Kaza

Kaza grew up as a village on the main valley floor of Spiti, the 'middle country' between Tibet, Ladakh and Kinnaur, on the bank of the Spiti River. The valley has been Buddhist since the second spread of the faith across the western Himalaya around the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the great monasteries of Tabo and Key were founded; Kaza's own Sakya monastery is a much later building, but the Sakya school has been present in the valley for centuries. For most of its history the village lived on barley, peas and yaks, and on the summer trade that crossed the passes to Ladakh and Tibet.

Spiti came briefly under Dogra rule, as part of the Sikh Empire, from 1842, and under the Treaty of Amritsar of 1846 passed to direct British administration. The Sino-Indian war of 1962 ended the old trade with Tibet, and the valley was opened to tourism only in 1992. After Lahaul and Spiti became a district in 1960, Kaza became the headquarters of the Spiti subdivision of Lahaul and Spiti district, which brought the offices, the health centre and the bus stand and made it the valley's one town.

The road over the Kunzum Pass from Manali and the slow improvement of the Kinnaur road, together with the opening of the Atal Tunnel below the Rohtang Pass in 2020, have transformed the last fifteen years. Road-trip tourism from the Indian cities now fills Kaza every summer, guesthouses and cafés have multiplied, and the village is working out how to manage water, waste and traffic in a cold desert.

Kaza is a Spitian village, and Spiti is culturally Tibetan: the people speak a Bhoti dialect, practise Tibetan Buddhism, and build whitewashed, flat-roofed houses of mud brick. The monasteries, Key above all, set the religious calendar. Kaza's Sakya monastery, inaugurated by the Dalai Lama in 2009, is the village's own centre, and he held Kalachakra ceremonies at Tabo in 1983 and 1996.

The Ladarcha fair in August, once a trade fair near Chichim with traders from Ladakh and Tibet, was revived in the 1980s and is now held in Kaza as the valley's largest annual event. Spiti Losar, the new year, falls around November, and Dachang around February. Everyday manners are those of the Buddhist Himalaya: clockwise around anything sacred, shoes off, a cup of butter tea or chhang offered to guests, and a strong tradition of hospitality that the homestay movement has turned into a livelihood.

The village's newer identity is as a base for travellers: motorcyclists on the Manali–Kaza circuit, photographers, trekkers heading over the Parang La to Ladakh, and winter visitors tracking snow leopards near Kibber. Cafés have appeared along the bazaar, and the mix of monks, government clerks, farmers and visitors on one short street is what Kaza feels like in summer.

Kaza is a small place that fills up in summer, when seasonal workers, drivers and guesthouse staff arrive from elsewhere. Government jobs are a mainstay: the subdivisional offices, the school, the health centre and the police draw families from across the valley. Farming is still the base, and green peas, grown as a cash crop, have largely replaced the barley and black peas of the past, in a short growing season. Tourism is the third main source of income.

The day runs with the sun and the cold. Summer mornings are bright and still, afternoons bring a hard wind up the valley, and by evening the temperature drops sharply even in July. Winter closes the Manali road, buries the lanes, and reduces the village to its residents, who spend the months on prayer, weaving and repairs with the stove as the centre of the house.

The current issues are those of a fragile place under new pressure: water, in a cold desert fed by glacier streams; the plastic and sewage that tourism brings; electricity and mobile networks that fail for days; and the question of how much building the village and its river bank can take. Homestays spread the benefit of visitors to the outlying villages.

Spitian food is the cooking of a cold desert at high altitude: barley, which grows where wheat will not, roasted and ground into tsampa and stirred into tea or kneaded into dough; peas and potatoes from the terraces; mutton and yak when an animal is slaughtered; and dairy from cows, yaks and dzos. Butter tea, salted and churned, is drunk through the day, and chhang, a cloudy barley beer brewed at home, is offered to guests and poured at festivals. Dried foods see families through the winter.

The dishes a visitor meets are shared with Ladakh and Tibet: thukpa, a noodle soup with vegetables or meat; thenthuk, its hand-pulled cousin; momos steamed or fried; tingmo, a steamed bread; and skyu, a stew of thumbed pasta and root vegetables. Sea buckthorn, a high-altitude berry that grows in the valley, is made into a tea and juice sold in the bazaar as a local speciality.

Kaza's bazaar also feeds the drivers and road-trippers on north Indian dhaba food, parathas and omelettes for breakfast, dal, rice and sabzi at lunch, and chai everywhere. A handful of summer cafés serve coffee, pancakes and pizza to a backpacking crowd. The best meals are in the homestays, where the family cooks what it grows, and in the monasteries' kitchens at festival time.