Vanishing Villages

Across the Indian Himalayan Region, high-altitude villages are being abandoned at alarming rates.

Kambotari Devi shouts from her terrace, trying to chase a monkey out of her fields. “They’ve been coming every day for 15 years,” she tells Yvan Rodic, the street photographer known pseudonymously as FaceHunter.

“They steal fruit from our orchards. The boars are just as bad—they destroy everything. But we’re not allowed to kill them. They’re protected.”

She knows she can’t stop what’s coming, but she fights anyway, refusing to give up.

As forests shrink, rainfall patterns shift, and predators like leopards disappear, monkeys and boars have multiplied across these hills, roaming more freely than ever and venturing ever closer to villages in search of food.

Kambotari has lived in Patoti since she was 16 and still works a few fields. “One of my sons lives in the city of Srinagar,” she says. “The other lives with me and helps when he can, but he drives a taxi to make ends meet.

“Farming doesn’t make sense anymore.”

The monkeys and boars will be back tomorrow, and Kambotari will continue shouting. But for most young people, mountain farming has become a losing battle, and the future seems to reside elsewhere.

Ram Singh, an older farmer, adds, “I still work the land the old way. My son is in Delhi but can’t support me, and my daughter is married in another village.”

“I’d move to the city too, if I could afford it.”

In his conversations, Rodic listened to people’s mixed feelings about leaving: there is hope for what’s next, but also pain and a sense of loss for a way of life.