Lepcha

Clans and Kinship

The basic unit is the family of a man and his wife, and above it the lineage, pü tsho (Siiger, 1967, pp. 112-117). The oldest reference to it is in the Chronicle's account of the pact between Thekong Tek and Khye Bumsa, about 1641, that all males should be counted as related to the sons and all females to the daughters, and it is commonly said that there are two kinds of pü tsho, one for men and one for women. Each male pü tsho has its origin in a peak, often Kanchenjunga or one of its 'brothers', and each female pü tsho in a lake or tarn, and twice a year every pü tsho holds a ceremony to its peak or lake deity. Marriage is barred if the two pü tsho share any blood relationship within the last seven generations on the father's side and three on the mother's; the marriage is a union of the two lineages, and the husband's pü tsho pays a bride-price (pp. 113, 132). Elders are keenly versed in genealogy and are consulted when a marriage is planned. Each village had its gya pön, the administrative head, nominated for three years, the office passing in turn among the men of the village.

Two lists: the pü tsho named in the Kalimpong legend of the demon Lasho that Siiger recorded (1967, pp. 113-114), with Tamsangmu from the same chapter; then the Lepcha families listed in the Gazetteer of Sikhim (1894, pp. 34-35), many named after the places they settled. Neither is complete, spellings differ between the books and from those used today, and three further names in the legend that could not be read reliably in the scan are left out.

In the Official Lists

• Scheduled Tribe

  Sikkim, West Bengal, Tripura

  Listed as: Lepcha

  An entry of its own in each of these lists.

Census 2011 counted 42,909 Lepcha in Sikkim, 33,962 in West Bengal (mostly the Darjeeling hills, now also Kalimpong district) and 157 in Tripura. The compilation used may not show amendments made between 2022 and 2024.

Checked on 2026-11-07 against the sources below. The lists are amended from time to time and can differ by district; for a certificate, the current order or the state's list is what counts.

Name and Origin

The Gazetteer of Sikhim (1894, Introduction, p. i) records that the Lepcha call themselves Rong-pa, 'ravine folk', and claim to be the original people of Sikkim; the history in the same volume calls the Rong 'the oldest and perhaps aboriginal inhabitants' (p. 27). A creation story Siiger heard at Tingbung tells that the first couple settled at the foot of Kanchenjunga, kong chen, beside a lake, where the mother gave birth first to the Lepcha and then to the other peoples (Siiger, 1967, p. 112). Lepcha tradition, as Siiger notes, sets the origin of each male lineage in a Himalayan peak and of each female lineage in a lake.

History

The Gazetteer of Sikhim (1894, pp. 8-10) gives the account, shared by Lepcha and Bhutia tradition, of how the Tibetan prince Khye Bumsa sought out the Lepcha leader Thekong Tek and his wife Nyekong Nal, who promised him sons; his descendants became the rulers of Sikkim, and Phuntsog Namgyal, proclaimed the first Buddhist ruler at Yoksom, is dated in it to 1641. The Gazetteer lists Lepcha families still living along the Talung river and elsewhere in its day (pp. 34-35). The Danish anthropologist Halfdan Siiger worked among the Lepcha of the Tingbung area on the Talung, in northern Sikkim, in 1949, and published The Lepchas: Culture and Religion of a Himalayan People in 1967. In 2011 the largest numbers of Sikkim's Lepcha lived in the North and East districts.

Faith and Worship

The older Lepcha religion, as Siiger recorded it, has the rum, deities, and the mung, demons, and two kinds of priest: the bongthing, a man, and the mun, who may be a man or a woman. Kanchenjunga, kong chen, is the great mountain god: at Tingbung an old male mun kept the shrine at Nung and led a great yearly ceremony to kong chen in the month kar song (Siiger, 1967, pp. 190-192). After the founding of the Namgyal kingdom in the seventeenth century Tibetan Buddhism spread among the Lepcha (Gazetteer, Introduction), and lamas and the bongthing or mun often work side by side at the same rites. Most Lepcha are now Buddhist; some are Christian, and the older priests are still called in.

Customs

Marriages are arranged by the older members of the family, who first examine the relation between the two pü tsho; a bride-price is paid by the husband's lineage, and the bongthing and the mun offer beer (ci) and rice and bless the couple, as the gods did at the first wedding (Siiger, 1967, pp. 131-132). Each pü tsho keeps its own ceremonies twice a year: for the Tamsangmu line a red cock is consecrated to Kanchenjunga at the start of one season and sacrificed at the start of the next, before a cone of rice shaped like the peak, on a hilltop from which the mountain can be seen, before sunrise (pp. 114-115). The Gazetteer notes the Lepcha's deep knowledge of the forest, its birds, beasts and plants.

Festivals

Stories and Legends