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Concept
Rai people
Summary
The Rai are an ethnolinguistic group belonging to the Kirat family and primarily Tibeto-Burman linguistic ethnicity. They mainly reside in the eastern parts of Nepal, the Indian states of Sikkim, West Bengal (predominantly Darjeeling and Kalimpong Hills) and in south western Bhutan.
The Rais are a set of groups one of the oldest tribes of Nepal . They inhabited the area between the Dudh Koshi and Tamur River in Nepal. They claim that their country alone called (Kiratdesh) in modern times, they have spread over Nepal, Sikkim and West Bengal. Rai are also known as khambu and in some places they are known as "Jimi or Jimdar"."Jim" means "land" which meant they owned the lands and other tribes had to pay their taxes to the jimdar, later they started animal farming and agricultural vegetation as their traditional occupation. They are known for worshipping nature and ancestral spirits. H. H Risley treats the Rais and Jimdar the as synonymous with the Khambus, but most of the Rais nowadays do admit Khambu and Jimdar to be synonymous terms connoting the same ethnic group. Rais are one of the dominant tribes of the Kirati group; they are a fighting tribe of Nepal. They are popularly believed to have offered a stiff resistance to the invasion of the Gorkhas. Kiranti Rais are hill tribes who once possessed considerable power and territory, but were reduced to submission by Prithvi Narayan Shah after his conquest of Nepal.
Kirati rule in eastern hills of Nepal ended after the conquest of Gorkha Kingdom in 1772–1773.
Numbering about 750,000, the Rai people mainly inhabit eastern part of Nepal. Linguists have identified up to 28 different Rai languages, most of them mutually unintelligible.
The 2011 Nepal census classifies the Rai people within the broader social group of Mountain/Hill Janajati. At the time of the Nepal census of 2011, 620,004 people (2.3% of the population of Nepal) were Rai. The frequency of Rai people by province was as follows:
Koshi Province (11.3%)
Bagmati Province (1.5%)
Gandaki Province (0.
Official source
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