Against a Peacock Sky

by Monica Connell

In the high mountains valleys of Nepal, tiny rural communities continue to eke out a living against a landscape at once harsh and magnificent. An cient traditions endure, changing little from generation to generation. For these people the valley in which they live defines the extent of their known world and everything within that world is patterned and coloured by the perasive presence - now angry, now benign, always mysterious - of the local gods. This is the story of Monica Connell's friendships and adventures - boar hunting with the village men in midwinter, celebrating the full moon festival, trekking for miles to a traditional Hindu wedding and of the more prosaic realities of the subsistence farmer's life - washing in incy water, being plagued by flies and working on the land for as long as the light lasts.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Asia

224 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1991

About the author

Monica Connell grew up in Northern Ireland. She studied Sociology at London University followed by Social Anthropology at Oxford. Her first book, Against a Peacock Sky, an account of two years in a Nepalese village, was shortlisted for the Yorkshire Post Best First Work award and has been translated into German and Dutch.

More recently she trained as a photographer and published two illustrated books about Bristol contemporary culture – Flying High: New Circus in Bristol, and A Universal Passion: Music and Dance from Many Cultures – for both of which she received Arts Council awards.

Her latest book, Gathering Carrageen, about her return to live in a Donegal village she knew as a child, will be published in 2015, by Sandstone Press.

She currently lives in a traditional farmhouse in Andalucia with her husband, Adrian Mitchell.

Reviews

[Paul]

The beauty of the country of Nepal high up on the rooftop of the world is a stark contrast to living there. It is a tough life at altitude and the tiny villages still eke out their existence. The traditions that have existed since time immemorial still hold their power, the modern world at that point had almost no influence on their continuation of life.

For an outsider trying to fit in is very difficult, but for someone used to the relative comforts of a Western lifestyle then this feels an even larger step away from civilisation. Monica Connell is an anthropologist and she wanted to visit a village there to complete the fieldwork section of her degree. She had taken language lessons, studied guide books, scrutinised maps on the area and drew up longs list of supplies to take. She chose the Jumula district as these people there, the matawali Chhetris had not been studied in any depth so this seemed an ideal choice.

The tiny Otter plane took her and Peter, a research assistant who was going to take photos of them, from Kathmandu to Jumla where they stayed for a few days. A village was suggested to them and they headed out to take a look at it. The walked into the village and we met by barking dogs and stares from the villagers. Invited up onto one of the roofs, she asked permission to stay for a period of time to learn about life there. After they had finished, they realised that they had left it too late to head back to Jumla. They sat under a tree deciding what to do, and two boys appeared saying that their father had invited them to stay for six months. The village of Talphi had selected them and this man, Kalchu would become a close friend.

To me all the cows looked similar – small and black all over although I did recognise that some had longer horns and a few had non at all. He looked at me and said he often wondered how I told my books apart. To him they looked the same.
We smiled, acknowledging the difference of our worlds.

It is an intense world that she has entered, life is hard in the village and the rich tapestry of life and death is a daily occurrence. She and Peter settle into a routine in the village, helping out the family that they are staying with, watching the villagers dancing for the festival of karati on the roof of a neighbours house, seeing the tiny symbolic gestures and rituals when the flocks to go on the move and helping out where possible with those that were ill. As the monsoon arrives, they observe them building a temporary bridge as they do every year. She marvels at the way the women collect the pine needles, gather then together somehow and carry the enormous loads back to the village.

Connell provides some real insight into daily life in this village. It is full of tiny details that help paint a picture of what life is like there, from the grime that surrounds them all the time, the bead of dew glistening on the grass at dawn, the villagers smoking a chillim and getting the harvest in. The village is maintaining its way of life, but the outside and modern world is chipping away at it little by little. Connell writing is sharp and clear, much like the rarefied atmosphere. She writes with compassion too, not seeking to judge the people for the things that they do, nor questioning the rituals that hold significance to them. Rather, she bonds with Kalchu and his family, helping with the activities and work, participating and sharing the happy and sad moments of daily life there.

[Petergiaquinta]

I just found this short review stuffed away in my desk...I wrote it in the tail end of 1991, back from the Peace Corps and restarting my career as a high school English teacher in the Chicago suburbs, for a little publication we had called The Third Eye Daily Digest. It was a way for the PCVs in our group to keep in touch after COSing. It was a fun little thing that lasted for a couple of years and a handful of issues. Then email and the Internet suddenly became a thing, and it withered away. So it goes.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I've found a book I enjoyed about Nepal, one which doesn't cause me to snort derisively every time the author waxes sentimental about those rich-in-spirit Nepali peasants or displays a Himalayan ignorance concerning the rudimentals of Nepali culture or geography. Nowhere in the book does the author ponder the infinite wisdom of that most holy greeting: "I salute the god within you," and no pens are distributed with self-satisfaction to obnoxious children who respond by calling the author a white monkey to his face. I know I'm an arrogant reader, and I have a hard time reading books written about Nepal, even those by PCVs. But, this is a fine book, an honest depiction of a Chhetri village in Jumla, big on detail and observation of the daily routines of a family, short on the sweeping generalizations by an unbidden and uninsightful narrator that so often make me cringe when I'm reading this kind of book.

The book is Against a Peacock Sky, by Monica Connell, Viking 1991. The author is a social anthropologist who lived in the village of Talphi, near Jumla bazaar, for two years.

[Les Dangerfield]

Social anthropologist, Monica Connell, with a series of vignettes depicting aspects of the life of a remote Nepali village during the two years she spent there. Having visited parts of Nepal, I felt that she fairly accurately and unromantically captures the look and feel of the villages and surrounding countryside, the toughness of life there. The book isn't written chronologically but structured around a series of sections focussing on events, traditions or individual people.

[Prayash Giria]

A tender collection of vignettes drawn from the two years the author spent living in and among a remote rural commune in Nepal towards her PhD in Anthropology, Against a Peacock Sky is a refreshing alternative to conventional travel writing. There is no sense of ‘purpose’, indeed not even a ‘journey’ here; instead Connell simply recollects varied experiences of life in that outpost - planting and harvesting of crops, births of human and animal babies, weddings and adulteries, boar hunts and berry forages, shaman healers and medicine requests, and even the happysad lives of local pet dogs. Her writing style is vivid and richly descriptive, and Connell’s dedication to respectfully and objectively recording rather than commenting offers a refreshing alternative to the usual ‘white man travels in the developing world’ slop that fills much of the travel writing genre. Some may find the book a little flat given its lack of narrative, but as a documentary effort as well as intimate portrait of a fast vanishing way of life, this is a uniquely readable memoir.

[Kate]

By eland publishing which does out of date travel books
Published mark Shand

[scarlettraces]

Very lyrical, and enjoyed from that perspective. I'm assuming the internet has changed everything.