Longer Version of Article Published As 'Bickering And

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.

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