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Thapa'. When I started writing my historical novels in the mid-1990s,
the Indian Army did not enlist Duras because they were not on any
Nepal government list of Nepali tribes, castes or clans: by the time my
volume 4 was published, the Indian Army had begun to enlist them.
The 'Yadavs' found in the Terai are members of the Yadu family
to which the god Krishna belonged.
Enough of jats, briefly on to place names. 'Kathmandu'
meaning 'wooden temple' and 'Pokhara', 'lake' are well known. The
study of Nepalese place names, or of any country's come to that, is
worthy of a Master's degree. Most large rivers in Nepal end in '-di', the
Magar for 'water'. This gives me the feeling that that is another strong
indication that the Magars came over the Himal prior to other
epicanthic eye-lidded people. Two that always please me are in Laos
(that name still shrouded in mystery) are the River Mekong – 'Me',
mother, 'Kong' river – it, until recently the longest unbridged river in
the world and the world's thirteen longest, and 'Vientiane', not Vien ti
ane but 'Vieng' 'a fortified town' and 'Chan' from 'chandra' moon, so
'fortified town [in a bend of a river] in the shape of a half-moon'. The
French always made guttural, throat-clearing noises with 'ch' sounds
so the 'chan' had to be spelt with a 'ti' (like the 'ti' in 'attenti on' and the
English, not knowing why the word was spelt thus – and why should
they? – had their own pronunciation which no Laotian recognised!
From 257 to 208 BC, the earliest date we have, 'Vietnam', as it is
now known, was Au Lac when the Chinese moved into it and changed
the name to Nam Viet: 'nam', 'south' and 'Viet' the Romanised
ideogram for 'getting somewhere with difficulty' was. After eight
more changes in name, in 1792 or 1802, from Dai Viet as it was then
known, a delegation went to Peking ('northern capital') to ask for the
old name of Nam Viet to be restored. The emperor said that to keep
the name given by the Chinese would only mean that they, the
Chinese, would feel they had to return. To prevent that he would
allow the name but to rendered backwards, 'Viet nam'.
Borneo and Brunei are different spellings of the same word and
'Gurkha' is an English word. 'Hukum', an order, in fact really meant