Shared Heritages, Belonging, Rootedness and the Notion of Bhoomiputra: Gleaning the Literary Engagements of the Gorkha in South Asia

The backdrop of the discussion in this study is the native Nepali-speaking people in India and their quest to cartographically chart their emic self-defined identity in a map called Gorkhaland in and around Darjeeling in the directional construct ‘North Bengal’, located in the Indian state of West Bengal. The phases of the demand for Chuttei Rajya (separate state) from Chiyasi ko Andolan (1986 Movement) and the current imbroglio (stretching from 2007 to 2017), though showing signs of peculiarities and particularities in terms of the movement, styles of leadership, political agency, participations, etc., continue to showcase commonalities, connections, and continuations in the indelible question of the identity of the people and its place. The claims of belonging to the martial race, Bir Gorkha and the linked ‘Gurkha/Gorkha/Gorkhey Identity (Chinari)’, have been strongly contested. ‘Being Gorkha’/‘Being Nepali’, ‘Feeling Gorkha’/‘Feeling Nepali’ and ‘Being Bhoomiputra’ is severely webbed and caged into experiential and existential paranoia. The discussions in the paper by weaving across poetry, literary works by the Nepali-speaking communities in India, and local plays such as Bhanu ra Pala 1 and 2 by Lalit Golay (2007, 2009), attempt to bring to the fore the complex politics of representations, performance, and aesthetics of the contested claims to the trans-Himalayan ‘shared heritages’ of ‘Gorkha’ and being Bhoomiputra at the same time in South Asia.