A Vacation Outside the Box: The Town of MUSTANG in Canadian County OKLAHOMA vs the Town of MUSTANG in NEPAL

WHETHER in the real world or in the back lot of some studio, there is probably a town named after almost every breed of horse. In America, iconic breeds bear Spanish or Mexican names such as Apaloosa and Palomino: but with the Mustang, there is of course that most iconic of cars, the '67 Ford Mustang; the four-wheeled counterpart to that other icon of the 60s the Harley-Davidson motor-bike. And away from cars there are the two towns; Mustang Oklahoma and surprisingly, another Mustang, this time in Asia, Mustang, Nepal

IN terms of Physical Geography however, the two Mustangs happen to be thousand of miles apart, separated by oceans and mountain ranges. In America, Mustang Oklahoma is a bustling centre of urban life in Canadian County, Oklahoma City real estate is quite unlike its Nepalese counrterpart.

The other Mustang is a province in the mountainous state of Nepal, between Tibet and China. It is a primarily agrarian community, where the cattle are translocated each year during the annual transhumance. It is also one of the last few places in the world where the tradition of Polyandry still survives. In the village of Njimba, Fraternal Polyandry is a variation in the tradition which provides for brothers to be married to the same wife.

In the case of Mustang Oklahoma, it is not difficult to accept that the word is the anglicized version of the Mexican Mestengo . a breed of wild horse, but what about Mustang Nepal?

HOW can this coincidence be explained? Could there exist in The Nepalese language, a word which so closely resembles Mestengo that it got transferred into the Nepalese language as 'Mustang'? The chances are probably several billion to one against. The pronunciation of 'Mustang' in Nepalese is completely unrecognizable as the same word in English. While the reality of Mustang is quite acceptably an animal of the American grass-lands, in what way does its Napalese counterpart reflect this fact? Even if there is no accepted answer to this question, the almost unbelievable coincidence is a counter to the American tendency towards insularity.

Oklahoma!

MOVING ON from the precise meaning of Mustang, Oklahoma too has its ethnic connections. It translates to the Land of the Red Man, and was coined out of two Native American dialects. It designates the area to which the Cherokee were re-located, hundreds of miles away from their homelands in southern Georgia in 1838, during the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, when it was thought that the land had contained deposits of gold too precious to be left to 'savages.'

NEPAL is a country nestling, for a portion of its terrain, in the foothills of the Himalayas, famous for its sherpas. It is extremely rocky, and until 1992, was closed to outsiders. It cannot by any stretch of the imagination, be associated with the image of herds of wild horses galloping across the plains. It is also the birthplace of Tensing Norgay, who accompanied Edmund Hilary on the very first expedition confirmed to have reached the summit of Everest, In America, Mustang real-estate is as pricey as anywhere else.

OF course in these days of the Conspiracy Theory, there are those who claim that Tensing, having already attempted the conquest of Everest in 1935,1936, and 1938, was more experienced than Edmund Hilary, and that he was in fact the first to reach the summit. They claim that the 1953 expedition reprises the circumstances of the discovery of the Geographical North Pole. On that ocassion, the leader of the expedition was for a long time credited with the achievement, while nis navigator, who had in fact discovered the Pole was air-brushed out of the picture.

MEANWHILE back at Mustang Oklahoma, By using as an example, two instances taken from the continent of Europe, it is quite easy to demonstrate that it is impossible for words and expressions to travel over anything but the shortest distances without changing their character. For example, in making the crossing from Spain to England, an expression denoting a royal personnage, La Infanta de Castilla, became the name of a neighbourhood in South London, the 'Elephant and Castle'. Still in England, what began in France as '...route du Roi, the King's route, became 'Rotten Row' a bridle-path in Hyde Park popular with the horsey set, and Cat and Fiddle, very popular as a name for Public House, is a corruption of Catherine la Fidele, more commonly known as Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII (Greaves).

LET'S see how this works. Route du roi could have been translated literally as the 'King's Road', or idiomatically as 'Kingsway', but the intention was not to translate, but to replicate. With this in mind, it is quite easy to see this process at work in the pairings - Mestengo/Mustang, Route du Roi/Rotten Row, Infanta de Castilla/Elephant and Castle, and Catherine la Fidele/Cat and Fiddle.

WAS the Mustang Nepal named in the same manner? We need to discover its meaning.

BUT far from being a Nepalese word, 'Mustang' is Tibetan for 'Plain of Aspiration'. It is a corruption of sMan-thang, pronounced Moostang. Could Moostang have been replcated from another Tibetan word sounding almost the same as sMan-thang? Perhaps the answer to this conundrum is that 'to every rule there is an exception'. Obviously, the solution is to examine the issue from the Nepalese/Tibetan viewpoint. We know what to expect when discussing Western European languages. Should the same rules apply?

CONSIDERING the separation of the two locations in terms of distance, language and culture, this should not be the case. Mustang Nepal is within striking distance of Kathmandu Nepal, The terrain is extremely mountainous, and for the most part, its contact with the West is restricted to treks organized around places like Muktinath Nepal and Langtang Nepal. In Mustang Oklahoma, income levels are several times higher, and there is nothing anywhere on the American continents to match the very rudimentary in Nepal. In the same way, there are no tents to be seen in the Mustang Oklahoma zipcode. If only for these reasons, the same rules do not apply.

References

William Greaves: Its my Round: A Personal Celebration of 2000 Years of the British Pub.