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Mark
Turin/The many tongues of the nation: Ethnolinguistic
politics in post-1990 Nepal
The
aim of this paper is to move beyond the rhetoric
of ‘Nepal is a poor, landlocked state’
and to penetrate more deeply the diversity of
this society. Nepal is a richly multi-lingual
country, although the constitution fails to note
this.
In
categorising Nepal’s language groups, it
is common to refer to ‘Tibeto-Burman speakers’,
although there is no such language as Tibeto-Burman.
As a category, Tibeto-Burman implies a false sense
of cohesion. In reality, speakers of the same
language family may not get along, such as the
Germans and the English. But, in Nepal, the ‘Tibeto-Burman’
category is a cover for many other assumptions
about the people grouped into this language family.
This classification places the location of these
languages not in Nepal, but in Tibet and Burma,
which suggests that the speakers of these languages
are not genuinely of Nepal. A better term might
be ‘Tibeto-Nepali’. Nepali scholarship
needs to take on this question. There is much
stereotyping of Tibeto-Burman people, from Prachanda
to Westerners, oftentimes in the vein that they
are fierce fighters and have Chinese features.
Indigenous
communities are where different theories collide.
Ethnic classifications may differ from self-descriptions,
and rare is the language that is known by only
one name. It is customary to name a group by the
language that it speaks, and the name given by
a group to itself is often not the same one imposed
by outsiders. For instance, consider Newar and
Newari, the second being influenced by Indo-Arayan
conventions.
This
also plays out in the various names of the 30,000-40,000-strong
Thami/Thangmi/Thani people. The first of these
names is a national description, the second is
a self-name, and the third is a religious name.
Each of these designations involves a different
origin story and represents an attempt by someone
at naming a group of people. The word ‘Thami’,
for instance, comes from an unflattering Brahminical
myth about these people’s origins.
Some
political theorists argue that groups such as
the Thangmi represent a fourth world: those marginalised
in the third world. According to census data,
of Nepal’s 75 districts, 74 have Thamgmi
residents, although most Thangmi-speakers are
concentrated in two economically marginalised
northern districts. And while such ethnic surveys
are important, their data are rarely analysed
in full and put to good use. Moreover, the biases
of census-takers, who are often city-dwelling
upper-caste Hindus, are evident.
There
is also a political aspect to group identification.
Some ethno-activists want to maximise their group’s
strength by ‘aligning’ with other
non-Hindu groups to claim a larger portion of
state resources. Others want to stress their group’s
individuality by using clan names that distinguish
them from neighbouring peoples. In the 2001 census,
this dual process played out, and with census
data showing more than 1200 languages (of which
just over 100 were eventually recognised by the
state) and 533 ethnic groups (of which 61 received
official recognition).
A
commonly voiced concern is that many unique languages
are dying out, although the rhetoric of this argument
is fatalistic. In Nepal, in what is a metaphor
of sorts, Tribuvan University’s language
journal adopted as its title ‘Gipan’,
a word that means language in an already dead
language. The good news is that the central government
plans to fully document the languages of the kingdom
and produce an encyclopaedia on the languages
of Nepal.
The
Thangmi language, while still spoken by some people,
is suffering from the increasing encroachment
of Nepali, which has a wider vocabulary. Even
so, Thangmi is proving to be versatile, with new
words being coined and new songs being composed.
Some Thangmi ethnic-activists are even trying
to ‘discover’ a unique Thangmi script,
as the constitution appears to offer official
recognition to languages with a literate tradition.
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