The hills and mountains of Nepal have been a source of perennial pleasure and source of inspiration for outsiders but of unrelenting tough life for hill dwellers themselves. The plains, on the other hand, have been universally vilified for its hot and humid climate, mosquitoes, and more recently, armed gangs of thugs and cross-criminals. Breadbasket they may be for all and sundry for Nepalis but beautiful they are certainly not.

For me, growing up in the courtyard of the Himalayas at the edge of the Charkose Jungle, the mountains always appeared alluring. The pristine secretive forest in the plains itself held mysteries in its depths where my Rajbanshi villagers disappeared for days on end in the sixties and early seventies with their bullock carts to collect firewood and, more importantly, wild banana leaves to be used as plates for guests to eat from and cane and wild bamboo to make the enclosure in which to hold wedding and funeral feasts.

The mythical axe-beak also lived in the forest, so my Rajbanshi grandma said, in its dark bowers, waiting in ambush for the wood and leaf gatherers. It listened to them attentively, and the moment it heard the name of any villager, it memorised the name long after the villagers had returned to their villages, so much so that one day the villager whose name the axe-beak chanted would diminish in body and die. The occasional peacocks and deer the Rajbanshis brought couldn’t save the man’s life. I of course hadn’t seen this happen but the stories sent shivers down my spine, making me always cautious in the forest while grazing our cattle. But the villagers would go back to forest again to collect leaves and wood when the occasion came.

The flood also came from the forest and its marshes, bringing every monsoon season grown fish that we caught with bow and bamboo nets. It also in the process deposited wild fingerlings and crabs in the fields and whirlpool ponds it made in the middle of the field. We caught these all year round until the next season brought another round of fish and fingerlings. But in the seventies, all this was on its way out. The DDT had killed malaria, the only barrier between the hills and the plains, in a decade or so emptying the hills into the plains.

But in 1976, I had occasion to cross the forest and visit the hills of Dhankuta. I was back from college on Dashain vacation, and was going to one of my neighbours’ hilly abode, a full-morning’s walk east of Dhankuta, to celebrate the festival. He and many others had descended from the midhills a couple of decades earlier in search of land and had built their homesteads either in the clearings in the forest where the Dhimals lived or on its edge where the Rajbanshis lived. They repaired to the hills in the warm season to escape malaria and came down to spend the winters in the plains. I was also invited that year to celebrate Dashain in the hills. So far, the hills, even more than the forest, had appeared to me a distant, dark-blue blob of ranges along the northern horizon just below the golden hues of the Kanchenjungha range. Save for the occasional fires on some evenings, I had no clue what went on in the hills.

The trip to my neighbour’s village east of Dhankuta introduced a new geographical perspective. The early rise in Dharan, the trek up the hill all day long and the brisk walk to the village next morning in anticipation of familiar faces were an eye-opener for a lifestyle and terrain I had never imagined of people with whom I had lived as close neighbours. We had come from two different poles of the Hindu civilisation: the Gangetic plains and the Himalayas that had together constructed a singular narrative and unified scriptural imaginary smoothing over or subjugating the anomalies.

But what struck me most was how people lived in the hills: how they made those wide trek paths, how they built houses with clay and rocks, how they could construct even small village-towns with lined bazaar and stores, how they maintained a sense of their cultural and commercial life without the trappings of modernity. This modernity adulterated with colonialism, brought about by the British in India and the adjoining border areas, and its predecessor Islamic culture brought from the larger civilisation from the West of Hindu Kush had defined the North Indian experience directly in the past millennium.

Yet, life and culture had gone on in the hills with their own individual, communal and intercultural complexities. Even in the 1970s, a few of the houses in the village on the east-facing slope had been abandoned by its occupants who had settled in the plains for good, tired as they had been of the annual trek up and down the hills. I could see young Peepal plants and tufts of grass sprouting in the crevices of the walls and the roofs. The flora was on its aggressive march to reclaim traces of human habitation. In the coming decades my neighbour and many like him would abandon their settlements in the midhills for good for a more prosperous muddy life in the plains.   

A friend who was born in the hills made a pilgrimage to his ancestral village. He recently told me that the entire village has only a few people still living there. Save for the choice lands, much of it had receded into bush and had become a habitat for leopards.

In one sense, nature has slowly reasserted itself against human will. But what is going to happen now that Nepal is engaged in conceiving a plan for federalism and in the next few decades roads and electricity may make the villages even in the hills accessible as never before? Will there be a Tarai-hill migration as many second generation migrants from the hills have begun to revisit the places where they or their parents were born and had grown up a few decades earlier? Will the Nepali hills be like Sikkim where the Sikkimese could be prosperous even without agricultural produce of the plains? Will technology and communication transform them in ways that a new prosperous culture will emerge there replacing the hardship and exploitative socio-economic arrangement of the past?

The possibility of federalism and local ownership of resources has become exciting especially regarding the hills. It appears that they have a new future awaiting them — more exciting, more prosperous, and more vibrant in a way that may be unimaginable now. This is what I saw in the spring of 2007 in Sikkim. Even the remote hills had been turned into pliable destination for tourists and produce. There was an aggressive campaign under Chief Minister Pawan Chamling to develop the hills in an eco-friendly manner. Prosperity had come to Sikkim as never before, many recounted. To be sure, generous Indian aid was responsible for some of what we saw but Sikkimese with their Lepcha, Bhotia and Nepali ethnicities had made remarkable progress in developing the hilly state into agro-business as well as tourism haven. Local ownership with national and international partnership can do the same in Nepal.

Then, there may be a scramble for the hills and mountains again even among Nepalis, effecting a balance with the plains’ exaggerated importance for its fertile land despite its climate.

Post Your Comment

Please note that all the fields marked * are mandatory.
* Full Name
* Address
* Email Address
* Comment
* Captcha	Get another CAPTCHA code
Note:	Comments containing abusive words or slander shall not be published.