Indian Gorkha History of Northeast India Nagaland

Gorkhas History in Nagaland : Nagaland, Hari Prasad Gorkha Rai, an authority on the Gorkha community in the Northeast, written about how 400 hundred years ago, some men of Chiechama village were going to their fields when they came across three young, tired and hungry Gorkha boys. The villagers took pity on them and brought them home. Two of the boys died of cholera. The one who survived said his name was ‘Rai’. A villager elder adopted him and later even married him off to his daughter. In course of time, Rai became assimilated into the Angami tribe and his descendents are now called Metha Tophris, or non­Angami Methama clan.

Nagaland

Till today, it is a custom to give a male child in the clan the name ‘Rayi’. This commemorates the name of the clan’s original father. If this story is true, then the history of the Gorkhas in Nagaland begins in the early 17th Century. In the compound of the 3rd Assam Rifles at Kohima, Nagaland’s capital, there is a memorial stone that places the date of the base’s establishment in 1835. This means the Gorkhas have been in Nagaland since then. When the British marched in soldiers from the Native Infantry Cachar Levy and Artillery Force to Kohima, they stayed back and were rehabilitated at Chanmari.

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