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

Chainpur (see Map 3). It was on the path up to this beautiful Newari
bazaar town that we had our first Yakha encounter. This was with two
old men who said they were Yakha but that they didn't speak the Yakha
language. I asked them if they knew the Yakha greeting, but they did
not (I subsequently discovered it was 'namaste', like Nepali). Majhiya
Man Bahadur and his wife were the first Yakha-speaking Yakha we met, and
we stayed with the family for several days, However, we were not
certain that Madi Mulkharka was where we wanted to do the bulk of our
research. As the most 'developed' pancgvat In Sankhuwasabha, we
wondered about how representative it was, and how easy it would be to
learn Yakha there. In the case of Majhiya Man Bahadur's family, for
example, both he and his wife spoke Yakha, but their children, while
understanding it, rarely spoke it and their grandchildren were growing
up speaking only Nepali. We also had a gut reaction against some cheeky
children there who shouted and laughed at us but wouldn't enter into any
form of more meaningful interaction. Majhiya Man Bahadur's wife had
come from Tamaphok, a pancayat on the other side of the valley from Madi
Mulkharka, where she said everyone spoke Yakha. So after a few days,
with a letter of introduction for the daughter of the Tamaphok pradhgn
pa-c (the pancayat head), we picked up our rucksacks again and made our
way 2,000 feet down the hillside, across the Maya Khola river and up the
north facing side of the valley to Tamaphok.
We were warmly received in Tamaphok, and since it was also obviously
a centre of Yakha language and culture, it seemed ideal as far as our
'pure' research priorities were concerned. The Yakha did not constitute
the majority of the population in the pancgyat as a whole, nor were they
even the single largest ethnic group found there. However, of the