The sweep of attitudes and perspectives, of fractures and fault lines, in the shadows of the Himalayan arc, ‘East of South-east’, are placed in context in Manoj Joshi’s essay. He talks of the harsh and tangled reality of political calculations in the cis-Himalayas, which were ‘inhospitable, high and remote, and never accurately surveyed or mapped or demarcated’. On long-running border disputes, he says: ‘Tibet lies across the Indian border from Burma in the east, spreading to Kashmir in the west… Prior to the Chinese decision to annex Tibet, a looser, more flexible order prevailed along the Himalayan frontier. Despite the extreme terrain, ideas, trade, and people moved freely. What changed things was the Chinese constructing a hard state where a soft one existed.’
Through these pages, we will relook at the interconnected geography, culture and identities of a crucial, fascinating, somewhat underreported part of the world, observing disruptions, seeking what coheres. Poetry, music, and food, roads and linkages, political standoffs and religious clashes, fact and fiction all find voice. As a Kumaoni, from the central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, I feel intensely connected to the range and sweep of these magical mountains.
My knowledge of the subject is patchy but passionate. This collection of essays has been put together to learn and understand more about a region I love and care about. I can’t pretend to be a travel writer. Due to abiding hypochondria and some inescapable health problems, I’m a better reader than a traveller and a determined anthologist, getting people to write about the places I want to visit and understand.
Sanjoy Hazarika has made a plea for a loosening of border restrictions and a resumption of cross-border trade and contacts. ‘A formula has to be found where it is possible to work across the borders while maintaining the sanctity of frontiers. The possibilities are endless, if the vision exists.’
This trans-Himalayan identity – fragile, yet enduring – marks all the essays in the book, mapping the contours of the Himalayas, the East of South-east.
A HIMALAYAN CITIZEN
Sujeev Shakya
I grew up in Kalimpong, West Bengal, then a small town nestled on the Indian side of the Himalayas. A town that drew a lot of attention as the connecting point between various Himalayan nations – India, Bhutan, Nepal and Sikkim (then a separate state). I grew up understanding the idea of different Himalayan nations, but continuously wondering about how the international boundaries in the Himalayas must have been marked. When in school, it was usual for me to see vehicles with licence plates from three foreign countries lined up outside. Sikkim was still another country; Bhutan and Nepal had their distinct red licence plates for private vehicles. We could literally walk into Sikkim in an hour’s time and drive into another country in a few hours – be it Bhutan or Nepal.
Growing up with international boundaries just next to you, in the days when passports and national identity documents were still a new phenomenon in our part of the world, made me think a lot on the issue of Himalayan identity. This cosmopolitan world was fun and I could smoothly adjust to the various differences. When I meet fellow Himalayan citizens, I tend to see the same sense of adaptability and ease with which they traverse the world. We never grew up with a strong sense of nationalism, as our sense of the country we belonged to was limited to the singing of the Indian national anthem during school functions or when a VIP visited our school. When the Nepali national anthem praising the Nepali king and country became a daily ritual on Radio Nepal, we did not mind that either. On 10 March, when people would come out on the streets decrying the Chinese occupation of Tibet, I used to feel a sense of affinity, as many of my friends, their parents and their communities would be part of this annual saga. Though I used to find it strange that the people who traded in Chinese goods, wore Chinese shoes and carried tea in Chinese flasks came out so strongly against the Chinese.
Coming down from school on Tirpai Road, we would see the remains of the structure that apparentlywas the Counsellor Office of the Tibetan government and had been burnt down after the Chinese occupation of Tibet. We were told it was haunted and we used to explore this place after school to try and spot ghosts of Chinese soldiers. At times, I used to turn left at Topkhana to see the Bhutan House where, we were told, the Queen Mother of Bhutan lived. My father, who had lived in Tibet for a decade and a half, later told me that the Bhutan House was constructed to welcome the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. On Saturdays, when I used to tag along with my mother for the biweekly vegetable shopping at the haat bazaar, I would wonder who was this Raja Dorjee after whom the market had been named. I used to think that he must have been someone who fought for Indian independence, but many decades later, as I started researching more on the Himalayas, I learnt that he was key advisor to the king of Bhutan.
For us, the mountains were precious – only those which had snow on the peaks were mountains, the rest were all hills. They were to be revered. They did not have finite shapes; they were symbols of the infinite. They showed us our insignificance in the larger scheme of things. This image of the grandeur of the mountain travelled with me. To Ghandruk, in the Annapurna area, where the daunting Machhapuchre peak looks down upon you and you like the idea of being insignificant. Mountains become part of you then. Or on a clear day, during the morning flight out of Kathmandu, when I would book a window seat each time to be able to see the mountain ranges going deep into the Tibetan plateau. Or in Cape Town, South Africa, where I could spend hours watching the clouds roll down the Table Mountains. In Musange, Rwanda, I never got tired of looking at the gigantic Mount Karisimbi, with the silver-frosted top that was just 4,600 metres compared to the mighty Himalayas, but gave a sense of magnanimity nevertheless. In Bhutan when I would see the Tiger’s Nest, a monastery on a hilltop, I would want to go there to experience the grandeur of its height. In Coorg in south India or during the drive to Mussoorie in the western Himalayas, hills and mountains became part of me.
It is very difficult to describe what makes one feel as if one belongs to the mountains. I recall, during school holidays in Kalimpong and even later, being driven in a bus through meandering roads, hitting the plains at Sevoke as I encountered Siliguri, the big city in the plains. A dreadful encounter. Hot, humid, crowded and busy, it was challenging to find my bearings there. Eating Avomine tablets on each trip was the norm, as I did not want to throw up like my fellow passengers. The fifty-kilometre journey seemed like the longest one of my life. Later, when in some cities I had to travel this distance every day to get to work, I started to wonder about the perception of distance in the Himalayas.
Across the border, one became anxious when one got into those night buses from Kakarvitta on the Nepal side. This anxiety continued till the bus crossed Mugling, about 100 kilometres west of Kathmandu. When the night bus meanders through the serpentine road and the hills become visible, one again feels at home. Naubise, twenty-five kilometres away from Kathmandu, becomes one’s reference point for home. So, perhaps, home is where you and the hills meet.
Later in life as I travelled through many cities and countries round the world, I continued to make my home in the place where I met the hills. After the most absorbing commercial flights in the world, the Kathmandu to Paro journey continues to mesmerize when you can see the Everest from a vantage point above. It is even better in good weather when the captain of the Drukair Airbus 319 takes the plane closer to the Everest. When you land in Paro, the fresh air and the drive to Thimphu make you feel as much at home as in the hills.
Mobility has been a challenge for people who grew up in the hills. If there were no roads, they had to walk for hours. Before television and internet invaded homes, the small community that you lived with became the place where people traded stories. Of course, the distances you had to travel on a day-to-day basis were quite short. You had few desires, so you had a lot of time to yourself. The idea of storytelling then became important. People from the hills can tell stories, and stretch them interminably! We had a special term coined for that, ‘Khorsani sukaune guff’,
meaning the guffaw over drying chillies. The story behind this was that in the hills, if you asked someone what they were busy with, they could spend the next hour talking about the chilli they were drying. This could begin from the day that person went to buy the green chillies, whom she bought them from, whom she met while purchasing them, innumerable anecdotes about her journey to and from the chilli vendor. In between, she would also tell you how the last time she used the dried chillies to make aloo dum (a spicy potato dish), the favourite dish of her son-in-law who visited her last week, or the gory stories of how the hot chillies wreaked havoc on someone’s digestive system. She could describe in detail the sounds that emanated from the toilet and the tears in the eyes of the chilli-eater when he came out of the toilet. The intonation is musical in the hills, every word expressed with a musical sound, so you don’t mind listening to the hour-long chilli story. Everybody traded stories and the same story was told at regular intervals by different people. Even today, despite the invasion of television or internet into people’s homes, the storytelling style hasn’t changed much. The languages may have changed, the subject may have changed, but the oral tradition continues. The references are now to the last joke they read on WhatsApp or the YouTube video they watched or the piece they read on Twitter.
There is some divine connection between the Himalayas and food. Food unites the folks from the hills. In any part of the world, it creates a sense of homecoming and togetherness. The ubiquitous momo parties are something we look forward to whether in London or in New York. When I was studying in Calcutta, we had a Nepali-speaking association of students from the Himalayan region, cutting across boundaries. The annual event used to be a momo party. From kneading the dough, making the wrappers, chopping the vegetables to mincing meat, to steaming the momos, the process creates a great sense of belonging. The hot achar that accompanied the momos was a Darjeeling influence. Similarly, when it came to making aloo dum, there would be serious discussions on the chilli that would go into making it, the use of dalle (jalapeños) as in Darjeeling and Sikkim, the addition of fenugreek or ajwain seeds as in eastern Nepal, or putting in a bit of cheese as is the norm in Bhutan.
Among the diasporic Himalayan community, one of the prized possessions is the moktu or the vessel in which you steam momos. Even after having tried out sophisticated steamers and electric steaming machines used to make Chinese dumplings, I still feel that the relationship with the moktu is pristine and cannot be replaced by any other equipment.
For folks who grew up in Kathmandu Valley, the sound of the kerosene stove while cooking momos is something they miss. Their brand of momos are known as the jhwai (the sound of the kerosene stove), also called mamachas (the Newah ‘cha’ integrated to the word) and use spiced buffalo meat. They are served with achar loaded with sesame seed and sour lapsi powder from the Himalayan hog plum. In Kathmandu, where I landed after college in the late 1980s, vegetarian momos were still considered an oxymoron and were rarely found. However, in Rangpo, Sikkim, vegetarian momos sold with spicy chilli sauce along with chhola bhatura and dosa was a delight enjoyed even by extreme carnivores.
Just as dialects separate and provide identity to the various groups and sub-groups of the Himalayas, the way one cooks their momos or aloo dum reveals which part of the Himalayas they belong to.
In the Darjeeling hills it is said that if you never owned a guitar or played one when you were young, then there was something wrong with you. Music is another factor that binds the Himalayan citizens. The popular Dzongkha songs that I hear in the cabs in Thimphu have different lyrics but seem to have been inspired by popular Nepali numbers. Every momo party has to end with singing, where old Kishore Kumar songs jostle with The Beatles, The Eagles and Narayan Gopal or Om Bikram Bista. These super collections are now easily accessible, with many a kind soul having put them up as collections on YouTube. In the villages on trekking routes in Nepal, one can still listen to live performances in the evening or engage in the dohari (folk songs) tradition of the Gurungs, or dance to the tune of Tamang Selos. Spicy food and alcohol provide a heady mix to one’s creativity and help shed all inhibitions. The constant humming of birds and the roaring of the Himalayan rivers make one used to music all the time.
Difficult circumstances and poverty have always been part of the identity of the people of the Himalayas. This was popularized by portraits of the Himalayan dwellers. With the camera becoming more and more affordable and easier to use, photographers started to make a living by selling images of perceived human poverty. The roads reached the Himalayas very late and in many areas, infrastructure is still a far cry. Sustainable living has been the Himalayan value but with the advent of development aid, Himalayan nations like Nepal fell prey to the newer definition of development. So people were asked to leave their farms where they were planting good organic rice to come and work for the ‘food for work’ programme and buy inferior-quality rice with the money they earned. Laptop-chugging development mobilizers started telling them how their lives should be. Development aid workers started building toilets in the high Himalayas and were astonished when the toilets were unusable in just six months, because there was no water. They discovered that the toilets were filled with stones that the locals used for wiping!
In the remote parts of the Himalayas, money is only needed when one has to pay for transport services, and in later years, for mobile phones and recharge cards. Roads are a double-edged sword. Accessibility does not necessarily help reduce poverty; it can also transport young people to the cities in search of a better life and leave the hills full of old people and children. Sustainability of the geography is as important as sustainability of the people. So the lenses through which we look at poverty and prosperity need to be continuously recalibrated. This continued to challenge me and got me involved with the Himalayan Consensus movement, to relook at the way the Himalayas can make its citizens happier and more prosperous, but not at the cost of their future generations.
A couple of years ago a friend of mine from Kathmandu travelled with me to Kalimpong. One evening, he was amused to see hill folks whose parents came from diverse regions such as Punjab, Bihar, Rajasthan and Tibet, just sitting across chatting in chaste Nepali, while sipping beer and eating momos and aloo dum. The Nepali being spoken had the same ‘hill’ inflection. Perhaps, my annual pilgrimage to school reunions is about continuously learning to de-learn carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, and instead to enjoy the little moments of life that we go through each day which we have stopped noticing.
Himalayan citizens carry a unique identity. It does not matter which part of the world you belong to when you inherit the hills as your identity. You learn bits and pieces of many languages. The Himalayas is your larger identity; you have a sub-identity of the region/country you belong to for sure, but it never really matters which nation you are domiciled in or which passport you carry. This was the case for many years.
The polarization of the people in the hills began as under an independent India the various Himalayan nations started to figure out their own status within South Asia. The Himalayan kingdoms had their own relationships and complicated conflicts with other countries and with living in this new reality called India, an independent country partitioned along religious lines. In the north there was China that was reeling under tremendous economic difficulties as new political structures tried to change the status quo of the large country. After the annexation of Tibet, China, formerly thousands of miles away, became a new neighbour. Even before Independence, when the capital of British India shifted from Calcutta to Delhi, the prominence of Darjeeling waned as the ‘summer capital of the Bengal Presidency’, thereby reducing the importance of the Himalayan region.
Then and now, Delhi could never understand what went on beyond the National Capital Region. For many in Delhi, anything that was in the west had to do with Partition and Pakistan. People from the south were stereotyped as Madrasis whose language and food one did not understand. People from
the east were in a pecking order of bhaiyas from Uttar Pradesh, Biharis or Bangalis; beyond that everyone was a chinky. Nepalis were stereotyped as the ABCD of Indian society: aaya (nanny), bearer, chaprasi (peon), and durwan (guard). The average Nepali was portrayed as a security guard in Bollywood movies, uttering only ‘Sahapji’. In many Indian homes I was confronted by unspoken but evident surprise – how can Nepalis be educated and professional too?
The identity discourse started to gain momentum in the 1980s with the demand of recognizing Nepali as a national language in India. Sikkim had just been annexed to India and Nepali was an official language there. The language demand later morphed into the demand for a separate state for the Gorkhas (as a new pan-identity different from the Nepalis of Nepal). Federal and state armed forces got involved in suppression of the movement. There was no victory for anyone. The politics of myopia pushed many people out of the region. In the mid-1980s, there was an exodus of Nepalis from Meghalaya as well as Bhutan due to hostility from the other communities, and close to 100,000 Nepalis became refugees in eastern Nepal. In Nepal, the 1990 Jan Andolan restored multi-party democracy, and for the first time, attempts for a local self-government were made and the identity discourse evolved. The mid-1990s saw the evolution of the Maoist insurgency in Nepal that spilled over to the Indian side. The politics of identity continue to plague the Himalayan region. From Kashmir to Burma, one’s national allegiance has become a new way of redefining oneself rather than being content just being a Himalayan citizen.
As connectivity in the world increased, identity became important for travel across borders. The proliferation of banking activities and formalization of commerce required further proof of identity. Suddenly, the question of which nation and which state you belong to became important.
The Himalayan Arc Page 2