From my village, Namgia, the mountains do not end at the border.
On a clear day, when the sky is blue and the peaks stand sharp against it, you can look across towards Tibet (now in China). Growing up here, that view never felt unusual to me. It was simply there, beyond our fields, beyond the dry mountains, beyond the roads that climb higher and higher into Upper Kinnaur.
But my grandfather looked at those mountains differently.
To him, they were not the borders of India The road that once they use to take.
When I was younger, he would tell me stories of a time when people from this part of Kinnaur travelled across these mountains for trade. Long before the highways, and modern border posts, there were paths that connected our villages with Tibet.
One of the most important of them crossed through our closest pass Shipki La.
Today we talk about Shipki La as a border pass. For generations before us, however, it was part of a much older network of movement between Kinnaur and Tibet. The old Hindustan–Tibet Road travelled through the Sutlej valley and reached the frontier at Shipki La, while the Sutlej itself enters Kinnaur from Tibet near the pass at Khab region.
For people living here, those mountains were never quite as distant as they might appear on a map.
My Grandfather's Tibet
My grandfather rarely described the journey as something extraordinary.
That is perhaps what fascinated me most.
What sounds adventurous to us today was simply part of life for an earlier generation.
He spoke about men leaving the village with animals carrying goods, disappearing slowly into the mountains and returning days or weeks later. There were no engines waiting to carry them comfortably uphill. Much of the journey depended upon feet, animals, weather and knowing the land.
You travelled when the mountains allowed you to travel. You stopped when they did not. There were certain paths, certain resting places and certain people you knew along the way.
And somewhere beyond the pass was Tibet.
The trade that moved through the Himalayan borderlands historically carried everyday commodities rather than luxuries alone. Wool, salt and other goods came through these routes, while products from the Indian side travelled in the opposite direction. Shipki La eventually became one of India's designated border-trading points with Tibet.
But listening to my grandfather, I always felt that calling it simply trade did not explain the whole story.
Because people carried more than goods.
They carried words. They carried food habits. They carried stories about places on the other side. They met people, returned home and told others what they had seen.
Over generations, journeys like these became part of the cultural memory of Upper Kinnaur.
When a mountain pass was not a border
As children, borders are easy to understand. There is our side. And there is the other side. But the older stories of Kinnaur make that idea much more complicated.
The communities of our high Himalayas existed long before today's political boundaries took their present form. Geography separated people, but it also connected them.
A high mountain pass may look like a barrier from a distance. For someone who knows the route, it can become a doorway.
Shipki La was one of those doorways.
The pass lies on the present India–Tibet frontier in Kinnaur and for centuries formed part of a corridor of economic and cultural exchange across the western Himalayas.
That history can still be felt in Upper Kinnaur. Travel through villages here and you begin to notice how naturally different cultural influences sit beside one another.
The architecture changes. The landscape becomes drier. Buddhist influences become increasingly visible.
Even the language and rhythm of everyday life begin to tell you that you are approaching a region that has looked both south towards India and north towards Tibet for generations.
Kinnaur itself was once part of the former Bushahr State, and the district in its present administrative form was created only in 1960.
History here is therefore much older than the lines we now see on a district map.
The Journey Was Never Easy
There is a tendency to romanticise old mountain life.
My grandfather never did. When he spoke of travelling through the mountains, he also spoke of cold.
Of uncertainty. Of paths where one wrong step mattered. Of weather changing faster than expected. There was no phone call to tell your family that you had reached safely.
No weather application telling you what the next three days might bring. No vehicle waiting if someone became tired. The mountains decided much of the schedule.
A journey that appears beautiful in an old photograph was also physically demanding work.
That is something I think we sometimes forget when we look back at previous generations. For them, these mountains were beautiful, certainly.But they were also livelihood.
The Sutlej came from the same direction
There is another thing I understood much later. The river flowing through Kinnaur had already made the journey before any of us had.
The Sutlej enters Himachal Pradesh from Tibet near Shipki La before cutting through the deep valleys of Kinnaur.
As a child, a river is simply a river. As you grow older, you realise what geography means.
The water passing below our mountains has crossed the same broad frontier that people once crossed for trade.
Perhaps that is why this landscape has always felt connected to something beyond itself.
The mountains may appear enormous, but the valleys have never existed completely in isolation.
People followed rivers. They crossed passes. They traded. And gradually, different worlds met.
Then the route became quiet
The twentieth century changed the character of the frontier.
Political changes in Tibet, followed by the deterioration of India–China relations and the 1962 war, severely disrupted the traditional movement that had existed across these mountains. The older patterns of travel could no longer continue in the same way.
Trade through Shipki La was later revived in a controlled form, but what returned was very different from the world remembered by previous generations.
The pass became a regulated international frontier rather than simply a route known and used by neighbouring mountain communities.
Namgia itself today lies within the protected border region, reflecting how differently this landscape is administered in the modern era.
For my grandfather's generation, that transformation must have been enormous.
A route that had existed within living memory suddenly led towards a place that became difficult to reach.
Yet the memory never completely disappeared
Even when the road became quiet, people remembered.
Perhaps this is why stories about Tibet still emerge so naturally in conversations with older people in parts of Upper Kinnaur.
Someone remembers a relative who travelled there. Another family remembers something that was traded. Someone remembers a word their grandfather used.
These are small memories. But put enough of them together and they reveal something larger. Kinnaur was never simply a remote Himalayan valley hidden from the rest of the world. It was connected. Its people travelled.
They negotiated some of the most difficult terrain imaginable and maintained relationships across mountains that today appear to divide two completely separate worlds.
And remarkably, the story is still changing.
Traditional border trade through Shipki La resumed again in August 2026 after a gap of several years, when a first group of local traders from the Indian side was permitted to cross through the route.
For people elsewhere, that may sound like a small piece of international news. For villages around this part of Kinnaur, it carries a much longer memory.
When I look across the mountains today
I sometimes wonder what my grandfather saw when he looked towards those peaks. I see an international border. I see roads, checkpoints and mountains that most people will never cross freely.
Perhaps he saw something else.
A path he knew. A place where someone was waiting. A journey that had been taken many times before.
That is what old stories do. They change the way you look at familiar landscapes.
And here in Namgia, when the evening light falls across the mountains towards Tibet, it becomes easier to understand something my grandfather's stories had been trying to tell me all along: Before these mountains marked a border, they carried a road.
And for generations, people from Kinnaur walked it.
