Gurkhas’ in the town: migration, language, and healing

The serga pye1 recalls how a group of Tamu-mai2 (Gurung) came upon what is now the ancestral village of Kohla, planted some grain, returned to find that it had produced a high yield, and moved across the Lamjung Himal to settle in the forests above their present villages. Many Tamu-mai consider the move across the Himalaya to be the final stage in their migration, without realizing that they themselves are engaged in an equally historic migration. This article examines the contemporary rural-urban movement of the Tamu-mai, which is intimately tied to the experience of service in the British army, and explores some of the associated social and cultural changes. As people plot new urban geographies, and as the second generation grow up as town-dwellers, a new Tamu social landscape is created and the sense of what it means to be Tamu is shifting. In this new environment, the cultural landscape is being re-drawn. As the map is reformulated, some knowledge and practices have lost their cultural centrality. Language, for example, has been displaced, and few of the second generation speak Tamu Kyui. In contrast, despite a wide choice of alternative options, shamanic healing practices retain their cultural salience.