronology or facts of events, but a means of reclaiming the chance to reflect on the feelings we were experiencing together and alone. I only hoped to remember later when Ambu Ji milked the buffalo mid-afternoon while everyone was asleep, when Amna nudged me to take a stroll in the searing overhead sun to snatch a break from the congregation in the hut, or when I stood under the towering oaks, endlessly humbled.

02.

The days are divided around the care of the buffalo. The children in the family often keep watch over the herd while they graze, and the buffalo listen intently to their whistles and voices, knowing exactly which direction each call signals.

The term the Van Gujjars use for nomadism is musafiri, the Urdu word for wayfaring or journeying. Fricatively soft, musafiri appears in Urdu poetry as a term associated with ‘epiphany’ – walking as a way of accessing a territory beyond the usual and, hence, walking as wisdom. Similarly, in living with the Van Gujjars, I came to understand musafiri as more than getting from one place to another. Musafiri functioned as a practice in which abundance is measured not by accumulation but by moving in step with what the land provides. At the same time, it carried a personal weight beyond ecologically driven migration, as an inherited and cherished way of life. The elders living farther from the high-altitude forests and pastures spoke of those places with deep longing. Lal Sain, working part-time as a watchman at a mango grove in the foothill plains, told me, “Wait till you have seen the rivers of grass up there; there’s nothing quite like it.” So addicted to walking in the forests was Lal Sain in his youth that he was known to pack up and leave for a few days, aside from the usual migratory patterns. He would take a buffalo along and drink its milk for sustenance, carrying his belongings himself instead of loading the animal, out of care. Now, in the plains, he slips into the neighbouring deciduous sal forest from time to time for a better night’s sleep.

The forest is their home, and their knowledge of it runs deep. When I was down with the flu, Rani rubbed leaves of Lantana camara on my palms, bringing immediate relief. According to her elders, the flowering shrub had been introduced by the British in colonial India as an ornamental plant. Curiously, the same plant is hazardous in the mountains, yet in the plains it offers healing; these subtleties were carefully learned by watching the buffalo, who munch on it in the plains but leave it out in the mountains. As among the few vegetarian nomadic communities in the world, the Van Gujjars primarily consume dairy as the most accessible resource, supplemented by greens, herbs, and berries, oftentimes sourced from the forests. The abundance of wild-growing foods in the higher-altitude forests is one of the reasons Hasina eagerly awaits her family’s migration uphill, as she says while we collect wild fern nodes for dinner.

05. 

Resting on a bed of pine needles after reaching the alpine pastures.

Challenges have always laced their movements across these lands, which they have continually resisted and negotiated. An example of this is the 1990s grassroots Van Gujjar movement, supported by local NGOs and extensive media coverage, which sought to undo Cartesian dualism, or the nature–human divide, that influenced conservation policies. With rapid development and changing local sociopolitical dynamics, increasingly impacted by global and transnational forces, the hurdles faced by the Van Gujjars have grown to encompass more than matters of ecological concern. Over two decades after the Van Gujjar movement, diminished public support for the cause has produced a reconfigured marginality wherein the Van Gujjars continue to assert their presence in the forest, yet their voices are far less heard when problems arise. The paths to the pastures, once forest trails, have become concrete roads dotted with growing threats such as traffic, denser populations, and a socio-political climate increasingly seeped in Hindu nationalism, and violence perpetuated against Indian Muslims. Saffron now deluges the green of Uttarakhand, provoking loose claims that cast the Muslim Van Gujjars as outsiders seizing more than one home, when in fact their home has always been walking with the swell of the seasons, the shield of canopies, taking only what is needed, and care as lived praxis.

07.

Throughout much of the day, when they are not out grazing, the buffalo remain in a shed close to the Van Gujjars’ dera. Here, the elders look after them, balancing the fresh grass they graze on outside with meals of dried husk. While milking the buffalo, the Van Gujjars take a few sips of the milk as a calf would, in a process known as dhar. “Boiled milk could never taste the same,” she says.

08. 

Playing with pebbles while the buffalo herd grazes nearby.

Back in the searing plains, we walked along dried riverbeds, taking the buffalo herd out to graze. The buffalo moved at an apathetically slow pace, giving us too much and too little to do in the meantime. We played games, tossing and catching river stones when we weren’t lounging on stubby patches of grass. Rani, who was my age and became a friend in no time, was fond of poetry and whispered a few lines she had written, later admitting they might have been influenced by a dialogue from a Bollywood film: “Hazaaron manzilein hongi, hazaaron karwaein hongi; zamaana humein dhoondega, hum na jaane kahaan honge.” (There will be a thousand destinations and a thousand caravans; time will look for us, but the search will be futile.)

09. 

Looking up while searching the forest floor for wild strawberries on our way down from the pastures.

Writer Bio

Ameyaa Mallik (b. 2004, Delhi, India) is a photographer interested in emotional interiority, the ways our chosen and surrounding geologic landscapes reflect and extend it, and image-making as a conscious process with the ability to hold space between loss and change.