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Many people have amisconception about the Gorkhas in India - that they are foreigners and have migrated from Nepal. There could not be a greater mistake than this. The Gorkhas are in fact the aborigines of India and they can trace their history back to ancient times. The Gorkha community is the product of Indo-Aryan and Mongoloid assimilation from ages past. As a linguistic group they can trace their origin back to Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman beginnings. In fact the Gorkhas consist of both Indo-Aryan and Mongoloid racial groups.
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, Nagaland 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 non Angami 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 that included Gorkhas, many of these Gorkha soldiers stayed back and were rehabilitated in an area in Kohima that was called Chanmari, meaning firing range. Their descendents still live in the same place.
Gorkhas have insisted that they are not migrants to India. They say that they came to India along with their land, skills and culture. When one-third of Nepal was annexed by the British after the Anglo-Nepal War in 1815, the residents of that territory became subjects of the British East India Company. In 1857, when the crown took over India from the East India Company, the Gorkhas became citizens of British India and when India became Independent in 1947, they automatically became Indian citizens.
Sources
https://m.facebook.com/bharatiyagorkha/about?refid=17
By
JACOB SUNDAS
BLOGGER
CHÜMOUKEDIMA, DIMAPUR NAGALAND
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