Nepal can be traditionally divided into three geographical features. They are: (1) Himalayan region on the north and (2) Swialik mountain and the hill in the middle, and (3) Plain (Terai) region on the south, facing the border of U.P. and Bihar of India. The southernmost part, the Terai, has been traditionally very sparsely populated because of hot humid climate and the prevalence of a virulent type of malaria. Most of parts of the Terai consists of dense forests. In recent years, as a result of an effective malaria eradication programme, much of the forest has been cleared for cultivation. As a result of the in-creasing pressure of population in the mountains and other parts of neighbouring regions, the Terai is becoming a densely populated agricultural belt.
The area of this study is situated in the district of Jhapa, one of the conscious political area of Eastern Nepal, bordering West Bengal on the east and Bihar in the south.
Damak as a multi-caste municipality in the Jhapa district where a very old agricultural com-munity called 'Dhimal' inhabit since a long time past. They are supposed to be the first settlers of this area and are 2,783 in number. This society was completely isolated from the rest of the country till 1970 when the East-West High Way was constructed, which connects western Nepal with Eastern Nepal near Naxalbari of West Ben-gal.
Since the beginning of the Sixties, Nepal is witnessing a great deal of changes in the field of education politics, economics and means of transport and communications. Because of these changes and development, the society at large has been showing significant interaction between various ethnic groups, resulting in total and partial socio-cultural changes in all spheres of their life. These aspects of changes in culture have not been well-studied by any native scholar, so far.
Due to, the opening of the new highway, many ethnic groups from the mountains of the north have migrated to Jhapa, most mobile place and a centre for education, small industries and trade and commerce. The result has been a total social, cultural and political transformation of this agricultural community.
Every society has a value system, which helps maintain its cultural consistency and continuity. The members of the society, traditions, institutions and values of a consistent cultural pattern have an inherent force which strives to maintain the socio-cultural identity of a particular group of people. Damak as the area of study was selected, because it was the biggest area of Jhapa district in Eastern Nepal, where the first Land Reforms Act was introduced by His Majesty's Government of Nepal about twenty four years ago. Here the Panchayat Land Revenue Act had also been introduced a few years ago.
Studies of village societies or rural families in Jhapa District of Nepal are almost non-existent, till date. Free access to Nepal has been permitted to the outside world only from 1950's. In contrast to the hills of Nepal, the Terai (plain) region, probably being too hot, dusty and geographically unattractive, and notoriously malarious region until recently, has received comparatively little attention of the Nepalese as well as of foreign anthropologists. Consequently, little is known about the socio-economic and cultural life of terai communities to the outside world. The Terai region comprises 15 percent of Nepal's total land area and yields about 31 percent of the nation's gross agricultural and domestic product. Seventy six percent of the government revenue till 1975 was collected from this area.
Jhapa, the area selected for this study, is the biggest district of Nepal terai, where land reforms were first introduced in 1964, there by bringing revolutionary changes in the land tenure system, as also in the life of the original inhabitants like the Dhimal, Meche, Koche, Rajbanshi, Majhi, Satar, Tharu, etc., who live in this region.
A large number of hill people migrate regularly to the plains every year for want of land for cultivation in their own region. Recently this trend has reached its peak. The opening of East West Mahendra Highway has further brought about remarkable changes in the social, economic and political life of the population.
Jhapa has 44 village panchayats, of which Damak is the largest and more densely populated and developed. This is also the richest area where considerable urbanisation and industrialisation is noticed. Gradual introduction of modern technology associated with economic develop. ment and political consciousness of the people have generated a process of change in the social and political institutions of the societies inhabiting this area. It is generally argued that as a result of migration, urbanisation and political changes, the self-sufficiency of the villages is slowly breaking up everywhere. Castes and joint families are disintegrating and their inter-caste or intercommunity relations are altering. In Nepal there is no such scheduling of the communities as in India. We find schedule castes and tribes to have constitutional benefit in India. All communities are not treated as castes though they have hierarchy and distinct social stratification. Here in Nepal after the revolution of 1989 and achieving the goal of full democracy, several communities are demanding scheduling of the communities in the constitution of Nepal. It is hoped that structuring will have a good future and benefits for different communities. As a result, village or com-munity unity is gradually fading away. These observations, more or less, seem to be true, but the truth or otherwise of these arguments can only be ascertained after a fairly large number of intensive sociological and anthropological studies of the various communities living in the Terai, have been made. Some anthropologists have drawn attention to village studies made in this regard of the Nepali people. They have published various accounts of village life in Nepal, without covering the Terai villages. So these studies depict only a partial picture of rural life of the people of Nepal. Further, these studies contain some ac-counts of agriculture, political, geographical and ethnographic aspects, leaving aside the socio-economic and cultural matrix of the Nepalese rural life. By doing so, the authors have failed to assess the social dynamism and context, which is possible by way of analysing the whole web of socio-economic, political and cultural inter-relationships which make up the village community into a single unit.
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