Today, the “Nepali speaking community” in New York is indeed vast and unexpectedly present: professors and students, entrepreneurs and activists, artists and designers, bankers and real estate agents, and a small army of taxi drivers, waiters, cashiers, babysitters, and even Everest summiteers, to name a few. But how many Nepalis are there in America or New York, anyway?
“I would love to answer that question for you, but I just don’t know what I would base that answer on,” Madhu Raman
Acharya, the former Permanent Representative to the UN, had said in his office two years ago. The only right answer is, of course, that it’s growing steadily in every possible way.
And one small but immensely dedicated New York-based organization, Adhikaar (www. adhikaar.org), has spent the last three years tirelessly charting that growth.
This week, on Wednesday December 8, Adhikaar officially launched its report, “Snapshots of the Nepali-Speaking Community in New York City: Demographics and Challenges,” at a public function hosted at The New School University.
The event was introduced by Ashok Gurung, an early supporter of Adhikaar, and also the Senior Director of New School’s India China Institute that regularly hosts Nepal-related events. Speakers at this event were the report’s authors, Susan Hangen, Professor at Ramapo College and Adhikaar’s Board Co-Chair, and Luna Ranjit, Adhikar’s founder and executive director, alongside Councilmember Danny Dromm, Chair of the Immigration Committee, New York City Council, and Howard Shih, Census Program Director, Asian American Federation.
“One of the challenges in the early days was that of recognition – few people outside the Nepali community knew about the pace of growth of the Nepalis,” explained Ranjit. “So we were not only raising awareness about the issues faced by our community but also the community itself. That was one of the main incentives for the start of the research project.”
Adhikaar itself was struggling for recognition, too. The organization was started with a US$500 contribution from one of Ranjit’s former professors and was based out of a basement office. There were other challenges: “We were young, and women – not the typical faces of leadership in our community. We had to work hard to earn our legitimacy within the community.”
They have come a long way since. When the Jankaari project started, the organization got written about in The New York Times’ April 29, 2007 edition. That year, Adhikaar was recognized with the 2007 New York Women’s Foundation Neighborhood Leadership Award. The following year, the organization was bestowed the 2008 Union Square Award, which came with not just a US$50,000 prize but also valuable mentoring and support in terms of networking and growing as an organization. Today, the Adhikaar office has a dedicated space for the first community center for New York’s Nepalis and is located in Woodside, Queens, a neighborhood with a dense Nepali population and in close proximity to other Queens neighborhoods with large Nepali presence. The organization also has three fulltime staff.
“A lot of people’s efforts are behind Adhikaar’s success. Countless people have given their time and energy and resources,” Ranjit declares. “We’ve been very fortunate since the early days to have had very dedicated staff, board, and volunteers.” Still, it is hard to imagine what drive the team would have without Ranjit’s sense of passion and perseverance.
Luna Ranjit was born and raised in Kathmandu by a mother who worked as a lab technician, and a father who was at the time a political activist, and also an educator and writer.
“A renaissance man, I guess,” Ms. Ranjit smiles. She gave her School Leaving Certificate exams from St. Mary’s School in 1993 and her A-Levels from Budanilkantha School in 1996. In both schools, she served as House Captain and won awards for Track & Field. She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Grinnell College in 2000 and then earned her Masters degree in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton, in 2004. Between Princeton and the founding of Adhikaar, she also worked with the New Voices National Fellowship Program in Washington DC. It supported small social justice organizations like Adhikaar.
Her marriage to Rushil Shakya is as old as Adhikaar itself: 5 years. And it was he who made Adhikaar possible in many ways. “I worked without pay for the first two and a half years while Rushil not only supported me financially but also volunteered with Adhikaar and supported it in every way possible,” she adds.
According to Adhikaar’s files, the organization has helped at least 500 individuals on average every year since its inception. With the publication of this report, it has helped bring to light and study an entire community that has remained for most parts, in many ways, unaccounted for.
“We were able to get Nepalis, Burmese and Bhutanese to be included in the Census 2010 data releases. So for the first time, we were able to get census data broken down in high detail for those three groups,” Howard Shih, Census Program Director, Asian American Federation, explained at The New School. “And now, we’re encouraging the American Census Bureau to do the same thing for the American Community Survey, and that’s a survey that has the poverty information and language spoken at home, and all of the other important information we need for policy research.”
But what about the Nepali community’s political leanings? Of the many subjects that it touches on, political leaning or affiliation is one not discussed in this report.
“That community involvement in the present has primarily been focused on the transnational, on engagement with Nepal. And I think that has something to do with the circumstances under which people arrived. Most of them are the displaced middle class people, largely during the ten years of the armed conflict, people who are business owners or in these other occupations who found their livelihoods disrupted and realized that in order to maintain their middle class status they would have to migrate. So they are operating under this myth of return, that their stay in New York is temporary,” said Dr. Hangen, an anthropologist who has also authored books on Nepali society and politics, of her personal broad observations. “I think right now we are witnessing a big shift within the Nepali community. People are starting to become citizens, people are starting to buy houses; they are putting down roots and thinking about regaining their middle class status here.
Indeed, involvements in local politics can have many impacts for the community in question. “From my own experience, one of the things that has to happen within many emerging communities is to have political empowerment and become politically involved,” Councilmember Danny Dromm, Chair, Immigration Committee, New York City Council, said. “Unless the communities become politically involved, even down to the level of being involved in your local democratic club, the funding stream is not going to come your way.”
Snapshots of the Nepali-Speaking Community in New York City: Demographics and Challenges is a culmination of Adhikaar’s Jankaari project and based on a sample size of 300 surveys, four focus group discussions, and 12 in-depth interviews. The report is a first attempt of this sort – incorporating not only Nepalis from Nepal but also Bhutanese refugees of Nepali origin as well as Indian Nepalis – and Adhikaar has plans to build on it as resources become available. For now, it serves as a valuable document in its own right, and a solid foundation to build on or draw from for similar future studies.
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