To:
Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai,
Baluwatar, Kathmandu
Nepal
Subject: Make the System Work, Help Deliver Justice
Dear Prime Minister,
When Sita Nepali, a Nepali citizen aged 21, arrived home after working
in Saudi Arabia earlier this month she was robbed at the hands of Immigration
Officials at the Tribhuvan International Airport. A Nepal Police
constable then took authority of her, took her to a hotel, and proceeded to rape her that night.
This blatant crime against a Nepali citizen, perpetrated by a Nepali
government official and a Nepali police constable, must be addressed
by the government immediately. The crime is all the more horrific
because the robbery was perpetrated on someone who had worked with
great difficulty in a foreign nation to support her family.
We urge your office and the Home Ministry to
immediately investigate this case and set an example of how violence
against women will not be tolerated in Nepal. We urge you to use the
vast resources at your disposal to call on every government and
non-governmental bodies working on women's rights
issues to find out just what happened to Sita Nepali at TIA and pursue
justice as required, to the full extent of the law.
Nepal's international commitments to end violence against women, and
discrimination against Dalit communities, especially women from
marginalized and poor backgrounds, will be in question if you do not
immediately address this case through all justice mechanisms at your
disposal.
Dear Prime Minister, a simple request: irrespective of the number of
days you may have left in your office, please use whatever time you
have to show us that you tried to make the system work for a single person, so that "we the
people" can have some hope it may work for us all one day. Sita Nepali has to get
justice. By working to help deliver that justice, you can also help deliver hope of a better
Nepal to millions of Nepali women. To fail Sita Nepali would be to fail the nation.
Regards,
Signed: ______________
Name:
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26 December, 2012
11 November, 2012
The Future of the Future
This is what Nepal will look like under Chinese 
colonialism, if the Maobaddies continue to be in power.
colonialism, if the Maobaddies continue to be in power.
26 January, 2012
Future Challenges: What we can learn from Burma
Published in Bertelsmann Future Challenges, 26 January 2012
We know a lot about Burma. We know of violations of human rights waged against the political opposition and ethnic minorities, recruitment of child soldiers, political prisoners, refugees, and forced labor. We also know about the ongoing struggle between the military junta and Aung San Suu Kyi and her many house arrests. When people need an example of an undemocratic country, they will quote Burma and North Korea. US government officials have been quoted as saying the Burmese regime is the most difficult to deal with. It is easy to imagine that we know everything there is to know about the country.
In Burma I could sense such oppression in the very air of Yangon. But I also encountered some unexpected things that we don’t normally think about when we think of Burma. We know that we do have something to teach the Burmese state. But is there something the Burmese people have to teach us?
The boys running the stall in Yangon who sold me a peanut salad returned more change than they owed me when they couldn’t find the correct amount. It was immediately clear profit wasn’t the prime motivation for running their stall.
And this become even clearer night after night when walking through the streets of Yangon, darkened by the electricity blackouts, I saw groups of people drinking tea and chatting convivially on the pavements.
People had an approach to life that hinged more on community ties than on capitalistic transactions. The Internet was not easily available. Ironically, government censorship and control seems to have led to a cut-down in electronic chatter and to the “Joy of Quiet” that Pico Iyer wrote about in the New York Times last week. Please note that I do not endorse government control of media — I am merely observing, from my anthropological background, an unexpected side effect.
(Gorkhali girls dressed in their own costumes on the left, and dressed in Kachin costumes on the right)
One man told me that Burma was the safest country on earth, and I didn’t have to fear being robbed anywhere. And I could believe him. People can walk around loaded with stacks of notes but nobody would dare rob them because first people are not greedy (true) and second, everyone is under surveillance (also true). I am certain that round-the-clock community surveillance is not the way I would want to live my life—but a tangible sense of “something else” happening was present where money played a less central role, and community played a larger role in social encounters.
I gathered from conversations with the Gorkhalis in Burma, whose families migrated there over a century ago, that they rather liked the country and would never return to Nepal. The reason, as one woman put it, was that they did not like the individualistic life in Nepal where people only cared about their own welfare.
“When someone dies in Burma, everybody gathers,” one woman told me. “Even the Muslim neighbours come. I was visiting my cousin in Kathmandu and an old woman died in the house in front of hers. Nobody knew about it. Nobody gathered for the funeral.”
Community life, which enveloped me as soon as I stepped off the plane, is the central focus of people’s lives. Unlike other countries where individuals and couples in nuclear families are financially responsible for their own units, Burma has larger family networks that co-operate financially.
In America, people carry an ever-present sense of fear around with them that the capitalist rug under their feet could be pulled out from under them at any moment. Once that rug is gone, everyone is on their own. The state provides support to those who need help — but despite the billions purportedly spent on Medicare and welfare, the 45 million poor people in America who are unemployed or on low income appear to suffer from a chronic lack of healthy food, education, mental health, and hope. They – and especially African-American men – are also targeted by a highly racialized and commercialized prison-industry complex.
The people in Burma are poor as well — AUSAID estimates that one third of Burma’s 50 million live in poverty. Some older people in Yangon looked close to starvation. Emma Larkin, of “Finding George Orwell in Burma” fame, writes about this lack of spending power among the urban residents of Yangon, and how poverty deprives them of food. But in Myitkyina, the northern part of Burma where there is a large Nepali community, I got the sense that the people of all ethnicities whom I met were prosperous entrepreneurs, working on small businesses or farm owners. In the bazzar $2 bought me a meal of rice, fish, meat, salad with a molasses sweet. While pockets of Burmese, including the Chin, suffer food deprivation, other parts seem to do well on food that I would categorize as healthier than that found in transnational fast food outlets.
In Mandalay, I found the center of the Gorkhali Myanmar Hindu Sangh. This is the umbrella organization of people of Nepali origin. Because they came as Gurkha soldiers, they call themselves “Gorkhali” in Myanmar. The organization has built a “dharmashala,” a pilgrims’ resting place, where educational, cultural and medical support was offered. The sense of service to the community was present everywhere. A visit to the doctor led me into a fascinating apartment where a jolly man was using his floor as his doctor’s surgery. He lacked medical equipment but clearly his priority was healing – not peddling pharmaceuticals. This throwback to the old-fashioned doctor who serves the community, which in these days of managed healthcare we can read about only in books, came as a pleasant surprise.
So is Burma not such a monolithic story, after all? Are there old forms of social relations left intact in Burma from which the Greater We can also learn? Are there vital elements of community life that we have lost in our frenzied quest for money and modernization? Perhaps before everyone goes down the glossy road of globalization, we can also learn some lessons from the Burmese people.
For the linked article, go to:
Future Challenges website, Bertelsmann Stiftung
http://futurechallenges.org/local/what-we-can-learn-from-burma/
We know a lot about Burma. We know of violations of human rights waged against the political opposition and ethnic minorities, recruitment of child soldiers, political prisoners, refugees, and forced labor. We also know about the ongoing struggle between the military junta and Aung San Suu Kyi and her many house arrests. When people need an example of an undemocratic country, they will quote Burma and North Korea. US government officials have been quoted as saying the Burmese regime is the most difficult to deal with. It is easy to imagine that we know everything there is to know about the country.
In Burma I could sense such oppression in the very air of Yangon. But I also encountered some unexpected things that we don’t normally think about when we think of Burma. We know that we do have something to teach the Burmese state. But is there something the Burmese people have to teach us?
The boys running the stall in Yangon who sold me a peanut salad returned more change than they owed me when they couldn’t find the correct amount. It was immediately clear profit wasn’t the prime motivation for running their stall.
And this become even clearer night after night when walking through the streets of Yangon, darkened by the electricity blackouts, I saw groups of people drinking tea and chatting convivially on the pavements.
People had an approach to life that hinged more on community ties than on capitalistic transactions. The Internet was not easily available. Ironically, government censorship and control seems to have led to a cut-down in electronic chatter and to the “Joy of Quiet” that Pico Iyer wrote about in the New York Times last week. Please note that I do not endorse government control of media — I am merely observing, from my anthropological background, an unexpected side effect.
One man told me that Burma was the safest country on earth, and I didn’t have to fear being robbed anywhere. And I could believe him. People can walk around loaded with stacks of notes but nobody would dare rob them because first people are not greedy (true) and second, everyone is under surveillance (also true). I am certain that round-the-clock community surveillance is not the way I would want to live my life—but a tangible sense of “something else” happening was present where money played a less central role, and community played a larger role in social encounters.
I gathered from conversations with the Gorkhalis in Burma, whose families migrated there over a century ago, that they rather liked the country and would never return to Nepal. The reason, as one woman put it, was that they did not like the individualistic life in Nepal where people only cared about their own welfare.
“When someone dies in Burma, everybody gathers,” one woman told me. “Even the Muslim neighbours come. I was visiting my cousin in Kathmandu and an old woman died in the house in front of hers. Nobody knew about it. Nobody gathered for the funeral.”
Community life, which enveloped me as soon as I stepped off the plane, is the central focus of people’s lives. Unlike other countries where individuals and couples in nuclear families are financially responsible for their own units, Burma has larger family networks that co-operate financially.
In America, people carry an ever-present sense of fear around with them that the capitalist rug under their feet could be pulled out from under them at any moment. Once that rug is gone, everyone is on their own. The state provides support to those who need help — but despite the billions purportedly spent on Medicare and welfare, the 45 million poor people in America who are unemployed or on low income appear to suffer from a chronic lack of healthy food, education, mental health, and hope. They – and especially African-American men – are also targeted by a highly racialized and commercialized prison-industry complex.
The people in Burma are poor as well — AUSAID estimates that one third of Burma’s 50 million live in poverty. Some older people in Yangon looked close to starvation. Emma Larkin, of “Finding George Orwell in Burma” fame, writes about this lack of spending power among the urban residents of Yangon, and how poverty deprives them of food. But in Myitkyina, the northern part of Burma where there is a large Nepali community, I got the sense that the people of all ethnicities whom I met were prosperous entrepreneurs, working on small businesses or farm owners. In the bazzar $2 bought me a meal of rice, fish, meat, salad with a molasses sweet. While pockets of Burmese, including the Chin, suffer food deprivation, other parts seem to do well on food that I would categorize as healthier than that found in transnational fast food outlets.
In Mandalay, I found the center of the Gorkhali Myanmar Hindu Sangh. This is the umbrella organization of people of Nepali origin. Because they came as Gurkha soldiers, they call themselves “Gorkhali” in Myanmar. The organization has built a “dharmashala,” a pilgrims’ resting place, where educational, cultural and medical support was offered. The sense of service to the community was present everywhere. A visit to the doctor led me into a fascinating apartment where a jolly man was using his floor as his doctor’s surgery. He lacked medical equipment but clearly his priority was healing – not peddling pharmaceuticals. This throwback to the old-fashioned doctor who serves the community, which in these days of managed healthcare we can read about only in books, came as a pleasant surprise.
So is Burma not such a monolithic story, after all? Are there old forms of social relations left intact in Burma from which the Greater We can also learn? Are there vital elements of community life that we have lost in our frenzied quest for money and modernization? Perhaps before everyone goes down the glossy road of globalization, we can also learn some lessons from the Burmese people.
For the linked article, go to:
Future Challenges website, Bertelsmann Stiftung
http://futurechallenges.org/local/what-we-can-learn-from-burma/
12 January, 2012
Bangkok’s Neglected Water Wealth
Published in Bertelsmann Stiftung's "Future Challenges" 11 January 2012
I was in Bangkok last mid-April when it started to pour heavily with rain. I was in Sukumvit Road, the heart of the commercial district. Trying to walk to my hotel, I found that my road quickly flooded with rain within a few hours. I returned to Kathmandu, and followed with anxious trepidation news of the flooding in Thailand via Twitter and Facebook.
The stories of old people guarding their small homes by the river banks worried me. I emailed my friends to find out if they were okay. One had fled her home with her parents, an elderly aunt and two dogs. Another friend told me the bottom floor of her parents’ house, close to the airport, had been flooded. The damage to the city seems immense.
And yet, isn’t water a precious commodity, one we should celebrate if we get more of it? I learnt from a Thai animation made by volunteers to inform the general public that the reasons for the flooding were the artificial barriers constructed to dam the flow of water from the highlands down to the sea, as well as deforestation. With no trees to absorb excess rain water, the waters swelled as they moved towards the city.
As a child, I dreamt of Bangkok as a beautiful city filled with lights, flowered decorations and beautiful women in yellow and red silk clothes. But when I actually went to live there, what hit me was the unlimited amount of concrete, heat and noise.
The noise would rise at midnight to my 8th floor room, a high whine from aerodynamic motorcycles ridden by young men with little regard for speed limits. The noise was unbearable. I longed for spaces with greenery and wooden buildings, the kind advertised in Thai magazines. But those had long since been cut down or taken apart. Perhaps my disillusionment at a city in which urban planners had paid so little heed to green trees and natural building materials was also linked to the water issue—a methodical respect for natural environments, as we see in some European cities, would have incorporated water not just as a side issue but as a central part of the city’s identity.
People told me that many traditional canals, or khlongs, that once crisscrossed Bangkok and were a natural pathway for the rainwater to make its way out to sea, had become disused or closed off. At one time there were so many canals that Bangkok was nicknamed “The Venice of the East.” The canals also acted as thriving marketplaces for “floating markets.”
Sadly, few of these canals still remain—they were filled in and turned into asphalted streets and those that remain are not adequately maintained. Properly managed, the city could take this bounty of water and use it to replenish its canals which also act as public transport arteries for its many commuters. Maintaining the existing canals and creating new ones would certainly be a key solution for both public transport as well as a good way of stopping next year’s floods.
In his memoir “A Missionary in Siam: 1860-1870,” N.A MacDonald writes beautifully about the bamboo foundations of Thai homes build on riversides. The foundations could be moved up and down at will with two sliding pieces of bamboo, and people could adjust the foundation length as the waters rose and fell. This may be costly to do in the era of steel and concrete, but stilts can still be replicated at low cost. Architectural designs which utilize stilts – a mainstay of houses built on floodplains for thousands of years – should also be encouraged by the government to avoid the problem of flooding ground floors. Brad Pitt’s non-profit organization, Make It Right, is building modern homes on stilts, in order to combat future flooding.
If Bangkok paid more heed to its traditional urban planning heritage, where water played a central part, it would not think of water as a threat but as an asset. If there was an urban revival of this tradition of valuing water as both live-giving and nourishing, then perhaps the flooding of the rivers would be an carefully managed annual event rather than a disaster. Then perhaps the women wrapped in yellow and red would return to float flower arrangements in the river once again, creating a dream city.
I was in Bangkok last mid-April when it started to pour heavily with rain. I was in Sukumvit Road, the heart of the commercial district. Trying to walk to my hotel, I found that my road quickly flooded with rain within a few hours. I returned to Kathmandu, and followed with anxious trepidation news of the flooding in Thailand via Twitter and Facebook.
The stories of old people guarding their small homes by the river banks worried me. I emailed my friends to find out if they were okay. One had fled her home with her parents, an elderly aunt and two dogs. Another friend told me the bottom floor of her parents’ house, close to the airport, had been flooded. The damage to the city seems immense.
And yet, isn’t water a precious commodity, one we should celebrate if we get more of it? I learnt from a Thai animation made by volunteers to inform the general public that the reasons for the flooding were the artificial barriers constructed to dam the flow of water from the highlands down to the sea, as well as deforestation. With no trees to absorb excess rain water, the waters swelled as they moved towards the city.
As a child, I dreamt of Bangkok as a beautiful city filled with lights, flowered decorations and beautiful women in yellow and red silk clothes. But when I actually went to live there, what hit me was the unlimited amount of concrete, heat and noise.
The noise would rise at midnight to my 8th floor room, a high whine from aerodynamic motorcycles ridden by young men with little regard for speed limits. The noise was unbearable. I longed for spaces with greenery and wooden buildings, the kind advertised in Thai magazines. But those had long since been cut down or taken apart. Perhaps my disillusionment at a city in which urban planners had paid so little heed to green trees and natural building materials was also linked to the water issue—a methodical respect for natural environments, as we see in some European cities, would have incorporated water not just as a side issue but as a central part of the city’s identity.
People told me that many traditional canals, or khlongs, that once crisscrossed Bangkok and were a natural pathway for the rainwater to make its way out to sea, had become disused or closed off. At one time there were so many canals that Bangkok was nicknamed “The Venice of the East.” The canals also acted as thriving marketplaces for “floating markets.”
Sadly, few of these canals still remain—they were filled in and turned into asphalted streets and those that remain are not adequately maintained. Properly managed, the city could take this bounty of water and use it to replenish its canals which also act as public transport arteries for its many commuters. Maintaining the existing canals and creating new ones would certainly be a key solution for both public transport as well as a good way of stopping next year’s floods.
In his memoir “A Missionary in Siam: 1860-1870,” N.A MacDonald writes beautifully about the bamboo foundations of Thai homes build on riversides. The foundations could be moved up and down at will with two sliding pieces of bamboo, and people could adjust the foundation length as the waters rose and fell. This may be costly to do in the era of steel and concrete, but stilts can still be replicated at low cost. Architectural designs which utilize stilts – a mainstay of houses built on floodplains for thousands of years – should also be encouraged by the government to avoid the problem of flooding ground floors. Brad Pitt’s non-profit organization, Make It Right, is building modern homes on stilts, in order to combat future flooding.
If Bangkok paid more heed to its traditional urban planning heritage, where water played a central part, it would not think of water as a threat but as an asset. If there was an urban revival of this tradition of valuing water as both live-giving and nourishing, then perhaps the flooding of the rivers would be an carefully managed annual event rather than a disaster. Then perhaps the women wrapped in yellow and red would return to float flower arrangements in the river once again, creating a dream city.
06 November, 2011
The Gorkhalis of Myitkyina: Himal South Asia
October 2011, Himal South Asia Magazine
By Sushma Joshi
Tracking down a far-off Nepali community.
My flight to Yangon on 18 June is cancelled. Thai Airways announces that heavy rain has closed Yangon airport. In the restless gloom of the waiting area, rumours start to spread. The Myanmar Army has taken over the airport, people whisper. Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday is a day away. Has some event occurred while they have been away? Young fathers sit staring into space, wondering whether they can ever return home.
We get bussed to the Amaranth Hotel, a fancy five-star hotel in the outskirts of Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok. Using my wireless thumb drive, I e-mail my friend in Washington, DC, and request her to check Twitter. Within a few minutes, I get my answer: a plane has skidded off the tracks at Yangon airport. Flights supposed to land there are being rerouted to Singapore.
We fly to Yangon the next morning. In the excited conversations I start up with my fellow travellers, I refer repeatedly to my visit to ‘Burma’, to which they politely remind me it is now ‘Myanmar’. At a crowded traffic junction, a young newspaper boy flashes me illicit news printed in The Nation, a Thai newspaper. The front flap is folded over to hide the headlines inside: Kachin rebels resume fighting at border, threats of civil war. Only 3000 kyats (around USD 468), he says. I get a Hollywood thrill seeing the news, hidden so discreetly and flashed briefly before my eyes.
In a nearby restaurant, the kindly owner starts to discuss the Kachin rebels with me. The people are protesting, she says, because the benefits of the new hydroelectricity dam currently being built will all go to China. The Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River will dry up and the Kachin will get nothing in return. She is surprised I do not know all this already. ‘I think you are journalist and you come to report about this,’ she confides. I deny this, but she hardly believes me: how could I not be a journalist? Obviously I was not a tourist – clearly I had come for some specific purpose.
Four months earlier, in February, I had ridden a pickup truck to Lashio, in the northern Shan state. A government official had looked at me and asked, ‘Are you a writer?’ Do I have I am a writer written on my forehead, I had wondered at the time. In hindsight, this was disingenuous: which tourist in her right mind would be riding a pickup truck to Lashio, sitting squashed alongside thirty labourers in the back with a giant pile of goods, and only a plastic mat as cushioning? I had admitted I was a writer, of sorts, but I need not have worried – the official went on to tell me that Myanmar was now introducing democratic norms and would soon become like other democracies. He also told me that he never took the state-owned Myanma Airlines, and that he felt that his country would slowly but surely adopt the political freedom of other countries. He admired writers, and wanted to learn to write in English. Of course, he was a government official whose children studied at the best schools. His three rosy-cheeked children went to one of the best boarding schools in the country, in Pyin U Lwin (formerly Maymo), where he was picking them up to take them for a short vacation. Ordinary people had told me that only government officials get to send their children to good schools, or to buy property or start businesses. We can’t do anything, they said. It might have been true in this case but the official was so pleasant, polite and charming, and so clearly on the side of a democratic system, that it was hard to fault him.
Despite all this, I was unsure how much I should reveal – would saying that I was writing a book about the Nepali/Gorkhali community in Myanmar bring unwelcome attention? Did I want to invite the possibility of more government officials asking me more questions? I was unsure, and in the confusing absence of information it seemed better not to say anything.
To the gompa!
Back in the Yangon restaurant on a steaming and oppressive June evening, I shook my head and said: ‘No, I’m not here to report on the Kachin rebellion.’ The owner was surprised by this. Then she resumed telling me the story of what was happening in Myitkyina, almost as if it did not matter why I had come in the first place, as long as I got a chance to witness what was going on there. I was educated, it was clear. I could speak and write in English. And this was enough credentials to be a witness.
Reading the New Light of Myanmar, the government-run newspaper, I saw that indeed the Kachin rebels have resumed fighting in Myitkyina, where I was headed. As the restaurant owner had earlier indicated, the news also told me that the Kachin were protesting the building of a dam by China; they had already blown up 22 bridges. The newspaper alternatively offered sticks and carrots: warnings to those going against development alongside pleas to rebels to remember that they are part of the Myanmar state, and that those who agree to support state policies can come to the negotiation table.
Let me admit it right here: I am not one of those who go seeking adventure. I was in Myanmar to find out more about the history, culture and life of the Nepali community there. If fighting was happening exactly where I was headed, perhaps I should not go. Unlike many of my friends, I am not a conflict junkie. And while getting their heads broken open with a policeman’s baton during protest marches in Nepal’s democratic movement was a badge of honour for many of my friends, I tend to be more cautious. Following my mother’s advice, I tend to save my brain cells for other activities.
Precisely as planned, however, I did fly to Myitkyina the next morning. The USD 308 ticket felt exorbitant, but I had already planned this for months so there was no possibility of backing down. I was excited to see the Gorkhali gompa, described to me in great detail by the Mahayana Buddhist followers in Pwe Oo Lin. I was also excited to meet some of the estimated 300,000 people of Nepali origin who lived in Kachin state. With villages named Rampur, Sitapur and Radhapur, I had a feeling I was going to see a lot more of Nepal in Myitkyina than I had planned. Of course, with my usual lack of planning I was carrying no phone numbers with me – only a sense that everything would turn out right.
Myitkyina is almost 1500 km from Yangon. In the fresh green air, much of the oppressive gloom of Yangon city falls away. People do not look away with shuttered faces – over here, they look at you with a smile and an open face. As I looked around the verdant greenery and the gently dilapidated buildings, I wondered how the Nepalis had gotten here in the first place.
Later, people tell me that most Nepalis arrived with the British during Second World War to fight the Japanese. The Allies won. The Gurkha regiments stayed behind, even after the end of the war. Others came to trade even before the First World War – one tradesman in the bazaar told me his father came to Burma because it was the land of plenty. His father noticed that children in Calcutta picked rice out of the gutter to eat, but in Rangoon they threw away platefuls of rice from the eatery he sat in on his first day. That is how he knew this land was a rich land. Nepalis also built the road in this town, I was told. ‘My father worked on that road,’ a Nepali tells me later. ‘That road’ is the Ledo Road, which goes from Ledo, in Assam, to Kunming, in Yunnan. The Ledo Road was built as an alternative route by the British to carry supplies to the Chinese after the Japanese troops cut off the Burma Road in 1942.
I need not have worried about knowing not a single soul in Myitkyina as I descended from the airplane. Waiting outside the airport was Bijay Adhikari. Mr Adhikari worked the airport route as a taxi-driver. At first I mistook him for an Afghan – possibly one who had been left behind in this remote outpost, the detritus of some war of the past. Then he asked me, ‘Which country are you from?’ And when I said, ‘Nepal’, he said, ‘I am Nepali too. You don’t worry. I’ll take you everywhere.’
The first stop in our itinerary was Bijayji’s home. His wife sat in front of the Hare Krishna shrine in their home, her hands folded, the picture of propriety and devotion. The Hare Krishnaites, known only for their hippie oddities in the US, have apparently acquired a popular following of diasporic disciples from Hindu backgrounds in countries such as Myanmar. Cut off from their religious traditions and hungry to learn more about their religious heritage, these disciples provide a fertile following.
Bijayji’s wife tells me their three children are all working in Thailand – the son a tailor in Phuket, the two daughters working in retail outlets in Bangkok. ‘Don’t people in Myanmar miss their children?’ I asked, and immediately realised my mistake. Bijayji’s wife looked sad and she glanced down. Almost all of the younger generation of working age has migrated to Thailand. ‘Our villages are empty of young people,’ Bijayji said.
‘Your son must make a lot of money in Phuket, then,’ I said. ‘I met a lot of Nepali tailors who are doing very well in Thailand. They own their own homes and businesses.’
Bijayji shook his head and replied: ‘The tailoring business boomed for those who went about a decade ago. In the current economic climate, it is difficult for new people to establish themselves in Phuket.’ He said his daughters and son planned to send back their grandchildren so the grandparents could look after them while they worked in the big cities.
Bijayji then took me to meet his 80-year-old mother. We chatted for a while, and I felt an immediate affinity with the old woman. It is strange, I thought, how a point of commonality could be forged so quickly between this 80-year-old woman in Myanmar and myself, based on our shared heritage. Many of the people that I met during my travels in the country had a unique openness towards the world; while distrust tends to wrap many modern societies like shrink-wrap, in Myanmar many still exude an immediate intimacy. This openness worried me – I feared I might inadvertently do or say something that could put the people I met in harm’s way.
But I need not have worried. The Gorkhali community has nothing to hide in Myanmar. ‘We have excellent relationships with both the state and the Kachin rebels,’ I was told several times, with great conviction.
In the bamboo hut of the old woman, we moved to the issue of religion, always a contentious one in Myanmar’s Gorkhali community, as they refer to themselves. The old lady was a Buddhist, unlike her son and daughter-in-law, who followed the Bhakti movement through the Hare Krishna path. She had a Buddhist shrine midway up her wall, like her Burman neighbours. ‘We have no quarrels here,’ she said. ‘I follow Buddha, and they follow Krishna.’ Unlike in the larger community, this family seemed to have made peace with religious freedom and the different choices of family members.
Rebel, rebel
Immediately afterwards, we went to the gompa. Dorje Lama, the chairman, welcomed me warmly. An election to choose members of the committee was in full swing. Most of the people were Tamang. We sat down at a bench at the back, and I admired for a few moments the civil ways in which the event was taking place. Ostensibly it was an election, but it was clear the candidates had been pre-selected and nominated. The men sat on one side, the women on another. They all watched as the man on the dais read out the names of the elected male candidates.
‘We were planning to have a celebration but it wasn’t appropriate with the Kachin rebels resuming the fighting,’ a man named Nima Lama told me. About 80 or 90 Gorkhalis had been recruited by the Myanmar Army to fight the Kachins, he noted. I had already come to hear about this forcible recruitment by the military, but Mr Lama seemed to think that this was an issue of patriotic duty. ‘The Gorkhalis should fight the rebels, too,’ he said passionately. ‘It’s their duty. I hate the Maoists and what they did to Nepal.’ All the Gorkhalis I meet talk about the Bagi, or Tigers, their nickname for the rebels in Myanmar, with the same neutral tone that many urban Kathmandu people have used to talk about the Maoists. There appeared, at least on the surface, to be no approval or point of commonality with the rebels.
Mr Lama told me, ‘So, I’ve been back to Nepal a number of times.’
‘What did you think?’ I asked him, curious. He said it was a waste of time.
‘Hartals, chakka jams and strikes. I was stuck in a house all day and didn’t get to see anything,’ he said. This was a familiar story. The Gorkhalis in Myanmar who had gone to visit their relatives in Nepal uniformly seemed to have experienced it as a series of unbroken strikes that left them stranded in concrete suburban homes. It was time and money wasted, they said. Mr Lama went on about the Maoists for a while. Then he asked me what I thought about all of that.
‘Yes’, I said, ‘but now in Nepal the war is over and now we are left with all these orphans. Later you look back after killing all your people and you think: What was that all for? Why did we kill our own people? Who will take care of these children now?’ This made him sombre.
‘Besides’, I added quickly, ‘one of Buddha’s edicts is not to kill.’
Later this week, I will learn that the Kachin too are seizing Gorkhalis to fight in their army. A Gorkhali woman told me that her 17-year-old nephew, travelling to the Chinese border to trade motorcycle parts, was seized by the Kachin rebels. ‘They’ve taken him to be part of the Kachin Independence Army. His mother went up and begged them to release him, but they won’t let him go.’ Then she had added: ‘I’ve heard the Kachins have their own Gurkha battalion.’ I wonder at this strange game, in which both the state and the rebels seize the Gorkhali. Gorkhalis end up fighting their own people on opposite sides of other people’s wars. Indeed, being tagged as ‘brave’ has long been one of the Gorkhali’s biggest curses – and perhaps also a significant blessing. Both sides, it appears, want Gorkhalis as allies, and none see them as enemies. That is why the villages are empty, as the young men and women flee the conflict.
Another man sitting in the hall recounted a historical titbit. A relative of his from Myanmar was one of the police officers who went back to Nepal to lead the coup against the Rana regime that established King Tribhuvan on the throne. I turned on my video camera and begged him to repeat this story. But he refused, saying it would not look good to say this aloud. Anyway, he said hastily, everyone knows this history.
The Ranas appear in the Gorkhali community’s consciousness every once in a while. But the history of opposition to the regime is quickly brushed over, almost as if referring to that moment, for some reason, is a forbidden pastime. Anything that refers to opposition to an autocratic regime, it appears, is forbidden. The Gorkhalis of Myanmar seem to censor any thought that could be potentially treasonous – everything is smoothed over by the belief that they live in a rich, happy and generous utopia.Interestingly, the Gorkhali community does live a rather charmed existence, one that brings few external distractions to the building of community ties, social events and economic activities that continue amongst great warmth, love and support. This is immediately apparent in each city and village that I visit.
‘There is no Gorkhali in Myitkyina who doesn’t own his own home, or who is starving,’ the organisation of Hindus in Myanmar assured me. Whatever the official policy of the land – including several complicated categories of citizenship that have left a few Gorkhalis in Myanmar with only partial citizenship rights – it is clear that in general the tight community support, the economic stability afforded by the freedom to run businesses, as well as the sense of being part of a stable and prosperous community has an impact on people’s sense of happiness. Gorkhalis appear to maintain a strict disinterest in politics and a neutral stance towards all parties. This, it appears, has helped them to navigate the quagmire of Myanmar and escape the human-rights violations and savagery faced by many other ethnic groups in the country.
Carry on lightly
I walked up on the elevated platform and sat down to interview the chairman of the committee. After a few minutes of chatting, I became aware that one of the two monks sitting around the table was filming me with his cell-phone camera. He stood directly over me, his face hard-edged, directing the camera in my direction. Suddenly my throat went dry. I kept forgetting that religious institutions are never free of politics in Myanmar.
These were like no other monks I had seen – they wore the yellow robes of the Theravada monks, but what were they doing here, in this Mahayana gompa? The way they looked at me made me nervous. I became aware that I was saying that I was happy at the way the elections took place, and how they were concluded in such an orderly and efficient manner. I also said that Tamang inside Nepal train to be monks in Tibetan monasteries in the Mahayana tradition. Where does Myanmar stand on Tibet? Are they so in bed with the Chinese that any mention of Tibetans is seen as treason? I had talked to Mr Lama about a few famous rinpoches and a few famous gompas, figures who have a good reputation for teaching Buddhism in Nepal. Yet these same people might also be perceived by China as politically problematic. Was I treading in a political minefield here? I hoped the monks were not government spies and that they did not mistake me for one either.
Of course, the only thing you can do in such moments is to carry on lightly, as if nothing is amiss. Which was what I did, asking questions about the history of the gompa’s formative moments. It became quickly clear that the people gathered around me had little spiritual guidance, that the space functioned only as a community space rather than a monastic one.
It was time to leave. As I got up, I saw Mr Lama sitting in a circle with the two monks still present. They were engaged in a deep discussion. I had a feeling they were talking about me. For a moment, nervousness overcame me. Then I got the sense that what I had told Mr Lama earlier – that killing your own people is never profitable, and not part of the Buddhist dharma – had been reported back to the group. It had entered the discourse and changed the tenor of people’s certainty. One of the yellow-robed monks came to say goodbye. As we departed, I gave him a deep namaste. He grudgingly and suspiciously acknowledged the gesture. I could see him watching us as the motorcycle carried us away. ~
Sushma Joshi is a writer and filmmaker from Kathmandu. Her book The End of the World was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. She is writing a book about Nepalis in Burma and Thailand, with support from the Asian Scholarship Foundation.
By Sushma Joshi
Tracking down a far-off Nepali community.
My flight to Yangon on 18 June is cancelled. Thai Airways announces that heavy rain has closed Yangon airport. In the restless gloom of the waiting area, rumours start to spread. The Myanmar Army has taken over the airport, people whisper. Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday is a day away. Has some event occurred while they have been away? Young fathers sit staring into space, wondering whether they can ever return home.
We get bussed to the Amaranth Hotel, a fancy five-star hotel in the outskirts of Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok. Using my wireless thumb drive, I e-mail my friend in Washington, DC, and request her to check Twitter. Within a few minutes, I get my answer: a plane has skidded off the tracks at Yangon airport. Flights supposed to land there are being rerouted to Singapore.
We fly to Yangon the next morning. In the excited conversations I start up with my fellow travellers, I refer repeatedly to my visit to ‘Burma’, to which they politely remind me it is now ‘Myanmar’. At a crowded traffic junction, a young newspaper boy flashes me illicit news printed in The Nation, a Thai newspaper. The front flap is folded over to hide the headlines inside: Kachin rebels resume fighting at border, threats of civil war. Only 3000 kyats (around USD 468), he says. I get a Hollywood thrill seeing the news, hidden so discreetly and flashed briefly before my eyes.
In a nearby restaurant, the kindly owner starts to discuss the Kachin rebels with me. The people are protesting, she says, because the benefits of the new hydroelectricity dam currently being built will all go to China. The Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River will dry up and the Kachin will get nothing in return. She is surprised I do not know all this already. ‘I think you are journalist and you come to report about this,’ she confides. I deny this, but she hardly believes me: how could I not be a journalist? Obviously I was not a tourist – clearly I had come for some specific purpose.
Four months earlier, in February, I had ridden a pickup truck to Lashio, in the northern Shan state. A government official had looked at me and asked, ‘Are you a writer?’ Do I have I am a writer written on my forehead, I had wondered at the time. In hindsight, this was disingenuous: which tourist in her right mind would be riding a pickup truck to Lashio, sitting squashed alongside thirty labourers in the back with a giant pile of goods, and only a plastic mat as cushioning? I had admitted I was a writer, of sorts, but I need not have worried – the official went on to tell me that Myanmar was now introducing democratic norms and would soon become like other democracies. He also told me that he never took the state-owned Myanma Airlines, and that he felt that his country would slowly but surely adopt the political freedom of other countries. He admired writers, and wanted to learn to write in English. Of course, he was a government official whose children studied at the best schools. His three rosy-cheeked children went to one of the best boarding schools in the country, in Pyin U Lwin (formerly Maymo), where he was picking them up to take them for a short vacation. Ordinary people had told me that only government officials get to send their children to good schools, or to buy property or start businesses. We can’t do anything, they said. It might have been true in this case but the official was so pleasant, polite and charming, and so clearly on the side of a democratic system, that it was hard to fault him.
Despite all this, I was unsure how much I should reveal – would saying that I was writing a book about the Nepali/Gorkhali community in Myanmar bring unwelcome attention? Did I want to invite the possibility of more government officials asking me more questions? I was unsure, and in the confusing absence of information it seemed better not to say anything.
To the gompa!
Back in the Yangon restaurant on a steaming and oppressive June evening, I shook my head and said: ‘No, I’m not here to report on the Kachin rebellion.’ The owner was surprised by this. Then she resumed telling me the story of what was happening in Myitkyina, almost as if it did not matter why I had come in the first place, as long as I got a chance to witness what was going on there. I was educated, it was clear. I could speak and write in English. And this was enough credentials to be a witness.
Reading the New Light of Myanmar, the government-run newspaper, I saw that indeed the Kachin rebels have resumed fighting in Myitkyina, where I was headed. As the restaurant owner had earlier indicated, the news also told me that the Kachin were protesting the building of a dam by China; they had already blown up 22 bridges. The newspaper alternatively offered sticks and carrots: warnings to those going against development alongside pleas to rebels to remember that they are part of the Myanmar state, and that those who agree to support state policies can come to the negotiation table.
Let me admit it right here: I am not one of those who go seeking adventure. I was in Myanmar to find out more about the history, culture and life of the Nepali community there. If fighting was happening exactly where I was headed, perhaps I should not go. Unlike many of my friends, I am not a conflict junkie. And while getting their heads broken open with a policeman’s baton during protest marches in Nepal’s democratic movement was a badge of honour for many of my friends, I tend to be more cautious. Following my mother’s advice, I tend to save my brain cells for other activities.
Precisely as planned, however, I did fly to Myitkyina the next morning. The USD 308 ticket felt exorbitant, but I had already planned this for months so there was no possibility of backing down. I was excited to see the Gorkhali gompa, described to me in great detail by the Mahayana Buddhist followers in Pwe Oo Lin. I was also excited to meet some of the estimated 300,000 people of Nepali origin who lived in Kachin state. With villages named Rampur, Sitapur and Radhapur, I had a feeling I was going to see a lot more of Nepal in Myitkyina than I had planned. Of course, with my usual lack of planning I was carrying no phone numbers with me – only a sense that everything would turn out right.
Myitkyina is almost 1500 km from Yangon. In the fresh green air, much of the oppressive gloom of Yangon city falls away. People do not look away with shuttered faces – over here, they look at you with a smile and an open face. As I looked around the verdant greenery and the gently dilapidated buildings, I wondered how the Nepalis had gotten here in the first place.
Later, people tell me that most Nepalis arrived with the British during Second World War to fight the Japanese. The Allies won. The Gurkha regiments stayed behind, even after the end of the war. Others came to trade even before the First World War – one tradesman in the bazaar told me his father came to Burma because it was the land of plenty. His father noticed that children in Calcutta picked rice out of the gutter to eat, but in Rangoon they threw away platefuls of rice from the eatery he sat in on his first day. That is how he knew this land was a rich land. Nepalis also built the road in this town, I was told. ‘My father worked on that road,’ a Nepali tells me later. ‘That road’ is the Ledo Road, which goes from Ledo, in Assam, to Kunming, in Yunnan. The Ledo Road was built as an alternative route by the British to carry supplies to the Chinese after the Japanese troops cut off the Burma Road in 1942.
I need not have worried about knowing not a single soul in Myitkyina as I descended from the airplane. Waiting outside the airport was Bijay Adhikari. Mr Adhikari worked the airport route as a taxi-driver. At first I mistook him for an Afghan – possibly one who had been left behind in this remote outpost, the detritus of some war of the past. Then he asked me, ‘Which country are you from?’ And when I said, ‘Nepal’, he said, ‘I am Nepali too. You don’t worry. I’ll take you everywhere.’
The first stop in our itinerary was Bijayji’s home. His wife sat in front of the Hare Krishna shrine in their home, her hands folded, the picture of propriety and devotion. The Hare Krishnaites, known only for their hippie oddities in the US, have apparently acquired a popular following of diasporic disciples from Hindu backgrounds in countries such as Myanmar. Cut off from their religious traditions and hungry to learn more about their religious heritage, these disciples provide a fertile following.
Bijayji’s wife tells me their three children are all working in Thailand – the son a tailor in Phuket, the two daughters working in retail outlets in Bangkok. ‘Don’t people in Myanmar miss their children?’ I asked, and immediately realised my mistake. Bijayji’s wife looked sad and she glanced down. Almost all of the younger generation of working age has migrated to Thailand. ‘Our villages are empty of young people,’ Bijayji said.
‘Your son must make a lot of money in Phuket, then,’ I said. ‘I met a lot of Nepali tailors who are doing very well in Thailand. They own their own homes and businesses.’
Bijayji shook his head and replied: ‘The tailoring business boomed for those who went about a decade ago. In the current economic climate, it is difficult for new people to establish themselves in Phuket.’ He said his daughters and son planned to send back their grandchildren so the grandparents could look after them while they worked in the big cities.
Bijayji then took me to meet his 80-year-old mother. We chatted for a while, and I felt an immediate affinity with the old woman. It is strange, I thought, how a point of commonality could be forged so quickly between this 80-year-old woman in Myanmar and myself, based on our shared heritage. Many of the people that I met during my travels in the country had a unique openness towards the world; while distrust tends to wrap many modern societies like shrink-wrap, in Myanmar many still exude an immediate intimacy. This openness worried me – I feared I might inadvertently do or say something that could put the people I met in harm’s way.
But I need not have worried. The Gorkhali community has nothing to hide in Myanmar. ‘We have excellent relationships with both the state and the Kachin rebels,’ I was told several times, with great conviction.
In the bamboo hut of the old woman, we moved to the issue of religion, always a contentious one in Myanmar’s Gorkhali community, as they refer to themselves. The old lady was a Buddhist, unlike her son and daughter-in-law, who followed the Bhakti movement through the Hare Krishna path. She had a Buddhist shrine midway up her wall, like her Burman neighbours. ‘We have no quarrels here,’ she said. ‘I follow Buddha, and they follow Krishna.’ Unlike in the larger community, this family seemed to have made peace with religious freedom and the different choices of family members.
Rebel, rebel
Immediately afterwards, we went to the gompa. Dorje Lama, the chairman, welcomed me warmly. An election to choose members of the committee was in full swing. Most of the people were Tamang. We sat down at a bench at the back, and I admired for a few moments the civil ways in which the event was taking place. Ostensibly it was an election, but it was clear the candidates had been pre-selected and nominated. The men sat on one side, the women on another. They all watched as the man on the dais read out the names of the elected male candidates.
‘We were planning to have a celebration but it wasn’t appropriate with the Kachin rebels resuming the fighting,’ a man named Nima Lama told me. About 80 or 90 Gorkhalis had been recruited by the Myanmar Army to fight the Kachins, he noted. I had already come to hear about this forcible recruitment by the military, but Mr Lama seemed to think that this was an issue of patriotic duty. ‘The Gorkhalis should fight the rebels, too,’ he said passionately. ‘It’s their duty. I hate the Maoists and what they did to Nepal.’ All the Gorkhalis I meet talk about the Bagi, or Tigers, their nickname for the rebels in Myanmar, with the same neutral tone that many urban Kathmandu people have used to talk about the Maoists. There appeared, at least on the surface, to be no approval or point of commonality with the rebels.
Mr Lama told me, ‘So, I’ve been back to Nepal a number of times.’
‘What did you think?’ I asked him, curious. He said it was a waste of time.
‘Hartals, chakka jams and strikes. I was stuck in a house all day and didn’t get to see anything,’ he said. This was a familiar story. The Gorkhalis in Myanmar who had gone to visit their relatives in Nepal uniformly seemed to have experienced it as a series of unbroken strikes that left them stranded in concrete suburban homes. It was time and money wasted, they said. Mr Lama went on about the Maoists for a while. Then he asked me what I thought about all of that.
‘Yes’, I said, ‘but now in Nepal the war is over and now we are left with all these orphans. Later you look back after killing all your people and you think: What was that all for? Why did we kill our own people? Who will take care of these children now?’ This made him sombre.
‘Besides’, I added quickly, ‘one of Buddha’s edicts is not to kill.’
Later this week, I will learn that the Kachin too are seizing Gorkhalis to fight in their army. A Gorkhali woman told me that her 17-year-old nephew, travelling to the Chinese border to trade motorcycle parts, was seized by the Kachin rebels. ‘They’ve taken him to be part of the Kachin Independence Army. His mother went up and begged them to release him, but they won’t let him go.’ Then she had added: ‘I’ve heard the Kachins have their own Gurkha battalion.’ I wonder at this strange game, in which both the state and the rebels seize the Gorkhali. Gorkhalis end up fighting their own people on opposite sides of other people’s wars. Indeed, being tagged as ‘brave’ has long been one of the Gorkhali’s biggest curses – and perhaps also a significant blessing. Both sides, it appears, want Gorkhalis as allies, and none see them as enemies. That is why the villages are empty, as the young men and women flee the conflict.
Another man sitting in the hall recounted a historical titbit. A relative of his from Myanmar was one of the police officers who went back to Nepal to lead the coup against the Rana regime that established King Tribhuvan on the throne. I turned on my video camera and begged him to repeat this story. But he refused, saying it would not look good to say this aloud. Anyway, he said hastily, everyone knows this history.
The Ranas appear in the Gorkhali community’s consciousness every once in a while. But the history of opposition to the regime is quickly brushed over, almost as if referring to that moment, for some reason, is a forbidden pastime. Anything that refers to opposition to an autocratic regime, it appears, is forbidden. The Gorkhalis of Myanmar seem to censor any thought that could be potentially treasonous – everything is smoothed over by the belief that they live in a rich, happy and generous utopia.Interestingly, the Gorkhali community does live a rather charmed existence, one that brings few external distractions to the building of community ties, social events and economic activities that continue amongst great warmth, love and support. This is immediately apparent in each city and village that I visit.
‘There is no Gorkhali in Myitkyina who doesn’t own his own home, or who is starving,’ the organisation of Hindus in Myanmar assured me. Whatever the official policy of the land – including several complicated categories of citizenship that have left a few Gorkhalis in Myanmar with only partial citizenship rights – it is clear that in general the tight community support, the economic stability afforded by the freedom to run businesses, as well as the sense of being part of a stable and prosperous community has an impact on people’s sense of happiness. Gorkhalis appear to maintain a strict disinterest in politics and a neutral stance towards all parties. This, it appears, has helped them to navigate the quagmire of Myanmar and escape the human-rights violations and savagery faced by many other ethnic groups in the country.
Carry on lightly
I walked up on the elevated platform and sat down to interview the chairman of the committee. After a few minutes of chatting, I became aware that one of the two monks sitting around the table was filming me with his cell-phone camera. He stood directly over me, his face hard-edged, directing the camera in my direction. Suddenly my throat went dry. I kept forgetting that religious institutions are never free of politics in Myanmar.
These were like no other monks I had seen – they wore the yellow robes of the Theravada monks, but what were they doing here, in this Mahayana gompa? The way they looked at me made me nervous. I became aware that I was saying that I was happy at the way the elections took place, and how they were concluded in such an orderly and efficient manner. I also said that Tamang inside Nepal train to be monks in Tibetan monasteries in the Mahayana tradition. Where does Myanmar stand on Tibet? Are they so in bed with the Chinese that any mention of Tibetans is seen as treason? I had talked to Mr Lama about a few famous rinpoches and a few famous gompas, figures who have a good reputation for teaching Buddhism in Nepal. Yet these same people might also be perceived by China as politically problematic. Was I treading in a political minefield here? I hoped the monks were not government spies and that they did not mistake me for one either.
Of course, the only thing you can do in such moments is to carry on lightly, as if nothing is amiss. Which was what I did, asking questions about the history of the gompa’s formative moments. It became quickly clear that the people gathered around me had little spiritual guidance, that the space functioned only as a community space rather than a monastic one.
It was time to leave. As I got up, I saw Mr Lama sitting in a circle with the two monks still present. They were engaged in a deep discussion. I had a feeling they were talking about me. For a moment, nervousness overcame me. Then I got the sense that what I had told Mr Lama earlier – that killing your own people is never profitable, and not part of the Buddhist dharma – had been reported back to the group. It had entered the discourse and changed the tenor of people’s certainty. One of the yellow-robed monks came to say goodbye. As we departed, I gave him a deep namaste. He grudgingly and suspiciously acknowledged the gesture. I could see him watching us as the motorcycle carried us away. ~
Sushma Joshi is a writer and filmmaker from Kathmandu. Her book The End of the World was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. She is writing a book about Nepalis in Burma and Thailand, with support from the Asian Scholarship Foundation.
12 June, 2011
The culture of giving
Published in the Kathmandu Post, Jul 2011
Link to article in Kantipur: http://www.google.com/url?
Link to article in Kantipur: http://www.google.com/url?
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In Burma, the first point of contact is the Hindu umbrella network of Gorkhalis in Burma. In Mytkyina, this is where I went.
Always, it’s a group of men. A large percentage are Brahmin. Unlike Nepal, there’s a crucial difference. These men head organisations which function. As the circle of men sat patiently telling me about their work, from schools and scholarships for students to study Nepali during the summers to wells dug and crematoriums built, I wondered what factor enabled them to work as a group, as opposed to the leaders of Nepal.
These are the same Brahmin men, the bad boys of Nepali politics, co-operating in Burma. What makes them co-operate? The answer is simple. In Burma, donations are raised from the community itself, not external sources. Each family makes a small or big contribution, according to income. This is known as musti daan—an old idea that putting aside a fistful of rice per meal would add up to a large contribution annually. These donations are social investments. They never run out, unlike the willful streams of European and US government funds—because they come deep from the well-spring of social life itself. This social life is not bounded by arbitrary notions of a singular nation state, or a polity of fractured ideologies, but bounded by religion.
Through daan, or religious donations, comes merit. People’s lives are uplifted, and given moral value through time and money that they donate. They get direct benefits. Their status is raised. Whoever gives more and works hardest is seen to be the leader, in moral terms. In Burma people still show up to dig wells and build crematoriums. It’s a societal obligation—not a passing windfall, a “project” funded serendipitously by a foreign force.
The concept of daan or dana exists in Hindu and Buddhist cultures. The problem in Nepal is the Hindu population continues its devotional work, but the active spirit of giving of even fifty years ago has stopped. Priests, who received donations, became seen as forces of corruption. No moral authority replaced them. In Nepal, you’d be hard-pressed to find an institution which still teaches Hindu scriptures—schools in Burma where Gorkhali children learn moral values and scriptural lessons were built in the last few decades, just as Nepal demolished its own. (Note to critics who are dying to jump in and inform me Nepal has more than Hindus—this article only discusses Hinduism, not the myriad, varied religions of Nepal.)
In recent decades, politics has become the channel to donate to society. But politics too had fallen into the same abyss where moral authority is lacking. Nepal has no Gandhi or Nehru to turn to. Nobody was able to move away from the imperatives of taking care of family to taking care of society.
In this chaos, enter foreign donors. Into this muck they threw millions of dollars.
What man in his right mind wants to work if he can get his annual salary after writing a proposal of a few pages, with donors fighting to keep these funds free of monitoring and evaluation? Positively begging the grantees, in fact, to spend it fast and spend it quick, with no accountability? In Burma, however, each and every Gorkhali leader has a trade or profession of his own. He is always a social volunteer—not a professional activist. Foreign funding is unheard of in Burma.
In Hinduism, the donor gets more merit than the receiver. But with the erosion of Hindu religious life and institutions like the guthis, people are no longer “making” merit for the past half century. And with that has come an erosion of society.
Through the casual conflation of Hinduism with prevalent practices of gender and caste oppression, we have discredited all Hindu religious expression, institutions or even affiliation. In the fight for social equality, we’ve tried to bring down old practices, but haven’t replaced them with new and better ones. We have unbounded a society by giving ourselves the assurance that the political ideology of democracy will fill the social vaccum. But is this truly possible? Why do Europeans and Americans continue to have discussions about the separation of Church and State—surely if they were truly secular and free of religion, this discussion would not occur?
If Europeans and Americans did not keep their own liturgical traditions, their own networks of religious leaders and institutions, where would their democracy be? But for us to be true democrats, we must un-Hinduise ourselves, Nepalis think. Hinduism is a vulgar embarrassment of animal sacrifices and child goddesses, and it must slowly be erased in the fight for social change. Forget the centuries of great art, architecture, music, literature and culture that came out of it. No young person in Kathmandu will say easily “I am Hindu”—it has become an embarassment for young people to state their religious affiliation. In a democracy, donations to society is an admired ideal. When legalised as taxes, it is a citizen’s responsibility. But inside religion, donation is a moral imperative.
There’s other ways to contribute to society. Communists give donations via monthly fees, or through labor. Socialists pay heavy taxes. Capitalists start foundations (and get tax breaks). But in the absence of political agreement, religion is often a binding factor.
Any young Jew who’s volunteered for Hillel, or any young Christian who’s baked cookies for the Church, or any Muslim who’s given Zakat knows this act of giving back to society via religion is the foundation of social life. Other major religions keep religious expression alive through social contributions. In Hinduism, the religion of the majority of people in Nepal, no young person knows how to give in an active manner to society anymore. Hinduism, re-defined as a religion of superstition, rites and rituals, has lost its spiritual and societal strength. Young people must stop thinking of themselves only in terms of opposition to Hindu practice—and start finding ways to contribute in a positive manner through their religion. Only then can we build a new Nepal.
Joshi is writing a book about people of Nepali origins in Burma and Thailand with support from the Asian Scholarship Foundation
sansarmagazine@gmail.com
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