A couple of weeks ago, an incident took place in Delhi that created a small flutter in the Indian media. This involved the ejection of one Tailin Lyngdoh, a Khasi woman native to the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, from the exclusive Delhi Golf Club for ‘looking’ different. Employed as a governess, Lyngdoh had accompanied her employer to the Club at the invitation of one its members. Not long after they arrived, they were accosted by the manager along with one of his assistants and told to leave. Asked to furnish a reason, the Club officials said that it was because she looks like a maid. And, how did they deduce that? Because: i) She looks different; ii) Dresses like a servant; and iii) Looks like a Nepali.

British legacy

It could be that the Club manager’s action was borne out of the exaggerated sense of self-worth common to those who rub shoulders with the high and mighty. Or, it could be that he had been given a dressing down by one of the regular worthies of the Club who felt affronted by the presence of someone ‘different’ in their midst. But that an Indian citizen would be humiliated thus in a Club patronised by, among others, India’s top civil servants perhaps explains why large sections of the country continue to feel alienated from the state even 70 years after Indian independence. After all, Indian bureaucrats have inherited a heritage from British administrators, who, in the words of writer Shashi Tharoor, were ‘as a rule, singularly smug and self-satisfied and insufferably patronising in their attitudes to Indians (when they were not simply contemptuous)’. Substitute ‘Indians’ with ‘Khasi’, ‘Nepali’ or ‘different’ in post-independence India, and one can begin to understand what happened at the Delhi Golf Club. It also explains why none of the Club members stood up for Lyngdoh’s right to be present in the premises.

Lyngdoh’s employer was understandably incensed and she protested against ‘insulting a traditional dress of an Indian citizen’. Missing, however, in all the discussion in the Indian media that I am aware of was why looking like a Nepali should have been a factor in the Khasi woman’s removal at all. Setting aside the question of what a ‘Nepali look’ is since Nepalis sport looks that represent almost all the world’s population, it did not seem to strike anyone that the episode was particularly insulting to Nepalis in general, and also to the large population of Indians who identify themselves as Nepalis, a group estimated by Mahendra Lama in his column yesterday to number 10-12 million.

I will not venture into the issue of who qualifies as an ‘ethnic Nepali’. The politics around Gorkhaland of the Darjeeling hills has tried to create a distinction by adopting the term ‘Indian Gorkha’, which Lama also favours, but anyone who has been to Northeast India knows, Nepali-speakers readily dispense with such formulations or even to calling themselves Indian-Nepalis (or, Nepali-Indians) and are content with the simple ‘Nepali’ to denote their identity. The Delhi Golf Club was hence discriminating not only against the Khasi but also against Nepalis of Indian citizenship, a group that outnumbers the Khasi by a factor of six or so. I presume the 29 million of us domiciled within the borders of Nepal do not have a locus standi against the Club’s behaviour, and can do little other than write articles of this kind.

Enough said

The ‘Nepali look’ appears to be an unwanted burden that the indigenous population from India’s Northeast have had to bear in mainland India, with implications that question their citizenship to inconveniences in everyday life. Take the following account from some years back that appeared in a New York Times profile of Mary Kom, who recently became famous through the eponymous Bollywood production of her life and times: ‘On a Sunday several years ago, Ms Kom was walking to church in a South Delhi neighborhood with friends, all Koms. A bus pulled up beside them, and the conductor called them Nepalis, implying, she said, that they were part of a migrant servant class. She does not remember who threw the first punch, but before she knew it, her male friends were fighting with passengers, while others fled…Among northeastern Indians, she said, “the face is mostly similar, they think that we’re from Nepal, and they really look down on us…”’

That some North Indians should express their prejudices against the Northeasterners and their ‘Nepali look’ is unfortunate. Humans have harboured all kinds of prejudices against others even if it is not universally shared or articulated. Neither are we ourselves immune for there are examples aplenty in Nepal itself against the ‘Nepali look’ alluded to by both Mary Kom and the manager at Delhi Golf Club. I provide a couple of them here, and although both are quite inadvertent and even benign, they sufficiently illustrate my point.

Back in 2004, as the to-be publisher of the late Govinda Bartaman’s celebrated travelogue, Sohra Sanjhharu, I was going through the manuscript and came across the term ‘Mongolian’ used to describe a trio of women Bartaman had seen on the highway between Narayanghat and Butwal. I had a bit of to and fro with Bartaman over such a usage, and to my astonishment, he informed me that ‘Mongolian’ was a term commonly used in Nepali literature for Janajatis in general. I did not investigate his claim as such, but I argued that if one of the major groups of Nepal is to be described as ‘Mongolian’ by virtue of their facial features, by logical extension it implies that: i) there is a ‘Nepali look’; and ii) it does not apply to them. Such a ‘Nepali look’ would be different from what the manager, Kom and the Delhi bus conductor assumed to be the ‘Nepali look’.

To his credit, Bartaman did agree a change in the terminology, but I was brought back to such a conception of a ‘Nepali look’ incidentally on the same day as the Mary Kom profile appeared in 2014. This came in an adulatory piece on the poet Bhupi Sherchan by Sarubhakta, the current Chancellor of the Nepal Academy of Music and Drama. Writing in Kantipur of his fellow Pokhara resident, litterateur Sarubhakta’s prose was eloquent in describing the first time he laid eyes on Bhupi during a game of cricket in the late 1960s in Pokhara: ‘He was standing at the crease to bat dressed in neat and spotless white. I never knew when he entered the field to bat. I did not know which position he was batting from. I did not pay heed to who was on the opposite side of the crease [sic]. I did not remember who was behind the wicket. I probably did not see the fielders strung around the field. I looked at him and continued to look at it. Because, he looked different from the others I had seen—somewhat Japanese, somewhat a-Nepali… [my translation]’

Need I say more?