15
THE LONG, HIGH VALLEYS OF NEPAL

Nepal’s border was reached on 14 December. Across an icy pass and there was Kathmandu, 4,500 feet up. Tired and hungry, Mehmed, Nigel and Tony spent their first night shivering in a student’s room. Their luck changed the next day. Stephen Barber in Delhi had given them a letter of introduction to Field-Marshall Kaiser, a member of the Rana dynasty. The Ranas had served as the hereditary prime ministers of Nepal. The revolution of November 1950 brought an end to the aristocratic Rana regime that had ruled the country since 1846. Nepal then saw the dawn of democracy. The Field-Marshall prospered still and lived in an old palace, with lots of bedrooms. He said he had no room – perhaps because his incredibly attractive wife, who had appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, and had been voted one of the ten most beautiful women in the world at the time, was standing next to him and being ogled at by three young men. Instead he paid for them to stay at the best hotel in Kathmandu – the Hotel Royal – for ten days, and gave them £30 to spend on food to boot. Six waiters could not serve the hungry travellers quickly enough as they emptied their plates in the hotel’s restaurant.

The Kingdom of Nepal, a narrow strip of mountain-bound land between India and Tibet, had been inhabited for centuries. But no outsiders got there before the 1950s. Most Nepalese lived in scattered settlements herding flocks on the plunging slopes of the Himalayas or farming fields that ranged from poor and rocky plots to fertile plains. The Kathmandu Valley was the fertile centre-piece in a string of Middle Himalayan valleys stretching east and west through the 500-mile length of the kingdom. Northward, the mountains rose and thickened to a great white wall that includes nine of the world’s 14 highest peaks. To the south, the way was barred by rugged hills, forested and choked with 15-foot elephant grass, jungles made dangerous by tigers, and swampland running along India’s northern border. Access to the inner kingdom was so rugged and precipitous that for centuries the only goods to reach or leave Kathmandu were carried on the backs of porters.

Short and tan-skinned, the people of these cities dwelt among soaring temples and monoliths, locked into their villages in the valleys by the compass of mountains around them. They adhered to the Buddhist and Hindu faiths, many of them practising both in common rites. Now both sides were busy placating their gods to try to avert the anticipated disaster on 4 February when it was said that nine planets would be in conjunction – as in 1934 when the same thing happened and Nepal experienced the most devastating earthquake of modern times. The people painstakingly observed an intricate caste system, based on traditional family trades and crafts, but for all the strictures of caste, they were tolerant of exceptions and social climbing. A life rich in ceremony and a society satisfying in its firm order sustained them as the modern world impinged on ancient Nepal. The houses showed the original form of the pagoda, with their sloping roofs and projecting eaves. The wooden pillars and house fronts were elaborately carved with animals, birds, flowers, figures from Hindu mythology and grotesques of various characters. These carvings were all of Newar origin – that is, of the original and still thriving tribe of the valley. There were a number of pagoda-style temples, all heavily ornamented and many with erotic tantric carvings.

Shaped like a maple leaf and surrounded by mountains almost a mile high, the Valleys of Nepal contained 209 square miles of fertile land and more than 400,000 people crowded together. Farming was the basic work of the valley, carried on intensively by the large, clan-like families that were the basic unit of the valley society. Every day members of a farming family went out to work their plot, which was usually rented and often as small as one-tenth of an acre. The other members remained at home and plied the traditional trade or craft that long ago determined their caste. Farmers’ thatched-roofed homes were tucked into the scores of hamlets dotting the rice fields.

The valley’s three cities – Kathmandu, Patan and Bhatgaon (all over 1,000 years old) – lay within walking distance of the fields. Many people were city dwellers as well as farmers. Inside the cities, the complex interchange of goods and services that helped to create them in the first place went on in a caste-prescribed way. In the open on the streets of Kathmandu, the dense population did their everyday chores. The pottery makers worked in their workshops and the priests officiated in their temples. Innumerable religious holidays, always marked by lavish ceremonies, the costs of which sometimes kept people in debt for a year, supplemented the bustle of commerce. The Kathmandu ‘Orchestra’ was more photogenic than musical to judge from the noise emerging from its instruments. The three cities had long since outgrown the walls built to defend them in the eighteenth-century twilight of fierce chieftains, when each city was a kingdom at war with the others. Nepal was less a nation than an aggregation of more or less self-sufficient villages.

At least ten broad ethnic groups and many smaller ones inhabited Nepal, each with its own combinations of physical traits and cultural characteristics. Showing Tibetan influences, the northern border peoples – like Tamang and Sherpa – were generally short, yellow-skinned and Buddhist, and spoke Tibeto-Burmese dialects. Under Indian influences, the Nepalese along the southern border were tall, dark-skinned and Hindu, speaking Indo-Aryan dialects. Between the two bands the tides of migration produced a great mixture with spectacular results in the Kathmandu Valley. The most important language spoken in Nepal – and the only one with any body of writing – was Newari, that of the Newars, whose ancestors first developed the valley. Their culture had survived in spite of suppression by the ruling Ghurkhas, a warrior caste famed as fighters far beyond Nepal. The Newars still bore marks of Mongolian origin, both physically and in their customs, which were similar to those of other races akin to the Mongols. Probably the Newars had originated in Tibet, or even China, and had acquired Indian blood, habits and religion, through invasion and immigration. The joint or extended family unit, its members all related on the male descent side and living together in one home, existed at all caste levels in the Kathmandu Valley.

Nepal brought into the modern world a staggering catalogue of problems – as old, varied and complex as the civilization of the Kathmandu Valley. The homes of more than 3 million Nepalese along the southern border were at times disastrously flooded. The rate of literacy was low – somewhere between 2 and 9 per cent. King Mahendra had made a model of monogamy, but polygamy still existed. Pockets of slavery persisted. Bartering was still the main method of trade and payment. Bits of railway and paved roads were so recent that the first wheel seen in Nepal, besides those used for making pottery, appeared on an aeroplane, as late as 1950, flown in from India to relieve a local shortage of rice. The cost of living was high, with an average per capita income of about $30 a year, and the standard of living wretchedly low. Only slightly more than 10 per cent, or some 6,500 square miles of Nepal’s total area, was under cultivation, but this was practically every inch of the rugged country’s arable land. The Nepalese took extreme measures to utilize the land, terracing hillsides, using hand tools, to a height of 10,000 feet above sea level. Increasing population had produced subdivision and re-division of the land, about two-thirds of which was cultivated by tenant farmers. Farms of half an acre were self-sufficient and farms of over two acres produced a marketable surplus. But while great landlords owned up to a million acres, private or rented holdings of less than half an acre were still the rule, despite attempted land reform. The economy stagnated because there was no middle class to moderate the extremes of wealth and poverty.

Only after the mid-1950s could foreigners access the Kathmandu Valley. Tourists could visit Kathmandu, but then it still required special government permission to travel outside the valley. In 1956, the valley was finally connected by a paved road to India. Americans were installing telecommunications, building roads and airstrips; Indians worked on educational and health programmes, huge power and flood-control projects; Russians were building a cigarette factory and a hydroelectric installation; the Chinese built cement and paper factories and a road to Kathmandu from Lhasa. Many people feared the Chinese would persuade the Nepalese to become Communist. In due course, they nearly succeeded.

Nepal faced an acute refugee problem. Since 1959, Tibetans had been crossing over the border into Nepal to escape the clutches of the Chinese Communists. They lived in settlements, especially round Buddhist temples, scraping a meagre living by making Tibetan works of art and selling them to tourists in Kathmandu.

The Red Cross did a great deal for the Tibetan refugees, both in Nepal and in India. But refugee numbers increased daily and over 40,000 had already poured into these two countries. The Red Cross had even tried settling small colonies of them in foreign countries, such as America. Despite their sufferings, they always had a ready smile on their round, ruddy faces. The Dalai Lama’s personal representative for Nepal, Lopsang Gailen, told the Expedition about Chinese atrocities in Tibet, particularly the treatment of the monks – how they were not allowed to keep their heads shaved and were imprisoned if found praying.

Since 1956, Nepal had done much in the educational field, particularly making education entirely free, rationalizing textbooks, printing and distributing them widely in the country. Education was no longer only for the privileged classes and the high illiteracy rate was rapidly decreasing. Nepali-written textbooks were replacing those from abroad with every hope that a Nepali culture would flourish and the country become more united. More schools and colleges were opening, as was a new university. Over two-thirds of the costs had been met by the people themselves, a sign of how strongly the need for education was felt in Nepal. Previously there were few schools in Nepal, and classes did not go beyond the age of 13. A commission appointed to study these problems and develop a national education policy reported in 1956 and 1961. It emphasized vocational training, but this was an expensive option needing help from experts. America responded by financing and training teachers.

The natural difficulties of change, compounded by the endless differences among Nepalese politicians about how to do it, slowed progress. Some criticized locations chosen for US aid projects. Yet American steel for many footbridges rusted in the hills while the government debated where the next one should be located. Very much aware of their strategic position between India and the Red Chinese in Tibet, the Nepalese veered before each political wind, trying to stick to their avowed course of neutralism. To show their independence of India they kept the Nepalese clock ten minutes ahead of Indian time. Yet they were enthusiastic and eager to please every nation working to help them. Their civilization – that of the Kathmandu Valley – was a strange relic, but it had survived; perhaps because of, rather than despite, the waves of migration and invasion that had swept over the land since pre-history. Assimilating new peoples into the valley society had perhaps kept it from the rigidity that characterized some of the world’s defunct civilizations. The Nepalese perhaps would absorb – rather than be absorbed by – modern technology.

In the Kathmandu Valley, overhung by the 20,000-foot peaks of the Himalayas, the capital city was surrounded by irrigated fields. In the old quarters most of the city’s 100,000 or so people lived crowded together in shapeless squares and narrow streets among the magnificent, golden-roofed temples. For centuries trade in and out of the Kathmandu Valley depended on the sure step and strong backs of the Nepalese porters, some of whom could carry 160-pound loads, consisting of anything from rice to pianos, and parts of cars. Patan, the oldest city in the valley, just outside Kathmandu, reached its prominence as a Buddhist city, though its outward appearance and most of its 40,000 people were Hindu. The strategic position of Nepal, sandwiched between Tibet to the north and India to the south, made it politically vulnerable in twentieth-century politics. But the mountainous country was so drastically cut up that it took three weeks to travel from the capital city of Kathmandu to the end of the Kingdom.

Before leaving Kathmandu a climb up to the British Embassy’s bungalow at Kakani, at just over 7,000 feet, provided a phenomenal sight of dawn breaking. The whole snow-clad panorama of the Himalayas was spread out from Annapurna to Everest. A sea of mist hung over the terraced hills and clusters of huts towards Kathmandu.

On Christmas Eve the Expedition got underway again after a great Christmas lunch with John and Brenda from the British Council, and sharing a bottle of whisky at the Public Works Department hostel. Arriving at the border at midnight, the Kombi crossed back into India without stopping – no formalities or signing of papers. This apparent bonus was to cause headaches for Mehmed a month later.