FORUM (Spotlight Weekly)

Nepal: Birth Against Improbable Odds

The Nepalese nation was born against improbable odds. In the most difficult terrain imaginable, the Nepalese achieved unity and then withstood the British threat to rule all South Asia. Today, land-locked and hedged in by great powers, the Nepalese still proudly assert their independence in the family of nations. At home, their chief concern is development. Internationally, though Nepalese troops are everywhere respected, the Nepalese stand for nonalignment and peace. In fact, few have attained the peace the Nepalese enjoy.

[Visitors to Nepal sometime interpret this to mean there is no violence in Nepal and are shocked to find that individual Nepalese can be quite aggressive. As a nation, however, the Nepalese are peaceful, their respect for human life and values deep and abiding. There is violence in Nepal today, concentrated mostly in the cities or near them. Political instability has allowed young Nepalese to vent their resentment against a social system that seems to exclude them from the benefits they see as their right and their frustration at the slow pace of development. It is worrying because the level of violence has escalated over the last thirty years. Despite this violence, the statement stands. Few countries enjoy the level of peace that Nepalese enjoy.]

The story of Nepal's growth as a nation spans the years from 1744 to 1951. The locale is a giant slice of the Himalayas measuring five hundred miles from east to west and ranging from 100 to 150 miles north to south. This land in which the Nepalese have built their nation is a rugged rectangle, tip-tilted slightly to the northwest and balanced precariously between the great plateau of Central Asian and the Indian subcontinent.

Beautiful beyond belief, Nepal is the joy of mountaineer, wanderer and trekker alike. The land enfolds almost every type of terrain and climate known to man. It sweeps up in great natural steps from the subtropical lowlands to icy peaks that crown the roof of the world. Yet all is not scenic beauty. The mountains and hills that make up eighty-four percent of Nepal's surface area almost defy unity, and their stony soils yield crops grudgingly. The story of the Nepal's growth as a nation describes the Nepalese struggle to overcome the burdens the mountains have placed on them. Since the sweep and shape of the land have molded Nepal and the Nepalese we must consider these mountains carefully.

The mountains of Nepal are the youngest of the earth's great fold mountains. They were formed by the steady northward pressure of the Indian subcontinent against the central Asian plateau. Viewed from the air they seem an endless maze of ridges and peaks, without any discernible pattern other than the steady build-up from the lower ridges in the south to the high Himalaya in the north. There is a pattern, however, and that pattern is the beginning of our story.

Moving northward from the Nepal-India border, we see first a continuation of the Gangetic plain, called the Nepal Tarai. The Tarai is twenty to thirty miles in width and stretches east to west along most of Nepal's southern border.

In times past, the Tarai was heavily forested and known to local people as the home of a virulent strain of malaria, called Aul fever, or simply Aul. Villagers feared it as a killer. Until modern pesticides controlled the malarial mosquitoes, only the Tharus, an aboriginal people who seemed immune to Aul, dwelt year-round in the Tarai. Forests, Aul fever, and the Tarai soil, glutinous during the monsoon protected the hills against encroachment from the south.

The Chure range provided a second line of defense. Rising to heights of two to four thousand feet, the Chure are hogback ridges with steep slopes falling to the north and south.

North of the Chure range lies the Inner Tarai. This strip of land, about ten miles wide, resembles the flat plains of the Tarai proper. Its soils are less fertile. The Inner Tarai ends with the steep ascents of the Mahabharat Lekh. Like the Chure range, the Mahabharat Lekh stretches from east to west across the whole length of Nepal. There the similarity ends. The ridges of the Mahabharat are higher. Some peaks reach elevations of nine thousand feet, but, as a rule, the general elevation along the main axis is lower and remarkably regular. North of the Mahabharat Lekh lies a topographic depression stretching perhaps fifty miles north to south. To the Nepalese and to trekkers, the ridges that divide this depression are the Hills, the heartland of Nepal. The density of population is high and farming is the way of life. Not all the hills can be cultivated, but the broader river valleys called chahar, are intensively farmed and the hillsides are terraced higher than one would believe possible or practical. The fertility of the valleys and the scarcity of good farm land dictated living pattern. The valleys were farmed. Homes were on the ridge.

The villages we see sitting astride the ridges, with terraced fields reaching down the slope to the valley below, tell a story. As the population grew, the valley bottoms no longer produced enough food. Terraces were cut into the hillsides to create new fields. Then more terraces, and more, until irrigation was no longer possible. On these higher, drier terraces, millet and eventually maize became the major crops, both coarser than rice and harder to digest, but still foods to feed a family to survive.

The constant search for farmland has led Nepal to near disaster. When Nepal's population was five million, the pressure on the land was not serious. Traditional ways were adequate. The annual cycle of religious festivals and Jatras, marriages and even death brought people together to eat and drink, to sing and dance, and to enjoy the fruits of their labors. They had little, but it was enough. As the population grew, the pressure on the land intensified. New fields had to be found, and forests were steadily cut back to secure them.

The population is now over 18 million. In many places, water can hardly be found in the dry months of February and March. In these months, women and girls make the long trek down the mountain to a stream and climb slowly back, water-jars on hip or carried on their backs, up and up and up, day in day out. Always there has been a struggle to survive on the land, and always the land dictated the terms of survival.

(Excerpts from the book "Nepal: Growth of a Nation" by Ludwig F. Stiller, S.J.)