Nepali Bhasha Andolan, circa 1960s

From its fount of the Khas Kura in the remote north-western Buddhist Khasan Nepal to its mid-western Gorkhali bastion to the all-embracive modern Nepali to being the provincial Gorkha Bhasha as Darjeeling Gorkhaland's lingua magna mater, it is the Nepali language's long historical odyssey that is still in the vortex of cognitive dissonance and polarised and vested syllogisms and solipsism.

In Darjeeling's case, its modern historical path is littered and pockmarked by various upheavals - turmoil in its tea estates, language aspirations, hill autonomy to the present-day issues of full autonomy, inclusion in the 6th Schedule, recognition of all hill residents and tribal aborigines - even including Bahuns, Chettris and other Indo-Aryan Hindu caste Nepalis - as minorities.

The language's latter-day travels and travails as Nepali and Gorkha Bhasha to India's northeast, especially its explosion in Darjeeling, was recently highlighted by my ex-school teacher in Darjeeling, Ishwar Ballabh, in his weekly Simantavarti column in Kantipur of Saturday Asar 25, 2062 BS (July 9, 2005). Ishwar Ballabh, then an itinerant from Kathmandu in Darjeeling, had left our Turnbull High School sometime ago for his own life as a civil contractor, following the footsteps of the success of his famous father-in-law Mantu Lal.

I like to add my own personal pieces to what turned out to be an explosive period in Darjeeling's heart, soul and soil when its intellect and sentiments were twinned to the Nepali Bhasha that united all the diverse Nepalis in the diaspora.

Conversely, this period of 1960/61 in Nepal was not one of democratic movement as in Darjeeling but a regressively repressive backtracks to imaginary demagoguery and medieval feudalism. King Mahendra had institutionalised his Partyless Panchayat on the feudal foundation of the old India-diasporic Shah-Rana-Thakuri triumvirate with Bahuns, Newars and some tribal - the latter to be gazetted as Adibasi Janajatis only in the next century - as his court jesters and sops. Whereas, as we shall see, the Nepali language movement in Darjeeling was a pan-Nepali agitation of the Nepali diaspora in Darjeeling, and headed mostly by Matwali Nepalis with their own mother tongues, as opposed to Nepali-speaking Tagadharis, simply because every Nepali's sole identity depended on the Nepali language.

Ballabh mentions of Nepali being labelled a language of the "coolies" in old Darjeeling. From its low coolie status, Nepali had to be made "cool" for educational curricula, a vehicle of overall communication and a duly recognised medium of expression in mainstream India. No less than Nepali language's enshrinement in the Eighth Schedule of India was the agenda of the movement Ballabh, as a proximate witness from Nepal to the movement, reminisces on.

Ballabh's early mention of Rup Narayan Sinha in his write-up is crucial. Sinha, who wrote "Bhramar", the first modern novel of Darjeeling, was a handsome man in black, both as a successful and rich black-jacketed lawyer in Darjeeling's district "Kutchery" courthouse and a tuxedoed pink gin-toting Nepali Angrez Saheb at the Gymkhana and Planters Clubs every evening. Fair and fantabulous as Sinha was, Nepali was certainly not a coolie language for such a cool foxtrotting and fandango dancing Nepali who was an Englishman to the core. Among his many persuasions, Sinha was a pioneering writer in Nepali, and this fact lent much support to the inclusion of Nepali language in India even though he had passed away some years ago - his funeral being the longest and biggest in Darjeeling's memory till then.

Along with Rup Narayan Sinha, Ballabh mentions the redoubtable name of Reverend Ganga Prasad Pradhan. Exactly opposite of the colourful and flamboyant Sinha, and older by many decades, Pradhan was the first Nepali Christian, a Presbyterian pastor in the Northeast, to promote and propagate Nepali literacy through the translation of the Holy Bible, English hymns and psalms into Nepali, compiling and publishing English-Nepali dictionary and grammar, printing his religious "tracts" or pamphlets, as well as formalising school textbooks in the Nepali language.

Then Ballabh suggests the Su-Dha-Pa "tri-ratna" of Surya Bikram Gyawali, Dharanidhar Koirala - the two from Nepal - and Paras Mani Pradhan, later living in Kalimpong, and Shiva Kumar Rai of Kharsang as well who did their utmost for the recognition of Nepali as one of the languages of India.

To their decades-old advocacy, I would add the younger names of Achchha Rai "Rasik", Okiuyama Gwain, Gabriel Rana, Dr. Trilok Rai, G. Tshering while Ballabh himself mentions Indra Bahadur Rai, Ganesh Lal Subba, Agam Singh
Giri and Indra Sundas of the slightly later generation while the period's younger firebrands were Til Bikram Nembang/Bairagi Kainla, Guman Singh Chamling, Prem Thapa, Jonathan Thapa, Tarak Bahadur Karki, Adon Rongong and others.

The demand for the due recognition of Nepali in the Indian Democratic Republic was a longstanding one. But both the state government of West Bengal and the central one in Delhi seemed to air the opinion that Nepali was a bifurcated and foreign language. As for bifurcation, the Nepali leaders presented the case of Bangla in the west and north Bangal of India and also in East Pakistan, and Sikh and Punjabi trifurcated between India and Pakistan, if not Tamil between South India and Ceylon.

So what was the problem, eh? As for Nepali being a foreign language, what was the yardstick for that paradigm when Nepali was in usage for already more than a century in Darjeeling and its neighbourhoods? And the speakers of this language were the bona fide citizens of India, weren't they?

The usual official ploy, since the British Raj days, was to form commissions to arrive at something conclusive. But such august bodies practiced the usual delays and committed omissions while Darjeeling's many polarized political leaders, especially lately, helped the official formalism by their own muteness and absence from the scene.

As can be seen, the abovementioned name list supplied by Ishwar Ballabh and I has neither a single political leader nor an elected representative of any political groups, be it the Congress Party or the Communist Party or the Gorkha League of Darjeeling. The political vacuum and the active apathy of the Nepali political leaders of the region is a subject of a separate story.