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

Sanskritizat ion had been part of Yakha experience for over two hundred
years and were an intrinsic part of their sense of identity as an ethnic
group. Recent developments experienced by the Yakha could be seen as a
continuation of this processo These could be framed in the discourse of
'modernization' or 'development' rather than 'Hinduization' or
'Sanskritization', but the processes involved, and the Yakha responses
to them, I shall argue, were essentially the same. However, the opening
of new lines of communication and greater volumes of information flowing
along them, meant that interaction with the outside world had increased
dramatically since the arrival of caste Hindus in the 18th and 19th
centuries.
For example, the road which had first linked Dhankuta, then Hile,
and then Basantapur with the Tarai meant that, at the time of our
fieldwork, what our family remembered as a six-day walk to Dharan in
1965 had now become a three-hour walk plus bus-ride. As we saw in the
last chapter, the road from the Tarai to Rasantapur allowed more regular
and frequent Yakha experience in the outside world, Migrants
(k~ktrbaeci) returning to Tamaphok from outside brought with them goods
and ideas which slowly became distributed around the community. The
road also allowed easier and more frequent access for non-Yakha
personnel, goods and services from the outside world into the Tamaphok
comrnuni ty.
The road was not the only channel of communication to have arrived
in the relatively recent past. Battery-powered radios, frequently
brought back by returning migrants, were another increasingly important
source of information and ideas from the outside world, According to
the pradhan DB-c's records, there were licenses for 56 radios in