The lecture deals with the three inter-related concepts of migration, livelihood and identity from the perspective of the Nepalis without Nepal, located mainly in India’s Northeast. It tries to show how their identity as migrants from Nepal has been a bane for them in India’s Northeast, how it influences their orientation towards Nepal and India, and how it affects their livelihood pursuits in the latter country.Listen to or download lecture in audio formatNepalis without Nepal: Migration, Livelihood and Identity{play}http://www.soscbaha.org/downloads/audio/nepalis_without_nepal_migration_livelihood.mp3{/play} 

  Sikkim, in the Eastern Himalaya, is named ‘sacred land’ (Ti. Bas yul) by the Bhotyas and other sikkimese ethnic groups. And in the West Sikkim, the area is known as Beyül Demojong, ‘the hidden valley of rice’.In my doctoral thesis (Chiron, 2007), I have developed the idea that the patrimonial heritage within the Kaychupalri area of West Sikkim transcends the physical element of property ownership. It also includes the inheritance of the sacred landscape (Beyül Demojong), topography and ecology, and its connotation such as pilgrimage centre. Vidal de la Blache, a leader of the tradition of Human Geography during the XIX century, once observed that man and his environment are more intimate than a snail and its shell. I want to demonstrate here that the relationship between nature and…

On the eve of the First Constituent Assembly’s deadline to draft a constitution, a consortium of politicians and civil society groups under the banner Akhanda Sudurpaschim, “Undivided Farwest,” announced a transportation strike across Nepal’s Farwest Development Region that lasted for 32 days. Anxious that the two Tarai districts of the region—Kailali and Kanchanpur—would be separated from the seven Hill districts and consolidated into an ethnic federal state, “Tharuhat,” Akhanda Sudurpaschim supporters demanded the government recognize the entire Farwest Development Region as a single federal province under the principle of “geographic federalism.” In this paper, I address how it became possible for the development region concept to garner sentiment and create territorial attachments in Nepal’s Farwest. Using archival documents and administrative reports describing the planning of the development region model in…

Communities choose their identities over time with distinct objectives in mind. Nepalis IN Sikkim and Darjeeling  had to struggle at various periods in the last 150 years as ‘Paharias’, ‘Nepalese(of Sikkim)’, and ‘General (common) citizen of India’ for their citizenship, political rights and recognition of Nepali language as an Indian language. The year 1990 turned out to be critical for them like of the other Nepalese communities. The democratic movement in Nepal let loose a movement of ‘janajati’, an under- current that also spread in east of Nepal in India. The movement received a momentum after the Government of India accepted the recommendations of the Backward Commission that had termed most of the Sikkimese Nepalis as the ‘OBC’- (Other Backward Classes). When pressed for the implementation of the above decision…

Substantively, the debates about secularism in Nepal are over the proper place and role of religion in a modern, heterogeneous nation-state. The manner in which these debates take place, however, reveals much about how democracy can be made to operate and how particular democratic ideals are constructed. In this paper, I examine how political agency is conceived of, employed, and negated in the secularism debates. Political agency is a concept and concern central to the work of sociologists interested in how states function. Most studies are concerned with agency from one of two directions: topdown and bottom-up. The top-down approach focuses on how states or other corporate bodies facilitate or suppress the agency of individuals and groups. The bottom-up approach focuses on how individuals and groups express or self-suppress their…

In the 1950s, Nepal not only became a democratic state, but also entered into the international community of nations with its much celebrated membership in the United Nations and other regional and international forums. This was a time when the state, in a fairly celebratory mood, tried to become like other states. Its projection to the outside world was of a Hindu state claiming to have embraced the global values of “modernity”, such as human rights and democracy. In the 1960s, when it constitutionally adopted Hinduism as its religion, this did not change Nepal – as the discourses show – from claiming its adherence to the modern global values. The state’s modernization efforts during all the 30 years of Panchayat were deemed to be compatible with its Hindu identity. After…

The slogan “Buddha was Born in Nepal” can be seen on taxis and t-shirts throughout the streets of Kathmandu and is pervasive in popular discourses of Nepali national pride. In the formerly Hindu, newly secular state of Nepal, why does it matter so much where Buddha was born? Who makes this claim, and for what purposes? In this paper, based on research conducted during 18 months of anthropological fieldwork, I will investigate the ambivalent tensions surrounding the claim that Buddha was born in Nepal through discursive analysis of personal conversations and observations, along with media artifacts and unfolding events. On the one hand, the claim is frequently deployed as an assertion of a unified and proud Nepali national identity. Nepal’s ownership of Buddha’s birthplace gives it a unique status among…

Once upon a time, social scientists treated “secularism” as a benign referent to the absence of theocratic governance. Thanks to a series of critiques and correctives, many of which have come from scholars and experiences in South Asia, secularism is now recognized as a set of ideological constructions in its own right. As a result, the term has been increasingly problematized. Along with the consensus that there is not simply one, but multiple modernities, scholars have recognized that each of modernity’s constitutive components – including secularism – come in a variety of forms. The task now is to understand what the different forms of secularism are, and what they do. Secularism in Nepal is a particularly rich, yet remarkably understudied, source of information for global discussions related to the proper…

Himalayan towns showcase a variety of institutional, regulatory, and technology led arrangements for sustaining the flows and quality of water. These arrangements and approaches are largely aimed at mitigating concerns related to alternate land uses in and around water-supply catchments, and their potential impacts on water quality and availability. Recently, incentives for controlling landuse through Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) type arrangements have attracted some attention in the region, along with numerous other approaches. These include negotiated settlements between up- and down- stream water users, or between international donors and local communities; the enactment of zoning regulations; and the promotion of tree planting and forest protection in water supply catchments. These efforts are largely guided by perceptions and science regarding the benefits of such actions on sustaining water flows. In…

The supply and management of drinking water to small towns of the Himalayas is a critical challenge. Around half of the urban population in the Western Himalayas, covering Nepal and the two Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, live in small towns of less than 100 000 people. These small towns rely on springs, lakes and rivers for drinking water with supply systems managed and governed through a variety of approaches and institutional arrangements. Across the Himalayan region, widespread urbanisation and reports of decreasing spring water flows have increased pressures on water supplies. This paper aims to draw insights about institutional arrangements and local governance for water supply management systems for small towns in the Himalayas by drawing on six case study towns – two from Nepal and four…