Nepal’s last car carrier Dhana Bahadur
In his hometown in Chitlang, Dhan Bahadur Gole is
affectionately known as the "gadi bokne buda'" (car carrying old
man). At 89, Dhan Bahadur is the last known survivor among porters from the
region recruited by transporters to transport motor cars to Kathmandu in the
1930s. This was before the serpentine Tribhuvan Highway linking the capital to
the Indian border was constructed in 1956, and the only way to get to Kathmandu
was on foot or to fly. Cars bought mainly by the Rana or Shah nobility were
brought to Calcutta by ship, driven sometimes up to Bhimphedi and then carried
over the mountains by porters.
Dhan Bahadur helped ferry his first car, a Daimler, when he was
only 17. He was in a team of 64 other porters and the journey from Bhimphedi to
Thankot (see map) took eight days. He would typically receive 5 aana (less than
a rupee) as payment, so despite his name, Dhan Bahadur did not get rich
carrying cars. The cars were secured onto long bamboo poles and bigger cars
required up to 96 porters to heave up the trails. “We didn’t even know the
model of the cars we were carrying, we just called them 32, 64, 96 depending on
the number of people carrying them,” Dhan Bahadur remembers.
His only
preparation before every journey was to weave two pairs of straw slippers. “A
pair was never enough, sometimes we would wear down two pairs of slippers even
before we reached Chitlang, and so we had to make more on the way,” Dhan
Bahadur recalls. The Tribhuvan Highway followed another route to Kathmandu via
Palung, but now the road has arrived even in his home village of Chitlang.
Over a period of twenty years, Dhan Bahadur says he carried
about 30 cars. When he was not carrying cars, Dhan Bahadur would porter other
goods including tobacco and sugar from Bhimphedi to Thankot on his back. Once
the highway was completed and jobs as a porter were hard to come by, Dhan
Bahadur started selling handmade products in Thankot before opening his own
farm back home in Chitlang.
“All the three porters from my village who worked with me, including
the group leader, are all dead,” says Dhan Bahadur. Married thrice, Dhan
Bahadur has two sons and lives with his granddaughter and her family in
Chitlang.
