CHAWENG BEACH on Samui Island in the Gulf of Thailand and the Thamel tourist quarter in Kathmandu Valley have a lot of common, most obviously in those trying to sell wares to tourists. Like all exotic places where tourism is the mainstay of the local economy, trinket-wallahs of Samui, like their breed in Kathmandu, seem to be on a perpetual holiday – chatting up Western tourists in Italian as if they had no intention of selling anything at all. Before you realise it, however, you have bought things you never even knew existed – how often do you use a backscratcher shaped like a hand with fingers in perpetual rigor mortis, or a 'crazy hat' in velvet?
Another similarity between the hawkers of Thamel and Chaweng is that they talk to each other in Nepali. This is a pleasant surprise for the Indian or Pakistani – and there are many of them these days in Thailand with Bangkok having emerged as a major venue for all kinds of South Asian seminars and workshops (due to Indian and Pakistani flight bans back home) – for the Nepali will invariably understand some Hindi/Urdu. How pleasant to be able to bargain in your own language when even English sounds like Thai. But the question that begs asking is: how did these 'Nepalis' ended up in Samui Island, which few Nepalis have even heard of? Actually, the story is not very different that of other South Asian diaspora since the time of Girmitiyas to the Caribbean Islands in the 1840s.
Threatened identities
Nepali migrants started to find their way to Burma soon after the fall of Awadh in the wake of the brutal suppression of the 1857 'Sepoy Mutiny' by the British, which was achieved with some assistance of the Gorkha forces led by Jang Bahadur Kunwar. The Kathmandu satrap proved to the British rulers that they could depend on the loyalty of Gorkhalis should the need to subdue pesky natives arise again. Consequently, the colonisers actively encouraged Gorkhali settlement in the troubled regions under their control.