Sometimes we visited the tribals in their markets, like Chatikona and Kudili. It was here that we found them at their happiest – sociable, excited and brilliantly jewelled. At dawn, they poured out of the hills, traded their jackfruit and liquor for a few rupees and then – fleetingly solvent – went shopping. After buying salt and dried fish, there was not much change but still plenty to see. Here were druggists and magicians, trap-makers, drummers, barbers and the secretive potters of the Kumbehra tribe. A nursery of acrobats performed around their crippled mother, and – from a rubber tyre – a pedlar hacked out a fresh pair of sandals. By noon, it was all over and, under a scouring sun, the tribals filed back into the forest. They were chattery and exhilarated, and a few a little tipsy. Already, I could feel my hunter-gatherer coming back to life.
More centuries fell away as we got deeper into the hills. The tribes’ villages were usually arranged around a large, open space facing a Banyan tree, a block for sacrificing buffalo, or the stones of the earth goddess, Jhankar or Hundi. Inside, the houses were cool, and smelt pleasantly of sandalwood, smoke and herbs. Some of the tribes, like the Khond and the Saora, enjoyed beautifully carved doors but there were few possessions. The Gadhaba showed us the carcass of a bear they’d just killed.
I asked the naik, or headman, where they’d found it.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Here in the village.’
‘Had it attacked someone?’
‘Yes, so we had to kill it with our arrows.’
‘And so now what will you do with it?’
‘Sell it. The meat is good.’
Women had a curious place in this ancient world, somewhere between victim and goddess. Often, they were out working in the fields, and only the men remained, looking after the children. Once, however, some Ghadaba girls came in early from the fields to show us their dhemsha dance. These stunning, powerful girls well knew their value to the tribe, and boasted of bride-prices worth several years’ income. The youngest, aged about thirteen, told Jayne she’d cost her husband a fine cow, and 2,000 rupees (about £30).
‘And,’ she grinned, ‘five pots of liquor.’
In their dance, the girls clamped together, inward-looking and exclusionary. This was their ritual defence against kidnap. Bride-capture, they said, gave suitors an unfair advantage in marriage negotiations. Although their dance was violent and sporadically erupted in fights, it was magnificently effective. By the end, they were drenched, and we were engulfed in a firestorm of dust.
Ghabada girls, dancing away the risk of kidnap
Oddly, it wasn’t hard to imagine all this up on the Wessex Downs. The chants, the ash, and the interlocking women. Stripped of technology’s trappings, human life can suddenly seem stunningly familiar. I remember thinking how odd it was that, if I’d stopped the clock at any stage in the last ten thousand years, I could still be here, watching the same women and the same dance.
Only possessions changed, and rotted away. In Orissa, these rituals will leave nothing for the archaeologists. Once, we watched some women sacrifice a buffalo. They were Langia Saoras, and, in the middle of the group, the priestess, deep in a trance, called down the ancestral spirits. Despite the intensity of her communication with the Afterlife, a picnic atmosphere prevailed. The older ladies threw off their tunics and lay in the grass, smoking massive teak-leaf cigars. Every morsel of the animal, except its hide and horns, simmered on the fire. Of this extraordinary day, I thought, there will be nothing for future generations, except pottery and bones.
EVENTUALLY, AT THE EXTREME limit of our adventure, we came upon the Bonda themselves. I’ll never forget this encounter. The tribe were filing out of the forest, on their way to the market at Onukudeli. I was immediately struck by how small they were, and by their nakedness. This indignity, explained Subrat, was forced upon them by the goddess Sita as a punishment for some long-lost indiscretion. But, as curses go, the Bonda bore it magnificently. The women, barefoot and shaven-headed, were sculpted taut and lean by work. They wore only ringas, skimpy kilts of forest fibres, but their bodies rippled with beads and snakes of silver and alloys. The men were more drab but viciously armed with drawn swords and iron-tipped arrows.
‘Don’t photograph the men,’ warned Subrat.
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but why?’
‘Because, if you do, they’ll kill you.’
He was quite serious. This reputation of the Bonda men for casual homicide has always intrigued anthropologists. Although entirely indifferent to possessions and devoid of sexual jealousy, they have the capacity for sudden and deadly fury. What they fear most of all is sorcery – and photography is sorcery. Without hesitation, they will kill a photographer and won’t deny the crime; to the Bonda man, deceit is worse than murder.
The women were quite different. While the men were impassive, they were confident and coquettish and adored being photographed. They teased Subrat in impenetrable Remo but I could tell from their laughter that their jokes were worldly and wicked. These wonderful girls wouldn’t marry until they were thirty, by which time the tribe had had the best of their work. Each would then take a husband of about twelve, who, with his brothers, would love her into old age.
‘Well, they’ve got bodies to die for,’ said Jayne.
‘Sure,’ said Subrat absently, ‘they’ve got good food in their villages.’
Ah, yes, food, I thought, and remembered the teacher.
‘But food,’ said Subrat, ‘is a strange subject with the Bonda.’
‘Why?’ we asked.
‘Because they’ve got whatever they want, yet they still eat rats and insects.’
Soon, it was time for the Bonda to move on. One of the women gave Jayne a heavy metal bangle, not unlike the ones that turn up in Wessex. Meanwhile, one of the men sold me an arrow – for the equivalent of 25p. It’s now one of my most prized possessions. The hunter who sold it to me was no higher than my chest but he had the massive forearms of an archer, and regarded me with admirable contempt.
As he padded away, I suddenly thought, There goes Wantage Man. It was, of course, a ridiculous idea. I hadn’t found my Iron Age hero at all. Although I had perhaps glimpsed something of his spirit.
Three Tibetans in Ireland
DERVLA MURPHY (born Lismore, County Waterford, 1931) was determined to write, not to marry and to travel to India. She realised two of these ambitions in Full Tilt, her first book, which describes her exuberant bicycle ride from Lismore – where she still lives – to India, through Iran and Afghanistan. It has been followed by some twenty further titles, including an acclaimed memoir, Wheels within Wheels. Her most recent book is The Island That Dared, a series of journeys through Cuba, with her daughter Rachel and her three granddaughters. www.dervlamurphy.com
Three Tibetans in Ireland
DERVLA MURPHY
On a cold grey day at the end of March 1964, shortly after my return from the cycle ride to India, I first met a Tibetan in Western surroundings – the foyer of a central London hotel. I had been working for some months in Dharamsala, then an overcrowded and under-funded refugee camp for Tibetan children, and that moving encounter with the Tibetan way of being made me feel slightly apprehensive. How would this young man, Lobsang, only five years out of Tibet and three months out of India, be reacting to our Western ways? But I needn’t have worried; by the time our refugee-related business had been concluded I knew he was in no danger of being ‘tainted’ – he was simply adjusting to his new circumstances to the extent required by good manners.
As we walked through St James’s Park my companion explained his background. The second youngest of eight children, he was born in 1943 in Lhasa where his civil servant father practised as an oracle. (Only in retrospect can one fully appreciate the uniqueness of Lobsang’s generation of Tibetans. Born the son of a government oracle, he is now the grandfather of an IT-savvy seven-year-old.) In 1945 he had been orphaned and two years later was adopted by his father’s brother, an Incarnate Lama of the Gelugpas, who had f
ounded two monasteries. At one of these – Tubung Churbu, twenty miles west of Lhasa – Lobsang spent his school holidays in a small community of a hundred monks. Although one can’t have an informally relaxed relationship with an Incarnate Lama, his Abbot uncle’s unspoken affection comforted him. During term-time a warmhearted Lhasa aunt mothered him and three of his brothers.
When the Lhasa Uprising began in March 1959 Lobsang’s only sister (a pioneering agronomist) was murdered by the Chinese and he fled to Tubung Churbu; his family was sufficiently prominent for every member to be at risk. The monks were preparing to follow the Dalai Lama to India and two weeks later the Abbot set out with twenty-five young lamas, his sixteen-year-old nephew and a train of sixty mules carrying a library of ancient Sanskrit manuscripts and a famous collection of t’ankas – traditional Tibetan Buddhist paintings on silk scrolls. To avoid the Chinese, refugee caravans used perilous passes over high mountains and this comparatively short journey took more than three months. Half the mules were lost through injury.
Lobsang and his friends suffered acutely from loneliness and grief; they already sensed that their exile would be permanent. He described himself as ‘caught between two fears’. Would the Chinese successfully pursue them? And what awaited him at journey’s end? He spoke only Tibetan and a little Chinese and could not begin to imagine the world beyond the mountains. He was then unaware of the significance of money; always his needs had been provided for yet soon he was to be unsupported.
But not immediately: at Kalimpong Uncle arranged for his nephew to lodge with Sherpa Tenzing of Everest during the monsoon, where he learnt Nepali, Hindi and English. The Abbot continued to Benares where he was soon to hold the chair of Sanskrit Studies at the Hindu University. His t’anka collection had survived the journey and a year later formed one of the main attractions at Delhi’s International Exhibition of Oriental Art.
In November Tenzing helped Lobsang find a job as house-boy to an expat American family – an unremarkable move by our standards, but in Tibet this youth had been attended by personal servants who wouldn’t allow him to put on his own boots. At this stage he found himself being scornfully regarded, in some refugee circles, as too naïve to make the most of his connections. In fact he wished to equip himself with some means of helping the tens of thousands of illiterate Tibetans then drifting about northern India in bewildered misery. After nine months he had saved up enough to leave the Americans and become a voluntary worker at Mrs Bedi’s School for Young Lamas. There Joyce Pearce of The Ockenden Venture discerned his capabilities and offered him the opportunity to help settle orphans in European homes, which is what brought him to London.
Before we said goodbye at Waterloo Station, Lobsang had accepted my invitation to spend his summer holiday in Ireland, on the smallest of the three Aran Islands.
IN THE 1960S Inisheer’s only roads were narrow dirt tracks, the traffic consisted entirely of donkeys, water was drawn from wells, clothes were homespun, everyone spoke Irish – and there two of my books were written by candlelight. It seemed to me that a Tibetan would find himself at ease on Inisheer, an intuition soon confirmed by Lobsang.
Our two and a half hour steamer journey from Galway, on a cloudless August morning, was Lobsang’s longest sea voyage. When we anchored, a fleet of currachs – frail little craft of wood-lathe and tarred canvas – immediately surrounded us to ferry passengers and goods ashore. Boat-days were then quite an event for the 280 or so islanders and inevitably Lobsang’s arrival provoked uninhibited curiosity. This slightly discomfited me but afterwards it transpired that the refugee had observed a family weeping as they said goodbye to an emigrant daughter and had been more aware of this sad feature of Inisheer life than of his own conspicuousness.
For three weeks we shared a friend’s cottage (Daphne was the only outsider living permanently on the island), washing at the well three-quarters of a mile away, cooking over an open turf fire and sleeping on the floor. Lobsang enthusiastically took on many of the daily chores and had soon dug a splendid latrine for use with turf ash. He also volunteered to collect dung to supplement our expensive imported turf but here ethical complications arose; cowpats containing insects were ineligible for burning. Observing this, Daphne and I discreetly abandoned forays to collect barnacles and periwinkles.
After sunset we sat around the glowing hearth and returned to Tibet with Lobsang. He had seen more of his own country than most non-nomadic Tibetans. In 1956 Uncle had taken him on an eighteen months’ journey to a sacred mountain in west Tibet. This pilgrimage of a Very High Lama to a Very Sacred Mountain generated a caravan of 100 horses and mules and 300 yaks, carrying camping equipment and stores for sixty monks and servants. West Tibet’s barrenness made it necessary to carry so much food – mainly tsampa (roasted flour), cheese, dried meat and compressed vegetables, plus emergency fodder for the animals.
At nightfall everyone but the Abbot helped set up camp – excellent training, Lobsang remarked, for him and his pampered young companions (all fledgling lamas). Several flooded rivers had to be forded, the equines swimming through the swift icy water, the yaks being ferried on square, flat-bottomed boats of wood and yak-hide. Excitements were few: a panther killing a dog; hundreds of wild horses galloping across the steppes. Recalling that happy and peaceful journey, Lobsang had to pause occasionally to control his emotions. Already he realised that, even as we spoke, Buddhist Tibet was being changed forever. From him I learned that the sudden violent dispossession prompting a refugee flight is peculiarly traumatic. Apart from the loss of a settled home and traditional occupation, and separation from close friends and familiar places, it is the death of the person one has become in a particular context. Three years after our Inisheer interlude, Lobsang noted: ‘Every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.’
BY MAY 1965 I was back in Nepal with the Tibetans, running a children’s feeding programme in Pokhara’s refugee camp, overlooked by Machhapuchhare. On 12 May, as I walked between ragged cotton tents, occupied by recently arrived nomads from west Tibet, piercing squeaks drew my attention to an object lying on the palm of Ngawang Pema’s hand. It was very small, very black and very vocal. Moments later I had exchanged the equivalent of ten-and-sixpence (50 pence in new money) for a twelve-day-old Tibetan bitch to be delivered once she was weaned. I wondered what the astrologists would make of the coincidence that this pup and I had entered Nepal on the same date: 1 May.
Six weeks later Tashi moved in to my mud-floored room in the bazaar and I took time off to help this refugee adjust to her new environment. All afternoon she lay on my lap while I wrote but hours passed before her look of puzzled distress began to fade. Then at last she wagged her tail – a brief and doubtful wag, but this sign of dawning trust enchanted me. A night of unmothered whimpering would have been understandable yet Tashi slept soundly, curled up on my stomach. As she was much too young to be left alone I carried her everywhere, for the next month or so, in a cloth shoulder-bag.
By mid-September Tashi’s furry cuddlesomeness had been replaced by a silky strokeability. Her black coat had elegantly symmetrical white and tan markings and her admittedly ridiculous brown feathery tail curled up and over her back. Several schools of thought debated the delicate question of her breed. A local ‘expert’ pronounced her to be a smooth-haired Tibetan terrier, which was absurd; but Ngawang Pema – hoping to sell the next litter to foreign visitors – agreed with him. An Indian UN official, who himself bred Afghan hounds, defined her as a Miniature Himalayan Sheepdog – a theory reinforced by Ngawang Pema’s occupation. Personally I regarded her as a perfectly good Tibetan mongrel or pi-dog. However, anyone besotted enough to go to the immense inconvenience and expense of transporting a dog from Nepal to Ireland must be tempted to pretend, as a face-saving device, that the import belongs to some rare Central Asian breed of enormous snob-value. Therefore the form I filled in on 15 September, to begin the arduous process of obtaining Irish citizenship for Tashi, boldly proclaim
ed her to be a Miniature Himalayan Sheepdog.
A week previously I had informed the Irish Embassy in Delhi that on 3 December I planned to land in Dublin with a Nepal-born dog. In reply came a parcel of lengthy documents making it plain that Ireland’s Department of Agriculture is allergic to alien quadrupeds. One could visualise the thin-lipped bureaucrat who had devised all these regulations to wither any imprudent relationships cultivated by expats. Reading them hardened my determination to ‘import a domestic pet of the canine species into the State from a place abroad … separately confined in a suitable hamper, crate, box or other receptacle which must be nose and paw proof and not contain any hay, straw or peat-moss litter’. Impatiently I completed the preliminary forms and wrote letters to ‘the approved quarantine premises’ and ‘the approved carrying agents’ while Tashi lay happily by my feet unaware that during the next few months a lot of people were going to make a very big fuss about a very little dog.
Throughout October and November all my ‘reminding’ letters to the Irish Embassy in Delhi and the Department of Agriculture in Dublin were ignored. By 26 November Tashi’s entry-permit should have been awaiting me in Kathmandu but it wasn’t. From there I sent many frantic cables to Delhi and Dublin, Tashi accompanying me every morning to the new ‘Indian aid’ Telephone and Telegraph office. While I drafted progressively less polite messages the staff eyed my companion derisively and commented on the unusual brand of lunacy revealed by the compulsion to import such an object to Ireland. After four days of impoverishing communications I ended my campaign defiantly; at 3.20 p.m. on 3 December a black-and-tan bitch from Nepal would land at Dublin airport with or without her visa which had been applied for on 15 September.
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