On April, 2018, we as group of students of anthropology, sociology and population studies were fielded as researchers to five of the eastern districts of Nepal. Our task was to visit the designated Village Development Committees (VDCs) and municipalities, local structures prior to the existing village and town councils, and ask 20 households, male and female from each, a roaster of questions on household properties, health and social security, employment and livelihood, language and education, social, cultural and gender relations, inclusive government, and, women’s reproductive health and empowerment. As a student of sociology who has attended theoretical classes in aforementioned topics and who comes from relatively urban locale of western plains, I was excited to make trips on rugged hinterlands, several of them, and, meet people from diverse sociological matrices — caste, class, gender, ethnicity and geographical and so forth — and, hence, relate the practicalities of research to what I have learnt in classroom. Organized by Department of Anthropology, Tribhuvan University, the research project, called Social Inclusion Research 2018, boasts of having the highest sample size of 17, 800 households, 20 households from each of the 10 clusters of each of the 89 caste-ethnic groups, all selected randomly, and, further, of scrutiny of quantitative findings with the ethnographic observations and vice versa. Being a part of well choreographed research team, I went on to appreciate the assortment of social, cultural and linguistic elements existed as a mosaic, yet, threatened by the abstract forces with their details unbeknownst to social, cultural and linguistic agents themselves.
Roads to Anywhere
As we walked further north from Num, the last jeep station, in Sankhuwasabha district, we saw countless excavators carving the hills to draw a road passing through a number of Bhote settlements that would reach up to the Chinese border of Kimathanka. The expected motorable road runs parallel to an ancient trail to Tibet that dates back prior to unification of Nepal. At many places, excavators were seen flown to remote locations by choppers and operated with fuel transported by mules. The road had been completed up to a place called Barun — confluence of Arun and Barun Rivers, and, patches of road have been dug beyond that place. Last year, chief of Makalu Village Council along with six of his entourage faced a tragic death after his jeep fell off the mountain. The under-construction road is being disputed by locals, of about five Bhote villages on the way, who want the road to pass through their villages. We visited three Bhote villages of Hatiya, Hung Gong and Chepua in upper Arun riverine. The residents have shifted their identity as Bhote — a term taken as synonym for ‘savage’, ‘serf’ or ‘beef eater’ as Andras Hoffer notes in his book on Muluki Ain — from erstwhile Lhomi, or, the Southern People. According to locals, Buddhist Bhotes of this region were named as Lhomis by the Christian missionaries and writers. In Hatiya, the tailored settlement seems more like an ancient city with Buddhist prayers inscribed on stonewalls and flags fluttering in the air. The locals in Hatiya have kept much of their social, cultural and linguistic traditions intact as opposed to Bhotes of Khandbari, district headquarter, who have started giving Hindu names to their children. As the road passes through, there is fear of conversion of the hinterland from sustainable to dependent on the social, cultural and economic fronts, the symptoms of which already being witnessed. As places that are gradually consuming Chinese articles and watching Hindi soap operas, the road will further take over to push people on the edges to meet the consumerist demands. The balancing act, preservation of culture after the invasion of road, is crucial.
In east, much like elsewhere, roads are being aggressively built without enough consideration of fragile hills and mountains. Many of the roads are whimsically constructed without any environmental assessment. Watching from a high station of any of the eastern district, one can see dashes of roads practically everywhere. We went to Necha Batashe of Solukhumbu through Tingla in July a week after a jeep fell off the cliff killing all its seven passengers. A narrow road snakes up and down the mountain where flood water pours in everyplace. In Nawalpur of Okhaldhunga, monsoon water falls off the hills, washes the road and enters the houses of poor Majhi community risking frequent mudslides and creating existential crisis.
Roads are considered as synonymous to development in Nepal. The rhetoric of development is readily put into practice through haphazard construction by a nexus of politicians and contractors to gain low price applause from the locals without eyeing much upon the consequences.
Good Bye to Language
We travelled to five VDCs — Tamafok, Mamling, Aakhibhui, Kharang and Panchkhappan — in Sankhuwasabha district, and, talked to the Yakkha locals. Yakkhas who earlier branded as Yakkha-Rais have dropped Rai from their identity and instead recognize themselves as ethnic brethren of Limbus. Tamafok is the biggest settlement of Yakkhas in the district. Almost everyone speaks Yakkha language. The schoolchildren, however, speak Nepali as they are taught in the same at school fulltime, and, some guardians say that their children feel ashamed of speaking the native language. Nonetheless, there are initiatives taken by some of the locals to preserve the linguistic heritage — publishing books and pamphlets in Yakkha language written in Devnagari, instead of original Srijunga Script. Interestingly, Yakkhas of Tamafok report their religion as Hindu and celebrate Dasain festival. The number of Yakkha speakers gradually decline as we move from Tamafok to Mamling, Mamling to Aakhibhui, Aakhibhui to Kharang, and, Kharang to Panchkhappan. No one speaks their heritage language in Panchkhappan. The consciousness of identity, however, is in reverse order. Almost everyone in Panchkhappan reports their religion as Kirat and has discontinued celebrating Dasain festival.
Listed ‘almost safe’ by Mark Turin and Yogendra P Yadava in 2006, Kirati language of Yakkha now feels unsure of its own safety. The government policies are ambiguous and restrictive — limiting locals from making any kind of valuable contribution to safeguard their language. On the other hand, many speakers support Nepali as a medium language at schools as they feel their children would get government jobs with ease in future as many in urban locations send their children to English medium schools to make their children competent enough in English to get standard jobs in international organizations. During our survey, we came across Sunuwars of Udaipur and Okhaldhunga, Danuwars and Bhujels of Udaipur, and, Majhis of Okhaldhunga who have put to an end of their linguistic and much of their cultural heritage.
The language supplies a possibility of sense to a human life and a vision to self and civilization to those who speak, understand, intend and think in a given language. Furthermore, as Turin and Yadava note, linguistic diversity as an integral component in ecological stability and the fabric of cultural life, such diverse linguistic and cultural playground is gradually being vanished resulting onto an ecological anxiety.
Research Meditations
I had completed all my graduate exams in sociology and had just returned from abroad attending an exchange program before leaving Kathmandu to the east. This was practically my first research experience, a fair chance to look at the empirical and everyday montage of human lives which disciplines like sociology translate into a monotony of abstract theoretical portraits.
During our research, we repeatedly came across twin issues, one posed by the blunders committed by previous survey researchers including national census enumerators upon which we based our samples and will eventually link up our study, and, another, incomprehensibility, ambiguity and redundancy in our part — questionnaire, as we call it. A particular section of our questionnaire was saturated with argots of constitutionalism, bureaucracy, politics and governance which aimed to quantify the opinioned answers. The respondents whose vernacular speech doesn’t conform to standard Nepali version and whose empirical acts are not reflective toward the Nepali we did make use of. I observed many of my respondents confused and misguided by our questions as they felt not relatable — in terms of sociolinguistics, they would have framed their experiences with more ease in their own vernacular speech. On the other hand, standard textbooks on survey research disallow the modification of questions as it might lead to a change in the intentionality. Furthermore, the monotony of questions in a language different from everyday speech would lead to an early ‘respondent fatigue’ dropping interest for further questions.
There are scores of Kathmandu based institutes and consultancies overseeing the ‘data industry’ which send enumerators and ethnographers across the country several times to collect millions of quantified data ranging from agriculture to social inclusion. Development agencies prefer data in real numbers so as to formulate or guide the government to devise its policies in tangible sense apart from its usual benefits — gather large scale data and generalize.
Apart from self reflectivity of agencies who conduct survey and other kinds of research to improve their instruments, the foot soldiers should move further from their task of merely ‘collection’ of data, reminiscent of data being already ‘out there’ waiting for collection as garbage bags on the sidewalk. At times, data has to be produced. s
The pedagogical device included in university syllabi and employed in classrooms further eclipses research from its entirety and closes off the creative frontiers.
Social research is crucial to knowledge production and to formulate right policies of the state. And, it is equally necessary to advance the social research itself to make it more relevant and worthy.
