The Dhimal are an ethnic minority group of some 20 000 people in the
southeastern part of Nepal and adjacent parts of India. Their language
is linguistically related to the family of Sino-Tibetan languages. They
are one of the 59 recognized indigenous groups who lived on what is
today Nepali soil long before the Indo-Aryans arrived with their Hindu
culture and caste system constituting the ethnic majority group in Nepal
today. In Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology, very little is known
about the ethnic group of the Dhimals. The author descends from the
Dhimal community himself and has presented a dissertation with a wealth
of valuable linguistic and ethnographic data. This massive work is
likely to become a standard work on the Dhimal community not only in
linguistic terms but also with respect to Cultural Anthropology.