One thing they did not do—at least very often—was leave the hills for the marshy grasslands and jungles below. This was the terai, the rich northern floodplain of the Ganges, a green belt of land that ran a verdant course along the southern base of the Himalayas. The word “terai” itself is an Urdu term meaning something akin to “marsh” or “basin,” and this is a fairly accurate description for much of the territory. Vast expanses of elephant grass—which can reach up to seven meters—covered wide swathes of the damp ground, and provided ample habitat for deer, rhinos, sloth bears, wild elephants, and of course, tigers. These flat, rippling grasslands were cut through by tributaries of the great rivers that flowed down from the mountains above, and were interspersed by dense patches of forest (aka, jungle), marked primarily by the famous sal trees, which in the terai were able to keep their leaves throughout the year. As one might expect, the soil in this floodplain was exceedingly fertile, and with the proper irrigation systems could produce considerable yields of grains like rice and millet. Yet the Hindu Pahari people—who inhabited the hills and mountains above—were generally reluctant to visit the flatter, wetter lands below, for one convincing reason: the entire region was infested with malaria. Whatever agricultural promise it held was offset by the very real risk of contracting a potentially lethal blood parasite. To go into the terai, particularly during the warmer monsoon months of the year, was considered a near–death sentence for the people of the Nepalese hills. As the colonial forest surveyor Thomas W. Webber noted in 1902, “[P]aharis generally die if they sleep in the Terai before November 1 or after June 1.” And even in the cooler months, the risk of contraction still existed. The presence of malarial mosquitoes throughout much of the year provided a natural deterrence against any sort of large-scale settlement. Living year-round in the terai, for most Nepali people, was simply out of the question.
There was, however, one group that felt remarkably at home in the terai: the Tharu, a people who predated the arrival of the Indo-Aryan Hindus, and who had developed over many centuries a genetic resistance to malaria. They were able to not only survive but thrive in the tropical lowlands, living off the land in small family-based clan units. While their Pahari neighbors clung to their dense villages and terraced fields in the mountains to the north, the Tharu lived in relative isolation in the jungles and grasslands of the terai belt below, with small communities strung all along its verdant length. There existed—and continues to exist today—some differences in terms of languages, traditions, and religious beliefs among the various Tharu groups. Many eventually adopted the Indo-European languages of their neighbors, and some, like the Rana Tharu of far western Nepal, even hesitate to label themselves Tharu at all, and insist instead that they are descended from an ancient Rajput king. However, one thing the Tharu all share, from the Rana Tharu of the far west, to the Chitwania Tharu in the central region, to the Kochila Tharu of the east, is a common identity as a “people of the forest.” Their own sense of self is intimately and inextricably linked with the natural environment of the terai. It is their mother, and it is their home. And for most of the nineteenth century, they depended upon it for virtually every facet of their existence.
This isn’t to say, however, that they had no effect upon or interaction with the environment. They most certainly did. There is an increasingly antiquated notion that indigenous peoples engaged in sustenance-based survival strategies exist in a sort of innocent and Edenic bliss within an ecosystem. But with the Tharu, as with people just about anywhere, this was simply not the case. The Tharu did create irrigation canals to yield better harvests from their fields. They did engage in a slash-and-burn system of grass husbandry to feed their animals, not least of which were the elephants they caught and domesticated. And they definitely did cut down trees for timber when needed, and clear space for fields in the forest when advantageous. But they did so with the knowledge firmly in place that the forest could serve as both a natural and a renewable resource. To destroy the forest and the animals that lived within it would have been a form of cultural, if not literal, suicide. They relied upon it for building materials, for firewood, for animal fodder, and for a host of wild foods that they could only find there. This included game such as deer, boar, and rabbit, as well as fish and the freshwater ghonghi snails that served then, as they still do today, as the unofficial national dish of the Tharu people (and that taste exceptional, I discovered, thanks again to my host, Sanjaya, when paired with moonshine rakshi liquor and served with an eye-wateringly hot ginger-curry sauce). Edible ferns, mushrooms, and wild asparagus were gathered on a daily basis, and a host of medicinal plants were available when needed. The existing ecosystem of the terai provided a veritable cornucopia of materials and provisions necessary for survival—without it, they would have had no homes to live in, no fuel to cook with, no animals to raise, and practically nothing to eat. Keeping the forest intact and productive was a priority above all else.
To this end, the Tharu across the full range of the terai engaged in a sustainable form of short-fallow-shifting cultivation, growing rice, mustard, and lentils, and rotating crops to allow the soil to recover between plantings. Being seminomadic, most Tharus lived in low-impact mud and grass structures and stayed at a given habitation site for only a few years, ensuring that no single patch of forest would ever be over-farmed or over-hunted. In western Nepal in particular, where the Champawat was born, the Tharu lived communally in family-based longhouses called Badaghar—a collective labor strategy that enabled them to pool resources, maximizing their yields while minimizing their environmental impact. All in all, it was a lifestyle that both demanded and ensured a productive forest.
Needless to say, keeping this system of continual usage and renewal running smoothly was something of a balancing act, and for the Tharu, maintaining equilibrium wasn’t just about agricultural practices or labor strategies; it had its spiritual dimensions as well. Though nominally Hindu, the majority of Tharu practiced—and continue to practice—a syncretic version of the religion founded upon older animist beliefs. They worshipped and made offerings to the familiar pantheon of Indo-Aryan Hindu gods borrowed from their hill-dwelling neighbors, but also venerated a vast array of forest and animal spirits that predated the arrival of Shiva or Vishnu to the terai. For officiating the ceremonies of the former—funerals, in particular—visiting Brahmin priests were largely relied upon, who came down from the hills in the non-malarial months. When it came to the latter, however, the more traditional, tribal elements of the Tharu religion were always conducted under the auspices of the local gurau, or shaman (our word “guru” is derived from the same root). The gurau was largely seen as the protector of villages, and the intermediary between the Tharu population and the host of bhut spirits—both malevolent and benign—that inhabited the grasslands and forests that surrounded them. Rather than stone temples, the Tharu relied on shrines within the home containing important idols, as well as ceremonies held at specific forest locations called than, where the various animal spirits could be worshipped in the open, at the foot of a sacred tree. The local population was generally served by two types of gurau, both a ghar gurau, who was something akin to a family doctor, and the patharithiya gurau, who became involved in larger issues that affected the village as a whole. For example, an illness in the family attributed to unknown spiritual causes might best be handled by the ghar gurau, who would attempt to appease the unhappy spirit and convince it to return to the forest. A plague that was affecting an entire village or region, on the other hand, would be the bailiwick of the patharithiya gurau. The process of becoming a gurau generally took several years of apprenticeship with an established practitioner. Once fully initiated, the new gurau, following a ceremonial contract of service between himself and a community or household, was responsible for protecting that community or household from any form of spiritual imbalance. Such ceremonies involved puja offerings of goats, pigeons, and rakshi liquor, and could serve as a shield against everything from hou
se fires and crop failures to attacks by wild animals.
Including, as it were, tigers. The gurau was responsible for protecting his community from a number of potentially dangerous species, in particular the rhino, the elephant, the sloth bear, and the leopard. Yet it was the tiger to whom the gurau held an especially sacred relationship. To be able to live alongside tigers and communicate with them was seen as the mark of an effective gurau. When royal Nepalese hunting parties, both Shah and later Rana, came through the terai to hunt tigers, they never did so without asking a local gurau for assistance, as it was understood that only he had the power to summon the great cats from the forest. And even today, particularly among older Tharu, there is a belief that a truly powerful gurau can ride the tiger and use it to travel between villages at incredible speeds. Some will even swear that they’ve seen this with their own eyes, and they will describe in detail the sight of a wizened old shaman climbing upon the back of a huge, striped tiger and bounding away through the trees. While speaking with the guraus of several villages near Chitwan, I heard reference again and again to “Raj Guru,” a recently deceased gurau they had all known personally and who, despite a penchant for rakshi liquor—apparently he was equally famous for his drinking—was still able to summon tigers at will to reach sick villagers in need. To the outsider, such stories sound incredible, but to someone steeped in the cosmology of the Tharu, they are only logical. Being able to live in harmony with the tiger—even gain mastery of the tiger—represents the ultimate form of spiritual ability, because the tiger was and still is regarded as the ultimate expression of the forest’s awesome power. A person who can harness the power of the tiger can, in effect, do anything. To the Tharu, the tiger was never a monster to be exterminated, but a force of nature to be harnessed and understood. The truly great man was not he who could kill a tiger, but rather he who could make peace with it, and good use of its fangs and its claws. He who could channel that power, as it were, into something constructive.
And in their own unique way, that’s precisely what the Tharu did. The key to maintaining their own sustainable way of life in the terai was to keep a certain healthy balance between forces that were ostensibly at odds. The Tharu relied on wild deer and boar as a source of meat, but both would eat their crops if their numbers became too great. Tigers solved the problem nicely, keeping the ungulate population robust but not excessive. However, if the tiger population became too concentrated, then tigers began preying upon livestock—thus, adequate habitat was needed. And because the Tharu also depended on the forests and grasslands for building materials and animal fodder, they were even further inclined to keep ecosystems both productive and intact. This in turn preserved ungulate populations, which further nourished the tiger population . . . and so on. It was a delicate balancing act of sorts, a chain without a beginning or end, that linked together the humans, the flora, and the fauna of the terai. But it was an act of balance that the Tharu excelled at. They farmed their fields, they grazed their animals, they hunted and fished in their forests, and they burned and harvested fodder from their grasslands. And they always did so alongside a healthy population of wild tigers.
This does not mean, however, that the Tharu existed in a state of perfect isolation. Their innate resistance to malaria may have allowed them to inhabit an otherwise uninhabitable stretch of wilderness, but they were not totally cut off from the cultures that surrounded them. Indeed, the lands of the terai had been incorporated into the various kingdoms and princedoms of the region for thousands of years, serving as a crossroads among the various states that straddled the boundaries of what is today Nepal and northern India. Siddhartha Guatama—better known as the Buddha—is commonly believed to have been born in Lumbini, some 2,500 years ago, in the ancient Shakya Republic of what would eventually become Nepal. People, products, and religious beliefs traveled in and out of terai settlements for millennia, and the inhabitants paid homage and taxes to the feudal lords of the region, in times of peace and war, through a rotating caste of Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist rulers. But while boundaries and allegiances shifted with time, the daily life and culture of the Tharu remained relatively stable. This proved to be true even when the surrounding kingdoms were consolidated following the conquests of Prithvi Narayan Shah, the founder of Nepal’s Shah dynasty. Between 1743 and 1768, from his home base in the mountain kingdom of Gorkha, he conquered neighboring kingdoms one by one, eventually combining them into a single, unified state whose borders more or less correspond to modern-day Nepal. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, the Tharu people of the terai valleys, although far removed from the capital in Kathmandu, became subjects of the new Nepalese king.
The relationship took time to develop. The Shah rulers of a nascent Nepal initially saw the terai wilderness of their new kingdom as a potential source of agricultural expansion, and they actively encouraged the Tharu to increase their taxable farming output through land grants and incentive packages for local communities. But it did not take long for the Shahs to realize there were even more pressing reasons to keep the forests and grasslands of the terai uncultivated and intact, and that the Tharu people were far more useful as guardians of the forest than as destroyers of it.
The reasons behind this tactical about-face are complex, but high among them was the preservation of a species whose role in the subcontinent cannot be underestimated, particularly in the preindustrial era: Elephas maximus, the Asian elephant. Long before there were all-terrain vehicles, bulldozers, or heavy artillery, there were elephants, and the kings of the Indus Valley had been using them as such since the Bronze Age. In Nepal, there are records going back to at least the sixth century B.C. of state-sponsored elephant management, as evidenced by a report of a Licchavi king named Manadeva who built a bridge across the Gandaki River solely for the transportation of hundreds of war elephants. Works of Sanskrit literature such as the Arthashastra are filled with detailed instructions on elephant husbandry, and the Muslim Mughal Empire relied on the exchange of elephants to cement relationships with their neighbors in the Nepalese hills throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Elephants were often decreed as royal property, regardless of their provenance, and when one considers the raw potential of their bodies—both constructive and destructive—the reasons for their regal status become abundantly clear. With males reaching weights in excess of 5 tons, with maximum shoulder heights approaching 12 feet, and with trunks that contain more than 40,000 muscles, the Asian elephant possesses awesome strength coupled with tremendous dexterity. For constructive purposes, these traits could easily be harnessed to fell timber, haul stone, erect columns, and steady walls—all of which were necessary for the infrastructure and ceremonial needs of an expanding kingdom. For destructive purposes—well, when it came to warfare, there wasn’t much a mounted elephant couldn’t do. The siege engines of the day, a fully armored elephant with spikes mounted on its tusks and a fortified howdah tower on its back could also function like a Sherman tank. Able to achieve speeds of up to twenty miles per hour, and covered with a hide that could absorb dozens of arrows and musket shots alike, a trained war elephant was more than capable of breaking even the most stubborn of enemy lines, trampling infantry and skewering cavalry horses on its bladed tusks. They provided an elevated vantage point for commanders, and a well-angled shot for mounted archers and snipers. A full complement of military elephants was essential for any aspiring regional power of the day, Nepal included, and their value was certainly not lost on the Shah kings, who had built their vast kingdom, both literally and figuratively, on the backs of well-trained pachyderms.
There was, however, one facet to elephant husbandry that lent a tremendous amount of import to the preservation of the terai: the animals were difficult to breed in captivity. The aggressiveness of rival males coupled with exceedingly long gestation periods—up to two years, in many cases—rendered captive breeding extremely impractical, and made capturing wild juvenile elephants an absolute necessity. And in Nepal, the fo
rests of the terai was where wild elephants were to be found. When it came to the capture and training of wild elephants, there was one group of people who had centuries of experience: the Tharu. As elephant handlers nonpareil, the Tharus came to be replied upon by the Shah dynasty for keeping the kingdom’s supply of elephants well stocked, and always at the ready. This meant the establishment of the government-sponsored hattisar, or elephant stable, in many Tharu communities, which came as part of a mutually beneficial arrangement. The local Tharu could use the elephants for their own farming and construction purposes when needed; however, they would be expected to report for duty when the king deemed their services necessary. This included royal hunts, when the Shah king would visit the terai to pursue rhino, bear, leopard, and of course, the most regal quarry of all, the Royal Bengal tiger. Hunting tigers demanded that the shikari be mounted atop an elephant, with a local Tharu always serving as the mahout, or elephant driver. The Tharu, along with their royal visitors, even developed a uniquely Nepalese technique for corralling tigers, known as the “ring” hunt. It involved using dozens of elephants to surround a tiger, before finally entrapping it behind a solid wall of trumpeting tuskers. Tharus were well rewarded by the Shah kings of Nepal for their service during royal hunting excursions, with gifts of land, captive elephants, and even a pagari, or a “turban of honor” that the recipient could wear with pride for the rest of his life. Such rewards served to solidify the loyalty of the Tharu people, and in doing so, ensured that the terai with its herds of wild elephants would be preserved as well.
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