Gorkha History of Northeast India

Assam
The historical name of Assam is Kamarup. In the Puranic Age, Nepal and Kamarup comprised a single domain. Matsyendranath, a great mystic yogi of Kamarup, is said to have gone to Nepal and settled there. This ancient link between Nepal and Assam was resurrected in modern times in the 19th Century. In the early days, the Gorkhas were cattle herders in the Assam valley, their grazing grounds spread from Baralimara to Bhavani Devithan. Bura Chapari of Tezpur was declared a professional grazing reserve in 1881. In 1920, the Gorkhas were ordered to vacate the land, but, after public pressure, the order was repealed in 1933.

After the success of tea gardens in Assam, the Assam Company began bringing in labourers from 1853. After passing several legislations in 1863, people from Nepal and other communities were given the freedom to enter the tea plantation in Assam. The Gorkha population in Assam naturally went up. Labour was hired not only in tea gardens but in the other fields also. In 1889, oil was explored at Digboi. Gorkhas were employed from the very beginning of the enterprise. Since the native people feared to enter the dense forest of Digboi., the British employed the Nepalese for the operational work.

Places surrounding Digboi, like Itabhatti, Rasthpati, Nalapatti, Muliabari, Topabasti, Agreement Line, Goru Phatak were all originally inhabited by Gorkhas. During World War I, when the native people fled from Digboi, the Gorkhas were appointed as security personnel at the oilfields. In 1923, Jitbahadur Pradhan was authorized to recruit labourers for the refineries. He brought in hundreds of Nepali workers, particularly from North Bengal.

Nagaland
Nagaland, Hari Prasad Gorkha Rai, an authority on the Gorkha community in the Northeast, written about how 400 hundred years ago, some men of Chiechama village were going to their fields when they came across three young, tired and hungry Gorkha boys. The villagers took pity on them and brought them home. Two of the boys died of cholera. The one who survived said his name was ‘Rai’. A villager elder adopted him and later even married him off to his daughter. In course of time, Rai became assimilated into the Angami tribe and his descendents are now called Metha Tophris, or non­Angami Methama clan.
Till today, it is a custom to give a male child in the clan the name ‘Rayi’. This commemorates the name of the clan’s original father. If this story is true, then the history of the Gorkhas in Nagaland begins in the early 17th Century. In the compound of the 3rd Assam Rifles at Kohima, Nagaland’s capital, there is a memorial stone that places the date of the base’s establishment in 1835. This means the Gorkhas have been in Nagaland since then. When the British marched in soldiers from the Native Infantry Cachar Levy and Artillery Force to Kohima, they stayed back and were rehabilitated at Chanmari.

Manipur
The entry of the Nepalis and their settlement in Manipur can be traced to 1819 at the earliest. It is quite probable that some scattered Nepali families were already settled in Manipur before this date. Some scholars push back the history of the Gorkhas in Manipur to the beginning of the 16th Century. Lore also has it that the first Nepali came to Manipur at the beginning of the 10th Century. He married a Meitei girl called Kumbi, who belonged to the Mayang Heikong Ningol, a popular Manipuri clan. Since this man reared cows and buffaloes in the Khuti, or the goth (cowshed), his descendants are knowns as gotimayan.

The first batch of Gorkhas came to Manipur during the time of Raja Gambhir Singh. In 1824, the Gorkhas of the 16th Sylhet Local Battalion, later to become the 8th Gorkha Rifles, were included in the Police Levy of Gambhir Singh. During the first quarter of the 19th Century, Manipur was much troubled by Burmese intruders and troops. To secure Manipur, Gambhir Singh raised an army in 1825 and recruited Gorkhas from Sylhet for it. The militia was named the ‘Victoria Paltan’. The nomenclature is a clear indication of the preponderance of Gorkhas in the army since the word paltan is a Nepali corruption of the English ‘platoon’. Having earned the trust of the British, Gorkha soldiers were detailed to protect all the Political Agents. They were also brought in as cooks, milkmen, traders and agriculturists.

The number of Gorkha soldiers in Manipur increased when the East India Company moved the 23rd, 43rd and 44th battalions of the 8th Gorkha Rifles to Manipur around 1880. Later, according to the records of the Chief Commissioner of Assam, 400 Gorkha soldiers from Golaghat and 200 from Silchar were brought in. In 1891, more were relocated to the region from other places in Assam. Maharaja Chandrakriti’s reign too saw many Gorkhas coming in.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, Gorkhas were being recruited in the Assam Military Police, where 82 of them were posted at Tura in the Garo Hills Battalion, 730 were at Dibrugarh in the Lakhimpur Battalion, 331 at Kohima in the Naga Hills Battalion, 111 at Silchar in the Silchar Battalion, and 105 at Dhaka in the Dhaka Battalion.

In 1915, the 2nd Gorkha Rifles stationed at Imphal was replaced by the Darang Military Police when the renowned fighters were deployed for action somewhere in Europe. This very Darang Military Police stationed at Manipur was converted into the 4th Assam Rifles in 1917 and 80 per cent of its personnel comprised Gorkhas.

Almost all the Gorkhas who came to Manipur on active service settled there permanently after retirement. The British government allotted land to the personnel of the 4th Assam Rifles first in Thangmaiband and later in special colonies in Eroisembe, Chink, Tangri, Kalapahar, Torbung, Maram, Imphal, Irang and Kanglatombi. After 1945, many personnel from Subhas Chandra Bose’s INA also made Manipur their home.

The fact that Nepali literature’s first poetical work in print came from Manipur is proof that the Gorkhas were fully assimilated into Manipur society and its social pursuits by 1894, the year that Tulachand Alay wrote and published Manipurko Sawai.

Mizoram
The Gorkhas have been in Mizoram at least for a century and a half. In 1865, Colonel T.H. Lewin wrote, “I had formed a high opinion of the little Gurkhas, who under Col. Macpherson, had done the fighting of the expedition, and I obtained permission to send to Nepal and get immigrants from there to colonize this frontier waste.” Gorkha colonies were established on the Myani river, a northern affluent of the Karnaphuli, now in Bangladesh. Colonel Lewin wanted to establish a number of villages along the “frontier waste” between the plains and the hills so that a well­defined boundary between the local and British territories could be established. Colonel Lewin records that “the country where the villages were located had previously been uninhabited, for fear of the marauding Lushais, and my idea had been to establish there a good stockade villages of courageous, stiff­people like the Gurkhas, who should serve as the buffer between the Mong Raja’s territory and the independent Lushais to the east.”

After the construction of stockades at Lungai and Aizawl, peace was restored in most of the hills. The government needed man­power—traders, masons, dak­runners, chowkidars, farmers and others—for which they turned to the Gorkhas, fearing that the natives were not yet fully docile. The Gorkhas also reached Mizoram as personnel of the Frontier Police Battalion. It is also recorded that by 1891, hundreds of people freely moved across the frontiers of Manipur and Chittagong hill tracts. The Gorkhas were not among them, however. They were imported by the British themselves. There is a case recorded in 1872 when the Gorkhas rescued the kidnapped Mary Winchester, daughter of the manager of the Alexandrapore Tea Garden, from the hands of Lushai chieftains. This act of loyalty won the Gorkhas the trust of the British, who recommended that they settle in the area for good.

The Surma Valley Military Police Battalion, later known as 1st Assam Rifles, was raised at Changsil in the north Lushai Hills by General Tregears in 1889. Its ranks were mainly filled by Gorkha soldiers. The Gorkhas, after their retirement from the army and the police forces, accepted the Lushai Hills as their homeland. Today, they form the most socially organized Gorkha community in north­east India.

Meghalaya
The primal settlement of the Nepalis in Meghalaya, once called the Khasi­Jaintia Hills, can be dated to the establishment of their social organizations there—the Gorkha Thakurbari (1824), Gorkha Durga Puja Committee (1872) and Gorkha Union (1886). The Thakurbari certainly from records appears to be the oldest organization of Gorkhas in the whole of the Northeast. It still runs two temples and one middle school for girls. The Gorkha Durga Puja Committee was started by the Gorkhas of the 1st and 2nd battalions of 8 GR. In 1940, when the platoon was shifted to Quetta, now in Pakistan, the committee was handed over to the civilians and ex­servicemen residing in and around Shillong. Another older organisation is the Gorkha Union, later known as the Gorkha Association.

The history of 8th Gorkha Rifles reveals a lot about the Nepalis in Meghalaya. Major Alban Wilson writes: “In 1845, an outpost of the regiment was established at Umbai in the Khasi Hills, under the command of Subedar Deoraj Alay, who was given the civil powers of a third class
magistrate. He died after he had been two years at Umbai, Cherrapunji, but in that short time, he had endeared himself so much to the inhabitants that they erected a large tomb over his grave by the road side, and to the present day, every inhabitant of the place worships at his grave, and when passing by, places a chew of supari on it”

In 1866, Lieutenant W.J. Williamson was appointed the commissioner of Garo Hills. He set up a police force in Tura comprising two inspectors, two sub­inspectors, six head constables and 100 constables. Most of the constables and coolies brought to Tura were Gorkhas from Goalpara in Assam. In an entry in his diary on December 25, 1867, Williamson notes, “... The Nepalee coolies and the constables worked quite to my satisfaction....” The Nepalis were employed in trees felling and road construction also. When the American missionaries reached Garo Hills, they had taken 12 Gorkhas with them from Dhubri in Assam. A.G. Phillips wrote in his diary on December 12, 1876: “I am at Tura at last. I left Goalpara November Seventh, reaching Dhubri on the following day, where I stopped to get coolies for building, as this is a place to which many Nepalese come seeking work.”

When one goes through the history of the 8 GR, Shillong of 1867 could not have shown any resemblance to the charming cantonment and civil station that so many subsequently came to know it as. Asked what the place was like when he marched into Shillong with the 44th battalion of 8 GR, Captain Kalu Thapa replied, “There was not a rat there.”

Along with the servicemen, Gorkhas were ‘invited” to rear cattle in the Northeast. Lyndred Shira, a writer based in Tura, discloses this in the following words: “When Tura was first occupied by the American Baptist Mission in 1876, there was hardly anything out here. The present site of the school was a thick jungle, infested with wild and dreaded elephants that roamed at large breaking the silence of the atmosphere with their vocal trumpets. Goshai, a Nepali fellow, must have occupied this plot of land sometimes towards the beginning of this century. He must have been invited by the British Government to start a cattle farm here, purposely for supply of milk to the residents of the locality.” Goshai’s grazing farm was known, till late, as Nippal adding, or ‘Nepali hill’.

In 1872, Shillong had 1,363 inhabitants, 935 in the active service. Of those in the services, 772 were Gorkhas. By now, The Nepalis had made homes in almost all the places of Meghalaya, though there was no single area inhabited fully by them. Manorath Upadhya, a third grade ‘jemadar’ of the Garo Hills Military Police Battalion, wrote Tirthavali in 1915. As in Manipur, this once again testifies to the social and literary pursuits of the Gorkhas living with the Garos and Khasis from very early on.

(Source - The Role of Gorkhas in the Making of Modern India & Bharatiya Gorkha Parisangh)