Memories, warnings, and hope

In moments of nostalgia I recall the few months during my year out that I spent in a remote part of Northern India. It was a rural village in West Bengal, a few miles from the hill station of Kalimpong, in the famous Darjeeling district. The village, Beyong Busti, was a community of Lepchas, an ancient and now endangered tribe of people native to the region. The three months were spent teaching the children of Beyong English, at the newly constructed village school.

Getting there involved a two hour jeep ride from Kalimpong, along narrow, winding roads perched precariously on steep hillsides, and through Tolkienesque forests steeped in a dense Himalayan fog. The road ended at Buddhabari Bazaar, a market village which, apart from coming alive once a week on market day, when traders come to sell fruit and vegetables to villagers from the area, seemed all but abandoned. It was a few minutes walk down a hill track (passable only to goats and men) to the village.

It was remote. Electricity, though available at the Bazaar had not yet made its way into the valley. It was only recently that the traditional mud huts were giving way to tin-roofed "modern" housing that, I quickly learned, was capable of creating the most terrific noise in a hailstorm. Water came through small plastic pipes channeling water from the spring at the top of the valley. Food came from the Earth, grown and harvested by the same people that ate it. The houses were well spread out, often several minutes walk from each other. To the North the hills rose steadily toward Kangchenjunga, the great Himalayan peak, abode of the Lepcha guardian deity.

The day, for the villagers, began in the cold hour before dawn. Tea was made on smoky fires, the wood for which was chopped and carried from a few miles away. Cows had to be milked, and the land tilled in preparation for the rains. The children prepared themselves for school, which was, depending on where in the village you lived, up to an hour's walk away. By our standards it was a difficult life, but one which was also simple and practical. There was a closeness to Nature, an understanding of the Earth that is to us citizens of the 'developed' world an alien concept.

What I remember most about this place was the sense of peace. I recall the cold, misty mornings: the sound of chickens foraging for breakfast, a goat and her bleating kid roaming the hillside, the cows in the distant cowshed awaiting their milking; the flapping of Buddhist prayer flags in the wind. If you listened carefully you could hear the sound of firewood being chopped somewhere across the valley. On some days the mist would linger for hours, masking the Sun behind an impenetrable veil. The hillside below would disappear into an expanse of whiteness, at once eerie and enticing. Everything sounded different, damped by the moist air. The trees creaked gently, as though sharing secrets.

An idyllic picture, perhaps. But life in Beyong was not without its troubles. Many of them, I daresay, were from outside. The consumerist culture, developed and so powerfully exploited by the marketing enterprises of the West, was encroaching on this territory too. Coca-cola bottles could be found strewn in the compost heaps. A television had recently found its way into the village, powered by an old car battery; the image was speckled and scrolled down the screen, looping back to the top every time. Children wanted to buy chewing gum, magazines and fireworks at the bazaar; adults found a stronger substitute for the local brew in Western spirits. In a place where wealth did not previously exist in the form of money, money now began to grow in importance.

The missionaries realised this. Several small churches had sprung up on the hillside, set up by missionaries using this newly desired money as an enticement—I go so far as to say payment—for conversion. I was told that about half the originally Buddhist Lepcha population in the area had converted to Christianity. It was heartbreaking to note the divide between the Christians and the Buddhists. The one didn't attend the funerals of the other, even within the same family; marriage across this newly created divide became nearly impossible. In a community that is already dwindling in size, there is a sad irony in this.

I had the fortune, if I can call it that, of meeting one of these missionaries; his first and only purpose was to get me, too, to convert. By way of greeting he asked, "are you Christian?" Christianity, he said, offered the answers (and money) that couldn't be found elsewhere. "Forget about all this primitive nature-worship." I have a tendency to anger, and this was a moment when the ability to overcome it was severely tested.

Let me emphasise that I have nothing against Christianity, or indeed against any other faith. But what I cannot tolerate is the attempt of believers to impose this upon anyone else. The Lepcha religion, so much part of their tradition that it was at one time inseparable from daily life itself, was a rich repository of wisdom, a method of existence. Nature was worshiped because Nature was what sustained life. With this worship came an intimate knowledge of her workings—the plants, the animals, the seasons. This was its value and purpose.

The culture and traditions, the language and ceremony that for so long has been a part of the Lepchas appears now to be giving way to modernity. The simple village life that for so long has been the heart and soul of India is steadily (and alarmingly quickly) disappearing, its pursuants being lured or forced away from the land into that perennial rat race that is the city. This is taking place across the country, indeed across the entire planet. "There is money there, there is happiness there." If only it were so.

Development in the world has brought many good things. Indeed, if it were not for technological advances, you would not have to be subjected to reading this. But it has also brought many bad things. We have become detached from the Earth that feeds us; we no longer hear its voice in the trees and the rivers, we no longer walk barefoot on the grass. We live in an unsustainable oil-powered age, oblivious of the terrible legacy that we risk leaving for our children and grandchildren.

But there is hope; there is a sense of awakening to the follies of the past. A number of individuals have realised that we need to re-engage with Nature, and realised that it is possible to do so. The ways of the past were not primitive and retarded, far from it; they were abundant with a wonderful harmony with the Earth and the Universe, a harmony that in today's world we have little understanding of.

Those ways can be brought back and adjusted to fit our contemporary lifestyle—we do not need to go back to living in mud huts (though it is something that I personally, have always had an inclination towards). But we need to do it collectively. It needs to change from being a maverick, nonconformist movement to a global, unified effort. The decision to join this effort is one that each of us will have to make, if not today then tomorrow or the day after. We can all contribute in ways best suited to our nature.

I am confident that this change will come about, but the manner in which is does so is in our hands. It can either be that we awaken now to Nature's warning, or we wait for her (and that includes her control over the human temperament) to take things into her own hands. Einstein perhaps foresaw the latter when he said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

We can avoid that, if we try.