The Name Bhotey

Etymologically, the name Bhotey is innocuous enough. Literally, it designates someone who lives in Bhot. The term Bhot comes from the late Sanskrit Bhotah, which derives from Bod, the Tibetan name for Tibet. A Bhotey is therefore, quite simply, a Tibetan. But it is not that simple.

Regrettably, 'Bhotey' has gained pejorative overtones, since it evokes certain cultural traits, obnoxious to orthodox Hindu sensibilities. These traits, seen to be characteristic of the people in question, are that they wash infrequently, eat beef, and drink alcohol. To this extent 'Bhotey' is comparable to the Newar word Sain, which has become a derogatory expression for ethnic Tibetans.

'Bhotey' has come to acquire particularly charged overtones in Nepal. The unification of the kingdom left the conquerors with a chaotic array of peoples to organise into a nation. To make legal sense of the situation, they devised a series of national codes which made allowance for the perceived difference in status of the component groups. The most important of these codes was the Muluki Ain of 1854, which proposed a hierarchy of five caste groups, three "pure" and two "impure". The Bhoteys were placed in the lowest of the pure groups, designated Enslavable Alcohol Drinkers.

Unlike the Indian caste system, in which tribes lie altogether beyond the pale, the Nepali scheme accord a central place to its ethnic groups, who form the backbone of the middle and lower pure categories.

Perhaps because the Bhoteys lived a long way from Kathmandu, they received more cursory attention. A number of Tibetan-speaking enclaves have their own caste systems (sometimes very elaborate affairs), and all have at least the concept of ranked social groups. But these local differences were ignored, and nobility were indiscriminately placed together with artisans under the 'Bhotey' rubric.

From the point of view of the people who were designated by the term, Bhotey was an unsatisfactory label largely because it did not refer to a single ethnic group. More problematically, it was not a distinctively Nepali ethnonym. In a context where membership of the nation was based to some degree on having a clear ethnic identity, there were certain disadvantages in belonging to a category as vague as the Bhotey.

Besides, Bhoteys were by definition from Bhot, and the nation of Bhot was one with which Nepal was by no means on the best of terms. Worst of all, legal documents sometimes used the term metonymically to designate the third caste group as a whole, to the extent that members of the Non-Enslavable Alcohol Drinkers category could, as punishment for certain offences, be turned into Bhoteys. A number of ethnic groups raised objection to their inclusion in the category, and reconstituted ethnic groups crystallised around names that had previously applied to small enclaves. The adoption of new names did not necessarily improve the legal status of their bearers, but this at least had the merit of being unambiguously Nepali.