Hookah tales

Published On: February 3, 2017 08:26 AM NPT By: Prawash Gautam


From the golden window of Patan Durbar, King Siddhi Narasimha Malla (1618 – 1661 AD) watched the dance. Dark descended early in the month of Kartik and chilly air filled the palace courtyard. Reclining against a cozy cushion, he watched the dancers’ elegant movements as he took deep, slow drags from his elaborately designed hookah.

A lover of art and literature, he wrote many plays and dance recitals. Famous among them is Kartik Nach, a weeklong dance recital performed in Kartik (November-December) every year.

Today, the Kartik Nach tradition carries on, and the golden window, closed most of the year, is flung open during the performance. The King is long gone, but a hookah is placed beside the window. A symbol of the King’s presence, it silently watches the dance. 

“The times of hookah are long gone,” says Durga Prasad Prajapati, 81, suggesting how, just like this tale from history it has kept alive, hookah too remains more in memory now.

He selects lit charcoal pieces from an iron tray and places them on the clay chilim – the hookah top that holds tobacco and coal.

When the hookah is ready, he takes slow drags from the bamboo hose, producing soft guttural sound that spreads through the quiet surrounding of cool January evening in the courtyard of Ganesh Mandir in Bolanche, Bhaktapur. After smoking for a few minutes, he passes it to Shree Prasad Pajapati, 70.

“Almost all households had hookah then,” Shree Prasad says. “Today, people don’t have time and patience to prepare and smoke hookah.” He adds that most elderly smokers in Kathmandu no longer smoke in their homes. “You can’t even get charcoal for hookah as all households use cooking gas.”

For these ardent smokers, gathering for morning and evening prayers in the pati at Ganesh Temple offers some precious moment to smoke hookah with friends. The same applies for most elderlies in the valley. “The guthis of respective temples provide hookah,” Durga Prasad says. 

Although science has long proven that smoking is injurious to health, generations of people have smoked in various forms, including hookah. In 2005, a World Health Organization (WHO) Advisory Note suggested that hookah smoking is at the least as harmful as smoking cigarette.

Yet, in spite of having awareness about the health risks of hookah, elderlies like Durga Prasad and Shree Prasad reminisce about the days when hookah culture was prevalent with a feeling of nostalgia.

Hookah was an important part of the daily social and cultural life in Nepal for at least the past few centuries. In that way, hookah evokes scenes, settings and lifestyles of our grandparents’ times and offer insight into their worldviews and cultures. Hookah fostered community perhaps as much as it deepened its cleavages, and impacted the country’s legal system. It inspired poets and singers and was colloquially woven into adages and phrases.

Until a few decades ago, mostly elderly men gathered in the courtyard, at dusk in summer or as the sun showered its first rays in winter, smoking hookah. As the hookah made rounds between them, they cracked jokes and shared stories – events of the day’s labor, a problem that needed advice or the one that had found solution– or took communal decisions.

“Most were farmers then,” says Durga Prasad. “You completed your daily work in the field and after that it was leisure. You sat together smoking hookah and talked.”

Shree Prasad recalls that hookah was indispensible in bhoj – traditional Newari feast – marriage ceremony, or any kind of family gathering. “People even carried hookah when they went to work in the fields.”

It was not only the elderly who smoked. “There was a saying that all males had to smoke once the first trace of mustache appeared above their lips,” says Gajendra Nath Regmi, 79, office secretary of Madan Puraskar Guthi. “People found it amusing if someone said he didn’t smoke.”

In many ways, hookah was a way of life, and it created bond and knit social fabric. Therefore, the saying hookah paani banda (literally – severing of supplies of hookah and water) resonated in the Indian subcontinent. It meant social boycott, severing of social ties to those who broke social norms.

Beyond the confines of households and community, hookah found place in shops in towns. The shopkeepers provided hookah for customers, who smoked as they selected clothes or other provisions and bargained. Many shops offered tamakhu (hookah tobacco) as fossa – complimentary gift – on purchases. “In Kathmandu, this was usually the case in clothes and utensil shops,” Regmi says.

None other than Jung Bahadur Rana had arranged hookah stations for his chakariwalas. “The chakariwalas waited for him to give his daily audience,” professor Dinesh Raj Pant recalls his father, Nepal’s noted historian Naya Raj Pant, saying so. He explains that Jung Bahadur could be late or simply decide to not turn up, so he set up hookah camps for chakariwalas. “They ran from the main gate of Thapathali Durbar towards the turning of today’s Norvic Internation Hospital,” Pant adds.

Hookah reflected the class of its owner. The owners could customize its design according to their tastes and needs, using materials they liked. If they could afford, the hookah stem would be of glass, crystal, porcelain or silver, and the head of brass or silver. Elaborate carvings decorated its head and base. The Rana queens smoked from the long pipes of lavishly designed hookah. The Rana palaces or houses of aristocratic families had designated posts of hukke – one who prepared hookah.

The rich could commission specially designed hookah from as far as Benaras. Among the items listed in a catalogue preserved in the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya is hookah. People from Kathmandu or other towns could order it as early as the mid-19th century.
But hookah relayed more profound social relationships than merely tell the wealth of its owner; it became a medium to enforce and deepen the caste cleavage. In gatherings, those from the ‘upper’ caste sat on the straw mat while the ‘lower’ caste people squatted at a safe distance so they wouldn’t accidentally touch and pollute it.

So embedded was hookah was in Nepali society that Jung Bahadur included it in Nepal’s first legal code– the Muluki Ain – promulgated in 1854. It prescribed social codes for people of different castes to follow while sharing hookah. The seventh Rana Prime Minister Juddha Sumsher saw the negative impacts to health and economy resulting from a major smoking population. He intervened by enacting a law in the early 1930s, banning smoking for males below 16 and females below 14.

After democracy came to Nepal in 1951, the smoking population declined as people became more aware about the health risks of tobacco. Also, cigarettes became commonly available and smokers could replace hookah. Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, 2011, found that only 0.6 percent Nepalis (ages 15 – 49) smoked hookah as compared to 13.9 percent cigarette smokers.

So, only vestige remains of hookah culture. But because of their deep social and cultural roots, they became part of songs and poems and were adopted into ukhan (proverbial sayings) and tukka (phrases).

The once popular gaun khane katha (riddles) has one on hookah: Aakasko aago pataalko paani mukh bata tane naak bata jane, ke ho? (Fire from the sky, water from the underworld, you drag from your mouth and it leaves from your nose, what is it?) There are folk songs, poems and other lines written on hookah as well. 

Indifferent to the health risks of hookah they smoke with much relish, both Durga Prasad and Shree Prasad take comfort in the fact that such popular adages, songs and poems will keep the memory of the hookah culture alive for generations to come.

prawashgautam@gmail.com


Leave A Comment