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Between the mountain peaks and the plains is a belt of ridges and deep valleys. It is an area of great beauty, where isolated villages exist very independently, and where agriculture is hard manual work. The Tibetan Sakya Centre is in Rajpur, on the edge of this belt and close to the plains. The photographer Germaine Krull (1897-1985) retired to the nearby city of Dehra Dun, where she spent her late life helping Tibetan refugees. It was a privilege to visit her, to look at photographs and hear stories of Man Ray and Andre Kertesz, who she knew in Paris in the 1930s.
The ridge above Rajpur is rich in high-grade limestone, then being mined for making cement. Debris from the open-cast workings, and the dust from the cement plant (visible in “Ploughing in the hills”) was causing massive pollution, and it is to the credit of local people that they opposed, and defeated, the business interests. The quarrying has stopped, and the cement factory closed down long ago
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