Dr. Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyaya
The Himalayas are in the north of the Jambudwipa or the Indian peninsula.It is a snow-capped mountain range that serves as the crown of the holy land that is India. It is the abode of Lord Shiva or blessings personified. The word Shiva means benediction. From the Himalayas, love and kindness radiate in all directions like clouds and in the shape of benediction streaming down in countless rivers. Not only are the Himalayas the abode of snow and gods, the mountain range itself is a god of gods. And Uma the demon- slayer, the goddess Durga is the offspring of the Himalayas. Since the Himalayas, the abode of gods is in the north, it has been often argued that the inhabitants of India whom one might call the Aryans after the western fashion had their ancestral home in the north only. Lokmanya Tilak posited that the original home of the Aryans was situated in the North Pole. But the snow-capped Himalayas could be a more reasonable ancestral home of the Aryans. No wonder that the nostalgic people all over the globe are drawn to the Himalayas. And of course the people who still linger in the lap of the Himalayas are their kins. It is always a pleasure to meet the people whose homes are the Himalayas. Because it is in them that the pristine purity of the first children of gods are still preserved.
This is a humble treatise that seeks to know the thoughts and the way of life of the Lepchas, a people whose home is the blessed Himalayas. To that end the present treatise seeks to decode the songs of those Lepchas which have been collected and magnificently edited by Lyangsong Tamsang Lepcha in the small volume, The Indigenous Lepchas and Their Songs.
But let us first ask –who is a Lepcha? A Lepcha poet introduces himself thus—
Skilful in using and firing bows and arrows
And playing flute and bass and Lepcha guitars
Expert in using swords and pens
Observe me carefully
I am a Lepcha
The Lepchas who live in the territory lying between the Himalayas and Jalpaiguri and Nepal and Bhutan could be the people who still hold on to the primeval way of life and culture that is still sacred to us. The towering gigantic mountains capped with pure white snow and green hills and valleys below constitute their landscape. Amidst hills and dales in the hoary Himalayas, they still sing and dance to the merry notes of Toot Fo and Paril Bu, Fodaong Fo and Tagrek Fo, their hearts lifted up to chant hymns to Kingtsoomzaongboo.
The small volume of Lepcha songs opens with an invocation to Kingtsoomzaongboo. That is the mangalacharanam. The name Kingtsoomzaongboo is a symphony in itself. It is the Kanchanjungha or the treasure house of gold. Kanchanjungha stands for the golden Himalayas. And of course it is the creator of land and water. The bard knows that it is the genesis of the stars in the firmament. Hence it is the father of the world. And the Lepcha poet offers it Chyee or fermented beer.This reminds us of the Vedic rishis who offer somarasa to their gods such as Indra or Agni. In fact unless both the addresser and the addressee— the god and its votary are plunged in ecstasy, god’s plenty is not there. The Lepcha priest of a poet offers Chyee to Kanchanjunga—the creator of the Himalayas. He also offers Chyee to the hills and the cliffs. He lights lamps in array and burns incense in reverence to Kanchanjunga and to the hills and cliffs including mount Pandim and mount Graongkaa. Kanchanjunga will enlighten them and give them shelter. Mount Pandim and mount Graongkaa will bestow peace and tranquility upon them. The Himalayas that literally means in Sanskrit the deity who lives in the palace of snow shall bestow prosperity to these children of snow.
Next comes the invocation to Naaraok Rum, the god of music. Because it is through the chanting of the songs that the Lepcha people, the children of the snow can preserve, and spread their very rich and ancient Lepcha culture for posterity. This is not all. Like the sacred confluence of Teesta and Rangeet ceaselessly flowing hand in hand in love and harmony towards the plains of India, the Lepcha culture should flow into the cultural realm of the Indian plains to awaken them to hopes and fears it heeded not.
The invocation to Kanchanjunga and the Himalayas and to muse over or the mangalacharanam over, the Lepcha poetry celebrates the birth of a child with invocation to the guardian spirits of birth and life. It is the guardian spirit of both body and soul. The poet prays to the guardian spirit of the child so that its future becomes as bright as the shining silver coin. The poet also prays to the goddess of Fortune so that the child grows to be an honest, virtuous and prosperous person. The poet asks the guardian spirits, Nunglen Nyoo and Kathaong Fee, to cleanse the new born baby and its soul and to drive away evil spirits, if any, in the child’s abode. The cleansing ceremony of the new born child is observed by way of sprinkling holy water and Chyee. Besides, a strand of seven threads is tied round the wrist of the child. Seven is the magic number which stands for the seven worlds-Bhuh, Bhuvah, Svah, Janah, Mahah, Tapah, Satyam in Hinduism. Once the strand of seven threads is tied round the wrist of the child, the poet of the priest announces that it is a complete human and an asset to the world. Thus the Lepcha community looks upon every birth as the increase in the asset of the world.
Since every birth brings fresh hope, no wonder that the Lepcha community celebrates every marriage with dance, song and play amidst joy and delight. The bride and groom should live long like the Himalayas standing strong. Like the Teesta and Rangit – they must flow together, for ever with enduring love for one another. And they should bring forth fruits and flowers in bright sunshine in their bowers.
During the Lepcha marriage, it is the jewel bride who is entrusted into the laps of groom’s parents. The uncles and aunts and relatives are the witnesses to the ceremony. The jewel bride carries light with her when she migrates to her new home.
Any marriage is like the wedding of the rivers Rangeet and Rongnyoo. Toot Fo, the legendary bird of the Lepcha mythology, leads Rangeet, the groom, while Paril Bu, the dragon snake, leads Rongyoo or the Teesta, the bride to their wedding at what we call the confluence of
Teesta and Rangeet. Thus every marriage in Lepcha community is a charmed one where Nature divinities preside. And just as every confluence generates great energy so does every marriage hold out great promise. The rivers Teesta and Rangeet once united flow downwards to enrich the plains. So does the Lepcha community carry the torch to light the world. No wonder where ever they go there is the dawn.
Lepcha literature is very rich in songs of love. The lover and the lass join in enduring bond like the Teesta and Rangeet. Their love is loud likening the humming of the bumble bees. Their love flows like cascades down the mountain side. The wife carries water in a bamboo cylinder to quench the thirst of her husband and waits near the Sambraang trees . Sometimes the world is not a fitting place for true love to consummate. Hence the lovers wonder where could they place their love and union of two bodies! The woman tells her lover——
If you jump into the burning fire
I will also jump upon it
If you jump into waters
I will also plunge into it
This is befitting heroic poetry and romance.
The Lepcha songs celebrate every new birth and every wedding and every spring with a view to realize a brave new world.
With the advent of spring the cuckoos of different families, the Naam Fraong Fo ,Tukpo Fo , Tukvyer Fo, cry Kaa koo koo! Kaa koo koo! Oh the beloved children of Mother Nature and God! Oh you Lepchas!This is the time to commence work. This is the time to sow Jo Po Maar rice and Jo Po Chyong rice.
And every New Year they rejoice because when the first bamboo shoots originated in this world and when the broom grasses originated in this world the Lepchas likewise originated. The Lepcha poet claims-the Lepcha, bamboos and broom grasses are alike.
This is the message of the Lepchas to the world. This is the voice of Nature and God revealed to the Lepchas. Unless the world pays heed to the voice of the Lepchas, it is foredoomed to utter annihilation. Christianity exhorted that man is the crown and coping stone of the creation. The Bible asks man to lord over Nature. Hinduism in its later years revelled in one God that impels all thinking things and all objects of all thoughts and runs through all things. While Christianity in its craze for the conquest of Nature has made nature out of joints, the Hindu’s craze for the conquest of inward Nature has made them other-worldly, aloof to the travails of the world. The murky clouds of air pollution hang heavy in the skies above the Earth. The pollution distorts Nature the creation of God in a lamentable way. The Chyakmong Fo was given golden beak and golden wings and emerald necklace by God himself But the bird laments——
Fellow birds snatched away
My emerald necklace and golden wings
I hid my golden beak
I hid my golden legs
Dipping them inside a marshy place
And to this day
My golden beak
My golden legs
Only remain in one piece.
We should remember that our dear Earth is the only space-ship where we could live. If this space-ship of ours is suffused with pollution generated by modern science, technology and the spirits of globalization, we humans have no other place to hide our heads.
Indeed earlier when the so called modern civilization had not raised its hydra head felling trees, dynamiting mountains, sending smoke to the skies, the Porcupine could say
During Sambryaang glyock
A time when it is the hottest
I stay secure in my burrow
But right now the son of man has no shelter where he can hide his head. True love has no place where it can flourish and fruitify.
Hence the Lepcha lover laments-
I tried to place our love
On a tree
But the tree fell
I tried to place our love
On the land
But it subsided away
Right at this moment every one of us should chant the mantra –we the humans, bamboos and broom grasses are alike. It is from the Lepcha culture that we should derive the realization that we men and the Nature are one. We men and the grasses and the rivers are close kins. Nature worship should be the religion of the world. We must chant to the tune of Lepcha poet and pray with folded hands
The master of land
The master of water
The master of kingdom birds
We extend our warm welcome to you
To bring fresh air and sunshine to our doorway
Neither reverence for Brahman nor worship of God the Father could help us in the face of the crisis of civilization. We must learn from the Lepcha people the worship of the different forces of Nature and her many creations separately. Philosophical abstractions, do not help us to live in the real world, the world of the contingent. Once we get rid of our abstractions there could be a world where we could take refuge and where true love could prosper.
To born is to die. Every birth implies death. But the Lepcha bard reminds us that one must not grieve for that. Because to be born and to die is the way of the world and it is decreed by the almighty God. Even the Sun and the Moon were once almost eaten away by Daar Sathong in the olden days. Hindu mythology dwells on how the Dragon’s Head or Rahu eats away the Sun and the Moon from time to time. When the Sun and the moon are eaten away it is called the eclipse. The Lepcha poet reminds us that even the Sun and the Moon are eaten away. Landslides occur on the mountains and the hills. Wildfires destroy the forest. Storm blasts mow down the trees. The day becomes night. The daffodils that burst forth with the day break droop when the barred clouds bloom the soft dying day.
The Lepcha poet says –
We are born to die
It is the rule made by the Almighty God.
The Lepcha mind is aware of the brief stay of man on earth and of the transitoriness of everything in the world and of the world itself. The western culture reacted to this transitoriness of the world preaching Epicureanism——Drink Life to the lees; eat drink and be merry. But the Lepcha reaction to the awareness of the transitory nature of the world is different. This has been depicted in a powerful lyric entitled Human Life. True that man’s life is as short as the stay of the morning clouds in the sky, the stay of the flower in the garden or the shiny dews in the arum leaf. But in that case man should be as beautiful as the flower in efflorescence as the cloud aglow in the morning sun or as the dew drops deposited at dawn dazzling like diamonds. In short man should make his life as beautiful as possible within the short span of life. He must not look forward to any life beyond death and leave his duties for tomorrow. Hence the poem Human Life exclaims over and over again that no one knows the future. True that life is short. But we could make life here and now as beautiful as that of a flower or a cloud or a dew drop. The Lepcha poet knows that the world is also transitory. But it is not harsh. It is like the garden where flowers bloom. It is like the arum leaf in which the dew drop shines. On another level the world is like the skies blue and boundless. There we appear like trailing clouds of glory emanating from the god of gods Kanchanjunga or Kingtsoomzaogboo. But our lifespan is as short as the stay of a dew drop on the arum leaf or of the cloud in the skies or of the flower in the garden. The Lepcha poet reminds us that nothing can be taken from the world. We come naked here and we go naked hence. This is what a Hindu has to realize to become a sannyasin. But the Lepcha people have an innate realization of this truth. They did not learn to possess. Food clothes and shelter are all that these children of Nature look forward to.They are the tribe of sannyasins withal. In fact it seems that the earliest stage of human civilization was predominated by the tribes of sannyasins who lived on roots and fruits whatever Nature gave them out of her bounty. With the roll of time man gradually drifted far off from this truth. It was the love of possession that brought about what we call civilization. It was the lust for possession that made man more civilized and the architects of the two Great Wars. The Lepcha poetry lingers on earth to remind us of the truths that awake during the childhood of human civilization to perish never.
While meditating on death and transitoriness of the world Lepcha songs are deeply philosophical. The world where we live is like an arum leaf and we are dew drops in it with our megacities and shopping malls. This shows that the Lepcha poet is intuitively aware of the multiverse where countless universes twinkle for a moment and then vanish .But the Lepcha poet reminds us that our thoughts on life are greater than the stars in the skies. They are not as short-lived as our life on earth or as the life of stars as well. The Lepcha poet wants us to wake up in the truth that the body might die but our thoughts do not and our souls do not. And we must find our way to Poomju or make it.The Lepcha poet tells us -
From time immemorial
The Beloved Children of Mother Nature
Your ancestors are waiting
At Poomju your home in the Himalayas
With arms open
The Lepcha people do not have any notion of hell. Because they do not have any positive law. Positive law always speaks of negation—This thou must not do….. Or….That thou must not commit. But is there any positive law to rule the family? Each member of a family knows what his dos and don’ts are. To that end any enactment of law has not been necessary. Similarly the Lepcha people needed no positive law and no one sins among them. With the advent of civilization positive laws were enacted and sins were born, jails and hells were created. Lepcha poetry could lift up our souls to the heights beyond the dichotomy of modern civilization - to the heights of Poomju.
Dzongu of Sikkim -green woodlands lorn with orchids in full bloom surrounded by the snow-clad summits of the Himalayas is the incarnation of Poomju upon earth. Dzongu is to the Lepchas what Jerusalem is to the Christians and Vrindavana to the Vaisnavas.
But it is a pity that modern civilization is out to destroy the sacred niches of man. Every nation, every culture has the right to live in this world. This is what the human rights and the UN Charter profess. But it is a necessary charecteristics of modern civilization to preach what it does not practice and to practice what it does not preach. It is all for large populations and for large quantities and abstract notions where individuals are ignored, small ones are ignored and quality is ignored. When churches, temples and mosques are desecrated there is a worldwide furore but when the lonely splendour of the sacred Dzongu is molested, when the sacred rivers springing from the heaven, Rangeet and Teesta are dammed, no voice of protest could be heard from the UNO, from the Human Rights organizations. This is because the Lepchas do not have political power or money power or muscle power. Theirs is a small community. The world does not know that small is beautiful. Even a small community could achieve great things. But the world is forgetful of that. The world is more concerned with communism, capitalism, pantheism and the like and never pays heed to the small and the individual and the individual’s beliefs. The world might take care of the vast Buddhist viharas and cave paintings of Ajanta and Ellora where may be snakes and fairies are carved. But real forests, the real mountains and their caves with real pythons and cobras, the truly holy places haunted by gods and fairies, sacred and secluded are sacrileged in the name of democracy and development.
Consequently the Yel Malee bird darting here and there in the evergreen forests generations succeeding generation finds its ancestral home and traditions encroached and tampered and mutilated and transgressed. The bird complains that many a hunting birds have migrated into its ancestral land. They try to drive away the Yel Malee bird from its homeland. Besides there are alien birds come to its native forest that breed so many youngs that the native birds of the forest become outnumbered. The Numprick Fo birds have arrived in the native land of the Yel Malee. The latter have been made to forget their native tunes, notes, songs and dances by the stranger Namprick Fo birds. This is a cruel allegory. It speaks of how the Lepchas have been outnumbered in their homeland because of strangers migrating there. Their native religion, native tongue, native dress, in short, their native way of life is being made out of joints. What is true of the Lepchas is true of the Maoris of Newzealand or the Red Indians of America. But this is not all. Human race all over the world is being uprooted from its tradition along with the flora and fauna of the earth. Yel Malee Bird gives a tongue to the groans of the existence.
The small volume of Lepcha songs has, structurally speaking, four distinct parts. It opens with invocation to deities that belong to Nature itself. They are not the gods of the hills or lakes. The hills and the lakes and the rivers are themselves gods. The Mount Kanchanjunga is the god of the gods. The snow-capped Kanchanjunga is what the philosopher Emmanuel Kant calls sublime. It is so vast, it is so great, it is so effulgent, it doffs and dons so many hues, it excelsiors the forests and hills and reaches such dizzy heights touching the skies that it baffles our imaginations. It is something that is beyonds our imagination. This Kanchenjunga is the creator of the universe. Presently after the invocation, the most significant rituals in the life of the children of snow, the Lepchas such as their birth, marriage and death have been delineated with great vividness. Meditation on death and the transitoriness of the world have led the Lepcha bard to dwell on eschatology. Although the Lepcha poets celebrate the union of bodies, they do not fear death in a song which we have already referred to. The hero goes off to death in an attitude. The heroine is ready to leap into fire for her sweetheart’s sake. It appears that the Lepcha bards believe in a soul that survives the body. Presently after death the soul returns to the ancestors. The latter welcome the soul with stretched arms. But this is not all.
In a song a bird recounts its previous birth. It suggests that the Lepchas, the children of snow believe in transmigration of the soul. In the third section of the volume of the song, the Lepcha lyricists speak in the parole of the birds how they are being out numbered by strangers migrating into their land. The Lepcha poets bemoan the fast erosion of their traditional culture their language, their clothes, their age-old beliefs, in short, their ways of life. The use of the persona of the birds to give a tongue to the groans of the Lepcha people speaks of consummate Lepcha poetic art. It would be very sentimental if the Lepcha poets had spoken in their own person or parole of the desperate situation into which they have been thrust by blind fate or by history. But the story of Lepcha people and culture is not destined to end in laments. Hence the fourth part of the volume of songs.
The Lepcha poet celebrates the Lepcha New Year with fresh visions. The youngs move from one house to another in the Lepcha villages announcing that the Lepcha New year had come. They must awaken to the exigency of the hour to uphold Lepcha values, Lepcha culture, Lepcha tongue and the like. The youth must take the oath that they would keep up their Lepcha identity. They should remember their glorious past. The Lepcha people never invaded the native place of any other people or culture. But when the King of Bhutan attacked Lepcha habitat, the Lepcha king Pano Gaeboo Achyok of Damsang heroically resisted the invaders. The Lepcha people had built impregnable forts to defend their motherland from foreign aggression. The Lepchas fought under the command of King Gaebo Achyok and braved death like heroes. The Lepcha poet tells us that the King Gaebo Achyok though physically dead is still very much alive in spirit. He is with the Lepchas in their battle for identity and survival against the invaders who seek to wipe the Lepcha culture from the cultural map of the world. With this battle cry the volume of songs ends. This clearly speaks of how deftly the editor once upon a time a Major in the British Army arranged the folk songs thematically as it were in a battle array. Hats off! Major! The readers are now waiting with bated breath to witness the heroic war on the cultural and spiritual plain for the identity of the Lepchas.
But the volume is not meant for the Lepchas only. Under the impact of modernization, globalization, capitalism, science and technology every culture, every people in the globe faces identity crisis . And the volume of Lepcha songs under study raises battle cries against this dehumanizing situation of the world.
Aachuley!
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