Limbu Language Rights: Interview with Dr. Tumbahang

During my last few weeks in Kathmandu, I sought out people that I thought had interesting opinions on language rights and language education in Nepal, and sat down with them for informal interviews. Here is the first of these interviews, with Dr. Govinda Bahadur Tumbahang, Associate Professor in Linguistics at the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies at Tribhuvan University. In this blog post I mentioned Process of Democratization and Linguistic (Human) Rights in Nepal, which was written by Dr. Tumbahang.

Here is my interview:

I enjoyed your article about Linguistic Human Rights.

I left some interesting things out of that. It began with the annexation of the Limbu Kingdom by Prithvi Narayan Shah. He and his heirs gradually put barriers on Limbu language and culture. Limbus used to sacrifice cows, but they were prohibited to do this by the regime. They were forced to lie to God, to say "We sacrifice this cow unto You" when in fact it was a buffalo or a he-goat that they were sacrificing. This is the Hinduization of culture. At the beginning, Limbu was the language of business dealings and notes, but this was restricted under Prime Minister Chandra Shumsher especially. Then there was the Panchayat policy of one nation, one language, one culture.

Why did the Ranas oppress language?

A ruler wants his own language to prosper. If you put yourself into their shoes, you see that using many languages in official capacity can be very expensive. Also, with many languages come many secret things that the Ranas have difficulty finding out about. The Ranas must bring many nationalities into the mainstream and unify them. 

Which was most targeted by the regime - ethnic languages, religions, or cultures?

First they attacked culture, then language later. The Limbus were forced to celebrate Dashain, and were compelled to sacrifice goats. They had to put their fingertips in goat blood and smear it on the walls of their house. Then spies of the government, disguised as yogis [ascetic holy men], would go around the villages to make sure that this was done. The Athpahariya Rai of Dhankuta refused to celebrate Dashain, even after two of the protesters were hanged. Later on, they began to require that Nepali be used in office places and schools. 

What has been the situation since the People's Revolution of 1990?

Many people have started seeking their identity through speaking out about their language and culture. The situation is congenial. 

The constitution provides the right for people to learn in their mother tongue. In Kathmandu people tried to use Newari in an official capacity, as people in a few other districts did with Maithili, but then this was quashed by the Supreme Court of Nepal. This raised suspicions about the government's dedication to linguistic rights. 

Has the situation changed since the Second People's Revolution?

So far only tall talks untranslated into action. The government has made 15 mother tongue education textbooks, but at the primary level mother tongue language is only taught as a separate subject and not a medium of instruction. There are also not enough mother language teachers.

What is the role of different entities like activists, bureaucrats, and schools in language preservation?

Ethnic organizations are trying to mobilize people to contribute to the cause, to use politics to preserve language and culture. Also some other individuals are doing work.

For example, some organizations like Kumar Lingden's Sanghiya Loktantrik and the Kirat Yaktung Chumlung are fighting for an autonomous Limbu land with the right to self determination. If this happens, Limbu will be the official language and our culture will be preserved. Limbuwan is an issue of identity. I support the Limbuwan state.

What is your research background?

I study the Kiranti languages. I did my PHD on Chhatthare Limbu, and I have written on Athpahariya Rai and Standard Limbu, which is Panthare Limbu.

How did Panthare become the standard? 

This is a very good question. The Limbu Panthare were rulers and scholars, and they wrote literature in Panthare. When radio stations started to broadcast in other languages after 1990, Panthares became radio newscasters. So Panthare has come to occupy a central role whether we like it or not. 

This shows how language and dialect is always a matter of power. The Gorkha rulers had to appease the Limbus in Nepal because there were many Limbus across the Nepalese border in Sikkim that might band against them. So they gave some Rai and Limbu the title of hereditary ruler. They had their own law code for their villages, and they could officiate in all but 5 of the worst crimes.

There are four Limbu dialects, which are all very similar except for Chhatthare, which is my dialect. Chhatthare is quite different, but it is not accepted as a different language because there is strong pressure to keep all Limbus unified. I even did PHD research to show that Chhatthare should be considered a separate language, and when I gave a talk at Arjun's Yaktung Chumlung I was nearly chased out the door. That office is dominated by Panthare speakers, and there is pressure to keep Panthare as a standard.

This actually creates a big problem for mother tongue education, because Limbu classes are all taught in Panthare dialect, which is very difficult for Chhatthare children to understand. This is a major difficulty of mother language education. Although by adulthood most Limbus understand Panthare because it is used as a lingua franca in Limbu communities, it is very difficult for children, who say in the classroom, "this is not our language."

The Rai communities are a very different situation. When they start to talk about a Rai state, they break down on the issues of language and culture. They are in fact many different languages and cultures and tribes - like Bantawa - that are lumped together into the single caste name Rai.

The Squirrels are Exhausted

Taken by my uncle in Dallas.

I arrived in the United States exactly 365 days after I left. I spent a great week with friends in Washington DC, and then flew back to Austin, Texas. This summer has been a brutally hot one in Texas, with strings of 110+ degree days and wildfires destroying large tracts of land and homes around Austin. These days the grass and trees are still dead and brown, but it has started to get a little bit cooler. Like the heat exhaustion-inflicted squirrels, for the past couple weeks I have been lying around listlessly for much of the day. Reverse culture shock took me by surprise - maybe I should call it familiarity shock; it is the uncomfortable feeling that time is out of place, that I have suddenly woken up and all of the last year has been a dream. But my friends have slowly been drawing me out of that feeling.

Floating Villages of Tonle Sap Lake

The most interesting places I visited in Cambodia were the floating villages of Kompong Luong and Kompong Phluk, two of several such villages located on the Tonle Sap lake. Floating Villages of Tonle Sap Lake is a short youtube video I shot from boats and the guest house where I stayed. Kompong Luong is a village of several thousand people that live together on pontoons and boats. I found it fascinating that the whole town was organized with a main water road through the town. During the wet season much of the town moves to a different location on the lake. 

I hired a boat driver for a tour from the shore. I was told that many of the residents of Kompong Luong were Vietnamese immigrants, but the entire time I was there I never encountered anyway who could speak English, so I was able to find out very little about how the village developed.

From a distance I saw this church moving to a different location in the village one morning.

A floating gas pontoon.

A party hall where there was a all-day wedding celebration. As I slept in my guesthouse, the sounds of such traditional songs as 'Play that Funky Music White Boy' came drifting into my bedroom from the party pontoon. Enigmatically almost every raft had a sign that labelled it as a 'Mobile Phone Shop.' By the signs, there must have been several dozen of these mobile phone shops.

Pool tables at the guesthouse. The guesthouse/homestay consisted of two immense pontoons and contained six rooms, pool tables, a restaurant and a general store. There was light and electricity, although the plumbing emptied into the lake. At the guesthouse I met the only two tourists that I saw for the whole day, and a lovely family that operated the guest house, restaurant, and store. I found it a very comfortable place to stay. There was a slight rocking from the water, but it was not enough to disturb a pool game. I slept very well, in spite of my driver's warnings that I would be seasick the whole night.

In the morning I saw the villagers fishing in the lake, people cooking and beginning their work. Above, a device that cuts up coconut flesh. Below, village life. I saw people on boats selling breakfast soup, vegetables ice, batteries, and boats full of schoolchildren in uniform. 

Humans were not the only raft dwellers: there were geckos on the rafters, and pets everywhere: the guesthouse had five dogs, and elsewhere I saw a pet monkey.

Later on, I visited another village on the Tonle Sap. This one had more regulated tours because it was close to Siem Reap. There was a constant flow of goggling tourists like myself. Most of the dwellings in this village were not floating. They were on stilts over the water, and presumably the water level is very low during the dry season.

The village bordered upon a sunken forest. In this village I saw many floating wooden cages that I was told were miniature fish farms.

There was also an island temple.

A Short List of Strange or Confusing Things I Saw in Bangkok

After having spent so much time in Nepal and feeling like I finally developed enough of a grasp on language and culture to be able to basically understand what was going on around me, my day in Bangkok left me feeling totally adrift and confused:

Wait, what?

This is just a shop with some monks sitting out front, right?

Oh god! He's not reeaaal! It's some sort of terrifying lawn furniture!

This man appears to have a gremlin on his belt

And I hope this is his pet

"So! Hot"

Not so strange, I just like the facial expression

Ditto with this rakish devil, although the top hat confuses me a little bit

Your average, boring industrial canal scene

Wait, what the heck is that? Its like five feet long and moving quickly and I still have no idea what that is oh god its swimming toward the boat

Vipassana Meditation Comics

From August 17th to the 29th, I was taking a meditation course near Battambang in Cambodia. This is the brand of vipassana meditation taught by S.N. Goenka - there are similar meditation centers in Nepal and India, and also in Texas, but I needed a change of scenery. I was taking the long route back home to the United States. 

I was there for ten full days, and I spent about 12 hours a day meditating alongside 120 Cambodians and five foreigners. We were under a vow of silence that included a ban on reading, writing, or making eye contact with the other meditators (we were occasionally given the opportunity to ask our instructors questions, but I found them difficult to speak to and I usually declined).  

I learned a lot, but I found it very difficult and stressful, especially towards the end of the course when I began experiencing some anxiety. The main thing I learned after ten days was that experiential insight meditation is not bunk; there is something very powerful and potentially useful there, but it requires more dedication and mental stability than I can spare at this point in my life. After it was over, I went to a computer and typed up notes nonstop for about six hours. I also sketched some Vipassana Comix, which I think give a general impression of my experience.

The comic below details the evolution of my ability to meditate through the course, symbolized by the size and clarity of the thought bubble that contains the word विपश्यना (vipassana). Of course, other random thoughts started cropping up as well, from cravings to the mundane to the weird and random, and I did my best to put them aside: 

Some notes about the meditation course and the things I did to occupy myself during the short breaks between meditation sessions:

In vipassana we learned to feel sensations on the surface of our skin, sensations that correspond to positive or negative emotions. We would scan the entire body from top to bottom, starting with the top of the head:

Looking down as if from above

But we were supposed to view these sensations 'equanimously,' meaning that we do not react with craving or aversion to them. This is difficult to do if, say, your butt hurts a lot (like it does). Also, when you progress a little more and begin to feel deeper, subtler, pleasant sensations, it is almost impossible not to crave these sensations in opposition to the usual butt pain-type of sensations. For me this lead to craving for not-craving:

Meta.

We were allowed to speak to our instructors once every few days, and although they spoke English very well I found them difficult to confide in. I think that ideally this sort of course should be taken in a familiar culture and setting:

Rather than quieting down over the long days of concentration and silence, I found that my imagination went into overdrive. Without warning, bizarre thoughts and ideas began to come into my head. A few of the Vipassana Comix I drew as a result are displayed below:

Heading Back Around

from Hotel Hong Kong in Pokhara

Kathmandu has been my home for eleven months and three days, but today I'm leaving Nepal and heading back to the United States. I've had a pretty great time teaching at Shree Udaya Kharka, working with NELTA and Fulbright, teaching with a wonderful counterpart teacher and staying with a headmaster who has accepted me into his family. Since the grant ended, I've been writing articles, interviewing linguists at Tribhuvan University and teachers at multilingual schools, helping with the orientation for the new batch of Fulbrighters, editing grants and organizing the library catalogue of the LDC (my brilliant friend John helped me put a search engine for the library catalogue on their website), and, of course, having crazy adventures across the width and breadth of Nepal. But now I feel that it is about time for me to return to my homeland. By which I mean that if I don't leave soon, my government-paid airplane ticket will expire.

If all goes according to plan, though, it will take me some time to get back. I'm flying to Bangkok, and then taking a bus to Battambang, Cambodia. There I will attend a Vipassana meditation course, why not? Long hours of meditation, seclusion, diet, and no talking for 10 days. Those that know me well (and those that don't can probably guess) know that I am not good at keeping my mouth shut and even worse at sitting still. So this should be an interesting challenge for me. It reminds me of a joke, actually:



"A novice monk is told by the leader of his order that to enter a monastic life he must first complete five years of service to the monastery under a vow of silence. On the anniversary of each year he may say two, and only two, words, but every other day he must maintain complete silence. The novice works hard and faithfully throughout the first year, and on the anniversary of the first year he is approached by the leader and asked if he has anything to say. The novice replies, 'Terrible food.'


After another year of faithful service, he is once again approached by the leader and asked if he has anything to say. This time, the novice replies, 'Hard beds.'


After the third year, the novice himself approaches the leader of his order, hands over his habit, says 'I quit,' and walks out of the monastery. The leader calls after him, 'You might as well! You've done nothing but complain since you got here!'"



(Apparently this joke, or rather a slightly different version of it, is old Irish monastic humor. This website here has translations of the joke in English, Irish, and 105 other languages.)


... but hopefully my experience will be much more positive. After that I will visit a few different sites in Cambodia and Thailand and then return to the United States on September 10th.

Shrawan Ghumgham (A Monsoon Stroll from Kathmandu to Muktinath)

I have just uploaded a travel documentary that I made during my recent 12-day Nepal farewell expedition. With no exaggeration and in all modesty, I think that I can safely say that it is better than Planet Earth and Baraka combined. It is on Youtube and only 20 minutes long, and below I have provided a description of the locations and events. Check it out!

Shrawan Ghumgham (A Monsoon Stroll from Kathmandu to Muktinath)

Indra Chowk contains one of the best fabric markets in the old part of Kathmandu. I was there to buy dhakka fabric, which is the patterned fabric most famously used in the national hat of Nepal. I was buying fabric to ship to the United States and give to the Multicultural Refugee Coalition, an organization in Austin that provides support for refugees entering the United States. I have volunteered there and I have friends among the ethnically Nepali Bhutanese refugee community, and the fabric is for their sewing programs. When I was finished, I went to the spice market at Asan Chowk and bought cardamom, because I like it and it's cheap there.

I left Kathmandu by motorcycle and followed the Prithvi Highway. My driver and traveling companion was my daai Saroj. We stopped at the roadside town of Malekhu. Because it is a popular rest stop on the road from Kathmandu to Pokhara, I have been in Malekhu at least a dozen times, but this was my first time eating the fried fish that Malekhu is famous for. 

Saroj at the gateway to Bandipur

In the afternoon we rolled into Bandipur, a beautiful hill town a few miles from Dumre. The touristification of the town has only increased in the two years since I last stayed there for my education research project, but it is still a great place. My favorite part about staying in Bandipur back in the day was living above a restaurant, because in the morning I would come down to breakfast and people from the town would be sitting and drinking tea and discussing news and politics, and I always felt a welcome party to interesting conversations. Saroj and I stayed in the same place and I introduced him to some of my old friends.

Bandipur's Khadga Dev Temple, which didn't make it into the documentary, contains the sacred sword of Mukunda Sen, the ancient King of Palpa. I was told that the sword bends and vibrates and grants superhuman strength to the priests who worship it on the festival day when it is taken out. Always covered, it is passed first to the Kame (Blacksmith) priest, the blacksmiths being father to the sword-goddess, and then to the Magar priest, the Magars being the warriors.

Saroj and I misjudged the distance from Bandipur way down the hill to Siddhi Cave, and we ended up walking down the hill for most of the morning. We were attacked by leeches for the first time, although I escaped with only one tiny bite. Passing the shrines at the entrance, we made our way into the cave. In the cave I met a young man who had come from Dumre and we continued further than I had ever been into the cave, down a long slippery ladder and past an underground lake. We continued down a very narrow crevice with water flowing through it until it became too steep and tight for us.

The next day Saroj and I parted ways. He drove his motorcycle down to Chitwan and I continued by bus to Pokhara. I stayed in Lakeside in the usual touristy areas and I read and ate some pizza while looking out over the bar scene. The next day I met my bhaai Min, who studies in Pokhara but is from the village of Tangting, across the valley from Sikles. I had been to Tangting twice before (see Return to Tangting), but never in the rainy season, and I was unprepared for how difficult it would be to get there. We took two buses, one which had to ford through a river (on the way back the river had gotten too deep and we had to wade across), and then continued up the side of the hill on foot for five hours through the pouring rain. When I finally came to Tangting, it was dark, I had 34 leech bites on my legs and the beginnings of a fever and sinus infection that kept me pretty grumpy for the next four days. But I was staying with old friends who cooked me rice and lentils and water buffalo meat and gave me strong home-brewed liquor as 'medicine' and let me sleep the rest of the next day. During the rainy season, Tangting seems to rest inside a cloud 24-7, which made walking its cobbled streets a beautiful and eerie experience.

I walked down the next day and made it back to Pokhara. I had planned on taking a plane flight to Jomsom, but the Jomsom airport had been closed for four days straight due to bad weather, and for three days in a row after that I arrived at the airport at five in the morning only to see my flight cancelled. It was a good thing, though, because I had a chance to recover.

This guy did not have a chance to recover.

On the third day I decided to cancel my plane ticket and take the bus route from Pokhara to Beni. After Beni the roads are very unreliable during the wet season because of constant landslides. At the site of a landslide, the bus stops and all the passengers walk across until they arrive at the other end, where there will hopefully be another bus or jeep waiting to take the passengers to the next landslide. In this way I ended up in Tatopani and stayed in a trekker's lodge. There I met Sanjeev, a driver from Delhi who was making a pilgrimage to Muktinath Temple in Mustang. We travelled the rest of the way together. Tatopani is famous for its hot springs, which I enjoyed early the next morning before embarking on a series of quick jeep rides and hikes across landslides (the longest hike of the day was about an hour and a half). On the path I saw sadhu holy men on their own pilgrimages to Muktinath, European and American trekkers, Australian educational development workers, and local villagers and students. At one point we traveled in a jeep hired by the development workers, which stopped to pick up a sick person in a village to take them to a health post further along the road. We often had to wait for jeeps to fill up with passengers, or for bus drivers to finish their meals, but soon enough the emerald green forests became dark brown scrub hillsides and we arrived in Jomsom early in the evening.

Jomsom and Marpha are trekker hotspots, and they are known for growing the best apples in the area. I had promised an old teacher of mine that I would bring him some apple brandy from Jomsom, which was not hard to find. The shelves of all the stores are filled with apple juice, apple brandy, experimentally home-brewed apple ciders... I wanted to buy apples but they were not yet in season. Sanjeev made friends with a Jomsom butcher who was originally from Bangalore, and he showed us the apple orchards and tried unsuccessfully to convince an apple farmer to give us some samples. 

The next day we bought bus tickets. Sanjeev employed one of the boys from the butcher shop to guide us to Muktinath and to find him a salikram, a sacred fossil-stone from the waters of the Kali Gandaki river below Muktinath Temple which is an integral part of a Vishnu shrine. This time of year the river rushes with muddy water as dark as oil. It must be crossed on foot, which is a difficult feat because of the rushing water, deep mud, and sharp hidden rocks. 

Why are you smiling, you fool?

At Muktinath I started feeling the wintry cold and the altitude. There was a drizzle, and we passed some tourist lodges and Buddhist monasteries before making the slight ascent up to the main temple complex. There Sanjeev did puja at the Muktinath Temple to Vishnu and bathed in the sacred 108 water taps (head-achingly cold water in the wintry air). He filled a water bottle with the sacred water for later use. We visited the Buddhist temple where the 'self-arisen' natural eternally burning flame is contained, and then we headed back. I got stuck crossing the river by myself for about twenty minutes, and one of the buses broke down and had to be pushed down the hill to a small town, but we returned to Jomsom with daylight to spare.

The cast of adventurers: a pilgrim, an American, and a butcher.

Early in the morning the skies were finally clear and a plane flight back to Pokhara looked probable. At the airport, security officers stopped checking my bag and started to question a group of French trekkers and their Nepali guide, who had brought back a large statue that they claimed to have purchased. The security officers doubted the authenticity of their receipt and the age of the statue and accused the trekkers of temple-robbing, but I did not get to see how that drama played out because my plane landed and it was time for a dramatic flight back to Pokhara. It took only 20 minutes to cover the same ground that had taken 2 days by bus.