Gorkha Dreaming

by HK PRADHAN AND VIKASH PRADHAN

FROM ISSUE # 110 (February 2005) | IN THIS ISSUE
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Come February, and the exam fever reaches a frenzy. The Darjeeling hills, more renowned for its tea than education, gears up for the new season's influx of students. The dormitories are empty save the few preparing for their board exams. Year after year, the pattern has remained unchanged – coaching classes and last minute revisions, and 2005 is no different. The batch of 1987 will however have more than the average story of Board Exam histrionics to recall – the Gorkhaland agitation was at its peak, and the exam schedule inconveniently coincided with the infamous 40-day bandh.

The mid 1980s saw the Gorkhland movement flare up. Spearheaded by a former NCO of the Indian Army, the charismatic leader of the Gorkha National Liberation Front, Subash Ghising, the movement fired up the passion and the imagination of the people of the Darjeeling Hills. The Gorkha was finally fighting for her/his rightful place in the Indian mainstream.

About two decades gone by, the very same people who stood by for the movement, often at the cost of their lives and property, are reluctant to talk about it. Most maintain a diplomatic silence while others in the cover of anonymity blame the leadership of betraying their trust and selling out. With the formation of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hills Council, a compromise solution seems to have been arrived at, but the basic questions about the Gorkha populace in India remain largely unanswered. A sense of achievement did prevail for a short while but with time, it has given way to general skepticism.

Why Gorkha? Did we need the Gorkhaland agitation? What did it achieve? Have the Gorkhas got their due? Tricky questions and trickier answers, here is an effort to find a few:

Background:
Simply said, Gorkha denotes the Indian component of the modern-day Nepali Diaspora but that is as far away from the truth as Hindustan is the nation of the Hindus'. While it is true that the Gorkhas share a common lineage and stock with the Nepalese, it will be very inaccurate to think of them as an immigrant Nepalese population living in India.

Nepali, as a people, is made up of various ethnic components of Aryan, Mongoloid and even Dravidian stock, most with their own dialects and languages. Going by ancient Hindu scriptures and texts, the Kiratas were spread from the North of the Vindhya Mountains to the Himalayan foothills. As more recent history indicates, the Licchavis meanwhile were spread between Utkal to the Himalayan foothills during the initial half of the 1st Millennium B.C. The Tibeto-Burman group of inhabitants of the region descended from the Tibetan plateau. The Chhetris are said to have come from the Saurastra-Rajputana region of Western India. Similarly the Brahmins and the dalits akin to them could have come from North Indian plains.

Initially only the Chhetris, claiming to be the protectors of the holy cow, were known as the 'Gorkhas'. It is said to be a distortion of the term 'Gorakchhaks' or a term to signify themselves as the followers of Gorrakhnath. In context to the British, who wrote or re-wrote the recent history of the Indian sub-continent, the generic term 'Gorkhas' was used to denote all those races they confronted during their attempt to subjugate Nepal.

Prior to the consolidation of the Indian sub-continent by the British, the borders or extent of any tribe, or ethnic communities must have been fluid or undefined because cartography came to India only with the Westerners. Also ravaged by epidemics and natural calamities, and at times, where entire civilizations were swept away, there should have been no dearth of land. However, now governments and scholars toe the lines of the British either to favour one ethnic community or for depriving another, impose well-defined borders for them. In this way some ethnic communities that freely roamed the extent of the Himalayan regions are shown as having been confined to limited pockets within a strict modern day geopolitical border. Thus, the various communities living and freely sharing a broad stretch of land bordering the Southern Himalayas since ancient times came to be confined and divided by political boundaries of recent origin.

The complexities increased manifold after the sub-continent was rid of its colonial masters in 1947. The Darjeeling hills and the other neighbouring regions became part of the Indian Union but the people were far from integrated into the mainstream. Despite their rightful claim to the land, the Gorkhas in India were referred to as Nepalese or immigrants, and as per highly confidential order of the Central government, their births not registered in the North Eastern states of India. Further lines of division were drawn up based on contentious issues like race.

[Continued next month: the Gorkha/ Nepalese Mixup and the past and future of the Gorkhaland movement ]

About H.K. Pradhan
H.K. Pradhan is very proud to be an open minded Indian but feels unfortunate to belong to a despised ethnic group. He served the Central government for 35 years in various regions like North Bengal, Sikkim, Nagaland, Meghalaya and perceived the bitter status of his community in the country first hand, both overt and covert. To his credit, he also has a book containing tips of 512 herbal remedies and history of some ethnic medicines of the Indian sub-continent since the pre-Ayurvedic period.

Gorkha Dreaming Part 2 >>