The “Polygamous Nepali Migrants” in N.K. Rustomji’s Writing about the Eastern Himalaya
- Swati ChawlaDetails
24 November 2024/९ मंसीर २०८१ (आइतबार, दिउँसो ३ बजे)
Research Seminar Series
The "Polygamous Nepali Migrants" in N.K. Rustomji's Writing about the Eastern Himalaya
Swati Chawla, PhD, Associate Professor, Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, India
Abstract:
The paper traces the enduring legacy of colonial racism in Nari K. Rustomji’s depiction of Nepali migrants in the eastern Himalayas. Rustomji was an influential Indian official who served in the highest echelons of the colonial and postcolonial Indian administration in the northeast and the kingdoms of Sikkim and Bhutan. I will draw on Rustomji’s published work (Rustomji 1971, 1978, 1987), his private papers housed at the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library (formerly the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library), archival documents from the Sikkim Agency at the National Archives of India, and Nepal-related files from the Sikkim Darbar digitised under the British Library’s Endangered Archives Project.
Rustomji (1919–1993) joined the Indian Civil Service in 1941, the year after British Foreign Secretary Olaf Caroe’s highly influential “Mongolian Fringe” thesis, which had been preoccupied with the problem of securing India’s defences on the eastern frontier. Since Nepal supplied a large contingent of regular troops to the Indian Army, Caroe advised India to consider itself paternalistically “bound to maintain an unobtrusive tutelage” over it. In his racialised thinking, the Nepalese were a “philoprogenitive and colonising race” whose “tendency to expansion [was] feared and hated by the other States.” Nepalese cultivators, artisans, and tradesmen had “spread widely” into Sikkim and Bhutan and were also “found in large numbers” in Assam (Caroe [1940]1980: 114).
During the time that he was posted in Sikkim and Bhutan and aided the kingdoms’ transition from colonial rule to fresh treaties with postcolonial India, Rustomji’s public and private correspondence reveals a similar racialisation of Himalayan peoples, a Buddhist civilisational bias, and a marked prejudice towards the Nepalese in Sikkim and Bhutan, whom he considered an inferior racial and civilisational other (Chawla 2023b, 2023a). Echoing Caroe, he called them “a polygamous race,” among whom “a household of three or four wives and a dozen to fifteen children is not an uncommon phenomenon” (Rustomji 1978: 7).
Colonial prejudice against Nepali migrants continued to inform postcolonial state-building processes and regional foreign policies in the Himalaya long after Independence. Understanding these legacies can provide critical insights into the historical factors that shaped India’s diplomatic and social positioning vis-à-vis Nepal and within the broader Himalayan region.
References
Caroe, Olaf. (1940) 1980. India and the Mongolian Fringe. In The North-Eastern Frontier: A Documentary Study of the Internecine Rivalry Between India, Tibet and China, Volume 2, 1914–54. Parshotam Mehra, ed., pp. 111–124. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Chawla, Swati. 2023a. Fashioning a ‘Buddhist’ Himalayan Cartography: Sikkim Darbar and the Cabinet Mission Plan. India Quarterly 79(1): 29–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/09749284221147271.
Chawla, Swati. 2023b. ‘Nothing in Common in “Indian” India’: Bhutan and the Cabinet Mission Plan. In South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent. Bérénice Guyot-Réchard and Elisabeth Leake, eds., pp. 61–81. Leiden: Leiden University Press.
Rustomji, Nari. 1971. Enchanted Frontiers: Sikkim, Bhutan and India’s North-Eastern Borderlands. London: Oxford University Press.
Rustomji, Nari. 1978. Bhutan: The Dragon Kingdom in Crisis. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Rustomji, Nari. 1987. Sikkim: A Himalayan Tragedy. New Delhi: Allied Publishers.
About the Speaker:
Dr Swati Chawla is an associate professor of history at the School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University. She received her PhD in history from the University of Virginia. Her doctoral research focused on the protracted processes of nation-building and citizenship-making in the eastern Himalaya at the cusp of India’s transition from colonial rule. She teaches courses on Tibet and the Himalaya, migration, citizenship, and advanced research methods. She tweets @ChawlaSwati and the hashtag #himalayanhistories.