-Dr. Sonam B. Wangyal

Professor Richard Keith Sprigg is a person well known to the academics of Kalimpong and the surrounding areas. What is generally not known is that he was absolutely thorough in whatever he did. I once sent him a short study on the meanings of names of some places in the district for his opinion and what I got back was well over twice my input. He had consulted dictionaries, met people who taught Nepali, Hindi, Bengali and even consulted Lepcha elders before coming to any conclusion. He was that thorough. He lived for many years in Ahava Cottage at Dr. Graham’s Homes and his residence became a lodestone for linguists and historians from all over the Himalayan region and places further afar. People came to tap his vast knowledge of Tibeto-Burman languages and related subjects. In 1955, while with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, he arrived in Kathmandu with several photocopies of some manuscripts preserved at the India Office Library, London. The documents formed a part of Brian H. Hodgson’s collection made in Darjeeling and Nepal in the early 1840s. It was believed that the documents were in the Limbu script but there was no one in England could read them and Sprigg had arrived in Kathmandu to find someone who could. The following account will illustrate his thoroughness in finding a reader and the follow up to it.

At Kathmandu he met Tilbahadur Limbu and Col. B. Chemjong, both highly respected and educated Limbus, but they were none the wiser at reading the manuscript. They suggested that Kaziman Kandhanga of Ghoom Pahar, Darjeeling, could possibly shed some light on the matter. After sometime the Professor was at Ghoom but Kaziman too was helpless save for another address he provided: Iman Singh Chemjong at Ilam, Nepal. To decide in the next course of action he went to the tranquil settings of Kalimpong and made the Himalayan Hotel his base. There he thought he would find success in the Limbu school but the Limbu masters at Dungra Busti Jambok Memorial School were no more knowledgable than the previous contacts. Here someone once again suggested that Iman Singh Chemjong could possibly be the appropriate person. This was the second time the name had cropped up. A small bit of research revealed that Chemjong had worked in Sikkim the previous year and so Sprigg went there to find out if the man had the required knowledge to be worth the chase. T.D. Densapa, a respected scholar and a senior bureaucrat of Sikkim, confirmed that Chemjong had worked in the Revenue Department of Sikkim and was able to read and write in a script that was similar to the ones in the photocopies. There was at least some small hope now but there were several big problems for the Professor: Ilam was difficult of access, a foreigner needed special permission to enter the place, he was told that there were no hotels there, and if he at all got to Ilam there was no guarantee that Chemjong would be able to read the photocopies, a likely outcome especially after the three previous failures from dependable sources. Chemjong’s address was found and it was decided to invite Chemjong to Kalimpong. After sometime Chemjong arrived. Yes, he could read the script and to the baffling question of why the others could not do was that the scripts had been revised and improved upon by no other than Chemjong himself. All the others were folowing Chemjong’s alterations and were clueless about the original primitive script. I might add here that the script has undergone further modifications to make it computer compatible. Further additions like punctuation marks have been included and in the future there may be more additions with the introduction of diacritic marks. Anyway, that is looking far too ahead and let us go back to the past. In the short time that Sprigg spent with Chemjong, he learnt to read and write the Sirijonga script. Sometime later the Professor, along with his wife – a Kalimpong lady – went to the Limbu heartland of Ilam to actually live with the Limbus. This was no easy job for a European not used to answering nature’s call in the open and on missing out on egg and toast for breakfast and some wine at dinner. But the call of learning something new was too strong to cast aside. At Ilam he learnt the Limbu language and the way the Limbus lived while his wife, not equally academically inclined, spent her hours teaching the women folks how to knit sweaters, socks, muffins and gloves: something the Limbu women had never seen or done before.

In 1989 Sprigg reviewed for the SOAS “A Grammar of Limbu” by Professor George van Driem and in between made contributions like “Phonological formulae for the verb in Limbu” (1966), “The Limbu s-final and t-final verb roots” (1984), and he wrote the Foreword for H.W.R. Senior’s reprint of “A Vocabulary of Limbu Language of Eastern Nepal.”