ABSTRACT
No one who has ever written on the Limbu community has considered their perception of physical environment important enough. The early British writers, including Eden Vansittart (1915: 108-9), E. T. Dalton (1872: 102), H. H. Risley ([1891] 1981: 18-19), C. A. Campbell (1845: 75-8), and John Morris (1985), have written on the history, language, clan organization, religion, and rites de passage of Limbus but they literally wrote nothing on the Limbus’ relationship with their environment. Among the more recent publications on them, in the Nepali or English language, are dictionaries, books and articles on their relationship with Bahuns (Nepali Hill Brahmins) or on their history and culture (Chemjong 1960; Caplan 1970; Upreti 1976; Senior 1977; Limbu 1989), or language (Subba 2002). Compared to the Limbus of East Nepal, nothing has been written by the British administrators on the Limbus of Darjeeling and Sikkim: the former perhaps because they were considered as one of the Nepali castes and the latter because they lived away from the Indo-Tibetan trade route resulting in their ignorance about the early existence of Limbus in present-day West Sikkim.
