Socio-Cultural Environment - Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT)

About a century and a half back, the famous naturalist Hooker
wrote, “The Lepcha is the aboriginal inhabitant of the country. The race to
which he belongs is a very singular one; markedly Mongolian in
features, and a good deal too, in habit; still he differs from his Tibetan
prototype, though not so decidedly as from the Nepalese and Bhutanese
between whom he is hemmed into a tract of mountain country, barely 60
miles in breadth. The Lepchas possess a tradition of floods, during
which a couple escaped to the top of a mountain (Tendong)…” (Hooker,
J.D., 1855, p.117). Most of the early British travelers and administrators
had written about the Lepchas at length. Apart from Hooker, White,
Waddell and Risley described the tribe from all possible angles. In the
words of White, “They are people of a mild, quiet and indolent
disposition, loving solitude, and their homes are found in most
inaccessible places, in the midst of forests if possible, and seldom above
an elevation of 4000 feet”. (White, J.C., 1909, p.7). Risley observed,
“The Lepchas, or as they call themselves, the Rong-pa (ravine-folk),
claim to be the autochthones of Sikkim proper…. They are above all
things woodmen of the woods, knowing the ways of birds and beasts,
and possessing an extensive zoological and botanical nomenclature
of their own” (Risley, H.H., 1928, p. 1).
From all the above descriptions it can be said emphatically that the
Lepchas are the earliest tribe who inhabited this place well before other
ethnic communities arrived. As their name Rong-pa implies, they lived in
riparian sub-tropical forests and learnt the intricacies of nature from a
very long-standing experience. Although with the passage of time they
lost much of their forest-dwelling habits, their linkages with nature is
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