Opinions from around the region   November 1995

BONDA HIGHLANDERS´ CONDITION, as they tackle linear time, is discussed by the late Indian sociologist Bikram Narayan Nanda (1954-1994) in Contours of Continuity and Change: The Story of the Bonda Highlanders, Sage Publications, 1994 pp 208-209.

Given (such) a void in the structure of consciousness, and the myth of development which returns the highlands to the mythical world of spirits, any attempt by the highlanders to escape their present predicament arising out of their own involved discourses of space, time, work and experience of their meanings would indeed be vain. Lacking their grip over their own language of description of their present, the minimum, margin to decide their existential conditions in the present, that is so necessary a precondition to decide their destiny, the Highlanders are unable to project a notion of the future--a future in which anything is possible insofar as the impossibilities are everywhere. The islands of linear time that strike like match-sticks in the dark landmass of life shed light upon segments, but not on the whole continuous process of which these segments are a part.

That they can themselves take control of and thereby decide the future of the highlands is unknown to them. Perhaps capable of revolt at the official wickedness, their living social and symbolic conditions do not provide the possibility of a critical consciousness. Will the highlanders be able to impute their sufferings to a system explicitly understood as unjust and inadmissible? Or will they accept their suffering as natural and so total that there is no possible escape from the ´natural´ order of things.

The political conceptions and symbolic associations of the highlanders are locked up in the logic of the social transformation... This process of transformation subjectively denies and objectively prohibits the possibility for highlanders to view their situations and figure out sufferings. Between their attitude to their circumstances and their material conditions falls the veil of a diabolical develop¬ment. The discourse of such a development denies them their time and leisure. It devalorises the values of their labour power and vociferously violates their collective values associated with labour. It privatises their collective and symbolic environment and campaigns for the pragmatism of privatised production. Ironically, or not so ironically, in undermining the traditional production practices in the highlands, it would probably unfurl the flag of what is truly tribalism, as we see in some other parts of the country.

Quivers of agony
Puts poetry
Upon supple steel What is theory?
Pathos...
Versifies verbs
Memorises melancholy
Comments on metaphor!
Well, what of the possible.
When pathos is inevitable?

If impure poetry
Offends mastery in theory
How can the victim
In the given
Vocalised in the vernacular,
Proficient in the particular.
Trumpet the song of silence.
Listen to what seems unfamiliar;
Voice the possibility of an impossibility?

HIGGELDY-PIGGELDY DEVELOPMENT is better than force-fed Westernised models, writes cultural theorist Michael Thompson in Water and the Quest for Sustainable Development, edited with Graham Chapman (Mansell, London, 1995, ISBN 0 7201 2191 4).

We in the West are so accustomed to offloading our obsolete technologies (car assembly lines, for instance) and our unfashion-able ideologies (planning, for instance) on to Third World countries that we find it difficult to entertain the possibility of anything valuable ever coming the other way: ´from them, to us´. That, however, is what is happening now with the contradictory certitudes approach. While U.S. Congressmen continue to demand ´one-armed scientists´ (so they cannot say ´on the other hand´), and British MPs still rant on about "bogus professors´(by which they mean those recognized experts who happen not to share their particular certainty), social foresters in Nepal are actually getting the trees to grow systematically modifying their ´Western science´ idea of what a healthy forest looks like until it can mesh constructively with the villagers´ ´home-made´ idea of what a healthy forest looks like. Out go the eucalyptus seedlings, the straight line and the boundary fences; in come wind-seeded indigenous species, higgeldy-piggeldy layouts, and locally funded forest guardians. The plurality of problem definitions, in other words, is seen as a valuable resource, not something to be got rid of before work can begin.

This is not to say that all the Himalayan policy actors have abandoned their ´single definition approaches, but only that the plural rationalities framework is now in place: both in practice and in theory. Those who define the problem as ´too many people are now able to debate constructively with those who see it as ´not enough food´, and they are able to agree that, given the scale of the uncertainty that surrounds the facts at issue, both definitions are legitimate. The situation is similar with contradictory definitions of what development is. Those (the members of the Chipko Movement, for instance) who advocate land-based self-sufficiency are able to countenance those (the ´Trade Not Aid´ campaigners, for instance) who favour a resurgence of the intensive trading that lay behind the original emergence of the Nepalese kingdoms, and both are then able to connect their arguments with the views of those (the Hunzas of the Pakistan Himalaya, for instance) who see development aid as a way of expanding their agricultural production, not in order to become self-sufficient, but in order to break out of their mountain fastness and into the global market-place.

Nor are the pluralized people of the Himalayan region just sitting there waiting for the debate over what development is to be resolved before they can start to do it, The self-sustainers (the ´tree-huggers´ of the Indian Himalayas, for instance) are getting on with sustaining themselves; the traders (the Manang-bhotis who live in the remote valley behind Annapuma, for instance) are merrily flying Apple computers into Kathmandu from Thailand and Tibetan carpets out to New York; and the exuberant agriculturalists of Pakistan have been so successful in breaking OIK that Hunza apricots can now be found on the shelves of any London whole food store.

That all this is happening in the Himalayas is not in dispute. The dispute is over whether or not it is sustainable and, if it is not, what needs to be done about it. However, since the facts that would decide that are well inside the pale of uncertainty, each actor is free to construct his or her own answer.

THE CORRUPTIONS OF BUDDHISM, as described in The Outline of History by H. G. Wells, Gassel! and Company, London 0951) (revised edition, pp 408-409), provides an alternative view of Buddhism to that of Bernardo Bertolucci´s The Little Buddha,

Except for Gautama´s insistence upon Right Views, which was easily disregarded, there was no self-cleansing element in either Buddhism, Taoism, or Confucianism, There was no effective prohibition of superstitious practices spirit-raising, incantations, prostrations, and supplementary worships. At an early stage a process of incrustation began, and continued. The new faiths caught almost every disease of the corrupt religions they sought to replace; they took over the idols and the temples, the altars and the censers.

Tibet today is a Buddhistic country, yet Gautama, could he return to earth, might go from end to end of Tibet seeking his own teaching in vain. He would find that most ancient type of human ruler, a god-king, enthroned, the Dalai Lama, the "Living Buddha". At Lhasa he would find a huge temple filled with priests, abbots, and lamas-he whose only buildings were huts and who made no priests--and above a high altar he would behold a huge golden idol, which he would learn was called "Gautama Buddha!" He would hear services intoned before this divinity, and certain precepts, which, would be dimly familiar to him, murmured as responses. Bells, incense, prostrations, would playtheir part in these amazing pro¬ceedings. At one point in the service a bell would be rung and a mirror lifted up, while the whole congregation, in an access of reverence bowed lower...

About this Buddhist countryside he would discover a number of curious little mechanisms, little wind-wheels and water-wheels spinning, on which brief prayers were inscribed. Every time these spin, he would team, it would count as a prayer. "To whom?" he would ask. Moreover, there would be a number of flag staffs in the land carrying beautiful silk flags, silk flags which bore the perplexing inscription, "Om Marti padme hum," "the jewel is in the lotus." Whenever the flag flaps, he would learn, it was a prayer also, very beneficial to the gentleman who paid for the flag and to the land generally. Gangs of workmen employed by pious persons, would be THE CORRUPTIONS OF BUDDHISM, as described in The Outline of History by H. G. Wells, Gassel! and Company, London 0951) (revised edition, pp 408-409), provides an alternative view of Buddhism to that of Bernardo Bertolucci´s The Little Buddha.

...Except for Gautama´s insistence upon Right Views, which was easily disregarded, there was no self-cleansing element in either Buddhism, Taoism, or Confucianism, There was no effective prohibition of superstitious practices spirit-raising, incantations, prostrations, and supplementary worships. At an early stage a process of incrustation began, and continued. The new faiths caught almost every disease of the corrupt religions they sought to replace; they took over the idols and the temples, the altars and the censers.

Tibet today is a Buddhistic country, yet Gautama, could he return to earth, might go from end to end of Tibet seeking his own teaching in vain. He would find that most ancient type of human ruler, a god-king, enthroned, the Dalai Lama, the "Living Buddha". At Lhasa he would find a huge temple filled with priests, abbots, and lamas-he whose only buildings were huts and who made no priests--and above a high altar he would behold a huge golden idol, which he would learn was called "Gautama Buddha!" He would hear services intoned before this divinity, and certain precepts, which, would be dimly familiar to him, murmured as responses. Bells, incense, prostrations, would play their part in these amazing proceedings. At one point in the service a bell would be rung and a mirror lifted up, while the whole congregation, in an access of reverence bowed lower...

About this Buddhist countryside he would discover a number of curious little mechanisms, little wind-wheels and water-wheels spinning, on which brief prayers were inscribed. Every time these spin, he would team, it would count as a prayer. "To whom?" he would ask. Moreover, there would be a number of flag staffs in the land carrying beautiful silk flags, silk flags which bore the perplexing inscription, "Om Marti padme hum," "the jewel is in the lotus." Whenever the flag flaps, he would learn, it was a prayer also, very beneficial to the gentleman who paid for the flag and to the land generally. Gangs of workmen employed by pious persons, would be going about the country cutting this precious formula on cliff stone. And this, he would realize at last, was what the world had made of his religion! Beneath this gaudy glitter was buried the Aryan Way to serenity of soul.

BUT THIS RIVER WAS ALWAYS FILTHY, wrote Kabir, the fifteenth century saint-cum-poet of Benaras who ridiculed all formalised religion, who was willing to say it out loud that the Ganga stank. Bach then, you could be politically incorrect. (Re/: Hess and Singh, 1986.)

Pandit think before you drink
that water The house of clay you are sitting in —
all creation is pouring through it.
Fifty-five million Yadavs soaked there,
and eighty-eight thousand sages,
At every step a prophet is buried.
All their clay has rotted.
Fish, turtles and crocodiles
hatched there. The water is thick
with blood. Hell flows
along that river, with
rotten men and beasts.

HIMALAYAS, a poem by Eelum in Cornice 1995, annual magazine of the Rato Bangala School in Patan,

The thing I always love to see,
Which always fills me up with glee.
 The thing which tourists love to climb.
And have the most tremendous time.
It reaches out to touch the sky,
 It´s higher than a bird can fly,
Here lies the tall Mount Everest,
Which is taller than all the rest.
In the northern part of Nepal it lies.
Quite of a lot of space it occupies,
 It´s full of glaciers, rivers, ice and snow.
If the sky is clear, we can see them in a row.
It has very cold weather.
It is whiter than a dove´s feather,
There we find many yaks, Carrying loads of heavy sacks.
Here we find our national flower.
It is higher than the Twin Tower,
It is bordered by Tibet,
 And as a mountain range it´s perfect.