JHAPA DISTRICT, NEPAL – The clock reads 7 p.m. on a gloomy winter evening. Rajgadh village, located in the Jhapa district in the southeastern corner of Nepal, glows from the dim light of oil lamps. As Shree Tudu, 57, cooks dinner on a clay oven in her “kitchen” – a small straw hut in the middle of a field – a noisy makeshift metal pipe periodically disturbs the calm evening. The fire’s heat keeps the front of her body warm, but her back can’t escape the cold as dew drenches her yellow scarf.
At the other end of the yard, a group of five stout men with dark complexions talk to each other in their native language, Santhali, as they drink beer and snack on fried chicken.
“Santhal men work hard all day long, and the intense labor causes their body to ache in the evening,” Tudu says. “Without a few shots of alcohol, they are not able to sleep in the night or go to work the next day.”
Hunting and fishing are the traditional occupations of the Santhals, an indigenous community in Nepal and India.
Tudu’s house, cattle shed and kitchen surround a yard in the middle of the property, where she lives with her husband, son, daughter and grandchildren. Unique to this indigenous group, the houses stand 1.5 meters above the ground and consist of clay-plastered bamboo walls and sloped straw roofs.
“Our houses have become our identity, as people can recognize a Santhal settlement just by looking at the roofs,” Tudu says.
But her house belongs to a local landlord, as Santhals have lost much of their property throughout the years. Some say their identity is vanishing as well because of a lack of implementation and awareness of indigenous rights.
With their own culture, religion and language, Santhals tend to isolate themselves from Nepali society. Marital customs reveal the few privileges enjoyed by women, who are taught that they shouldn’t speak much. Although nongovernmental organizations, NGOs, insist on promoting education and sanitation in Santhal communities, many Santhals resist. Men have just started to obtain citizenship certificates in recent years so they can buy land, but women see little need for attaining them. Santhal community leaders say they used to have a lot of land but outsiders took advantage of their illiteracy and tricked them out of it. An international convention guarantees indigenous rights in Nepal, but some say the government hasn’t fully implemented it while others say Santhals aren’t even aware of it.
The Santhals are one of 59 indigenous groups recognized by the Nepal government. Dark in complexion with black, curly hair and stout, muscular bodies, they are called Santhals in the Indian state of West Bengal and Santhals or Satars in Nepal. In Nepal, they reside in jungles in the eastern districts of Jhapa, Morang and Sunsari.
Lukhi Ram Hasda, a Santhal and president of the Association for Upliftment of Indigenous Nationalities in Nepal, an indigenous rights organization, says that the Santhal community has been growing – from almost 42,700 members in 2001, when the last census was held, to 120,000 members now.
The Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities, NEFIN, an organization of indigenous groups, has defined the Santhals as “an extremely backward ethnic group.” The arrow is their traditional weapon, many speak only Santhali, and they practice their own religion, Sarna, which emphasizes ghosts and spirits. With their own religion, culture and language, they tend to isolate themselves.
Though Tudu understands Nepali, she can only speak Santhali. They are the only indigenous people in Nepal to speak a language from the Austro-Asiatic language family of Southeast Asia.
“Since I don’t speak Nepali very well, I feel shy to talk to people,” she says in Santhali as she enters the house. “I am scared of talking to strangers.”
But it isn’t just Tudu. The Santhal community in general refrains from communicating with people from other communities because it doesn’t trust them.
“They have their own customs, rules, laws and court to settle disputes,” Hari Prasad Sapkot, secretary of Garamuni, another locality in Jhapa, says of the Santhals. “Usually the mukhiya, or the community head, acts as the judge to solve the problems.”
Santhals’ marital customs are one tradition that sets them apart from other communities. If a girl is interested in a boy in the community, she will enter his house forcefully. If the boy and his parents can’t persuade her to return to her home, they try to make her leave by burning chilies over the fire with the doors and windows closed, hoping the fumes will make her leave. If she doesn’t, the boy’s family has to accept her as his wife.
“If an unmarried woman from the community gets pregnant and the man refuses to accept her, the woman’s parents look for another man to marry her off, but the impregnator has to pay a fine in the form of a pair of oxen, two manas [approximately 2.5 kilograms] of rice and bear the expenses of the wedding,” says Binod Murmu, 30, a Santhal leader and development activist for the improvement of Santhal living standards.
These customs also reflect a level of empowerment among the Santhal women, but local women say that’s where it ends.
“A cock crows and not a hen,” Tudu says, referring to the Santhal belief that women should not speak a lot.
Child marriage and polygamy are also common among the Santhals.
“We believe that the marriage vow ties are strong even after death,” Murmu says. “Therefore, it is common to marry the sister of a deceased wife or vice versa.”
Though a slowly diminishing custom, a boy may even walk up to a girl during a fair and marry her simply by lining her hair with some vermillion, a bright red powder. But if the girl doesn’t want to marry the boy, she can refuse and they can divorce orally.
“This practice is disappearing, but it does still happen sometimes during Hat Bazaar,” Murmu says, referring to the local farmers market.
In addition to their unique marriage customs, Santhals also stray from Nepali norms when it comes to education and sanitation.
Sumitra Tudu, 14, who lives in Garamuni and is not related to Shree Tudu, doesn’t go to school. She quit school after completing grade five and now keeps busy with domestic jobs. Once she was able to read and write letters and do basic mathematics, Sumitra’s grandmother, Sumi Tudu, told her that her education was complete.
“Education and schools are erasing our culture and customs,” her grandmother says. “It is OK for sons to go to school, as the world is changing, but daughters should stay home and take care of the house and learn household work.”
Some of the local NGOs have promoted the education of Santhal children and adults by providing books and stationery. But the children do not want to attend school, and their parents don’t make them.
“We want to spread the awareness and help them move forward, but it will take a long time for them to fully understand the importance of education,” Sapkot says.
The NGOs have also tried to provide toilets to the Santhals, who prefer to relieve themselves in open fields. Nari Samaj, an NGO in Garamuni, installed several toilets for the Santhals with the support of Lutheran World Federation, a coalition of Lutheran churches, but the Santhals refuse to use them.
“We built the toilets when we came to know that everyone went to the open field to relieve themselves with money [we] got from donors and even taught them how to [use] it on several occasions, but they refuse to use it,” says Kamala Sapkota, a Nari Samaj member.
“I feel shy to go to the toilet,” says Tudu, who says she is more comfortable going to the field early in the morning and covering her face if she sees someone coming her way.
The Santhals didn’t even receive citizenship certificates until 2007 because of their self-isolation from Nepali society.
“Though most of the Santhals have got their citizenship certificates now, it’s likely that [women] have stayed away from getting them because they think it is unnecessary,” Hasda says.
Shree Tudu agrees.
“I do not need a citizenship certificate as a woman because we work and take care of the family,” she says.
But her husband, Suraj Muni Tudu, 60, says he was excited to receive his citizenship certificate in 2007.
“Now I can vote and choose a leader and even buy land,” he says.
For years he has worked on his landlord’s farm under the adhiya system, a popular contract in which landlords provide the land, landless farmers provide the labor and they split the harvest equally. He says it has enabled him to provide for his family but that he’d earn more for his work if he had his own land.
“Even though I work hard the whole year round, I don’t reap the benefits because I have to give half of the production to the landlord,” he says.
This year, he harvested a total of 80 manas, about 140 kilograms, of rice from the land. He gave half to the landlord and sold his own half to pay off loans incurred from domestic expenses from the year before, earning no profit for this year.
But it wasn’t always like this. He says his grandparents had enough land in the past but that clever people, who migrated from the hills, gradually captured his paternal land through manipulative loans.
“They took their fingerprints as agreement to [an] amount larger than that actual amount, as my grandfather was illiterate,” he says.
Many studies have shown that the Santhals once had a lot of land in their name. When they migrated from India into Nepal’s Jhapa and Morang districts, they chose to live in the fringes of the forests and slowly cut down trees for farming. But their informal possession of the large amount of land made them easy victims.
“After the alleviation of malaria in the Terai, the flat, fertile lands attracted those from the hills, and they started to lure the innocent Santhals with money,” says Somnath Neupane, a Garamuni farmer who is not a Santhal. “They cheated and misused their honesty, eventually making them landless.”
Journalist Nakulkaji Pandey details the transactions in his novel, “Kranti Ko Pahilo Charan,” or “First Steps of Revolution.”
“Local landlords got fake [fingerprints] to agree on loans, and later added multiple zeroes at the end of the actual loan number to make the loan amount higher,” Pandey writes. “Santhals could not pay the principal amount and high rate of interest, [and] ultimately handed over their land to the landlords and became [ploughmen] and [herdsmen].”
Despite the injustice against the Santhals, Sapkot says it is not in their nature to retaliate and usurp other people’s land, as was done to them. He says they instead isolate themselves and remain unaware of their rights.
“Their attitude towards life doesn’t allow them to either force themselves on others or get along with other[s],” Sapkot says. “They are extremely honest and are unaware about their rights, which makes it difficult for them to adjust with the people of other communities.”
Others say Santhals squandered their money and property on alcohol.
“Santhals have the habit of drinking alcohol and enjoying themselves,” Neupane says. “So whenever they have a little money, they spend it on entertainment. That could also be a reason his forefathers pawned their land for money.”
But Tudu’s husband denies this.
Santhals do have rights to own land and preserve their distinct culture and identity under an International Labor Organization, ILO, convention. Nepal signed the convention, ILO 169, in 2008. The first part of the convention has 12 sections that list the minimum basic policies, such as recognition of indigenous nationalities, human rights, fundamental freedoms, equality with other citizens, and pre-consultation and participation in development activities. The second part lists seven points regarding land rights.
Yet indigenous rights advocates say ILO 169 is far from being implemented, leading to a loss of identity. According to a NEFIN report, Santhals’ language, script, religion and culture are slowly vanishing because of a lack of preservation thanks to the state’s weak policies and structural interventions.
Others say that few Santhals know about the convention and that the first step is empowering them so that they become aware of their rights.
“So first of all, their level of awareness should be developed, and efforts should be made towards empowering them, and then only will they be [able to] understand the national and international laws created for their benefit,” Hasda says of his community.
