The start

In 1839, Dr. Campbell, of the British East Indian Company devoted himself to the task of developing Darjeeling, inviting the hill tribes of neighboring region including Nepal to cultivate the mountain slopes, and stimulating trade and commerce. Every encouragement was given to the settlers, who received grants of forest land. It was mainly the hill tribes of Nepal who cleared the dense forests in the difficult mountainous terrain that helped Darjeeling grow by leaps and bounds.

It was these hill tribes who were involved in the formation of the Hill Corps for the maintenance of law and order and improvement of communications in such a difficult terrain. Apart from Nepal, the people who worked here on the invitation of the British were the hill tribes from Sikkim (and of course, Darjeeling, which was gifted to the British by the Raja of Sikkim in 1835) and Bhutan too. All these facts which are documented in LSSO’Malley’s Darjeeling Gazeeter prove beyond doubt that apart from the Gorkhas who became Indian citizens by transfer of their land to British India, the other hill tribes who came to Darjeeling from Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim were settlers who were enticed by the British to come to help the British build and develop this part of British India.

In 1898, the final report on the Darjeeling Terai Settlement published by Sri Sasi Bhusan Dutta (Bengal Secretariat Press, Calcutta), a Settlement Officer of the Government of West Bengal, the total population as well as its ethnic breakup of the Terai areas of the Darjeeling district (i.e. Siliguri and its periphery of today) has been documented. The report reveals that more than 31% of the population in the Siliguri and adjoining Terai regions consisted of the Gorkhas, the Lepchas and the Bhutias. The remaining population was principally Adivasi and Mohamadden. What is remarkable is the fact that, the report does not show the presence of any Bengali population then. It is thus clear that the majority of the population in Siliguri and the Terai at the end of the 19th century was predominantly castes belong to the Nepali/Gorkha and Adivasi community.

After the signing of the Indo-Nepal Treaty of 1950, some people settled in India from Nepal by virtue of the treaty but their number is very less as can be verified from the Census reports. So, we see that even those who settled in India after 1950 did so legally as permitted by the Indo-Nepal Treaty of 1950, which is of mutual benefit to India and Nepal.