Tharu people


The Tharu people are an ethnic group living in the Terai in southern Nepal and northern India. They speak Tharu languages. They are recognized as an official ethnicity by the Government of Nepal. In the Indian Terai, they live foremost in Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The Government of India recognizes the Tharu people as a scheduled Indian tribe.

Etymology

The word थारू is thought to be derived from sthavir meaning follower of Theravada Buddhism. The Tharu people in the central Nepali Terai see themselves as the original people of the land and descendants of Gautama Buddha. Rana Tharu people of western Nepal connect the name to the Thar Desert and understand themselves as descendants of Rajputs who migrated to the forests in the 16th century.
Possible is also that the name is derived from the classical Tibetan words mtha'-ru'i brgyud, meaning the 'country at the border', which the Tibetan scholar Taranatha used in the 16th century in his book on the history of Buddhism.

Distribution

In 2009, the majority of Tharu people were estimated to live in Nepal. There are several endogamous subgroups of Tharu that are scattered over most of the Terai:
Smaller numbers of Tharu people reside in the adjacent Indian districts Champaran in Bihar, Gorakhpur, Basti and Gonda districts in Uttar Pradesh, and Khatima in Uttarakhand.
As of 2011, the Tharu population in Nepal was censused at 1,737,470 people, or 6.6% of the total population. The percentage of Tharu people by province was as follows:
The percentage of Tharu people was higher than national average in the following districts:
According to Alberuni, Tharu people have been living in the eastern Terai since at least the 10th century.
The Rana Tharus in western Nepal claim to be of Rajput origin and to have migrated from the Thar Desert in Rajasthan to Nepal's Far Western Terai region after the defeat of Maharana Pratap against a Mughal emperor in the 16th century. Some scholars refute this claim. Another claim posits that the Tharu people are descendants of the Shakya dynasty, who propagated Mahayana Buddhism in Nepal from the late 1st century BC to the early 1st century AD.

13th to 20th centuries

The Tabaqat-i Nasiri chronicle of the Islamic world contains records of an expedition by Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji into Kamrup region between Gauda and Tibet in 1205 AD and refers to the resident people as Kunch, today's Koch people, Mej/Meg today's Mech people and Tiharu as having mongoloid appearances. These people impressed the Turkic peoples who had similar features as them, like slanting eyes, snub noses, high cheek bones, yellow complexion of the Mongols and who spoke a different language than in the rest of the subcontinent.
Following the unification of Nepal in the late 18th century, members of the ruling families received land grants in the Terai and were entitled to collect revenue from those who cultivated the land. The Tharu people became bonded labourers in a system also known as Kamaiya. In 1854, Jung Bahadur Rana enforced the so-called Muluki Ain, a General Code, in which both Hindu and non-Hindu castes were classified based on their habits of food and drink. Tharu people were categorized as "Paani Chalne Masinya Matwali", i.e., touchable enslavable alcohol drinking group, together with several other ethnic minorities. In the late 1950s, the World Health Organization supported the Nepalese government in eradicating malaria in the forests of the central Terai. Following the malaria eradication program using DDT in the 1960s, a large and heterogeneous non-Tharu population from the Nepali hills, Bhutan, Sikkim and India settled in the region.
In the western Terai, many Tharu families lost the land, which they used to cultivate, to these immigrants and were forced to work as Kamaiya.
In Chitwan, after the eradication of malaria, the U.S. government joined forces with the Nepali government in a project to build a new road, schools and health clinics, and distribute land to migrants from the hills. They invited Tharu people to take land but many Tharus preferred staying "voluntarily landless", as they worried that taking land would make them vulnerable to exploitation from Nepali governmental tax collectors and to attacks from wild animals. They preferred to stay as tenants for large Tharu landlords, who were often relatives.
When the first protected areas were established in Chitwan, Tharu communities were forced to relocate from their traditional lands. They were denied any right to own land and thus forced into a situation of landlessness and poverty. When the Chitwan National Park was designated, Nepalese soldiers destroyed the villages located inside the national park, burned down houses, and beat the people who tried to plough their fields. Some threatened Tharu people at gun point to leave.

1990 to present

After the overthrow of the Panchayat system in Nepal in 1990, the Tharu ethnic association Tharu Kalyankari Sabha joined the umbrella organisation of ethnic groups, a predecessor of the Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities.
In July 2000, the Government of Nepal abolished the practice of bonded labour prevalent under the Kamaiya system and declared loan papers illegal. Kamaiya families were thus enfranchised from debts supposedly incurred, but were also rendered homeless and jobless. Bonded labour shifted to children who work in other households for food for themselves and their families, but rarely with access to school education.
During the Nepalese Civil War, Tharu people experienced an intense period of violence, were recruited by and coerced to help the Maoists, especially in western Nepal; several Tharu leaders were assassinated and infrastructure of the Tharu organisation Backward Society Education destroyed.
After the Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed in 2006, Tharu organisations postulated an autonomous Tharu state within a federal Nepal, emphasising equality of opportunity and equal distribution of land and resources.
In 2009, Tharu people across the Nepal Terai protested against the government's attempt to categorise them as Madheshi people.

Genetics

Genetic studies on Y-DNA of Tharu people from two villages in Chitwan district and one in Morang district revealed a high presence of Haplogroup O-M117 followed by Haplogroup H, Haplogroup J2a-M410, Haplogroup R1a, Haplogroup R2a-M124, Haplogroup J2b2-M12/M102/M241, Haplogroup D-M174, Haplogroup L-M20, Haplogroup O-M95, Haplogroup E-M35, Haplogroup O-M134, Haplogroup Q-M242, Haplogroup C1b1a1-M356, and Haplogroup K-M9. A genetic study on mtDNA of several Tharus in Nepal showed that the total of South Asian mtDNA haplogroups ranges from 31.6% to 67.5% in the Tharu while the total of East Asian mtDNA haplogroups ranges from 32.5% to 68.4% depending on the Tharu group studied.
A genetic survey of Tharus from Nepal, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh showed that they have both a South Asian and an East Asian human genetic origin.

Resistance to malaria

The Tharu are famous for their ability to survive in the malarial parts of the Terai that were deadly to outsiders.
Contemporary medical research comparing Tharu with other ethnic groups living nearby found an incidence of malaria nearly seven times lower among Tharu. The researchers believed such a large difference pointed to genetic factors rather than behavioural or dietary differences. This was confirmed by follow-up investigation finding genes for thalassemia in nearly all Tharu studied.
Tharu people have limited, not complete, immunity to malaria. Many Tharus, particularly babies, died from malaria.

Culture

The Tharu people comprise several groups who speak different dialects and differ in traditional dress, customs, rituals and social organization.
They consider themselves as a people of the forest. In Chitwan, they have lived in the forests for hundreds of years practising a short fallow shifting cultivation. They plant rice, wheat, mustard, maize and lentils, but also collect forest products such as wild fruits, vegetables, medicinal plants and materials to build their houses; hunt deer, rabbit and wild boar, and go fishing in the rivers and oxbow lakes.
The Rana Tharus never went abroad for employment, a life that kept them isolated in their own localities. They developed a unique culture free from the influence of adjacent India, or from the ethnic groups in Nepal's mountains. The most striking aspects of their environment are the decorated rice containers, colorfully painted verandahs and outer walls of their homes using only available materials like clay, mud, cow dung and grass. Much of the rich design is rooted in devotional activities and passed on from one generation to the next, occasionally introducing contemporary elements such as a bus or an airplane.