Nepali language and literature education was about going up to the front of the classroom of my old colonial era Convent school in the hills of North Bengal, reading out a few paragraphs from a textbook called Pandhra Tara (Parajuly 1968), till the teacher decided it was someone else’s turn. Sajha Katha, an anthology of short stories prescribed for English medium I.C.S.E board affiliated schools, was taught a little more animatedly by our Lepcha teacher, Mrs. Panlook. Outside the classroom, the second movement for a separate state of Gorkhaland, raged through the hills of North Bengal. Bimal Gurung, the leader of this movement, demanded for permanently shutting down the border between India and Nepal, as an important step in ending the identification of Gorkhas in India with Nepal (Sharma 2023). This was history repeating itself for the same call was made in 1986, by Gurung’s mentor, and the leader of the first movement for Gorkhaland, Subhash Ghising, which led to members of his party, the Gorkha National Liberation Front, burning copies of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between India and Nepal (1950), which allowed for free mobility of goods and people between the two countries, on 27th July 1986 (Sharma 1923).

“In the context of the andolan, there arose the question of authors from India and Nepal as being different, while the condition inside the classroom is such that school teachers have even rang me up to ask whether a particular author is from India or Nepal,” Mr Yogbir Sakya, the chief architect of the change in the Nepali language and literature curriculum for I.C.S.E (Indian Certificate of Secondary Examination) schools which was done in 2016, informs me (personal communication, 26 February 2025; 28 February 2025; 4 April 2025). He also tells me that this was the first time the Nepali language and literature syllabus was being revised afte its initiation within I.C.S.E schools, post the first movement for Gorkhaland in 1989. The change in 2016 involved eliminating a text called Pandhra Tara, published and designed in Nepal, (Parajuly 1968) from the tenth standard Nepali curriculum and changing the twelfth standard textbook, an anthology of short stories, from Sajha Katha to Gadhya Kunj (2016), which meant reducing the number of authors from Nepal while adding two new women writers from North Bengal in the form of Lakhi Devi Sundas and Matilda Rai.

The reading culture of migrant communities along the Indo-Nepal border (eastern part) presents its own understandings of inhabiting a border zone that foregrounds the complexities of identity for migrant communities who inhabit a physical borderland. What did it mean to read Nepali authors in Indian school textbooks, where Nepali literature forms an unchallenged continuum dismissing questions of border and national identity? How does local and regional identity which for the Nepali migrant community, means imagining close ties with Nepal, come into conflict with the demands of national identification, which requires stricter and homogenous demarcations? As this paper aims to answer these questions, it hopes to examine the lived experience of migrant communities through a foray into borderland studies and migration studies, while relying on content analysis, discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews.