Limbu
Contents |
Limbu
This section has been extracted from THE TRIBES and CASTES of BENGAL. Ethnographic Glossary. Printed at the Bengal Secretariat Press. 1891. . |
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Traditions of origin
A large tribe, probably of Mongolian descent, ranking next to the Rhambu and above the Yakha 'among the three upper divisions of the Kiranti group. The precedence given to the Khambus is supposed to be due to their having a larger proportion of Rha and Newar blood, while the Limbus have interbred freely with the Lepohas. The Yakha are a minor tribe, concerning which little is known, Unlike the other two, they have no generally recognized honorific title, though they claim to be addressed as dewan and call themselves Yak Thomba or yakherds, with reference to the tradition that this was their characteristic occupation before the tribe crossed the Himalaya into Eastern Nepal. The name Limbu, 01' Das Limbu, from the ten sub-tribes (really thirteen) into which they are supposed to be divided, is used only by outsiders. Tibetans bave no speuial name for the Limbus; they call all the tribes of the Indian side of the Himalaya by the general name Monpa or dwellers in the ravines. The Lepchas and Bbotias or Tibetans settled in Bhotan, Sikkiro, and Nepal speak of the Limbus as Tsong, because the five towns or sub¬tribes included in the class known as Lhasa-gob'a emigrated to Eastern Nepal from the district of Tsang in Tibet. Lepchas call them chang, which may be a corruption of Tsong. By other members of the KiIllnti group they are addressed by the honorific title of subah or su11ah, a chie£.
The Limbus, according to Dr. Campbell, "form a large portion of the inhabitants in the mountainous country lying between the Dud-Kosi and the Kanki rivers in Nepal, and are found in smaller numbers eastwards to the Mechi river, which forms the boundary of Nepal and 8ikkim. In still fewer numbers they exist within the 8ikkim territory, ' as far east as the 'Tista river, beyond which they rarely settle. In Bhutan they are unknown except as strangers." Hodgson locates them between the Arun Kosi and the Mechi, the 8ingilela ridge being theu' boundary on the east. The Limbus themselves claim to have held Tom time immemorial the Tamba Khola valley on the upper waters of the Tamba Kosi river; and the fact that one of their sub-tribes bears the name Tambakhola suggests that this valley may have been one of their early settlements. '1'hey bave also a tradition that five out or their thirteen sub• tribes came from Lhasa, while five others came from Benares. The former group is called the Lhasa-gotra, and the latter the Kasi-gotra; but the term gotra has in this case no bearing on marriage. All that can safely be said is that the Limbus are the oldest recorded population of the country between the Tamra Kosi and the Mechi, and their flat features, slightly oblique eyes, yellow complexion, and beardlessness may perhaps afford grounds for believing them to be the descendants of early 'Tibetan settlers in Nepal. They appear to have mixed little with the Hindus, but much with the Lepchas, who of late years have migrated in large llumbers from Sikkim to tbe west. Dr. Campbell compares the two tribes in the following words :-" The Limbu is a very little taller in stature than the Lepcha, somewhat less :/leshy, and more wiry in the limbs. as fair in complexion, and as completely beardless. He is soaroely ever as ruddy as the Lepchas sometimes are; his eyes are, if anything, smaller, and placed more to the front than the Lepcha's, and his nose, although somewhat smaller, is rather
higher in the bridge than that of the Lepcha. He wears his hairlong, but does not plait it into a tail; has no fancy for bead necklaces; wears a kukri instead of the bain 1 and wide trousers and a jacket or c1tapkan in preference to the robe and long jacket of the Lepohas."
At the time of the Gurkha conquest of Nepal the country east of the Arun Kosi was beld by petty Limbu chiefs on quasi-feudal terms from the Hindu Rajas of Bijapur and Makwanpur, at whose courts representative Limbus disoharged the duties of Chauntra or prime minister.
Taking refuge in the hill forts with which each chiefship was provided, the Limbus offered a gallant resistance to the invading Gurkhas, and the latter underwent many repulses before their supremacy was fully established. Although used to bearing arms, and deeming themselves a military race, they do not rank among the regular fighting tribes of Nepal, and they are not admitted into the Gorkhali regiments of the Nepalese army. Their principal occupations at the present day are agriculture, grazing, and petty trade. They serve in the Kiranti regiments raised about 30 years ago by Jang Bahadur, and some of them have enlisted in our own Gurkha battalions. Some authorities believe them, with the rest of the Kiranti, to be inferior in soldierly qualities to the Khas, Mangar, and Gurung tribes, from whom our best recruits are drawn, but this opinion seems to be giving away, among the present generation of Gurkha officers, to a more favourable estimate of their military capacity, and their behaviour in the Sikkim compaign of 1888 is understood to have borne out the latter view.
Internal structure
The internal structure of the tribe i extremely complicated, and can best be studied in the Appendix, where it is shown in a tabular form. The Limbus are divided into thirteen endogamous sub-tribe , each of which is again broken up into a number of exogamous septs. The names of the septs are extremely curious. Two. or three at the most are totemistic, a few are local or territorial, and one only is eponymous. By far the greater number of them refer to some personal adventure or peculiarity of the original founder of the sept, and they suggest the existence of a considerable body of rather grotesque folklore. The rule of exogamy goes by the male side, and is supplemented by forbidding intermarriage between persons descended in a direct line from the same parents as long as any relationship can be traced. Intermarriage between consins is barred for three generations, or, as some say, for seven. In practice, however, while the rule forbidding marriage within the thar is most strictly observed, there seems to be much uncertainty about prohibited degrees, and I believe near alliances with the mother's kindred are by no means uncommon . A further complication is introduced by the restrictions 011 inter¬marriage arising from mit!! (Limbu saiba) friendship or on fictitious brotherhood among most of the hill races. Two men contract friendship by a special ritual at which a Brahman, or, when the partice are Buddhists, a Lama, officiates, and reads mantras or mystic formule, while the two friends thrice exchange rupees, hand¬kerchiefs, or scarves, and daub each other between the eyebrows with the paste made of rice and curds which is used in the marriage ceremony. The effect of the union is that the friends are reckoned as brother , and intermarriage between the two families is prohibited for several (some say eighteen) generations. Any breach of the rule is punished in British territory by exclusion from caste. In Nepal, I am informed, more severe punishments, such as death or slavery, are inflicted.
Members of the Murmi, Lepcha, and Bhotia tribes may be admitted into the Limbu tribe after being approved by the tribal council, called by the Limbus tum thum, and giving a feast to the local community. In some cases the new member is required to file a written statement to the effect that he has entered the tribe and will abide by its rules. Khambus and Yakhas, being Kid,ntis them¬selves, may be admitted into the tribe by the simpler and more direct process of adoption. In any case the children of a Limbu man by a Bhotia, Lepcha, Gurung, Sunawar, Mangar, or Murmi woman, or of a Limbu woman by a man of any of these groups, are admitted without question into the Limbu community.
Religion
The phlegmatic and utilitarian habit of mind which a German ethnologist has noticed as characteristic of the Mongolian races comes out conspicuously in the nonchalant attitude of the Limbus towards religion. Where their surroundiugs are Hindu, they describe themselves as Saivas, and profess to worship, though with spariug and infrequent observance, Mahadeva and his cousort Gauri, the deities most favoured by the lax Hinduism of Nepal. In a Buddhist neighbourhood the yoke of conformity is still more easy to bear : the Limbu has only to mutter the pious formula, om mimi padme om, and to pay respect and moderate tribute to the Lamas, in order to be accepted as an average Buddhist. Beneath this veneer of conformity with whatever faith happens to have gained local acceptation, the vague shapes of their org'inal Pantheon have survived in the form of household or forest gods, much in the same way liS Dionysus and other of the Greek gods may be traced in the names and attributes of the saints who preside over the vintage, the harvest and rural festivals of various kinds in remote parts of Greece at tho present day. Under such disguises, which serve to mask departures from the popular creeds, the Limbus wurship a host of spiritual beings whose attributes are ill-defined, and who e very names are not easy to ascertain. Yuma, Kapoba, and Theba rank as household gods, and are propitiated once in five years, or whenever disease or loss of property threaten the family, by the slaughter, outside the house, of bnffaloes, pigs or fowls. The votaries eat the sacrifice, and thus, as they express it, "dedicate the life-breath to the gods, the flesh to ourselves." No special days are set apart for the ceremony j but it cannot be per¬formed on Sunday, as that day is sacred to Himaliya. Those who wholly neglect the duty are supposed to suffer in person or property, and the common hill disease of goitre is believed to be one of the special modes by which the gods manifest their displeasure. Temples and idols are alike unknown, nor, so far as I can ascertain, does the imagination of the Limbus trouble itself to clothe its vague spiritual conceptions with any bodily form. Himariya., the god of the forest, is propitiated on Sundays by offerings of sheep, goats, fowls, pigeons and Indian-corn A stone ullder a tree by the roadside is smeared with vermIlion and bound with thread, and this place of sacrifice is marked by consecrated rags tied to a bamboo pole. In addition to these more or less beneficent, or at least neutral, divillities, the Limbus are compassed about by a multitude of name¬less evil spirits, "who require peculiar managelLent in wardino-off their caprices." '1'0 appease and propitiate these is the special function of the Bijuas, a class of wande:ring mendicants peculiar to Sikkim and the eastern parts of Nepal. Bijuas are wholly illiterate, and travel about the country muttering prayers and incantations, dancing, singing, prescribing for the sick and casting out devils. They wear a purple robe and broad-brimmed hat, and are regarded with great awe by the people, into whom they bave instilled the convenient belief that their curses and blessings will surely be fulfilled, and that ill-luck will attend anyone who allows a Bijua. to leave his door dissatisfied.
While tbe Bijua. acts as exorcist and devil-worshipper for all the Himalayan raoes, the equally illiterate Phedangma is the tribal priest of the Limbus for the higher grades of spirits, and officiates at sacrifices, marriages, and funerals. He is also called in at births to foretell the destiny of the infant, and to invoke the blessings of the gods. '1'he office frequeutly descends from father to son, but any one may become a Phedangbo who has a turn for propitiating the gods, and for this reason the occupation shows no signs of hardenin g into a caste.
Animism
It will be apparent from the faots stated above that the leading A principle of the Limbu religion is anmism, the belief in the existence of souls or spirits of which only the powerful-those on which man feels himself dependent, and before which be stands in awe-acquire the rank of divine beings and become objects of worship."l Among the Limbus, as among the aborigines of Chota Nagpur, who appear to have reached a very similar stage of development, this belief has given birth to a number of primitive miscellaneous divinities whose functions are very vaguely defined, and who do not owe allegiance to any centralised authority. This multiplicity of deities would of itself seem to favour the growth of Shamanism, a phenomenon which Sir John Lubbock regards as a widely distributed phase of thought forming a necessary stage in the progress of religious development. Others have gone so far as to use Shamauism as a sort of general name for all those animistic religions which make prominent use of the agency of the Shaman. Without disputing the convenience, or indeed the necessity, of introducing a 01as8¬name of some kind, I would urge that ShamAnism is a term singularly ill-suited to serve as the designation of a large group of religions. For in the first place the practice which it denotes is oommou to religions of all varieties of culture, and is by no means confined to the religions specially called Shamanistic; and secondly, the word, while calling attention to the superficial, fails to connote the essential characteristics of the class of religions in question. It may, indeed, possibly be the case, as has been hiuted above, that the Complicated departmentalism of certain animistic religions, where the supreme power is cut up into fractions and distributed among an army of gods, ghosts and demons, has led to the development of Shaman¬ism by leaving it uncertain to whom a man should apply for the alleviation of any particular evil. The Shaman, like the touts who hang about our public offices, professes to help people out of this difficulty, and to show them not only to what god their petitions should be addre8sed, but in what form they should be couched, and by what ceremonies introduced.
But even on this showing the prac¬tice is the' consequence, not the cause, of certain primitive ideas; and it is these ideas, not any of their more or less variable consequences, which a definition should aim at expressing. Taken by itself, then, the word Shamanism seems to fall short of completeness as a description of the Limbu religion. For all religions of that type the term animism should be retained as denoting the entourage of vague spiritual influences which is of their essence. In dealing with these surroundings different agencies are resorted to: sometimes the fetish predominates; sometimes the medicine man. According as one or the other of these predominates, the particular form of animism may conveniently be styled fetishistic or Shamanistic. Following this principle, the Limbu religion may be defined as a rather elementary form of Shamauistic animism, in which the Bijua and Phedangma play the part of Shaman, the former operating on the demons, and the latter having for his department the gods. Finally, we may perhaps hazard the conjecture that the original religion of the Limbus is closely akin to the Pon or ancient religion of Tibet. In both we find the forces of nature and the spirits of departed men exalted into objects of worship. In both systems temples and images are unknown, while propitiatory offerings occupy a prominent place. To complete the parallel, neither recognize a definite priestly order, while both encourage resort to Shamans or medicine men to ward off the malign influences which surround the human race.
Disposal of the dead
Both cremation and burial are in vogue among the Limbus, the latter being the more common, and probably the older, practice. The corpse is placed lying on its back with the head to the east. The grave is lined with stones, and a cairn, consisting of four tiers for a man and three for a woman, erected on the top. The Phedangma attends at the funeral and delivers a brief address to the departed spirit on the general lot of mankind and the doom of birth and death, concluding with the command to go whither his fathers have gone and not to come back to trouble the living with dreams. N either food nor clothes are placed in the grave, but sometimes a brass plate with a rupee in it is laid under the head of the corpse. For nine days after the funeral the sons of the deceased live on plain rice without any salt; and for a month or two the relatives wear flowers in their hair and avoid merry-makings. The special and characteristic sign of mourning is a piece of white rag tied round the head. There is no periodical ceremony for the propitiation of ancestors.
Inheritance
At a man's death his sons, natural or adopted, divide his property; I but an adopted son or a natural son by a wife informally married (kachchi sadi) takes only one-half of a legitimate son's share. The division of the property is usually made by the tribal council (thum-thum), who set apart au extra share for the eldest son. The youngest sou is allowed to choose his share first, and the other shares are then allected by the thum-thum. Failing SOilS, the sons-in-law actually living in or willing to live in the family homestead are entitled to divide the property. Brothers are the next heirs, and married sisters, if they attend the funeral, uaually get a small share in the inheritance, although it is said that they have no positive right to claim this concession. An exception to these rules of devolution occurs in the case of daifo or property given to a sister or daughter or acquired from a maternal uncle or father-in-law. This is equally distributed among the sons of the woman to whom or on whose behalf it was given, and in the event of her dying without children it reverts to her own family. This simple customary law is administered by the headmen of the tribe. and hardly any instances are known of Limbus having resorted to our courts for the settlement of disputes regarding property.
Social status
The Limbus stand wholly outside of the Hindu caste system, and their social position can only be defined with reference to the other Himalayan races. They belong to the upper division of the Kiranti group, which inhabits the middle hills of the Himalayas, and rarely descends below an elevation of 2,000 feet. Within this division the Limbu take rank below the Khambu and above the Yftkha, but this distinction is probably unknown beyond the limits of the Kiranti group, and in the eyes of society at large tbe three tribes occupy practically an equal position. They lJonsider themselves, and are regarded by others, as superior to the Danulir, Hayu, and Thami, who make up the lower division of the Killlnti. Their relations to the people of Nepal are less easy to define. They are certainly deemed inferior to the Khas, and probably also to the Mangaril aud Gurungs, both of whom are classed as military tribes. Newars hold a place second only to the Khas; Gurungs are inferior to the Newars. Mangar and Sunwar have their place next to the Gnrungs; Limbus, Khambus, and Yakhas are inferior to the Mangar and Sunwar. In the matter of food, they have very few prejudices. They eat beef, pork, and the flesh of all clean-feeding animals, and drink wine. In fact, the only restrictions on their diet appear to be those imposed on certain th(ws by the obligation not to eat the totem or beasteponym of the group. They will eat with all the castes of the hills execpt the Kami, Damai, Sarki, and Gain. 'The Census Report of 18 tH returned 2,429 Limbus in the district of Darjiling.
Limbu
(From People of India/ National Series Volume VIII. Readers who wish to share additional information/ photographs may please send them as messages to the Facebook community, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be gratefully acknowledged in your name.)
Synonyms: Limbu, Yak Thumba [West Bengal]
- Subtribeslsubgroups: Ahtharal, Charkhola, Chhothar, Maikhola, Miakhola or Terodiar, Panthar, Phenab or
Bhuiphuta, Tambrikhola, Yangorup [H.H. Risley] Titles: Subba [West Bengal] Subha or Suffah (chief) [H.H. Risley] Surnames: Limbu [West Bengal] Exogamous units/clans: Angbu, Chothar, Khebangba, L ohringten, Manglagpa, Miongba, Panthar, Pheagpa, Phejon, Pheodan, Terodiar, Thekim, Yakpangjen, Yakshoma, Ya kten [West Bengal] Exogamous units/clans (thor): *Septs (that): Aktenh ang, Angbohang, Angdenba, Anglah, Anlabang, Baidohang, Bakhim, Bargharri, Chdbegu, Hangam, Isbo, Kerungma, Khema, Khingba, Legma, Libang, Lingden, Luha, Mahb ho, Pho-Omphu, Photro Porno, Popson, Puktebu, Sangma, S enihang etc., Serling, Serma, Teling, Thekim, Tumbrok, Yakpangden, Yakshoma, Yigam, Mahbu, Yungma [H.H. Risley]
