Lepcha Place Names East of Teesta
The Stories Hidden in the Names of Hills and Villages
I have travelled through the hills innumerable times. Yet, the more I travel, the more I realise how little I actually know about the places I pass through.
My journey into the hills began in the country east of the Teesta. Purbikhola was my first camping ground, and Panbu was the first place I trekked to. We walked from Sevok to Charkhole Khola, passing through Panbu, Yangmakum, Samthar and Kafer.
At the time, these were simply names on a route. They marked villages, ridges and stretches of forest along the way. I had little reason to think about where the names came from or what they might mean.
It was only much later that I began to look at them differently.
What if these names were more than convenient ways of identifying places? What if they carried fragments of an older understanding of the landscape, preserved in the language of people who had lived among these hills for generations?
The country east of the Teesta has a long association with the Lepcha people, whose ancestral homeland is known as Mayel Lyang. Here, the names of hills, rivers, villages and forests can offer glimpses into a way of seeing the world in which the landscape was not merely a setting for human life. It was an integral part of life itself.
Once I began to think about this, places I had passed through many times acquired a different significance.
Mayel Lyang: The Ancestral Homeland of the Lepchas
The Lepchas, who call themselves Rong or Mutanchi Rongkup in their own cultural and linguistic traditions, are recognised as the Indigenous people of Sikkim and have deep historical and cultural connections with the surrounding Eastern Himalayan region, including parts of present-day Darjeeling and Kalimpong.
Their traditional understanding of their homeland does not fit neatly within the political boundaries visible on a modern map.
Today, the region is divided between administrative territories and national borders. Sikkim, Darjeeling, Kalimpong and the neighbouring Himalayan landscapes are governed through different systems. But these boundaries do not fully explain the older cultural geography of the region.
For generations, people moved through the mountains along paths connecting settlements, forests, rivers and grazing grounds. Their knowledge of the land developed through everyday experience: walking between villages, gathering forest produce, cultivating fields, following streams and observing the changes of the seasons.
The landscape was understood through familiarity and use, through stories passed down within families and communities, and through the names given to particular places.
Mayel Lyang, the Lepcha ancestral homeland, belongs to this wider cultural understanding of the mountains. It is not simply a geographical expression. It carries a sense of belonging, memory and relationship with the natural world.
To understand something of this relationship, we need not begin with a grand historical monument or a formal account of the past. Sometimes, it is enough to look more carefully at a name on a village signboard.
Panbu: A Name Connected with the Python
Panbu is becoming increasingly known among travellers for its elevated position and its expansive views across the Teesta valley towards the plains of the Dooars.
On a clear day, the landscape opens out into layers of ridges, river valleys and distant lowlands. The view itself explains much of the village’s growing appeal.
But the name has another story.
According to the interpretation associated with the local Lepcha tradition, Panbu derives from Panobu, meaning the python.
It is a small detail, but it changes the way one might think about the place.
A village name connected with an animal invites questions about the landscape as it was known to earlier inhabitants. What kinds of animals were familiar to people living here? Which parts of the forest were associated with particular creatures? How did people recognise and remember the places around them?
We should not assume that a name alone provides definitive answers to these questions. Nevertheless, it offers a starting point for looking beyond the view that first attracts visitors.
When we arrive at Panbu today, we may be thinking about photography, the mountains or the broad sweep of the Teesta valley. The older name reminds us that the landscape has other stories, too — stories shaped by the natural world and by generations of people who knew it intimately.
Yangmakum: The Hill Hidden Behind Another Hill
Of all the place names along this route, Yangmakum is perhaps the one that resonates most strongly with my experience of walking through these mountains.
The name is interpreted locally as deriving from Yaang-Maa-Kung, describing a steep hill hidden behind another hill.
Anyone who has walked through the hills east of the Teesta will recognise the feeling.
You climb towards a ridge, expecting that the ascent is nearly over. You reach the top, only to discover another slope rising beyond it. The path bends around a shoulder of the mountain, and a new ridge appears. What seemed to be the final climb becomes merely another stage of the journey.
There is always another hill behind the hill in front.
From a distance, the mountains may appear to form a continuous wall of green. On foot, they reveal themselves as a succession of folds, ridges, valleys and slopes, each concealing another part of the landscape.
The experience is familiar to anyone who has walked in the Eastern Himalayas. Yet the name Yangmakum gives that experience a particular cultural expression.
It suggests a landscape understood not from a single viewpoint but through movement. You discover the shape of the land gradually, as you walk through it.
This is one of the reasons I find walking such a rewarding way to explore the region. A road journey gives us views of the mountains, but a walk reveals how the mountains are arranged, how paths wind between them and how one village relates to the next.
The landscape unfolds in stages, and the name of a place may preserve something of that experience.
Samthar: Remembering the Shape of Bamboo
Another name along the route is Samthar, associated in the interpretation shared with me with Saam-Thaar, referring to three pieces of bamboo cut at an angle.
Bamboo has long been an important material in the everyday life of many Himalayan communities. Depending on the species and local practices, it can be used for construction, household objects, fencing, baskets and numerous other purposes.
Its uses are practical, but the knowledge surrounding it is also cultural. People learn which bamboo is suitable for a particular purpose, when and how it should be cut, and how to work with the material.
A name connected with a particular shape or way of cutting bamboo suggests the kind of observation that can emerge from close familiarity with the natural resources of a place.
Such names deserve to be approached with curiosity rather than certainty. Their precise linguistic meanings and historical origins need to be understood within the Lepcha language and local oral tradition. Still, they encourage us to consider how everyday objects and activities might become part of the vocabulary through which people identify their surroundings.
The names we use for places often reveal what we consider worth remembering.
Mazeok: A Connection with Plants and Everyday Life
Mazeok is another name that takes us away from the grander features of the landscape and towards its everyday details.
The interpretation given for the name derives it from Maon-Zo-aak, referring to green plants used to feed pigs.
It is a very different kind of image from the one that usually dominates travel writing about the Himalayas.
We tend to describe mountain destinations through their forests, waterfalls, viewpoints, wildlife and distant snow peaks. These are important features of the region, but they do not tell the whole story of life in the hills.
Traditional landscapes are also made up of fields, kitchen gardens, livestock, paths between houses and the plants that people collect or cultivate for daily use.
For a community living close to the land, a plant may be significant not because it is rare or beautiful, but because it has a particular practical use. It may provide food for an animal, serve as a household material or grow in a place where it can be gathered when needed.
A place name associated with such a plant or practice offers a glimpse into this more ordinary, lived-in landscape.
It reminds us that the cultural history of the hills is not confined to monuments, festivals or major historical events. It can also survive in the language used to describe the small things that make everyday life possible.
Relli: The River as People Experienced It
Then there is the Relli.
The river is an important geographical feature of the Kalimpong hills, flowing through a landscape of steep slopes, settlements and forested valleys. Its character changes with the terrain and the season, and its waters are closely connected with the surrounding countryside.
The name Relli is associated with Rilli, a Lepcha word describing a swirling river.
There is something particularly fitting about this interpretation.
A river can be represented on a map by a line, but that line tells us little about the experience of standing beside the water. It does not convey the movement of the current, the sound of water passing over rocks or the way the river changes after heavy rain.
To someone who has spent time beside it, however, these characteristics are not incidental. They are part of what makes the river recognisable.
A name that refers to swirling water brings the river’s movement into the language used to identify it.
This is a different way of describing geography from the one we usually encounter in modern maps and travel guides. A map may tell us where a river flows. A name rooted in observation may also suggest something about how it behaves and how people have experienced it.
When we cross the Relli today, we may be thinking about the road, the journey ahead or the landscape on either side. Knowing the story associated with its name gives us another reason to pause and look at the water itself.
When the Landscape Changes, What Happens to Its Names?
The place names of the Eastern Himalayas developed within particular cultural and historical circumstances. Those circumstances have changed considerably over time.
As modern systems of administration expanded, the hills were increasingly surveyed, mapped and organised according to political boundaries, property arrangements, revenue collection and forest regulations. Colonial forest policies and later administrative systems altered how land was classified and used in many parts of the region.
These changes did not affect every community or locality in the same way. Their consequences varied according to local histories, land arrangements and patterns of settlement.
However, for Indigenous communities whose cultural identity was closely connected with their ancestral landscapes, changes in land use and administration could have consequences beyond questions of ownership or access.
A forest might be understood differently when it became subject to new rules governing its use. A traditional path could become less accessible as settlements and land arrangements changed. Practices once sustained through everyday contact with the surrounding environment might become more difficult to continue.
Language could change alongside these circumstances.
When younger generations use a language less frequently, words connected with local plants, animals, terrain and traditional practices may also become less familiar. If the stories associated with a name are no longer regularly shared, the name may survive while its meaning gradually disappears from common understanding.
A signboard can preserve a word without preserving the knowledge that once accompanied it.
This is why the study and preservation of Indigenous place names matter. They can help researchers, communities and travellers understand how people have described and interpreted their surroundings. They can also provide an entry point into discussions about language, cultural continuity and the relationship between people and land.
The names Panbu, Yangmakum, Samthar, Mazeok and Relli are not, by themselves, a complete history of the Lepcha people. But the stories associated with them remind us that even small details of a landscape can carry cultural significance.
Lepcha Language and Cultural Revival
The Lepcha language is an important part of the community’s cultural heritage. Like many Indigenous languages around the world, its continued use depends on whether it is spoken, taught and passed on to younger generations.
Language preservation involves more than recording vocabulary. It includes sustaining the contexts in which words have meaning: family conversations, oral histories, songs, traditional knowledge, community gatherings and the everyday naming of the natural world.
Lepcha individuals, cultural organisations and community initiatives have worked to preserve and revitalise the language and associated traditions. The approaches can include language teaching, documentation, cultural programmes and efforts to make the heritage more accessible to younger people.
These efforts are especially important when knowledge has traditionally been passed down through personal interaction rather than formal written records.
A place name can become a useful starting point for such learning. Asking what a village name means may lead to a discussion about the local language, a particular plant, an animal, a river or a memory connected with the place.
The process of preserving cultural knowledge is therefore not simply about looking backwards. It is also about giving younger generations opportunities to understand the landscapes in which they live and the histories that have shaped them.
For visitors, there is a lesson here, too. Learning about local heritage requires patience and a willingness to listen. It means recognising that a place has a cultural life extending well beyond what can be seen during a short visit.
It also means acknowledging the limits of our own knowledge. Where an interpretation is uncertain or disputed, it is better to ask and learn than to turn a tentative explanation into an unquestioned fact.
Discovering the Eastern Himalayas on Foot
Walking through the hills east of the Teesta has always been a physical experience for me. The paths rise and fall, villages appear beyond ridges, and the landscape changes as one moves through it.
But walking can also change the way we understand a place.
When we travel by road, our attention is often directed towards destinations. We think about how far we have to go, how long the journey will take and what we will see when we arrive.
On foot, the spaces between destinations become part of the experience. We notice the shape of a ridge, the plants growing beside a path, the way a settlement sits on a slope and the relationship between a village and the river below it.
We have more opportunities to speak with people, observe the landscape closely and learn details that might otherwise pass unnoticed.
This does not mean that walking automatically gives us a complete understanding of a place. Cultural knowledge cannot be acquired simply by following a trail. It requires listening, reading, asking questions and approaching local traditions with respect.
But walking creates opportunities for that kind of learning.
A journey through Panbu, Yangmakum, Samthar, Kafer and the surrounding hills can be more than a route connecting one village to another. It can also be an introduction to the cultural geography of the Eastern Himalayas — provided we take the time to look beyond the scenery.
The same is true of the Relli valley and the wider landscape of Kalimpong. The region’s paths, settlements and rivers have stories that are not always visible at first glance.
Some of these stories survive in written records. Others are carried through oral traditions, local knowledge and the memories of people who have lived here for generations.
And some remain embedded in the names we use every day.
A Different Way of Looking at a Place
I still think about those early journeys through the hills. Purbikhola was my first camping ground. Panbu was my first trek. The walk from Sevok to Charkhole Khola took me through places whose names I accepted without question.
It is strange how easily we become familiar with a place without really knowing it.
We may return to the same mountains for years, photograph the same valleys and walk along the same paths, yet remain unaware of the histories and cultural associations that surround us.
The discovery that a name such as Yangmakum may describe a steep hill hidden behind another hill gives an ordinary journey a new dimension. The interpretation of Panbu as a name associated with the python makes us think about the animals that belong to the landscape. The story of Relli encourages us to pay attention to the movement of the river rather than simply its position on a map.
These are small discoveries, but they change the questions we ask.
Instead of asking only where a place is, we begin to ask how it acquired its name. Instead of treating a village as a point on a route, we wonder about the people who named it and the knowledge they carried. Instead of seeing the landscape as a collection of views, we begin to recognise it as a place shaped by generations of observation, work, memory and belonging.
The next time I pass a signboard saying Yangmakum, I will probably think about the hill hidden behind the hill in front of me.
And when I cross the Relli, I will remember the interpretation of its name and look again at the water moving through the valley.
Perhaps this is one of the most rewarding things about travelling through the Eastern Himalayas. We often begin a journey believing that we are going to discover new places. As we learn more about them, we realise how much history, knowledge and meaning they already contain.
We are not always discovering something new about the land. Sometimes, we are discovering how much we have yet to understand.
And sometimes, the first clue is a name on a signboard.
Exploring the Hills Beyond the Familiar
At Darjeeling Walks, we believe that walking offers an opportunity to experience the Eastern Himalayas beyond its familiar viewpoints and tourist routes. The region’s villages, forests, tea gardens and mountain paths can reveal a deeper understanding of its natural and cultural landscapes.
If you are interested in exploring the hills around Kalimpong and Darjeeling on foot, we would be happy to discuss the possibilities with you. A walk can be shaped around your interests in local culture, village life, nature, photography or the history of the region.
To discuss a Travel experience in the Eastern Himalayas, call +91 9733300696 or use the enquiry form below.
Sometimes, all it takes to begin understanding a place is the willingness to ask a little more about its name.