The caravan of Sanuman

Introduction

In July 1972, anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista was appointed the Nepali consul general to Lhasa. By his own admission, because Tibet had never been as closed off to Nepalis as to people from the rest of the world, "privileged access to Tibet did nothing to arouse my imagination until I developed an interest" in the many Nepali ethnic communities that had social, religious and cultural links with Tibet.

In Tibet, Bista met with several Nepalis and Tibetan Nepalis. He estimated there were a little more than 500 living in Tibet at the time, of whom 40 were born in Nepal. As he wrote in his 1979 book Report from Lhasa, "The others were born in the Tibet region either of mixed parentage or mixed ancestry of a few generations back, but all still maintaining Nepali lineages" that arose primarily out of the trans-Himalayan trade conducted by Newars from Kathmandu. The heydays of the Lhasa Newars, as they were called, were over by the time Bista arrived. Nonetheless, among those he met was one merchant who tried to coax him into giving Nepali citizenship to his mistress.