Mystery beyond the ladder story of Daramdin-2

Another fascinating input to my finding led me to some unknown discussions about the origin of the earthen tower story. We believed the story was related to Lepchas, but close to the Lepchas are the Limboo and Newar communities, who share the earthen story to have belonged to them. The Limboo community believed they were the earliest settlers in this region, and it was their story. At the same time, the Newar populace claimed they were the very potters who built the earthen tower, told a local from Daramdin. 

Close to the vicinity of the Daramdin bazaar, there lays a cave made from the chink of a huge stone. Small openings take us to a chamber where the locals believe it to be a meditation room. I found many locals saying they had become aware of this cave since childhood and played around it. The so-called cave has a cube-shaped stone scored in such a fashion that it seems symbolic of some ritual activities. The walls on its left are closely associated with some inscriptions of the Limboo language (most probably), and this develops curiosity. 

Surely it strikes. Is it related to the earthen tower story, I ask myself? Just below the ridge lies a place called Kumalay Tar, named after the settlements of the kumalays (potters). They were the Newar potters from Nepal. Though the kumalays are no more, the name of that place still remains to add more mystery to the story.

An unknown symbol was found in a cave at Daramdin

My first reaction was when I saw the very historical (!) site that recorded the presence of pot pieces; it was nothing more than a sheer stance that looked more like a common village field found in most parts of hilly regions. There was nothing extraordinary I was looking for besides its rich fable. Next to this field is a burial place, and I was told most of the bodies buried under the burials belonged to the Newar community. What was more interesting was the rare instance that Hindu Newars by no means lay to rest their families underground, as far as my little knowledge is concerned. Some pottery pieces are displayed at the Museum of Sonam Tshering Lepcha, a Lepcha artifact collector at Kalimpong. 

In one of his interviews published in the weekly Weekend Review from Gangtok in 2002, he assumed this to be 3,600 years old. Having crossed more than seven decades of his life span, this grandpa holds some rare artifacts of Lepcha's prime periods. Among his prized processions are a few fragments of pots he collected from Daramdin in 1975. Also found in his museum is the mock-up of the pottery ladder.

Earthern ladder model at Lepcha Museum, Kalimpong

According to the article ‘The lake-and–ladder story‘ published in A Stranger's Note & Other Essays, it had been mentioned about the naming of the place Daramdin which goes as Da (lake) ram (obliterate) din (remove); the Lepcha turned the lake into the present land and constructed a ladder on it. It had been mentioned after the visit of Sonam Tshering Lepcha at Daramdin that the scientists from Sikkim and India had brought large quantities of pot pieces that were quite different from the ones collected by Sonam Tshering Lepcha himself. Later on, it became apparent that the pots collected by those people were from the graveyard!

In the text from Puratatva, a bulletin of the Indian Archeological Society, in its piece of writing on “Prehistoric Exploration in Sikkim”, the team of Prehistory Branch of Archeological Survey of India, Nagpur during their two-month-long exploration in Sikkim in 1980 had reported of finding a couple of dozens of Neolithic Tools in regions of Dzongu, Mangan, Singhik, Dikchu and nearby areas including the Pakyong. The report said the pottery was significantly absent in the sites explored. They further wrote, "in such landscape, one does not expect proper earth to manufacture pottery. Neither could a kiln be possibly made here. Before the coming of aluminum or brass utensils, people used to have their vessels made of wood. They even boiled their food in these wooden vessels by plastering the necessary parts with mud.”

This ladder incident is mentioned in a collection of folk tales of Lepcha published in 1981, which included some new pages of information never heard before. It is said that it took twelve years for the Lepcha people to construct a tower that was of an affordable height. Finally, when the tower fell off due to a mix-up of proper pronunciation, it was believed that the huge tower fell on the opposite hills of the Daramdin, forming three valleys of hills towards the now Darjeeling jurisdiction. The three valleys got their name from it, and those hills were Maney Bhanzyang, Kaizalay Bhanzyang, and Reling Bhanzyang!

The field at Daramdin where the other pieces were found

I would like to conclude my fascinating story of the ladder incident of Daramdin with the tale that I found very interesting about the naming of the Daramdin. The book I have been following is A.K. Fonning's Lepcha-My Vanishing Tribe. I find this book very informative and love how it was written. The book says that it was the Nembangu clan of the Lepcha tribe that had supposedly constructed the earthen tower and the particular spot was earlier known as “Kado-Rom-Dyen” meaning “we smashed it down”. In bygone days, the first two alphabets of the first word from Kado-Rom-Dyen got lost, and thus, we found the new and the most famous names in Sikkim folk lore…it was Do-Rom-Dyen.

My skeptic mind is still seeking a more generous explanation of certain queries. It does drive me to think it is not possible that those kumalay had different settlements in this part of the land, and the pieces recovered were the distorted pot pieces left by them. It makes me think there should be some carbon-14 dating of the materials that are assumed to belong to the graveyard pots, too. Is it not that over the years, we have been collecting those graveyard pot pieces and maintaining them to be of the mythic Daramdin Earthen Tower?

It is hard to decide whether the incident had actually happened in this part of Sikkim. Still, the fact remains that whether or not the story had any authenticity, the ladder story of Daramdin shall always stay close to the Lepcha people and to Sikkim. To some extent, old Lepcha folks had that wild imagination and romanticism that they borrowed the story (if) from another source to boast to their kids. If the story seemed borrowed, what about the fragments still found in the fields of Daramdin?