How women-led collectives have become custodians of Monpa heritage in Arunachal Pradesh

Four women from Damu’s Heritage Dine, a community tourism venture—Dorjee Lhamu, Leiki Chomu, Tsering Lhamu and Rinchin Jomba—prepared ingredients for the pop-up organised by World Wildlife Fund India. They chatted with guests as they readied litho, or Asian pear, water celery, buckwheat noodles, phursing gombu and organic red rajma. Especially interesting is the phursing gombu, or cornflour tart filled with oleoresins sourced from the Chinese lacquer tree. Chomu and Jomba informed us that locals suffer severe allergic reactions by even going near the tree or touching it. Hence they are scared to harvest it. Only one elder in the village has the skillset to harvest it correctly.

Dressed in traditional shinka todung, the women served stories like these along with takto khazi or buckwheat noodles, and an orange salad with pickled radish. The meal, part of a series of pop-ups across Delhi, was not just an introduction to the exquisite and rarely-showcased Monpa cuisine but also to a fast-fading way of indigenous living.

Back home in Arunachal Pradesh, a team of eight women manages Damu’s, an 11-seater restaurant housed in a 150-year-old Monpa heritage structure. Started in March 2024, the community-based tourism venture nestled within the busy Tawang circuit has been witnessing a steady stream of tourists who want to sample authentic local cuisine, after feeling wary of the generic noodles, momos and poori sabzi offered by other eateries in the region. Today, tables need to be booked a day in advance at Damu’s, which derives its name from the word ‘daughter’. “We are showcasing heritage without commodifying it. Damu’s highlights how tradition too can evolve and keep up with the times," says Jomba, 41, who enjoys plating Monpa dishes to give them a fine-dining feel.

The old home, belonging to Jomba’s extended family, is an example of the fast-disappearing Monpa architecture. Similar mud-and-stone buildings suited to the local climate are being replaced by reinforced cement and concrete homes. There is an increasing social stigma around indigenous homes, with many locals of the view that RCC structures are signs of affluence. In such a scenario, Damu’s Heritage Dine doesn’t just try to conserve heritage cuisine but also strives to instill a sense of pride in age-old local architecture. By choosing to base themselves in the 150-year-old home, renovated with the help of WWF India, this set of women is showing how old Monpa structures can be repurposed and adapted.

Residing in the lush forested districts of West Kameng and Tawang, the three branches of the Monpa community—Tawang Monpa, Dirang Monpa and Kalaktang Monpa—are known for their culinary wisdom, climate-resilient architecture, pastoral songs and weaving, all rooted in the rich local ecology. However, the younger generation is moving away from this traditional knowledge. Women-led collectives are taking matters into their own hands and finding ways of returning the community to the ethos of their land.

As at Damu’s Heritage Dine, likeminded women have come together in Nyukmadung, Chug and Tawang, where a social enterprise and grassroots design studio, It’s All Folk, led by designer Namrata Tiwari, is working on a craft-to-conservation model. The community facilitation centre serves as a research and development hub for the brand Norbu, which markets smaller craft collectives such as Dangnga and Brokpa. Based on a farm-to-fashion model, fibre for each of their products is sourced directly from the Brokpas, the traditional yak herders.

“Climate change forced the Brokpas to shift to higher altitudes. Attacks on yaks by dogs and periodic outbreak of diseases have put the livelihood of this pastoral community in peril. They are abandoning yak herding to work as contractual labour," says Kamal Medhi, senior expert, community-based conservation, WWF India. To change that, the Norbu Collective has taken on the production, design and marketing of products made with raw material sourced from the Brokpas. “These practices have always existed in the villages. We are not introducing something new, rather we are adding value to the existing system by bringing in technical expertise," says Medhi.

About 25km away, in the Chug Valley, a self-help group led by Dorji Choijam is reviving the centuries-old mon-shugu style of paper making. Delhi-based Tripti Shukla, who runs Vanwasi-Adiwasi Foundation, trained women to use natural dyes and pigments to make diaries out of mon-shugu paper, which holds immense significance to the Monpa community, but is dying out as people are turning to industrial paper. A wildlife researcher, Shukla founded the Vanwasi-Adiwasi in 2021 as a pilot project to foster community-based conservation. In 2024, she visited Chug as part of her foundation’s effort to empower women of indigenous communities. A workshop was conducted in an initiative to revive traditional Monpa craft while fostering conservation awareness for the endangered migratory black-necked crane.

“These collectives don’t just generate livelihood but also instil pride in heritage practices. This creates a sense of ownership within the community," explains Medhi. Western Arunachal Pradesh spans several altitudinal variations, from 500 to 7,000 metres, and is home to thousands of species of flowering plants and animals. The Monpas, who form the majority, have community custodianship of nearly 60 per cent of the forested land. Since 2004, WWF India has been working with locals to establish Community Conserved Areas, or CCAs, to connect livelihood and conservation, and empower locals to manage their natural resources.

“The most significant achievement of the CCA framework has been the securing of more than 1500 square kilometers of red panda and snow leopard habitat," states a WWF report. Community-based tourism programmes also fund conservation—surpluses from Themang Bapu CCA in West Kameng fund forest patrolling to monitor illegal collection of minor forest products and hunting. There are nine CCAs in West Kameng and Tawang, with village councils and women leading the efforts in most.

“Women used to play a significant role in pastoral communities back in the day," says Medhi. “Their roles got limited during the transition from traditional to modern way of living. They started working as labour on construction sites or were tilling small pieces of land." Through the CCAs, the idea was to restore the agency of women and make them the fulcrum of livelihood and conservation initiatives.

Damu’s began when Nishant Sinha, a community-based tourism coordinator for WWF, saw how quickly the landscape was changing in western Arunachal Pradesh, but the elders were resistant to his ideas. Jomba alone listened and got her family together to adapt their family home into a restaurant. The learning has been a two-way street. For instance, when the Damu’s team came to Delhi in November and noticed the demand for natural materials in everyday living, they realised the folly of what was happening back home. “While their homes were being filled with plastic chairs, tables and cupboards, the world outside was taking a more ecofriendly approach. That was a big realisation—the need to go back to the older sustainable ways," he says.

Damu’s has inspired others. Leki Chomu, the 24-year-old manager at Damu’s, started a living museum in her 200-year-old ancestral home last year. She wants to offer an immersive storytelling experience around the everyday life of her community, with a library, tours and other initiatives. Similarly, residents of Mirba, a 1,000-year-old Monpa village in Tawang, have preserved their mud-and-stone homes, and the state government has declared it a heritage village.

The income from such initiatives has made it lucrative to other women, who would either work in the home or till their land. Though the WWF team has not yet audited the revenue from Damu’s, the estimated income during peak season, between October to January, has been around ₹1.5 lakh a month, with 50 per cent of this as profit. “Others come to me for guidance on what they could take up. Last year, we supported the Duhumbi Heritage Fair in Chug Valley, led by a mix of women and men, which celebrated Monpa and Brokpa heritage. This year, they organised the event without our support. They have understood the value of their heritage," says Sinha.

The road to change is a long one. “The results will start coming in a decade but the foundation has been laid," says Tiwari. Besides a field office in Nyukmadung, It’s All Folk runs a community facilitation centre and a series of women’s groups across western Arunachal. “The mission has always been to create place-based intervention… nothing alien is introduced," adds Tiwari, who has been working in northeast India for ten years. “The Brokpa and Dangnga Collectives are not registered as self-help groups. These are traditional women’s collectives, recognised as institutions by the local communities. We have made a conscious effort to acknowledge the traditional institutions that exist within the Monpa community," says Tiwari. The collectives are known as tsokpas, based on the Monpa term for a group of people who come together for a mission. Besides 45 yak herders, the brand Norbu brings together 12 women in a collective at Nyukmadung and 15 in Chug. The target is to have 100 beneficiaries in the near future.

Pema Choton, 47, lovingly called Ama Bato by those in her village, is the community lead at Nyukmadung. Earlier, Choton would weave garments only for her husband, two daughters and son. “Namrata Madam taught us how to make jackets using sheep and yak wool and other products too. People would earlier burn the wool, but she showed us how to bring new techniques together with our traditional knowledge to use this material sustainably," she says. The money has come in handy too, especially to support children’s education or to buy little treats.