Reflections on the Lost World of My Village Life
Little did I know that the place I was growing up was a secluded idyllic corner of the world, soon to be transformed beyond recovery and recognition. Surrounded by a vast semi-tropical rain forest in southern Nepal, my village in Bardiya was a tiny island amidst a dense forest that invariably teemed with fruits and berries. Almost at any given season, you could sneak into the forest in your backyard and find something to eat — Indian plum, Java plum, Ceylon oak fruit, gooseberry, wood apple, and so on. We lived with all kinds of birds and animals in the vicinity, oblivious to the fact that life then was fully in synch with nature.
My village echoed with melodic chirps and high-pitched whistles of birds. After sunsets, white herons came to perch on banana leaves and ruffled their feathers. The wind rustled the banana leaves all night long. On a serene night, you could hear sharp alarm calls of red-wattled lapwing and, for some reason, you would wait for more of the same sounds, gazing at the starry sky out of the window. The thin air of the night carried a faint fragrance of night-blooming jasmines or limes.
Most of the houses in my village had thatched roofs, many bulging with ash gourd vines and fruits. The houses, with reed-and-mud walls, huddled together and shared large yards in the front. It gave a sense of proximity to the villagers. The small Tharu village was surrounded by an immense stretch of farmland which, in turn, was encircled by a dense wilderness that stretched for miles with small pockets of settlements here and there. The farmland was dotted by scarecrows to keep invading wild animals and birds off. During harvesting seasons, some villagers had to spend their nights in the atuwa or farm?machans, pulling strings to bang tin boxes with attached wood hammers.
The seasons of corn and chickpea brought swarms and swarms of parakeets and other birds, but the season of mustard also brought wild honey bees. For a short time in Autumn, the whole farmland would be covered by a carpet of mustard flowers and go abuzz with the bees carrying nectar to their hives on the gigantic semal trees. It was a time for us to harvest mustard seeds and a fresh supply of honey together. It was a time for the cranes to fly in their uniquely symmetrical patterns high in the sky to the south. They sounded as if they were talking to each other along the way.
We had an age-old well in the middle of our village, its drainage covered by layers of moss. With a bricked circular inner wall, the well was as old as the village itself and nobody knew for sure when the village was settled. The entire village gathered around the well in the evenings for bathing, washing, and chitchatting. Here, the elderly reminisce about their old days, and the youngsters, in their primes, weaved new stories of their affairs. Housewives fetched water from the well, artfully lodging multiple clay water pots, one above another, on their heads.
We lived with all kinds of birds and animals in the vicinity, oblivious to the fact that life then was fully in synch with nature.
Life in my village was grounded on earth in the literal sense with barely a few two-story houses. There were no complaints about basic mood-floor life. Children played on the dusty roads and adults toiled on earth. Every evening, before the sun went down the crimson horizon in the west, cowherds returned home with their cattle from the jungle, leaving a thin haze of dust on their trail. With the nearing bell sounds of their homebound mothers, calves would begin mooing and galloping on the road. The only purpose of keeping large herds of cows for my villagers was getting manure for the field and growing bullocks for plowing and draught. Having more cows than you needed made no business sense, but nobody was concerned about cost-benefit analysis in those days. Many things in the traditional agrarian life had their own cultural and aesthetic significance.
When they were free, the women in my village went fishing or collecting wild leafy vegetables and mushrooms from the forest. With the onset of the spring season, the whole village smelled of the intoxicating aroma of Mahua flowers collected from the forest. The paddy fields did not just supply rice, they also supplied plentiful fish,?ghonghi?snails (escargot), and crabs. Nature and natural life had their ways of providing vital nutritional supplements the human body needs. People produced almost everything — except for salt, kerosene, and clothing — to sustain their life. In this largely self-sufficient pre-plastic world, women weaved?dhakiya?baskets and men knitted fishing nets. Every year, village men traveled to the north in their caravan of carts to collect babiyo (sabai grass) which made ropes. Every year, traders from India visited the village to barter their tools. The villagers barely needed to go to the hospital. For ailments they suffered, they had their own traditional healing methods or faith in their shaman, known as?guruwa.
Despite the fact that the Terai forest had an abundance of animals — including a wide variety of deer, wild boar, blue bull (nilgai), gauri gai (gaur bison), monitor, pangolin, and different kinds of rodents — and birds, my villagers were not given to hunting as a major source of nourishment.?Although the village people had no idea about how the ecosystem worked, they had a keen intuitive awareness that rampant exploitation and exhaustion of nature was not the way to sustain life generation after generation.?They got only the things they could not grow from nature. They did not need clocks and calendars to run their life.?It ran with the rhythm of changing seasons and their corresponding weather patterns.
Every evening, before the night fell, plumes of white smoke billowed from thatches and women rushed from one house to another to share their delicacies of the day. Exhausted by the manual farm work, adults sat on?khatias?in the wide yards, chatting and smoking tobacco from the gurgling hookahs and children went out to play on the streets. The air smelled of roasted chilies. Village girls, named after flowers and clad in floral gowns, walked together on the street with an air of adolescent smugness and sporadically burst into giggles at the jokes they shared. These self-assured village girls epitomized the ‘seize the moment' verve every generation wanted to realize in their youth.
Although the village people had no idea about how the ecosystem worked, they had a keen intuitive awareness that rampant exploitation and exhaustion of nature was not the way to sustain life generation after generation.
When the night deepened and stars appeared in the sky, my village would enter the dream world regulated by circadian rhythm. Somewhere in the village corner, an old forlorn voice would give a tune to ancient lore by the fireside. The night would be punctuated by the calls of nocturnal birds, jackal howls, and dog barks until the rooster crows announced the arrival of dawn.
The pond near my village was covered by a verdant carpet of water lettuce, with water lilies in the corners, embanked by tall reed grasses. Their feathery flowers continued swaying with the gusty blows of wind. The ducks from the village spent the whole day in the pond, dipping their necks deep into the water. From moment to moment, they would go playing hide and seek. For some reason, their males had raspy voices. A hovering bird observed the view from the sky. A swarm of whirling beetles kept swirling in an opening. The village had names for birds and beetles alike.
Every monsoon, flooding canals brought piles of leaves and sediments from the forested areas and restored the soil on the farm. Some birds came for ripening crops, but others came for bugs and insects. Nature had its ways of fertilizing the land and controlling pests. It rewarded human labor with a bountiful yield. Large flocks of vultures feasted on dead livestock in the forest clearing near the village whenever an animal died. A huge carcass would be reduced to a heap of skeletons in a matter of a few hours. Jungle cats and mongooses occasionally sneaked into the village to hunt domestic fowl.
I went to a primary school in another small village across the forest with my siblings and some village friends, following an ancient cart track filled with ankle-deep dust under a green canopy that invariantly echoed bird calls. The calls of common hawk cuckoos were distinct and captivating. More than an opportunity to learn, going to school was an adventure. We chased macaques with crimson buttocks and langurs with dark faces on our way to school. We climbed trees to pluck wild persimmons and marking nuts and sometimes even to steal parakeet chicks from their nests. We stopped to observe how dung beetles rolled the lustrous animal droppings to their underground nests. We stopped to see how velvet mites emerged, like all varieties of mushrooms, from the forest floor after a rain. We stopped to watch a spectacle of a mongoose versus cobra fight. We learned from nature about the nature of life — the things school could not have taught us.
Little did I know then that soon my world would change forever. Before I was a middle school student, a massive resettlement project was launched around our village. In a matter of a few years, a huge swath of forest in the mid-western lowland of Nepal was cleared on an industrial scale. Soon, we witnessed a lively gold rush moment around our village. Lumberjacks, loggers, laborers, and transporters scrambled from everywhere, including India, to partake in the treasure offered by the systematic deforestation campaign. The sawmills of Timber Corporation a few miles away from our village got busy around the clock and the bazaar around it kept sprawling.
We learned from nature about the nature of life — the things school could not have taught us.
A few years back, the entire village would erupt on its heels when a motor vehicle came to our village. We would touch the vehicles and wonder how they worked. We liked the strange smell of diesel exhaust. Now, we had shiny bulldozers, heavy-duty trucks, and jeeps speeding on dusty roads. We were filled with euphoria to see ‘development’ taking place around us. Within a couple of years, our secluded ancient village was surrounded by new settlements. We were no longer an isolated self-reliant village wrapped in nature. The rest is history typical of a society exposed to modern life.
From the vantage point of Anthropocene, I look back at the lost world of my village life. Our village did not have electricity until I completed my high school education and left for Kathmandu for higher education. It had managed without artificial lights the way its ancestors had managed for 200,000 years of their evolutionary history. Now, my village can boast of all the basic amenities of modern life — electricity, solar panels, satellite dish, wi-fi, and you name it. As a trade-off of modernization, it is drifting away from nature and the traditional wisdom informed by the biospheric particularities of the land is vanishing into the thin air.
My village which could have been a unique human settlement — as unique in its culture, language, belief system, and lifestyle as any Polynesian, Ceylonese, Namibian, or Caribbean village — has now become a part of the global village. To meet the challenges of modern ambitions, it is compelled to shed its old self every passing year and adopt what counts as normative in the modern lifestyle. With the arrival of tap water and then running water, the ancient well that lied at the heart of my village and functioned as a community center has remained abandoned as a leftover of the traditional way of living. The item songs of commercial films have superseded the traditional folklore that was passed down from one generation to another.
My village which could have been a unique human settlement has now become a part of the global village. To meet the challenges of modern ambitions, it is compelled to shed its old self every passing year and adopt what counts as normative in the modern lifestyle.
Now, when I compare my childhood days with those of my children, I realize how circumscribed and how one-dimensional their life has become.?Urban life has deprived them of the opportunity to freely wander in nature or play on the street. When boredom sets in, they turn to electronic gadgets and remain snared to shiny devices for hours.
With the fragmentation of families, children spending their time with their grandparents — which was taken for granted in traditional societies — has now become a rarity.?More and more, the brave new world of utilitarian idealism has invaded their spiritual space, dampening their sense of wonderment. As if life has a preordained teleological destination and as if frivolous joys (such as riding a grazing water buffalo in the field or running after dragonflies, butterflies, or fireflies) have no value in life, we expect them to be precociously productive and excel in whatever they do. The linearity of the journey, from school to employment, has pushed them to a world that is becoming hypercompetitive and emotionally taxing.
“Are you a technophobe, a neo-Luddite, or what?” A friend of mine asked me recently in response to my critical views about modern life. “Do you know in your glorious past majority of the people died before they turned forty? How about the extreme poverty and humiliation many suffered caused by human exploitation?”
Certainly, my friend had a great case in point. One cannot deny that the advancement in modern science and technology has significantly extended our longevity and brought material comfort to our life. But while being overly enthusiastic about modern achievements,?we tend to remain oblivious to the fact that the myopic vision of anthropocentrism has brought us to our own peril. True, we have added several decades to our lifespan, but have we been able to add value to our surplus years in an equal measure?
For the first time in our evolutionary history, we humans have become the cause of climate change, ecological collapse, and the great mass extinction. For the first time in human history, we are witnessing an unprecedented extinction of indigenous cultures. The cult of consumerism has turned the biosphere into a commodity, including our own habitat. With the stockpiles of nuclear arsenals and global warming, we have become our own existential threat.
While being overly enthusiastic about modern achievements,?we tend to remain oblivious to the fact that the myopic vision of anthropocentrism has brought us to our own peril.
As if there is no tomorrow, we are destroying the rainforest in Amazon on an industrial scale to feed soy to the farm animals in China and we are felling trees in Borneo to satisfy the global hunger for palm oil. Countries and global corporations have no regard for natural habitats and ethnic communities that have sheltered in nature.?All that counts in the modern economy is rapid growth in GDP as if it is the only measure to establish our worth on Earth.
Science says the human gut is the second brain — like the rainforest, teeming with countless gut microbes. Diversity in and the count of gut bacteria directly influences our mood and emotional state. It takes a wide variety of food items from different sources to maintain a healthy gut and, by extension, a healthy mind. But the intake of chemical-treated processed foods and antibiotics has bleached our guts days in and days out, the way pollution has bleached the coral reefs in the oceans.
Monocropping and the indiscriminate use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides are having a devastating impact on our lands and waters. Arthropods?are dying out on a colossal scale and with them, the entire ecosystem is collapsing. The extinction rate of insects, birds, animals, and reptiles is thousands of times higher than that would occur naturally. Due to overfishing and global warming, our oceans are turning lifeless. Our glaciers are melting and forests are on the fire, but we are going about our business as if we don’t have obligations towards future generations or as if we can buy our time with the wealth we are busy accumulating.
The extinction rate of insects, birds, animals, and reptiles is thousands of times higher than that would occur naturally.
Oftentimes, the village boy, who enjoyed living a simple life in nature, frets inside me and pines over the lost world of village life. Given an opportunity to choose, he would have gone back to the world where birds, insects, and animals gave meaning to life and where everybody knew everybody and went about their work, leaving their doors ajar.