THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

phuphu~arg, These were pop guns made out of two short pieces of malinno
of different thicknesses. The larger piece was filled with seeds which
were then fired from one end by ramming the thinner piece inside, The
Brahmin children who showed these toys to me insisted that both the word
and toy were Yakha, although I wondered whether there may also have been
an onomatopoeic derivation from Nepali.
Fores t (Ban )
In describing the typical scene of the Mewa Khola valley in Ilam
district, Sagant could have been writing about the Maya Khola valley
landscape of which Tamaphok was a part: a swathe of houses and f ields
across the slopes, broken only by thickets of bamboo and groves of
trees, often between two wooded belts, one by the river and one by the
crest, These extremities were distinctive, Rivers were often malarial,
rocky and gorge-like, and both they and the forests belts were wild
areas inspiring fear (Sagant, 1976:32). For the Yakha too, the riverine
and r idge-crest forests were wild, jungly places, the haunt of ghosts,
spirits and wi ld animals.
It might seem odd to cast the forest, an integral part of the
farming system, in the role of cultural bogeyman. True, the forests
were known as a source of wood, medicines, strawberries and chestnuts
(and the river provided fish). However, the acknowledged importance
of forest and river products did not detract from people's fear of the
places they came from, One man remembered the days when carrying goods
from Dharan to Taplejung could earn him 120 NRs (worth a lot more in
those days); his main fear along the route was the terrifying forest
between Basantapur and Chauki (a hamlet at the head of the Maya Khola