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Lost Inheritance in
the Mountains
“In 1947, brothers and sisters, the British left granting
India her freedom, granting the Muslims Pakistan, granting special provisions
for the scheduled castes and tribes, leaving everything taken care of, brothers
and sisters -
Except us, EXCEPT US. The Nepalis of India. At that time, in
April of 1947, the Communist party of India demanded a Gorkhasthan, but the
request was ignored… We are labourers on the tea plantations, coolies dragging
heavy loads, soldiers. We are Gorkhas. We are soldiers. Our loyalty and
character has never been in doubt. And have we been rewarded? Can our children
learn our language in schools? Have we been given compensation? Are we given
respect?
No! They spit on us.”
This excerpt of a speech from the Booker Prize winning novel
“The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai mirrors the current unrest in
Darjeeling led by Bimal Gurung, the leader of Gorkha Janmukti Morcha.
Kiran Desai, who won the Booker Prize (2006) for her novel,
portrays the unstable political period in the mountainous region of Kalimpong
in the eighties – when Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), led by Subash
Ghising - the Guru of Bimal Gurung, demanded a separate Gorkhaland in Kalimpong
and neighbouring Darjeeling.
In a crumbling Scottish mansion named Cho Oyu lives Sai, a
seventeen-year-old girl, with her grandfather, a retired civil court Judge.
Completing the household are the Judge’s beloved dog, Mutt, and his faithful
cook. The very first chapter portrays the liberation army of GNLF, made up of
young lads, enter Cho Oyu forcefully – ‘in leather jackets from the Kathmandu
black market, khaki pants, bandanas - universal guerrilla fashion. They were
looking for anything they could find – kukri sickles, axes, kitchen knives,
spades, any kind of firearm.’
The situation is also profiled through the character of Gyan
who is however not part of the same class as Sai. He speaks a different primary
language and eats more indigenous food. He is Nepali, which is a minority group
in India but a majority group in Kalimpong. He tutors Sai and is paid a paltry
sum for his time and effort by the judge. He tells the story of his great grandfather,
his great uncles in the British army, “And do you think they got the same
pension as the English of equal rank? They fought to death, but did they earn
the same salary?”
Slowly it dawns on Gyan why he had no money and no real job came
his way, why he couldn’t fly to America and why he was ashamed to let anyone
see his home. He and his kin did not enjoy the same rights as the others around
him - Anglo Indians, Bengalis, Marwari businessmen, and even Lepcha tribals. Destitute
Anglo-Indian students in Dr Graham’s Homes were better off than him. They all belonged
here lawfully – whereas his identity was questioned all the time.
The novel deals with the quest for individual identity. It
is the struggle for search of one’s root, in a world that has undergone a
significant change in the postcolonial era.
The conflicting ethno-racial relationship between people who come from
different cultural, historical, religious and social background throws up a
playfield of unease.
For meeting of varied cultures is never harmonious. Often
violent, it peters out to a compromise and sometimes subsumes the weaker culture.
Kiran Desai gives a backdrop to the agitation in the book – “When
England controlled much of India, they brought in Nepalis to work on the tea
plantations, and although colonialism is officially gone, the descendants of
these people still live in the border region, but do not have equal rights.
During the mid-1980s in the border region of India, including Darjeeling, there
were numerous processions, demonstrations, and some violent riots by minority
groups who wanted fair treatment.’
GNLF wanted to bring dignity and a sense of belongingness to
their people. The biggest insult they often faced was when they registered the
utter bewilderment of people who didn’t consider them to be ‘Indian citizens’. Leading a procession through Kalimpong,
Gyan’s
fellow agitators proclaim loudly, “This is where we were born, where our
parents were born, where our grandparents were born. We will defend our own
homeland, we will run our own affairs in our own language. If necessary we will
wash our bloody kukris in the mother waters of the Teesta, jai Gorkha.”
Conversations between Anglo-Indian residents in the novel bring
in further detail of the history of Gorkhas. -
Around the 1800s NepalI people left their villages and migrated to the
tea plantations of Northern Bengal, in search for work. They settled in hamlets
bordering remote tea estates of Darjeeling-Kalimpong area. By and by along came
the imperial army looking for strong soldiers to fight their wars. They were
delighted to discover the Gorkhas - able, courageous, obedient, and to top it,
loyal to the core. They recruited them in numbers, and the Nepali soldiers
fought English wars in World War I and II, besides imperialistic expeditions.
They brought innumerable victories to the British and were decorated with
honours. A Statue of a Gorkha soldier at Westminister is testimony of their
valour and the part they played in British wars.
Of course many perished on battlefields fighting alien wars
and sometimes against their own brothers in Pakistan, India and South East
Asia. Still there are a number of Nepali soldiers in the Malaysian, Singaporean
armies today. The Indian army also kept its doors open to recruit Nepalis in its
cadre. The Gorkha regiment is the pride of the armed forces in India.
When power suppresses, resistance is born in its
interstices. Despite the fact that generations of Gorkhas have lived in the Bhutan-Sikkim-West
Bengal sector since the 1800s, this part of India has been a messy map. First
the Gorkhas were turned out of Assam and Meghalaya. The King of Bhutan made
noises against influx of immigrants to his country. The novel further augments,
“A great amount of warring, betraying, bartering had occurred: between Nepal,
England, Tibet, India, Sikkim, Bhutan; Darjeeling was annexed from Sikkim, Kalimpong
plucked from Bhutan.”
The proud Gorkha felt betrayed, “In our own country, the
country we fight for, we are treated like slaves. Here we are eighty percent of
the population, ninety tea gardens in the district, but is even one Gorkha-owned?
Every day the lorries leave bearing away
our forests, sold by foreigners to fill the pockets of foreigners. Everyday our
stones are carried from the river bed of the Teesta to build their houses and
cities.
We are labourers working barefoot, in all weather, thin as sticks, as
they sit fat in managers’ houses with their fat wives, with their fat bank
accounts and their fat children going abroad.”
Their fury flamed over,
overflowing into the streets, as they looted shops, burnt lorries and burgled
rich Anglo-Indian bungalows.
The current situation in Darjeeling is akin to the political
and cultural upheaval discussed in the book. History may never repeat itself but
it often rhymes and “those who do not learn from history are condemned to
repeat it”.
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