Location and Mobility: A Shaping of Postcolonial Identity in Kiran Desai's novel The Inheritance of Loss

Background of the Study

With words of applause to the Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City, states that its “a revelation in the possibilities of the novel […] vast in scope, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the immigrant quarters of New York; the gripping stories of people buffeted by winds of history, personal and political.” Whereas, The Publishers Weekly finds the text as deftly shuttling “between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a better life, when one person’s wealth means another’s poverty”. These views, even though, raise the issues of nations’ tragedies, human failings and the pain of exile causing ambiguities of post-colonial India; cannot fully address the novel's diverse identities of the characters unless it is discussed on the ground of location and movement. Therefore, this paper probes into the problem how location and mobility influence to shape identities embedded in local actions, global cultural landscapes in the postcolonial context and thereby enhances the search of existential identity.

Text and Context of Post-coloniality

A major feature of post-colonial texts is the concern with place and displacement, shifting of location and resulting in “the crisis of identity into being” (Bill Ashcroft and et al., 47). As Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss  strongly contextualizes a range of attributes of postcolonial issues drawing the mobile characters of the various locations, predominantly strives for relocating their diverse identities. Since the death of her parents under the wheels of a bus in Moscow where her father was studying to become an astronaut, Sai, the female protagonist, begins to live with her grandfather, an English-educated Indian judge and his cook at Cho Oyu in Kalimpong, a crumbling, isolated mansion built years before by a Scotsman. When the judge was to purchase the house, the Scotsman had said, “It is very isolated but the land has potential” for “quinine, sericulture, cardamom, orchids” (Desai 28). Nonetheless, “the Judge was not interested in agricultural possibilities” but he could live here “with the solace of being a foreigner in his own country” (29). In the case of the Judge “purchasing the house” gives a sense of locating himself and being a foreigner is a sense of displacement. As the characters in the book move through the various distances ranging from India, Nepal to America while they pursue hopes that inevitably elude them. In locating the postcolonial identities in the novel, Desai draws wide-spreading impacts of location and mobility of the characters resulting in from every contemporary international issue such as globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism, independent movement and violence. To mark such categories of identity the novelist has portrayed the characters that are mostly either exiles, eccentrics, or both possessing distinctive nature and culture owing to their life experiences of diaspora and hybridity. The novel opens with Sai, sitting on the veranda, and reading an article about “giant squid in an old National Geographic,” the judge who sits away at the corner with his chessboard “playing himself”; Mutt, the dog snoring gently under his chair and the Cook trying to light the damp wood inside the “cavernous kitchen.”

Amongst different remarkable handlings of post-colonial identities such as the use of English and sometimes Hindi language with mixture of various dialects by the characters and the narrator in the novel make rich cultural combination and dialectical blending of culture for “recognition” due to “racial and ethnic hybridization” (Alcoff 6). Hybridity has been a term to describe societies that emerge from contacts of European “explorers” and those “explored”. Instead of explaining these contacts as mere imposers of a major culture onto a minor culture, hybridity emphasizes their mutual intermingling. The judge and Sai are “estranged Indians” who converse in English for they know Hindi, a little. The judge's estrangement began as a student in England. He envied the English and despised Indians, slathering powder over his too brown skin, rejecting his peasant father; back in India, he could be hideously cruel to his wife, indirectly causing her death.

The Cook's son, Biju, meanwhile, lives miserably as an illegal alien in New York going from one job to another like “a fugitive on the run-no papers” (Desai 3), trying to locate himself. The judge has lost his place in India, where once he identified with the British rather than his own people. Sai has lost her parents (in Russia), her young love, and has not yet found herself. Biju is searching for his place in a new world that seems to have no niche for him. Due to immigration and migration, globalization and multiculturalism propagated by the waves of modernization, or the concept of colonial hangover, most of the characters struggle with their hybridized identity and the forces of modernization, and at the same time trying to maintain their “recognition that identity makes a difference” (Alcoff 8). For Alcoff, culture is one means of collecting together a group, even a weapon in the struggle for independence. In search of cultural/ethnic identity in the year of 1980s, some young Nepali-Indian activists (“unleashed Bruce Lee fans in their Amer ican T-shirts made-in-China-coming-in-via-Kathmandu?” 157) are fighting for their own state.

Due to the change of location which gives rise to the challenges all to face the same heart-wrenching questions that haunt the immigrant: Who am I? Where do I belong to? And how do I perform? Biju lives as a diasporic life of in-between-ness in America, wanders with hardships in order to get the Green Card but always remains with empty-handed and loss of fortune. Similarly, for many people from over the world who experience a diasporic life and possess hybrid identity “of unsettling, recombination, hybridization and cut-and-mix, in short, the process of cultural diaspora-ization” [sic] (Hall 94). As an impact of location the judge returned to India a changed man. He used to envy the English and detested Indians. He worked as being English with the passion of hatred and for what he would become; absolutely everyone, both English people and Indians, would despise him.  Such nature of living is known as “culturally uprooted, alienated, or more or less assimilated engages in a sociological battle in search of its identity” (Cabral 60).

Even though the characters like Judge, Sai, Father Booty, Uncle Potty, Mrs. Sen, Lola and Noni, at Cho Oyu and Mon Ami, who live together yet they fail to create a pleasant and accommodating atmosphere. They eccentrically behave each-other nevertheless they have formed an “imagined community” as Daniel Mato quotes to Benedict Anderson (282). While doing so, Kiran Desai's presentation of India is both the place that Biju (who is Indian) dreams of escaping and where Father Booty (who is not Indian) longs to remain. Due to the sense of displacement, Biju in New York is not immune from nostalgia. He can feel the pulse of the forest, smell the humid air, the green black lushness; he could imagine all its different textures, the plumage of banana, the stark spear of the cactus, the delicate gesture of ferns.

Such a mixture of behaviours and attributes that are shaped by postcoloniality can also be observed through Desai’s critique of the existing material and discursive conditions, as well as polyphonic multicultural diversity of its many subjects appear to be the source of struggle and inspiration as Biju remembers about “Colonial India, free India,” he finds “the tea was the same, but the romance was gone” (133); Biju and his friends drank tea and diligently they read the New York Times together, including the international news. They take Tikka masala, tandoori grill, navrattan vegetable curry, dal makhani, pappadu. Harish-Harry says, “Find your market. Study your market. Cater to your market.” Demand-supply. Indian-American point of agreement (145). In this course of cultural transformation that generally followed the ending of colonial mandates, rising immigration and economic liberation that they provide, in Linda Martin Acolf’s term, a “cultural space” and “ totalizing self” whereas Arjun Appadurai (1996) has called it due to “Global flows” of culture as “disjunctive” order employing a set of terms (ethnoscape, financescape, mediascape, technoscape, and ideoscape) to stress various streams or flows along which cultural material that might be seen to be moving across national boundaries. Whereas, a double movement of going forth and coming back of the characters would create a “circulatory regime” (Markovits 3) undergoing through crisscrossing circulatory flows. Appadurai examines the current epoch of globalization, which is characterized by the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation, and provides fresh ways of looking at popular consumption patterns, debates about multiculturalism, and ethnic violence. In addition, that disjuncture, he says, becomes “central to the politics of global culture.”

Cultural Hybridity

Even though, hybridity originates from the Latin hybrida, a term used technically for a cross between two different species, it also shows the connection between the racial/historical categories of the past and contemporary cultural discourses and whereby resulting in “a culture in its colonial operation becomes hybridized” (Young 159). Similarly, in The Inheritance of Loss, the exploitations of cultural hybridity remarkably abound in almost all the characters' activities in one way or another. For instance, the education that Sai was taught at St. Augustine’s Convent falls between the contradictions to follow hybridity across “Lochinvar and Tagore, economics and moral science, highland fling in tartan and Punjabi harvest dance in dhotis, national anthem in Bengali and an impenetrable Latin motto” (30). Gyan, an ethnic Nepalese, an immigrant, loves Sai in return – until he becomes swept up with a group of insurgents agitating for freedom movement from India and decides he needs to despise her and her bourgeois ways, thinking that individual “Happiness has a smaller location” (59) that is, in front of the wider (ethnic and regional) location. Jemubhai Popatlal Patel, who possesses Western and colonial hangover and behaves like a foreigner in his own country. He exists in the condition of nation-ness or nationlessness. Mrs. Rice on

Thornton Road

had taken to calling him “James.” His study at Fitzwilliam has grown in him a fertile soil to form solitude -- “The solitude became a habit, the habit became the man, and it crushed him into a shadow” (39). During on board, the Strathnaver on his way back, the judge used to sip beef tea and read “How to Speak Hindustani,” (119) since he had been posted to a part of India where he did not speak the language. Other precisely sketched Kalimpong characters include two elderly Anglophile Indian sisters – Lola and Noni who sip tea and read Jane Austen, safe within the confines of the estate they call Mon Ami, and a Swiss priest named Father Booty who keeps a dairy and dreams of teaching Indians to make cheese. 

When he was in Britain, the mind of Jemubhai used to grow stranger to himself, found his own skin odd-colored, his own accent peculiar because of the notion of hybridity that makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference. According to Edward W. Said (2003), such things happen due to “the clash between culture and civilization” (334) between West and East. It is because of cultural fusion that creates confusion, as the Judge “forgot how to laugh, could barely manage to lift his lips in a smile […]” (40), since the rhetoric of hybridity, sometimes referred to as hybrid culture is fundamentally associated with the emergence of postcolonial discourse and its critiques of cultural imperialism. This second stage in the history of hybridity is characterized by literature and theory that focuses on the effects of mixture upon identity and culture. Key theorists in this realm are Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and among others whose works respond to the increasing multicultural awareness of the early nineteen nineties. Homi K. Bhabha’s essay “Interrogating Identity: The Post-colonial Prerogative” (1990) analyses the liminality of hybridity as a paradigm of colonial anxiety. His key argument is that “colonial hybridity, as a cultural form, produced ambivalence in the colonial masters and as such altered the authority of power”. And, we find out such paradigm of hybridity that abundantly attains culturally fertile place in The Inheritance of Loss, too, although it lacks the altered authority of power.

R. Radhakrishnan, another postcolonial critic, talks about the phenomenon of hybridity as a theme so dear to post-structuralist theories of “deferral, difference, and dissemination”. In the novel, Jemubhai shows strange behavior after his return from Cambridge; at Piphit, he “sat up, fidgeted, looked at the winged dinosaur, purple-beaked banana tree with the eye of one seeing it for the first time. He was a foreigner- a foreigner-every bit of him screamed” (166-67). Radhakrishnan notices the “crucial difference” that one discerns between metropolitan versions of hybridity and postcolonial versions in which, he says “the former are characterized by an intransitive and immanent sense of jouissance, the latter are expressions of extreme pain and agonizing dislocations” (Radhakrishnan 314). In the novel, European and American feel such a sense of jouissance as Father Booty and Uncle Potty fully enjoy even without any legal document. Father Booty was found to be residing in India for forty-five years “illegally [….] He knew he was a foreigner but had lost the notion that he was anything by an Indian foreigner […]” (220). But on the other hand, the characters like the Judge, Sai, Biju, Gyan and other are found struggling and living with the postcolonial versions of cultural hybridization even in their own authentic-country. Desai, through this representation, obviously wants us, hence, to explore the pain of the immigrant, and the unfairness of a world in which, “one side travels to be a servant, and the other side travels to be treated like a king.”

Besides this, the matter of irony is that Biju, Mr. Iype and others who live in America in search of identity (Green card and job) and talk about to kick out Indian-Nepalese, Bangladeshis, Afgans, Muslims, Tibetans, and Bhutanese from India. Lola and Noni who had a self-righteousness common to many Indian women of the English-speaking upper-educated background women who go out to mimosa brunches, eat their Dadi's roti with adept fingers, put on a sari or smacked on elastic shorts for aerobics, could say “Namaste, Kusum Auntie, aayiye, baethiye, khayiye!” (50). On the other hand, the movements of a group of  Monks who escaped from Tibet along the salt and wool trade routes had arrived in refugee status, and “Lhasa beauties dancing waltzes at the Gymkhana Ball, amazing the locals with their cosmopolitan style” (45). Desai presents many other agencies of cultural hybridization as Mrs. Sen blames Muslims who eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning and drink whiskey every evening. Moreover, they pretend one thing but do another-“[…] they drank, smoked, ate pork, visited prostitutes, and then denied it” (130). In Kalimpong haat Nepali women with golden nose rings dangling and Tibetan women with braids and prayer beads, and Lepcha medicine men all assemble at a place with diverse identities. Lola and Noni think of Sai as an orphan child of India’s failing romance with the Soviets.

Conclusion

Kiran Desai, in The Inheritance of Loss, predominantly employs the mixture and mishmash of cultures proliferated in local, national and global sphere. For instance, Sai, joins Father Booty and Uncle Potty at Mon Ami, with Vaseline smell and an odor of wet sheep and celebrates Christmas though she is not Christian originally nevertheless habituated to follow westernized customs and rituals because of the influence of metropolitan hybridized culture “she had the same accent and manners. She was a westernized Indian brought up by English nuns, an estranged Indian living in India”(210). According to Mike Featherstone (2003), the existence of a global culture in the restricted sense of “third cultures” affects a number of trans-societal institutions, local cultures and cultural producers.

In course of portrayal of love, longings and losses the characters and actions in The Inheritance of Loss move between national and international (transnational), local and global locations and movements to result in hybridized form of culture, that is, “Third culture”. This cultural hybridity, even though, leads to further controversial relations in the characters of the novel their longing is perhaps the thing that the characters in this novel do best. They long for identity, they long for love and they long for acceptance -- yet rarely are they skilled at locating aptly any of the above since postcolonial hybridity is, in Radhakrishnan words, “a frustrating search for constituency and a legitimate political identity.” This is a story of exiles at home and abroad, of families broken and fixed, of love both bitter and bittersweet but consequently leading towards constant existence.

Works cited

Alcoff, L. Martin. “Introduction: Modern and Postmodern.” Identities. Eds. Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 1-8.

Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 27-47.

Ashcroft,Bill, et al., eds.The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. 2^nd ed. Delhi: Routledge, 2008.

Ashcroft, Bill, et al., eds. The Empire Writes Back. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Bhabha, Homi K. "Interrogating Identity: The Post-colonial Prerogative." Anatomy of Racism. ed. David Theo Goldberg Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 183-209.

Cabral, Amilcar. "Identity and Dignity in the Context of the National Liberation Struggle." Identities. eds. Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 55- 61.

Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2006.

Edward W. Said “The Clash of Definitions.” Identities. eds. Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 333-335.

Featherstone, Mike. "Localism, Globalism and Cultural Identity." Identities. eds. Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 342-359

Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Black Film, British Cinema, ICA Documents 7. London: Institute of contemporary arts, 1989.

Markovits, Claude, et al. Circulation and Society. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.

Mato, Daniel. “On the Making of Transnational Identities in the Age of Globalization.” Identities. eds. Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Radhakrishnan, R. "Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity." Identities. eds. Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 312-330.

Young, Robert. “The Cultural Politics of Hybridity.” Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

History and Socio-culture of Limbus and Cherokees: A Comparative Study in Response to Trauma Theory

Abstract

Limbus in Nepal and Cherokees in the United States both belong to the indigenous ethnic communities. The major tension to create problem alike is the loss of historical land ownership, and infliction of language and culture, that is, their identity. The loss has been traumatic both in memory and experience. Hence, this article focuses on questions: How is experience a component of a politics or an ethics of recognition? What kinds of experience help in resisting trauma or in working through its aftermath? And also provides some clues for rewriting of the historicity.

Limbu and Cherokees

Limbu, an ethnic community, is one of the marginalized groups in Nepal. They have their own language and culture, norms and values. They have been living with their distinct historicity mainly in the eastern part of Nepal known as Limbuwan after the takeover of the Kathmandu valley, the present capital city of Nepal, by Lichchhavi Kings in the beginning of the Christian era. The ethnic group, then, spread and lived safely and autonomously until 1974 in Mechi and Koshi zones in the area of 16,358 square kilometer. In 1974, in certain terms and condition, Prithvi Narayan shah had incorporated the Limbuwan into the greater state of Nepal.

The Cherokee, one of the aboriginal ethnics of present United States of America, had also their own language, culture and social norms and values. They were cleared up from south-east North Carolina and forced to get shifted to north-west Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

Identity of both groups is most closely associated with the issue of violence perpetrated by the ruler over historical territories, culture, language, etc. Ethnic territory is essential as location and boundaries determine who is a member and who is not and designate which ethnic categories are available for individual identification at a particular time and place. This article is an attempt to answer some crucial questions against state violence in terms of territory, language and culture over Limbus in Nepal and Cherokees in the United States: What were the historical conditions and how had they gradually been destroyed?  What kinds of strategies were used to inflict identities of those ethnic groups which have become a trauma in memory today?

Historical Loss and Trauma

The meaning of trauma, Cathy Caruth (1995) says, “addresses not only individual isolation but a wider historical isolation” (Introduction, 11). History speaks not only of the lost memories of violence but works “as a permanent reactivation of the past in a critique of the present” (Tim Woods, 342). Pertaining to historical trauma, Dominick LaCapra (1999) expresses, “Absence appears in all societies or cultures, yet it is likely to be confronted differently and differently articulated with loss” (701).  For an instance, “Post apartheid South Africa and Post-Nazi Germany face the problem of acknowledging and working through historical losses in ways that affect different groups differently”(697). According to Miranda Alcock (2003), an object can be impregnated with meaning as land is home where a person develops his/her culture but when home is lost it is lost forever. For him, “Cultural experience refers to inherited tradition something in the pool of humanity,” in which, “one was happy to find people to whom he could speak in his language” (Alcock 295).

As both a victim and analyst of his time, Saadat Hasan Manto was able to perceive the traumatic dislocation which took place in South Asian society during 1947. He well-understood the anger, bitterness, paranoia and secret fears of each individual caught up in the turmoil and violence of this period. By mixing up the name of the character and place, the individual and the land, Manto in “Toba Tek Singh” emphasizes the relationship between a person’s home and his identity. Therefore, “The reality of violence, not simply as external fate,” Yale Professor Geoffrey Hartman (1995) observes, “but intrinsic to the psychological development of the human species, and contaminating its institutions” is the fateful question (552). Critiquing the Trauma’s double gesture -- triggering and contaminating theory during performance of cultural practice, Tom Toremans (2003) makes a note that “expression of the memory is trauma in cultural practice” and “trauma is also a cultural practice when importance shifted out of the text it became cultural rather than deconstructive” (351). Trauma, hence, precipitates not only the phenomenon associated with the physical infliction, rape, murder and so on but also with loss of historical land, language and culture. Traumatic symptoms, James Berger (1997) perceives, “are not only somatic, nonlinguistic phenomenon, they occur also in language” (574).

Limbu and Cherokee: Violence of Historical Land, Language and Culture

In comparison with Limbus (also some other indigenous/ethnic groups) of Nepal and Cherokees in America face, in particular, similar line of violence that resulting in the presence of socio-cultural trauma in them. Both become the victim from contemporary governments’ violation of their historical land ownership. Only difference between them is that the Cherokees are cleared up from south-east North Carolina or shifted to north-west Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). While carrying out this job, accordance with Diane Glancy’s text Pushing the Bear: A Novel on the Trail of Tears (1996), the Cherokees got rigorous suffering, torture, rape, deaths, etc. on the trail. With the fragmented storyline that keeps readers in the painful present of the Cherokee ordeal. One voice here is more frequent than others -- it is through the words and wordlessness of Maritole, a young farmer, mother, wife, daughter, and sister, that the readers enter the deepest experience of the trail. Early in the novel when she returns home after her eviction to retrieve a few belongings, and finds white people at her table, then she claims “This cabin is mine! But the soldiers grabbed me and threw me outside the door....” [It is] “My grandmother's cabin before she died. My baby was born there.... It was my farm! We had not even cleared all the fields yet...” (14-15). Obviously, such kind of massive removal manifests as a form of genocide. The banishment of Maritole's family and all Cherokees from North Carolina, Valerie Miner (1996), means as “dislocation from the climate, diet and seasonal ritual central to an agrarian people” (6). It is their historical loss of land, culture and habitus. Hence, Maritole protests “They couldn't remove us. Didn't the soldiers know we were the land?” (2).

Limbus, on the other hand, who were considered Historically landlords with the possession of a large area of land known as kipat, the land which is inalienable, are made landless people now. Thousands of Limbu were killed during Prithvi Narayan Shah’s unification campaign to Land Reform Act of 1964 and thousands of other were forced to live an exiled life being unacknowledged refugee in various parts of India such as Asam, Sikkim, Darjeeling, and Bhutan, Burma, Malaysia, etc. Thousands of Limbu youths were forced to join in East India British Company army along with other ethnic groups such as Rai, Gurung and Magar during the World War I and II where more than two millions of ethnic Nepali lost their lives. Thousands of others are missing. They were displaced by a politics of intensity by respective governments of Nepal to which Scott Lash, a cultural critic, terms as “hegemony or extensive politics” (1). The politics of hegemony extensively created through violence by the ruling class ideology has resulted in the traumatic memory of the survivors today, the feeling of loss and genocide, the traumatic representation of pain and dramatic loss of identity. It is said that the violence involves in making national histories and it is thought to be a necessary part of the task of nation-building where arises the problem in recording the history while historians, in the words of Gyanendra Pandey, “seek to represent violence in history face problems of language” (The Prose of Otherness,190). Although history, usually, is for the winners but the Limbu in Nepal and Cherokee in America have distinct context and therefore should be critiqued distinctly.

According to the history of Nepal, Limbus had full authority over their land in the Pallo (farther) Kirat namely, Taplejung, Pachthar, Ilam, Tehrathum, Sankhuwasabha, Dhankuta, Morang, Jhapa and Sunsari districts until and even after the so-called unification campaign of Prithvi Narayan Shah in 1774. Even though there was no decisive defeat and victory between the two sides in the fight, Prithvi Narayan Shah deceitfully killed thousands of Limbu people and Limbu combatants going out of the accord and the condition. Iman Singh Chemjong, one of the historians, writes “[…] but going against the terms and condition of them Gorkhali soldiers killed the chief of Limbu Kangsore and thousands of other Limbu men and women with the weapons kept secretly hidden underneath sand. Shah, in this way, created the compelling situation to sign the historical treaty of Shrawan 22, 1831 B.S (1774 A.D.).” (Kirat History 20). This pact is known by “Lalmohar” (the red seal) of 1774, where Prithvi Narayan Shah has vowed for consent and recognition to the ceaseless ethnic autonomy of Limbuwan. Consequently the Limbus enjoyed their right of autonomy even after the democracy of 1950. “The war between Gorkha and Limbu,” Kumar Lingden, a Limbu enthusiast views, “was not ended but was halted, in a certain condition, Limbuwan was included within Gorkha” (3).

The Lalmohar of 1774 was approved by each succeeding generation of Shah Kings. King Tribhuvan in the year 1951 and king Mahendra in 1960 also approved and affirmed the Limbuwan and its autonomy.  But after four years of its approval king Mahendra gravely intrigued over Limbu community and their historical autonomy along with inception of Land Reform Act 1964. Limbu Kipat (the possession of land that can not be transferred) system was important privilege since it is for them forever from yesteryears to the years to come. They believe that this right is provided by the (mother) earth as said in the Mundhum, Limbu’s religious scripture. Concerning to the Land Rights and Ethnic Conflict in Nepal, Thomas Cox writes that, “Studying land rights in Nepal reveals serious ongoing conflict between dominant high-caste Hindus and some ethnic minorities, in the process shattering the myth about Nepal being a country of ethnic harmony. Land reform legislation has done more to hurt these minorities than help them” (1318).

Even after Limbuwan was forcefully incorporated into Nepal state by Prithvi Narayan Shah, the kipat tenure system enabled Limbu to maintain ownership and control over their tribal lands. Under the kipat system, all land was the common property of Limbu, and could not be sold to members of other ethnic groups. In the 1800s kipat land was so plentiful that the Limbu could not do all the agricultural work themselves. “To make up the labour deficit they hired Brahman tenants, who cultivated the land in return for a share of the produce” (Caplan 1970). In 1886, after all, the Nepal government passed a law which converted all cultivated kipat into raikar tenure. What this meant was that all land could be claimed for ownership by whoever cultivating it at that time. As a result of this legislation most cultivated land owned by Limbus suddenly became the property of Brahmans, making themselves the economically dominant group in this part. This sort of “economic dominance, along with literacy, control over government positions and knowledge of Nepali law enabled Brahmans to continue their takeover of Limbu land” (Caplan 12). Moreover, the 1886 legislation impoverished many Limbu, forcing them to borrow money from Brahmans by using their remaining land as collateral. After the loan contract was signed Brahman moneylenders often added 'a few more zeros making it seem that the Limbu debtor had borrowed much more than he/she actually did. When the Limbu could not pay back the money the Brahman would possess his land (ibid, 14-15). This is, strategically, governments’ or Brahmins’ act of displacement to the Limbus from their historical place. Unlike it, the arduous journey of displacement serves to renew the Cherokees' appreciation for the individual within the community and the community within the individual. “In leaving their land behind, they come to recognize not only what they have lost, but what they still have in one another” (Miller 13). Although the Cherokee’s displacement causes loss of ancestral land there is still hope of placement in Indian Territory. Diane Glancy herself speaks in a conversation with Jennifer Andrews that “a land affixes a sharper memory which works as historical recollection” (651).

Ann Armbrecht Forbes (1999) in her research work “Mapping Power: Disputing Claims to Kipat Lands in Northeastern Nepal” writes that “The cadastral survey conducted in 1994, which legally ended the kipat system, practically and symbolically marks the government's victory in this 200-year struggle” (16). While the political and cultural control over its territory and its people has thought to be shifted onto the Nepal government however the genealogy of ownership exists wherever there is the notion of title, Subba or Jimmawal, because of the way land rights were staked under kipat, securing one's claim to that land depended, in large part, on remembering-or contesting-this history. The land ownership of Cherokees was also controlled by the government leaving them with sense of loss, “thirty-five men signed away land that belonged to seventeen thousands Cherokee, “Yo. The Removal act. We didn’t believe it, through New Echota Treaty” (75). With similar vein of historical and cultural anxiety comes from Maritole’s father- “But look at my grandsons. They need corn. I have a musket. I can shoot game. But we have to have corn” to live our lives (79). Losing of Knobawtee’s farm arouses frustration and the sense of powerlessness. “His field has gone, and he did not know who he was” (74). Cherokees had resisted the Whiteman’s ways, especially the treaties, which they called “talking Papers” (121). On the trail, they remember their past - land, culture, traditions, myths, occupations which helps them memorize and get known from their past experience. This memorization from the past experience, then, tends to hurt them. To follow Avishai Margalit (2004), “To remember now is to know now what you knew in the past… Memory then is knowledge from the past. It is not necessarily knowledge about the past” (14).

Loss of identity and Resistance

The loss of land (homeland) is so readily linked to a presumed loss of cultural identity, one aspect of the functionalism of much work in this field. Another aspect, as Liisa H. Malkki (1995) refers, is the uncritical use of the concepts of an “adaptation” and acculturation” to analyze processes of transformation in identity, culture, and cultural tradition (5). But through fatal manipulation and conspiracy of state ideology Limbus were made landless one. Brahman manipulation of loan contracts was facilitated by the fact that Limbu were generally illiterate and depended on Brahmans to make up all contracts and forms. All the Limbu had to have a form (signed by a government official) verifying their claims to kipat land. Many of them, not knowing the significance of this land claim form, would lose or damage it. Realizing this, “Brahmans often challenged Limbu land ownership claims. When Limbu could not produce the proper forms the Brahmans would often take the land in question” (Caplan 1970). The continuing loss of tribal lands created profound economic and cultural stress in Limbu society. In the 1930s, the Limbu mounted a revitalization movement, known as Satya Hangma, in an effort to combat the stress and cultural disorientation caused by the loss of their land. The leader of this movement, an ex- Gurkha soldier called Phalgunanda, claimed that “by returning to traditional customs and to religion, the Limbu would become powerful enough to push the Brahmans out of the area and regain their land. Phalgunanda died in 1946 and with him the Satya Hangma movement” (Jones 1976). In 1948, resentment over usurped tribal land exploded into a Limbu uprising in which dozens of Limbus and Brahmans were killed. This revolt, however, “was quickly put down by Nepal's Rana government” (Upreti 1975). In 1968, the Nepali government abolished the kipat system of land tenure, resulting in the loss of the Limbu's remaining tribal lands (Dahal 1985). Many Limbu are now tenants on the land which they once owned. Indeed, over 70 percent of the remaining Limbu owned land is currently mortgaged, primarily to Brahman settlers.

According to Johan Galtung (1990), “By cultural violence we mean those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence […] exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics)” - that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence. The frequent juxtaposition of Cherokee language and script with English aptly reminds readers of the daily difficulties of translation and communication. Glancy uses the “bear” as symbol of comfort, of martyrdom and ultimately of survival. "Pushing the bear" becomes a metaphor for the Cherokees' arduous progress. Maritole explains: “The bear had once been a person. But he was not conscious of the consciousness he was given. His darkness was greed and self-centeredness. It was part of myself too. It was in all of us. It was part of the human being. Why else did we march? No one was free of the bear”. (181). One of the Pakistani scholars, Tahir Hasnain Naqvi (2007), observes that the State violence sought to initiate its “monopoly” over the “legitimate” use of physical force. Whereas, Gyanedra Pandey (1994), sees the state ideology as “the violence of the people was the (polar opposite) chaotic, uncontrolled, excessive and almost always illegitimate” and, “reason, progress, organization, discipline belongs to the state and ruling classes; violence belongs to the “Other”, those left behind by history” (191-3).

Violence studies are about two problems: the use of violence and the legitimation of that use. But the discourse of such coercion and legitimation of violence over ethnic people, by the respective rulers, do not fully found analyzed by the scholars and the historians. For an instance, according to George van Driem (1990), one of the scholars, notes that “the Limbus constitute a populous group which remained virtually autonomous until the 1780s.” After the Gorkha conquest in the second half of the eighteenth century, van Driem argues, “the influence of the Indo-Aryan language Nepali, or Khas Kura, became increasingly felt in Pallo Kirat ‘Far Kirant’, the homeland of the Limbu, Yakkha, Yakkhaba and Mewahang” (84). In fact, it was not the influence of Khas Kura but coercion of it. Since the use of violence and legitimation of that use closely apply on both Limbus and Cherokee native people, they experience collective trauma of such historical events with antinomic effects challenging the psychological endurance of a community. Some historians, of course, have incorporated fiction and personal histories into their work in ways that have highlighted the distinctive impact of violence/repression on the lives of ethnic people. Such works have proved fruitful illustrations how in the name of Hinduism and Christians the government suppressed the inborn rights of culture, language and religion, etc. of Limbus in Nepal and Cherokees in the U.S.

As aforementioned, despite the various types of coercion and intrusion from the side of Hindu ruling classes over the socio-cultural rights of Limbu and religion Mundhum[1] rituals seem ever vibrant and effective socio-culturally and historically. As a result Nepal was declared to be a Hindu kingdom (in the past) and Kirats were forced to be Hindu and eventually they were deprived of their religion, their culture and even their language. The people, who learnt and involved in spreading Srijanga script, were severely prosecuted by the then authorities. Ashok Nembang (2004), one of the Limbu cultural enthusiasts mentions:

When I was carrying some Limbu script books brought from Darjeeling and Sikkim on 21^st October 1970, an A.S.I. of Ilam inquired and caught me blaming as a reactionary activist. He first threatened and then stroked me. As a result, my jaws and chicks were swollen for four days. Both ears deafened for long. The scars of wounds caused by hitting of ghunguru stick and nails of boot are still being indicator of despotic behavior of that time. (3)

The attack over the language, culture and religion upon Limbus and Cherokee is extremely discerning acts of the Khas and English, Brahmins and whites, and Christian and Hindus. Most of the Cherokee are Christianized and the Limbus are forced to be Hindu. To attack on language, culture and religion is meant circuitously to genocide. Limbus, as for Kumar Lingden, “were kept aback not on the basis of knowledge but on linguistic competency” consequently, “they couldn’t express their opinions in their mother tongue whatever they had known” (4). Cherokees, on the other hand, are also deprived of their script (first written by Sequoyah) and spoken language. Tanner, a character in the novel confirms, “They [Whiteman] wanted our voices silenced so we couldn’t complain about the loss of our property, the murdering and plundering …they don’t want to be able to talk. They know our language gives us power” (Glancy 137). Similarly, the loss and dispossession of land and culture is vividly reflected through the lines- “Not our cornmeal bread. No, this white bread is nothing my granny would have touched” (73).

Conclusion

To sum up, even though, official history is written on favour of the rulers’ interest, now, it is the need and responsibility of the time as recent scholarship, has begun repeatedly pointing out, observing and recording neutrally. When history is made up of personal histories, so, too, personal identities are formed in relation to a larger ethical and cultural context. Rather than valorizing of independence many of the Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories focus on the sense of despair and dislocation caused by the partition of Pakistan and India. Likewise, various scholars, writers, politicians and civil society have raised the discourse of trauma experienced by the Limbu community in Nepal and Native Indian Cherokee in America through various genres. The domination and suppression of the rulers in terms of culture, religion, language and dislocation from the historical land possession collectively becomes traumatic for both of the above minorities. They are marginalized in every socio-cultural and historical aspect.  Evidently, there remains a lot of works to be undertaken by exuding the physical and psychological sufferings of Limbu and Cherokee people and acting through it although the “literature of trauma”, as Tim Woods observes (1998), “does overlap with marginalized, these are not necessarily coterminous” (344).

Works cited

Alcock, Miranda. “Refugee Trauma – the Assault on Meaning.” Psychodynamic Practice. Brunner Routledge: 9:3 (2003): 291-306.

Alexander, Jeffrey. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Eds. J. C. Alexander, et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004: 1-30.

Andrews, Jennifer. “A Conversation with Diane Glancy” American Indian Quarterly, University of Nebraska Press 26:4 (2002): 645-658.

Berger, James. “Tauma and Literary Theory”. Contemporaray Literature 38.3 (1997): 569-82.

Bista, Dor B. People of Nepal. Ratna Pustak Bhandar: Kathmandu, 1987.

Caplan, Lionel. Land and Social Change in East Nepal. University of California Press: Berkeley, 1970.

Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction”. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995: 3-12.

Cox, Thomas. “Land Rights and Ethnic Conflict in Nepal” Economic and Political Weekly.25:24/25 (1990):1318-1320.

Dahal, Dill R. “An Ethnographic Study of Social Change among the Athpahariya Rais of Dhankuta”. Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies, Kathmandu, 1985.

Driem, George van. “The Fall and Rise of the Phoneme /r/ in Eastern Kiranti: Sound Change in Tibeto-Burman”. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 53:1 (1990): 83-86.

Forbes, Ann A. “Mapping Power: Disputing Claims to Kipat Lands in Northeastern Nepal” American Ethnologist, 26.1 Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association (1999):114-138.

Galtung, Johan. “Cultural Violence.” Journal of Peace Research. Sage Publications 27:3 (1990): 291-305.

Glancy, Diane. Pushing the Bear: A Novel on the Trail of Tears. San Diego: A Harvest Book, 1996.

Hartman, Geoffrey. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies”. New Literary History 26.3 (1995): 537-63.

Lash, Scott. “Power after Hegemony: Cultural Studies in Mutation?” Theory, Culture & Society. May24:3 (2007): 55-78.

LaCapra, Dominick. “Trauma, Absence, Loss”. Critical Inquiry. The University of Chicago: 25 (Summer 1999): 696-727.

Linden, Kumar. “Limbuwan Jatima Swayatta Rajya: Ek Prastavana”. Kathmandu, Newa Pradesh, 2063-3-17.

Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2004.

Miner, Valerie. “Torn up by the roots” Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, by Diane Glancy. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996, 235

Malkki, Liisa H. “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things”. Annual Review of Anthropology. 24 (1995):495-523.

Naqvi, Tahir H. “Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State” Journal of Historical Sociology. Blackwell Publishing Ltd: UK, 20:1/2 (2007).

Nembang, Ashok. Satra Thumka Limbuka Thar Ra Mingshra. Dharan: Purbeli Printing Press, 2004.

Pandey, Gyanendra. “The Prose of Otherness” Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranjit Guha. eds. David Arnold & David Hardeman. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1994: 188-221.

Toremans, Tom. “Trauma: Theory – Reading (and) Literary Theory in the Wake of Trauma.” European Journal of English Studies. Routledge 7:3 (2003): 333-351.

Woods, Tim. “Mending the Skin of Memory: Ethics and History in Contemporary narratives.” Rethinking History. Routledge 2:3 (1998), PP. 339-348.

---

[1] Religion and religious scripture of Kirat people in both oral and written form