As a research scholar in the discipline of Anthropology, I have been trying to understand my own community identity as a person of Nepali ethnicity in India.
I first asked myself this question after moving to Kolkata to pursue an undergraduate programme. This is where I first felt that I was not one of ‘them’.
People on the streets catcalled at me and used words like ‘Chinki,’ ‘Momo,’ and ‘Nepali’ as slurs. I was young and was not able to comprehend why I was treated in this manner. I was comforted by my friends and seniors who told me that this was very common and that I should not pay heed to this.
I was far from home and on the receiving end of such slurs. This made me feel alienated, and as a response, a few students of Nepali ethnicity started to build our own world within the larger group of students. This trend continued even after I moved to Visva-Bharati to pursue my Master’s programme. I discovered that it is not just common people but also supposedly educated teachers and students who voice these stereotypes about Nepali ethnicity. This was reflected in how we are treated in the class.
The feeling of not belonging to a place because we look different made us more reserved and hesitant to allow someone from the ‘outside’ to come into our perceived world. It also crystallised my research topic along similar lines.
Then came our family trip to the much hyped Maha Kumbh in Uttar Pradesh.
As we practice a blend of Hinduism and Buddhism, my mother was eager to visit not just the Maha Kumbh, but also Ayodhya and other sacred parts of Uttar Pradesh. We were made to feel alienated in the very country where my father has been rendering his services in one of the uniformed forces. No one can deny the contributions of Nepali ethnicity in various fields, especially the army, in adding colour to the social fabric of India. Yet, my family was made to feel like outsiders at every step of our journey.
Will we ever be Indian, I wondered.
The gaze
After travelling the entire night, we arrived at Ayodhya, where the city greeted us with curious and uncomfortable gazes as we made our way to the temple. The roads to the mandir were crowded with devotees from all over India. We were also eager to be a part of the religious atmosphere, but those around us saw us as strangers from another universe.
What amazed us was how people distracted themselves from their prayers and instead chose to look at us while on their way to the temple. Some laughed at our faces and others pointed us out to their families and friends, occasionally calling us ‘Nepal’ and ‘China.’
This did not stop with Ayodhya; it followed us to the Maha Kumbh. A group of young men openly stared and leered at us on our way to the ghats.
Many academic works explained the phenomenon of gaze, ‘male gaze’, ‘female gaze’, and ‘medical gaze’, but my family and I were made to experience first-hand the real significance of the concept of gaze and its impact on those who were subjected to this gaze.
Direct confrontations
After some point in our trip, the gaze transcended into direct confrontations.
As the journey progressed, the whispers became louder, and people started asking us whether we were from China, Japan, or Nepal.
We would have ignored it if it had just been once or twice. All the while, I was convincing myself that when people from these parts of India come to our states, they never behave like this. Maybe they have not travelled enough to see the diversity of our country; maybe they don’t see this as an act of putting strangers in an uncomfortable situation, or maybe they are curious.
My thoughts leaned toward education. Only if they had been provided with a good education, maybe they would not have behaved like this with us, I thought.
But this thought did not live long enough. We were confronted by a well-dressed evidently educated woman who approached my sister in a tea shop in Ayodhya and asked in English, ‘Are you from Chin?’. She meant China.
Taking videos of us
In Varanasi my family and I had had a long day of visiting ghats and exploring places in Varanasi that, even though crowded, touched our souls.
On the way back, a bright light shone on our faces from about four steps away. It was a flashlight and two men on a motorcycle were filming us like we were exotic beings. My brain froze as I was trying to comprehend what was happening, but my 13-year-old sister went right up to those people and asked them why they were taking a video. I was stunned by my sister’s actions and incredibly proud of her.
There were also incidents when people used to come up to us and ask us to take a selfie with them.
Though I appreciated their decency in asking us for permission, I can’t help but wonder why a photo was necessary.
Social indifference
One of the important values inculcated by our society is to respect elders and women. We were also flabbergasted to witness the indifference exhibited by many people throughout this journey. We took the local trains from Maha Kumbh to Varanasi, and saw men sitting while a very old woman struggled to remain standing.
Realisation
The reminder from ‘others’ on the streets, in the classroom, on trains and buses, from the shopkeepers, house owners, and friends that we are different and don’t belong to ‘them’ or to India has been a recurring phenomenon throughout my college education.
While we can analyse deep-rooted social issues, racism and exclusionary techniques of our society in higher academics, I cannot forget how we were treated in our everyday life during the trip.
My trip to Kumbh, which represents India as a society, has acted as a trigger for my research.
I am sure fellow Indians who belong to minority ethnic communities and who live in northeastern and southern India have also experienced this in their interactions with the concept of a larger India.
My engagement with Rabindranath Tagore and the Visva-Bharati (founded by Tagore) at Santiniketan has introduced me to some of his social philosophies. He was an internationalist and believed in the unity of humanity. The motto of the university, as envisioned by Tagore, is ‘Atra Visvam Bhavatieka Nidam’, which means that it is a place ‘where the whole world meets in a single nest.’ If only we could see and understand what Tagore meant and accept the diversity of our country and, in the process, not make the people of another ethnicity constantly feel like outsiders, we would surely emerge a beautiful country.
Riya Gurung is a Research Scholar at the Department of Anthropology, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. She thanks her research supervisor, Sipoy Sarveswar, for his assistance with this article.
