Deepak Thapa on Nepal's Tamangs - The country is yours
It is a story worth telling, the one about how cars were
carried over the mountain trails on human backs till the 1950s so that Nepal’s
ruling class in Kathmandu could zip around the Valley’s few roads. It is
something that adds to Nepal’s exotic mystique, which most of us are guilty of encouraging.
For the most part, the grainy, black-and-white photographs of these laborious
undertakings showing scores of men struggling with metallic beasts of vehicles
tell us nothing more than just that. Until recently, that is, when a
newsmagazine carried a story of five surviving members of those labour gangs
that carried cars from Bhimphedi all the way to Thankot, whence, in the words
of one of them, “The babusahebs [gentlemen lords!] of Kathmandu would race them
to their homes.”
Porters transporting a car across a stream in Nepal (January, 1950).
Photographer: Volkmar K. Wentzel
The names of this octogenarian quintet from the areas around
Bhimphedi are worth recording: Dhan Bahadur Gole, Hira Bahadur Ghalan, Iman
Singh Rumba, Jukta Bahadur Waiba and Pote Gole. What ties them together is not
only that they are a part of history lost forever, but they are also all
Tamangs. That should not be surprising considering that the hills and vales
surrounding Kathmandu is a strong Tamang country and they would thus be the
natural choice to be the bearers of these vehicles for the rulers.
Blaming the oppressed: This brief introduction brings us to present-day Nepal. A
couple of weeks ago, a polite conversation gently veered towards the reality
that as a group Tamangs suffered more from April quake than anyone else. But
the discussion suddenly turned very uncomfortable when a high-ranking
government official made three statements that reflected what seemed like
wilful ignorance but, more disturbingly, a willingness to take patently
prejudicial ‘facts’ at face value.
Assertion 1: Eighty percent of the crimes committed in the
Valley are by Tamangs.
Assertion 2: Tamang families celebrate when they give birth
to a baby girl since she will grow up, join the sex trade, and support the
family.
Assertion 3: Crime and sex work among Tamangs is culturally
ingrained.
As a senior bureaucrat, he would probably be privy to crime
statistics—if these existed, for I seriously doubt that our cops actually have
broken down the crimes committed by caste/ethnicity. In all probability, he was
passing on information gleaned from off-the-cuff remarks made by officials in
their tête-à-têtes. But what was disconcerting was he had clearly not given a
single thought to why, if true, that could be so.
Our official (and no points for guessing which social group
he belongs to) surely had no idea that in their youth Messrs Gole etc from
Bhimphedi had no option but to work at porterage. Tamangs were prohibited from
accessing the main form of social mobility available to the major Janajati
groups—service in the British Indian army.
All because they were required by
the Kathmandu elite for services that scholar-activist-politician Parshuram
Tamang enumerated in 1992 as follows: “During the Rana years, Tamangs were used
as menial labour by the rulers and the courtier class—as construction labour for
the durbars, for cutting trails, portering, carrying palanquins, running mail,
delivering forest-based products, weaving baskets and trays, keeping palaces
clean, maintaining the indoors, doing gardening, providing agricultural labour,
keeping herds, making lokta paper, holding umbrellas, maintaining hookahs,
carrying goods, and serving as surrogate mothers for high-born offspring.”
Anthropologists David Holmberg and Kathryn March found that
northern Tamangs had to provide 25 days of compulsory service every year to the
rulers/state during the Rana era. This is not corvée labour common to many
feudal societies when one provides services free of charge on state projects.
The 25 days was something every household had to contribute on an annual basis
and often that 25 extended to 30 days as well. Forget getting paid for their
labour, they even had to make provisions for their own food.
The one area of government employment open to Tamangs was as
pipa, the generic term for menial workers in the Nepali army, which has
historically been the preserve of Tamangs. No chance of rising through the
ranks. Exiting the country was one way of escaping this burdensome existence
and many certainly did that, mainly to Darjeeling, where the Tamang population
had reached 50,000 by the end of Rana rule, becoming the second biggest
Nepal-origin group there.
If you keep a people down for centuries, it does have an
impact on later generations. No wonder that Tribhuvan University’s Nepal Social
Inclusion Survey 2012 found that among the 6-25 age group of Tamang males, 47
percent had been educated at just the class 1-5 level, and only 12 percent had
studied beyond class 11. The latter figure is half the attainment at that level
for the two other large Janajati groups, Magars and Tharus, themselves quite
backward. Block all avenues for progress, treat them like dirt, and then
despise them for failing to advance upwards. We have heard it all before
whether in the case of blacks in America or the Roma in Eastern Europe.
Kidnapping the girls: As for the sex trade, anyone with any interest in the
subject will have heard these stories, particularly as they relate to certain
villages in Kathmandu’s periphery. But can anyone believe that entire
communities are primed to sell their daughters into this heinous profession
unless there are extraneous reasons? As Parshuram Tamang had noted: “The system
of keti basne imported women from the Tamang hills for all kinds of chores in
Rana palaces. The maintenance of scores of female retainers, some of whom
served as concubines, is said to have started the trend towards prostitution
among poverty-stricken Tamang communities.” Did anyone miss the irony that the
cause of their poverty were the Ranas to begin with?
How Tamang women were viewed by the state becomes clear from
this quote from an interviewee of Holmberg and March’s: “On the night of the
big festival there, the royal herders would just grab the girls and take them
off. You were unable to say anything about this even if it was one’s own wife.”
If cowherds could get by with such impunity, one can imagine what went on in
the stucco palaces of Kathmandu.
Right the wrongs: I probably should stop here given the sheer ignorance of our
government official, who, as a Kathmandu native, would have seen Tamangs and
their situation throughout his life. But that a person in such a position of
power and responsibility can be completely blind to the structural inequities
that have played such a major role in the continued backwardness of Tamangs
says a lot about our state and its functionaries.
As we enter the phase of recovery from a disaster that has
devastated the lives of thousands of Tamangs, we have been provided with a
golden opportunity to finally right all these years of discrimination. If
managed properly, there will no longer be any need for words such as poet
Pratap Bal Tamang’s in ‘Aasyaang—think for yourself!’ (in Manjushree Thapa’s
translation of this address to an imaginary maternal uncle): “You too are a
citizen—like the others of this country/…The country is yours as well/The
universe is yours as well/Your rights exist here too.” One can only hope that
whoever heads the reconstruction authority has at least an understanding of
this most fundamental of truths.
