Vangooru Srujay Reddy received his MS Dual Degree in Exact Humanities (EH). His research work was supervised by Dr. Aniket Alam. Here’s a summary of Vangooru Srujay Reddy’s thesis GIS based interactive maps for exploring the Religious Geography of Spiti Valley, Himachal Pradesh as explained by him:
Religious sites are ubiquitous places with high cultural and social significance where people gather to perform various religious activities. The research in evolutionary archeology shows evidence for the existence of religious practices in human societies from the Middle Paleolithic era. From that time to today, religion plays a prominent role in people’s social, economic, and religious lives in many indigenous communities. A study of the religious sites in those spaces focusing on the spatial components of information has the potential to reveal possible relations with other physical factors and socio-economic processes. Due to technological advancements, many new ways are emerging for mapping, analyzing, understanding, and conserving the religious sites but rarely explored. In this thesis, we describe and demonstrate a novel approach for the in-depth exploration of 282 religious sites of Spiti Valley in Himachal Pradesh. This study is a confluence of ethnographic fieldwork methods and GIS-based computational tools to understand the religious geography by mapping the religious sites identified from 25 selected villages of Spiti Valley. Spiti Valley is a very sparsely populated Buddhist cold desert located in the northeast part of the Himachal Pradesh in Western Himalayas at the tip of the Tibetan Plateau. According to the 2011 census, Lahaul and Spiti district stands second, next to Dibang Valley of Arunachal Pradesh in India’s least densely populated districts with a population density of around two people per sq km. Spiti Valley has a share of 12, 457 people inhabited in 7, 101 square km out of the total 31, 564 people in an area of 13, 835 square km in the Lahaul and Spiti district. Despite the cold weather and most challenging living conditions, the people of Spiti somehow managed to keep the strong connection with their culture and traditions, including pre-Buddhist religious practices like worshiping mountain deities and the elements of nature from ancient times intact. The people of Spiti Valley follow Vajrayana Buddhism, similar to that of the Tibetan region. In this little part of the world up until the present day, religion has a precise role to play in the day-to-day activities of each and every individual resisting the changes across time and preserving the unique bond with nature passed down from their ancestors. This study started from an exploratory field visit to Spiti in October 2018 by 12 researchers working on the ICSSR sponsored project titled, ’Change and Continuity in a Trans-Himalayan Buddhist Community: A study of monasteries of Spiti, Himachal Pradesh.’ After that, we visited Spiti two more times to conduct fieldwork in July and September of 2019 for data collection. During the data collection, we conducted semi-structured interviews guided by the questionnaires with the help of field investigators to identify the religious sites in 25 selected villages. Then we visited each of them to collect the precise location and take photos and videos. We have combined all the information from our field visits, interviews, census reports, historical gazetteers, traveler tales, and others to create a spatial dataset of religious sites that is much more than the sum of its parts. Building on the dataset of religious sites created from the fieldwork, we have presented an eightfold model for categorizing the religious sites based on the similarities and dissimilarities in the structure, architecture, features, functions, and purpose. Among the eight classes, we have conducted a detailed analysis of Monasteries and Chorten (mChod-rTen). While looking at monasteries, we gave a brief introduction to Spiti’s five big monasteries, i.e., Tabo, Dhankhar, Kungri, Tangyud, and Kee Monastery. Then we created maps to trace the role of monasteries in the administrative divisions and traditional fiscal system given in the 19th-century works by some of the pioneering scholars who worked on Spiti. While looking at Chorten, we start with a historical background; then, we will classify 132 chorten based on the architectural style to understand the symbolism behind different types located at different places in Spiti. Lastly, we will discuss the correlations in the distribution of Chorten and land usage patterns. We have built a couple of Web GIS Applications to take users on a virtual tour to the religious sites along with images and other descriptive information. We are also building a mobile application to empower the people of Spiti and others as well for conserving the traditional knowledge in the form of geotagged images and short text descriptions.