Sikkim: Who will remember the Yak? Inside Lachung’s living oral tradition

“Yes. Earlier, they offered an entire yak during the puja. But a yak is expensive. So the responsibility was divided. One household brought the thigh, another another part, and so on for the ritual offering.”

It was an ordinary conversation with a colleague, but it stayed with me long after we had finished talking.

I had spent much of my academic life documenting the oral traditions of the Eastern Himalayas, yet this was the first time I had heard of a ritual shared through the different parts of a single animal. Why the yak? Why the thigh? More importantly, what story lay behind a tradition that one family still remembered but few seemed able to explain?

The questions eventually took me to Lachung in North Sikkim. I thought I was searching for the history of a ritual. Instead, I found myself searching for the people who still remembered why that ritual existed.

Everyone I met directed me to the same person.

“You should speak to Ajo.”

In the local Bhutia dialect, Ajo simply means “grandfather.” But in Lachung, it meant something more. It was how the village affectionately addressed an elder whose memories had become part of its collective memory. If anyone still knew the stories behind the mountains, the rituals and the sacred places, they said, it would be him.

My father and I found Ajo seated beside the kitchen hearth, quietly preparing the evening meal. One of his sons welcomed us with cups of freshly churned buttermilk and a bamboo basket filled with neatly braided khapsay. The room smelled of wood smoke, and neighbours wandered in and out as though every visit naturally ended around the same fire.

There was no interview.

Only conversation.

We began by speaking about the village itself.

“There were only seven households here once,” Ajo recalled, repeating what he had heard from the elders of his own childhood.

There were no roads then, he said. People walked for days across the mountains, carrying salt, wool and grain between settlements. News travelled slowly. Stories travelled much faster. They passed from one generation to the next around hearths like this one, carrying memories of sacred caves, guardian deities and ancestors who had shaped the village long before written history reached these mountains.

Only after nearly an hour did I ask the question that had brought me there.

“Why was the yak so important?”

Ajo smiled.

“You cannot begin with the yak,” he said. “You have to begin with the mountain.”

He rested his knife beside the chopping board and leaned slightly towards the fire, as though returning to a story he had told many times before.

“It began near Yuksom,” he said, “at a place called Pawo Khandri.”

Long ago, a young woman was grazing cattle in the high pastures when she encountered a mysterious stranger dressed entirely in white. The man offered her what appeared to be a lump of fresh snow. Thirsty after hours in the mountains, she accepted it without hesitation.

The stranger disappeared.

Some time later, despite never having been with a man, the young woman realised she was pregnant. Frightened and unable to explain what had happened, she eventually returned to the mountains, where she gave birth to what Ajo described as a dhoba khacha—a fleshy mass resembling entrails rather than a child. Terrified, she hid it inside a rocky crevice before hurrying home.

When villagers searched the place she described, they found nothing except enormous footprints believed to belong to an eagle.

Then the mountains began to speak.

“Hung… Hung… Hung…”

Day after day, the mysterious sound echoed from a cave now known as Hungri Dha. Alarmed, the villagers sought the advice of respected Rinpoches. Then, according to Ajo, an eagle descended carrying a letter. It instructed them to search once again near a cliff where a rock appeared ready to split apart.

This time they found a living child.

The child was brought back to the village but constantly pointed towards the mountains, refusing to settle. Religious elders declared that a sacred treasure would soon reveal itself. On the night of the full moon, villagers gathered outside the cave, where a hidden gter, or treasure, emerged from the rock itself. The child stepped forward and grasped it, revealing, according to local belief, his extraordinary spiritual destiny. In time, Ajo said, the miraculous child became associated with the lineage of Lachung Rinpoche, forever linking Hungri Cave with the sacred history of Lachung.

For a few moments neither of us spoke.

The fire crackled softly between us.

Whether the story was understood as history, faith or folklore seemed almost beside the point. What mattered was that it had survived—not in books or guidebooks, but in memory.

Ajo looked at me, perhaps sensing that I was still trying to connect the legend with the question I had asked at the beginning.

“The yak,” he said quietly, “was never just an animal.”

“It was part of a promise.”

That single sentence transformed everything.

The story I had come searching for was no longer about sacrifice.

It was about the promises communities make—to their ancestors, to their deities, and to the landscapes they call home. Understanding the yak, Ajo reminded me, first required understanding the stories that gave it meaning.

And that was where the real journey began.

Ajo’s words stayed with me long after he had finished speaking.

A promise.

It was perhaps the simplest explanation I had heard all evening, yet it carried the weight of generations.

He explained that long before symbolic offerings became common, families gathered at Chuba, one of Lachung’s oldest sacred ritual sites, to perform Phola Syoye, a ceremony dedicated to ancestral and local protective deities. Earlier generations believed these deities safeguarded the village, protected livestock, ensured good harvests and watched over families. Offering a yak was not merely an act of worship; it was the fulfilment of a relationship established by their ancestors.

Among the different parts of the animal, the hind thigh held particular importance. A long sinew drawn from it formed part of the offering, symbolising the removal of illness, obstacles and misfortune. Suddenly, the conversation with my colleague made sense. The memory of carrying the thigh had survived even after much of the larger ritual had faded. What one family remembered today was not an isolated custom but a fragment of a much older tradition.

“The yak was everything,” Ajo said.

In the high Himalayas, it carried loads across mountain passes, provided milk and butter, supplied wool for clothing and sustained households through unforgiving winters. Offering a yak therefore meant surrendering one of a family’s greatest possessions. It was both an act of faith and an act of gratitude.

Yet traditions rarely remain unchanged.

As roads reached villages that had once depended on mountain trails, livelihoods gradually shifted. Younger generations left for education and work. Maintaining large yak herds became increasingly difficult, while Buddhist teachings emphasising compassion towards all living beings encouraged many families to reconsider animal sacrifice.

What surprised me most was not that the ritual changed, but how it changed.

Rather than abandoning it altogether, the community chose to preserve its meaning.

Today, a symbolic yak made from butter and pak—roasted barley dough—takes the place of a living animal. The offering is different, but the prayer remains the same. It is a reminder that traditions do not always disappear; sometimes they simply find new ways to endure.

Then Ajo spoke about a practice I had never encountered before.

When a family decides it can no longer continue an ancestral ritual, they do not quietly stop.

They first ask for forgiveness.

During my fieldwork, another family described gathering relatives, monks and elders before formally ending the ritual observed by their ancestors. Together they offered prayers and explained that changing circumstances no longer allowed them to continue.

“Even for us it is difficult to find a yak now,” one family member told me. “How will our children find one in the future? We asked for forgiveness because we could not continue.”

There was no sense of rejecting tradition. Instead, the ceremony acknowledged it with humility and gratitude before gently letting it go. It recognised that circumstances may change, but respect for one’s ancestors need not.

Listening to these conversations, I realised my journey had quietly changed direction.

I had travelled to Lachung hoping to understand why one family still remembered carrying the thigh of a yak to a ritual.

Instead, I found myself asking a different question.

What happens when the last people who remember these stories are gone?

As the evening drew to a close, Ajo returned to preparing the evening meal, as though he had simply finished an ordinary conversation. Outside, children played along roads that had never existed in his youth. Visitors continued towards Yumthang and Zero Point, admiring the dramatic landscape without knowing that hidden within these mountains were stories carried almost entirely in memory.

Ajo never described himself as a storyteller.

To him, he was simply remembering what his own elders had once told him.

That, perhaps, is what struck me most.

Across the Himalayas, countless traditions survive not because they are written in books or marked on signboards, but because someone continues to tell them. Every conversation around a kitchen hearth, every story shared during a village gathering, becomes another act of preservation.

The butter yak offered at Chuba today still carries the memory of an older sacrifice. The ritual has changed, but the stories explaining why it mattered continue to give it life.

Those stories are becoming increasingly fragile.

As elders pass away, they take with them not only names and dates but entire ways of understanding the landscape—why a cave is sacred, why a mountain commands respect, why a family once carried only the thigh of a yak to a ceremony. Once forgotten, such knowledge is almost impossible to recover.

I left Lachung with pages of notes, recordings and photographs. Yet none of them felt as valuable as the evening I had spent listening to Ajo.

I had arrived searching for the meaning behind an old ritual.

I left believing that preserving oral traditions is not simply about documenting the past. It is about ensuring that future generations can still understand the stories that shaped their communities, long after the rituals themselves have changed.

One day, the butter yak may still sit upon the altar.

My hope is that someone will still remember why.

Tenzin Nyima Bhutia is an Assistant Professor of English at Sikkim Manipal University – Centre for Distance and Online Education and a Research Scholar in the Department of English at Sikkim University. Her doctoral research examines the narratives of folk beliefs in Sikkim, with a particular focus on oral traditions, indigenous knowledge systems, and lived religious practices. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork across the Eastern Himalayas, she documents stories, rituals, and community memories preserved by village elders, with the aim of safeguarding endangered oral traditions for future generations.

Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on this or any other issue.

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