Mise à jour le 10 juil. 2026
Publié le 9 juillet 2026 – Mis à jour le 10 juillet 2026
Ce fonds a été transmis par Janet lors de son vivant puis par Sayeed Rivzi, son époux, à Martin Vernier puis à Salomé Deboos (Convention de janvier 2026).
Ce fonds regroupe des notes manuscrites, des carnets de terrain et quelques photos ou cartes tracées de la main de Janet Rivzi.
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Biographie de Janet Rivzi (she)
« Janet Rizv, by John Bray, December 6th 2025Janet Rizvi, who passed away on 18 November, was one of the most creative Ladakh historians of her generation. Her legacy includes a significant body of written work and, perhaps just as importantly, a wide circle of friends both in India and in the UK. Born in 1939 in Aberdeen (Scotland), Janet studied History at Girton College, Cambridge, and stayed on to do a PhD. Her supervisor was Jack Gallagher (1919-1980), a prominent historian of the British Empire who in the early 1960s assembled a team of young historians to work on the provincial politics of colonial India. She completed her dissertation in 1969: its title was Muslim Politics and Government Policy: Studies in the Development of Muslim Organisation and its Social Background in North India and Bengal, 1885-1917. Later in life, Janet reflected half-ruefully that her choice of topic might not have been best calculated to win her a prestigious academic post in either the UK or in India. Nevertheless, her research shaped her life in two important respects. First, it gave her an opportunity to sharpen her skills as a critical historian. Secondly, and even more decisively, she met her husband Sayeed while on archival research trip to India. Janet’s love affair with Ladakh began when Sayeed was sent there as Deputy Commissioner for two years between 1976 and 1978. Their two sons Jamal and Adil attended the Lamdon School in Leh, and they built up a network of friends which endured long after Sayeed’s posting was completed. This early experience led Janet to start work on her first book, Ladakh: Crossroads of High Asia, which was first published in 1983. The third edition, which appeared in 2012, is still in print. It emphasises the interwoven historical legacies of Ladakh’s Buddhist, Muslim and Christian communities, and addresses both the history of Ladakh and the contemporary processes of social change, including the effects of the 1999 Kargil war. While no such work can aspire to be comprehensive, it remains the most authoritative general introduction to the region. Her second book Himalayan Traders: Merchant Princes and Peasant Traders in Ladakh did not appear until 1999 but by that time she had been working on it for nearly 20 years. The book is based on more than a hundred interviews with the Ladakhis who travelled to Tibet and Xinjiang until the borders were closed in the 1950s. It is dedicated jointly to Jack Gallagher and to the Ladakhi intellectual Akbar Ladakhi: the two men never met but at different times and places had served as crucial sources of inspiration for Janet. In an essay published in 1982, Janet highlighted the importance of oral history as a historical method and lamented that it had been neglected in India. She also underlined the effort involved. Once her interviews had been completed, she took care to produce meticulous type-written transcripts, translated into English from Urdu and Ladakhi. As she also emphasised, the work of recording oral sources is all the more urgent as our elders gradually leave the scene. Her own work in this field remains exemplary. Janet’s work on trade led naturally to her third major project, Pashmina: the Kashmir Shawl and Beyond (with Monisha Ahmed), which was published in 2009. The book documents the trade in shawl wool between Western Tibet, Ladakh and the Kashmir Valley. It goes on to discuss the promotion of “cashmere” as a widely-recognised commodity with purchasers in Europe, North America and across the globe. In the course of her research, Janet developed a fine eye for the intricacies of Kashmiri craftsmanship, to which the book’s illustrations pay generous tribute. From the mid-1990s onwards, Janet became a regular participant at the conferences of the International Association for Ladakh Studies (IALS) and she served as the association’s secretary between 2009 and 2011. During this period, she paid particular attention to the drafting of the IALS constitution and helped coordinate the association’s 15th conference, which was held in the Lamdon School in 2011. One of the conference’s main themes was the impact of climate change, and she herself presented a paper gleaning details of floods and other adverse weather events from the historical records. One of Janet’s earlier ventures was less successful, perhaps because it was before its time. In the 1990s and early 2000s, she tried to assemble support for an institution in Leh to be known as the Moorcroft Library, after British traveller William Moorcroft (1767-1825) who had stayed in Ladakh between 1820 and 1822. Janet’s vision was that the library would serve as a repository not only for published works but also for researchers’ field notes, including her own oral history transcripts. However, her proposal never gained the momentum it required. Before she passed away, she sent her notes for safekeeping in an archive in Switzerland. Janet appreciated Moorcroft both as a historical source and for his gregarious personality. She found another way of paying tribute to him by preparing transcripts of his unpublished manuscripts, only parts of which were published in the well-known Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan & the Panjab in Ladakh & Kashmir in Peshawar, Kabul, Kunduz & Bokhara. The originals are in the British Library and difficult to read. Janet’s transcripts can be found on the “pahar.in” website. In recent years, Janet had travelled to Ladakh less frequently, partly because of the effects of high altitude, but she and Sayeed continued to welcome Ladakh friends to their home in Gurgaon, a modest bungalow near Palam airport. Although she became increasingly frail, she was apparently in good spirits until shortly before her final illness. While taking a philosophical view of human frailty, Janet had an incisive sense of right and wrong, combined with a dry sense of humour. She took pride not only in her command of historical detail but also in her lucid style of writing. In all these respects, she served as a role model for her colleagues and for the new generations of Ladakh historians that will follow her. » |