Navel of the Demoness : Tibetan Buddhism and Civil Religion in ...

the people of mustang and their history 31
was closed to foreigners before 1991, since which time limited numbers of
tourists have been permitted to travel there on payment of a substantial royalty.
The line corresponds to no traditional boundary between old administrative
entities or ethnically distinct groups but seems to be largely a matter of supervisory
convenience: the last settlement on the Kali Gandaki within the
unrestricted part of Mustang is Kag (Nep. Kagbeni), which was long ago favoured
by the local rulers as the site of a customs post, since its geographical
situation permitted a clear view of travellers up and down the main trade route.
Mustang district is made up of a number of enclaves that are recognised
either as the residues of old administrative entities or the territories of ethnically
distinct groups. The northernmost part, as we have seen, is referred to as
Lo. Upper Lo is the territory that was ruled by the king of Mustang at the time
of the unification, and recognised by the Gorkhas as his domain. The area is
referred to more fully as Lotö Tshodun (Tib. Glo bo stod tsho bdun), ‘‘the Seven
Sectors of Upper Lo.’’ The word tsho (Tib. tsho), which I have translated here as
‘‘sector,’’ is an old Tibetan administrative division that might be better rendered
as ‘‘county’’ here; however, since we shall later encounter the same word being
used to signify subdivisions within individual settlements, as well as assemblies
of people, the vaguer ‘‘sector’’ is probably more appropriate. Each of the
seven sectors contains one or more settlements. Larger communities, like the
city of Monthang, account for an entire sector, while other sectors consist of
several small villages that have been grouped together. It is likely that these
sectors were above all tax-paying units, with all sectors being required to pay
the same amount in terms of cash or other commodities. How a sector would
organise the distribution of its tax burden among its component settlements or
houses seems to have been largely its own affair.
Below Gemi, the southernmost village in Upper Lo, is the large community
of Gelung, which (with the help of Jumla) broke away from the kingdom
in the 1754 (Schuh 1994: 85). Immediately to the south of Gelung is Baragaon,
corresponding to the region I have referred to earlier as Lower Lo. Since the
latter is sometimes used in Tibetan works to include areas even further south,
I shall abandon the name altogether in favour of the unambiguous Baragaon.
Baragaon (Nep. Bahragaũ) now is made up of nineteen settlements that, with
the exception of five villages, are all Tibetan-speaking. Since it is Baragaon and,
more particularly, the five non-Tibetan-speaking villages that are the main
concern of this book, I shall return to this enclave later and continue for now
with a rough sketch of Mustang as a whole.
South of Baragaon is a group of settlements known as Panchgaon (Nep.
Pancgaũ), a Nepali name that has its Tibetan equivalent Yulkhanga (Yul kha
lnga). Both terms mean ‘‘the Five Villages.’’ The villages are Thini, Shang,