Alice Millington (University of Cambridge)
In the wake of the snow frog: a tale of two landslides in the Khangchendzönga region, eastern Nepali Himalayas.
This presentation explores the historical and religious context of two Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (1963 and 1980) that occurred in the Khangchendzönga region of the eastern Nepali Himalayas. Central to the discussion is a being named as the "khangba," often translated as the 'snow frog' (gangs sbal), revered as the "supreme leader of the lakes and water" by the inhabitants of this Himalayan region. Created by local Buddhist and pre-Buddhist deities, the khangba is believed to have triggered catastrophic floods in Walung and Yangma in retaliation for perceived moral transgressions. In the case of Walung, he took half of the village with him, permanently altering the demographic and economic profile of this strategic trade entrepôt. Based on ethnographic research in Nepal’s Taplejung District, the first part of the talk addresses the plural causalities and ontologies of local disaster narratives. The second part details my own ‘search for the snow frog’ across Walung, Sikkim and Kathmandu, and attempts to connect the disparate threads uncovered in the process. How might we link the khangba's myriad identities across the Himalayas — from a hyperlocal disaster entity, a generalised klu deity; a multivalent celestial animal in Tibetan folk tradition; a potent component in Tibetan medicine; and a struggling endangered species?