Cryptids of India

The legends of India

In 1925 the photographer N. A. Tombazi, with a British geological expedition in Sikkim, saw a dark, upright figure moving across the Zemu Glacier below Kangchenjunga and later found footprints where it had been – one of the most quoted early sightings by an outsider. Almost a century later, in 2014, one of the two “yeti” hair samples that Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes linked to an ancient polar bear came from Ladakh; later reanalyses pointed to ordinary Himalayan brown bears. And in April 2019 the Indian Army made world headlines by posting photographs of giant footprints its mountaineers had found near Makalu base camp across the border in Nepal.

India’s wild-man lore does not stop at the snow line. In the Garo Hills of Meghalaya, people speak of the mande burung, or “forest man”; hairs collected there after a forester reported a sighting in 2003 were studied in Britain and, in 2008, DNA tests linked them to the Himalayan goral, a wild goat-antelope. For visitors, Sikkim’s Khangchendzonga National Park and the trekking routes towards the Zemu Glacier offer the closest thing to yeti country, while the forests of the Garo Hills are the place to hear about the mande burung.