Talk:Kuthi Valley

WP:INDIA Banner/Uttarakhand workgroup Addition

Note: {{WP India}} Project Banner with Uttarakhand workgroup parameters was added to this article talk page because the article falls under Category:Uttarakhand or its subcategories. Should you feel this addition is inappropriate , please undo my changes and update/remove the relavent categories to the article -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - 13:44, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Kuthi Yankti River As Kalapani River

Kuthi Yankti river originates from Limpiya Dhura is the Kali River, also the border river between India and Nepal. Kuthi Yankti in local language means Kali river aka Kalapani ( Black Water). Thus, Kalapani territory got it's name from the river. There are evidences to prove it if required. Techyson (talk) 06:06, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Please provide reliable sources, preferably WP:THIRDPARTY sources. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 09:23, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of Gunji Village, Nepal for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Gunji Village, Nepal is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gunji Village, Nepal until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 18:15, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Proposed additions: Nepal's census/land-record claims and scholarly assessments of the 2020 claim

The article covers the 1817 Nepali claim to the valley and its rejection, Shrestha's 1999 revival of the claim, and the 2020 claim, but does not mention the administrative evidence Nepal cites, nor any published scholarly assessment of the claim. I propose the following, adapted to this article's scope (fuller treatment of the wider dispute belongs at Kalapani territory, where I have made a parallel proposal on the talk page).

Proposed text 1 - in the history section, after the paragraph on the May 2020 claim:

In support of its claim, Nepal has cited elections conducted in the area in 1959, the 1961 Nepal census, and land revenue collected from residents of the valley's villages. Veteran journalist Bhairav Risal has stated that he visited the area as an enumerator during the 1961 census. Sam Cowan, while noting that he cannot assess Nepal's documentation, has expressed strong scepticism that Nepali officials could have conducted the census in Gunji, Kuti and Nabi, citing archival records showing an Indian State Police detachment at Gunji from the mid-1950s, the July timing of the census when most Byansis would have been in high pastures or on trading trips to Tibet, and the possibility that residents of the Indian-side villages who owned and paid tax on land across the border appeared in Nepali records without this establishing the villages as parts of Nepal. Cowan also observes that the 2020 claim is framed in almost identical terms to the 1817 claim rejected by the Governor-General — that the western branch of the headwaters should be considered the main Kali as it carried the larger volume of water — and, from a study of the East India Company's contemporaneous war papers, argues that the Company never contemplated a boundary on the Limpiyadhura line, since it would have left the Lipulekh trade route, a central objective of the war, in Gorkha hands.

Proposed text 2 - in the section on the Byansi villages, after the sentences on the villages of the valley:

The Byansi villages have historically maintained close ties across the border: residents of the Indian-side villages owned houses, fields and summer settlements on the Nepali side, for which they paid rent and taxes. Anthropologist Katsuo Nawa's fieldwork in the 1990s found that citizenship, natal village, and residence did not necessarily coincide among Byansis; in one case an Indian civil servant born in a Nepali village maintained his house there and supervised the village's traditional rituals.

Note on a primary resource: The full text and official maps of the 1961 Nepal–China Boundary Treaty, whose western starting point bears on this area, are available at File:1961 Nepal-China Border Treaty in Nepali and English with maps.pdf. I offer no interpretation of the maps and am not proposing article text based on them.

Rationale: Text 1 presents Nepal's supporting evidence through its proponents (ORF, myRepublica, Risal) and pairs it with the published scholarly response, preserving Cowan's hedging. Text 2 adds sourced ethnographic context directly relevant to this valley's villages, partly from Hoon (1996), already cited in this article. Comments welcome; if there are no objections I'll make the edits in a few days. HistoryNerd2515 (talk) 10:43, 17 July 2026 (UTC) HistoryNerd2515 (talk) 10:43, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

On Proposal 1, when you say "Nepal cites", that would mean that the Government of Nepal cites. But I do not have any confirmation that the Nepalese government made any such claims. Indian diplomats have stated that the only area that was ever discussed in border talks was the Kalapani territory, nothing beyond. Newspapers are not reliable sources for history. We can't give recognition to claims made by random individuals in newspapers about what happened 50 years ago, without some solid evidence. For example, if Indian villages had indeed been enumerated in the 1961 census, the census records should be available to demonstrate that fact. WP:EXCEPTIONAL claims require exceptional evidence. Sam Cowan is not a historian either. But he is saying nothing different from what we say on the page. So there is nothing more to be done. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 16:36, 25 July 2026 (UTC)

On Proposal 2, I can't find the content you give in the first sentence on Hoon, p. 221. If you can fix the citation, please do. The second sentence is based on a quotation in Cowan's article, but it is not to be found in the "Ethnic categories" paper of Nawa. In any case, the "Rang" mentioned in the quotation are not specifically Byansis or the residents of Kuthi Valley. All the Bhotiyas of Uttarakhand refer to themselves as "Rang". Neither is anything special about some of them having mixed existence on both the sides of the border. It is an open border, and millions of Nepalis live and work in India, some as citizens, some as migrant workers and others as settlers. Nawa's article is a bit naive from my point of view, and I wouldn't recommend using it for anything.

Finally note that you need to be extended-confirmed to edit topics on social groups as per WP:CT/SASG. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 16:09, 26 July 2026 (UTC)

I have condensed the content. I would have preferred to delete it entirely because it is quite WP:UNDUE. None of your sources is really about cross-border landownership. It is not at all clear how important this issue is. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 22:14, 26 July 2026 (UTC)

References