www.kalimpong.info

In honour of the original inhabitants of our hills.
-Admin

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Lepcha Mad
Dr. Sonam B. Wangyal

Of the many people the Lepchas honour few can match the reverence that Lieutenant General George Byres Mainwaring (proper pronunciation Mannering) commands. This veneration becomes all the more significant since Mainwaring was not a Lepcha and belonged to an aristocratic family of Cavenagh-Mainwaring from Whitmore and Budduph in Staffordshire. He was born in India on 18 July 1825 while his father was serving in the Bengal Civil Service. From his father George Mainwaring he received his first name, George, and from his mother, Isabella Byres, his middle name Byres. As it was the convention with people possessing money and status the boy Mainwaring was packed off to ‘home’, in his case home being Aberdeen, Scotland, to complete his studies and from Aberdeen it was to Wimbledon for higher learning in classics and mathematics. In the confines of the British institutions little did the young lad know that one day he would be a champion amongst the Lepchas and that he would be reverentially recalled by this community even well beyond a hundred years of his death. (more…)

-Dr. Sonam B. Wangyal

Grammarians say that a verb’s job is to complete a sentence. In other words it is impossible to make a correct sentence without using a verb. However, we, the Nepali speakers, don’t just use verbs but also give them such leverage that they bestow an effervescence that is unique to our language. I had previously mentioned that one has to be ‘with it’ to fully understand the nuances and the complexities of the Nepali language and I recall an incident when an Australian friend of mine, who had married a Nepali girl and had been with Nepali speakers for two months, telling me, “Dāi, Nepali ekdamai sajilo rahechā for I have found the ‘operative’ word and the term is ‘nose’. All I have to do is say ‘bus-nose, uth-nose, khā-nose, jā-nose, khel-nose, lekh-nose etc and my job is done.” A year later he had a totally different opinion. It is difficult for them to understand how we make complete sense out of sheer nonsense. Take for example the two simple verbs with completely opposite meanings, ‘uthnu‘ (to stand) and ‘basnu‘ (to sit) and now join them to obtain ‘uthi basnu‘ and we get ‘keep on standing’. Similarly we have ‘pakri‘ (to catch) and ‘chhōrnu‘ (release) and the combination ‘pakri chhōrnu‘ would imply an intention to definitely catch or arrest. For most westerners these are miles above their cerebral cortex.

But it is not just a case of two opposite meaning words making a stronger sense. A simple verb can have five, six or even more meanings. Here we shall consider only two of the many versatile ones.

‘Mārnu‘ is the verb meaning to kill, beat, or strike e.g., ‘mānchhe mārnu‘ (to kill a person) and ‘māyā mārnu‘ (to kill love/pity i.e. to forget). Now consider ‘angālo mārnu‘ and we get the meaning to embrace, ‘tālā mārnu‘ would imply to lock and ‘thappari mārnu‘ (thappar = slap, slapping) would be a peaceful gesture of clapping hands. The meaning ‘to kill’ could possibly be loosely inferred to in ‘thakai mārnu‘ (to rest) in that one would be metaphorically killing tiredness and stretching the same logic a little further ‘palaiti mārnu‘ would be to kill any intention to walk. ‘Pa‘ is the Nepali for leg and ‘latta‘ stands for matting and when the legs are matted together, in the sitting posture, it is a clear sign of being firmly seated or ‘palaiti mārayko‘.

The other verb is ‘lagāunu‘ or to wear as in ‘lugā lagāunu‘ (to wear clothes). But there is nothing to put on in ‘thes lagāunu‘ for the term translates as ‘to cause to trip’ and should you be told to ‘dhār lagāunu‘ you would be sharpening a knife or giving an edge to the creases of your trousers. My Aussie friend just could not get to the point of accepting that ‘bhāg lagāunu‘ meant ‘to divide’ and neither could he accept that to put the blame on someone we say ‘dos lagāunu‘. I guess he will have much more difficulty in understanding and accepting the phrase ‘māyā lagāi chhāryo‘ (love, wear, and abandon) but that is what he exactly did, and of all the people, to a Nepali girl.

The Telegraph published a most distasteful and ill-informed article by Sumanta Sen on April 3, 2008. The article was so disparaging, divisive and just so widely off the mark that I totally ignored it, as one would ignore the rantings of a juvenile blogger online.. Anyone with a keyboard and an opinion can write anything, and responding to all of them is not possible, nor required. That is the reason this site did not feature the contents of that article.

However, the difference here is that even though the quality of the article makes it undeserving of anyone’s attention it is unfortunate that The Telegraph deemed it appropriate to publish the article. By virtue of this blunder wherein Sen’s article slipped through the editorial cracks, the article has been given the credibility that comes with publication in a national newspaper.

The Telegraph should acknowledge their mistake, should retract the article, and offer an apology to the citizens of the Darjeeling district who have been maligned by the careless writings of Mr. Sen.

It has since then come to our attention that Dr. Sonam Wangyal had written to The Telegraph with an appropriate reply. However, the Telegraph has not yet responded to Dr. Wangyal’s correspondence. Hopefully they will do the correct thing and print Dr. Wangyal’s rejoinder in an equally prominent location in their publication. In the meanwhile however, I have received permission from Dr. Wangyal to re-post his letter in this site.

Thanks,

-Admin

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Give Us One More Thing

Writing rejoinders is not my cup of tea but Sumanta Sen’s Fight for a New Home (Fifth Column, 3 April 2008) leaves me no other option than this unpleasant task of responding to his essay that openly betrays lack of access to ground realities and of his little knowledge of the history of Darjeeling’s hills and plains.

Firstly, let us take the case of his profoundly disturbing declaration that “Strictly speaking, the Nepalese in Darjeeling can be dubbed ‘foreigners’ because they have come from another country.” Banking on Sen’s logic the Parsis scattered all over India, people of Ahom descent in Assam, the Aryans who came to India from Europe, the Sindhis since Sindh is primarily in Pakistan and as a matter of sad but ’strictly speaking’ contention all the Bengalis that migrated to West Bengal from East Pakistan are also foreigners. It is foolhardy to throw stones at others unless one lives in a bullet-proof glass house. And Sen does not have that protection for all we have to do is take a peek at Tripura, the very name suggests the place belongs to the Tripuris, where hordes of refugees poured in from East Pakistan and settled in the fringes of the small kingdom. Today the original inhabitants are in the fringes, very akin to refugees anywhere, and, to use Sen’s term, ‘immigration’ has seen to it that the centre of political, financial, cultural, linguistic and administrative fields are with the Bengalis: from the Chief Minister down to almost every officer that matters is a Bengali. Business is conducted in Bengali, the colleges and schools are predominantly Bengali and even the restaurants smell Bengali or should I say they smell of elish, rhui and bhetki. One could ask the same question Sen has asked in the essay, “Should numbers alone be the deciding factor when it comes to determining the future of the hills (read natives of Tripura)?” Has Sen ever wondered what ever happened to the Reangs, Chakmas, Malsums (Halam), Mogs, Darlongs and the other tribes besides the ruling Tripuris. Nevertheless, these are realities that one must learn to accept and by extension learn to accept that Gorkhas in Darjeeling are as much Indians as Parsis in Mumbai or Bengalis in Tripura.

There was a suggestion that the Indo/Darjeeling-Nepal border could be fenced to check “such a high rate of influx“. Permit me to mention that the Indo-Nepal Treaty of 1950, Article VII, states, “The Government of India and Nepal agree to grant, on reciprocal basis, to the nationals of one country in the territories of the other the same privileges in the matter of residence, ownership of property, participation in trade and commerce, movement and privileges of a similar nature.” If any type of barricading is to be resorted to then the treaty or the specific Article has to be revoked. Who stands to gain or lose by annulling the Article makes an interesting work but is beyond the scope of the present subject. What I find most amusing is that the Government of West Bengal has, even today, a department for Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation headed by the Hon’ble Minister of State, Shri Binay Krishna Biswas (Secretary: Smt. R. Venkataraman, IAS, and Officer on Special Duty: Shri A. Kanugo, WBCS). The Department was formed in 1950 with the following objective: “The Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation Department was created to handle the enormous dimensions of the human tragedy that West Bengal had to face following the partition of India in 1947…” It has been over six decades since partition and the Department has been around for almost as long and its existence clearly suggests that the infiltration still continues and the illegal immigrants even have a department to welcome them. On the other hand if there is no illegal immigration why do we have the Department sixty years to the unfortunate events.

Mention has been made that the hills suffers from cultural hegemony, Gorkhas and Nepalis are different, and that the Sixth Schedule is best for the hills. In the first case the article mentions that “display of muscle power has also ensured that they (Gorkhas) ride roughshod over a Buddhist culture, which advocates peace, friendship and harmony.“. The British may have been past masters in the art of divide and rule but Sen’s divisionary line will only raise a lot of dust and disgust. I am a Buddhist, a member of a minority community, but in my almost sixty years of existence not once have I been intimidated or my faith questioned, let alone my Buddhist culture being ridden “roughshod”. It is because of the tolerance that exists in the hills that Buddhist Bhutia women volunteered to fast till death for Gorkhaland, it is because of the same reason that Pemba Tshering Bhutia has been elected the chief of the Municipality, it is the very same reason that makes Kambachen (a Bhutia) and Cheten Sherpa (also a Bhutia) raise their fists and voices for Gorkhaland. Bhutias and Gorkhas may be culturally different but when it comes to Gorkhaland they speak the same language and run the same mile. Sen has even made an attempt to bring about a collision between the Gorkhas by writing that, “The Gorkhas, however, are a small community in Nepal.”. The scheme is to suggest that the others are not Gorkhas. I think it is best left to us to decide who is or is not a Gorkha: the semantics of the terms Gorkha and Nepali might confuse Sen and it is better that he makes peace with what little he knows. Where the Sixth Schedule is concerned I have never known a giver/donor being so utterly excited and frenzied to give the Sixth Schedule and conversely I have never seen the proposed receivers so absolutely hostile to the proposal. Need anything more be said on the matter!

There was one piece where Sen hit the nail on the head: Darjeeling belonged to Sikkim and it was gifted to the British by the Maharajah of Sikkim. In other words Darjeeling never belonged to Bengal. Now keeping that in mind the question that automatically arises is, “How does West Bengal fit into the slot?” Maybe there is a shared culture (No), could there be a shared history (No), possibly the physiognomy of the people of Bengal and Darjeeling are similar (No), since they share a common boundary the terrain could be similar (No), or since the languages spoken by the two communities are derivative of Sanskrit…(don’t even think about it), script (No), food habits (No), dress (No), music, religion, mental temperament (No, No, No, and NO a lot many more things)! Bengal has to let go, if not today definitely sometime later.

Mr. Sen and his ilk must realize the hillmen are not Bengal’s or Bengalis’ enemies. Talk to any intellectuals like Krishna Singh Moktan, Dr. Indra Bahadur Rai, Dr. Harkabahadur Chhetri, Prof. Samten Norbu, to name a few, and not only do they love the Bengalis but they hold anything Bengali in awe and reverence. I myself was taught by Bengalis, my colleagues are Bengalis, my workers are Bengalis and some of my most trusted friends are Bengalis. On 23 March 2008 Raja Surajit Sen, former Manager of Debpara Tea Estate passed away and six of us, all hillmen, closed shop and took the long ride to Shillong to pay our respect to a Bengali gentleman who was also our good friend. In front of hundreds of mourners all six of us cried like children because we loved that Bong and there are many others for whom we will do the same. Most hillmen simply love Bengalis for they have given us so much in terms of education, vocational guidance, thriftiness, the value of tourism, politics, pride in one’s culture, exposure to a wider world and much much more, and it will be difficult to find one adult Gorkha who has not been touched by a Bengali. Despite what you have written it does not dilute our love for the Bengalis but Mr. Sumanta Sen, please give us one more thing, give us Gorkhaland and you will forever touch our hearts.

Sonam B. Wangyal

- Dr. Sonam B. Wangyal

Those of you who are above the age of thirty will probably remember Kalimpong’s lonely warrior Mr. Tharchin, who was more popularly known as Tharchin Babu. For those who do not know him I hope the following essay will fill up, to some extent, the inadequacy.

The Centenary volume of SUMITE in referring to “those predecessors who have left behind their footprints (labour, signs of service) to the people of this region” lists sixteen great souls of our region, and tucked away at the center, at number 8, is written: “Rev. G. Tharchin - Author of Tibetan English Dictionary and Tibetan Readers, and Editor of (the) first Tibetan Newspaper in India.” It was very kind and thoughtful of the folks at SUMI to remember this remarkable man. He was a thoroughly likable character, peculiar in many ways, and one oddity that was immediately noticeable was his attire which put him in the order of what is referred to in the western world as a ‘westernized oriental gentleman’, or in the less respectable language – a wog. He almost always wore a shabby, ill-fitting suit, complete with a watch chain and he topped all that with a greasy felt hat that he never failed to doff repeatedly to his acquaintances. His scraggy neck, stained teeth and bristly gray eyebrows more or less complemented the scruffy clothes he wore.

However, Tharchin, a Ladakh-born Tibetan who made Kalimpong his home is remembered not for the way he dressed or looked but for a journal he wrote. Like Suresh Chandra Jain, who is remembered not for his soaring height or his portly appearance but for bringing out the only weekly, Himalayan Times that served Bhutan, Darjeeling, Dooars, Sikkim and Tibet; Tharchin Babu is and will forever be reminisced for Tibet Mirror which was the only Tibetan language journal ‘in the whole world’. It was read from the grand monasteries of Lhasa to the Oriental departments of esteemed European universities, and it was eagerly awaited upon by the foreign offices of Washington, Peking (Beijing), London, Moscow and New Delhi. When the Chinese presence in Lhasa intensified Tibet Mirror responded with salvos of anti Chinese, anti communist and anti Mao Tse Tung articles. The magazine, besides underscoring Tibet’s cause did much to, in no uncertain terms, balm the angst and hurt the local Tibetans carried against him for forsaking Buddhism in favour of Christianity.

Besides the uniqueness of a Tharchin Babu’s clothing, that of him becoming a Christian, and his journal being the only Tibetan language tabloid, we must also include another exclusivity: he was the editor, proprietor, compositor, printer, publisher and the selling agent of Tibet Mirror. The journal being a one-man show it would come out as and when he had the time, the inclination, and the inspiration to sit and write and most of all when he had the money to meet the printing cost. Consequently, its publication was extremely erratic and sometimes there was no Tibet Mirror for months and at other times even for a year or two. Because of the indeterminate duration one might have had to endure in waiting for the next issue, every time the tabloid came out it became a major event in the Tibetan-speaking world. He however made up for this inconsistency at a later period. When the Chinese communist army occupied Lhasa, Tharchin Babu was so enraged that he responded with double issues a month containing a greater barrage of anti-communist articles with Chairman Mao Tse Tung always receiving the author’s full contempt.

But besides the Tibet Mirror Tharchin Babu also published Bible texts and religious tracts for the Church of Scotland Mission and occasionally did some print-works for the local businessmen. He also was a teacher in great demand: his knowledge of classical and colloquial Tibetan was excellent and to tap this gift numerous Europeans Tibetologists came to study Tibetan grammar under him. Foreigners frequently sought him out as a guide and when on that job he would be away from Kalimpong for weeks and months, this being one amongst the several contributory factors for the irregular issues of his journal. Tharchin Babu, in summary, was an indefatigable man and whenever the opportunity presented itself he capped his busy schedule as a lay preacher for the Church of Scotland Mission.

He is no more with us, the Tibet Mirror is gone and his house from where the Tibet Mirror Press functioned at the Tenth Mile is but a ramshackle shed awaiting demolition and the rise of a multi-storied concrete structure. but he still lives on in our memories as a man who single-handedly and unflaggingly, despite knowing that it was a lost cause, took on the might of the Chinese communists from his small dingy wooden house at Kalimpong.

George Dorje Tshering Tharchin, alias Khunu Tharchin, was without a shade of doubt our ‘Lonely Warrior’.

- Dr. Sonam B. Wangyal

When the Scottish Universities Mission (SUM) was formed it was decided that Sikkim would be its field of operation. Keeping that in perspective Reverent Macfarlane was sent to Kalimpong, as the first SUM missionary, to start a training school for teachers and catechists who would later go to Sikkim and spread the message of the Bible.

On 19 April 1886 the Training Institute was formally opened with twelve students. They lived in long low-roofed houses containing rooms that accommodated two to three students. The number of pupils gradually increased and in the turn of the century an English medium school run by Harkadhoj Pradhan was amalgamated to the Scottish Universities Mission’s Training Institute raising its numerical strength and also the associated problems that come with such a sudden increase. Rev. Dr. Sutherland, the first Principal, had recently left for Scotland having managed the school for over twelve years and the new incumbent must have found the job quite a hand full. Despite the sincerity of the mission and the historical importance of the institution the formative years were difficult and actual success was some distant years away.

In 1901 the school was in its fifteenth year and was still struggling to stand on its feet. The muster roll of 26 March showed a strength of a hundred pupils but the actual attendance was almost 50% less with only 53 students in the class rooms. The weak turnout would have, in a way, suited the new Principal, Rev. John Macara, for the school was short staffed with only one Pundit and three “chela” Pundits. The medium of instruction was in Hindi and you readers will be surprised to know that in the primary section the children were made to learn Latin and how that would be of use to the hill lads seems rather uncertain.

In 1907 Rev. Sutherland returned for his second stint as the Principal. The school had grown substantially but the facilities had not kept pace and that year Mr. N. Lambert, the Inspector of Schools, commented, “With the exception of Mr. Sutherland the members of the staff have poor qualifications and are poorly paid.” Rev. Sutherland was to change all that and set right whatever other shortcomings. The improvements were so rapid and substantial that the new Inspector of Schools, Mr. P. Chatterjee, when he visited the school in 1914 wrote, “The school is unquestionably doing excellent work and I would like some of our teachers in the plains to come and see the work done here.” A year later Lord Charmichael noted, “It seemed to me that the nature study in the school is the best which I have met with any school in Bengal.” The rickety old school was now standing on solid foundations and Sutherland could now look forward to heading home having given over 25 years (1887-1899 & 1907-1920) of his active life to the growth and development of the school. It was a time well spent and when he left Kalimpong in the beginning of 1920 he must have been a very satisfied man.

Today SUMI is one of the best schools in India. The nouveau riche may gauge the standard of a school by the fees charged but the proper method is to rate a school through its alumni. In the final count it is not the fancy buildings, heated swimming pools, grand parks with stadiums etc. etc. but how the finished products of the school have fared in life. This deciding factor in the case of SUMI’s is so impressive that it will easily put to shame many better endowed and more celebrated institutions. The SUMI gave Bhutan and Darjeeling their first doctors, produced a Chief of the Army, an Inspector General of Police, several Cabinet Ministers, Ambassadors, numerous educationists, top ranking bureaucrats, the first Nepali Judge in an Indian High Court and the list could go on endlessly. Suffice it to say that the young ones of SUMI have a wonderful legacy to uphold which sums up to a heavy but at the same time a delightful burden of making themselves successful SUMITES.

- Dr. Sonam B. Wangyal

We dealt with ‘haat‘ and today we will continue to examine some other parts of our body. The Nepali tongue has many double words that add emphasis to the first one e.g., sato putlo, phuk phak, pit pat etc. Where our anatomy is concerned I have chosen a couple of double-worded general terms and the first one is ‘dublo patlo‘ which easily translates as lean and thin but it is a bit more wiry than that and is closer to meaning something like emaciated. The other is ‘patali putali‘ where the first word is a gender reverse of ‘patlo‘ and the second provides us with a choice between a butterfly and a doll. My choice, and probably yours too, is definitely the latter one because the accepted meaning of the compound word is a slender and beautiful woman, a doll-like creature, but a ‘butterfly-like slim woman’ does not sound too bad, does it!

Now on to some specific body parts: ‘Pate‘ (pronounced as in rate or mate) or stomach has its own nuances and we take on ‘pate palnu‘ which literally translates as nourishing the stomach but actually means to earn a living. Well our ancestors who coined this term and Napoleon who said, “An army marches on its stomach.” were both very much on the same wavelength for they knew how important it was to nourish the ‘pate‘ before anything else. No wonder our forefathers took the logic a notch higher by bequeathing us the term ‘pate kholnu‘. It does not mean to commit suicide and neither does it imply any surgical procedure but to, as the English speakers would say, spill it out, open up the heart. Yes, our ‘pate‘ is in the heart of everything and therefore our profoundest thoughts would come not from the bottom of the heart but from the bottom of our stomachs which the following phrase aptly illustrates: ‘Hami pate kholera bolnay manchay ho!’.

In the first of this Nepali Nuances series we dealt with the verb ‘katnu‘ and I mentioned ‘nak katnu‘ but there is more to it than a single poetic expression and an almost opposite meaning is implied by the term ‘nak thamnu‘ (uphold one’s nose) or preserve or guard one’s social standing. If you are capable of ‘nak thamnu‘ then, believe me my ‘nak phulcha‘ (nose will swell) or you will do me proud. The neighbouring ear is also not few, I mean ‘kamtiko chhaina‘. ‘Hati kanay‘ implies big ears and not elephant ears while ‘kanayguji‘ (guji = insect) does not mean insect in or of the ear but rather the wax in that orifice and the word ‘kanay‘, by itself, has nothing to do with the ears but surprisingly means a one-eyed person. Older people are used to saying ‘kanma tail halyo‘ meaning blocking the ears and therefore not heeding or not responding to a command or request. Some people claim that the actual meaning is ‘to keep silent’ (which probably is also the result of indifferent ears!). But to consider more familiar terms I would like us to mull over ‘kan khayo‘ or to irritate the ears through noise or words and when the irritations are of different nature we normally yell out, “Tauko khayo” and that would amount to something like ‘to get on the nerves’. To the person who gets on our nerves we often tell him/her off by saying, “Tero tauko!” which despite translating as ‘your head’ actually means “You blockhead (idiot, stupid)!”

Talking of ‘tauko‘ we have the famous term ‘ghantaukay‘. Most dictionaries translate the term ‘ghan‘ as ‘a large hammer sledge-hammer’ but I think the prefix ‘ghan‘ has no relation to a hammer but it just means what it is supposed to mean, big (cf.ghan kanu = to make a big sound, ghanandhakar = pitch dark, ghanera= excessive etc.) and so the word does not mean a sledge-hammer head as given by one the most famous dictionaries but simply big head, nut, cranium or skull.

At the opposite end of ‘tauko‘ is the ‘khutta‘ and with it is connected a marvelous expression, “khutta jhiknu“. It is almost opposite of ‘haat halnu‘ (to meddle) and suggests an act of total disassociation. My favourite for this week is ‘nang ra masu‘ denoting an intimate relationship. What could possibly be so closely related than the flesh and the nails and we are all aware of the soreness that can be caused when the two are separated. I wish that any relationship
you strike will be of the ‘nang ra masu‘ nature and hope the day will never arrive when you have to ‘chhati thoknu‘ in regret.

Ajako lagi dherai bhayo hola, abha ma khutta jhiknu paryo.

- Dr. Sonam B. Wangyal

The Nepali word for hand or, more correctly, the forearm is ‘haat‘ and the term was once used, formerly frequently and now occasionally, to denote a measure of length representing the distance between the finger tips to the elbow. But let us not leave it at that but rather ‘haat lagau’ (commence/begin) to give it the real flatter it deserves instead of just a cursory mention. ‘Haat misamis‘ (lit. exchange of hands) means fighting and conversely should the flaying hands come together we get, ‘haat jornu‘, and one would then be asking for supplication: now isn’t that appropriate!

Similarly, another appropriate one is the common expression ‘malai rees uthyoki haat chilai halcha‘ or if provoked I itch for a fight. In the small gambling joints that punctuate our hills ‘haat‘ takes a new meaning in the common expression ‘tas barne kasko haat ho?‘ meaning whose ‘turn’ is it to deal the cards. In both the latter cases hands may be essential for the implied purpose but the intended meanings are entirely different: fight and turn.

But I know that most of us are not fighters or gamblers so let us continue with some other undertones of the word which ‘mero haat pareko cha‘ (or have come to my possession.) and I am inspired to ‘haat halnu‘ or meddle with them. In the English language we are familiar with the term ‘the long hand of the law’ but in Nepali it is just the opposite: only our thieves have long hands and so we are told, “Tyo sangha hosiyar garnu, haat lamo chha!” (Be wary of him, he is a thief!). The meddling hand appears to be everywhere and therefore it is not uncommon to hear comments like, “Tyasko safaltama mero haat chha!” or “Mero bephaltama tyasko thulo haat chha!“.

Now what is exceptional is that the fingers in the ‘haat‘ are given a very unique pecking order and using the word ‘auli‘ the thumb is ‘jethi auli‘, ‘maili auli‘ the first finger, ‘saili auli’ the second finger, ‘kaili auli‘ the third finger and ‘kanchi auli’ the little finger. The alternative is to use the word ‘aulo‘ (masculine) which will then give us ‘buro aulo‘ for the thumb, ‘chor aulo‘ or ‘kalmi aulo’ ( ‘kalam‘ holding) for the index finger, followed by ‘mailo (maila) aulo‘, ‘sailo aulo‘ and ‘kancho aulo‘ down the hierarchy. In which other lingo is this possible!

Before we round off this part of the essay let me tell you one more thing about ‘haat‘. John Keay, the famous historian on India, would like us to believe that the early Aryans migrating to Aryabarta, the land between Vindya and the Himalaya, had never seen an elephant and seeing the trunk do the job of a “hand” they simply called the beast ‘hat-ee’ (Sanskrit: hasti).

Talking about the early Aryans there is another contribution of theirs to our lexicon, so says another historian. The Aryans traveled from west to the east, towards the sun, looking for a better future. So ahead of them was their ‘purba‘ or ‘before/future’ and that became east, ‘purab‘. At the opposite was what they had left behind or ‘pachhim‘ (cf. Nepali ‘pachhi‘) and so we got our west. In the left direction were the Himalaya, the high mountains or ‘uttan‘ or ‘uttara‘ and that came to be known as ‘uttar‘ or north and the land on the right hand side became ‘dachhin‘ or south (Sanskrit: dakhsina = right or south). So if an Englishman blows his trumpet saying that NEWS means North, East, West and South you can tell him that where cardinal directions are concerned we have a much richer and more profound history.

(Here is the first essay from the series “Their words, hamro vocabulary” by Dr. Sonam Wangyal. In this series of essays he looks at the influences of other languages on the Nepali tongue (and sometimes vice versa), and the fates of the words that are borrowed or modified (or mutilated) as they travel from one vocabulary to another. Enjoy! -Admin)

-Dr. Sonam Wangyal

We are, I would like to believe, a class by ourselves when it comes to adopting and adapting foreign words into our vocabulary. This short essay will consider some English words that have slipped into ours.

The word ‘hap-pen’ per se makes no sense but once its root ‘half pants’ is brought to mind the Nepali speakers’ adaptability becomes obvious. Similarly so many English words become Nepali with just the minutest of change: tile to ‘tali’, pension to ‘pinsin’ or ‘pesin’, bioscope to ‘baees-scope’, brush to ‘burus’, sentry to ’santry’ etc. Even English names of places find our sculpting tongues transforming them to suit our speech. In Darjeeling the Shrubbery Grounds became ‘Sarbary’ Ground, in Kalimpong the Homes became ‘Homus’, in Sikkim the White Hall was altered to ‘White-al’ and in Kurseong Dow Hill was changed to ‘Dao-ill’.

To arrive at our own new words we sometimes make additions and at other times we subtract from the English. A good example of our expanding a word would be ‘tar-karry’. Here the word curry (actually a word from Kerala but came to us as English ‘curry”) is expanded with the addition of ‘tar’ or gravy/sap giving us the hybrid ‘tar-karry’ or curry with gravy.

But we are at our best when subtracting and my favorite is ‘Alkatra’ for tar. In the olden days when the roads were being laid out in our hills the cold environment half the liquid tar would freeze before it was laid on the road and so oil had to be added to soften it. Thus developed the term ‘oil and coal tar’ and our forefathers not to happy with the tongue twister simply reduced it to ‘alkatra’. Similarly, the drivers had a difficult time saying ’shock-absorber, jerk-absorber’ and so they abbreviated the whole thing to ’shokup jokup’. The simplest of abbreviation is to be found with cauliflower where our ancestors just removed the second moiety ‘flower’ and kept the first part ‘cauli’ or ‘kauli’. The same goes for ‘patloong’ for pantaloons, ‘paltan’ for platoon etc.

Simple slip of the tongue can be traced in ‘eskroop’ for screw, ‘bundil’ for bundle, and ‘kitli’ for kettle.

Dr. Indra Bahadur Rai’s explanation as to why we chose not to call the tea gardens with more precise words like ‘bari’, ‘bagan’ or ‘bagaicha’ is another that I am very fond of. In the days of yore the Assisstant Managers would, pointing to the plantation, command the workers to hurry saying, “Come on, come on.” Our folks thought that the place the fingers were pointing to was the “Kaman” and so the word stuck.

It is an unwritten law that any English word commencing with an ’s’ has to be rendered with an ‘es’ in the Nepali and so we have eschool (school), espeed (speed), estand, estation, etc. Our favourite and the most useful vegetable, squash, of which we can eat every part: the fruit, the roots, the leaves, the tendrils, the stems and the shoots, took a little more refining than the simple addition of ‘es’. After all it is our special vegetable and so from squash it became ‘esquash’ according to the established system and then received an additional revision to finish off as ‘esquoosh’.

Esquoosh me for the day - I promise you more “Their’s” and “Hamro” in the future.

(We will be featuring some series of essays by Dr. Wangyal on a regular basis, starting with this one: Nepali Nuances. In this series Dr. Wangyal explores the richness and vitality of the Nepali language, and with his trademark and typical style he covers the range of this richly idiomatic and charmingly onomatopoetic language of ours. I hope you enjoy reading his essays, and please do leave your thoughts and remarks as comments. This is a great forum to interact with the author. Thanks, -Admin)

- Dr. Sonam B. Wangyal

With this essay we commence a seven-part series on the amazing vitality of the Nepali tongue. The subtlety, complicatedness, and the sheer beauty of the exceptionally native nuances make it a very personal language. People talk of the complexities of the English and other languages but I am a firm believer that they are a poor second to Nepali. One has to be ‘with it’ for a very long time to grasp the fine idiosyncratic shades and the incredible earthy and at times wacky rationale of the Nepali language. Could the translation ‘Losing bull: purging habit’ make any sense to a non-Nepali speaker! The Englishman would rather prefer ‘A bad workman quarrels with his tools’ but that is too simple and far too straightforward for us and so we have ‘Haruwa goruko chheruwa bani‘ and only we, the Nepali speakers, can appreciate how well and ingeniously it has been coined.

But this essay and those that will follow are not about adages, proverbs and aphorisms but about words. And we will kick it off with ‘khanu‘ or the verb intransitive (and transitive) meaning ‘to eat’ and round it off with ‘katnu‘ or to cut. Can one eat a reprimand? Well, we can for ‘Gali khanu‘ is a common exercise, after all, ‘hamiharu gali khadai ta hurkayko ho‘. We have a way of dealing with the unpleasant aspects in our lives and like eating a reprimand or rebuke we simply chew and swallow anything negative that comes our way. Therefore, we might lose but we can never get thrashed simply because we eat whatever thrashing is doled to us or ‘hami dhulai khancha‘, and to cite a few other examples we have ‘dhoka khanu‘ (to eat a duping), ‘thesh khanu‘ (to eat a stumbling) ‘laat khanu‘ (to eat a kick) etc. And the menu of edibles does not get any shorter for we have such delicacies like smoke or cigarettes (sigrate khanu), promises (kasam khanu), salary (jagir khanu), business or trade (bechi khanu) etc., but the icing on the cake must be, and unlike in the English where one would steal a kiss, we eat a kiss (moai khanu or chumba khanu in our hills), after all, the primary function of the oral cavity and its appendages is to eat.

The next word I have chosen is ‘katnu‘ (verb transitive) for ‘to cut’. Cutting, to us, is an innate inclination and every house has a khukuri to prove that. But we cut many more things than physical objects and so we, of the hills, are at home with the expression ‘dara katnu‘ (to cross a ridge) and ‘dara kataidinu‘ (to chuck it over the ridge). Similarly, we have ‘phaal katnu‘ (to jump over) and sometimes we almost kill it by saying ‘phaal marnu‘. Occasionally we set aside, or should I say cut, everything else and concentrate on a particular subject and this we term ‘bichar katnu‘. Similarly, when we slice the flow of another’s speech with an interjection it is ‘baat katnu‘ and when a soldier decides to ‘naam katnu‘ he is not chopping off his names to pieces but simply cutting it off the regiment’s roster. There are other terms like ‘hisaab katnu‘ (to deduct, or cut, from an account), ‘arkal katnu‘ (to estimate), but ‘nak katnu‘ (to be disgraced or to be subtracted of respect) was once an actual lopping of the snout, beside of course the associated deduction of status. When Prithwinarayan Shah conquered Kirtipur, he was so provoked by the Kirtipurians’ stiff resistance, he ordered the noses of all the male inhabitants of the place be chopped off, save children at breast and musicians skilled at playing wind instruments, and the order was carried out to the last detail. History books have never fully explained the mercy granted to the children and the musicians and my guess is that the children were of no threat while the musicians were necessary to welcome the all conquering Maharaja into his new domain. Mercifully, today ‘nak katnu‘ does not involve physical mutilation but just partial trimming off of social standing or reputation. Finally to my favourite ‘cut’ i.e.,
‘doko namlo katnu‘. Here ‘doko namlo‘ refers to the drudgery or the daily grind of hard physical labour a servant, slave or an impoverished person undergoes and when one is liberated from such an agonizing existence through a generous donor, a sudden windfall or children landing up with good employment it is equivalent to ‘doko namlo katnu‘.

One more ‘cut’ before I quit this piece: “Yo essay pani etimai katney.”

-Dr. Sonam B. Wangyal

At the time of the British take over of Kalimpong (1865) the population of the present day Sub-Division was estimated to be around 3536 souls only. Following the annexation immigration was actively encouraged and the industrious Nepalis happily crossed the Tista to populate and terrace the virgin soil. By 1881 the population had risen to 12,683 and the annual revenue from poll tax had also increased from a paltry Rs 640 to a respectable Rs 11,800. In the next decade the population more than doubled to 26,631 and the bazaar had, beside the Nepalis, Lepchas and Bhutias, several Marwaris, Mohameddans, and other plainsmen. When Britain extracted a trade convention in 1893 allowing for a trade mart at Yatung it was expected to boost trade through Kalimpong. However, nothing worthy of statistical records materialized and people, by then well over 45,000, went about their normal chores waiting for a bonanza called Tibet Trade. Then towards the turn of the century a man arrived who was to change the face of Kalimpong. This man, Rev. Dr. Grahams, in the opening year of the twentieth century contributed considerably to Kalimpong’s population, prestige and pecuniary development by commencing the St. Andrew’s Colonial Homes. The empty hillside below the Daelo then became the sight of sustained construction. Expecting many more Europeans to follow Dr. Graham, Daelo was made the preserve of the Europeans with the government earmarking ten residential sites of two acres each for European settlement. Far away on the opposite side the ‘Development Area’ was reserved for the hillmen with the ruling that no one else could occupy it. Later matters would end the other way around with Europeans and Bengalis living at the Development Area and the hillmen on the Daelo slopes.

The next spurt of development came when many of the soldiers in Younghusband’s Mission to Tibet passed through Kalimpong in 1904. The Mela Ground was increased to accommodate the soldiers, numerous coolies and suppliers arrived (many of whom never went back) and the crude road to Jelep La was improved upon. Incidentally, the temporary armoury of Younghusband containing some canons (Nepali: tope pronounced as in ‘rope’) became our present day ‘Top-khana’. This Mission profited the British with two more trade marts at Gyantse and Gartok and with that the chances of Kalimpong becoming a bustling trade centre increased. But hope was belied for the road communication was still primitive and most of all the Tista was yet to be bridged sufficiently strong for the expected commerce. It was during this difficult phase that a European wool trader, Mr Korb, finding that all suitable lands being either reserved forest or reserved for hillmen, applied to the government to purchase a plot. This became a sounding bell that there were people, besides the highlanders, who were interested in settling in Kalimpong. With Darjeeling becoming rapidly overpopulated the government now weighed Kalimpong as a possible alternative.

Mr. C. J. Stevenson-Moore, a Member of the Board of Revenue, along with the Commissioner of the Rajsahi Division and the deputy Commissioner of Darjeeling accordingly visited Kalimpong in the first week of June 1914. Kalimpong was found suitable for a hill station but Stevenson-Moore set three prerequisites: (1) the area east of Tista be declared a Sub-Division, (2) provision for potable water supply be made and (3) the road to Jelep La be improved. In 1915 the Tista Valley Extension Railway opened with Gaillekhola as a terminus and effort was made to improve the existing cart road between Tista and Kalimpong including the road to Jelep La. In 1916 Kalimpong was declared a Sub-Division and in November 1917 the Governor of Bengal visited Kalimpong and approved Rinkingpong as suitable site for a new Civil Station. The rules were revised to allow fresh settlers at Ringkingpong and the hillmen living there walked away with compensation for land, crop and building with an additional bonus in the form of cash for shifting. Kalimpong was now to become a hill station.