The local story
Cardamom, alder and the people of the west
Hee Bermiok has no famous monastery or battle, and we will not invent one. The double name is usually explained as joining two neighbouring settlements, Hee and Bermiok, and its story is the story of western Sikkim's farming people. Limboo families, whose homeland of Limbuwan ran across both sides of the Singalila ridge, and Lepcha families, the oldest people of Sikkim, farmed these slopes before the Namgyal dynasty was founded at Yuksom in 1642. Under the Chogyals the west was the kingdom's heartland, and in the late 1780s Gorkha armies from Nepal overran it before the border was restored in 1817.
From the late nineteenth century, especially after John Claude White became the first British Political Officer in Sikkim in 1889, Nepali-speaking farmers settled across western Sikkim and the village took on the mixed character it has today. Over the twentieth century, large cardamom grown under Himalayan alder trees became the main cash crop here, as across the state; Sikkim is India's largest producer. In 2003 the Limboo and Tamang communities were recognised as Scheduled Tribes in Sikkim, and in 2016 the state was declared fully organic, so Hee Bermiok's farms grow without chemical fertilisers or pesticides.
Above it all stands Kanchenjunga, 8,586 m, which much of Sikkim regards as a guardian deity. Each year at Pang Lhabsol, in August or September, monasteries honour the mountain with masked dances, and Lepcha tradition holds Kanchenjunga as the sacred source of their people. Homestays came to Hee Bermiok in recent decades, as Sikkim encouraged rural tourism, and families began hosting travellers who wanted the Pelling view without Pelling's hotels. It remains a farming village first.
