Back from Berthang, Hee-Bermiok, West Sikkim

Managed to organise a visit to an agricultural valley area with no road access in West Sikkim. The Hee-Bermiok Constituency down the valley from Rinchengpong, with the twinkle of Gezing visible at night on the upper flank of the hills facing out from Berthang village, where I stayed with the extremely enthusiastic and passionate “JD”: director of another NGO called “Health and Environment Society”, who mostly busied himself with the largely voluntary (i.e. very low paid) job of Gram Panchayat secretary. The family I stayed with is a Brahman family that has been in the area for two generations. The village itself is predominantly Brahman/Chetri, with large numbers of Rai and Limbu, as well as some Lepcha and Bhutia. Above the village, and above the road that links Kaluk with Dentam, a small community of Sherpas live close to a reserved-forest area; opposite Berthang are other villages, some majority Gurung, other mostly Rai or Limbu. An extremely ethnically diverse, agriculturally productive, and fairly well-populated - but precipitously and dizzyingly steep valley area.

The house I stayed in, and in fact much of the village, is almost totally self-sufficient in terms of food consumption. They produce most of their own rice on the wet-paddy terraces that intermittently run up the side of the valley from the Kaleg and Rangit rivers, that meet to head down towards the town of Legship. Maize, millet, and varieties of manioc are the supplementary carbohydrates. They grow around 4 varieties of lentils (distinguished by colour), have access mandarin fruit, which dots household and land everywhere, grow tomatoes, spinach and herbs in home or kitchen gardens, and almost every house I visited has at least one cow. They buy essential food items such as oil, salt, sugar, tea and spices from the roadside shop a winding 2 km uphill (takes an hour to walk it). It is hard to make generalisations about the village as a whole, in part because the actual concept of the village is extremely loose, but mostly because I stayed with probably one of the richest families in it – they owned what seemed like a considerable amount of land, whereas some families, a couple of Limbu households for example, owned nothing: no land and no house. They simply worked on other people’s land in exchange for part of the food production determined either beforehand or ona fixed 50% basis (the famous kutia and adhia systems common throughout Nepal for example).



An interesting Hindu funeral (some photos below) by the river on the last day:


















Good to be in a such a productively "busy" village: