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Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas
Rhoderick Chalmers
4.1 Introduction
Questions of language and national identity have coloured the history of Nepal and the
eastern Himalayan region for decades. But since the 1980s they have emerged
at the forefront of political movements – sometimes violent – which have underscored
the ethnic, religious, and social fault lines of the area. The relationship between
language and identity is complex even at the level of smaller ethnic groups; when
combined with the questions of nation and nationalism it has proved fraught with
danger. In the mid-1980s Darjeeling’s separatist Gorkhaland movement played on
language as the unifying strand of Indian Nepali society while insisting on a clear
separation from the state of Nepal. Nepali
Wnally
gained recognition as a national
language of India in 1992, the culmination of almost a century of campaigning. By this
time Nepal’s own ‘people’s movement’ had brought an end to the monarchist
Panchayat regime, opening a Pandora’s box of ethnic and linguistic claims. The
collapse of the central autocratic system brought with it a loss of faith in the simple
‘one language, one country’ nationalism that had been promoted for decades. Ethnic
grievances and spurned calls for linguistic rights have since been seized on by Maoist
insurgents as further aids to recruitment in an intensifying war. In Bhutan, mean-
while, the 1980s saw the Dzongkha language deployed as one element of a rigid state
nationalism. By the start of the 1990s the teaching of Nepali had been banned and
much of Bhutan’s Nepali-speaking population displaced to refugee camps.
This chapter provides an overview of issues of language and national identity in
these regions. Following a brief introduction to the languages of the area it examines
the history of language and politics in Nepal, Darjeeling, Sikkim, and Bhutan
and the various ways in which language has become entwined with national identities.
At the outset it is important to note that we should hesitate before using terms such as
‘nation’ and ‘national’ unthinkingly. These are neither universals nor do they neces-
sarily have exact equivalents in languages other than English. In Nepali, for example,
a sense of shared identity would be ascribed to a
jati,
a term which can stretch from
a single ethnic group to the entire human race, encompassing regional or national
Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas
85
identities in between. Nor do nation-states have a long pedigree in the region as a form
of polity. ‘National’ groups are neither homogeneous nor do they tend to be contained
neatly within the boundaries of a single state. Indeed, this is a region of multiple
identities: within Nepal there are Hindu Nepalis, Buddhist Nepalis, plains Nepalis,
Nepalis of any number of distinct ethnic groups; beyond the boundaries of Nepal
itself we
Wnd
Sikkimese Nepalis, Indian Nepalis, Assamese Nepalis, Bhutanese Nepalis,
and so on. This chapter aims to unravel some of these complexities and highlight the
key issues and current trends that underlie the increasingly sensitive debates around
language and identity that are taking place throughout the region. Most space is
devoted to discussion of Nepal, whose population is many times greater than that of
Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan combined.
4.2 The Area
The Himalayan region has a turbulent history. For centuries it was an area of
Xuctuating
political control, with petty principalities struggling to extend their
inXuence while sandwiched between the great powers of north India and China. It
was only following the late eighteenth-century uniWcation of Nepal and its bruising
C
H
I
N
A
(TIBET)
SIKKIM
Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas
86
R. Chalmers
war with the British East India Company in 1814–16 that states were contained
within strict boundaries. Before its military clash with the British, the small state of
Gorkha had in the space of a few decades politically united a swathe of territory
along the Himalayas from the river Sutlej in the west to the Tista in the east.
The 1816 settlement saw Nepal’s territory reduced and its borders demarcated. It
was contained within the Mahakali to the Mechi rivers, a stretch of some 885 km,
and it occupies much the same territory today. Geographically the country can be
divided into three bands: the high mountains that form its northern frontier, the
central hills, and the southern plains (Tarai) that stretch along its open border with
India.
Immediately to the east lie Sikkim and Darjeeling. Sikkim, a small state bordering
Tibet which British India treated as a protectorate, acceded to the Indian Union in
1975. Darjeeling and its immediate area had been gifted to the British by Sikkim in
1835; this area was extended in 1865 by the incorporation of Bhutanese territory
annexed by the British after a punitive campaign. Despite separatist struggles, Darjee-
ling remains a district of the Indian state of West Bengal. Bhutan lies to the east of
Darjeeling and Sikkim and remains a sovereign state, albeit highly dependent on India
and obliged by treaty to manage its foreign aVairs in collaboration with New Delhi.
Although much smaller in area, Bhutan’s geography is similar to that of Nepal, also
encompassing high mountains, hills and some low-lying plains on the border with
India. Despite limited recent moves towards democratization Bhutan remains a
hereditary monarchy, the current king Jigme Singye Wangchuck being the fourth
member of a dynasty established in 1907.
Nepal is not only the largest of the areas under discussion but by far the most
populous. According to the 2001 census its population had reached some 24 million
and population growth remains high. Indian census
Wgures
of the same year indicate
that Sikkim’s population had only just crossed the half-million mark while Darjeeling
district as a whole counted some 1.6 million inhabitants. The enumeration of Bhutan’s
citizens is not so simple. The topic itself is politically sensitive and in the absence of
recent census statistics best estimates indicate a total of between 600,000 and 1 million
(see section 4.7). The population of all of these areas is very diverse and this is reXected
in the remarkably high linguistic diversity outlined in the following section. The
people of the Himalayan region encompass Hindus and Buddhists, animists and
Muslims, highland pastoralists and lowland agriculturalists. Despite one signiWcant
division between speakers of Indo-Aryan languages (generally caste Hindus) and
Tibeto-Burman languages (generally distinct upland ethnic groups with shamanist
or Buddhist traditions), the relationship between the diVerent caste, ethnic, linguistic,
and national groups of the Himalaya is far too complex to admit simple categoriza-
tion. Historical patterns of language and religious shift have been compounded by
migration and intermarriage to produce a much more mixed population than census
statistics imply.
Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas
87
4.3 The Languages
Linguistic diversity is one of the most striking features of Nepal and the eastern
Himalayan region. This area lies at the meeting point of two great language families,
the Indo-European and Tibeto-Burman, as well as including small communities of
speakers of Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic languages. While the larger languages are
well established and deWned, with several enjoying long literary traditions and others
in the process of standardization, there are dozens of smaller languages that have
yet to be well described and documented. Many of these are endangered and some
have become extinct in the recent past. Given the diYculty of separating languages
and dialects (categories which admit to no absolute deWnition) it is understandable
that estimates of the total number of distinct languages spoken in the region vary
considerably. Within Nepal, however, where the tradition of descriptive linguistics
now stretches back well over four decades, most experts agree on a
Wgure
of
somewhat over one hundred languages. Among these, Indo-Aryan languages claim
the most speakers but the Tibeto-Burman group includes a far larger number of
distinct languages.
The dominant language in the region as a whole is Nepali, the national language of
Nepal and mother tongue of around half of its population. In both Sikkim and the hill
areas of Darjeeling, Nepali has long been the prime lingua franca, and also functions
as an oYcial language. Bhutan is home to a range of Tibeto-Burman varieties, some of
them very close to standard Tibetan, and the last two decades have witnessed a
determined government campaign to strengthen Dzongkha as the oYcial language.
It is worth noting that there are areal features shared across language families and the
great religious traditions, especially as expressed in Sanskrit and Tibetan, that have
had an impact on vocabulary and other features of language use. Across this region,
English also plays an increasingly important role as a second language and educational
medium.
1
4.4 Language Shift, Migration, and the Roots
of Language Politics
Nepal and the eastern Himalayan region have been shaped by signiWcant language
and population shifts. A long-established pattern of eastward migration – primarily
for economic reasons – has been accompanied by the displacement of minority
languages. In general the shift has been to Nepali, and this shift is most pronounced
in the erstwhile migrant populations which now dominate Sikkim and Darjeeling.
In Bhutan, the presence of large numbers of Nepali speakers has, however, been one
of the main reasons behind moves to strengthen Dzongkha as the national language.
For good surveys of language in Nepal and the Himalayas, see the following: van Driem (2001), Hutt
(1988), Kansakar and Turin (2003).
1
88
R. Chalmers
The spread of the Nepali language – in limited functions as an oYcial language but
more signiWcantly as a lingua franca – has been a continuing trend since at least the
eighteenth century, and from before the uniWcation of Nepal. External factors such as
the large-scale recruitment of ethnically diverse Nepalis into the British Indian Army
provided added impetus to the adoption of a shared language. By the late nineteenth
century a vibrant Nepali publishing industry had been established in Banaras and as
the twentieth century progressed formal education within India and Nepal greatly
increased the use of the language. Under the autocratic Panchayat regime (1960–90)
the promotion of the Nepali language became an integral part of the uniform national
culture which the state sought to impose on its subjects, epitomized by the slogan
‘one country, one dress, one language’.
Yet Nepal was characterized by nationism rather than nationalism: it was the state
that was in search of a nation rather than vice versa. As several recent historians have
noted, the conquests of King Prithvinarayan Shah of Gorkha in the late eighteenth
century uniWed the country politically but not socially or culturally. This is not to say
that Nepalis did not share identities wider than the purely local: ties of religion,
region, or ethnic community were all present to diVering extents across the geo-
graphical territory of the country. But even the early rulers of the united kingdom did
not think in ‘national’ terms and their diverse subjects probably did not enjoy any
broad sense of cultural community that could be labelled as incipient national
sentiment.
2
In retrospect, then, the eruption of ethnic politics and linguistic movements follow-
ing the introduction of multi-party democracy to Nepal in 1990 is hardly surprising.
In the process of reassessing the foundations of the state, language has come to occupy
a central, if often symbolic, position. The struggle for minority linguistic rights has
become emblematic of a wider intellectual and political eVort to redeWne Nepal as a
culturally pluralistic state. For the ethnic associations which mushroomed in the
immediate aftermath of the democracy movement recognition of linguistic diversity
has become a totemic issue. Although many members of Nepal’s ethnic groups have
adopted Nepali as their primary language, demands for mother tongue teaching and
the use of minority languages in oYcial contexts have formed a central plank of ethnic
politics.
Ironically, it was only beyond Nepal’s borders that a proto-nationalist consciousness
developed around the shared use of Nepali. Waves of emigrants had populated
Darjeeling (in British India), established themselves as the majority group in the
protectorate of Sikkim, settled in large numbers in the south of Bhutan and built up
sizeable communities in the western Himalayas, northeast India, and urban centres
such as Banaras and Calcutta. These communities – especially the hundreds of
thousands of Nepalis who made Darjeeling their home – were ethnically mixed and
initially included many non-Nepali speakers. Yet the Nepali language rapidly eclipsed
2
For a history of nationalism in Nepal, see Onta (1996), and also Burghart (1984).

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