Children of the Snowy Peak

Set in Dzongu Valley and along the Teesta River in Sikkim, India. It explores the indigenous Lepcha community worldview. Where ancestral myths, beliefs, and oral stories intertwine with present realities of nation building, capitalism, and climate change.

A vague memory: In 2007, I witnessed a group of people sleeping beside a road in protest. I looked, then walked away. I was a youth, drawn towards the big city lights and the promise of freedom. Years later after returning home, with questions of my identity and uncertainty. I realized how little I knew of myself and my homeland. The language that I spoke in was of someone else. Someone asked me once, “If you don't speak in both your father and mother tongue, in what language did you communicated in your dreams?”. The answer was ambiguous, but the question lingered and made me self-reflect about my own voice. My voice as an indigenous person returning to this place I called home.

This journey of self-reflection and rediscovery pulled me into the mythical and spiritual world of my community. A minority Indigenous community from the eastern Himalayan region of Sikkim, India, who worship nature and live with deep reverence for their land, Where the river is a sacred pathway, the mountain, the guardian creator and a place of return, and which people feared, loved and have protected for generations. And eventually led to environmental conservation, and protection of ecology in Sikkim.

My current work focuses in Dzongu Valley and along the Teesta River, in Sikkim, India. Dzongu, nestled within the Khangchendzonga Biosphere Reserve has been a Lepcha protected area since the 1950s, officially declared by the King of Sikkim. But after Sikkim's annexation by India, this once tiny Himalayan kingdom, subsumed with the larger idea of nation building as an Indian state strategically bordered with Tibet-China. Its identity was reshaped within the Indian nation-state, spurring rapid development. And hydropower projects were initiated rampantly across Sikkim. The Teesta, a transboundary river traversing Sikkim, West Bengal, and Bangladesh became a major site of exploitation. In 2023, a Glacial Lake Outburst triggered devastating floods, overwhelming the 1200 MW Teesta Stage III plant in Chungthang, North Sikkim. It was one of the biggest dams built on the Teesta River.

This danger was long forewarned. In the early 2000s, activists from the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT), and from Dzongu, Sikkim, began the “Save Teesta” movement. And after a three-year relay hunger strike, five projects in Dzongu were scrapped. And the struggle continues against the remaining projects inside Dzongu.

The ‘Save Teesta” movement became a significant moment in the history of Sikkim, India.

Children of the Snowy Peak is an ongoing experimental multimedia project born from my personal journey of rediscovery as an Indigenous Lepcha person returning home to Sikkim after years of distance and disconnection. Started in the year 2019, this work focuses on my community’s ancestral and collective memory and mythology, it navigates Lepcha cosmology, where nature, myths, and stories co-exist in sacred harmony.

Through photographs, sound, text, archives, and community collaboration, it explores the in-between spaces where spiritual beliefs and lived reality blur. ​By drawing from oral traditions, ancestral knowledge, and environmental movements like “Save Teesta,” this work reflects on identity, resilience, myth and our sacred relationship with the land. Based on memories passed down to us through oral stories and ancestral mythology, and those shaped by our current reality, standing at the edge of nation-building, capitalism, and climate change. It is an attempt to invocate the collective memory of our past, present, and the unknown.