Work on the history, traditions, and languages of Lahaul and some neighbouring regions
Tobdan (born 1944) is a historian and linguist from Himachal Pradesh, India. He is noted for his work on the cultural traditions, histories, and languages of the Lahaul and Spiti district, and some neighboring regions.
Personal life
Tobdan originally belongs to the Tod valley of the Lahaul division of the Lahaul and Spiti district, Himachal Pradesh.[1][2] He is a retired bank official.[3][4] He lives in the Kullu valley, Himachal Pradesh.[5] Tobdan is multilingual. He is fluent in his native sTodpa, Hindi, English, and Punjabi, and is conversant in most of the languages spoken in Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh, and Spiti.[6]
Tobdan was among the founder-members of the non-governmental organization 'Society for Conservation and Promotion of Culture in Lahaul & Spiti', and the chief editor of its annual, and later bi-annual magazine Kunzom, which was published from 2005 to 2014.[7][8]Kunzom published short stories, poems, folksongs and grammatical sketches in various languages spoken in the Lahaul and Spiti district.
Tobdan supports the claim that Buddhism was present in Lahaul before the advent of Tibetan Buddhism, and discusses them in some of his Lahaul-based works.[10][11]
In 2010, he opposed diverting water from natural water channels for hydroelectric dams in the Lahaul region.[12]
In a 2021 interview, he expressed support for the preservation of the near-extinct Tankri script of the western Himalayas.[13]
In another 2021 interview, Tobdan opined that compared to its neighboring valley Spiti in the Lahaul and Spiti district, Lahaul had received very little scholarly attention. He had intended to bridge that knowledge gap through his body of work and particularly his then-recent book Ancient Lahul and Himalaya.[14]
Reception
Tobdan's works have been cited by many academics and independent scholars as important secondary sources on the histories, languages, and cultures of regions in Himachal Pradesh like Kullu, Lahaul, Spiti, and Kinnaur. These include Moran (2013),[15] Tsering (2014),[16] Bellezza (2015),[17] Rahimzadeh (2016),[18] Bhattacharya (2017),[19] Chamberlain and Chamberlain (2019),[20] and Halperin (2019).[21]
Elizabeth Anne Stutchbury, who conducted her doctoral research in Lahaul in the early 1980s, appreciated Tobdan's early initiative, as a Lahauli local, of studying and documenting his homeland, while decrying the general lack of any in-depth anthropological research on Lahaul at that point of time.[22]
John Bray commends Tobdan and Dorje's book on the Moravian missionaries in western Himalayas (2008) as a valuable contribution that makes information from disparate sources on this subject more readily available.[23]
^Stutchbury, Elizabeth Anne (1991). Rediscovering Western Tibet: Gonpa, Chorten, and the Continuity of Practice with a Tibetan Buddhist Community in the Indian Himalaya. PhD diss. at the Australian National University. p. 34.
^Berti, Daniela (2001). "Book review of Joshi et al (eds.) 'Himalaya: Past and Present Vol IV, 1993-94". European Bulletin of Himalayan Research. 20 (1): 228–232.
^Tsering, Tashi (2014). "On the Unknown History of a Himalayan Buddhist Enclave: Spiti Valley before the 10th Century". Journal of Research Institute: Historical Development of the Tibetan Languages. 51: 523–551.
^Stutchbury, Elizabeth Anne (1991). Rediscovering Western Tibet: Gonpa, Chorten, and the Continuity of Practice with a Tibetan Buddhist Community in the Indian Himalaya. PhD diss. at the Australian National University. p. 43.
