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EBHR 39 Autumn-Winter 2011

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EBHR 39 Autumn-Winter 2011 3 EBHR 39 Autumn-Winter 2011 ARTICLES An Unpublished Account of Kinnauri Folklore 9 Sur Das, introduced by Arik Moran Keeping the Hill Tribes at Bay: A critique from India’s Northeast 41 of James C. Scott’s paradigm of state evasion Jelle Wouters Shaping Secularism in Nepal 66 Chiara Letizia LECTURE Time, Identity and Historical Change in the Hills of Nepal 106 (Ninth Annual Lecture of the Britain-Nepal Academic Council) Anne de Sales REPORT The Catalogue of the Hodgson Collection in the British Library 128 John Whelpton and Michael Hutt INTERVIEW Women, Law and Democracy in Nepal: An interview with 146 Sapana Pradhan-Malla Gérard Toffin and Shova Shakya OBITUARIES Richard Keith Sprigg (1922-2011) 164 Heleen Plaisier Michel Georges Francois Peissel (1937-2011) 167 Roger Croston BOOK REVIEWS Daniele Berti and Gilles Tarabout (eds): Territory, Soil and 174 Society in South Asia David N. Gellner 4 EBHR-39 Hermann Kreutzmann (ed): Karakoram in Transition: Culture, 178 development and ecology in the Hunza valley Davide Torri Marie Lecomte-Tilouine (ed.): Nature, Culture and 181 Religion at the Crossroads of Asia Nayanika Mathur Martin Moir: Not Exactly Shangri-la 183 Michael Hutt Nishchal Nath Pandey: New Nepal: The Fault Lines 185 Milly Joshi Devendra Raj Pandey: Looking at Development and 190 Donors: Essays from Nepal Jeevan Raj Sharma Gérard Toffin: La Fête Spectacle. Théâtre et rite au Népal 193 Arik Moran Mark Turin and Bettina Zeisler (eds.): Himalayan Languages and 198 Linguistics: Studies in phonology, semantics, morphology and syntax Nathan Hill ENDPIECE Me at the Beginning of Life 206 Jhamak Ghimire 5 EDITORIAL The work involved in producing a scholarly journal is, more often than not, a labour of love. Academics based in the Euro-American world are given scant credit by their employers for editorial work, but we do it because of our sense of belonging to an academic community, for which a Bulletin such as the EBHR provides a focal point. It is therefore very heartening to draw readers’ attention to two noteworthy examples of academic generosity within these covers. On 22 June I received an email from one Mr William Eustace of Malvern, which read as follows: A colleague of yours gave me your e-mail address as she thought you may be able to help me. Whilst sorting out some old papers I came across an old exercise book which was given to my Grandfather, Sir Harold Glover, whilst he was Chief Conservator, Punjab Forestry Service. Dated 1937 it is hand written and describes folk-lore stories in the Kunawar region of Northern India. In spite of my being born in Lahore (my father was in the Indian Civil Service and for a time was District Commissioner of the Kangra District), my knowledge of Hindu and Buddhist Gods and Deities is very limited and I find reading the stories difficult. If I could find someone who understands this subject, together with the place names, and is prepared to type the contents of the book (only 66 pages), then it would bring to life a part of my family history that both I and other members of my family could enjoy. Whether the contents are of any interest to a wider audience, I have no idea, but perhaps you would be able to answer that. I forwarded this email to Arik Moran, and the result is the article published in this issue entitled ‘An Unpublished Account of Kinnauri Folklore’. I am most grateful to William Eustace for offering this to us, and to Arik Moran for taking the time to edit and introduce this most interesting text. The second example of academic generosity to which I would like to draw readers’ attention is the contribution made by John Whelpton, Mark Turin and Burkhard Quessel to the completion and online publication of the Hodgson Catalogue, on which we report in this issue. I urge EBHR readers 6 EBHR-39 to visit the catalogue website and browse there at leisure: the Hodgson archive contains something for almost everyone. I am also very grateful to Anne de Sales for granting us permission to publish the text of the lecture she delivered in London on 31 October. Writing of this quality deserves an audience far wider than a university lecture theatre can accommodate. A specialist peer-reviewed journal such as the EBHR can provide young scholars with an opportunity to present their work for the first time to a Himalayan Area Studies readership. Usually, this is the work of researchers working at postdoctoral level: Chiara Letizia’s highly topical article on the evolving understandings of secularism in Nepal is a prime example. But in this issue we are also very happy to publish an article by a Ph.D student, Jelle Wouters, which recommended itself to us because of its focus on India’s little-studied Northeast and its critique of a key text. This issue also includes an interview with Sapana Malla-Pradhan, a leading Nepali human rights lawyer, marks the passing of the great Tibeto- Burman linguist Keith Sprigg and the Himalayan explorer Michel Peissel, and ends by celebrating the achievement of Jhamak Ghimire, who is an inspiration to us all. Michael Hutt, January 2012 7 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Jelle J.P. Wouters completed an M.Phil in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford in 2010. Currently he is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, where he is working on state and nonstate, indigenous approaches to socio- economic development. His publications include ‘Revisiting Srinivas’s remembered village’ (Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, New Series 2(1-2): 44-65) and ‘Reconfiguring colonial ethnography: the British gaze over India’s North-East’, in North-East India: A handbook of Anthropology (forthcoming, edited by Tanka B. Subba). Arik Moran completed a D.Phil in History at the University of Oxford in 2010. His research concerns the formation of communal identities in the West Himalaya in the 18-19th centuries, and changes in social and political culture among Rajput elites against the backdrop of British expansion and oral epic traditions. He is currently working on a project on social memory in oral traditions in Himachal Pradesh. He was appointed as lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies, University of Haifa, Israel, in 2011. Chiara Letizia is a social anthropologist and historian of religions, and a researcher and lecturer in cultural anthropology at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Since 1997 she has been conducting research on religion and society in Nepal. She received her PhD from the University of Rome in 2003 for a thesis on Hindu pilgrimages in the Tarai, and conducted post- doctoral research at the CNRS in Paris in 2004 on the adoption of Buddhism by Tharu and Magar communities in relation to ethnic claims and political change. From 2009 to 2011 she was a Newton Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, where she conducted research on understandings of secularism in Nepal. Anne de Sales holds the position of Chercheur at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in association with the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre. Her doctoral research focused on the shamanic tradition of the Kham-Magar of Northwestern Nepal and resulted in a monograph entitled Je suis né de vos jeux de tambours (Nanterre, Société d’ethnologie, 1991). Her 8 EBHR-39 recent work concerns the social and cultural impact of the Maoist uprising in rural Nepal, with special attention to local narratives. She is also co- editor with Robert Parkin of Out of the Study and into the Field: Ethnographic theory and practice in French anthropology (Berghahn Books 2010). 9 An Unpublished Account of Kinnauri Folklore by Sur Das, introduced by Arik Moran Stretching along the banks of the Sutlej River from the border with West Tibet to the Shimla Hills (Himachal Pradesh, India), the remote region of Kinnaur (also spelled ‘Kanawr’, ‘Kunwar’, etc.) is among the most fascinating, if least understood, parts of the Himalaya. A major obstacle to comprehending the region is the notorious difficulty of its language, which is a Tibeto-Burman dialect that greatly differs from the Indo-European Pahari spoken in adjacent parts of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarkhand. The complex cultural world of Kinnaur, which draws from the West Tibetan, Hindu and indigenous Pahari cultural zones that surround it, has consequently been exceedingly difficult to access, with the few insights into it limited to comments found in travellers’ accounts and anthropological interpretations by researchers specializing in and around the region. This paper redresses this shortcoming by presenting a hitherto unknown account of regional folklore that was written by a local Kinnauri in 1938. The text, originally titled ‘Himalayan Folk-lore Stories’, was recently discovered among the effects of Sir Harold Matthew Glover (1885- 1961), a high-ranking official in the colonial Forest Department.1 Glover commissioned the account from a subordinate ranger while on tour in ‘upper and lower Bashahr’, the erstwhile kingdom of which Kinnaur formed the easternmost portion. The author, the notable (negi) Sur Das of Sangla, wrote the text in cursive English in a notebook of 67 pages, measuring 18x22 cm.2 Sur Das was highly esteemed by his superior, who cites a passage from I wish to thank William Eustace for providing me with a scanned version of the text presented in this paper and his permission to reproduce it here for a wider audience, as well as additional documents and information on his grandfather, Sir Harold Glover. 1 Sir Harold Glover was born in Worcester, England, and educated at Worcester Royal Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford.
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