Kail Pahura or Nature’s Gift - but for whom?

- Signe Normose

In the spring of 2000 a fellow student of anthropology and I set out to Western Nepal, where we stayed for four months visiting various Tharu villages in connection with doing a baseline survey for the Tharu organisation Backward Society Education (BASE). The next spring in 2001, I visited Nepal again to do fieldwork for my Master's level thesis at University of Copenhagen. I was interested in the Royal Bardiya National Park and its impact on the lives of the people, mainly Tharus, who lived around it. I decided that the best way to go about this was to stay in a village bordering the National Park. For five months I lived in a village in Rajapur District, eating, working and spending the days with the local people and talking to them about their lives. This article is the result of some of the ideas and thoughts that came up in course of my conversations with the people in and around the National Park.

"Royal Bardiya National Park; home to the great one-horned Rhinoceros, the Bengal tiger, the Gangetic dolphin and more than 30 other mammals, 200 species of birds, numerous fish, reptiles and plants. A get-away where you can experience wildlife as well as the indigenous Tharu culture in undisturbed settings."

This is roughly the wording of hotel brochures and the park literature describing the largest national park in the Nepali Terai. Having known as a most attractive tourist destination the Royal Bardiya National Park generates a substantial income of foreign exchange, while at the same time serving as an important site for researching animal and plant life. The government of Nepal sponsors such research in cooperation with several foreign donors and a Norwegian university. In this respect the park is known worldwide.

However, not so widely known and discussed is the impact the park has on the lives of the people living around it. The impact is partly positive, as the park has generated some employment opportunities. However, the park rule, which stipulates that the land and other natural resources within the park area are protected and are, therefore, not allowed to be used by the people around the area, has an impact more negative than positive.

This lack of access to natural resources has, of course, had an impact on the people around the park, especially the Tharu population. This article will explain the reasons for this.

Land in the Old Days

In order to understand the degree of impact the national park has on local people, it is important to understand the overwhelming role of land ownership in the society in rural Bardiya. Most people agree that in not so distant past, Bardiya was a jungle area occupied mainly by the Tharus. Since the area was malaria infested, frequented by bandits from India and abundant with wild animals few people ventured there voluntarily.

Historical research tells us little about land ownership in Bardiya in the past. Land documents dating as far back as 1726 show that land in the area was legally granted to Tharu ‘Chaudharys’, who functioned as tax collectors for smaller kingdoms. (Krauskopff 2000). The Chaudharys were mainly traditional village headmen (mahato/bhargar) or religious leaders (gurua) of the Tharu communities. However, very little is known about the then system of land ownership. In 1861 the present Bardiya district, then part of the area termed Naya Muluk (lit. new area), was given to then Rana Prime Minister Jang Bahadur Rana and his brothers as a birta grant. This came to mean a change in the policy of landownership and taxation. The chaudhary system was changed in favour of a jimindar system. The jimindar system in effect meant that the Tharu lost influence and were replaced by high caste landowners from the hills. In order to farm land a peasant had to get permission from the jimindar, and was then in turn obliged to pay taxes and provide free labour (begari) to the jimindar. As the income generated through taxation was very low, especially for the jimindar, who merely functioned as a middleman between the state and the peasant population, and due to the lack of local law enforcement bodies, the extraction of begari was often unfairly burdensome. With the introduction of this jimindari system many Tharus refrained from obtaining land from the jimindars, as, if they did, they had to pay tax and perform begari. Therefore, they rather chose to hire themselves out or attach themselves to a landed family – becoming what is today known as a Kamaiya.

Becoming Marginalised

At the time of the jimindari system, this was probably a very wise strategy because the Kamaiya did not have to pay taxes or practice begari, but could still sustain a livelihood. However, in the 1960s the Nepali state changed its land and taxation policies and these changes ran contrary to this strategy. The jimindari system was abolished, and it is made obligatory for every individual farmer to pay the tax. At the same time the government started massive migration and resettlement schemes thereby bringing a lot of hill occupants down to the Terai. In effect this meant a massive rush for registering land - at least for those who knew what was going on! Many Tharus did not understand (or maybe they never even heard about it!) the process of land registration. For the fear of getting included in the list of to tax payers, many did not register the land they were working on. This is why majority of the Tharu population in Bardiya has little or no land today and they are living on sharecropping on the land belonging to high caste landowners or rich Tharu families. Hand in hand with the processes around the (failed) land registration went also a social and political marginalisation of the Tharu society as the Nepali caste system perpetuated by the hill migrants, gained ground in the villages of Bardiya. In this period the Tharu did not lose access to only land but also to a number of natural resources as the national park was established.

The National Park

What is today known as The Royal Bardiya National Park was established as a royal hunting reserve in 1967. Since then the area has been expanded several times, latest in 2001, bringing it to its present size of 1518 sq. km. When it was simply a hunting reserve, local people were allowed into the park area, where they would collect wood, plants and, on rare occasions, hunt. Later, this practice was deemed illegal by the government and, therefore, the Nepali military started protecting it. At present, the local people are allowed access into the park only for one week in December-January. They need permission for the access and are allowed only to cut the high grasses growing in the park, commonly used for roofing purposes and making rope. If caught in the park at other times than this week, people are fined and their tools confiscated. If the "trespassers" are women, the security persons might punish them ‘on the spot’ by forcing them to dance and sing. This means that villagers find it increasingly difficult to obtain the natural resources they need for building and repairing houses and making utensils. They also complain of lack of fodder for animals, lack of firewood and the difficulty of finding plants (medical and edible) they used to get from the park area. This is primarily so for the poorer Tharu people who do not have the financial means to buy these products from the market.

Indigenous People

The historical economic, social and political factors leading the Tharu to be marginalised are many — too many to be dealt with more thoroughly here. However, it seems to me that one of the root causes in the present day resource conflict lies in differing perceptions of rights over the land and of who should have these rights.

In Bardiya, it always puzzles me that there is general consensus — among high caste landowners, Tharus and the people connected with the national park - that the Tharus are the indigenous people. And yet what people mean by this does not seem to be the same.

Whenever I talked to Tharus, they would say that they were indigenous as "they had been there before everyone else" and that they "had always tilled the land there and that others came there later on and infringed their rights". This statement was not formulated in line with what many indigenous peoples advocacy groups say and the international policies acknowledging the rights of indigenous people but from personal experiences like; "My grandfather was here and there were no one else. He was farming the land. Many years later a Pahar or a person from the hills moved here, came to my grandfather and said that the land belonged to him. And, he had the land ownership paper. We could do nothing. He took away our land."

The high caste land owning families in Bardiya agreed that the Tharus were the indigenous people and that they had probably lived there before anyone else did. However, they did not feel that the Tharu should be given their rights over the land. On the contrary, many had a very patronizing attitude towards the Tharus. They said that up until recently most Tharus had been like children unable to look after themselves. They feel that since the Tharus have only recently stopped being ‘noble savages’ and since they themselves have for so long been taking the responsibility for the Tharus (through employing them as Kamaiya, through registering their land and through ‘bringing them civilisation’), the Tharus should still be helped and guided — ‘indigenous’ as they (still) are.

Also the people connected to the national park, such as park staff and hotel workers, would tell me that the Tharus were the indigenous people of the area. ‘Indigenous artefacts’ are at display at the Tharu museum at the park headquarters, the ‘Tharu culture’ is explained at boards at the visitors centre, and most of the hotels in the area organise ‘Tharu village walks’ or ‘Tharu cultural shows’ to amuse the tourists. The ‘indigenousness’ of the Tharus is clearly seen as an asset to the park, in so far as it attracted tourists. However, the coin also has a flipside. Apart from being a cultural asset to the park, the Tharus are just as much a problem. The Tharus are the same persons who go illegally into the park to collect wood, they are possible poachers killing the animals, and they are the people who complain and ask for compensation when the wild animals in the park destroy their crops. The Tharus are, as an indigenous people essential to the park, but as individuals they are a threat.

Rights and Resources

Despite the consensus that the Tharus were ‘indigenous’, the different groups in Bardiya inscribe the term indigenous with different meanings. This makes solving conflicts over resources difficult because every group has something to ‘protect’ — either their own rights over land, a biological diversity, a way out of poverty or a view of how the world should be. In the present situation the Tharus have lost access to land and to resources, and have very little say in how the park should be managed. The protectionist views of both park and high caste landowners makes it difficult for the Tharu population to involve themselves in decision making regarding the park area related matters because they are seen as partly ‘uncivilised’ and partly as a threat to the park plant and wild life.

If the Tharu community is to change this, it is important that they link up with the international attention to indigenous people’s rights. This will give more weight to their version of what it means to be indigenous, and may help gain influence over the natural resources available in the park.

(Signe Nørmose is a master's level student at the department of Anthropology at Copenhagen University)