Collusion and bickering: Landscape, religion and ethnicity in the Central Himalayas. iWill Tuladhar-Douglas, University of Aberdeen.
Hundu, 2002.
The market town of Pharping is an hour’s bumpy ride from, or about 15km southwest of, Kathmandu. A half-hour’s walk along the new road above Pharping is the village of Hundu. Hundu people are all Tamangs, or Bhote as the Newars in Pharping are likely to sayii. If you should ask more persistently whether there are any non-Tamangs in Hundu, then some Pharping Newars will eventually tell you that there is an enclave of Bālāmi (a Newar caste) there—Hundu Tamangs say the enclave isn’t really inside Hundu. I had walked up to Hundu in order to view the new Buddhist gompa built by the Tamangs, using money raised within the community. Hundu clusters around the head of a valley. The new gompa had been built above the turn in the road where it crosses the stream, and thus had a magnificent view down the valley. My conversation partner and handler that day was Vishnu Gopal Tamang, a wealthy and influential member of the community.
Newar Buddhist friends had joked that morning that it was strange for a Buddhist to be named Vishnu Gopal, so blatantly a Hindu name. We agreed that while no Newar Buddhist would ever do such a thing, there were some Newars, Manandhars, who said they were a Buddhist caste but still gave their children Hindu-sounding names to make their lives easier. Even the Mahārjans were doing it these days. It never went the other way around, did it? What with the government always favouring Hindus, who could blame Vishnu Gopal’s parents for giving him that name; and after all, he had built a gompa.
When I saw it, to my eye the gompa was not like the other gompas in the area. Around Pharping there are substantial monasteries called gompas, with ornate buildings for housing student and senior lamas and a separate room for the rituals and teaching, and most likely a few prayer wheels around. Such gompas are in
perpetual construction all around Pharping and spreading up the road towards Hundu. The larger ones also had a chorten, (Tib. chos.rten, Skt. caitya, New. cibā): a hemispherical monument with a stepped spire on top. This gompa was a substantial chorten with a single large room underneath, enough for a lama to do rituals and teach.iii
Vishnu Gopal and the other village notables who talked with me that day were proud to have a proper Tamang gompa to compete with the new Tibetan monasteries. We talked about the insultingly low count of Buddhists in the government census:10%, said Vishnu, not 50% like it really is. He described organizing for pan-Tamang Buddhist societies, national efforts to build unity among the various Buddhist communities around Nepal, even international linkages. I asked about working with the Newar Buddhists in Pharping. Vishnu Gopal pointed out that Newar Buddhists could never join such an organisation because only some Newars were Buddhist. We puzzled over the ethnicity of the ‘Tibetans’ who were building new gompas—everyone knew that the newest monastery along the Hundu road was actually for Sherpas, who in Vishnu Gopal’s eyes were not Tibetans at all, but Nepalese—even though he said the money for the monastery had been raised from Westerners who had been duped into giving money because they thought it was for Tibetans. Still, he ended by approving their efforts. If it was part of an effort to unify Buddhism in Nepal it would be a good thing.
Kopu, 2007.
Kopu is the other way from Pharping, a half hour’s walk straight down a steep track (and rather more ascending). The climate and vegetation are noticeably different: warmer, with trees and birds that don’t occur in the Schimia-Castanopsis complex around Pharping. The first time I walked into Kopu I was actually climbing back up, having walked almost all the way down to the Bagmati gorge looking for forest areas that might feed into Pharping’s economy and ethnomedicine. I found the tea shop in the middle of town and asked for tea. Under the enormous fig tree that sheltered the town green was a typical Newar caitya. In terms of Buddhist architectural categories, this is the same reliquary monument as the chorten in Hundu, but where Hundu’s
chorten followed the Tibetan style, this had clearly been built by Newar stonemasons in the mid-20th century for the Tamangs of Kopu. It was just like those built in Lalitpur, the Newar city some 15km away, or indeed, the Newar caitya still standing at the shrine of Vajrayoginī, the last remaining Newar Buddhist monastery in Pharping. I studied it carefully looking for any inscriptions; briefly I wondered if there had ever been influential Newars in Kopu.
What, someone asked, was I looking at?
‘This Newar caitya’
That raised an immediate storm of protest. It was not a Newar caitya. This was Kopu— a Lama village, that means Tamang Buddhist Lama, didn’t I see that, not Newars. I hastily tried to recover my position: yes, it was a Tamang village, a Lama village, and everyone, even I, knew that. Perhaps Tamangs had employed Newars to build a chorten for them? My efforts were not well received and I apologised for any insult and changed the topic. Later, speaking with the schoolmaster of the local primary school, I returned to the question of the Newar-style caitya. To me, I said, it suggested that there had been a time when Tamang patrons could command the services of Newar stonemasons. Tamangs in that time would have accepted at least some Newars as fellow Buddhists. He agreed, adding that this was less likely now. Tamangs had to struggle to defend their Buddhism over against the oppressively Hindu state, against the Bahun-Chetris and Newars.
The conversation then turned to the beautiful and very dense forest that sat in a steep ravine hanging down by Kopu—it was this forest I had been trying to make sense of as I walked down-slope from Pharping.
‘Do you’, he asked, ‘know the story of Lakṣmaṇ asking Hanuman to bring medicines?’
‘And Hanuman brings a whole mountain?’
‘Yes! We say this forest is a piece of that mountain that fell off along the way.’
Three local villages, Kopu, Nimṭol and Gopaleśvara had agreed, several years ago, to set up a co-operative arrangement to steward this particular forest and as a result it had reverted to being a thick jungle, full of useful herbal medicines (jaḍībuṭī) and
other non-timber forest products. Nim Ṭol is a Bālāmi Newar settlement and Gopaleśvara is a Bahun-Chetri village, both lying just below Pharping town. All three villages had the right to forage in this forest for raw materials that they could use or sell on, but the agreement binding how intensively the forest could be utilised was held in common among the three villages. The story about this particular patch of forest being part of Hanuman’s mountain is also told by Pharping Newars, including those that self-identify as Buddhist, and Gopāleśvara’s resident. Both Tamangs and Buddhist Newars will, in other contexts, remark on the Rāmāyana teleserials (in Hindi) and classroom teaching of the Rāmāyana as examples of the Hindu state controlling popular discourse; but here it’s a unifying narrative that is used as part of the construction of a (literally) shared landscape.
Setting out the problem and working definitions.
The hills to the southwest of the Kathmandu Valley rise from 1200 to 2500m, with terraced agriculture and forest of several ecotypes. The ancient Newar town of Pharping is the market centre for numerous villages thereabout, and marks the first stop on an equally ancient trade route (recently reincarnated for the benefit of lorries) passing from Kathmandu, the administrative and commercial centre of Nepal, to Hetauda and thus to the lowlands (madesh): the Terai, and eventually India.
People around Pharping constantly use religious, caste and ethnic affiliation as registers in which to gossip about others. The participants in the economic, political, and social struggle for the construction and control of Pharping in 2002-6 came from a genuinely wide range of (often overlapping) positions: Newars of various castes, some of whom lean more towards Buddhist or Hindu priests, though only the priestly castes themselves are obliged to take sidesiv; aggressive Christian missionaries (who now own the internet domain ‘pharping.org.np’); monks and nuns at the Tibetan refugee monasteries of the Nyingma school; Bahun-Chetri Hindus; low-caste Parbatiyas being pulled towards the Christians; Tamangs who are also Nyingma but differently so; Armed Police Force men at the checkpoint on the main road into town; and Maoist cadres who denounced religion categorically. Here I write largely from the perspectives I know best from my fieldwork: Tamangs, Tibetans, and those
Newars who may call themselves Buddhist (including my family, whose home is above the market square). All three of these groups are Buddhist in contrast to what was, during the time of this fieldwork, the official and dominant religion, Hinduism.
In listening to how people talked about and across—and so reproduced— ethnic and religious identities, I was struck by the way in which local landscapes were both created by, and formed a context for, this kind of talk. Especially when the language was witty and skilful, as in gossip and banter, the landscape emerged within conversation as much as the categories that were the overt topic. An earlier study among Pharping Newars had led me to conclude that daily attendance at a network of nonsectarian shrines was key to their persistent reconstruction of flexible and inclusive religious membership in the face of sectarian challenges. For these shrines, both their organization of urban space and their clear refusal of exclusive categorization were necessary features; there was a link between the achievement of a shared landscape and the social reproduction of polytropy.
Turning instead to inter-ethnic conversations, overtly categorizing talk that used division tactically to achieve conversational goals similarly appeared to presume and reframe a landscape. Around Pharping, landscapes emerge within relational interactions as a socially constructed ground by means of which other social processes are achieved. This process is like language in that such constructions of the environment require actors to engage in a constant stream of small, often subconscious agreements—collusions— that make possible higher-level social gestures such as bantering, experiencing illness, identifying a medicinal herb or acknowledging a bad omenv. In this way it can usefully be compared to Silverstein’s (2004) analysis of language as cultural process and product. Unlike language, these landscapes are not grammatical. Unlike language, they are constituted through a very wide range of activities, such as hunting, storytelling, foraging, exchange, architecture, illness, ritual and history.
It will be clear that I am using the term ‘landscape’ in a restricted sense, familiar to scholars in environmental anthropology, to refer to a shared, socially constructed and locally relevant environment. I do not thereby intend to suggest a polarity between some ontologically prior, external environment and contingent images of
that environment achieved and deployed socially. Rather they are more and less local, always intersubjective, emerging as part of the skilful achievement of ordinary social life. In philosophical terms, I am borrowing from Waldron’s (2002) consideration of Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1993). That well-known work closes with a challenge to Buddhism that Waldron picks up. He juxtaposes their theory and Bateson’s work with Yogācāra analyses of embodied social cognition and the nature of consensus reality and finds a good fit,vi though his dependence on language alone as the fabric of communication and hence historical consensus reality is far too narrow. In ethnographic terms, I follow Cambpell’s recent statement:
When brought under rigorous ethnographic scrutiny, what can be classed synthetically as environmental relationships from an outsider‘s standpoint (material processes and interactive relationships), decompose out of singularity and lead in many rhizomal directions beyond anything resembling a specifically ‘environmental’ domain. They diffuse out into social life and practice, ritual and politics. (2010:198)
Here, then, I am exploring the complentary motion: the constant, implicit work of co-constructing landscapes that underlies making distinctions in other social domains.
The urge to engage in this spontaneous, mutualistic and artful construction is fundamental to sociability, like the instant if unspoken agreement that accompanies overt play that play transforms the shared locale into a place. The term ‘collusion’, taken back to its Latin roots, means ‘playing together’. Sociable play is spontaneous, ordered and deeply reflexive. Even when the rules of childrens’ games (or absurdist theatre, or situationist interventions, or punning conversation) are in flux, there is a process of renegotiation of the rules that is part of the play itselfvii. Michael Silverstein (2004) has detailed the use of language to create a sociability that allows language to be meaningful and so on, in a beginningless process. The notion of language as a game looks back to Wittgenstein (1958: §23-4). Yet what I am striving to indicate here is not the rules governing language—though the Silverstein’s analysis of language provides lucid insights into sociability—nor any particular game,
but a social process by which humans inhabit their landscapes together with others: the willingness to engage in play, the constant process of discovering the rules already implicitly agreed, and then as part of play reworking those rules—what Goffman referred to as ‘the task of becoming spontaneously involved’ (1967:115). This collusion, like language, is both prior to and part of sociability but it extends beyond humans into the landscape and into social relations with and among nonhumans. The considerable work that goes into achieving a landscape underpinning and alongside other social actions is one instance of collusion.
According to the (human) speakers around Pharping, these collusive activities involve both humans and nonhumansviii, and it takes place across a wide range of activities: worshipping at shrines, hunting, trading in forest products, foraging, story-telling, becoming ill and seeking cures. Other animate beings such as wild and domestic animals, local and regional deities, certain trees and certain unusual humansix who act between the human and non-human worlds are understood to be equally potent and competent social agents even where their acts or speech are in principle incomprehensible to most humans. The long conversations between priest and goat that seek to persuade the goat to accept its own sacrifice is a fine example of play between goats and humans; should the goat refuse its intentions are honoured. Some of them are indeed only undertaken by non-humans, such as the special relationship between the mongoose (New. nawa chu ) and the cobra (nāg) described by Pharping Newars. The mongoose hunts the cobra and kills it by biting through its body; but, having consumed some part of the length of the snake, it then very carefully puts the head and tail sections together again and releases the resulting rather smaller, still living, cobra. Although people know that this happens, no one reports having seen it—it’s part of how mongooses and cobras relate, and not something people should see.
A brief discussion of polytropy is in order here. Carrithers (2000) proposed the term polytropy as a label, replacing the clumsy and colonial term ‘syncretism’, for the exuberant recourse to multiple sacred authorities among many South Asian societies. Unlike syncretism, polytropy suggests a happy additive complexity that does not presume some prior pure allegiance. While Gellner (2005) argued that the
conditions of Newar ethnicity within the Shah state has led to a gradual replacement of polytropy by conversion, in a recent (2010) article I documented a strong and flexible fabric of implicit but artful social practices among Pharping Newars that is resistant to overt declarations of monotonic religious affiliation. For members of Newar castes, whose indigenous pliable, porous categories of Hindu and Buddhist have been appropriated and made brittle and exclusive through enclosure within an oppressively Hindu state, polytropy is a highly political condition. Hence the existence of shared shrines which are neither Hindu nor Buddhist—or alternatively both Hindu and Buddhist—enable resistance to exclusivism that makes polytropy possible. In brief, when we move beyond Newars to look at inter-ethnic relations around Pharping, the way in which Newar organisation of urban space through Gaṇeśa shrines relates to Newar polytropy turns out to be a special case of mutually implicating and dialogic processes that collusively construct landscapes and the emergence of relational identities within those landscapes.
In each of these cases I am studying, collusion is achieved through artful and located conversations, though perhaps not always displays of verbal art. The participants base their ability to make distinct and relational claims about themselves within a landscape that they presume and construct during the course of their interaction. Yet there is no prior general landscape that everyone consistently presumes; it appears that specific, particular and richly endowed shared landscapes inform and emerge from each episode of bickering and bantering. In each of our cases, the parties to bickering presume and reshape a co-constructed landscape both architectural and ecological: a landscape of animals, paths, saints, forest resources, walls, trees, gods and watercourses.
In this article I have begun with artful spoken encounters between humans that foreground relational distinctions and undergird them with landscape-making. In listening to this bickering, we have already encountered collaborative forest management and sacred architecture; and as we go on, we will hear more about the management of processions and the extraction of forest resources; about religious histories and geographies enacted by elite scholars and ordinary pilgrims that both
combine and divide the landscape; and close with talk during walking intended to recover ‘ordinary’ mutualistic process after military struggle divided the landscape.
Relating ethnicity and religion.
The Nepali term often used to translate ‘ethnic group’ is jānajāti but this is usually used to refer to ethnic minorities as coherent groups opposed to central authority; as Mark Turin (2007) recently noted, Nepali is not regarded as a jānajāti language in Nepal. The main ethnic groups resident around Pharping are Tamang, Tibetan, Newar and Parbatiya, though all of these are problematic terms. The categories are often picked to pieces during gossipy conversations, as we have already seen; and the achievement of simple ethnic labels as a way of managing complex inter-caste and inter-ethnic marriages is as much a part of Pharping life as it was for Caplan’s study in 1973.
Campbell (2010:183) following Clarke (1980) and Sagant (1976) argues that ‘it would be a mistake to return to ethnically circumscribed worldviews for understanding environmental relations.’ Perhaps so; but for Pharping, both at the local level, where ethnicity is one of a set of categories used for relational classification, and at the national level, where both the royalist and Maobadi factions persistently deployed ethnic language in an attempt to garner support or assert control, ethnicity was assumed to be a useful and powerful category. Even though what is being described here is collusion that undergirds distinctions, it is useful to sketch how certain groups are perceived and reconstructed in conversation, and forego an analytic critique of the objective basis for such disinctions.
Tibetan
‘Tibetans’ in Pharping are perceived both as showy incomers and as valuable patrons, a group built up around the Tibetan refugee monasteries around Pharping. Some are genuinely Tibetan refugees or the children of refugees. Many of the refugees are seeking diplomatic status: they want a passport, either as a Tibetan refugee or as a Nepali citizen. A significant proportion of those called ‘Tibetan’ are
not from Tibet at all; they are from Tibetan-speaking area of Nepal. Suspicious Pharping residents may accuse all but the most ancient and incomprehensible of the Tibetans of actually being a Bhote (we will return to this term) looking to be treated as a Tibetan, especially when they seek UN refugee status and resettlement. They settled in Pharping in large numbers after 1960 because Pharping has been a key pilgrimage site for Nyingma Tibetan Buddhists for at least a thousand years. With the building boom in Tibetan monasteries, many of the Tibetan lineages began to build retreat centres around Pharping and these monasteries are now a crucial source of revenue for the area: guest houses, construction firms, and taxi operators all thrive because of their presence.
Newar
Newar ethnicity in Pharping collapses along caste and religious lines.x The four most numerous Newar castes are Śreṣṭha, Mahārjan, Manandhar and Bālāmi. Śreṣṭhas are pointedly Hindu, often in the style of the Bahun-Chetris; this is taken by other Newars as a sign of the same assimilation to a dominant ideology that also grants them access to economic and political privilege other Newars feel they lack. Mahārjans and Manandhars are nominally Buddhist. Bālāmi tend to patronize Hindu ritual specialists, but as one elderly Bālāmi put it, ‘We were here before there was any question of śaivamārgi or bauddhamārgi.’
While there are small numbers of high-caste Buddhists in Pharping (Tulādhars and Vajrācāryas), the majority of those performing Buddhist rituals are Mahārjans or Mānadhars, both groups which do not feel obliged to protect a Buddhist identity but may call Brahmin ritual specialists and perform rituals at the local Hindu shrines without any loss of reputation. However, a public celebration of Buddhist identity — the modern Buddha Jayanti festival — was initiated in 1957 by senior Tulādhars and Manandhars working together. Elder Mahārjans, Mānandhars, Tulādhars and the resident Vajrācarya priest do worry about the slow erosion of Buddhism in Pharping. The Pharping Mahārjans have built commercial, ritual and social links to the Tibetans and at least one Mahārjan family has sent a son to a Tibetan monastery. Other
Newars accuse the numerous Śreṣṭhas of assimilating to the dominant Parbatiya Hindu culture so thoroughly they cannot be considered Newars any more.
Bālāmi see themselves, and are seen by others, as the oldest and most original of the Newar castes in the area. Unlike other Newars who stay in Pharping town, Bālāmi settlements are scattered throughout the western hills and valleys, such as the cluster of Bālāmi houses near Hundu; and the Bālāmi ghat (cremation area) is not at the nationally famous Dakṣiṇkāli shrine, but at an isolated and little-known site across from a minor shrine to a local deity, well upstream from Dakṣiṇkāli.
Parbatiya
Parbatiya is a term used by Newars and Tamangs to refer to mother-tongue Nepali speakers from the high Bahun-Chetri caste as well as low caste Sarki, Kāmi and others. These two broad groups do not see themselves as one—like bhote the term is unwelcome. In Pharping conversations these two clusters are usually considered separately and distinguished by where they generally live—above or below the main road. Many Bahun-Chetri live in and around Pharping town centre; they are the dominant political caste nationwide, enjoy easy access to state power, and control the local government and health care system—whether as Maoist, Congress or Communist Party. Their religion is state-backed Hinduism and it agrees with the religion taught in the schools and broadcast over the television. There are Bahun-Chetri villages scattered around the area; in Pharping as well as in the villages Bahun-Chetris own almost all the schools, run the village development council offices, and are felt to control access to most resources. For example, Newar informants tell stories of Tibetan refugees seeking passports being tricked or cheated by Bahun-Chetri local officials, and in a neat inversion, wealthy Tibetans paying foolishly large sums of money to officials who then create false land documents for new monastery sites.
Sarki and other low castes live in separate areas below the playing field and the main road. Although they are mother-tongue Nepali speakers and are taken by others to be similar to the dominant Bahun-Chetris, they are systematically excluded from power. Christian missionaries have been successful in proselytizing among the
untouchable Parbatiya communities and there are now two churches in the clusters of houses below the main road.
Tamang
There are relatively few Tamangs living inside Pharping itself, but the social and economic relations between the Tamang villages all around Pharping and the markets and schools in town are central to its survival. Others often refer to them as Bhote, a term which refers to their Tibetic-ness, but may also use the term Lama (as do Tamangs) as a respectful term. Just across a valley and about 300m above Pharping is the village of Lamagau , where I was told, ‘Everyone here is a Lama, a Tamang, we’re all Buddhist. This place is called Lamagau !’.
While Tamang religious practice is both imbued with, and extends well beyond, monastic Buddhism, they distinguish between three different ritual experts: bonpo, lama and lambu (Holmberg 2006:89). Of the three, only lamas work with materials from the Tibetan textual tradition. Tamangs around Pharping, considered as Buddhists, are Nyingma Buddhists who see themselves (and are seen by others) as distinct from the Tibetans who build the new monasteries even though those same monasteries are almost all also Nyingma.
While some Tamangs join the monasteries, and certainly Hundu was happy to have its monastery-trained lama, they are not as constrained by literate Tibetan norms as are the Tibetans; there are, for instance, no amchi (doctors trained in Tibetan medicine) in the Tamang villages around Pharping. Rather the Tamang traditional medical practitioners have their own inventory of ingredients drawn from local forests and home gardens. Other groups immediately mention that Tamangs use slugs as medicine, which they do, and they are regarded (rather like Chepang or Kusunda, though not to such a degree) as expert in identifying and gathering non-timber forest products (NTFPs) for medical use. Campbell (1998) gives a good account of how Tamang rituals create and use an animate, politicized landscape.
Triśuli and Kathmandu 2007.
We were in an Ayurvedic medical shop just below the bazaar in Triśuli, a market town several hours west of Kathmandu. There is a substantial community of Newars there, with one of the only sustainable populations of Newar Buddhist priests outside the Kathmandu Valley. This particular shop was owned by a Śreṣṭha who claimed his family had been asked to open this shop by royal command sometime in the 1940s—though we had heard from others that he was newly in possession of this shop. Fishing for evidence of trade in protected animal products, I asked if he had any musk for sale. No, they didn’t sell that sort of thing now. Where did he get his medicines from? Oh, he had a network of local Tamangs who brought him supplies from the mountains, from Rasuwa and places like that up high in the mountains.
On further investigation both with him and with longer-established Newars in town, it turned out that he, like most other local vendors in that part of Nepal, actually bought most of their ingredients from a well-known Newar wholesaler of the Baṇiyā caste in Itu Bahāl in the centre of Kathmandu, with whom I have been conducting fieldwork since 2006.
During my time at that shop I have seen a steady stream of Tamangs bringing bark, roots, and other commodities collected from the forest for sale. They arrive just as the shop opens, and the morning’s work for the assistants at the Baṇiyā shop is largely taken up with assessing, weighing, and bargaining for these materials. Many of these Tamangs live in Chapagau , Lamagau and other Tamang villages around Pharping and collect their raw materials in the forests there; in the past, they came from further afield.
The phone is alive with orders for other bulk ingredients that must be sourced by lorry from India. As the day wears on the owners of traditional medicine shops all around Nepal—Gorkha, Triśuli, Nepalganj—arrive and make bulk purchases of medical ingredients (jaḍībuṭī). Some are Bahun-Chetri, some Newar. Other customers include bulk buyers for the incense factories around Kathmandu and prestigious Tibetan or Newar traditional doctors from Kathmandu, Delhi or Lhasa.
Our shop-owner in Trisuli, it seems, wanted to claim the prestige of Tamang suppliers for himself rather than admitting to participating in a traditional Newar trading network. Rasuwa Tamangs, since the construction of the road, no longer form part of a supply chain leading only to the Baṇiyā shops of Kathmandu. Now they sell their goods at the road-head to intermediaries who in turn sell to buyers in India, Kathmandu and the Terai. The prestige associated with Tamang collecting activities remains a part of how jaḍībuṭī wholesalers sell their wares and vaidyas sell their medicines.
Historical interlude.
Newars, Tamangs and Buddhism.
Three hundred years ago, before the establishment of the Śāh princely state of Nepal, the vast majority of Newars used Buddhist priests and there was no category of Tamang. Since at least the eighth century CE, the Newars, predominantly urban, ran a trans-Himalayan trading network that included medicinal and aromatic plant commodities sourced in the Himalayas and shifted both north to Lhasa and south to Patna. It was that thriving trade network that the Śāhs both coveted and blockaded in the 1760s in order to capture the Newar city-states. While Newars used and transformed Sanskritic Āyurvedic medical traditions, they were not adept at foraging for the raw materials themselves: they were middlemen, caravaneers and wholesalers. Just as now, I propose, these products were being supplied by skilled collectors from communities around the Kathmandu Valley.
The interests of the new Śāh state created a category for the non-Newar Tibetic peoples that dwelt around the Kathmandu Valley. Levine writes, ‘Tamang is an ethnic label created to facilitate interactions with the state’ (1987:73). So, too, competition in a highly Hinduized legal and commercial environment drove many Newar families and jāts to adopt a public ritual Hindu identity in order to secure contracts, patronage and employment—many of them subsequently claiming Śreṣṭha caste identity. Of the non-priestly castes, only the Uray—a cluster of castes
that includes the trans-Himalayan caravaneers (Tulādhar) and the medical and aromatic plant product wholesalers (Baṇiyā)—remain staunchly Buddhist.
The supply of NTFPs to Newars by Tamangs is the stubborn continuation of an ecological and economic interdependence that predates the Śāh state. It is one element in a changing mutual construction of religious and ethnic identity firmly rooted in a landscape—ecological, ritual, economic. The interactions between Newars and Tamangs have become less comfortable as Newars en bloc have come to be identified with the dominant Hindu state. I did not think to ask the Tamangs who were delivering basket-loads of bark and roots to the wholesaler at Itu Bahāl if they had any opinion about the religion of the family to whom they sold their heavy loads.
The Tibetans and Pharping.
The complexity of Pharping is an ancient feature of the place. The same chronicles that permit the historian to describe that complexity support modern constructions of of ritual land tenure that Tibetans use to justify their programme of building monasteries. What from the perspective of an long-time Pharping resident is the jarring visual domination of the hillsides by new buildings on illegitimately acquired land, for a Tibetan from the Nyingma school is the welcome sign of rebuilding a traditional monastic landscape in an ancient origin site happily regained through the suffering of exile.
Early Tibetan language biographies of Padmasambhava, recovered from Dunhuang, describe his birth in the Swat Valley of Afghanistan. In the mid-8th century he struggled with and subdued a demoness at Yang le shod, now the shrine of Śeṣ Nārāyan in Pharping. Together with a Newar tantric master and his old professor from India, he then went on retreat in a nearby cave (the A su ra phug grag, again in Pharping). The three of them systematized and wrote the first extensive version of the Vajrakīla tantra, effectively founding the rNying ma school. Only after this was he invited to bSam yas by Khri son de tsen, thus establishing Buddhism in Tibet (Boord 1993).
Tibetan historical documents also say that in the next century when Buddhism was suppressed in Central Tibet the Newar ruler of Pharping, Vasudhara, gave the scholar and practitioner gNubs chen Sangs rgyas Ye shes a refuge in which to continue his practice and writing. It is an indication of the extraordinarily cosmopolitan nature of Asian Buddhism in the 9th century, and Pharping as a site within it, that one of Nub’s key works, the bSam gtan Mig gron, is an evaluation of several different sudden enlightenment schools, including different schools of Ch’an (Zen) and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Hence Pharping was one node in a network that included what we would now call Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, China and India and included elements of Indo-Aryan, Newar and Tibetic ethnicity.
Only a handful of the most educated Newar Buddhist pandits know this story, and they certainly do not see themselves as Nyingma Tibetan Buddhists, though they do recognise the importance of Padmasambhava. The same narrative is used by modern Tibetan incomers to justify their construction of monasteries and a superior claim to ‘own’ the landscape around Pharping. Most are no longer aware that their own narrative puts a Newar Buddhist ācārya at the core of their own tradition. In the eyes of many Tibetans, Newars are mostly meat-eating, alcohol-drinking Hindus with an undue fondess for ritual feasts—a view they share with Bahun-Chetris. Some of the long-time resident Tibetan monks have developed personal friendships with Newar Buddhist families that enable them to question the stereotypes, and a few highly educated lamas know that the Newar Buddhist tradition is an uncle of their own. Although monks and nuns from Tibetan monasteries will travel days to make offerings to the deity Vajrayoginī, they will not take part in her Newar jātrā, which one Tibetan monk described as a corrupt Hindu ritual imposed on a pure Buddhist deity.
Although Pharping was recorded in in Tibetan pilgrimage manuals, there is no evidence that there ever was a Tibetan monastery before 1950. Sylvain Lévi visited Pharping on 2 March 1898 and discusses it briefly in Le Népal. He records it as a Newar town, through which ran the ancient trade to India; and he is aware of the importance of the area in Nyingma history. On that point, he observed that there were no Tibetans in Pharping but there were a few bhotiyaxi. Whether he meant Tamangs or others is open to question; as Ramble (1997:392-3) and Campbell
(1997:217) note, the term may have included Tamangs; but given how many old Tamang settlements there are around Pharping, it seems likely that he meant persons he identified as neither Tibetan nor Tamang..
The first Tibetan monastery was only built in the 1950’s before the main Tibetan diaspora. This was Chatral Rimpoche’s gompa at Yang le shod, Śeṣ Nārāyan. He now has a much larger monastery at Dullu and is almost never found at the Yang le shod monastery. Newars and Tamangs both remember his arrival with fondness and respect. In the first years of his residence he acted as a lama for a wide range of Buddhists in the area. As his fame spread and the money and monasteries increased, though, he ‘forgot the locals’ and was ‘swallowed up by foreigners’. Now wealth, corruption and lack of access to the rapidly multiplying Tibetan monasteries are all constant themes of complaint.
One especially sharp image of the link between the conspicuous Tibetan wealth of the new monasteries and their consequent loss of religious prestige among Pharping locals stands out for me. I was walking with my father-in-law down the main road towards Śeṣ Nārāyan. The road into town was smoky with busses, motorcycles and a steady steam of expensive 4x4s, windows tinted, carrying Tibetan monks and lamas. It’s a long drive up from Kathmandu into Pharping and the last short steep hill, from Śeṣ Nārāyan to the bus park, gets crowded and choked with exhaust if there’s any volume of traffic. Out from the smog appeared a young Hindu sadhu on an clean bicycle. He must have cycled up from the Valley, but he appeared tranquil and fresh as the 4x4s chugged past. Why, we asked, were there no Buddhist teachers like that in Nepal?
Bickering among Buddhists.
Buddhist Newars will separate themselves from other, less Buddhist or explicitly Hindu Newars. They may do so because there are specific questions of Buddhist ritual observance, because the local Hindu association has asserted its strength yet again, or they may do so to make common cause with other social groups oppressed by the Hindu state. Daily worship of Gaṇeśa shrines weaves a shared landscape that
resists division into Hindu and Buddhist, but bickering by Buddhists often asserts that same distinction.
Newars and Tamangs, probably from well before they thought of each other or themselves as Newar and Tamang, have a long history of interdependence based on the shared environment. The Tamangs found a market for the materials they could extract from the forests, and the Newars were able to sell these goods on for a profit. Their shared religious history, obscured in recent centuries, is being re-validated in Pharping. I suspect a more detailed history of Newar-Tamang relations would reveal considerably more in the way of implicit or covert collaborations. For those Pharping Newars inclined to consult a jhā̃̃̃nkri, the Tamang bonpo in Kopu, Lamagāu or Hundu are known to be the nearest practitioners, though I have never seen this happening myself; and some Tamangs are reported to have studied with Newar Vajrayāna healers. Both Tamang bonpo and Newar jhārphuk vaidya have particular ritualised geographies that determine a landscape in which healing can take place; the bonpo’s was mentioned above, while the Vajrācarya jhārphuk vaidya uses a Cakrasaṃvara maṇḍala.
Newar Buddhists and Tamangs both object to and take advantage of the influx of Tibetan wealth and monasteries. When a Tibetan monastery in Dullu was the targets for a Maoist bomb, marketplace gossip referred to the Tibetans shifting their money out of Nepal so that it would be safe if the Maoists came to power. Some families from both groups have moved to form patron-client links with the Tibetan monasteries, and Tibetans have been important consumers at Newar medicine and NTFP shops for centuries. Both Newars and Tamangs use the claim of shared Buddhism to justify their position especially when Tibetan rejection of shared religious values becomes embarrassing. All three groups share the landscape of Pharping and its associations with Padmasambhava and Vajrayogini, constructed through the telling of historical narratives and the performance of pilgrimages. There are 20th century records of collaboration in high monastic Buddhism—both Tamang and Newar monks resided at the Nyingma monastery of Nagi Gompa as students of Urgyen Tulku. I suspect a careful study would show many more such events.
Making the Pharping landscape.
To return to 2002 and the (then new) Tamang gompa: the gompa’s completion was celebrated on Buddha Jayanti of that year. That morning the Tamangs organized a celebratory procession that marched all the way from Hundu down to Pharping, with their Buddha-image carried on a wooden palanquin under a parasol surrounded by trumpets and Olcott’s Buddhist flags. In the evening there would be a large Newar jātrā (parade) in which a Newar image was similarly taken round the town; unusually for the event, this year the Tibetans were invited along. After an impatient false start, because the Tibetans turned up late, the procession restarted and was generally a celebration of the unity of Buddhisms in Pharping (Tuladhar-Douglas 2004). At the time, I had not fully grasped the importance of the Tamang procession in the morning; was it a sort of half-participation in the main procession?
The route of the Tamang procession went from the Tamang gompa in Hundu to Pharping, where it met the ancient roots of Tamang Nyingma. It also went right past any number of showy new Tibetan gompas. It did not fold itself into the traditional Newar route—why would it? The purpose of this procession was not to connect the Newar and Tamang celebrations. Rather, it was to connect this new gompa with Padmasambhava’s biography and, at the one moment when common Buddhist identity was at its most public, to assert its presence on the landscape.
Remaking the landscape.
‘You can’t walk there now,’ said my father-in-law. ‘There are Maoists in the jungle.’ This brief prohibition marked the closure of a favourite walking route. Uncomfortable silences closed off any attempt to get more information, and I knew enough about the fractured loyalties and pervasive fear that corroded every social interaction not to ask questions around the market. After years of increasing brutality, by 2002 bombs, rape, killing, conscription and abduction were a fact of village life. Royalistsxii and Maoists each performed their atrocities, building different registers of intimidation and loyalty. Socioeconomic divisions were sharpened and manipulated. Most outsiders were spectacularly unsympathetic. During an opulent Tibetan ritual held in Pharping in December 2001, one of the few American participants responded to
news of violence with the rather clumsy phrase, ‘Well, that’s it for Nepal. I guess we’ll have to move the Dharma to Bhutan now.’
The boarding school is a major landmark in Pharping. In the Rana and Panchayat period it had been an elite secondary school attended by princes and wealthy scions, but it had fallen onto hard times and been nationalised. In 2002, the ornate Rana buildings were crumbling, though many of the magnificent trees still stood. An old footpath which connected the Śeṣ Nārāyaṇ complex to Vajrayogiṇī ran through the hilly jungle above the school. It was also a secret connection between the two sites most sacred to Padmasambhava: Yang le shod (the Tibetan name for Śeṣ Nārāyaṇ) and Asura phug drag. Originally there was, it is said, a cave passageway linking the two; then there was a ledge than ran across the cliff face from Yang le shod and met a footpath through the jungle to Vajrayogiṇī. When a drunken monk, or tourist, or local—depending on the story—fell and died, the cliff section was closed, but the footpath stayed, with a dogleg down to join the metalled road for the last hundred metres.
As the Maoists became more active in the region, everyone ‘came to know’ that they used jungle paths to move troops and arms through the hills. In response the royal army took over the rear of the boarding school: the hillside between the school and the footpath was wrapped in razor wire and troops were garrisoned inside. The path became the jungle’s front edge as it menaced the militarised town: traversed by guerillas, watched by the army, and meshed in razor wire.
It is impossible for me to represent the divided loyalties and the sheer frustration and weariness imposed by the civil war onto the work of reweaving the fabric of day-to-day life. Since 1991, one side of Pharping has been Congress Party and the other Communist, but the division into those who supported the Maoists, those who supported the king and those who hoped for a return to representative government was by its very nature secretive and fraught, dividing individuals in different contexts as well as households and neighbourhoods, and thoroughly tangled up with many of the divisions Pharping informants have already mooted here. Yet it is possible to say that, generally, Pharping had for some time been relatively supportive of the
Maoistsxiii, it was certainly a key site in the Maoist strategy to encircle Kathmandu, and it had thus come to the attention of the Kathmandu authorities.
Now the divide between town and jungle was reworked and became a divide between territories controlled by the Royalist troops and the Maoist guerillas. The Armed Police Force established a checkpoint on the main road just in front of the school. They would stop and search everyone from pedestrians to tourist buses; harass girls and Buddhist nuns; and generally make their presence uncomfortably clear. A major army encampment was established on the ridge in Chaimale, an hour’s walk further west. One day in 2003, market rumour was that all the men from a nearby village had been taken away by the army; so far as I know, whoever was taken never returned. Some nights tracer fire flickered around the hills for hours; people stood on their balconies to watch the show.
What had been an enjoyable footpath connecting places in a religious landscape common to Tamangs, Tibetans and Buddhist Newars became the frontier in a war that specifically excluded Buddhism. The royalists saw themselves as protecting the purity of the last Hindu monarchy in the world. The Maoists reviled both Hinduism and Buddhism as mystifying forces. Both sides tried to harness ethnic politics, the royalists through a claim to hegemonic national unity and the Maoists through ethnic identity politics; but neither discourse had a place for that path we used to walk.
When, in 2006, we were finally able to walk in the jungle again, my father-in-law took us—several family members and friends—out for a sort of celebratory walk, beset by leeches and thorns, refinding a long overgrown footpath. All the people on that excursion, which took us from above and behind Pharping along a pipeline contour through the hills behind Satikhel and eventually to Dullu, told stories about events that had happened among those three settlements: elopements, feuds, rivalries. After years of national conflict that sharply circumscribed local placemaking and local talk, the landscape could once again be reproduced by relatively ordinary walking and talking.
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i [email protected]. This research was supported in part by a grant from the Carnegie Trust, and would have been impossible without the unfailing support of Bhawana Tuladhar-Douglas and Shrawan Kumar Tuladhar. ii The word bhote, while commonly used and lacking any obvious polite equivalent, is a disparaging term. As with other such terms, I am reflecting rather than endorsing my informants’ use of such terms. iii The Tibetan term sgom.pa literally just means a place for meditation and thus the term was being correctly applied; but around Pharping the construction of Tibetan monasteries has created a standard against which ‘gompas’ are judged. iv See among others Gellner (1992) for a discussion of the ‘two-headed’ Newar caste system; but the ensuing discussion of polytropy (see below) shows that the distinctions, even among those most committed to religious labels such as priests, are situational. Certainly I have visited Krishna temples with Vajrācārya friends on festival days, as a spontaneous decision taken while we were walking past.
v Compare Goffman’s discussions of conversational frame and turn-taking, which are social processes requiring a significant amount of signalling that is, necessarily, not consciously perceived as content within the conversation. vi Religious scholars among Buddhist Newar, Tamang and Tibetan communities would accept Yogācāra as the best possible account of consensus reality, bearing in mind the limits on utility to such analyses, as expressed in the late medieval Yogācāra-Madhyamika synthesis of Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. vii Calvin: ‘Sooner or later all our games turn into Calvinball.’ Hobbes: ‘No cheating.’ (Watterson 1995). viii Wittgenstein may be prepared to admit this, even though he restricts communication to language only. (1958:§25). ix The Tamang bonpo moving through an animate landscape is an obvious example of this sort of boundary-crossing human. Newar vajrācāryas or Nyingma lamas—who are able to follow the trails of the dead as they reincarnate in non-human forms—cross a similar boundary, though expressed in terms of time rather than space. x Gellner (1997:181) has noted how the Newars fail to become a jānajāti for this reason, and this is exactly the point Vishnu Gopal made as well. xi ‘Çeṣa Nârâyaṇa (Sikh Narayan comme on dit ici) n’attire pa seulement les Népalais; les Bhotiyas y viennent; à mon arrivée un group des leurs est installé dans des dharmsalas et une pierre porte inscrite en relief à manier tibétaine le Oṃ maṇi padem huṃ assez inattendu ici.’ (1905: III:400) xii Although technically the army and the armed police force were in the service of the state until King Gyanendra took complete control of the government in 2005, in practice after the 2001 palace massacre that put Gyanendra on the throne all my informants in Pharping or Kathmandu referred to the military as working for, and representing, the king. xiii It is possible to say that the presence of the Dakṣiṇkālī shrine and the elite boarding school elicited sharply divided loyalties. Well into Birendra’s reign, the
annual visit of the king to the shrine was a major event, and royal patronage of the boarding school was a source of pride. From the mid 1990’s onwards, Pharping also had a lively, visible Maoist presence and considerable local support. At present Pharping is one of two districts represented in the national assembly by the leader of the Maoist party.