The history of formation of Gorkha Nationality

Sangeeta Khewa

The understanding about the nationality named Gorkha has evolved over numerous generations, finally crystallizing in the movement for a separate state here, in the Darjeeling Hills. But, in the first place, it should be noted that there is no unanimity on the origin of the word ‘Gorkha’. Analysis of the Gorkha ethnic identity reveals that its growth and sustenance is rooted not only in kinship, descent, language or other ethnic markers but rather also in colonialism. The crisis of identity is nothing new to the Gorkhas in India. Are they ‘Mongoloid’ or ‘Aryan’? ‘Are they emigrants’ or ‘Aboriginals’? Are they ‘Indian’ or ‘Nepali’? Or what about the difference between ‘Nepali’ and ‘Gorkha’. Let us trace back into the pages of ancient history, to take an account of the formation of the ‘Gorkha’ nationality.

In the first place, it should be noted that there is no unanimity on the origin of the word ‘Gorkha’. It has very ancient historical references, we would come to that later, but after the establishment of the Gorkha or Shah (of Rajput origin) dynasty in 1559, the word began to be referred to the inhabitants there, and in broader sense, prior to the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814, the word ‘Gorkha’ or ‘Gorkhali’ was mostly meant for the Khāsas. The various mongoloid tribes known as ‘Kirāta’ were signified as ‘Khāsetar’. 

In India, the word ‘Gorkha’ was absolved of this very racial meaning particularly after the emergence of the All India Gorkha League in 1943. Then onwards, before and after the ‘indenpendence’, it was used for political objectives and to mobilise support from the people by rallying them under ‘a unified and none geo-centric classification’.

The use of ‘Gorkha’ and ‘Nepali’ is often used interchangeably, though the appropriateness of one over the other has ever since became a subject of much debate. It was first debated in early fifties between Ganeshlal Subba, a prominent leader of the undivided Communist Party of India and Ramkrishna Sharma, an All India Gorkha League leader. It was debated more vigorously after Subhas Ghising, the president of GNLF, denounced the word ‘Nepali’ in favour of ‘Gorkha’. 

While tracing the origin of ‘Nepal’ and thus ‘Nepali’, the local legends say that a Hindu sage named ‘Ne’ established himself in the valley of Kathmandu in prehistoric times and that the word ‘Nepal’ came into existence as the place protected (‘pala’ in pali) by the sage. Nepal is first mentioned in the late Vedic text, Atharvaveda Parisista as a place exporting blankets, and in the post-Vedic Atharva Siras Upanisad. The word ‘Nepal’ is believed by most scholars to be derived from the word ‘Nepa’ which refers to the Newar Kingdom, the present day Kathmandu Valley. In early Sanskrit sources (Atharvaveda Parisista) and in Gupta period inscriptions, the country is referred to as Nepala. The Newars of present day Nepal, the inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley and its peripheries, were referred as ‘Nepa-mi’ (citizens of Nepa) before the advent of Shah Dynasty. 

Prithvinarayan Shah, the Gorkha king, set out to put the word ‘Nepal’, in a vision to re-establish united Nepal kingdom, which got fragmented through the centuries earlier. In continuation to that, with several alterations, came the country later, called Nepal. And this course of a few centuries, and finally, the official assertions of Nepal being a country, has added recognition to the terms ‘Nepal’ and ‘Nepali’.

‘Gorkha’ as a term is in fact broader in sense. ‘Gorkha’, is best described as a ‘broad-based ethnic classification’, that is an amalgamation of Caucasoid Khāsas and the Tibeto-Burmese Kirātas, who are either aboriginal to or part of an ancient community of people living in and around the Himalayan, Sub-Himalayan and Indo-Gangetic regions of the Indian Subcontinent.

The word ‘Gorkha’ doesn’t narrowly meant the people from that particular region of Nepal, or the martial identity of ‘Gurkha’, or merely the people demanding Gorkhaland. It is a historical identity that took shape from the ancient times, unlike ‘Nepali’ or ‘Indian’, both of which took concrete shapes mostly in the period of British rule and subsequent existence as ‘independent’ countries. 

In this connection, it can be said that, the people, who resided in the areas called Bangladesh or Pakistan now, were Indians in the British era, as a result of the emerging consensus of struggle for Indian independence. Whereas, several areas in the north-east India and Kashmir or many other regions were not so. The feeling of eternity of these countries and the borders, in this subcontinent, are all mere eyewash on behalf of the respective rulers. The Bengali identity got divided into Bangladeshis and Indians, the Punjabis into Pakistanis and Indians and so on. 

The Gorkhās, similarly got divided into Nepalis and Indians, of which the counterparts in Nepal was formed by a gradual process of conglomeration of smaller tribes namely Newars, Khambus, Limbus, Sherpas, Mangars etc, each of these were settled more or less in distinct territories having distinct languages, and cultural practices. 

In Indian portion, the intermingling was far more intense as people from all those areas came here and settled together, in common territory, started using the same language for communicating with each other. This process of coalescing of Limbus, Mangars, Pradhans, Gurung, Tamangs and others to an extent appropriated various other tribes like Lepchas and Bhutias also, who were known to be excluded of the Nepali or Gorkha identity. There are varying results in the extent of this process of inclusion, as a complex milieu of social-cultural-economic and above all political processes continued. 

The political process here, in India, largely asserted it to be a ‘Gorkha’ identity. There were initiatives to introduce new nomenclature as ‘Bharpali’ (acronym of ‘Bharatiya Nepali’) and ‘Bhargoli’ (‘Bharatiya Gorkhali’). However, none of these suggestions seems to have received wide acceptance. In Nepal, both ‘Nepali’ and ‘Gorkha’ are used for official purposes, although the former is more popular. The official newspaper of Nepal is still called Gorkhapatra. For reasons like this, a large number of them think that the word ‘Gorkha’ will not give the Nepalis in India a distinct identity. There are also other reasons why many Nepalis do not favour the word ‘Gorkha’. One such reason is the low status associated with the latter word, which is frequently used to refer to security men or other domestic servants. 

The name ‘Gorkha’ has deep ancient roots. ‘Gorkha’ is essentially a Pali distortion of a Sanskrit term used to refer to the Khās people. G.Tucci, an authority on Nepal and Tibet, seems to believe that this word originated from ‘Goraksha’, meaning ‘protection of cow’. It is so in the Sanskrit scriptures. This seems quite plausible in view of the strong influence of the Goraksha or Gorakhnath sect of Hinduism in northern India during the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries. However, Harka Gurung, an eminent scholar of Nepal, considers the contention of Suryabikram Gyawali more plausible than this. According to Gurung, Gyawali traces its origin to the Khās word ‘Garkha’ which means‘revenue area’. 

The Khas and the Kiratas coalesced together through a pretty long historical period, and thus developed the Gorkha nationality as we find it today... 

The Khāsas were ancient group of nomadic pastoralist people who migrated to the Indian sub-continent from the Eastern Europe, or the Caucasian region neighboring Asia Minor region, also from where later on, the Indo-Aryans are believed to have came. In fact, the Khāsas moved to Central Asia, Iran and Afganistan before entering the Indian sub-continent and then occupied the outer foothills of the Himalayas. Although earlier Khāsas were taken to be a segment of the Indo-Aryans, scholars today opines that the Khāsas are Caucasoid because of their genetic makeup. During the advent of the Indo-Aryans there were numerous instances of conflict between Khāsas and the Indo-Aryans. 

The Khāsas practiced an ancient religion known as Masto which involved the worship of clan deities and animal sacrifices. The Khās society as such also did not manifest any caste hierarchy. The Khāsas were inducted into Hinduism in 8th century by Guru Gorakhnath whence the Khās society began to be divided into various castes and sub-castes. There however, remained notable differences between the Khās Bramhinical castes and the Indo-Aryan Brahminical castes. Some of the well know Khās castes today are- Bahun, Chhetri, Thakuri, Sarki, Kami, Damai and Gaine.

During the 13th century, as Buddhism began to make a big impact in the Himalayan and Sub-Himalayan regions, the Sanskrit term ‘Go Rakkha’ began to be distorted as ‘Gorkha’ in Pali. 

Many tribes from other Indo-Aryan people, during conquests or in search of livelihood got fused with people here.

The Kirātas were the original inhabitants of the Himalayan, Sub-Himalayan and Indo-Gangetic regions of the Indian subcontinent. Their demographical distribution ranges from Kashmir to Laos and Cambodia and from Tibet to Central India. 

An interesting aspect of Kirāt society is the lack of social stratification or caste system. The Kirātas were treated much on the same plain as the Khāsas by the Indo-Aryans. The Manusmriti even tagged the two together, and there classifying them as ‘impure’.

They were animistic and Shamanistic people which also make them the one with the oldest living cultures. The tantric aspect of the Hindu religion including certain tenets of Shaivism and Shakti are credited to have originated from the Animistic and Shamanistic rituals of the Kirāt people. An increasing number of Kirātas have today also full-fledgedly given up their ancient practices and converted to Hinduism, Buddhism or Christianity.

A Kirāta has been referred in Mahabharata and Ramayana, as ‘an innocent soul with a nature of a lion’. The Kings and governments have felt strong with the Kirātas fighting on their side.

There are 22 Kirāt tribes which in present day are taken as Gorkha people; which include– Rai, Limbu, Yakkha, Sunuwar, Newar, Jirel, Hayu, Gurung, Magar/Mangar, Tamang, Bhujel, Thakali, Tami, Chepang, Kagate, Kusunda, Chhantyal in the hills and Dura, Danuwar, Majhi, Dhimal, Meche from the Terai. 

The caste system was inflicted to them from the Hindus. The Khāsas, became predominantly Hindus and practiced strict casteism; After the conversion of the Khāsas into Hinduism, the Indo-Aryans began to use them as a means to reach out the Kirātas with an objective to introduce Hinduism among them. Newars, though of Kirāta stock, were most close to the Khāsas, in Nepal dynasty, had converted to Hindu practices, while the other Kirātas as the Limbu, Rai, Tamang had no semblance of any form of casteism in their society. In the process of gradual conversion to Hindus, manifestations of mutated forms of Casteism came into being among Kirātas. The remaining Kirāt who did not convert to Hindusim was nonetheless greatly influenced by Hinduism and began to practice a syncretic religion manifesting the tenets of both Hinduism and Shamanistic Animism. The Kirātas and the Khāsas were, at first, fiercely antagonistic as the Khāsas were the cattle herders and the Kirātas hunters; Eventually they learned to live together. The Vedic scriptures also offer accounts of close ties between the Khāsas and Kirātas, to the extent the Mahabharata describing the Khāsas and the Kirātas participating in the battle of Kurukshetra alongside the armies of Kurus. The two ultimately coming under one rule when King Prithvi Narayan Shah united all Khās and Kirāt kingdoms, confederacies and principalities into one united Kingdom.

The languages and dialects have the distinction of belonging to both the Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burmese families. Some use Devanagari script while some others use Tibetan though mutual influences are evident. The Nepali language or ‘Gorkhali’ or ‘Parbatiya’, which is of Indo-Aryan language family, is the modern derivative of Khās Kura, the language that was mainly limited among the upper caste Bahun-Chhetris (Brahman-Kshatriyas) in the seventeenth century. Even after the triumph led by Prithwinarayan Shah, this language didn’t fully succeed to build a bridge between the Tibeto-Burmese speaking tribal-ethnic people. In Nepal, these various tribes used to live in different regions. So it was a slow process of acceptance of this language by the Kirātas. However, gradually it became the lingua franca (or common medium of communication), interweaving the majority of people. The use of respective own languages are diminishing largely. In Nepal, those are still meagre but present. But in Darjeeling, as people from different tribes gathered here in the same territory, the lingua franca emerged a bit faster. Even the Lepchas and Bhutias here too went on accepting this language. And on the other hand, there were 29 dialects of Tibeto-Burmese Kirāta language family spoken by different clans, which faced extinction.

This is in brief the history of formation of Gorkha Nationality, and the origin of religious practices and language etc.