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Catching 'em Alive (Satis Shroff)
Related to country: Nepal
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

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Catmandu Blues Memoir:
Catching ‘em Alive (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

I met John Sidensticker, a tiger-ecologist from the National Zoological Park (Smithsonian Institute) in Katmandu. He was a tall, thin-lipped, well-built man with deep blue eyes and a matching ruffle of brown hair. John had a Ph D in Wildlife Ecology and Management and was in Katmandu with his wife and a two year old daughter. He'd done a four month job at the Royal Chitwan Park when I met him. And there was also Kirtiman Tamang from the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife (Michigan State University).

The goal of the tiger study was to get a detailed ecological and behavioural information on the animal that had to be known if viable populations of tigers were to be maintained in the wild. There was no use in laying a ban on the tiger-hunts and calling that conservation. The tiger is a lone hunter and there's still a lot to be known about about it, in the field of population dynamics, its special features,its social structure,its response to man and so forth. As to the distribution, the Nepalese tiger Panthera tigris, is one of eight subspecies of tigers in the world. Panthera tigris (also called the Bengal tiger) is found in Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Sikkim, Bhutan and West Burma. The other subspecies occur in northern Iran, Afghanistan, China, Siberia and in other parts of south-east Asia.

The tiger-density at the Chitwan Park,according to an estimate in 1974 was between 20 to 25. And the Karnali and Sukla Phanta Wildlife Reserves are said to have fair-sized tiger populations. The cause of the sharp decline in the seventies were: over-hunting, poaching and poisoning of the tiger's prey. The tiger basically needs vegetative cover in which to hide, a source of water and adequate animals to prey upon.

Sadly enough,man's progressive strides have jeopardised the tiger's haven of refuge by clearing forests for agriculture,townships and all the paraphernalia that does in the name of development. The gradual dwindling of Panthera tigris' natural prey leaves it with no option but to go in for domestic animals, thereby bringing it in direct confrontation with a deadly, invincible, ingenuous and fast spreading species called Homo sapiens.

The fieldwork of the ecologist duo began in the Park's Sauraha area, confined to the north-east part. The Chitwan Park is noted for its thick vegetation and complexity, so a zoologist working with only a jotting pad and a pair of eyes would hardly get far trying to study the ecology of the tiger in the Nepalese jungle. It might be the other way around. The duo used radio-telemetry to gather quantitative data on the tiger and, for comparison, leopard movements and predator activities in of the Chitwan tiger. Radio-tracking consists in attaching a radio-transmitter collar around the neck of the tiger or leopard. But strapping the transmitter-collar around the jungle cat is quite a job, because the animal has to be captured first. This is done by shooting the tiger with tranquillizer darts (the drug then in use was: Parke Davis CI-744).

The exact term for this operation is "chemical restraint," and it is the safest means available to "manhandle these overgrown and ferocious cats". The technique used is either to dart free-ranging individuals or to box-trap them. John was telling me that the radio-telemetry and chemical restraint methods were very new in South Asia,in fact they were used for the first time in Chitwan. After an animal is immobilised it is weighed, measured and tagged with a transmitter-collar. The tiger comes out of the drug slowly and there's no danger, I was told. The poor fellow feels groggy and wobbles on its feet for quite sometime. The radio-tagged tigers and leopards return to both:baits and natural kills the same day they were darted, and they went about their home areas just as casually, unmindful of the radio-collars.

From the radio-tagging it has been learnt that tigers and leopards use and reuse specific areas,and they shift from one area to another in keeping with factors like: seasonal changes, their reproductive status and forest-fires and grassland cutting by the local Nepalese. However, the main reason for change of habitat by the tigers tends to be due to prey species becoming scarce.

During the tourist season, which falls incidentally in winter, the tigers and leopards are highly active and move about day and night. However, as the season progresses and the mercury shoots up, the tiger tends to enjoy siestas in the unburned tall grass areas near a waterhole. They also enjoy the shade.

An analysis of the predatory habits of the tigers was made with the information collected from at least fifty natural kills and more than thirty baits killed by tigers and leopards. Most of the natural kills were located by tracking instrumented cats. These kills tell us about the movement of the tigers in relation to their kills, the time taken to finish the kills, and the distance covered and time between one kill and and another. John and Kirti regularly observed Panthera tigris both from elephant-back and per pedis. They made systematic observations from machans (Jägersitz) and line transects. All the data have come in handy in analysing how tigers utilise a particular area in relation to the structure of that area.

Like John was saying,"Only from this can we learn how environmental factors affect,for example,hunting, density of breeding adult tigers, reproductive success, immigration and emigration rates and so on." This has to be known to determine the course management must take to maximise environmental conditions for the tiger.

In Nepal the National Park and Wildlife Conservation Act of 1974 made hunting, killing or sale of tiger skins illegal, and it is illegal to kill a tiger in any part of the world. In the year 1986 alone 28,000 Bengal tiger skins were imported to West Germany according. Furs are status symbols in the western world especially among Royalty and the super rich. A leopard fur-coat costs 50,000 euros.

According to a study on tourism carried out by World Bank adviser Michael Wells based on data collected in 1989, tourism had brought more disadvantages than advantages. The number of tourists visiting Nepal were 260,000 in 1989 and they left 22 million euros in the kingdom. A fourth of this sum came from the tourist's purse from the fees collected while visiting a protected area. But the National Parks could make no profits. The money collected through Park entry fees was 0,8 million euros, but at the same time the Parks had an expenditure of 0,4 million euros.

More than a third of this sum was spent by the Nepalese government to pay the Royal Gurkhas. After the Maoists starting over-running the Police-stations and Gurkha check-posts, the Gurkhas had to be deployed to combat the Maoists, instead of poachers. Due to this deployment, the poachers had a great time, without any control from the Nepalese government. The Royal Gurkhas were deployed originally to be on the lookout for poachers, and also to prevent the local Nepalese from felling trees for firewood, which were actually used for the benefit of the foreign visitors. The rounding up, transport and disposal of the garbage and the excrement left by the tourists also costs money. The World Bank expert suggests raising the entry-fees of the National Parks drastically. In his opinion this will serve as a deterrent to the great number of visitors, and they protect the landscape and provide higher income. But whether this will pay off is another story, and has yet to be seen. His trump is Bhutan, which demands from every tourist 200 US dollars (320DM) per day. In certain circles, it is said that Nepal made a mistake in its management of tourism by letting in all rucksack tourists, who are known for their low budgets. On the other hand, it's a wonderful experience for the Nepalese and westerners to get in contact with each other, develop friendships and interact.

Nepal, which is a favourite destination among low budget rucksack tourists, doesn't have such strict regulations till now, and no compulsory sums to be spent per day. The tourists spend an average of 16 euros per day in Nepal.

December 19, 2007 | 5:49 AM Comments  0 comments


Wildlife Ecology in Beautiful Nepal (Satis Shroff)
Related to country: Nepal
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic


Live and Let Live: Wildlife Versus Humans in Beautiful Nepal (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

The loss of wildlife habitat in the states of Nepal, India and Pakistan caused by widespread and indiscriminate destruction of forests in the foothills of the Himalayas and the Karakoram has led to an ecological crisis, resulting in floods and landslides after the torrential monsoons. When the forests recede the humans venture further into the habitats of the wild animals to cut and gather firewood.

Take Chitwan, the jungle in Nepal’s Terai for instance. Till 1961 organised poachers wantonly decimated the wild Rhinoceros unicornis in the jungle in order to sell the rhino-horn for a profit due to its healing properties in traditional Chinese Medicine. In February 1993 for instance, four rhinos were found dead in the Chitwan Park and the poachers had removed their hoofs and horns. In Nawalparasi there had been similar cases of rhinos being shot for their horns and hoofs a few weeks earlier.

To assist the helpless wardens a battalion of 8oo Royal Gurkhas had been deployed. According to the then director of the wildlife department Tirtha Man Maskey, "There are 400 rhinos in Chitwan with a reproduction rate of 2% according to research statistics." A few days earlier 12 persons were arrested with 44 pieces of rhino hoofs and two pieces of horns. And in the Shukla Phanta three Rhino-cubs were found dead. The average life span of a rhino is 60 years. To combat the increased poaching a security committee involving the Chitwan chief district officer, forest officer, security officer along with the representatives of the various units had been formed. The point was: will poaching be stopped in the long run or only as long as the Royal Gurkhas prowl and patrol the National Park? Moreover, the Gurkhas were deployed to stop the Maoists insurgents in the past, and the poachers faced hardly any resistance and started decimating the wild animals. That also scared the tourists, and they were advised from their respective foreign departments to avoid Nepal.

Four species of rhinoceroses are threatened with extinction. The Taiwanese are known to be stockpiling rhino horns as an investment. According to a World Wildlife Fund(WWF)estimate already 10 tonnes are already stored in Taiwan. In 1970 the price of a kilo African rhino horn was $30 and today more than $2,000. The Asian rhino horn, which is smaller than the African one, is worth $50,000 a kilo because the Taiwanese think it's more potent. Even though commercial trade in rhino horn and its by-products are prohibited under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, Zimbabwe and South Africa would like to export them and use the money to support effective anti-poaching programmes. It's a case of legal trade to stop illegal poaching.

But poaching is also a trade. The legal market might "jeopardise rhinos elsewhere" according to Joanna Pitmann, who thinks "Taiwanese traders see gold in stocks of rhino horn." To think that 30 years ago there were 100,000 black rhinos in southern Africa. Now there are only 3,500, the better part of which are in Zimbabwe, which is notorious for its high poaching-rate. According to Joanna Pitmann: "An average of three rhinos are lost in Zimbabwe every week."

There seems to be a lucrative market and desperate souls are out to smuggle as many rhino horns and hoofs as possible. But aside from poaching there are also other problems. Thanks to the electrification of the many lodges along the Chitwan Park border the rhinos, tigers, leopards, and other denizens of the Royal forest nowadays have started getting used to techno-sound, hip-hop, lambada, Bollywood melodies, and rock n' roll music blaring for the delights of the jungle tourists. The noise pollution created by the industry catering to tourism, in what should be a tranquil and serene National Park, is a nuisance indeed for the denizens of forest.

Nepal’s Endangered Rhinos: Once a royal hunting reserve, the lowland valley of sal forest and riverine grassland has come to be known as the Royal Chitwan National Park, and is Nepal's number one Park. Take a trip down to Chitwan and you will get what I mean.

The wildlife you will get to see ranges from tigers, leopards, gaurs, sloth bears, sambars, chitals, hog deer, barking deer to the noted Gangetic dolphins which are seen cavorting in the waters of the Narayani River. And if you have a crush for ornithology, you will find exotic avi-fauna. Chitwan without the great one-horned rhinoceros would be unimaginable, since the area is internationally known as the wallowing grounds of 300 to 350 rhinos, which incidentally is the second largest population in the world.

Back in 1975 the rhino population of Chitwan was between 200 to 250.If you are planning to make a trip to Chitwan, I would advise you to make it between January and May, because that's when the rhinoceros concentration down there is the greatest. The lush, green grass provides high quality grazing to the rhinos. In May they begin to shun the tall grass species which are unpalatable, and that is when they make for the paddy fields of the local hamlets to pull nocturnal raids much to the consternation of the local Tharu and other Nepalese farmers. During the day you will find them wading in the shallow rivers and feeding on the aquatic plants.

Do the rhinos have a specific breeding season? Actually there's no evidence. The habitat in Chitwan is such that it provides a year-round food supply, and the conditions of living are most favourable to them. During the mating season, you are likely to hear "pant squeaks" when a male is hot on the trail of a female rhino. The females emit squeaks of low intensity when the pursue the males. The highest frequency of such squeaks is heard in the month of March. The males can be seen making furrows on the earth or sand as the case may be, by dragging their stubby hind legs along on the toes, while urinating. This was a phenomenon which had been baffling a biologist from Cambridge named Andrew Laurie whom I met, and who was doing research on the ecology of the Nepalese rhinos. He'd been recording the rhino behaviour every month and felt that their urinating and furrow-making during the monsoon may have been due to the "bad conditions for track preservation" He said, "The furrows are made by male rhinos after unsuccessful attempts to mate cows or after encounters with humans".

The rhino has a long period of pregnancy and the young ones take an equally long time to mature, and all this overrules the advantage of a regular breeding season. When a rhino cow has completed her period of gestation, she heads for a secluded spot. The cow disappears into the thick forest for several days before the birth. Andrew Laurie had evidence for a possible oestrus periodicity of between 34 and 44 days, which he obtained in the months of June and July. Laurie said, "I saw a bull grazing and moving with a cow and her two year old calf from the 14th to 16th June. On 15th June he mounted the cow and remained mounted for one hour, stationary in the elephant grass".

One whole hour: it was unbelievable.

Laurie went on to say, "I didn't see the bull again with the cow and her calf until the 19th of July, when he attacked her. It was amazing. He succeeded in turning her right over on her back by lifting from the side with his head between her front legs. And all this while the calf grunted from a distance in the tall grass."

He said the cow and the bull evaded each other until the 27th of July when the cow started to follow the male around sniffing at his penis, urinating herself and uttering "squeak blows".

There is a possible peak births during July and August, which would tie in with a peak of mating activity in March and a 16 1/2 month gestation period. But Andrew was of the opinion that mating behaviour and births have been recorded throughout the year, and it was hard to detect a peak. "I've christened a healthy calf with the named Lickety Split," he said with a chuckle because it seemed to dash about in the Chitwan foliage. The movements of the rhinos tend to be linked with food availability. They can be observed during the March-April feeding on the short grasses in the river banks in the blazing and forested plains located below the foothills of the Himalayas.

When grasses are scarce, they try aquatic plants, sedges and other coarse plants rather reluctantly. And when the grasses are burnt by the villagers of Chitwan, they immediately rush to these places to eat the charred stalks, which they relish. They return about two weeks to the same place to eat the new shoots. It's quite intriguing to watch a rhino eat short grass. It uses its lips to bite off or pull up the shoots. The chewing is continual and often, the animal blinks and then bites off new grass with its lips again. You will discover that some roots and grass drop out by the side of the rhino's mouth, but the animal normally has a gargantuan appetite and eats even the dead, russet and yellowed leaves on the ground.

And peaceful coexistence is not exactly what the villagers in the vicinity of the Royal Park believe in, at least as far as the rhinos are concerned. The Nepalese villagers have been briefed about the importance of the National Parks for the country, but not the animals. From as early as April in Katar and in the eastern parts of the Chitwan Park, the ungainly, cool and determined rhinos begin visiting the farmlands and feeding on the first rice and maize crops because they are so supple and delicious to them. Some of the rhinos tend to be neurotic and go about eating bananas, weeds and ripe wheat. And some even indulge in coprophagy. Keeping off the wildlife from the crops is indeed an eternal problem that the Nepalese farmers in the Terai face.

Rhino greetings: How do rhinos greet each other? They do it like the eskimos, I mean the Inuits. A young rhino approaches another slowly with its nose stretched forward. The noses come in contact gently, and often a sparring bout ensues with one's horn circling the other's snout. But unlike the Inuits, the horns of the rhinos sometimes clash with a great noise. A nuzzling of the side of one's face with the other's mouth may take place, with a view to biting each other. And sometimes, you may be able to watch a rhino down in Chitwan bob its head up and down or even grazing and sweeping its head speedily from side to side. However, the approaching rhino, after touching the newcomer's nose or nuzzling him will graze with him peacefully. The adult cows and bulls behave differently. They avoid contacts. But when they do come in contact, they hold their heads high and snort again and again, and even bare their teeth.

And what do adult males do when they come face to face with each other? They either ignore each other or threaten each other. The meeting is characterised by head-on approaches at times, followed by loud shouts, squirts of urine and touching of horns, low on the ground. And one of them may even turn and flee honking. Sometimes, a fight may develop in which the tusks are used a lot.

Andrew said, "During a fight one November, one male lost half its horn and both rhinos were deeply gashed. One of the animals returned six miles to the south of the Rapti River the next night. He walked very slowly, dragging a back leg and fed for no less than two hours." Eating after a good fight seems to do them good. You will find that the rhinos show the most aggressive behaviour in their wallows, where threats and fights are very common, especially during the monsoon season. Despite the existence of many wallows in Chitwan, you will find the rhinos concentrated at a few wallows, and the wallows are changed very often. Most interactions involve rhino cows and calves. The approach of another rhino to the wallow might trigger off an interaction.

Attacks normally take the form of a charge. I remember having read an exciting description of a charging rhino by Peter Fleming in my school days, in which he called the animal a "brute". Well, if you had a huge rhinoceros charging at you, you wouldn't be inclined to call it friendly or cute either I suppose.

The best thing to do under such conditions would be to clamber up a thick tree. But the tourists in Chitwan are mostly on elephant-back and hence such situations hardly arise. When a rhino charges, the head is held low, mouth open, tusks bared and the charge is accompanied by a loud roar. The rhinos stop facing each other at a distance of one to two feet. The charge is ritually repeated. Or one of the animals might turn and disappear into the jungle: a loser. Each attack results in the loser having to divert to another place in the wallow, or even away from the wallow all together. A banishment and the winner takes it all.

Approaching rhinos sometimes turn and go on quite oblivious of the snorts. Others don't even bother to take notice and walk right in. Even between the same rhinos in similar situation, the results of encounters are different on different occasions, and not stereotyped, according to Laurie.

"One cow and calf" he said," always occupied the same position in a wallow no matter which rhinos were present. They never took part in aggressive interaction rituals." But the normally playful rhino-calves are involved in the interactions." In one case," said Andrew, "a two month old calf attacked an adult female after she had chased off his mother. The cow in turned chased him in the opposite direction, but the spirited calf charged twice again. The cow stopped in front of him each time with her tusks bared, roaring loudly. Eventually the calf's grunts were answered by soft squeaks blown from his mother, who had returned to fetch him."

Interestingly enough, dung-piles are used by all members of the rhino population. And when a rhino comes across fresh dung, it serves as a signal for him to defecate. Calves invariably defecate after their mothers. And the dung-piles are developed in areas frequented by rhinos especially along paths and near wallows, and they are often 20 feet in diameter. A most remarkable thing about rhinos is that they defecate after an encounter with either another rhino, elephant or humans. So if a rhino defecates after he or she sees you don't feel insulted. It's the done thing in the world of the rhinoceros. One would not like to pass judgement, but the rhinos of Chitwan seem to have an entirely different opinion about us humans.

Besides the defecation, urination is also another important communication signal for the rhinos. A rhino squirts urine during or after encounters with fellow rhinos, elephants or humans, especially while walking away. It also urinates while on leaving a forest or grassland, a ditch, a field or road edge. The rhinos, while urinating, are known to scrape and drag their feet. The marking behaviour of the rhinos form a sort of communication system between individuals. The olfactory signals are recognised by other fellow rhinos.

The dung-heap for instance stimulates the rhino to defecate, and the furrows created by them after defecation and urination serve as visual and scent marks. And what's remarkable is that the only permanent association among the rhinos happens to be the cow and her calves. The adult males are solitary, egoistic and do not tolerate the presence of other rhinos. Physical contact is very important in the cow-calf relationship, and wallowing cows and calves often lie touching each other. The small and chubby calves are very playful and spend long periods rubbing their heads and flanks along their mother's huge body.

Mating among the rhinos takes place when the calf is about two years old. The calf is driven away usually by the male at the time of courtship. Both male and female follow each other's tracks in Chitwan or for that matter in Kaziranga or elsewhere, when they have lost contact and greet each other by touching noses. The behaviour patterns change as the animal matures from a baby to a calf, and from a sub-adult to a full grown, breeding adult. Forty years go, most of the rhinos in Chitwan lived in the ideal, wild environment with very few people and extremely low amount of cultivation.

The only deadly enemies were the stately princes and maharajas from Kathmandu or their royal guests from Great Britain, who took pride in wantonly shooting animals after driving them and trapping them through the use of hundreds of villagers who encircled them with endless white sheets of cloth, and the beating of drums, tin-cans to create a great clamour and frightening noise in the otherwise serene jungle in the Terai.

Royal Hunts: The royal shikaris sat on perches called machans or on the backs of tamed elephants and shot the animals, birds and reptiles. Not because they had hunger as is in nature among the denizens of the jungle, but because it was chic and was supposed to be a sport ever since the gun was invented. The idea was not to stalk an animal alone in the ratio of one against one, with the undercover of the jungle as part of the game, and to kill a wild animal to feed the starving wife and children. Agriculture and transportation problems were already solved and hunting and killing helpless animals living in the jungles and forests came in vogue, to be documented for posterity in front of 'fierce' animals, not realising that the fiercest and wildest animal was the human himself armed with a gun and lethal cartridges.

In one big game expedition alone, the Nepalese Royalty Jung Bahadur Rana shot 21 elephants, 31 tigers, 7stags, 1 rhinoceros, 1 boa constrictor, 11 wild buffaloes, 10 boars, 1 crocodile, 4 bears, 20 deer, 6 pheasants and 3 leopards. Three successive generations of British monarchs have done game-hunting in the Nepalese Terai jungle. In 1886 when King Edward VII visited Nawalpur he is said to have bagged 23 tigers, 1 leopard and 1 bear. His son King George V shot "in one day in Chitwan" 10 tigers, 1 rhino and 1 bear. That was in 1911.

In 1921, the Duke of Windsor, when he was the Prince of Wales, visited Bhikhana in the Nawalpur district and took part in a shikar (hunt)and was presented the following animals and birds by the Maharaja Chandra Shumsher Rana as a present for the London Zoological Gardens:1 baby elephant,2 rhinos,2 leopards,2 Himalayan black bears,2 leopard cats,1 black leopard,1 tiger,1 Tibetan fox,1 mountain fox,2 sambhurs,1 thar,1 unicorn sheep,3 musk deer,1 four-horned sheep,1 one-horned Tibetan shawl goat,2 Tibetan mastiff puppies,1 monitor and 1 python.For the ornithological collection there were: 4 Nepalese kalij, 1 white crested kalig-pheasant, 4 cheer-pheasants, 2 koklass-pheasants, 4 chukor-patridges, 4 swamp-patridges, 2 green-pigeons, 10 bronze-winged doves, 3 Great Indian Adjutants (L. dubius), 1 hawk, 1 peafowl (P. cristatus). That was just the list of the animals presented by the Nepalese Maharaja.

In the course of the shikar, the Prince of Wales shot 17 tigers, 10 rhinos, 2 leopards, 1 bear, 7 jungle-fowls, 2 partridges, 15 snipes, 1 peacock and a hamadryas (Naja bungarus).

“How long did it take to shoot all these animals?” you might ask.

Just eight days.

Today, the animals in the jungles of Chitwan, as elsewhere in the world, have to coexist with more people in the areas due to the increase in human population and migration of people from the mountains of Nepal under the resettlement programme of the Nepalese government. Much of the mixed forest and grassland areas which are good rhino habitat have been destroyed, giving way to settlements and cultivated fields.

The Nepalese population in 1974 was 12 million and in 1996 it is almost 18 million. Now it is 27 million. The humans multiply despite the so-called family-planning programmes that are publicised in Radio Nepal and Nepal Television, in the Gorkhapatra and The Rising Nepal. The movements of the rhinos and other animals in their original home grounds of the Terai (lowlands) have been restricted, so that they move after dark: stealthily, warily, over areas which used to be previously grassland and dense jungle. Nevertheless, there's one thing that gladdens all conservationists and animal lovers alike, is that the Nepalese rhinos are opportunists and surprisingly adaptable, utilising a wide range of food.

With proper wildlife management, the rhinos of Chitwan have increased in number. And rhinoceroses have also been translocated from the Chitwan Valley to the Royal Bardiya Wildlife Reserve. In order to reintroduce a part of the endangered species in another part of the country and to provide them with an alternate habitat, and as an insurance against any unforseen catastrophe that could infect the rhino population in any particular area. The translocation might also help reduce the conflicts between the need for protecting the endangered species(and their gene pool)and the Nepalese villagers living in the periphery of the Nationalal Parks.It took 16 hours to bring the rhinos from Chitwan to Bardiya, and was a major success. The WWF(USA) gave a helping hand to the Nepalese, and tranquillising equipment and other support were provided by the Smithsonian Institute.

But there's no need to be complacent, since the rhinos may succumb if disease broke out among them, for despite their thick armour, they are just as fragile as humans inside, as far as immunity is concerned. The most appropriate measure would be to move the villages from the Park area and to compensate the Nepalese villagers adequately through organisations like the WWF, World Bank or whatever, so that the wildlife may not have to encroach upon paddy fields at night. After all it is the human beings who have been encroaching upon the territory of the 'wild' animals, and not the other way round. The rhinos move in relation to the food, and when there is a stiff competition for food from wildlife, domesticated animals and the local people, migration to another territory is inevitable. The National Parks and Wildlife Office and the KMTNC need to be more vigilant in preventing human encroachment and poaching for furs and aphrodisiacs at the cost of rare animals which are a natural heritage, worth preserving.

On the one hand you have the government and conservationists passing laws that the Chitwan jungle be declared a National Park, so the dollar-paying tourists can stay in so-called jungle-lodges and go on photo-safaris on the backs of elephants through the thick elephant grass and drink campari or bourbon-on-the-rocks. And on the other hand, you have the farmers and villagers of the Chitwan area, who are endangered by the wild animals of the National Parks, because the wild animals (elephants, rhinos, tigers, leopards) not only come at night looking for fodder (rice, bananas, maize) and easy prey in the form of domestic animals, but also enjoy the protection of the National Park Rangers and, therefore, of the government.

The Chitwan Park covers 93,200 hectares and comprises also the flood plains of the Rapti, Reu and Narayani Rivers. The confrontation between the wildlife and humans in the jungle areas is pre-programmed. In 1974 there were approximately 400 rhinoceros and 70 tigers in Chitwan Park. According to a recent report published in July 31, 2006 the population of the endangered one-horned rhino in Chitwan has dropped from more than 500 six years ago to around 370. Three one-horned rhinos were killed and one wounded by poachers in around Chitwan National Park in south-western Nepal in the last week of July 2006.

It can only be hoped that the Nepal Terai Ecology Project's attempts to make solar-powered electrical fences to keep the rhinoceros out of the farm lands will be a help, though prowling big cats don't make much of such man-made hinderances.

Wildlife versus Humans: The KMTNC has in the past also initiated a grassland Ecology and Human Use project in collaboration with the International Institute of Environment and Development (USA). An American biologist named John Lemkhul made an in-depth study of the grassland ecosystem in Nepal, and the project proposed to develop a management scheme for the thatch grass that is vital for local human needs.

A Nepali grassland expert Keshav Rajbhandari from the Department of Botany also took part as a consultant. The study revealed that the Chitwan Park was providing over 15 million rupees indirectly to the village economy by permitting the local villagers to cut grass in the park for two weeks every year. It was found that 90,000 Nepalese enter the park during the two week season. The cutters are legally allowed to cut khar, kharai, bayo and smiti. The villagers walked up to 3km to get to the park and up to four members of a family helped to cut the grass. Even the Nepalese villagers need an entry permit to cut grass.

But at night, when the wild animals start plundering the crops, the farmers become angry, and try to drive them away. Moreover, there have been tragic episodes enough to fill volumes, whereby the village children and women have been attacked by the wild animals. The Rising Nepal and the Gorkhapatra, two Kathmandu-based governmental English and Nepali dailies, bring out such tragic news often enough. The humans living in the vicinity of the National Parks, that goes not only for Chitwan but also Langtang, Bardia, Rara, Sagarmatha (Everest) National Parks, are tempted to go to the Parks with their lush green grass and vegetation to gather firewood and fodder for their domestic animals. This phenomenon is also evident in the Darjeeling area, despite the forest-officers on duty. Where there's poverty and an acute dearth of firewood, there's always a way out of the desperate situation, mostly through illegal means.

It's not uncommon to read in the pages of The Rising Nepal about the call to "Propagate the Nature Conservation Message" and about the heavy responsibilities of the wardens in the preservation and effective management of Nepal's national parks and wildlife reserves. And in the same daily you have the story of how wild elephants terrorised and destroyed some thatched houses and saplings in Morang district, and how a village assembly member named Khadga Bahadur Ale was crushed to death while travelling from Letang to Kane through a forest.Or the story of a four year old girl named Sita Devi Paudel of a village in Dhikurpokhari who had been suffering from diarrhoea and was carried away by a tiger around 8:30pm and the next day only some part of the girl's body were found in the nearby jungle.

Meanwhile, there was another story about wild elephants on the rampage from the Sunsari district, where they'd destroyed the thatched huts of 12 families in the Baraha Chetra villege. And in the hamlet of Bishnu Paduka four cows and two domestic swines had been killed and some goats injured by the wild elephants. Another caption tells the story of how the man-eater leopard which had attacked many children in the Kaski district was killed by a single bullet fired by Ram Bahadur Tamang, a resident of Chapakot village in Lalitpur district. The leopard was 4.5 feet long, and had been terrorising the children belonging to the hamlets of Hemaja, Dhita, Kaskikot, Dhikurpokhari, Bhadauremagi and Sarankot.

The story reminded me of the German TV film entitled "Danger in the Rapti" by Max Rehbein, who's protagonist was Hemanta Mishra, a Nepalese wildlife expert, who likes to hear Beatles songs, in the role of a swashbuckling local Jungle Jim, in which he shot a man-eater and smoked a cigarette with the thankful village headman, for want of a peace-pipe. Hemanta Mishra used to work in the wildlife office in the early 1970s and ran the King Mahendra Trust for Nature Conservation, and was awarded the J. Paul Getty Prize for Natural Protection. He worked for the UNO later in New York.

Another story deals with a leopard which killed ten children, aged 3 to 13, in the hamlets of Dhimal, Bhadaure, Tamagi and Sarankot. A small 3 year old girl named Maya Adhikari of Malang village in the Sarankot district was snatched away from her mother as she was being washed in front of her house at 7pm on a Sunday. No wonder that the local people living in the vicinity of the National Parks feel insecure and few villagers venture out of their homes after sunset. The tigers turn into man-eaters only when then become old, are injured or have lost their habitat. The question is: Do the tigers encroach into the habitats of the Nepalese villagers or is it the other way around? To date there are 13 national protected areas comprising more than 9% of the total land area in Nepal. According to the Save the Tiger Fund report, the situation of the tiger in Chitwan is optimistic and their numbers are increasing and their habitats are improving. The number of elephants are also on the rise and provided that poaching is curbed, the numbers of rhinos will definitely increase in the future in Nepal.

The situation may take a positive trend if the Nepalese farmers plant trees, for only a fourth of the forest wealth of Nepal has remained intact. The reason is that in the year 1967, the then Nepalese government nationalised vast forest areas in the country. And after that the Nepalese farmers didn't feel obliged and responsible for the forests and started cutting down trees without second thoughts. In order to combat this, the Nepalese government introduced in 1979 the village-forest, the state-forest and the so-called protected-forest.

Old eco-song & dwindling habitats: "Nepal's wealth is the forest, said our ancestors" runs an eco-melody over Radio Nepal, but the vast tracts of forests have been encroached upon by people looking for agricultural-land. With the Nepalese forests dwindling, there is an increasing pressure in the remaining forests which have been declared National Parks, and are protected by the government.

There's no denying that there's a struggle for habitats between the wildlife and the humans in the vicinity of the National Parks of Nepal, as elsewhere in the world. As long as the Nepalese government and its apparatus, the wildlife offices, are active and educate and warn the people and nab the poachers, there might be hope for Nepal's wildlife. But can more wardens and wildlife management help in a country where the population has been steadily increasing, and where there's a dearth of arable land, and thus the competition and habitat encroachment on the part of the wildlife as well as humans in the limited living space in Nepal?

The 104 year old misrule in the past under the Rana heredity Prime Ministers, and the defunct Panchayat government, and the later administrative mistakes on the part of different governments, have led to the reduction in the number of flora and fauna in Nepal, not to speak of the forests which were prized for trees like the karma for furniture, sal in the foothills of the Churai chain for construction purposes. And sadly enough, Nepal needs 7.5 million tons of newly planted trees per annum if it is to avoid shortages.

At this stage I shall have to tell the story of a big game hunter-turned-conservationist. He came to Nepal in 1960,when there were a lot of tigers and no tourists. The tigers were shot till they became almost rare.

Today there are a little more than 60 tigers at Chitwan Park. Some In the year 1999 the number of tourists who visited Nepal were registered as 492,000 but due to the decade of armed conflict between the government troops and the Maoists some 13,000 Nepalese, mostly civilians, died. The tourists were advised not to go to Nepal and the number of visitors sank to 277,000 in 2005. The tourists were obliged to pay a “tax” to the Maoists.

Although over 15,000 tourists come each year to the Terai, the tiger population has nevertheless increased since then. The British banker named Jim Edwards (Tiger Tops) is supposed to have brought about this wonder. He organised jungle tours, wild water trips and trekking in the Himalayas, complete with climbing equipment: all for dollars naturally, because you cannot live in the Himalayas without money, and he has a beautiful residence in Kathmandu, a luxury apartment in London, and a domicile in posh St. Moritz. And till 1960 he was busy making money by organising big game Safaris. And since a couple of decades it's been ecology and tourism.

Protected Wildlife: The growth of the population in the Terai area and elsewhere in the Middle mountains of Nepal, which shows an increment of 2.6 per cent does and will exert a lasting pressure upon the wildlife and vegetation of Nepal in the long run. And these are the questions that will pose serious problems for the country in the future. For with the construction of new roads, establishment of new industries and lodges and hotels for the foreign tourists, the country expects an industrial and tourist-boom that might disturb the ecological balance of this beautiful biotope that is Nepal, with its diverse flora, fauna, landscapes and ethno-cultural rarities.

Meanwhile, the protected wildlife of Nepal has been divided into 38 species falling under the three classes of mammals, birds and reptiles. The National Park and Wildlife Conservation Act has put 26 species of mammals, 9 species of birds and three species of reptiles in the wildlife protection list (1993). The protected mammals are: the red monkey, hispid rabbit, wolf, red panda, hyena, lynx, tiger, wild elephant, small boar, stags, yak-nak, "napon", "salak", "sonru", the Himlayan red bear, "lingsang", "charibagh", leopard, the snow leopard, the rhinoceros, the musk deer, gaurigai, wild buffalo, "chiru" and "chapeka".

The birds in the protected list are: the stork, orane, Lopophorus impejanus (Nepal's national bird), "garmujur", the great pelican, the white stork, "chir", the munal pheasant and the "sano swar mujur"(peacock with the small voice). The list of protected reptiles include: the python,"sungohari" and the gharial.

After the establishments of National Parks in Nepal a number of projects were started: the Nepal Terai Ecology Project, the Snow Leopard Project, the Barun Valley Project, the Annapurna Project, International Workshops on the National Parks, Rhino translocation to India, the Nepal National Conservation Strategy, the Gharial Conservation project to name a few. The Smithsonian Institute (USA) helped start the Nepal Tiger Ecology Project in the 1974 and then decided to change the name of the project to "Nepal Terai Ecology Project" and expand the research activities "beyond the tiger."

One can only hope that the delicate balance between the Maoists and government troops will be set aside, and the poaching will be curbed in due time in one of the most beautiful National Parks of the world. For Nepal’s National Parks are worth a visit. The romantic sunsets, the cries of the wild in the jungle nearby, the adventurous hotels and modern amenities for the visitors from abroad, and the friendliness of the Nepalese people from different ethnic backgrounds.

I still hear the frivolous melody Resam piriri played by a Nepali boy with a flute in the Terai, Nepal’s lowland, and it reminds me of the wonderful people I met during my sojourn in my Himalayan country, be they Tharus, Rais, Magars, Gurungs, Tamangs, Chettris and Bahuns or Newars. I still see their smiling faces and their kind words, despite the decade of hardships, terror, intimidation and uncertainty. I admire their inborn desire to survive all these human-made obstacles and misery, to keep a stiff upper lip, and the hope and faith that they have in the Gods and Goddesses of Kathmandu, and Nepal in general.

In diesem Sinne: Jai Nepal, Waldmannsheil, Namaste from the Black Forest!

December 19, 2007 | 2:14 AM Comments  0 comments
Tags:


Governance in the Himalayas, corruption, nepotism, development, destruction, hope for future
Related to country: Nepal
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic


Memoir: MY VILLAGE DREAMS (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

Once upon a time there was a kingdom in the Himalayas called Nepal. People in the outside world also called it the Land of the Sherpas, the Land of Yetis and Yaks, the Land of the famous Gurkhas and the Land of the highest mountains in the world. It was ruled by a Gorkha king named Prithvi Narayan Shah, who in 1768 brought the different kingdoms together through his conquests. The rise of the House of Gorkhas (Shah dynasty) has endured since 238 years till November 21,2006.

In 1974, I happened to be a part of a scenario known as the ‘Back to the Village Campaign.’ It was a strange sight in the mountain kingdom of Nepal, which was a forbidden land twenty-four years ago. University professors, lecturers, bank managers, His Majesty’s section officers and other cadres, who normally barked at peons or paleys in the offices of His Majesty’s Government to bring them tea and snacks from the nearby tea-shops, were digging with shovels, lifting stones, plastering up the stone blocks with cement. The place was a remote locality of the Balambu village pan­chayat. And the motley crowd of workers were urbanised white-collar job-holders and citizens of Nepal, working shoulder to shoulder with their rural brothers under the ‘Go to the Village National Campaign’.

The national campaign had a branch office at Balambu, which was located 18-kilometres from Kathmandu along the Kathmandu-Thankot road. In 1975, with a view to enable one to acquire first-hand knowledge regarding the progress made by the government and semi-government workers in the development tasks of the village panchayats in the suburbs of Kathmandu Valley, a couple of journalists from the pro-government media: The Rising Nepal, Gorkhapatra and Radio Nepal were invited to take part in a surprise whirlwind tour of these areas. The ten pan­chayats where the Go to the Village National Campaign was being implemented in the valley were: Naikab-Nayabhanjyang, Purano Bhanjyang, Saritartha, Machhegaon, Mahadevsthan, Thankot, Dahachowk - Chowketar and Ward-Bhanjyang.

The Go to the Village Campaign was the brainchild of King Mahendra, the father of King Gyanendra Shah, and was launched in the Nepalese month of Pousch 1, 2024 (Nepalese calender). The National Campaign was intended to mobilise the masses, taking into consideration the fact that Nepal was predominantly an agriculture-based country. A country where the village forms the most important unit. And every village had its five elders who so-to-say ran the village.

It was believed in the palace circles, and in the panchayat government, that if there was to be an awakening at all in the country, it had to come from the rural masses of Nepal, and a so-called tentative ten-point programme was implemented in the villages of the kingdom, in which His Majesty’s civil servants, students and workers from the urban areas were deputed to go to the villages and help ‘to strengthen and popularise the sentiment of nationalism and national unity’. Nepal’s masses were to be acquainted with the Panchayat Democracy, and thereby develop and further strengthen it.

The panchas at the grassroot-level were required to stick to the principles of the non-aligned foreign policy that the country had adopted, a far sighted policy of the ruling Shah dynasty to maintain their power. As long as you were non-aligned, you could rule a kingdom as you pleased, and there were no allies who’d look over the shoulder and protest when human and other rights were misused. The Kingdom of Nepal had always been a special case as far as geo-politics were concerned. India had a patronising attitude towards Nepal because it was the only Hindu Kingdom, and India’s Hindus and Buddhists flocked to Kathmandu’s holy temples like Pashupati and Swayambhu. After all the Goddess Sita from the Ramayana came from the Nepalese town of Janakpur. Moreover, Gautama Buddha was a prince from Lumbini, another place of pilgrimage for the Buddhists and Hindus. Thanks to the assistance of Japan’s Zen and Shinto Buddhists, Lumbini is an attractive place now.

A campaign was to be started against corruption, injustice, oppression and bungling of works that were of national reverence. The campaign was to make the village population active and conscious. Efforts were to be made to render assistance for the successful implementation of the existing land-reforms, civil code, social reforms and development works which had a national bearing. The idea of cooperatives was to be expanded and propagated. The people were to be made aware of the importance of the forests and wildlife, and were to be encouraged to plant tree-saplings. Since agriculture was the mainstay of the country, agricultural output was to be given greater priority. Cottage industries were to be encouraged and extended in keeping with the blueprint of the national campaign.

All this was the gist of the Go to the Village National Campaign, which a Nepalese linguist named Tara Nath Sharma once dubbed as ‘an echo of Mao Zedong’s repressive measure of closing down the universities and sending teachers, intellectuals and writers to villages for mandatory manual labour during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.’

Showcase villages were taken as examples and the development under the Panchayat government shown to the media. Prior to the implementation of the National Campaign, modern medical facilities were unheard of in a village like Satungal and the local popula­tion had to resort to the shamans of the village, who would practice their ‘strange, archaic, unscientific, mysterious and useless occult art on the simple taboo-ridden villagers (sic).’ The exorcists and shamans didn’t demand money for their services, but the villagers paid them in kind, by sacrificing their best roosters, goats and other animals.

Things slowly changed and a dispensary was set up by the local unit of the Campaign, and the doctors started coming on a three-day rotation to the village and treated the patients. Sample medicines were distributed ‘whenever possible’ (most of the time it wasn’t possible), and the dispensary trained volunteers from the ten panchayats of the area as health assistants. Some of the diseases that were (and still are) common tend to be: ascariasis, hepatitis, colitis, amoebiasis and malnutrition in general. The villagers talked about the family-planning programme, which was also active in the hamlet and the rural population of the village had been vaccinated.

At Chowkitar village, a farmer showed the patch where he was growing pear, plum and peach from the seeds provided by the Campaign and which had been distributed by the local panchayat office. I had the impression that simple Nepalese villagers didn’t know that the seeds that were distributed by their respective panchayats could be used by them, and they’d be free to make a profit out of the produce. Nobody had told them anything about it. There was an unspoken loathing on the part of the villagers, when it came to interactions with the government officials. Many farmers seemed to have the notion that the products obtained through the use of go­vernment seeds would be confiscated.

That the villagers were fully aware of the importance of the forests was amply evident in the higher reaches of the villages, for the mountains were dotted with saplings of Pinus roxburghii. The saplings were, of course, provided by the Department of Forestry, and the planting was done exclusively by the Campaign workers. The farmers were too ap­prehensive about the consequences of bureaucratic involvement. Soil erosion, which has been a prime factor for the lessening of yield in the remote areas of Nepal, can be checked to a considerable extent through the much-publicised tree-planting ventures. The Nepalese farmers were shown films of the royal family King Birendra, Queen Aishwarya, Crown Prince Dipendra, and the other two princes Gyanendra and Dhirendra planting saplings in different regions of Nepal to the accompaniment of the ironical song ‘Nepal ko dhana, hariyo bana’ (Nepal’s wealth is its forests).

If, for instance, there was a conflict regarding land-ownership- rights in the Eastern part of Nepal, as in the case of my college-friend Karki, the petition had to be filed in front of the Narayanhiti Royal Palace as a last instance of justice on earth. Even though Mr. Karki was educated in a college in Kathmandu, and could read and write in Nepali and English, he was obliged to have a petition filed, and written, by an official petition-writer, whose duty was to write a letter in longhand with sentences that were standard examples in circumlocution and archaic, courtly, subservient manners of expression. Having paid the writer for his trouble and artistry, one had to leave the matter to the Gods, and wait and pray that it be heard somewhere in the chambers of the spacious, modern Narayanhiti palace. For Vishnu, who is also called Budanilkantha in Nepal, reposes on his bed of serpents in the primeval waters, couldn’t be bothered with such earthly matters. Vishnu’s preserving and restoring power has, in the past, been manifested to the world in a variety of forms through his incarnations.

During a visit to Lalitput I met Tschering Lama, a lean, bespectacled, restaurant-owner, who’d bought a plot of land smack on the shore of the beautiful Phewa Lake in Pokhara (Central Nepal). He was extremely proud of his new acquisition. Sometime later, when he actually wanted to build a house on his patch of virgin Nepalese earth, he came to know that the land definitely hadn’t belonged to the man he’d bought it from, and that his purchase document wasn’t worth a rupee. The land was the property of the Royal Family, and as such, not for sale to the commoners.

Mr. Lama was awfully disappointed, frustrated and depressed, because his life-savings had gone in this bargain. He’d had plans to build a lodge for the foreign tourists and also cater to their gastronomic delights. And there he was, a broken man with a glum expression on his face. He did have his smart attitude though, and that’s one trait I really admire among the Nepalese from the mountains. They keep a stiff upper lip.

You can see this smartness even under desperate situations amongst the hill-tribes and the Gurkha war-veterans from Flanders to the Falklands. The Nepalese are indeed a stoic, proud and sympathetic people, and a visitor to Nepal notices it, and learns to cherish it after a journey in the teeming cities, crowded trains and blazing plains of the Indian subcontinent. If you’ve had the pleasure of travelling around in India with its maddening crowds, a visit to Nepal can be so exhilarating. Due to the tourism trade, the tourist or traveller might be pestered by curio-sellers and money-changers in Kathmandu’s famous Freak Street (Jochhey Tole, as the Newars call it) and at the bazaars in Thamel. But the people in the countryside are grateful if, and when, they have visitors. These visitors were, before the tourists came en masse, travellers, ascetic holy men (sadhus), monks and pilgrims, or trading Thakalis and Tibetans with mule and yak caravans, and it was normal for the travellers to be questioned about their heritage, caste, birthplace and so forth.

A Nepalese invariably asks, ‘tapaiko jat kay ho?’ Which caste do you belong to? This is because the caste-system and tribe-clans are well-established in Nepal, and every Nepalese name also bears evidence to his or her caste or tribe. For instance: Birendra Bahadur Karki. The first name is this case is Birendra, and then comes ‘Bahadur’, which means ‘courageous’ because all Nepalese males would like their sons to be brave and courageous. And finally ‘Karki’, which denotes that the person belongs to the sub-caste of the Chettris, the second highest order in the Nepalese Hindu hierarchy.

The life of a Hindu, from birth till his remains are turned to ashes, is saturated with religion. Everything he or she does, even eating and drinking, is connected with a religious ceremony. Whereas India has thrown away the shackles of colonialism, as well as the privilege of hundreds of Rajas and Maharajas, because it is a secular state in accordance to its constitution, Nepal still remains Hindu, perhaps due to the fact that its doors were closed to the outside world, and foreign influence kept at bay. But in this Himalayan enclave which has been conserved by dynasties of Shah kings and Ranas who usurped the throne, there are also other ethnic Nepalese who practice other religions, like Buddhism, Animism, Islam etc. India has solved the problems of underprivileged tribes and castes by giving them the status of ‘scheduled’ and has created scholarships from the school-level to the University level.

The reason why the Maobadis under Pushpa Kamal Dahal, alias Comrade Prachandra, became stronger in West Nepal (Rukum, Rolpa, Jajarkot und Salyan) was because of Nepal’s general poverty, corruption, nepotism and lack of perspective. Only a small section of the Nepalese population benefited from the schools, colleges und universities and the blessing of Nepal-aid from foreign countries and mountain-tourism. The Maobadis are fighting now for the banishment of monarchy and removal of the feudal structures in the society.

In Nepal it was always difficult for a poor dalit (lower caste) or someone from the hill-tribes to set foot in Kathmandu, and give them a good education. It is a sad fact that only the rich can send their children to the best English schools in Kathmandu, Darjeeling, Kalimpong or Gorakhpur. The rest of the Nepalese parents sent their children to the government-run schools, where the standard of education was miserable. Nevertheless, thousands of Nepalese students pass their School Leaving Certificate exams and go to colleges and universities, with an English handicap.

In the Hindu society of Nepal, the King has always been the patriarch, who swears to his descent from ancient Vedic heroes who were worshipped by the people. A Newsweek interview with the former King Birendra Shah also didn’t help to throw new light into this ancient tradition, for His Majesty coughed up a diplomatic reply and that was it. The Bada Raj Guru, a Brahmin, was the first State Minister in ancient times, though the Nepalese Raj Guru has still retained his power, because in this Hindu set-up every governmental or stately decision is associated with a religious ceremony. For instance when the King of Nepal leaves his Narayanhiti Palace and visits his own country or other countries, the court astrologer is consulted to choose an auspicio­us day. The King is for the Hindus, not only the protector and preserver of ancient Hindu culture, but is also a manifestation of tradition and development in the Hindu world.

In September 1995, I was astonished how far the winds of democracy had swayed into Kathmandu valley. In Kathmandu Valley there are three former kingdoms: Kathmandu, Bhaktapur (Bhadgaon) and Patan (Lalitpur). At the Rato Bangala, an elite school in Patan smack in the middle of the Sri Durbar, run by a dear family I personally know, I had the privilege of taking part at a school theatre and there were parents and guests from Kathmandu’s upper society. A literary natak (play) in Nepali was staged, in which the protagonists played the role of the people of Kirtipur during the times of Prithivi Narayan Shah. The entire play was from the viewpoint of the besieged and cheated Kirtipurians, and not from the angle of the attacking and marauding Gorkha king in 1768.

I found it rather innovative and courageous on the part of Patan’s man-of-letters Mr. Kamal Mani Dixit, in comparison to the pre-democracy days when everything was controlled, and lips feared to speak about human rights and democra­cy. The people of Kirtipur had put up a brilliant fight in those days, but were defeated, and the males of this brave kingdom, located on a hillock near the Tribhuvan University, had to pay a terrible price. The Shah king ordered the lips and ears of the Kirtipurians to be cut. Only the traditional wind-instrument players retained their lips and ears. It was a bloody affair with a huge pile of lips and ears. The barbaric treatment meted out to the Kirtipurians spread like wildfire in the other parts of Kathmandu Valley and soon Patan, Bhaktapur and Kathmandu fell.

If you are planning to go to Nepal soon, do visit the brave town of Kirtipur, near Kathmandu. The triple-roofed Bagh Bhairab temple walls in Kirtipur are still decorated with swords and shields of the Kirtipurian troops defeated by Prithivi Narayan Shah’s victorious Gorkha army. There is also an image of Vishnu astride the Garuda. Underneath you’ll see the elephant-headed God Ganesh and Kumar. The Nepalese king is also revered as an incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu. I don’t want to sound like Borat, but blood sacrifices are made on two auspicious days: Tuesday and Saturday mornings. Another place in Kathmandu valley where such blood-sacrifices are made is in the temple of the Southern-Kali, where the Nepalese cook their lunch and have a feast after the temple visit.

I had a chance to meet King Birendra at the reception in La Redoute (Bonn) and had a small talk with such niceties as ‘How long are you in Germany? When are you returning?’ At the Graf Zeppelin Hotel in Stuttgart and Echterdingen airport, where I had the opportunity of handing Queen Ayeshwarya, who was a fellow poet despite her cruel role during the democracy revolution in 1990, a bouquet of flowers which I’d brought along from Freiburg im Breisgau. The late Madame Busak, the Stuttgarter Royal Nepalese honorary consul, was also there, in addition to Herrn Späth, the then Minister-Präsident of Baden-Württemberg. The Nepalese anthem never sounded more nostalgic then, and the traditionally quaint, triangular Hindu Nepalese flags fluttered in Stuttgart’s windy airport as the Bundesgrenzschutz played the Nepalese and German anthems.

In the meantime, Nepal’s multi-party government and the Maobadis have signed a peace accord and declared a formal end to a ten-year war of terror that killed more than 13,000 Nepalese. The agreement paves the way for the Maoists to give up their weapons and be confined to UN-monitored camps. An assembly will draft a new constitution and decide the future of the King Gyanendra Shah’s dynasty as the monarch of Nepal.

One thing is definite: the Maoists and the other communists don’t want the 200 year old monarchy anymore. What is encouraging, and curious, is that they have vowed to honor the outcome, even if the assembly decides to maintain a ceremonial monarch, stripped of his powers. A new wind blows in the Himalayas. Will the Maobadis give up all their arms like the Khampas (Tibetan freedom fighters from Eastern Tibet who’d come to Langtang) did in 1974, after they were confronted by the Royal Gurkhas? With a little bit of monitoring from the UN and Swiss officers, it might be possible to fill up a few containers, but will all the Maobadis surrender their arms? We can only hope and trust them to do so.

What will happen to the angry, restless, mobilised Maobadi fighters and child soldiers? Will they go back to their schools, if not destroyed, or for treatment in case they are traumatised? Will there be social programs for those who suffered under the atrocities of the government troops and the Maobadis? There’s a lot to be done in this country under the shadow of the Himalayas. Will it be a back to the village dream, after the triumphal march of the Maobadis into Kathmandu, heads and hands smeared with red vermilion powder and automatic guns in their hands? Or will the new government use the manpower resources by mobilising and subliming their youthful energies, towards the development of new jobs and a new economy?

Copyright © 2007 Satis Shroff, Freiburg

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About the Author: Satis Shroff is a writer and poet based in Freiburg (poems, fiction, non-fiction) who also writes on ethno-medical, culture-ethnological themes. He has studied Zoology and Botany in Nepal, Medicine and Social Science in Germany and Creative Writing in Freiburg and Manchester. He describes himself as a mediator between western and eastern cultures and sees his future as a writer and poet. Satis Shroff was awarded the German Academic Exchange Prize.

Writing experience: Satis Shroff contributes regularly articles and stories to www.Americanchronicle.com with its 21 affiliated US newspapers. He has written two language books on the Nepali language for DSE (Deutsche Stiftung für Entwicklungsdienst) & Horlemannverlag, and an anthology of poems (www.Lulu.com). He has written three feature articles in the Munich-based Nelles Verlag’s ‘Nepal’ on the Himalayan Kingdom’s Gurkhas, sacred mountains and Nepalese symbols and on Hinduism in ‘Nepal: Myths & Realities (Book Faith India) and his poem ‘Mental Molotovs’ was published in epd-Entwicklungsdienst (Frankfurt). He has written many articles in The Rising Nepal, The Christian Science Monitor, the Independent, the Fryburger, Swatantra Biswa (USIS publication, Himal Asia, 3Journal Freiburg, top ten rated poems in www.nepalforum.com (I dream, Oleron, an Unforgettable Isle, A Flight to the Himalayas, Which Witch in Germany?, Fatal Decision, Santa Fe, Nirmala, Between Terror and Ecstasy, The Broken Poet, Himalaya: Menschen und Mythen, A Gurkha Mother, Kathmandu is Nepal, My Nepal, Quo vadis?). Articles, book-reviews and poems in, www.isj.com, www.inso.org., www.nepalikhabar.com. Please also search www.google & www.yahoo under: Satis Shroff.

December 17, 2007 | 5:47 AM Comments  0 comments


A sojourn in Europe of a young female teacher from the Himalayas
Related to country: Germany
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Kathmandu Blues: THE LAND OF THE GREY-EYED (Satis Shroff)


‘Mom, I’ve received an invitation from Raj. I’m going to Germany!’

Saraswati’s mother, who had just finished her morning puja1 and meditation in her house-altar, and was carrying a copper plate with tika and other offerings, replied rather shocked, ‘Germany? Why on earth do you want to go to Germany? All those terrible skinheads and neonazis! How could you do such a thing? Didn’t you see the horrid pictures in Nepal TV and BBC? And the sad letters that your brother Raj wrote to us? It’s sad enough to have a son living abroad and now you want to leave your country, your matribhumi2.’

Saraswati tried to comfort her mother and said, ‘ But mom, I’m not leaving my country forever. I’ll just do a bit of sight-seeing and return home.’

‘Your brother also went to study and came back with a memsahib as a buhari3. Not that I have anything against Claudia, she’s a decent daughter-in-law, but I’m worried about you. You’re a young girl, and not a man. Think of the dangers in a foreign country’.

‘Mom, you can’t worry about everybody all your life. In my absence you could live with Sandhya and her family in Biratnagar.’

‘Please don’t mention Biratnagar,’ replied Mayadevi disdainfully.

‘You know that I can’t bear the beastly heat down there in the Terai. I am a pahari4 woman. All those cockroaches, lizards, snakes and pesky mosquitoes. No thank you. I prefer to live here in Kathmandu and battle with the bad air, rising prices of vegetables, change of governments and so forth.’

Mayadevi blessed her daughter by applying a scarlet tika on her forehead and went on to admonish her. ‘Let me read what Raj wrote about Germany’. And with that she went to her bedroom took out a letter from a bundle of blue-and-red striped airmail envelopes and put on her reading glasses.

‘Mom, I’ve also read the letters quite a few times.’

‘And you still want to go to Germany? A country where 45,000 Nepalese soldiers died in trenches in the two World Wars ?’

It took weeks to pacify her mother but finally Deviji resigned to her fate and moaned, ‘Perhaps it is my tagdir. Perhaps the Gods will it this way.’

And so it was on a lazy Saturday afternoon in June that Saraswati out to board the jet that was to take her to Germany. There was a haze over Kathmandu, obscuring the normally picturesque blue Mahabharat Mountains girdling the valley. The Himalayas weren't visible either.

A Nepalese policeman with a walkie-talkie was strutting on the tarmac of Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport rather importantly. The mobile staircase sped away from the belly of RNAC's Frankfurt-bound 747 jet. The engines began to purr and whistle to a crescendo. Saraswati peered out of the jet-window to catch a glimpse of Surendra and Rani, who'd come to see her off, in vain. Surendra was a college friend with whom her brother had lived at the Amrit Science College hostel in Thamel. They had gone to school in the Darjeeling district and both of them came from Eastern Nepal. They’d done their Intermediate in Science from Ascol and had stayed on in Kathmandu to do their Bachelor's degrees. After college Surendra had gone to Australia for higher studies and her brother had gone to Germany on a scholarship, but they’d remained good friends. Whereas Surendra had returned to Kathmandu and had married and built a house, her brother had settled down in Germany.

Inside, two experienced sari-clad stewardesses, with rich glistening jet-black hair, began to show the passengers the routine safety and emergency gadgets. A moustachioed Nepalese steward started along the aisle with a bamboo basket full of bon-bons, a curt commercial smile on his round face. The jet headed for the northern end of the runway, swerved around, came screaming down towards the southern approach and left the ground.

There was a time when this same airport was described as being the size of a handkerchief. Some handkerchief, with DC-10, Jumbo-Boeings and Airbuses landing all the time, not to speak of the internal-flights of RNAC, Necon, Nepal Airways and so forth.


The sun was going down in the Mahabharat mountains and the clouds appeared yellowish, with orange taints. Through a break in the clouds you could see the lights of Kathmandu winking at you, and glittering as though myriads of gemstones were scattered from the heavens by Manjushri5.

And suddenly Saraswati saw the Himalayas: majestic and breathtaking. It certainly is one thing to look at the snows from below, but quite another to peer at them from above. Snowy clouds appeared and then a meandering river and behold, the Himalayas, those tectonic giants.

There were orange tipped mountains in the distance because the sun was setting and you recognised Mt. Langtang instantly with its broad conical peak. Further to the west another massif: the Ganesh Himal, and then the Manaslu and Himalchuli. Far out, sticking out like the tail-fin of a fish, the Machapuchare, followed by the still higher Annapurna South. But Saraswati’s thoughts were elsewhere.

She was thinking about the wonderful Nepalese friends she was leaving behind. She thought about her sister Sandhya and her traditional presents meant for her brother. Her mother Deviji, who'd insisted on sending a radish -chutney (pickel) and some expensive Nepalese rugs. She had no idea that an air-passenger was permitted to take only 20 kilos of baggage. How could she, anyway? She'd never flown in her life.

She'd travelled with her husband throughout the India subcontinent by train and bus and had often been to Bombay and Calcutta, and naturally to places of pilgrimage from Hardwar in the north to Kanyakumari in the south, and naturally to Benaras and Mathura to bathe in the holy, but hopelessly polluted Ganges. She'd seen a lot of US air-planes flying sorties to the jungles of Burma against the Japanese during the Second World War, when she spent her holidays in Assam with her grandma and grandpa. Grandpa used to run coal-mines in Assam and was rather influential and entertained the British gorasahibs6 and their memsahibs by organising hunts in the Terai for them, and was also known for his parties.

Deviji was a child then, and cherished and treasured a green toothbrush an American fighter-pilot had given her as a parting present, before he went on a mission and never came back. The Japanese must have got him in Mandalay.

‘We're flying over Lucknow city, fine weather, ninety degrees Fahrenheit,’ cut in the captain. Then came the usual Nepalese and western music. And in next to no time they were soaring over Delhi and headed for the United Arab Emirate.

Lunch was an orgy with shiek kababs, tuna and dessert. And the dinner was a cinch. Saraswati sat near a small woman from Sikkim named Nirmala who'd been invited to Germany by her German boy-friend. She'd only seen him a year ago in Gangtok. And here she was with mixed emotions, for the first time in a big jet that was hurtling through foreign skies taking her to a destination and fate that was unknown. She had no idea what Germany was like, the German language, leave alone life in Germany. It was a big question mark. She was trying to hope for the best and to make the best of it. Saraswati thought, at least she had the assurance that her brother would be waiting at the other end, for she'd sent him a fax through Surendra’s NGO office and had telephoned with him.

A Sikkimese male, a Lepcha, was sitting next to her and he answered her questions put in Nepali, in English. He was one of those convent-educated brown sahibs, who took pride in speaking English and even humming the latest MTV-hits, oblivious of politics, culture, tradition and religion. An orientation towards the west without any objective criticism. But Saraswati preferred a sympathetic Sikkimese to an arrogant Bhutanese official, especially after they threw out thousands of Bhutanese of Nepalese origin, and Nepal has been taking care of them ever since.

The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel once called Bhutan’s King Jigme ‘a buddhistic ecological dictator which takes pride as a model-nation of the Himalayas.’ The poorer section of the Bhutanese people are just as innocent, unspoilt, honest-to-God like the Nepalese. It’s only that the King of Bhutan and his government approve of subtle, medieval, undemocratic methods in their dealings with the Nepalese, creating thereby tragic problems for thousands of Nepalese, instead of letting them live according to their own ancient Nepalese traditions and customs. On the other hand, Bhutan isn’t exactly, what one might call, a democratic state. What the King of Bhutan and his Foreign Minister have precisely done is shove their Bhutanese ethnicity and bureaucratic ideals and values down the throats of the so-called Lhotsampas.7 A policy of live and let live would have been appropriate in that Himalayan Kingdom. Bhutan doesn’t seem to have learned and absorbed much from the teachings of Buddha. One thing that Bhutan understands is tourism management.

When the passengers alighted at the United Arab Emirate, Saraswati and Nirmala followed their Sikkimese dandy to the terminal where he advised them to stick together ‘lest they be enticed to a sheikh's harem.’ It was strange and exciting to see so many sheikhs in flowing kaftans, sauntering around with their families, heading for destinations around the globe: have oil, will travel. The cleanliness and sterility of the Arab airport terminal and the luxurious shop windows impressed her. Soon it was time for them to board the jet again. The next stop was Frankfurt.

As the jet flew over Frankfurt Saraswati felt elated. She was wondering what her brother would look like after such a long time. Perhaps he'd put on weight and looked like one of those middle aged German tourists that came to Nepal to do a bit of trekking in the Himalayas. Perhaps he's just as worked up and anxious to see her. Somehow, even though she really hadn't seen her brother very often, they still had a great deal of respect and sympathy for one another. Since the people in Nepal believe in astrology, their planetary constellation was auspicious, and that was why they understood, respected, and harmonised with each other. The Nepale­se expression for it is: graha milyo. However, when the 'grahas'8 of two persons don't agree or coincide, the result is: ashanti, that is restlessness, turbulence, conflict and disharmony.

Before a hinduistic Nepalese goes on a journey, a jotisi or astrologer is consulted to seek out an auspicious date for the travel, so that no mishap should befall the traveller. The jotisi also chooses the proper time for departure. Saraswati’s mom had beckoned a bahun9 from Dhankuta, who happened to be on tour, and he'd consulted the stars and planets in his 'patro' or astrological calender, and had fixed a date, but getting a visa from the German Embassy in Kathmandu had taken more time than the astrologer had planned, so she had to extend her flight date. She’d hoped nothing inauspicious would occur. As a Nepalese she was obliged to take some rice, a beetle-nut and a coin wrapped up in a piece cloth to assure a journey without inauspicious things occurring to one.

She’d told her mom not to worry, but she'd already fixed up a day for a puja so that she’d be blessed. After all, her daughter was crossing the kalo pani10 (the black water) and going abroad to the Land of the Beef-eaters, pork-eaters, the Land of the Grey-Eyed, which they called 'kuiray-ko-desh' in Nepali.

Her mom was scared that she’d begin to eat pork and beef, because she was an orthodox Hindu and very religious and never left her karma and dharma-principles. But she was a sympathetic, well-meaning soul, and wouldn't even hurt a fly. She prayed and meditated throughout the better part of the day, and fasted on Sundays. Saraswati meditated every Wednesday. Deviji was of the opinion that even when the sons didn't care much about religion, the daughters had to carry out the traditions, and accordingly Saraswati was to undergo a three-day Hindu ritual purification ceremony called: pani patiya. This particular ceremony is meant for Nepalese Hindus returning from overseas to help them regain their caste, which might have been lost inadvertently during their sojourn in a foreign country with its strange customs, religious and eating-habits.

There was a time when the Nepal Durbar (Royal Palace) was so strict with regard to religion that the Gurkhas, those fearless fighters, were liable to punishment and arrest if they were known to enter Nepal without undergoing the ritual purifying ceremony. That's why every Gurkha regiment has its own pundit or bahun. Moreover, the traveller is given an egg, dried fish, meat and curd, and friends and relatives bring marigold garlands , spices, fruits and perform an ritualistic aratie with minute oil lamps placed on a bronze plate and moved in circles in front of the person bidding farewell. Saraswati had often seen such small farewell puja being performed at the Tribhuvan airport when her college friends left for Russia, France or the USA on government scholarships.

When in 1982 the First Battalion of the Duke of Edinburgh's Own Gurkha Rifles was sent to the Falklands, the battalion-bahun went along with them to cater to the religious needs of the Gurkhas. It is a Nepalese tradition to put two gagros (bronze pitchers) on the two sides of the decorated doorway when a member of a household is leaving for a far-off destination and also in case someone is returning home, in which case the traveller is obliged to put in some coins. The gagros are posted near the doors also during marriage because they are thought to be auspicious.

It took a long time to get through the German customs at Frankfurt. There were scores of jetliners parked outside. It was a different air that she breathed. It wasn't the fresh Hima­layan air of Lukla, the pungent cocktail of kerosene and petrol of the Tribhuvan Airport. Nor the hot blast of the desert air at the Gulf. In Frankfurt it was a whiff of car exhaust and industrial discharge. Yet there were people who'd adapted to this environment, and wouldn't dream of changing places.

The passengers were escorted by a hostess to a lift, and when the door opened Saraswati recognised her brother Raj, who was busy making a video with his camcorder. Her German sister-in-law Claudia held her 3-year old daughter Elena-Chiara’s hand and came forward to hug and kiss her. Claudia looked beautiful with her pearl-and-gold ear rings and her blonde hair. Her well-chiselled facial features seemed to have acquired a certain pinkness, for she seemed rather pale when Saraswati had seen her last in Nepal. At the traditional Nepalese marriage in Patandhoka, Dada had looked at her and had exclaimed, ‘She looks like a Bahuni from the hills of Nepal. So fair and slim.’

Saraswati was shy as usual, and Raj greeted her and gave her a kiss on her cheek. That was unusual for a Nepalese, because they generally folded their hands and wished the other: namaste, which means ‘I greet the godliness in you’. The elder person touches the head of the younger and blesses him or her with the words ‘bhagyamani hunu!’ He was a bit modernised and Germanised, she thought. Her brother looked the same, except that he had more grey hair. Nevertheless, it was strange to meet him in a foreign country, the country of his choice.

They posed for the obligatory photographs, and proceeded to the other end of the airport where their baggage were to arrive and they had to separate again. They saw fat Germans, Europeans, the international set, flight captains and crew, women in fashionable dresses, elegantly groomed males going about their business with urgency.

When they finally came out with their baggage, there were a lot of Nepalese and German faces and greetings in Nepali and German. Saraswati bade farewell to Nirmala, who was picked up by a decent-looking blond guy, probably a student from his looks, and the gallant Sikkimese dandy, who seemed to have business connnections, was greeted by a baldy German. Saraswati went with Raj. They took an U-bahn (tube) to the railway station, and then an sleek, fast, white ICE (inter-city-express) train to Southern Germany. Destination: Freiburg, a university-town at the foot of Germany’s Black Forest.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the Author: Satis Shroff is a writer and poet who writes in German & English. He has written over a period of three decades, what the Germans would call a “Landesumschau,” for his readers with impressions from Freiburg, Venice, Rottweil, Prague, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Basel and Grindelwald. Satis Shroff has worked with The Rising Nepal (Gorkhapatra Sansthan), where he wrote a weekly Science Spot and editorials and commentaries on Nepal’s development, health, wildlife, politics and culture. He also wrote weekly commentaries for Radio Nepal. He has studied Zoology & Geology in Kathmandu, Medicine & Social Science in Freiburg, and Creative Writing under Prof. Bruce Dobler (Pittsburgh University) and Writers Bureau (Manchester). Satis Shroff sees his future as a writer and poet. He was awarded the German Academic Prize. Satis Shroff’s bicultural perspective makes his prose and poems rich, full of awe, and at the same time heartbreakingly sad. In writing ‘home,’ he not only returns to his country of origin time and again, he also carries the fate of his people to readers in the West, and his task of writing is a very important one in political terms. His true gift is to invent Nepalese metaphors and make them accessible to the West through his prose and poetry.Please read his poems and articles in www.google & www.yahoo under search: satis shroff.
Copyright © 2006 Satis Shroff, Freiburg

December 17, 2007 | 5:37 AM Comments  0 comments
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Calendar: Longing For the Himalayas (Satis Shroff)
Related to country: Nepal
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic


"Longing for the Himalayas" by Satis Shroff (www.Lulu.com)

"Longing for the Himalayas" is an art collection that the multi-published lecturer, poet and writer Satis Shroff has painted. The paintings have appeared in his blogs for his poems and articles. He writes about the Sehnsucht or longing for the Himalayas in his lyrics.
Anfangsdatum: January 1st, 2008
Dauer: 12 Monate
(26 Seiten) Kalender: €14.09

December 13, 2007 | 10:22 AM Comments  0 comments


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Satis Shroff: Lecturer, Author, Poet, Singer(MGV-Kappel) Germany's Profile

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