Mountains Painted with Turmeric

by Lil Bahadur Chettri

  MOUNTAINS PAINTED WITH TURMERIC

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Publishers Since 1893

  NEW YORK CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 1957 Lil Bahadur Chettri

  Translation copyright © 2008 Michael J. Hutt

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-51295-4

  Photographs (except on title page spread) by Michael J. Hutt

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kshatri, Lila Bahadura, 1933–

  [Basaim. English]

  Mountains painted with turmeric / Lil Bahadur Chettri ;

  translated by Michael J. Hutt.

  cm.

  Novel.

  Translated from Nepali.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-231-14356-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Kshatri, Lila Bahadura, 1933–—Translations into English. I. Hutt, Michael (Michael J.) II. Title.

  PK2598.K73B313 2008

  891.4’953—dc22

  2007012236

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  MOUNTAINS PAINTED WITH TURMERIC

  Afterword: Nepali Critics and Basain

  Notes

  Bibliography

  FOREWORD

  Basain is a seventy-page novel written in Nepali by Lil Bahadur Chettri (b. 1932/33), a descendant of emigrants from the hills of Nepal who was born and still lives in the state of Assam in northeast India. Basain, Chettri’s first novel, was published in 1957–58 (this corresponds to the year 2014 in the Bikram calendrical era commonly employed in Nepal). Chettri is the author of two further novels—Atripta (The unfulfilled), published in 1969, and Brahmaputraka Cheuchau (On the banks of the Brahmaputra), published in 1986—but these remain less well known than his first, which entered its thirtieth reprint in 2006. A Nepali-language feature film based on the book and directed by Subash Gajurel opened in 2005 and was Nepal’s entry for the 2006 Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

  The word basain is a nominalization of the verb basnu, “to stay, reside,” so it is often translated as “settlement” or “residence.” It can also denote settlement in a place other than one’s own village or country: to move somewhere else and set up home there is expressed in Nepali as “shifting basain.” The central character of Basain is a peasant farmer named Dhan Bahadur Basnet (Dhané for short). Dhané’s family name shows that he is a Chetri by caste, as is the author of the novel. He lives in his ancestral family home in a village whose name we are not told, with his wife, Maina, his small son, and his younger sister, Jhuma. Dhané is beset with calamities from the very start, and the novel chronicles the way his circumstances and his position in village society conspire against him and eventually force him to leave—probably for India, though this is not stated. The dukha (suffering, sorrow) endured by ordinary peasants—the exploitation of the poor by the rich and powerful, the prejudice and social conservatism that punishes a woman who has been raped—is the central theme of the book.

  A second theme is the warmth and intimacy of village life, from which Dhané and his family are ultimately excluded. Although Dhané quarrels with various individuals during the story, these are all either the powerful “big men” (thulo manche) of the village or members of castes who are traditionally held to be of low status. Through all of this, Dhané’s friendships with men of equal or similar status remain firm. It is also significant that the downfall of Dhané’s sister Jhuma, a beautiful, affectionate, innocent personification of all that the male author considers ideal in a Nepali woman, is brought about by a man who is in a sense an outsider, an other. Throughout the original Nepali text, this man, who is a soldier, is referred to as “Rikute,” a name derived from the English word “recruit.” The term lahure, derived from the name of the city Lahore, is the Nepali word used most commonly to denote a Nepali soldier who serves in a foreign army, but it does not occur in this text. Like the language of Gurkha soldiers portrayed elsewhere in Nepali fiction (see Hutt 1989), the soldier’s speech is spattered with Urdu and Hindi vocabulary, which Jhuma does not understand, and at several points he is described as a “foreigner” or “stranger” (pardeshi, literally, “person of/from another country”).

  AUTHORSHIP AND INFLUENCES

  In his introduction to the novel, modestly entitled “My Endeavor” (Mero prayas), Lil Bahadur Chettri explained why he wrote the book. A translation of this introduction follows, interspersed with insights gleaned from an article Chettri published some thirty-five years later (Chettri 1992):

  As I think about it now, I realize that it was nearly three years ago that a friend was talking about Nepali literature: “Just write one small novel, why don’t you?” I remember him saying. With his encouragement, I thought a lot about writing a novel, and I sat at the table with my pen in my hand for two or three nights, right up until the time when the hands of the clock join in a single line; I sat there disconsolately, and I groaned. Where to begin? With what subject? Nothing occurred to me.

  Eventually, I more or less gave up. “Who invites pain into an unaching head?” I thought, but then one day at Pandu Station I caught sight of two young men who had just arrived from the hills. In reply to my first question, “Where are you going?” I got the response “We’ve come down here to look for some work as woodcutters.” They answered the many other questions I asked them in their own manner, too.

  The way they spoke, their manners and clothing, and their description of their village all struck me as foreign. If any other educated youth who had been born and raised in an environment outside Nepal, as I was, had been in my place, all these things would have seemed foreign to him, too.

  In his 1992 article, Chettri recalled that people from the hills of eastern Nepal used to appear in his home district in Assam every winter and that it became something of a habit for him to quiz them about life in their villages. He had spent some time in a Nepalese hill village as a young boy and had some “dim remembrance” of it, but what he gleaned from his interrogations served as a useful supplement. He also picked up many features of the eastern dialect of Nepali and employed them in Basain (to his amusement, littérateurs in Kathmandu were later to identify these wrongly as “Assamese usages” [35]).1

  Back to his introduction:

  It occurred to me that although the future of people like us, who have made our homes outside Nepal, is tied to the country in which we dwell, our language, literature, and culture are still Nepali, and everyone’s own literature and culture are dear to them. In order to become well acquainted with Nepali culture, it is also necessary to be familiar with the environment of the place that is the very heart of that culture. Otherwise it will always seem foreign when we hear authentic Nepali being spoken or listen to someone telling us about the culture that is played out in the village environment in the hills of Nepal.

  I started to write the novel, my main purpose being merely to acquaint my readers with the village environment back in the hills. Every year, Nepalis leave the Nepalese hills and come down to Madhes (the lowlands) and Mugalan (India).2 Do they leave their homes because they wish to? Perhaps that is true of many of them. But for others it is quite a different matter. I chose the misery and mystery that lie at the root of this as the theme of Basain.

  The work of writing the novel commenced, but because I was then a student, my quarterly and half-yearly exams kept harassing me. Thus I began the book in 1954 but had to postpone working further on it for about a year
. Then I would write a page or two when I felt like it and put it away when I didn’t, and 1956 passed in that manner. In April 1957, by some inspiration or other, I completed the remaining sections.

  In 1992 Chettri recalled that Basain actually began life as a short story entitled Besi (a besi is an area of cultivable land, usually on the floor of a valley). He was encouraged by his friend Chatra Bahadur Gurung to lengthen it, add a proper frame, and make it into a novel. Chatra Bahadur was also instrumental in getting the story published. Chapter 14 of Basain is the beginning of this original story.

  Basain might not entertain its readers, because that is not its aim. In it I have simply tried to give a picture of the villages in the hills of Nepal. Life in the hills—the joys and sorrows of the villages and the events that happen there—is the essence of Basain.

  From a literary point of view, the standard of this novel is not high, because I have based it on reality. The dialogue and some of the words in it are kept just as they are used far to the east of Kathmandu, in the villages of Dhankuta, Taplejung, and Bhojpur districts. No sniff of a literary pen will be found in this novel; instead, it provides the readers with the smell of the ferns and bitter-leaves3 that grow on the hillsides and in the ravines.

  I myself was not well acquainted with the environment in the hills, and so, although I consulted my friends from the hills where appropriate, my writing will probably be less than satisfactory in many places, and I will probably have failed to give a complete picture of a village. Also, because I am an infant who has only just begun to crawl about in the field of literature, many mistakes will have been overlooked, and the style will not be especially in teresting. But if readers will remember that this is my first step on the path of the novel and will forgive me for this and offer me the necessary advice, I shall take note of their comments for the future.

  Some years later, Chettri was to read Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and watch Satyajit Ray’s film Pather Panchali, and in 1992 he wrote that Basain would have been improved if these influences had been incorporated. Twelve years after writing Basain, he also read Lainsingh Bangdel’s important Nepali novel Muluk Bahira (Outside the country). Bangdel’s novel is concerned with the lives of several characters who have migrated from eastern Nepal to Darjeeling: Chettri writes that it struck him as “the Nepali reality that comes after Basain” (1992:36).4

  About the task of publishing the book, Chettri wrote in his introduction:

  Getting something published is even harder than writing it. It is natural that writers will despair if they do not receive any assistance in delivering their work to others. I am grateful to all the friends who helped to lead Basain along the road to publication and especially to Mr. B. B. Gurung and the editor of Swatantra Nepali (Free Nepali), Mr. Thakur Chandan Singh. Mr. Kamal Dixit of Sri Darbar, Pulchowk, Lalitpur, took up the burden of publishing it. This was not only a service to literature; it also deepened the friendship that exists between Nepal and Assam, for which I can find no adequate words of thanks. I also express my heartfelt gratitude to the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya for deciding to print this book.

  Finally, if Basain has found a place in the readers’ hearts, though it be smaller even than a sesame seed, then I shall feel that it has served literature in some measure, and I shall be inspired to publish my other works.

  When he began to investigate the possibility of publishing Basain, Chettri had only the handwritten manuscript. He first wrote to Thakur Chandan Singh, a well-known Nepali publisher and cultural activist based in Dehra Dun in the Indian Himalaya west of Nepal. Singh advised him to contact the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (Madan prize library), an institution in Kathmandu that awarded and still awards a prestigious annual Nepali literary prize. Although the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya was not engaged in book publication, its founder, Kamal Mani Dixit, wrote to request a copy of the manuscript. Chettri was not particularly interested: “What did I know about who Kamal Dixit was at that time? The distance from Kathmandu to Guahati must be almost 1000 miles!” (1992:38). But the faithful Chatra Bahadur Gurung undertook the laborious task of copying the whole manuscript out by hand and completed it within a week. About one year later, Basain was published, and a year after that it was incorporated in the Nepali literature curriculum of Nepal’s newly founded Tribhuvan University.

  THE SETTING

  The novel is set in the hills of far-eastern Nepal, as the author makes clear in his introduction. It was from this region that very large migrations, particularly of people belonging to the Limbu ethnolinguistic group, took place during the nineteenth century after the region had been absorbed into the new Gorkhali state. Nowadays, the Limbus have been marginalized politically in most districts by the Nepali-speaking high Parbatiya castes—the Bahuns (Brahmans) and Chetris who migrated into the area after the Gorkhali expansion—and by the Newar traders who followed in their wake (see Caplan 1970). Generally, Chetris might therefore be expected to be wealthier than most Limbus, and a stereotypical dispossessed nineteenth-century emigré from far-eastern Nepal would tend to be a Limbu. But Dhan Bahadur Basnet is not a Limbu; he is a Chetri, and the ethnicity of the author is probably a factor here: as a Chetri, he probably felt more confident writing about his own kind. In fact, although there is a mention of a nearby Limbu village and one of the village leaders is a subba (traditionally a Limbu title), almost all the characters of the novel appear to be either high-caste Hindus (Bahuns and Chetris) or members of the “low” Parbatiya artisanal castes: Kamis, Damais, and so on.

  The historical setting of the story is not made explicit. In his introduction, Chettri explains that he began to write it in 1954 and finished it three years later. One literary scholar, Rajendra Subedi (1996:81), states that the novel sets out to portray the feudal conditions that prevailed in Nepal before the overthrow of the Rana regime in 1950–1951. If one were to hazard a guess, however, one would have to say that the events of the story may be thought of as unfolding at some time roughly contemporaneous with the writing of the novel, although they are still redolent of the fate that befell earlier generations. One feels that Chettri’s aim is essentially to portray a conservative social order that has existed for generations. It may be located in time somewhere around the middle of the twentieth century, but one cannot (and need not) be more specific than that.

  The novel describes and refers to many aspects of the life of a hill village in eastern Nepal. Its author wrote it for a Nepali readership, not for the foreign reader, and so the text inevitably implies, infers, and assumes a great deal that will not be readily apparent to many non-Nepalis. I have therefore done my best to clarify and explain these references in notes as the story proceeds, drawing where necessary on the published works listed in the bibliography.

  Lil Bahadur Chettri modestly states that his portrait of village life may not be wholly reliable. Nonetheless, the agricultural cycle of the Nepali year is richly described and provides the story with its background and context. The foreign reader will therefore benefit from some familiarity with its main features, and the following brief summary is based on an account of the agricultural cycle as it was observed by Philippe Sagant in a Limbu village situated at midaltitude in the hills of eastern Nepal (Sagant 1996:248–77).

  The agricultural cycle of each year is conceived of as an annual process of rising and falling, with the arrival of the rains toward the end of Jeth (May–June) or Asar (June–July) as its climactic point. During the months leading up to the rains (Phagun, Chait, Baisakh, corresponding to the period February–May), the weather grows warmer, and farmers plant crops such as maize, wheat, and potatoes. The livestock that has been grazing close to the village through the winter is taken up to higher pastures. When the monsoon breaks, rice and millet seeds are sown close together in the freshly plowed, flooded paddy fields. After these have sprouted into seedlings (usually in Saun [July–August]), they are transplanted farther apart in the paddy fields. As the rains ease during Bhadau (August–September), the maiz
e crop is harvested, husked, and dried, and the rice and millet crops are weeded. The first rice and millet is harvested during Asoj (September–October) in the run-up to the great annual festival of Dasain. Then, during Kattik (October–November), while fruit and vegetables are abundant, the weather clears, and the livestock begin to return from higher pastures to the fields around the village. During Mangsir (November–December), the weather is bright, but the mornings and nights grow chilly. The big late-rice harvest takes place, barley and wheat are sown, and late millet and lentils are harvested. Pus (mid-December–mid-January) and Magh (mid-January–mid-February) are the coldest and quietest months: the rice is hulled and husked, and straw is stored away. As spring comes around again and the seasons begin once more to “rise,” the rain-watered fields are plowed, and the first maize is planted. Altitude is the main factor governing when a given crop is sown, transplanted, and harvested: the greater the altitude, the later the growing season, and of course a crop such as rice can only be grown in fields that can be flooded and are therefore usually in or near the valley bottoms. As Chetris, Dhané and his family are likely to live at a somewhat lower altitude than most Limbus. The village appears to be situated at middle altitude, with irrigable khet fields situated in the valley floor (besi) below it and forests and pastureland above.

  Various types of officials—subba, mukhiya, and baidar—appear in the narrative, and this fictional village would appear to be governed under a rather confusing mixture of systems from different periods. The subba was one of the local officials who had the right to dispense justice in Limbuan (the region of eastern Nepal that the Limbu ethnic group considers its homeland), according to a decree issued in 1883. The mukhiya or village headman was a link between the central government and the community who was mainly responsible for the collection of homestead taxes and other levies but whose jurisdiction also covered most other aspects of village life (Sagant 1996:141; Regmi 1978:71). The baidar was a kind of headman’s assistant who had to be literate, even if only barely so, because he needed to read and interpret the Legal Code (Muluki Ain) for the headman and assist in the drafting of contracts and petitions.