“We don’t actually own this land,” Punchha says, “Ours was in Baneshwor where there are no fields anymore.”
Punchha has been working on the leased land, growing seasonal vegetables for the past two years, before which it lay fallow. “This land belongs to someone from Mikha Bahal,” she says, pointing at the entire green plot. “But he has leased it to different people like me in return for annual share of the crops or vegetables we grow.”
Punchha, 77, says she is still working as it keeps her busy, and the land provides just enough food for her family. As she swiftly uproots radishes from the ground, she is surprisingly fit enough to carry on the work although she complains of occasional pains in her joints.
Her radish yield is small and limp compared to the bulky ones you see at the vegetable markets of Kalimati. “Those radishes in the market are brought from outside the Valley. Even our produce used to be huge, but farming condition isn’t as favorable anymore,” she says.
With the river drying up and turning into more of sewage, Punchha says even this kind of minimal farming will not be possible in a few years. “The water drainage that was used for irrigation has been blocked after tall houses were built. Their drainage pollutes the new water well we dig and it smells bad,” she says.
For now, on this part of the area close to the river, Punchha and other farmers still manage to water their fields from the drying river, using water pumps for which they share the payment of the electricity bill.
***
If you then take the narrow dusty road to the left from the Sikhabahili (Chamundra mahi) Temple on your way to the Yamapi Stupa from the Sankhamul bridge, the once-green patches of land in the area are either barren or have become sites for newly built, unfinished brick and cement houses.
As you keep walking along the lane, past the Sikhabahil Narayan Temple, you then come to the Chyasal fields, which is the biggest open farmland you’ll get to see in Patan. The only modern landmark here is the All Nepal Football Association (ANFA) Technical Center Football Stadium.
As white cranes fly over and some of these beautiful birds hover around the fields, it is hard to believe it is still the Kathmandu Valley. And as your eyes wander to the other side of the river, there again is the ugly reminder – the towering new buildings in New Baneshwor. This side, too, is not left untouched, however.
The area is now called Chyasal Nhu Basti – Newari for new settlement – informs Rajesh Byanjankar, busy mixing mortar for his house being built. From the terrace of the incomplete three-storey house, he shows the extensive plots of land, divided by bamboo fences, bars or just marked with rows of heaped soil,
“Most of this is the ancestral land belonging to the people settled in Chyasal. Generations of these people have worked and lived off these lands, growing food crops and vegetables for their households.”
Indra Byanjankar, the elder brother, laying bricks to build the fence, adds, “People are still somehow attached to the land, which is why the farmlands still remain. But the new generations don’t work the fields anymore. They don’t care much for it.”
***
Close to the ANFA Chyasal Football Stadium, Tuyu Kaji Byanjankar, 67, with his wife Chanmaya Byanjankar, is busy picking spinach. A kharpan basket made of bamboo rests in the shed made of bamboo and hay. Byanjankar is one of the few farmers who still carry vegetables in kharpan to sell on the roadsides of the Newar settlements in Patan.
“We leased this land four years ago from the owner in Chyasal,” shares Tuyu Kaji who used to work on the fields near Kupondole before he had to shift his work here. The reason again was the growing settlements and inaccessibility to water for irrigation.
As he surveys the spinach growing across most part of the two-ropani land on which the couple works, he says, “Here, we use the drain water from Chyasal. If more fortunate, we use the water from the pond in Balkumari.”
The pond he refers to in Balkumari is now actually a drying swamp with dead brown lotus leaves covering the entire surface.
Next to their field, Badri Byanjankar and her sister chatter along as they bundle freshly picked spinach with straw. Unlike Tuyu Kaji’s, the field belongs to Badri’s family where they grow crops for their own consumption and sell only if the vegetables are in excess, even after distributing it to close kin or neighbors.
“We work because there’s nothing to do at home,” she says, giggling. She recalls how the river was once beautiful, and they could touch the water surface which now has gone down almost 10-13 feet away from the banks.
“Before, the river water itself was channeled into the fields. But after people started excavating sand from the riverbed, the water level went down and we could no longer do that,” she shares.
As the river dries up without any proper water canals, she says people won’t be able to carry on farming here for long, and the land will be sold off for housing.
Tuyu Kaji adds from across the field, “Come next year and you’ll see a lot of changes. The seven ropanis of land you see over there marked with wire fencing have been sold off as a site for a school. Many other plots are also being sold, and the two new buildings over there are hospitals.”
The new hospital treats sick people, he says ironically, and it is also too close to the sickly river.
***
The Kathmandu Valley’s recorded history is a testimony to how, in the ancient past, like civilizations elsewhere in the world, the cultures here also thrived and flourished agriculturally with rich water and soil resources as the key forces. Farming was a cherished livelihood that fuelled trade as far off to Tibet in the north while rituals and cultures associated with fertility advanced at the same line.
From Rato Machhendranath Jatra, with people worshipping the god for rain, to fertility rites observed for good harvests during Dashain and Yomari Punhi, celebrating the arrival of new harvest on Shree Panchami – the cycles of festivities and cults have been traced as offshoots of the farming culture that once thrived in the Kathmandu Valley.
The elaborate architectural monuments that still stand as a cultural pride, many of which are also enlisted in the UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites, and a host of indigenous agro skills practiced to date and the range of local culinary varieties, are all evident of a once-vibrant agro-based economy, and the wealth accumulated during the golden eras of the Valley.
But with industrialization and the meteoric rise in the Valley’s population due to various socio-economic and political factors, their side effects have now resulted in the current deteriorated state of the valley’s rivers and unplanned real estate boom which have skyrocketed land prices, and the Valley’s core farmlands and the people who earn the livelihood off the soil are also suffering.
These fast disappearing lands are also resulting in the loss of indigenous farming culture, and along with it, the ancient valley’s lifestyles and traditions, the last of which can be seen in Chyasal, one of the few remaining farmlands in Patan and one of the last remnants of a farming culture which set the foundation of tehe rich civilization that prevailed for centuries in the Kathmandu Valley.
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