The term ‘Sunwar’ refers to one of the Gurkha soldiers of the faded away British Imperialism. And obviously, the term ‘Sunuwar’ is the Hinduized exonym of Tibeto-Mongoloid Kiranti people of eastern Nepal. It has nothing to do with the Indo-Aryan term ‘Sunar’for goldsmiths. Their autoethnonym is Kiranti-Koits. The /o/ sound is nasalized. On the process of Shah political, cultural and linguistic colonization and hegemonization during the 18th century, the Kiranti-Koits people were forced to be identified first as Sunuwar>Sunwar and finally ‘Sunar’. It is absolutely wrong. The Sunars are still of Indo-Aryan stock in Nepal and India. Please do not yourself abuse your academic degrees and research as such in the name of copy and paste. Hopefully, we Kiranti-Koits people are waiting for poetic justice. And I’m working for that. Let’s see whether I’ll be successful. If u western or eastern outsider-scholars want to research more on the Kiranti-Koits people of the Nepal Himalaya, please go through my PhD dissertation submitted to the Jawarharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India in 2005. Or at least try to find out the specimen of Kiranti-Bayung and Kiranti-Koits languages. Then, u’ll know what the truth is. Please e-mail me if you want to know more about my tribe. ‘Rapacha’ is my ethno-clanonym which is full of meanings in my mother tongue. Come and learn my language with me. I’ll be waiting for Godot.

Yours,
Dr. Lal Rapacha
Founder/Director
Research Institute for Kiratology
Kathmandu, N E P A L
kiranti.rapachalal@gmail.com
+
FG Fellow, AvH, Germany
I’ll soon be there to peep my people’s anthropology, languages, literature and linguistics through the western world’s windows.

The term ‘Sunwar’ refers to one of the Gurkha soldiers of the faded away British Imperialism. And obviously, the term ‘Sunuwar’ is the Hinduized exonym of Tibeto-Mongoloid Kiranti people of eastern Nepal. It has nothing to do with the Indo-Aryan term ‘Sunar’for goldsmiths. Their autoethnonym is Kiranti-Koits. The /o/ sound is nasalized. On the process of Shah political, cultural and linguistic colonization and hegemonization during the 18th century, the Kiranti-Koits people were forced to be identified first as Sunuwar>Sunwar and finally ‘Sunar’. It is absolutely wrong. The Sunars are still of Indo-Aryan stock in Nepal and India. Please do not yourself abuse your academic degrees and research as such in the name of copy and paste. Hopefully, we Kiranti-Koits people are waiting for poetic justice. And I’m working for that. Let’s see whether I’ll be successful. If u western or eastern outsider-scholars want to research more on the Kiranti-Koits people of the Nepal Himalaya, please go through my PhD dissertation submitted to the Jawarharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India in 2005. Or at least try to find out the specimen of Kiranti-Bayung and Kiranti-Koits languages. Then, u’ll know what the truth is. Please e-mail me if you want to know more about my tribe. ‘Rapacha’ is my ethno-clanonym which is full of meanings in my mother tongue. Come and learn my language with me. I’ll be waiting for Godot.

Yours,
Dr. Lal Rapacha
Founder/Director
Research Institute for Kiratology
Kathmandu, N E P A L
kiranti.rapachalal@gmail.com
+
FG Fellow, AvH, Germany
I’ll soon be there to peep my people’s anthropology, languages, literature and linguistics through the western world’s windows.

I am the person whose interview you summarised and I would like to ask you to cite the interview correctly.
You claim that I said the Sunwar worked with gold and are untouchable. This is not what I said because this is wrong. This is also not what Helen de Bruin wrote.
H. de Bruin wrote: the Sunwar “are considered to be of a lower, untouchable caste”. The people who believe, the Sunwar are a low caste of gold workers, mostly live in the cities, never visited a Sunwar village and do not know the Sunwar.
As to the name - Sunwar or Sunuwar - “Sunwar” is the name used in English literature, “Sunuwar” is the spelling of the last name of people when using Latin script.
Best regards,

Dörte Borchers

Here is a brief about The Sunuwar.

About Sunuwar - Who are Sunuwar?

The Sunuwar , who call themselves Koinch, are one among the more than 50 ethnic groups of Nepal. They speak a Tibeto-Burman language (Koich lo) and they belong to the autochthonous population of eastern Nepal also known as Kiranti , inhabiting the hilly region at the foot of the Everest massif since centuries before the unification of Nepal in its actual boundaries .

“Beer for the Ancestors” is the first ethnography about the Sunuwar, an ethnic group of eastern Nepal. Proceeding on an reconstruction of their history and a description of their social life based on a community study the author develops a model of Sunuwar-society including as main elements the law of inheritance, ancestors rituals and the

exchange of goods and manpower. The traditional Sunuwar law of inheritance prescribes the transfer of the lionshare of landed property to the youngest son and the transfer of prestige and offices to the elder sons. These inheritance rules generate a social tension, which could be relieved only by a process of periodical redistribution. This can be done only by ideological means, mainly by the ancestor-ritual. The ritual produces a pseudo practice which raises the form of ritual exchange to an ideal of exchange in every day life.