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Memoirs
Ethnic Roots Abroad
by Satis Shroff
 Claudia,
Maria, my sister Neeta and I had lunch together. We'd cooked Nepalese
food comprising: chicken, potatoes, rice and chutney and ice-cream as
dessert, and sat watching some videos of Neeta’s trip to Europe, when I
suggested that we should go to the ecological exhibition (Ökoausstellung)
at the Messplatz in Freiburg, reputed to be the biggest of its kind in
Europe.
We took the Strassenbahn, as trams are called in Germany, and got off at
the Messplatz. Neeta, who’s a teacher in a Nepali school, was on a visit
to Germany, and was quite surprised to see a peaceful exhibition going
on. There was no jostling, and not much noise. There were alternative
energy exhibits, esoteric music, tourist curios, temple statues from the
Hindu and Buddhist pantheons priced at 200 euros each, and lots of
biological food: müsli, which some nasty people call Vogelfütter
(bird-food), full-corn bread and crepes (a French invention), which can
in no way compare to roti, chapatti or paratha from Nepal and the Indian
subcontinent, bio-drinks, and woollen textiles and so forth. Solar cars,
watches, pumps and other energy-saving gadgets were also on display.
Freiburg even boasts of an ecological-station at the Seepark (west). We,
Freiburger, called our city till 1996 the 'Ökohauptstadt', which means
the ecological capital of Germany. This is a status awarded officially
in Germany. Till Heidelberg nabbed the title. Science City? Another
German town grabbed it. Perhaps Solar City?
Neeta tried out wholesome 'fullcorn-crepes’ and found herself making a
grimace. She wasn't a friend of full-corn bread, though she'd always
been fond of puris, chapatis and parathas made of 'atta' (full-corn
flour) in Nepal and India. It was a matter of taste, nothing more.
Either you liked something or not. The fresh apple-juice that went with
it was delicious though.
After the exhibition, which to Neeta seemed more like an esoteric
exhibition than an ecological one, we were, as the Germans put it "fix
und fertig" (exhausted), and decided to have a siesta and recharge our
batteries.
Later we watched the European Championship soccer in TV because Germany
was apparently playing against Sweden, and we were all avid soccer-fans.
The match was after dinner, which comprised: Thai scented-rice,
Indonesian egg-cauce and masala curry with onions, garlic, ginger,
tamarind and tomatoes.
Claudia took delight in cooking Nepalese and Asian food and had even
taken courses in Asian cooking at the local Volkshochschule, where an
elderly Indian guy was teaching German women the finer aspects of using
Ayurvedic spices in the potato-cum-masala chicken.
In Nepal a good many orthodox Hindu families have a brahmin or bahun as
a cook, because a bahun has a high esteem in the Nepalese society for he
can not only speak, read and write in Sanskrit which he has learnt in
Benaras or Kasi (India) but can also function as a priest, is pure and
unpolluted in comparison to other mortals, and is respected as a
mediator between the humans and the Hindu Gods.
An orthodox brahmin doesn't even touch the food that has been handled or
cooked by someone from the lower castes due to the impurity associated
with the lower castes. Even though the socio-religious barriers are
slowly disappearing in the urban areas of Nepal and because the Nepalese
have started travelling to Bangkok, Hong Kong, Europe and America--such
customs are still strictly adhered to in the Himalayan villages.
Neeta recalled that we had a Tamang cook from the tea-gardens of Ilam,
an all-round talent but he hadn't mastered the Chettri's usual command
of the Nepalese language with its complicated grammatical rules, derived
from Sanskrit. In Nepali, like in Latin in Europe, you have to be
careful about the tense and the honorific usage of words. For instance:
‘He has come’ would sound 'waha aunu bhayo.' The rice is cooked
would be: bhat pakyo. But this sincere, well-meaning Tamang kitchen boy
didn't know the rules of Nepali grammar and turned up with: bhat
paknu bhayo, which caused a great deal of laughter and was a family
joke for years.
Bhat is a neuter word and, as such, it cannot be attributed with an
honorific. He was bestowing honour upon the rice which was a howler.
Contrary to most guidebooks on Nepal, even the Nepalese are glad when
the guest comes punctually, because the dal-bhat-tarkari may get cold
and a warmed up meal tastes different than a freshly cooked one. Most
Nepalese don’t have a refrigerator. The guest can bring some sweets for
the children but alcohol is taboo in the high caste Brahmin and Chettri
families, even though a German guidebook suggests bringing a bottle of
whiskey for the host primarily because it’s imported or from a duty-free
shop.
When Neeta read that, she thought of her dear aunty Deviji in Patan, who
would be shocked if she produced a bottle of whiskey. Alcohol is
associated with decadence in the purity-pollution conscious Nepalese
world of the high caste Hindus. But on the other hand, there are other
ethnic tribesmen who pass under the rubric of the 'matwali-jat' (the
caste-that-drinks) who might be delighted with a bottle of Scotch and it
might create a good impression. After all, Scotch is expensive for a
Nepalese-pocket and is an imported item. Nevertheless, it is useful to
find out whether the person is visiting prefers alcohol or regards it as
an affront.
We Nepalese generally drink a lot of tea from Ilam (Eastern Nepal),
which is just as good as the Darjeeling one, if not better, because it
grows on the Nepalese side of the same mountains just across the border.
We make tea by boiling the water first, then putting the tea leaves and
letting them boil till a good, strong color appears, after which we put
sugar and milk. Another method of making tea in Kathmandu is to boil the
milk first, then put the tea-leaves along with cardamom and then the
sugar. It's called: dudh-chiya (milk tea) and is served with Ayurvedic
spices. The preparation is similar to the Milchkaffee in Germany.
Dr. Novel Kishore Rai, the former Nepalese Ambassador to Germany and a
good friend of mine, for instance prefers to drink smoked-tea made by
the hands of his dear mother in Ilam. She has a few bushes of Thea
sinensis which she calls ‘my plantation’ and is proud of her hand-made
tea. In the Victorian days the tea leaves were plucked, weighed, rolled
by hand and set out to wither in the sun. After the advent of
industrialization, the tea-leaves were rolled by machine and the
withering was also done in factories.
Since he was a man of Rai origin, I had asked him to say something about
his ethnicity and he said, ‘As you know, ‘Rai’ is only a cover term of
more than 60 to 70 sub-clans and they do speak more than 50 different
languages and not dialects. For example Chamling, Khaling, Thulang,
Bantawa, Kulung and so on. Culturally they are not so different, but
linguistically one cannot expect so much of variation among the
so-called ‘Rais’. Nepali is the only Lingua franca among them in their
original settlement and now the younger generation is drifting towards
Nepali because of so many socio-economical reasons. I am a Bantawa
speaker, belonging to the Chamling sub-clan, but my children and my wife
don’t speak Bantawa at all.’ They spoke German, English, Nepali and
sometimes Hindi, when we visited them at the Embassy in Bonn.
His two teenage daughters spoke excellent German and were preparing for
their German Abitur (‘A’ level exams). They have both received their
masters degrees from the University of Poona.
Since I’d grown up with shamanism in the form of traditional healers
like: jhankris, bijuwas, amchis, and yebas, I had given him a shaman
text in Thulung shaman vocabulary written by the anthropologist N. J.
Allen, and he went on to say, ‘ As you know, shamanism is an old
tradition in Nepal and the shamans are well-accepted faith-healers. They
do many kinds of shaman rituals and use the language, even though they
don’t understand the exact meaning of the words in many instances. Some
of the words and phrases they do repeat out of memory, and practice
without knowing the exact meaning. Moreover, they are controlled by the
spirits they beckon during their rituals. They agree, that whatever said
or done, is by the spirit but not by themselves. Science has not yet
been able to prove what is behind it and how it operates.
Dr. Allen collected and viewed some of these shaman healing practices
among the Thulungs of the Rai-group and he has written ‘Illness in
Nepal’, which may attract the interest of medical students. I would say
that this paper is more related to anthropology than western medical
practice. As a Bantawa native speaker, I cannot understand the Thulung
words he describes and some Nepali loan words we do understand, though
they are phonetically somehow different.’
I recalled that a lot of Tibetans, who had fled from their homeland
Tibet after it was annexed by Mao’s Red Army, would pass through our
small town and I was fascinated by their style of living because they’d
spread out their ornamental ethnic tents outside the town and make a
central fire and their mules, donkeys and yaks would graze in the green
grass along the slopes and their dogs would bark and scurry around. The
men had braided hair with moustaches and Mongolian beards unlike the
Sikhs with their thick mossy beards.
The Tibetans had a fire-place romantic about them. It was difficult to
communicate with them because they spoke only Tibetan and we spoke only
Nepali, English and a smattering of Hindi. Oh, how she wished she could
have talked with the friendly Tibetan ladies who were all smiles,
despite their tragic past. The post-fifties generation of Tibetan
children who came as refugees to Nepal, Dharamsala (India) and Rikon
(Switzerland) speak excellent Nepali, Hindi and Schwyzer Deutsch, and
also English and have integrated themselves in these respective
countries.
The milky rice-beer is a very popular drink among the matwali-jat
(the-caste-that-drinks) in Eastern Nepal, in the vicinity of Kathmandu
and among the different ethnic folks. Every tribe has its own brewing
secret. The Sherpas, Thakalis and Tamang-hillfolk prefer the chaang,
which is made of millet. During the cold months, the Sherpas and
Tibetans drink tongba which is a hot, milky alcoholic drink sipped with
the help of a bamboo pipe. Momos, thukpa and sukuti (dried meat) go well
with tongba after a long trek in the Himalayas. The highland Nepalese
also prefer the tongba during marriage feasts. During my days as a
journalist in Kathmandu, we used to go after a hard day’s work to relax
at Pala’s Place, where his wife and lovely daughter used to serve us
with momos, gyathuk and the warm tongba drinks. We’d sit around in a
circle with the Pala, a burly Tibetan guy, who has the head of the
family and the restaurant owner. Most of the Nepalese who came upstairs
to eat momos and drink Pala’s excellent tongba were His Majesty’s civil
servants and from the corporations. As time went by, the people would
get garrulous and start telling stories.
The ubiquitous raksi, a high percentage alcohol, which goes under the
clandestine name of gurkha-rum, is prepared from rice, millet and
barley. Raksi is not served in a small schnaps-glass but in a 0,4 liter
glass. Liquor is taboo in the case of orthodox Brahmins and Chettris.
The high-caste Brahmins go even so far as not to eat meals which have
the following ingredients: onions, garlic, mushrooms and tomatoes. Some
Brahmins and Chettris might even refuse to eat with Europeans because of
their ideas of pollution and food-taste. There might be a face-saving
move: by eating only fruit with them.
On the other hand, there are Nepalis who won't sit down and share their
food with others, because they're only used to eating self-cooked food.
Some Benaras-trained Brahmins even go to extremes and wear a loin-cloth
called the dhoti when eating a meal with rice. Even the eating-direction
is important for some. In Nepal you must be careful not to eat facing
the Himalayas to the north. The sight might be grandiose but it’s not
regarded as auspicious. And don't sit looking to the south either.
Either east or west is the most auspicious way to sit while eating lunch
or dinner in Nepal. The Nepalese eat facing to the south only while
conducting funeral ceremonies.
An eating-habit worth emulating from the Nepalese is the ban on speech
during meals. Nepalese observe silence while eating. I noticed that
speaking during meals was a normal thing to do in Europe. According to
the rules of etiquette, the only time the Europeans don’t speak is when
their mouths are full of food. That’s why you hear German parents saying
to their children, “Man spricht nicht bei vollem Mund.” The
topics during the meals were mostly about one's diseases: kidney
trouble, bowel problems, appendicitis, gall stones and how big they
were, even about the prostata-glands and pus-filled boils. I thought it
was a nightmare, and not a luncheon. But that's the way people are. They
have to tell others about their problems irrespective of the place and
occasion, despite the fact that such things are not encouraged in Knigge,
the German book of etiquette.
Once I asked a Japanese lady named Shikibu Sawa, who’d come to Freiburg
to learn German at the Goethe Institute and knew a common girl friend
named Franziska Dold, whether they also spoke during meals in Japan and
she said, ‘Oh, no. My father would hit me if I did.’
In Nepal, before we start eating, we purify ourselves ritually by
washing our hands and then sitting down on the floor near the kitchen
and making an offering of the different food to our Hindu, Buddhist or
animist Gods, Goddesses, Rimpoches, Bodhisattvas, spirits and ancestors.
There's no point in asking a Nepalese: "How do you say 'cheers' in
Nepali?"
The urbanized Nepalese may say: "Cheers! Prost! Kampai! Nastrovije!"
but the Nepalese from the village will tilt his head to the left and
say, "Pyunu hos!", which means 'please drink!'
Since a good many Nepalese have gone abroad for further studies and have
returned to work for the development of the country, they have organized
themselves into alumni clubs and the German-returned club members hold
an annual get-together through the courtesy of the Carl Duisburg
Society, Goethe Institute and the German Embassy in Kathmandu. On these
occasions you get to hear Nepalese conversing in German with the most
amazing dialects, depending on whether they got their degrees from:
Bavaria, Baden-Württemburg or Hessen. The same phenomenon is to be
observed among the England-returned and Russia-trained scholars.
The best way to get along with a Nepalese is to treat him or her as your
equal and with respect, no matter how poor or rich he or she may be,
because we Nepalese have an eloquent speech and care a lot about not
losing face in front of strangers. Think about that when you meet a
Nepalese and you've won a trusty and loyal friend for your lifetime. And
never pat a Nepalese on his back or shoulders, because that is where
one’s personal God resides, and he or she might get offended and react
with ‘deuta cha, chunu hudaina!’ Oh, please don’t touch me there,
there’s my God on my shoulder.
To win a friend in these consume-oriented days of egoism, with the
rat-race going on, people jostling each other with their elbows, can be
enriching. To return to Nepal and meet old friends with whom you have
shared your holiday-experience can be rewarding to some. To recognize
and be recognized, despite a long absence in the dizzy heights of the
Himalayas, be it under the Lhotse and Nuptse or below the Annapurna and
Machapuchhare can do you good. Good, honest, sincere people who respect
each other are welcome everywhere they go.
Claudia had once been to Bombay to attend her pen-friend Zinnat's muslim
marriage, and had often pumped me full with questions about life in
India, Hindu customs, religion and especially about the many Gods and
Goddesses in the Hindu pantheon. She was perpetually interested in
knowing which God was associated with which Goddess, and what their
riding animals were.
I groaned, threw up my hands and said, "It's like a never ending quiz on
who's who, with whom and on what, of the Buddhist and Hindu pantheon
circuit." Claudia, on the other hand, was determined to write down the
entire list of Gods and Goddesses and had her list always handy in the
kitchen, below the cupboard with the hot spices.
"Isn't Krishna with Parvati? And who's Laxmi? What does Krishna ride on?
A cow? But I thought the holy cow belonged to Shiva. Does Ganesh also
have an animal he can ride on? What, a rat?" she'd say terrified.
"Well as long as they don't ride on spiders. I'm scared of spiders. You
know, I have arachnophobia," she said.
"By the way, I know that Kumari is the Living Goddess in Kathmandu but
who is Kumar?" she asked. And what does he ride on?"
"Kumar is the elephant-headed God Ganesh's brother and he uses a
peacock," I replied.
All these questions somehow reminded me of the fictive American
journalist in the novel "The Mountain Is Young" who stepped out of the
aeroplane in Tribhuvan airport and asked , ‘Who's Shiva? Who’s Vishnu?’
The fact is that most Nepalese bear the names of Gods and Goddesses of
the Hindu and Buddhist pantheon, and a teacher might be confronted with
a class full of Gods and Goddesses, and there might be a God or Goddess
serving you in your flight to Kathmandu and back. In Kathmandu the
police even arrest a God.
March 31,
2007
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