The nature of Nepal
Humans create stories so life can make sense‘Tamar river in Tom’s book, is it the same as Tamor River?’ I texted my editor.
‘Yes, the Limbu pronounce it Tamar,’ he wrote back. ‘You have a lot of catching up to do!’
And I did. The fact revealed itself to me even more as I buried my nose in Thomas Bell’s new book, Human Nature. The book takes the reader on a journey as the narrative spans across four different regions in Nepal’s mountains that Bell covered in 2016-2018.
The years are not directly mentioned in the narrative, but marked by relating them to major events such as the earthquake and indicated vaguely as ‘two months later, in the monsoon’.
The first chapter, Migration, takes the readers though Panchthar-Solu in eastern Nepal. The second walk is a chapter called Agriculture, which covers Chautara to Gorkha or the central hills. The third, Architecture, is all the way to upper Dolpo. The last chapter, Conservation, cuts across Jumla to Rara Lake.
As a teenager, the first I saw of Nepal’s hills was the east, so the book immediately had me. It also took me back to my own travels to Dolpo and Jumla, constantly revealing everything I had not noticed during my own travels, fetching me names of places, laying before me a new map of Nepal.
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In the first chapter, we come across Bell’s companion Rajendra, who becomes a conduit to exploring the complexity of Nepal, including the obsession with casteness. The travesty of small talk in Nepali conversations is never lost even as the author records intriguing ideas connected to indigenous knowledge, myth, folklore, rivers, history, anthropology, science, literature, and art.
The book also takes heavily from research, evoking Shanker Lamichhane’s literature to Rousseau’s walks. The walks and the research proceeded ‘hand in hand’.
“I’d do a bit of reading, then a walk or two, then a load more reading and writing, and so on,” says Bell. “There was a year between the first two walks and the last two, during which I spent a lot of time reading up and made an early draft of part 1.”
Little incidents that occur along the way help build a narrative. In some instances, we experience harsh Nepal truths. Near Salpa, a boy beats a snake to death, saying “it bites”. There are conversations about death and hardships with people along the trail, spoken about as though they were the same thing as ‘someone making you wait till the morning’. It broaches on Nepali stoicism or maybe bravado.
The narrative is replete not just with people's stories, but the stories they tell and those that have been passed down. The story of Miyapma launches one into a world of myth and fantasy. There are stories lost to us, like that of Tunilu who learned the trick of dying from a lizard.
Then the stories of Nidhini the siren and the Banjhankri. The same stories get told in many communities across the world in different ways, converging stories that represent human nature. Humans create stories so life can make sense.
The writing is fast paced because of its mostly journalistic style. The quotes bear the tone of individual speakers, something only good journalists can do. The narrative is frank and honest, alternating between serious scholarship and banter. The mood often slips from profound to jocular. For instance:
“नुन खुर्सानी पिरो, खाने मान्छे हिरो,” rhymes a jhankri shaman in the fourth chapter.
“The first job for a book like this is giving pleasure and entertainment. People should read it for fun,” Bell tells us. And he makes a serious read, a fun one with anecdotes, hand-drawn maps, photographs, a glossary of 30 words on landscape.
The book is an environmental history of Nepal. It details the conquest of Prithvi Narayan Shah, explaining how it hinged on establishing an agriculture system that thrived on rice-plantation, which in turn allowed him to create a land-military system and introduce taxation. There are stories about Prithvi Narayan that get told with some discrepancy as they rove across the mountains, the destiny of all oral history.
“I hope the book provides an accessible and attractive telling of some aspects of Nepali history for readers who might not know about all of these things, or who hadn’t thought about them in this way before,” Bell says.
When in Dolpo, Bell also goes into the intricacies of its trans-Himalayan architecture. There are lengthy, art review-like sections on thangkas, where he delves into the history of the sacred style, its relation with the community the work takes inspiration from, and how the visualisation of it continues to impact the people.
Art is often woven into religious myths, such as the saga of the heroic Milarepa, where we stumble upon philosophy: ‘This body, so hard to obtain and easily broken…’ Also a reminder that we are each a leader with our own set of disciples. Each of us, our own Milarepa.
The fourth section is the strongest in rhetoric as it takes on Nepal’s conservation history. Like in Tom Bell’s first book, Kathmandu, there is sharp, forthright criticism of the system. The chapter points at the flawed conservation approach that has hurt indigenous science and peoples.
While there is the seriousness of a heavy topic, the narrative also bears occasional eccentricities, such as: the old man in Jumla has dogs, cats, fleas, hens, rabbits, goats and bees.
“I hope that the book has enough layers that different readers find different things in there that interest and entertain them,” Bell says. Me, I came away with history. Told. Forgotten.
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