"We must learn how to be tribal. This is difficult for us, but very, very important," said Mr Mukhia in his lilting boarding-school English. Wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses, a neatly starched handkerchief folded into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, and a bowler hat cocked rakishly to one side, the 70-year-old leader of Darjeeling's Mukhia/Sunuwar Rai ethno-political organisation looked more like a colonial caricature than a radical indigenous activist agitating for his people's place as one of India's Scheduled Tribes. While Mukhia cut an amusing figure, the fight for tribal status in which his group is currently engaged – alongside other ethnic organisations representing Indian citizens of Nepali origin in Darjeeling and Sikkim – is no laughing matter. The struggle for recognition as a distinct tribal entity, a classification that can entitle a community to educational and economic benefits from the state on the basis of their unique cultural history and language, is one of the most critical political issues in this region today.
In the early 19th century, the British Raj encouraged migrant labourers from Nepal to cultivate the fertile hills that now make up the state of Sikkim and the Darjeeling district of West Bengal. Besides working on tea plantations, the migrants also toiled on road-building projects, in holiday resorts and as menial staff supporting the colonial administration and its military. Although some of these labourers quickly returned home satisfied with cash in hand – in waves of seasonal migration that continue to this day – others chose to settle permanently in this booming region, where a level of economic success and social mobility appeared within reach that would be unimaginable in Nepal's caste-constrained midhills.
Most of the permanent settlers in Darjeeling and Sikkim were members of Nepal's ethnic groups, now commonly referred to as janajati, such as the Gurung, Limbu, Magar, Rai, Tamang or Thami. As is often the case in diaspora situations, these discrete ethnic identities were initially subsumed under a broader 'national' identity. Beginning in the immediate aftermath of Indian Independence, the unifying struggle for recognition as Indian citizens of Nepali origin, with full linguistic and cultural rights, reached its apex in the 1980s with the violent Darjeeling-based Gorkhaland movement, which agitated for a separate state. Led by Subhas Ghising, a Tamang, one of the movement's demands was that 'Gorkhaland' be recognised as a tribal state under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. Such a move would have ensured tribal benefits for all of Darjeeling's people of Nepali origin, regardless of their specific caste or ethnicity. As it was, Gorkhaland never became a state, and in 1989, Ghising settled for chairmanship of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC), which remains under Calcutta's jurisdiction as part of West Bengal.
At around the same time, thanks largely to pressure from the Mandal Commission, the Indian government set about revamping the country's stagnant reservation policy. Released in 1980, B P Mandal's report revitalised the practice of setting aside a certain percentage of government jobs and seats in public universities for disadvantaged communities. Even though such a system had existed since 1950, only when the government introduced a new benefit schedule in the 1990s did concrete benefits begin to trickle down to those classified as Scheduled Tribes (ST), Scheduled Castes (SC) or Other Backwards Classes (OBC).