Rethinking Tibeto-Burman: Linguistic Identities and Classifications in the Himalayan Periphery

RETHINKING TIBETO-BURMAN: LINGUISTIC IDENTITIES AND CLASSIFICATIONS IN THE HIMALAYAN PERIPHERY MARK TURIN (UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE & CORNELL UNIVERSITY) INTRODUCTION “To be human you must have a tribe. To have tribe you must have mother tongue” stated a Shona tribesman, when asked by the fieldworker John Hofman for a definition of his identity (Hofman 1977: 289). While by no means a universal truth, this assertion encapsulates a widespread sentiment held by both indigenous peoples and those who study them: that language and identity are inextricably linked. In this short article I offer some structured reflections on linguistic identities along the Tibetan margins and the classificatory tools that are used to define them. In particular, I argue against the uncritical extension of models of linguistic classification to categorise ethnic communities in the Himalayan periphery.1 INVOKING AND DEBUNKING TIBETO-BURMAN It is common practice for scholars to refer to many of the minority ethnic groups of the greater Tibetan and Himalayan region as ‘Tibeto- Burman’. The terms ‘Tibeto-Burman ethnic group’ and ‘Tibeto- Burmese people’ often appear as erroneous shortcuts for an array of standard characteristics believed to be shared by various peoples: being more egalitarian, consuming alcohol and meat, practising shamanism and animism, and generally not being part of one of the ‘great’ religious traditions of Hinduism or Buddhism which surround them. 1 I am grateful to Professor Dr. George van Driem, Dr. Daniel Barker, Heleen Plaisier, and Sara Shneiderman for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. Sections of this paper were presented at the Agenda of Transformation: Inclusion in Democrary conference in Nepal in April 2003, then under the title ‘The many tongues of the nation: ethnolinguistic politics in post-1990 Nepal’. 36 MARK TURIN The incorrect deployment of linguistic terminology to convey ethnic or social characteristics is extremely common in Himalayan studies, as illustrated by the following few examples. The anthropologist James Fisher writes that the “predominantly rural population at the periphery, whether Tibeto-Burmese [sic] or Indo-Aryan, was too remote, scat- tered, poor, and uneducated to launch an effective movement against the powerful groups which controlled the centre” (Fisher 1997: 13). The French scholar Gérard Toffin addresses the “classifications of the Tibeto-Burman hill tribes into Tamang, Gurung, Magar, Rai, Thakali” (cited in Gellner et al. 1997: 15), while Christian Schicklgruber sug- gests that ‘the Khumbo’ are distinct from “many other Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups” in terms of marriage practices (Schicklgruber 1993: 343). The Nepali intellectual Prayag Raj Sharma describes the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley as being of “mixed Indo-Aryan and Tibeto- Burman extraction” (Sharma 1993: 364) and the British-trained anthropologist Gil Daryn describes the Magar and Rai communities as “both of Tibeto-Burmese [sic] origin” (Daryn 2003: 171). Healthcare profes- sionals are also wont to conflate linguistic with ethnic classifications, as illustrated by Pratima Poudel Acharya and Fiona Alpass who posit that their “data analysis showed Indo-Aryan and lower caste ethnic groups had significantly lower weight babies than Tibeto-Burman and Newar groups” (Acharya and Alpass 2004: 40). As a final example of the imprudent mainstreaming of linguistic classification to map ethnic or social categories we need look no further than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the bastion of trusted popular information, from which we learn that: Of the three principal ethnic groups in the Indian subcontinent—Indo- Europeans, Tibeto-Burmans, and Dravidians—the first two are well rep- resented in the Himalayas, although they are mixed in varying propor- tions in different areas (2004). Although widely used and generally accepted, such uses of the term ‘Tibeto-Burman’ warrant closer examination and critical re-evaluation. First of all, no group or person can be said to be, or speak, ‘Tibeto- Burman’, since Tibeto-Burman is simply the language family that com- prises all extant and extinct languages under its umbrella. Tibeto- Burman is therefore neither an ‘ethnic’ category nor is it a classification that can be used to impute socio-cultural behaviour. Just as nobody actually speaks ‘Romance’, or is ‘Germanic’, so too there are no speak- RETHINKING TIBETO-BURMAN 37 ers of a language called ‘Tibeto-Burman’ and no clear set of cultural characteristics which can be attributed to all ethnic communities who speak languages belonging to this family. Instead, we may simply say that the Himalayan region is home to millions of mother-tongue speakers of languages that are part of the Tibeto-Burman language family. Finally, the term ‘Tibeto-Burmese’, illustrated in two of the above examples, is as linguistically inaccurate as it is ethnically dubious. While referring to the language family as ‘Sino-Tibetan’ or ‘Sino- Bodic’ rather than ‘Tibeto-Burman’ implies that one is taking a stance on the genetic affiliations of subgroupings within the language family, the term ‘Tibeto-Burmese’ is simply incorrect and conveys no specific cultural or linguistic meaning. There are several reasons why the above point is worth making. First, the phrase ‘Tibeto-Burman (speaking) ethnic group’ betrays a widespread misunderstanding of linguistic classification and a reluc- tance on the part of many non-linguists to examine what the term actually conveys in the greater Himalayan context. Second, and more importantly, the proliferation of this vague ethnolinguistic category implies a sense of cohesion between an ancestral origin and a contemporary, spoken mother tongue, when in fact such cohesion rarely exists. Similarly, just because English and German are related languages, it does not necessarily follow that this close linguistic relationship engen- ders an intimate social tie or shared cultural worldview between English and German speakers. In the context of Nepal, for example, a case in point are the Newar, who speak a Tibeto-Burman language but whose culture has been so profoundly influenced by values from the south, that it would be incorrect to represent the whole Newar population as sharing cultural traits with ethnic groups in Yúnnán—who also speak Tibeto-Burman languages—solely on the basis of linguistic classification. This point was succinctly made by the Newar linguist Kamal Prakash Malla when he spoke of Newar literature being the “most tangible evidence of the sym- biosis between a Tibeto-Burman language and the Indo-Aryan culture” (Malla 1982: 4). Malla’s example is particularly apt since the term ‘Tibeto-Burman speaking’ is often used to convey the sense that a community has no historical literary tradition or documented written culture. The Newar of the Kathmandu valley and beyond, with their ornate architecture, refined art and classical language, are thus Tibeto-Burman in linguistic 38 MARK TURIN classification only and share few of the typical or ascribed characteristics of minority ethnic communities who speak Tibeto-Burman languages. Similarly, aside from linguists, it is distinctly rare for scholars of or from Tibet to refer to Tibetans as speaking a ‘Tibeto-Burman language’, even though the classification would be correct. Literate forms, such as Tibetan and Burmese, are thus commonly held to be the parent languages from which other spoken tongues derive, placing them hier- archically above modern ‘Tibeto-Burman languages’. Discussing language and ethnicity in South and Southeast Asia, Harold Schiffman draws a useful distinction between what are histori- cally presented as the “overt manifestations of ‘high’ linguistic culture”, the codified, written and official forms, and the covert or ‘folk- cultural’ aspects which are more likely to be implicit, unstated and unofficial (Schiffman 1999: 431). The same conceptual distinction may be extended to Tibetan and Himalayan studies, in which Tibetan, Dzongkha and Newar comprise the former category, and ethnic groups speaking unwritten Tibeto-Burman languages make up the latter. Now that activists in many minority ethnic groups across the Himalayan region are engaged in the highly political process of re-creating or ‘inventing’ written traditions and developing scripts for their previous- ly oral languages, and while countless rural Tibetans remain illiterate, it is apparent that we need to move towards a more nuanced understand- ing of what, if anything, constitutes ‘high’ and ‘low’ linguistic culture. A further hazard in using the term ‘Tibeto-Burman speaking’ as a convenient ethnic label is that it appears to locate the peoples and groups it describes in a geographical space specifically related to Tibet or Burma. What of the minority groups in Yúnnán, Baltistan, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Spiti, who speak Tibeto-Burman languages but who may have no dealings with Tibet or Burma? It serves us well to remember that the Tibeto-Burman language family draws its name from the status of two dominant ancient literary languages, Burmese and Tibetan, and not from a field-based appraisal of contemporary linguistic distribution and diversity. While the linguistic classification of languages as Tibeto-Burman (versus Austro-Asiatic or Indo-Aryan) is precise, the use of linguistic terminologies and models of classification to label ethnic groups is much more problematic. The construction of any group’s ethnicity can- not simply be reduced to a one-to-one correlation with

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