Meher Ded — The Himalayan Shepherd Woman of Kashmir
- tribesmentravels
- May 16
- 15 min read
Marwah Valley, Kishtwar District, Jammu & Kashmir
Written for Tribesmen Travels
The morning I left Yourdoo, the valley was still in its own shadow. The Marusudar ran somewhere below the village, unseen but audible — a low, continuous sound that had been there when I went to sleep and was still there when I woke. The wooden homes of Yourdoo sat above the river on the slope, their frames dark with age, their rooftops carrying the particular silence of high-altitude mornings before the sun reaches the valley floor.
Shakeel was already standing outside when I came down. He was a Bakarwal boy— thin, unhurried, with the particular ease of someone who has never once doubted where he was going. He had a rope over one shoulder and a plastic bag with bread and something wrapped in a cloth. He did not say much. We started walking.
Yourdoo is one of those villages that registers in the body before the mind has made sense of it. It is not small in the way that small places announce themselves. It is simply far — far from the noise that most people accept as background, far from the rhythms that govern ordinary days. The valley that holds it is a bowl, and standing in it you understand why Marwah is the only place of its kind in Jammu and Kashmir: the peaks rise on all sides and the floor stays level and open, a quality that belongs to no other valley in the state. The whole arrangement feels geological rather than geographical — as if the mountains formed specifically to contain this particular silence.
We walked north from Yourdoo along a path that ran beside one of the streams feeding down from Sarasnag — the alpine lake that sits several hours above, beneath the Dangarhell massif. The stream was cold and fast, moving with the force of snowmelt rather than rainfall, and it joined the Marusudar somewhere behind us as we climbed.
Shakeel walked slightly ahead, as bakarwals always do, his pace something between casual and purposeful — the pace of someone who has made this walk so many times that it exists in the body rather than the mind.
Toward Apan — Trekking Into the Shepherd Settlements Above Marwah Valley
The path from Yourdoo toward Apan crosses through a landscape that changes more slowly than you expect. The pine slopes ease gradually into open alpine ground. The treeline recedes the sky expands. Every few hundred meters the valley reveals itself differently — a new angle on the rim of peaks, a different section of the Marusudar visible far below, the shape of a ridge that was hidden by another ridge until this particular vantage opened it.
We passed Nalan in the first hour. It is one of those places that would be impossible to invent — a high-altitude settlement beneath a wall of mountain so vertical and close that it seems the village exists in deliberate defiance of the rock.
The Bakarwal and Gujjar families who summer here have built shelters that are barely distinguishable from the landscape around them: wooden poles, canvas, stone walls that lean into the slope. But there are children running between the structures, smoke from a small fire, a dog watching from an elevated position with professional suspicion.
The alpine pastures above Nalan carry sheep trails that disappear into the upper ground. To call this a hamlet would be technically accurate and experientially insufficient. It is one of the most quietly extraordinary high-altitude settlements in Jammu and Kashmir — not for what it contains but for the fact of its existence at all, in that specific place, against those specific mountains.
We reached Apan in around two hours from Yourdoo. The route from Apan continues upward toward Sarasnag — that lake beneath the Dengerhell peaks which we have written about separately, a place with its own particular weight of silence and its own particular stories. On this day, Shakeel and I were not going to Sarasnag. We were going to find his mother.
Tribesmen has published a full guide to the Sarasnag alpine lake, the four-to-five-hour trek from Yourdoo via Apan village, and the sacred traditions of the Bakarwal people at its shores.
The Education of a Shepherd's Kitchen
I had spent time with Kashmiri shepherds before. Earlier in the year, during the Famber Valley trek in Kishtwar — the largest high-altitude pasture in Jammu province, eleven thousand feet above the Marwah approach — I had met shepherds from Pampore who were summering their flocks in that enormous meadow. They had invited me into a kitchen that existed at an altitude where most people's lungs would argue for a rest. The fire was small and specific. The trout they cooked had been caught from the same stream that runs through Famber,
We ate the fish with Maggi noodles because that is what you eat in shepherd kitchens at eleven thousand feet. It was, without qualification, one of the better meals I have had in a decade.
There had been a night in Marwah Valley earlier in the season when I stayed near the settlement of Kadir Kak — "Kak" being the respectful Kashmiri word for an elderly man, used the way some cultures use uncle or grandfather, acknowledging a certain status and a certain age.
Kadir Kak's fire was the center of an evening that extended longer than intended. And in that same valley on a different night — I cannot now be certain whether it was the same trip or a later one — there was an episode involving the dogs barking in a register that everyone in the group recognized as different. The shepherd whose name was Hassan said bear, quietly and with a stillness that communicated exactly how seriously he meant it. We did not open the door. The rain was on the roof. The darkness outside the hut was of a quality I had not encountered anywhere else we waited. The bear, if it was a bear, passed But I am getting ahead of myself.
The Shelter Beneath the Mountain
From Apan, the ground continued to climb toward the Dangarhell — one of the highest mountain arrangements in the Marwah region, a series of peaks and ridgelines running between fifteen thousand feet, their upper sections carrying permanent snow even in August, their lower flanks a series of alpine meadows and boulder fields interrupted by streams that run cold and clear regardless of the season.
Shakeel stopped at a certain point on the plateau and pointed. I looked in the direction he indicated and saw, beneath a rock formation that I had registered as part of the ordinary chaos of the boulder field, a small structure. It was close to the mountain wall — close in the way that only shelter-builders understand, placing themselves against the rock that will hold the warmth their small fire generates, using the boulder as one side of a room that would otherwise require walls.
The scale of the mountains around that shelter made it almost invisible. A giant rock. A small dark opening beneath it.
The scale of the mountains made the shelter almost invisible — a small dark opening beneath a giant rock. |
We walked for two more hours to reach it. The plateau-like ground was deceptive in the way that high-altitude terrain always is: the distance looks walkable until you are walking it, and then the cold wind and the thin air and the sound of your own breathing all conspire to make each step more deliberate than the last. The sheep trails crossed and recrossed. The silence between the peaks was not the silence of absence but of presence — a held-breath quality that belongs to high places and remains difficult to articulate afterward.
Meher Ded : Female Himalayan Shephered
A dog came first ,It came from the direction of the shelter with the velocity and commitment that mountain dogs bring to their work — the bark was not aggressive but declarative, establishing clearly that we had been seen and that our presence required explanation. Shakeel spoke to her first in Gojri, the language of the Bakarwals, and the dog retreated but continued watching.
We called out before entering. This matters in a culture where the arrival of strangers in remote places is not routine and where the announcement of oneself is both courtesy and custom. An answer came from inside — a woman's voice, steady, without alarm.
Meher Ded was seated near a small fire when we entered. The interior of the shelter was exactly what a person might imagine and also nothing like it — not the picturesque poverty of a travel magazine but a working space, organized with the logic of someone who has spent decades calibrating what is needed and what is not.
The rock formed the back wall and the ceiling at its highest point. The fire occupied a depression in the ground. Around it were the minimal possessions of a life organized around seasonal migration: bedding folded against the rock, cooking vessels of specific and deliberate sizes, a collection of objects that communicated function without decoration.
She was older her hands, when she moved them, moved with the particular precision of someone who has never wasted a gesture. She did not appear surprised to see her son or the stranger with him. She set about making tea.
I have tried, in the time since, to describe what the inside of that shelter felt like. The closest I can come is this: it was warm in the way that places are warm when warmth has been generated through effort rather than infrastructure, and that quality of earned warmth produces a different feeling than the warmth of a room with central heating. The tea arrived in a metal cup and was the temperature of something that had been made with care.
Meher Ded spoke in Kashmiri , She said she had lived this life since childhood. Migration, in the world, is not an emergency or a displacement but a season — a rotation as natural and necessary as the snow that closes the high passes each October and the melt that opens them again each June. The mountains above us were her summer. The lower valleys were her winter. The distance between the two — measured in days of walking, in the management of flocks, in the crossing of passes that non-shepherds would categorize as difficult — was simply the year.
A toddler moved between us with the confidence of a child who has known no floor other than the ground of this shelter, no ceiling other than the underside of a boulder. The daughter-in-law sat nearby, nursing something warm in her own cup. The domestic life of this family, conducted beneath a rock at fifteen thousand feet, was indistinguishable in its rhythms from domestic life anywhere — the conversations, the management of small children, the organization of food, the particular quality of attention that women in kitchens everywhere bring to their work.
I had carried sweets in my backpack — the kind of thing you bring on mountain treks in case of children. I left them Meher Ded, without ceremony, produced a piece of local Kashmiri cheese and handed it to me. It had the sharpness of altitude and the particular dense texture of cheese made from milk that comes from animals eating alpine grass. It was, like the trout in Famber, without qualification, one of the better things I have eaten.
We stayed for an hour. We did not stay longer because the light was moving and the descent required attention. Before we left, I recorded a short video. Meher Ded did not perform for it — she sat as she had been sitting, speaking as she had been speaking, her hands doing what her hands did. I posted it later, without expectation. It received, in the weeks that followed, several million views.
I have thought about that number since. Millions of people watching a woman sitting beneath a boulder in the mountains of Kashmir, making tea, being exactly herself. I am not sure what it says about what people are looking for. I am fairly sure it says something important.
The Fire at Kadir Pohal's Camp, and What Happened at Midnight
We descended from Meher Ded's shelter in the late afternoon and reached Kadir Pohal's camp as the light was going flat. Pohal means shepherd in Kashmiri — the word carries a specificity that distinguishes a shepherd who lives this life from one who does not. Kadir Kak was not a man who tended animals. He was a man whose entire existence was organized around the migration of animals and the management of that migration across a landscape most people will never enter.
The camp was a grouping of low structures around a fire that had been burning long enough to produce embers rather than flame. The sheep were settled in the surrounding darkness, their sounds marking a perimeter I could not see. The smell of the camp was the smell of lanolin and woodsmoke and something specific to the high Himalaya at night that I cannot name precisely — cold air and animal warmth and the particular earthiness of alpine soil.
We ate the conversation was in Gojri and Kashmiri, Kadir Kak spoke about the season — how the grass was holding, where the passes were likely to close first, which route they would take down in October. It was the conversation of someone managing a complex logistical operation across terrain that does not appear on any map made for tourists.
The rain came after midnight. It arrived without announcement — one moment silence, the next the sound of water on the roof of the shelter and on the ground outside. The change in sound was followed almost immediately by a change in the dogs. I was half-asleep when I became aware that the barking had shifted register. Dogs bark at many things. The particular quality of this barking — sustained, directional, and at a pitch I had not heard from those same dogs earlier in the evening — communicated something specific.
Hassan — one of the younger shepherds — said one word. Balu.
Bear.
He did not move immediately. He listened. The other men in the shelter were awake and also listening. The rain continued. The dogs continued something moved in the darkness outside the shelter that I could not see but could, in the way that certain information communicates directly to the body without passing through reason, feel was large.
We waited the shepherds made no sudden movements, lit no additional light, opened no door. They had lived this situation before and had a settled understanding of it: the bear would move on. Making noise or light might redirect its attention. The shelter was sound. The dogs were doing what the dogs were for.
After what I estimated at twenty minutes — time moves differently in that kind of darkness, in that kind of silence-that-is-not-silence — the barking changed again. Lower more intermittent then ordinary. The rain continued but the quality of the night had shifted, and within another half hour I was asleep again.
In the morning there were marks near the sheep pen that Hassan examined and did not translate for me but that the other men nodded at with an expression I understood to mean: yes, that is what we thought.
The Return to Yourdoo
We walked back down the following morning. The valley from above is not the same valley as from below — it reveals its shape differently when you are descending into it, the bowl becoming clearer, the rim of peaks settling into a panorama that the interior does not give you. The Marusudar became audible again before we reached the village. The wooden homes of Yourdoo came into sight in the middle of the afternoon.
I have been asked, since that trip, what it was about the encounter with Meher Ded that generated the response it did online. I find the question difficult to answer cleanly. The obvious answer — that people respond to human warmth in inhuman environments, that the specific image of a woman making tea beneath a boulder at altitude carries a charge that is hard to explain but easy to feel — is correct but insufficient.
The less obvious answer is something about the particular kind of competence that a life like hers represents. Meher Ded is not surviving in the mountains. She is living in them, with the fluency of someone for whom this is not an extreme environment but simply the one she knows. The toddler on that ground, the tea made from water carried from a stream, the cheese produced from her own animals — none of it carried the weight of hardship because none of it was presented as hard. It was simply life at altitude, organized by a woman who understood altitude in the way that a surgeon understands surgery: through the accumulation of practice until the knowledge is no longer conscious but physical.
I think often of what it means to move through a landscape like Marwah Valley and believe you are seeing it — its peaks, its river, its bowl of silence — when in fact you are seeing only the surface of a world that is also inhabited, in ways and by people who remain entirely invisible to the standard Kashmir itinerary.
The mountains of Kashmir are not empty. They are full of people who have organized their lives around these specific altitudes, these specific pastures, these specific passes. The hospitality that Meher Ded extended — tea, cheese, time — is the same hospitality that has been extended to us in every shepherd's kitchen we have sat in, from Pampore-pastured flocks in Famber to Kadir Kak's fire in Marwah. It is not a hospitality performed for visitors. It is simply what is done when someone arrives.
The tourist attractions of Kashmir — the gardens, the gondola, the lake, the houseboat — are real and good. But the encounter that has remained longest in my memory from all the years of traveling in this valley is a woman sitting by a small fire beneath a rock, handing me a piece of cheese. Without explanation. Without ceremony. As if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, which, in her world, it was.
The encounter that has remained longest in memory is a woman handing me a piece of cheese — without ceremony, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. |
Travel to Marwah Valley with Tribesmen
The route from Yourdoo toward Apan and beyond — into the shepherd settlements above the Sarasnag lake approach, into the world where Meher Ded lives her summers — is not a standard tour route. It requires a local guide, specific timing, and an operator who has been there and knows the current access conditions. We are that operator.
We are based in Srinagar, twenty minutes from Lal Chowk. Every offbeat route we sell is one we have walked ourselves. The Marwah Valley package includes the full valley approach, overnight accommodation, and the option to go deeper into the high shepherd country above — including, if the season allows, the walk toward the Sarasnag basin and the settlements above Apan.
WhatsApp: wa.me/916006464123 Call / WhatsApp: +91 600 6464 123 Email: support@tribesmen.org
Tribesmen Travels — J&K Tourism Registered Chandpora, Harwan, Srinagar, Kashmir 191123 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the Bakarwal shepherds of Kashmir?
The Bakarwals are a nomadic pastoralist community who have practiced seasonal transhumance in the Kashmir Himalaya for centuries. Each spring they move their flocks — primarily goats and sheep — from the lower winter valleys into the high alpine pastures above the treeline, sometimes reaching elevations above four thousand meters. Each autumn they descend before the passes close. The Gujjars are a related community, also pastoralist but more often semi-settled, occupying the mid-altitude zones. Both communities share the landscape above the Marwah Valley floor from late May through October.
Where is Yourdoo village and how do I reach it?
Yourdoo is a village in Marwah Valley, Kishtwar district, Jammu and Kashmir. It is accessible from Srinagar via the Margan Top pass — a journey of roughly six to eight hours depending on road conditions. The approach runs through Anantnag, Kokernag, and over the Margan Top plateau at 3,696 meters before descending into the Marwah bowl. The trekking routes toward Apan, Sarasnag, and the upper shepherd settlements all begin from Yourdoo. Most visitors access this area through a tour operator based in Srinagar who can manage the logistics and arrange a local guide.
What is Sarasnag and how is it connected to this route?
Sarasnag is a high-altitude alpine lake located above Yourdoo village in Marwah Valley, beneath the Dangerhell peak at 15,598 feet. It is considered sacred by the Bakarwal community and is the site of an annual prayer ritual. The trek from Yourdoo passes through Apan village and takes four to five hours one way. The lake sits at the base of one of the highest mountain systems in the Marwah region. Tribesmen has published a dedicated guide to the Sarasnag lake trek with full route, timing, and practical detail.
What is the best time to trek into the shepherd settlements above Marwah Valley?
June through September is the window when the Bakarwal and Gujjar shepherds are in residence at the high-altitude camps above Yourdoo. The Margan Top road is accessible from approximately June through early October. July and August are peak settlement months — the pastures are fully occupied, the streams are running, and the chance of encountering shepherd families at the higher elevations is highest. September is the optimal window for the combination of open passes, occupied settlements, and the beginning of autumn light changes in the valley.
Is it safe to trek into high shepherd country in Marwah Valley?
The trek into the areas above Apan and toward the Sarasnag basin is a serious high-altitude route, not a casual walk. Altitudes above four thousand meters require physical preparation and acclimatization. The presence of bears in the Marwah-Kishtwar National Park region is documented — as the encounter described in this article reflects. A local guide who knows the current conditions, the weather patterns, and the location of shepherd camps is essential. Do not attempt these routes alone. Tribesmen provides guides with direct knowledge of these specific routes, including Shakeel and others from Yourdoo village.
Can I visit Meher Ded or other shepherd families in Marwah Valley?
Encounters with shepherd families in the high-altitude camps above Marwah Valley are possible as part of a guided trek from Yourdoo. These are not organized "community tourism" experiences — they are genuine encounters that depend on seasonal presence and the specific knowledge of a local guide who has relationships with the families in question. The appropriate approach is respectful: seek permission before entering any shelter, accept hospitality when offered, do not photograph without consent. Tribesmen plans these routes in a way that treats the shepherd families as people, not attractions.
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