The Mongolian fringe

'The Mongolian Fringe' was the title of an official paper from 1940 authored by Olaf Caroe, the foreign secretary of the British-Indian government in New Delhi. It referenced the Himalayan region, including areas such as "Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and northern Assam". In Caroe's eyes, inhabitants of those regions had, as historian Alastair Lamb put it, a "predominantly Mongolian population (despite the clearly non-Mongolian nature of the Nepalese ruling family)." An unabashedly racialized view of the world characterised this genre of imperial geopolitical writing. The racial term 'Mongolian', according to the time's prevailing scientific theories of race, applied to most peoples of Central and eastern Asia, including Tibetans, the Chinese and the Japanese. To colonial officials like Caroe, the divide between Mongolians and the inhabitants of "India proper" was self-evident. Talking about the Excluded Areas of Assam (now a major part of modern Northeast India), former Governor Robert Reid said that "neither racially, historically, culturally, nor linguistically … [do the people] … have they any affinity with the people of the plains, or with the people of India proper."

This racialized gaze was not the exclusive domain of British colonial officials. Speaking about the implications of the Chinese takeover of Tibet, Independent India's first Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru:

Six decades later, those racial ideas are no longer publically articulated with the same confidence. In their place, however, is a 'racialized regime of visuality' to borrow a phrase from Cultural Studies scholar Joseph Pugliese. In India this makes its presence felt via the use of derogatory words like 'Chinky' or 'flat-nosed' in the rough and tumble of everyday life, and words like 'Northeasterner' or 'Pahari' in polite conversation. In the summer of 2012, Indian elites had to come to terms with the reality of this racialized regime when, following reports of violence between Bodos and Muslims in western Assam and rumours of possible reprisals, there was an exodus of panicked Northeasterners from major Indian cities including Bengaluru, Pune and Chennai. "Everyone who looks even vaguely northeastern – be it Nepalis, Assamese, Nagas or Mizos," said a news report from Bengalaru, "[was] quick to head to the train station." Given the reality of this regime, fast becoming the norm in India's major cities too, it may be appropriate to reinstate the term 'Mongolian', rather than use any of its euphemisms.