Nepal and the Eastern Himalayas

Abstract

Abstract 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 finally 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.