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Chapter 3

Origin Myths and Myths of Originality

In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality. (Lévi-Strauss 1979:20)

“I need photos of very ‘original’ Thangmi,” said Paras, as he pushed a stack of photocopied documents across the table toward me, indicating the terms of our exchange. With his signature plaid cap, dark glasses, and Nehru vest stretched over an expanding paunch, the president of the BTWA was the picture of a successful civil servant at the height of his career. Paras had been at the helm of the BTWA since the early 1990s, but due to his posting in the customs office some hours away in urban Siliguri, he was rarely present at BTWA meetings or events. Other members of the organization complained that Paras received credit for successes that he contributed little toward achieving, but his status as a well-educated senior government official lent the organization an air of credibility that even Paras’s critics admitted was necessary. In much the same way, albeit on a different symbolic register, Paras now hoped that I could contribute images from my fieldwork across the border in Nepal to lend credibility to the BTWA’s application for ST status—the draft materials of which he had just given me on the condition that I contributed to the final version as requested.

“What exactly do you mean by ‘original’?” I asked. “You know,” he said, raising his eyebrows, as if the fact that I even had to ask diminished his assessment of me, “‘Natural’ types of Thangmi, with less teeth than this [he gestured to his own mouth], wide porters’ feet with no shoes, clothes woven from colorless natural fibers. But what we really need is more photos of people like that doing puja (N: rituals), at jatra (N: festivals), you know, bore (T: weddings), mumpra (T:funerals), all of those things that we can’t ‘videoalize’ so easily here.” For Paras, the term “original” conveyed the triple entendre of “authentic” (in the literal sense of “original”), “primitive” (in the sense of “originary”), and “distinctive” (in the sense of possessing “originality”). He located the source of the “original” in the poor economic conditions and ritualized lifestyle that he stereotyped as characteristic of Thangmi in Nepal. For descendants of migrants who left Nepal to settle in India several generations earlier, like Paras, Nepal served as a convenient metonym for an “original” Thangmi culture locked in a static past.

At the level of personal practice, Paras and other relatively elite BTWA leaders distanced themselves from such markers of “originality.” It was therefore a relief to them that these characteristics seemed more common among Thangmi in Nepal. However, at the level of political performance, BTWA activists sought to appropriate and package such “primitive traits” and “geographical isolation”—both perceived criteria for a successful ST application—in the service of their own agenda. For this reason, it was frustrating to them that such originality was difficult to document in Darjeeling itself. This is where my photos came in.

At first, I thought that this obsession with locating the “original” in practice and packaging it in discursive terms was exclusive to activists in India like Paras, emerging from a sense of inadequacy that they themselves did not possess such “originality.” But I soon realized that in some way or another, the concepts condensed in the root word “origin” played an important role in constituting feelings of Thangminess for almost everyone I worked with. Gurus in both Nepal and India used the terms shristi (N: creation) and utpatti (N: origin, genesis) to describe the process of ethnic emergence as recounted in their paloke, the centerpiece of Thangmi ritual practice that narrates the community’s origins. Most Thangmi laypeople were familiar with such stories, which will be recounted later in this chapter, experiencing them as a positive statement of originality that countered feelings of marginalization.

Thangmi ethnic activists in Nepal also used the concepts of “original” and “originality” regularly in their speeches and writings. They typically used the Nepali words maulik and maulikta, respectively, instead of the English terms as Paras had.¹ For instance, in an argument against misrepresentations of Thangmi as a subgroup of the Tamang, the Jhapa-based activist Megh Raj concluded that “Thami is a complete ethnicity with its own original identity, existence and pride” (Niko 2003:46).² Maulik, often translated as “authentic,” is to some extent analogous with the term sakali, as introduced in Chapter 2, although the former term gestures toward the source of ethnic origins in a distant past in a more explicitly historical sense than the latter.

In this chapter, I show how diverse invocations of shared origins and originalities indicate a convergence of Thangmi worldviews around what we might call the sacred originary, recalling Godelier’s statement that “the sacred is a certain kind of relationship with the origin” (1999:169). It is not shared descent per se but knowledge of a shared myth of it that works as a universal marker of belonging throughout the transnational Thangmi community by pointing toward the original as that which imbues the sacred object of identity with its power.

The differences I observed in relationships to and expressions of the original—which I had initially thought indexed country-specific responses to the particular politics of recognition encountered in India and Nepal, respectively—were in fact not determined exclusively by political and economic particularities in each country but rather more by educational and generational positionalities that entailed different techniques for controlling and deploying originary power. That a shared narrative of origin constituted the power of Thangminess was so taken for granted it was almost never stated explicitly. It therefore took me a long time to understand this fact. Rather, the question up for public debate within the Thangmi community was how to best marshal that sacred power in the service of competing agendas; so it was these divides that appeared most evident to me.

Orality:Literacy—Myth:Science

Understanding the relationship between oral traditions of shamanism and literate traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism has been a central concern of Himalayan anthropology since its inception (Berreman 1964; Fisher 2001; Holmberg 1989; Mumford 1989; Ramble 1983; Samuel 1993; Ortner 1989, 1995), and relates to broader anthropological debates over the cultural causes and effects of orality and literacy (Ahearn 2001; Goody 1986, 2000; Ong 1982; Redfield 1960). The contemporary power struggle between Thangmi gurus and activists, who respectively wield the power of orality and textuality within the single ritual system of “Thangmi dharma,” offers a new set of insights on this classical theme. The question in the Thangmi case is not whether shamans will disappear or be subsumed by an encroaching literate tradition but whether activists will succeed in appropriating the orally embodied power of their own shamans.

Gurus (and indirectly their adherents) access originary power by propitiating territorial deities through a set of oral recitations that recount origin myths in a ritual register of the Thangmi language. The purposes of these recitations are twofold. First is to secure divine recognition of the special relationship between Thangmi and their territory. Such divine recognition is necessary to ensure a range of positive pragmatic effects, such as good harvests and the continued survival of the community. Second is to reproduce a form of “mythical thought” (Lévi-Strauss 1979:6, [1973] 1987:173, 184) that effects an inseparable link between Thangminess and the oral transmission of cultural knowledge. Such mythical thought is conceptualized by members of the Thangmi community—both guru and activist—to exist in opposition to scientific thought, with its reliance on written transmission. The efficacy of a guru’s practice depends upon his power to recite the correct propitiation chants in an embodied manner defined by its orality. In this formulation, lay Thangmi cannot access originary power directly and instead must rely upon their guru to mediate it for them when necessary.