The Lepchas of Sikkim

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The Lepchas are one of the Mongoloid tribes inhabiting the southern slopes of the Himalayas. Since most of the area in which they live was partially or completely closed to outside world, there is very little information available about their life and culture.

This book attempts to provide rich insight into the various aspects of Lepchas' life and culture, with special reference to Lingthem and Zongu villages of Sikkim. It tries to make a total picture by presenting three viewpoints the framework of the Lepcha society, the impact of the culture on the people, and the individuals who were the product of that culture and society. It describes in detail their homes, food habits, rules of kinship, and marriage, sex life, socio- religious rituals, and their relations with environment, foreigners, other Lepchas and the supernatural. A discussion on social evolution and aggression also find place in the book. Various disciplines-anthropological, psychological, functional and Freudian-have been employed to meet this purpose.

Geoffrey Gorer (1905-1985), was an English anthropologist and a noted author, for his application of psychoanalytic techniques to anthropology.

He was educated at Charterhouse and at Jesus College, Cambridge. During the 1930s he wrote unpublished fictions and drama. His first book was The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis de Sade (1934). Africa Dances (1935) was an account of a journey to Africa, and another cultural study Bali and Angkor, or, Looking at Life and Death (1936). Hot Strip Tease appeared in 1937 and Himalayan Village in 1938.

His admiration for George Orwell's novel Burmese Days led him to contact Orwell in 1935. They remained good friends until Orwell's death in 1950.

From 1939 he lived and worked in the United States. He wrote The Americans (1948), The People of Great Russia: A Psychological Study (1949), and worked with various (semi) official organisations about studies in Soviet and other cultures. Modern types (1955) was his last book written in America.

From 1957 he again worked in England.

Exploring English Character, based on a large survey he designed, which appeared in 1955. Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain appeared in 1965. The Danger of Equality and other essays (1966) were collection of some recent papers. Sex and Marriage in England Today appeared in 1971.

By J. H. HUTTON

(William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge)

Early writers on India tell us of a strange people living about the sources of the Ganges, mild and gentle in manners and of blameless life. Some of their other strange attributes are scarcely human, but it is perhaps permissible to recognise in this account of a gentle race living in a remote valley of the Himalayas an echo of some contact with the Lepchas, who differ very remarkably in this quality of mildness from at any rate their more immediate neighbours. No one who has had to deal administratively with the Nepali grazier, for instance, would impute to him an immoderate regard for the property or the predilections of his neighbours, nor is it at all a quality of the Gurkha in general; eastwards, on the other hand, the Bhutanese are not particularly noted for benignity and still less the Daflas and Akas beyond them. To find a Himalayan society in any way comparable to that of the Lepchas in its successful elimination of aggressiveness from its members and the reduction of jealousy to a minimum it would be necessary to go west of Nepal to the districts of Lahaul and Spiti. How far it would be possible to find it there it is not easy to say, for our recorded knowledge of the social and domestic life of the peoples of the Himalayas is scanty. Even the officers of the Assam Government have not yet produced any monograph on any of the tribes on the north bank of the Brahmaputra. Now, however, we are well informed at any rate about the Lepchas, for Mr. Gorer's Himalayan Village follows only by two or three months Major C. J. Morris' Living with Lepchas, dealing with just the same area and the same Individuals as are treated of in this volume.

This study of a Those primitive tribe suffers from two disadvantages, one inherent in the material, and one personal. The Lepchas are one of a number of mongoloid tribes inhabiting the southern slopes of the Himalayas; since most of the countries in which these tribes live are partially or completely closed to Europeans, there is very little precise information available about this culture area, and consequently many questions of culture contact, which will be inevitably raised in the following account, are at present unanswerable. I myself am not a professional anthropologist, in so far as I have never followed as a student any academic course in anthropology. As an undergraduate at Cambridge I was much impressed by the work and legend of W. D. H.-Rivers, who had died shortly before I became a student, and I followed with very great interest the lectures of Professor Sir William Ridgeway, who died at the end of my second year. But although I found the subject of anthropology an enthralling one, and read all the books I could on the subject, I never at that period of my life considered it feasible that I should myself become an anthropologist. I was at that time more interested in creative writing.

In 1934 1 made, almost by chance, a three months' journey in West Africa, a journey undertaken under very favourable conditions; on my return I wrote a book about this journey; and though from the point of view of anthropology it was inevitably so superficial as to be almost worthless, it was indirectly through this book that the present study was made. It was through my book that I made the acquaintance of Major C. J. Morris, late and Bn. 3rd Q.A.O. Gurkha Rifles, and he proposed to me that I should accompany him to India in 1936, after his return from the third Everest expedition; he hoped to make a study of the Gurkhas in their unexplored home in Nepal, but the hoped-for permission to enter that closed land was not forthcoming; so, as an alternative, he got the permission of the Maharajah of Sikkim to study the Lepchas in his country. During the whole of the visit Mr. Morris was my companion, and it was thanks to him that I was able to ignore both the practical and administrative difficulties in a strange land and under strange conditions which would most probably have proved insuperable to me unaided. Through his long-standing friendship with the Maharajah we not only obtained the permission to live indefinitely in Sikkim-a permission not easily obtained- but also his active collaboration in the choice of a site to work in and the co-operation of all the people, official and unofficial, directly or indirectly involved. I find it difficult to express adequately my sense of great indebtedness to Mr. Morris; his knowledge of local customs, both Native and European, were of inestimable.