[While discussing ‘Lhung’ or ‘dhung or dhunga’ as in Taklung, Ghairung, Mailung of Gorkha and Baglung district also, we may also discuss why Mt. Everest was proposed being named 'a Devadhunga’ in 1857 ? An Indian mathematician Radhanath Sikdar discovered the world's tallest mountain - The Peak XV in 1852, later to be known also as Mt. Sagaramatha or ‘Kang-chomo-lungma’ and different names seem to have been suggested as well. On May 11, 1857 the Royal Geographical Society of London named the mountain The Everest after the first British Surveyor General to India George Everest and in protest of which Brian H. Hodgson, who was the British Resident in the Court of Nepal for more than twenty years, proposed a local name for the peak as Devadhaung-Bhairavthan-Nyanam (Hodgson, 1874: 27, Malla http://tinyurl.com/kdh556w). The first word ‘Devadhaung’ or ‘Deva-dhunga’ – ‘stone god’ or ‘cliff or even mountain god’ is very much similar to Tak+lung which can be further reconstructed as Teg+lung – as in Takla+khar suggesting a 'lying tiger fort' or an impressive cliff or mountain.]
By B. K. Rana
Ridi Bazar, Gulmi District, West Nepal. |
1. ‘Kot or
‘+ kot suffixed’ toponyms:
There are numerous place names such as: Ribdikot (should be Ridikot), Birkot, Maikot, Jankot, Jharkot, Sarangkot, Sulikot, Bhirkot, Nuwakot, Mirkot, Musikot, Paiyunkot, Purkot, Dhuwakot, Linglingkot, Sahalkot etc. in the Nepalese mid-hills. Few more ‘kots’ can be found in the central hills also, such as: Nuwakot, Belkot, Thankot, Ramkot, Chapakot, Duwakot, Nagarkot, Charikot including Tilaurakot, Kapilvastu in western plains etc. Such kots can be found along the western
2. Jhong or Jhung
or Lhung, Dhung or Dhunga:
A kot or fort in eastern Magar, a
Tibeto-Burman language is Jhong or Jung. There are some ruins of ‘Mangar
Jhongs’ in Sikkim today also. ‘Lamjung’
or ‘Lamjhong’ and 'Namjung’ or
‘Namjhong’ are typical toponyms in Lamjung and Gorkha districts
respectively and both of which should mean a ‘lam’>
path or way and ‘jhong’ > fort or ‘kot’
on the way’. There is yet another ‘Namrong or Namrung’- but a popular deity among the Magars of
Gorkha. She is a formless deity who resides in the jungle or nature,
quite suggestive of nature worship or animism that the Magar people followed
before coming in contact with other
religious missionaries.I can remember
now, while still in teenage my grandparents sending me to worship this deity in Paslang dada. In Kathmandu ’s
north west corner stands Mt. Nagarajun today whose etymology should be “Naga+Jhong” – the fort of the Nagas.
The popular myth in Kathmandu valley is that from this “Naga+Jhong” was protected Kathmandu
valley. The myth further held tight the
hooded Naga royal golden throne that used to be the Kings’ seat until 2008 in
Nepal was a protector, Prof. Dinesh
Chandra Sircar has described as ‘durgrakshit
pradeshansheshu’ above. In Magar language 'Lung’
is a stone which is ‘dhung
or dhunga’ in Nepali language,
suggestive of some cliffs or mountains also. Those cliffs or mountains stand
formidable which people worship for fear
even today, as the ancient Egyptians did worship the River Nile. While climbing Mt.
Everest climbers always worship the mountain before the ascent.
While
discussing ‘Lhung’ or ‘dhung or dhunga’ as in Taklung, Ghairung,
Mailung of Gorkha and Baglung district also, we may also discuss why Mt.
Everest was proposed being named 'a Devadhunga’ in 1857 ? An Indian mathematician Radhanath Sikdar
discovered the world's tallest mountain - The Peak XV in 1852, later to be known also as Mt. Sagaramatha or ‘Kang-chomo-lungma’ and different names seem to have been suggested as well. On May 11, 1857 the Royal Geographical
Society of London named the mountain The Everest after the first British
Surveyor General to India George Everest
and in protest of which Brian H. Hodgson, who was the British Resident in the Court of
Nepal for more than twenty years, proposed a local name for the peak as Devadhaung-Bhairavthan-Nyanam
(Hodgson 1874: 27, Malla http://tinyurl.com/kdh556w).
The first word ‘Devadhaung’ or ‘Deva-dhunga’
– ‘stone god’ or ‘cliff or even mountain god’
is very much similar to Tak+lung which
can be further reconstructed as Teg+lung
– as in Takla+khar suggesting a 'lying tiger fort' or an impressive cliff or mountain.
3. ‘Gumike’ or ‘Gaulmik’
or Gulmi:
There is a district in Nepalese Midwestern hills called ‘Gulmi’ inhabited mostly even today by the Magars in
Lumbini Zone. Although the last
segment of this name word sounds Tibeto-Burman ‘mi’> man or people certainly, the name word that the district
has received definitively comes from
‘gumike[4] in Hirahadagalli
Copper Plate Inscription of 4th century AD,
and probably is the only such a place
name in South Asia . A relatively big river, nowadays called Kali Gandaki,
which the Kashmiri historian Kalhana writes 'Kalagandika’[5] flows downstream from
Tibet by this Gulmi area. The historian Kalhana writes, a Kashmiri
King Jayapida (752 -773 AD) had once
fought a battle here with Aramudi,
the king of Nepal in the 8th century. The Nepal King Aramudi defeated Jayapida and imprisoned in an ‘ashmveshmani' > stone house[6]’ suggestive of a ‘Gulma’ which also meant a police post
(Witzel 1993: 227). In the 4th century Hirahadagalli Copper Plate
Inscription ‘gumike’ is
further described as ‘gaulmik’ – 'police officer' (Sircar 1965: 465) that comes very
close to Gulmi. Furthermore, Gulmi was regarded as a district, gandnigulma vishaya during the duel rule of Narendra Dev and Udaydev in Nepal Sambat 119 or 1055 BS (Bazracharya 2064 BS: 16).
4. Ridi > 'Black Water' > Krishnagandaki or Kaligandaki:
Nowadays, there is a stream called - Ṛidī Khōlā (रिडी खोला) that meets Kaligandaki River and across, is Ṛidī Bazar in Gulmi district. I was there in November 1982. Ṛidī has here become both toponymy and hydronymy - name of a place and river as well. In Magar Kura, 'ridi' means 'black water' or 'black river'. The present 'Kaligandaki river' was actually 'Ridi'> 'black river' which was translated into Sanskrit as 'Krishnagandaki' in the medieval period of Nepalese history. From 'Krishnagandaki' it has become 'Kaligandaki' in Nepali language. (This is an added section here. Prof. Keshar Jung Baral offered this comment in Boston Magar Society Email list today, February 6, 2018).
5. The 8th century AD king ‘Aramudi’:
4. Ridi > 'Black Water' > Krishnagandaki or Kaligandaki:
Nowadays, there is a stream called - Ṛidī Khōlā (रिडी खोला) that meets Kaligandaki River and across, is Ṛidī Bazar in Gulmi district. I was there in November 1982. Ṛidī has here become both toponymy and hydronymy - name of a place and river as well. In Magar Kura, 'ridi' means 'black water' or 'black river'. The present 'Kaligandaki river' was actually 'Ridi'> 'black river' which was translated into Sanskrit as 'Krishnagandaki' in the medieval period of Nepalese history. From 'Krishnagandaki' it has become 'Kaligandaki' in Nepali language. (This is an added section here. Prof. Keshar Jung Baral offered this comment in Boston Magar Society Email list today, February 6, 2018).
5. The 8th century AD king ‘Aramudi’:
In the 8th century Nepal had a powerful king Aramudi
whose glory is beautifully sung in ‘Kahlana’s
Rajtarangini’(Stein 1892: 64) and whom some historians have claimed a Magar king by his ethnicity. Except for ‘Kalhana's Rajatarangini’ nowhere
can be found his name mentioned at all. Nepalese historians have
nowadays begun to accept that he existed. Quite a number of toponyms such as Argeli in Palpa; Arbani, Arje, Arkhale, Arkhawang, Arlangkot in Gulmi, Argal, Arjewa in Baglung and Arkhala in Nawalparasi districts seem to me to have come after him in the present day Kaligandaki region. These all place names provide some hints that he did really
exist, but we have no historical records and other archaeological evidence to support the claim. Once in Argeli, a person had told me that Argeli came
after a hermit named Aurab who used to meditate and protect the people from a cone type of modest sized hill in
Argali. But the Aurab myth, as Nepal being protected by Ne-Muni, is not very convincing.
These present
day Nepalese mid-hills could not develop themselves into some cultural or
political centers as, in some ways, did Palpa or a full fledged center of civilization like –Kathmandu
valley, the present day Nepalese capital. One of the reasons for these hills
remaining relatively ‘primitive’ seems
being, their geography or the difficult terrain across the Mahabharat
mountain range and the actual lack of access routes, linking major trade centers up across the formidable
Himalayas as Lhasa in Tibet also, if not
the major settlements, towns or other centers in the southern plains. Among
these mid-western hills lived or I shall write, live today also, a major group
of people - the Magars, in the proximity of the Gurungs, both of whom, in modern
times, became well-known to the world
after the battle of Nalapani in 1814 with British East India Company and
subsequent other two World Wars also.
These two
groups of people may not be categorized as ‘autochthonous’
because coming under Indian sub-continental cultural influence to form certain
territorial administrative units of their own, which they also had named ‘rajyas’ - kingdoms, with some ‘rajas’ – the kings or the 'group leaders';
these people had formed more than
forty-six[7] different ‘rajyas’ or small principalities up till 18th century in the present day Nepal. These ‘rajyas’ used to be some settlements across larger rivers or at some
strategic locations up in the hills or mountains and were probably in persistent
hostility for different political reasons.
The early history
of the people in these Nepalese mid-western hills is simply unknown or
unexplored as already discussed above; for example, we do not have any
historical records to fully understand who was the ruler that Drabya Shah had
killed to found Gorkha kingdom in 1559[8]. According to the Gorkha Vamshavali[9],
he was a Khadka King ‘of low social status’[10] but there are no historical records or archaeological
evidence to suggest who he actually was. We even do not know if the Gorkha
proper had any other name before Drabya Shah’s conquest.
Languages as
‘living things’ tell histories of the mankind. “The great power of language
evidence in displaying the history of the inner as well as outer lives of those
societies” (Evans 2010: 105). The first settlers or linguistic groups name the
places they live in their own particular languages and which become particular
toponyms of those places until some social changes take place. Unlike DNA ,
toponyms are fixed to the land and do not wander from country to
country but every successive linguistic group depending on how influential it has become, will certainly give a push forward to replace the signature on a
palimpsest with their own. This is what has been
the general trend in Nepal since the past some 250 years or so, that toponyms are being
gradually replaced by other powerful languages in the country. This will certainly lead to faster language deaths in the country.
References:
Bazracharya, Dhanavazra 2064 BS: Gopalrajvanshavaliko Aitihasik Vivechana –Nepal and Asian Studies, Tribuvan University , Kirtipur Kathmandu.
Bazracharya, Dhanavazra 2064 BS: Gopalrajvanshavaliko Aitihasik Vivechana –
Evans, Nicholas 2010:
Dying Words, Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us, Willey Blackwell , United
Kingdom .
Malla, Kamal
P. : The Linguistic Conquest of Mount Everest, Online paper. In The Himalayan Voice also.
Pant, Dinesh
Raj 1984: Gorkhako Itihas, Pahilo Bhag
2041 BS, History of Gorkha, Vol. I , Kathmandu
Nepal.
Rana, B. K. 2011: Kashmir,Kalhan’s Rajtarangini And The 'Magar King Aramudi' In Obscure History – The Himalayan Voice - January 3, 2011
Rana, B. K. 2011: Kashmir,Kalhan’s Rajtarangini And The 'Magar King Aramudi' In Obscure History – The Himalayan Voice - January 3, 2011
Sircar, D. C.
1965 . Select Inscription Bearing on Indian History and Civilization Vol. I,
From the Sixth Century BC to the Sixth Century AD, University of Calcutta , India .
Stein, M.
A 1892 : Kalhana’s Rajatarangini or Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir – Munshi Ram Manohar Lal, Oriental
Booksellers and Pubishers Nai Sadak Delhi -6
Vansittart,
Eden 1896: Notes on Nepal - Calcutta ,
India
Witzel,
Michael 1993: Nepalese Hydronomy: Towards a History of Settlement in the Himalayas .
Published in Nepal Past and Present,
Edited by Gerrad Toffin.
[1] It is a small Tibetan township at the border with India and Nepal . In Tibetan it is called Taklakhar. (Tibetan Talkakhar > Tegla Kar >
a lying tiger fort)
[2] It may also
seem coming from Sanskrit ‘koshth’ >
room.
[3]
Emperor Ashok’s Sarnath Pillar edict ( Sircar 1966:73)
[4] Sivaskandavarman Regnal Year 8, Hirahadagalli Copper-plate
inscription 4th century, plate no 2, first side ( Sircar 1965: 462)
[5] "स कालगंडिकासिन्धोरर्वाचि कटकं तटे।" (sa
kalagandikasindhorvarchi katakn tate) – Kalhana’s Rajtarangini – 555, pp 65
[6] "स कालगंडिकातीराश्रयात्युचास्मवेश्मनि ।" (sa
kalagandikatiirashtrayatyuchaashmaveshmani) - Kalhana's Rajatarangini – 546, pp 64
[7] Nepal had baise chaubise , twenty-two twenty four small principalities before
the unification of modern day Nepal .
[8] a) Bhadra Krisnha Astami
Wednesday 24, 1616 (Pant 2041 (1984) BS: 62), b) Wednesday 23, 1559 (Vansttitart 1896:
31).
[9] The
Shah Kings only authoritative genealogy.
[10] Historians have
written he was a Magar by his ethnicity
but the Gorkha Vamshavali does not specifically tell who he actually was.