A photographer’s quest to document Ladakh’s petroglyphs

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. As a young girl, Ahtushi Deshpande could often be found by her father’s side in his makeshift darkroom at their Delhi home. She watched him intently as the hobby photographer developed his precious negatives.

The smell of chemicals fascinated her as did the sight of an image coming to life. At 17, she followed in his footsteps and saved up her pocket money to buy her first camera. Then, on her first Himalayan trek a few years later, she soaked in the magic of the mountains and discovered the joy of wandering at those heady heights.

The two passions led the writer and self-taught photographer to her first petroglyph site in Ladakh in 2011. Amid a boulder field by the Indus River, she found a rock with intricate hand impressions engraved on it. The sight left her in awe of the unknown artist and their creation that lay in the midst of nowhere.

Over the next eight years, she documented more such rock art that culminated in her first book and an accompanying exhibition in Mumbai, Speaking Stones: Rock Art of Ladakh, which will travel to Paris in November. The book also a finalist for the Banff Mountain Book Competition this year. “Petroglyphs give you a glimpse of what existed prior to historical records, and the kind of people who roamed these landlocked, inhospitable regions, crossing high passes at a time when there were no roads.

These were hunter-gatherers yet they had this instinct and ability to create such wonderful works of art on the most unforgiving surface, that is rock," Deshpande, 55, says. She graduated with an economics degree from the University of Delhi, but it took her little time to realise that she wasn’t cut out for it and she made the switch to mass media. It was