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    Mountains Painted with Turmeric
    Mountains Painted with Turmeric
    Mountains Painted with Turmeric
    Ebook121 pages1 hour

    Mountains Painted with Turmeric

    By Lil Bahadur Chettri

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    About this ebook

    Since its publication in the late 1950s, Mountains Painted with Turmeric has struck a chord in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of Nepali readers. Set in the hills of far eastern Nepal, the novel offers readers a window into the lives of the people by depicting in subtle detail the stark realities of village life.

    Carefully translated from the original text, Mountains Painted with Turmeric tells the story of a peasant farmer named Dhané (which means, ironically, "wealthy one") who is struggling to provide for his wife and son and arrange the marriage of his beautiful younger sister. Unable to keep up with the financial demands of the "big men" who control his village, Dhané and his family suffer one calamity after another, and a series of quarrels with fellow villagers forces them into exile.

    In haunting prose, Lil Bahadur Chettri portrays the dukha, or suffering and sorrow, endured by ordinary peasants; the exploitation of the poor by the rich and powerful; and the social conservatism that twists a community into punishing a woman for being the victim of a crime. Chettri describes the impoverishment, dispossession, and banishment of Dhané's family to expose profound divisions between those who prosper and those who are slowly stripped of their meager possessions. Yet he also conveys the warmth and intimacy of village society, from which Dhané and his family are ultimately excluded.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherColumbia University Press
    Release dateJul 16, 2012
    ISBN9780231512954
    Mountains Painted with Turmeric

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      Book preview

      Mountains Painted with Turmeric - Lil Bahadur Chettri

      MOUNTAINS PAINTED WITH TURMERIC

      COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

      Publishers Since 1893

      NEW YORK     CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

      cup.columbia.edu

      Copyright © 1957 Lil Bahadur Chettri

      Translation copyright © 2008 Michael J. Hutt

      All rights reserved

      E-ISBN 978-0-231-51295-4

      Photographs (except on title page spread) by Michael J. Hutt

      LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

      Kshatri, Lila Bahadura, 1933–

      [Basaim. English]

      Mountains painted with turmeric / Lil Bahadur Chettri ;

      translated by Michael J. Hutt.

             cm.

      Novel.

      Translated from Nepali.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-231-14356-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

      1. Kshatri, Lila Bahadura, 1933–—Translations into English. I. Hutt, Michael (Michael J.) II. Title.

      PK2598.K73B313    2008

      891.4’953—dc22

      2007012236

      A Columbia University Press E-book.

      CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

      CONTENTS

      Foreword

      MOUNTAINS PAINTED WITH TURMERIC

      Afterword: Nepali Critics and Basain

      Notes

      Bibliography

      FOREWORD

      Basain is a seventy-page novel written in Nepali by Lil Bahadur Chettri (b. 1932/33), a descendant of emigrants from the hills of Nepal who was born and still lives in the state of Assam in northeast India. Basain, Chettri’s first novel, was published in 1957–58 (this corresponds to the year 2014 in the Bikram calendrical era commonly employed in Nepal). Chettri is the author of two further novels—Atripta (The unfulfilled), published in 1969, and Brahmaputraka Cheuchau (On the banks of the Brahmaputra), published in 1986—but these remain less well known than his first, which entered its thirtieth reprint in 2006. A Nepali-language feature film based on the book and directed by Subash Gajurel opened in 2005 and was Nepal’s entry for the 2006 Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

      The word basain is a nominalization of the verb basnu, to stay, reside, so it is often translated as settlement or residence. It can also denote settlement in a place other than one’s own village or country: to move somewhere else and set up home there is expressed in Nepali as "shifting basain." The central character of Basain is a peasant farmer named Dhan Bahadur Basnet (Dhané for short). Dhané’s family name shows that he is a Chetri by caste, as is the author of the novel. He lives in his ancestral family home in a village whose name we are not told, with his wife, Maina, his small son, and his younger sister, Jhuma. Dhané is beset with calamities from the very start, and the novel chronicles the way his circumstances and his position in village society conspire against him and eventually force him to leave—probably for India, though this is not stated. The dukha (suffering, sorrow) endured by ordinary peasants—the exploitation of the poor by the rich and powerful, the prejudice and social conservatism that punishes a woman who has been raped—is the central theme of the book.

      A second theme is the warmth and intimacy of village life, from which Dhané and his family are ultimately excluded. Although Dhané quarrels with various individuals during the story, these are all either the powerful big men (thulo manche) of the village or members of castes who are traditionally held to be of low status. Through all of this, Dhané’s friendships with men of equal or similar status remain firm. It is also significant that the downfall of Dhané’s sister Jhuma, a beautiful, affectionate, innocent personification of all that the male author considers ideal in a Nepali woman, is brought about by a man who is in a sense an outsider, an other. Throughout the original Nepali text, this man, who is a soldier, is referred to as Rikute, a name derived from the English word recruit. The term lahure, derived from the name of the city Lahore, is the Nepali word used most commonly to denote a Nepali soldier who serves in a foreign army, but it does not occur in this text. Like the language of Gurkha soldiers portrayed elsewhere in Nepali fiction (see Hutt 1989), the soldier’s speech is spattered with Urdu and Hindi vocabulary, which Jhuma does not understand, and at several points he is described as a foreigner or stranger (pardeshi, literally, person of/from another country).

      AUTHORSHIP AND INFLUENCES

      In his introduction to the novel, modestly entitled My Endeavor (Mero prayas), Lil Bahadur Chettri explained why he wrote the book. A translation of this introduction follows, interspersed with insights gleaned from an article Chettri published some thirty-five years later (Chettri 1992):

      As I think about it now, I realize that it was nearly three years ago that a friend was talking about Nepali literature: Just write one small novel, why don’t you? I remember him saying. With his encouragement, I thought a lot about writing a novel, and I sat at the table with my pen in my hand for two or three nights, right up until the time when the hands of the clock join in a single line; I sat there disconsolately, and I groaned. Where to begin? With what subject? Nothing occurred to me.

      Eventually, I more or less gave up. Who invites pain into an unaching head? I thought, but then one day at Pandu Station I caught sight of two young men who had just arrived from the hills. In reply to my first question, Where are you going? I got the response We’ve come down here to look for some work as woodcutters. They answered the many other questions I asked them in their own manner, too.

      The way they spoke, their manners and clothing, and their description of their village all struck me as foreign. If any other educated youth who had been born and raised in an environment outside Nepal, as I was, had been in my place, all these things would have seemed foreign to him, too.

      In his 1992 article, Chettri recalled that people from the hills of eastern Nepal used to appear in his home district in Assam every winter and that it became something of a habit for him to quiz them about life in their villages. He had spent some time in a Nepalese hill village as a young boy and had some dim remembrance of it, but what he gleaned from his interrogations served as a useful supplement. He also picked up many features of the eastern dialect of Nepali and employed them in Basain (to his amusement, littérateurs in Kathmandu were later to identify these wrongly as Assamese usages [35]).¹

      Back to his introduction:

      It occurred to me that although the future of people like us, who have made our homes outside Nepal, is tied to the country in which we dwell, our language, literature, and culture are still Nepali, and everyone’s own literature and culture are dear to them. In order to become well acquainted with Nepali culture, it is also necessary to be familiar with the environment of the place that is the very heart of that culture. Otherwise it will always seem foreign when we hear authentic Nepali being spoken or listen to someone telling us about the culture that is played out in the village environment in the hills of Nepal.

      I started to write the novel, my main purpose being merely to acquaint my readers with the village environment back in the hills. Every year, Nepalis leave the Nepalese hills and come down to Madhes (the lowlands) and Mugalan (India).² Do they leave their homes because they wish to? Perhaps that is true of many of them. But for others it is quite a different matter. I chose the misery and mystery that lie at the root of this as the theme of Basain.

      The work of writing the novel commenced, but because I was then a student, my quarterly and half-yearly exams kept harassing me. Thus I began the book in 1954 but had to postpone working further on it for about a year. Then I would write a page or two when I felt like it and put it away when I didn’t, and 1956 passed in that manner. In April 1957, by some inspiration or other, I completed the remaining sections.

      In 1992 Chettri recalled that Basain actually began life as a short story entitled Besi (a besi is an area of cultivable land, usually on the floor of a valley). He was encouraged by his friend Chatra Bahadur Gurung to lengthen it, add a proper frame, and make it into a novel. Chatra Bahadur was also instrumental in getting the story published. Chapter 14 of Basain is the beginning of this original story.

      Basain might not entertain its readers, because that is not its aim. In it I have simply tried to give a picture of the villages in the hills of Nepal. Life in the hills—the joys and sorrows of the villages and the events that happen there—is the essence of Basain.

      From a literary point of view, the standard of this novel is not high, because I have based it on reality. The dialogue and some of the words in it are kept just as they are used far to the east of Kathmandu, in the villages of Dhankuta, Taplejung, and Bhojpur districts. No sniff of a literary pen will be found in this novel; instead, it provides the readers with the smell of the ferns and bitter-leaves³ that grow on the hillsides and in the ravines.

      I myself was not well acquainted with the environment in the hills, and so, although I consulted my friends from the hills where appropriate, my writing will probably be less than satisfactory in many places, and I will probably have

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