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

As well as the ANM, a students' association (vidvhrthiko akhil) and
a farmer's union (kishn san.Eatan) were also formed, all under the
banner of the Communist Party as part of its swiftly organised local
campaign to rally support for the future elections. A Communist Party
'cultural meeting' was held in the school courtyard the day after the
ANM meeting. The organizers came from the Tarai town of Itahari and had
been at Basantapur the previous day. A stage was erected by putting
benches together and covering them with cloth to make a raised platform.
Before the meeting began everyone was given paper badges stapled onto
their clothes for either the Communist Party or the Nepal Women's Union.
I was interested to see our father in the audience sporting his
communist badge. There were songs accompanied by guitar, and speeches
about how money raised by the sweat of everyone's brow had been put into
the royal fami ly's Swiss bank accounts, and how we should get back from
the landlords what they had taken away.
! felt that the communists' message was not achieving its full
effect because of a lack of understanding about the culture of their
(predominantly Yakha) audience, The language used often contained a
large proportion of Sanskritic Nepali words with which those without an
education, for whom Nepali was a second language, were unfami 1 iar.
While there was reference to the need to respect all religions, as well
as languages and clothes, the Yakha were not mentioned specifically.
V!siting speakers argued for the right to love marriages over arranged
marriages, yet the Yakha already had a tradition of love marriages.
Customs such as women being expected to massage the feet of their
mother-in-law and husband's elder sisters with oil at night, being given
different food to the rest of the family, or being expected to remain