Hill Cultures

In the ‘General Description of the Himalaya’, the first chapter of the first part of his book titled Abode of Snow: A History of Himalayan Exploration and Mountaineering (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1955), Kenneth Mason writes, “Himalaya…is the greatest physical feature of the earth; in mass greater than all the mountains of Europe, including the Caucuses, put together…In so vast a region man is humbled and insignificant.” Mason was writing primarily for Euro-American readers. For an average Indian, the immensity of the Himalayas doesn’t need to be conveyed in or by comparisons. An average Indian knows and feels that immensity as a physical reality, as s/he sees the stretch of the Himalayas forming a prominent geographical line on the map of Asia. The massive mountainous stretch of the Himalayas from the western regions of Afghanistan to the eastern regions of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh is a formidable stretch of around 2400 kilometres, which cuts off a small part of the continent of Asia to create the Indian Subcontinent. Throughout that length of 2400 kilometres, and on both sides of the precipices forming a width of 200-400 kilometres, southern and northern, the Himalayas present an extraordinary geography for an Indian. This stretch of 2400 kilometres, looking like a horizontal line on a map, separates — almost like a wall — the South Asia from the North and, also, two racially different sets of humans. To a mystically and spiritually inclined person, this may appear a divinely planned Geography, the purpose of which may be too mysterious for us to uncover.

Geologists say that the Himalayas came into being between 40 to 60 million years ago; and yet they are said to be the youngest among the mountains of the world. One can only make a broad conjecture about the development and growth of life in the Himalayas in this period, to take the average between 40 and 60, around 50 million years. One can only conjecture about the length of time that the arrival and the evolution of life in the Himalayas may have taken. So much there predates archaeological, historical, and anthropological records. From the west to the east, the Himalayas have been home to a big number of cultures and lifestyles and belief systems — forming and reforming, altering and adapting — right from the time of the first arrival of humans in these valleys and heights. Obviously, the availability of life sustaining bounties of nature made human settlements possible there in the first place and then ensured their continuation and, in a way, proliferation. Among others, the most noteworthy gift the Himalayas have given to humans is water, not only to those who live in the valleys of the mountains but also, more importantly, to all the people in the entire north of the Indian subcontinent. For millennia, the rivers and rivulets emanating from the Himalayas have given the life-sustaining water to generations and generations of people in the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent.

Ed Douglas, in Himalaya: A Human History (W. W. Norton, 2020), writes, “[m]ountains are places for gods, not people”, and says further that “rivers are for both and that they are of far more consequence and interest to those living in mountains than to those who merely visit them”. By reference to the Puranas, Douglas adds a little later, “[t]hese mountains are the region of Swarga, or paradise, the home of the righteous…At the centre of this cosmic landscape, we are told, is Mountain Meru,… the city of Brahma…” These impassioned words of Ed Douglas may well serve as an introduction as well as an epigraph to the two thematically connected articles in the ‘Hill Cultures’ section of this issue of Caesurae. The paper titled ‘Exploring the Sacred in the Secret, the Secret in the Sacred: A Study of Sikkim as the Beyul Land’, written jointly by Bikram Chowdhury and Tanushree Chakrabarty, analyses the traditional Buddhist belief in a paradise-like land of purity and bliss. Characterized by “secretness” and “an elevated place sublimated into a space that is at once mysterious, promising and challenging”, Beyul Land, as Chowdhury and Chakrabarty discover through their analysis of available sources, is “a space” where the material has an ennobling and uplifting interface with the spiritual. Having thus laid their foundational arguments, Chowdhury and Chakrabarty, by reference to a stream in Buddhist theological literature and thought, then speak of Sikkim as “a Beyul Land” by virtue of its having “obtained the blessings of Lord Avalokitesvara.”

The second essay in the section, titled ‘The Holy Water Lands of Sikkim: A Case Study of Myths, Beliefs, and Conservative Narratives’, by Koushik Barman and Ananya Paul, examines the myths and beliefs surrounding the various lakes and other rivers in Sikkim. The study concludes that every water body in Sikkim, every lake and every river, has an origin myth or some other kind of belief or story connected to it awarding the water body the status of the sacred. Thus, if we connect the central themes of the two papers, it so turns out that the land of Sikkim becomes a Beyul Land, a paradise, and every drop of water in that land becomes holy.

Prakash Joshi

Editor, Hill Cultures

Caesurae: Poetics of Cultural Translation, Vol 6:1, July 2024.

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