This panel will offer three Himalayan scholars the opportunity to reflect upon and review their experiences of doing research over an extended period. The intent is to focus on several problems and areas and to examine how research within the Himalaya has evolved through the last third of the century. Nanda Shrestha will review his experiences studying migration into Nepal’s Tarai since the downfall of the Ranas in the early 1950s. John Metz will consider the argument that deforestation has produced environmental degradation. Nigel Allan will examine how differing models and preconceptions have promoted or hindered development efforts in differing parts of the Himalaya.

Nanda R. Shrestha, Florida A&M University

This paper will be a reflection on my twenty years of research on the causes and consequences of frontier migration in the Tarai region of Nepal. I have been in and out of the Tarai many times over the past twenty years, often as a field researcher. My reflections will be based not only on the formal research findings, but also on personal experience and observations—what I have done, what I see to be the future of the Tarai and how/why the Tarai’s fate is directly intertwined with that of Nepal.

Born and raised in the hills, I was initially drawn to the Tarai back in the 1960s. Several individuals from my hometown of Pokhara had relocated to Chitwan, the first Tarai district to be opened for land settlement after the overthrow of the Rana regime in the early 1950. It was a central Tarai district much feared by the hill dwellers because of its deadly malarial condition and dense forests inhabited by dangerous wild animals. As a young boy, I used to hear about those migrants’ stories, some terrifying as they told of their daily struggle and of deaths from malarial attacks and snakebites. Others were quite content, especially because they had, for the first time, become owners of a significant chunk of land, enough to support their families. Some were even able to send rice back to their families in Pokhara. Imbued in their experiences was a sense of fear as well as renewed hope of a new life, a new beginning. While my own family was never tempted to move to Chitwan, my own errant journey once took me to the district in the mid-1960s. Though my trip lasted only two days, I was able to learn something about the district and its new residents from the hills. Ever since, I have been interested in migrant life and its long and winding journey. My migration research thus largely owes its origin to this first visit to Chitwan.

John J. Metz, Northern Kentucky University

This paper is a personal reflection on the history and reality of the concept that deforestation in the Himalayas is causing environmental degradation. When I decided to do a Ph.D. in 1980, I chose to investigate the widely recognized "crisis" of deforestation and environmental degradation in the Himalaya. The idea that deforestation in the Himalaya is causing erosion and flooding in both the uplands and lowlands has had a long and varied career. It became the basis for major foreign aid projects in the 1980s, when national ministries and international development agencies spent millions to plant trees, reduce erosion, and improve watershed management. The argument was first utilized by foresters intent to limit subsistence users’ activities, but, ironically, was also used by Chipko leaders to attack the commercial exploitation which the foresters promoted. By the late 1980s research in Nepal designed to specify how population growth-induced-deforestation was producing accelerated erosion and flooding revealed a much more complicated set of physical and social processes operating. At the "Mohunk Conference" of 1986, revisionist arguments that human changes of the vegetation cover are insignificant causes of erosion and flooding relative to geological, hydrological, and meteorological forces first gained prominence. Ives and Messerli’s Himalayan Dilemma assembled these arguments and helped push them into a new orthodoxy. More recently, scholars have sought to understand how changes in Himalayan environmental discourses correlate with fluctuating development discourses. In this paper, I will review the career of the concept of Himalayan environmental degradation, examine the empirical evidence supporting this contention, and consider the validity of attempting such an empirical evaluation.

Nigel J. R. Allan, University of California, Davis