40 minutes long documentary is a first time portrait of architectural heritage, Buddhist sites and monuments in remote valleys of central Himalaya of Nepal, known as Tsum sbas-yul skid-mo-lung, sacred and hidden lands of happiness. The documentary follows a sudden arrival of bulldozer (a heavy construction equipment) in the valley in September 2013 and construction of one of the eight North South Transit Route Developments (NSTRDs) aiming to connect Tibet Autonomous Region of China and India however, without any consideration of imminent threats on cultural fabric of the region. Based on the documentary, I argue that Tsum communities hold rich oral histories to explain the local significance on spiritual underpinnings of cultural heritage and their opinions on impacts of bringing a motor road goes much deeper than whether or not…

This paper investigates what happens when an indigenous language is allowed into school for the first time. While Nepal’s constitution has guaranteed all communities the right to basic education in their mother tongues since 1990, implementation of this promise has been slow. I argue that language-in-education policies, rather than being technical solutions to solvable problems as policies and international development agencies represent the issue, are sites of political struggle, shaped by relations of power and inequality between languages, and more especially their speakers. One result of these relations is that speakers of minoritized languages increasingly demand schooling in English for their children, and have in many cases shifted to using Nepali in their daily lives. Language policies designed for idealized homogeneous villages, moreover, are poorly equipped to confront realities of…

  Suicide is one of the fastest-growing and least-understood causes of death, particularly in low and middle-income countries (WHO 2011). The institutions involved in the derivation of taxonomic categories used to define and report suicide deaths, importantly shape how the burden is understood, (un)validated, and responded to at varying levels of social authority (familial, community, national). Despite growing recognition of the high burden of suicide deaths in low and middle income countries (WHO 2008) and an alarming level of suicide among Nepali women specifically (Suvedi et al, 2009), Nepal’s Ministry of Health does not systematically collect or report on suicides (Khan, 2002; Pradhan et al, 2011). Suicide data are filtered through reporting systems shaped by social, cultural, legal, and medical institutions. This study seeks to analyze networks drawn by police,…

As part of a larger comparative project on middlemen in South Asia and Latin America, this paper addresses the social category of dalāl in Nepali society with a particular focus on manpower agents. Borrowed from Arabic and Farsi, the term, dalāl, stems from the Semitic root  "dal-lam-lam" which carries the meaning of guiding, or pointing something out, or evening directing someone towards something. In South Asian Sanskrit-based languages, it has come to signify brokers, or middlemen traders, of goods and people. In Nepali language and society, dalāl refers to a range of occupations as varied as prostitution pimps and real estate agents. In these various roles, the dalāl serves an in-between role as, for instance, a negotiator between two parties, or a translator of legal and illegal codes and practices, or…

New conservation territories, including buffer zones, migration corridors, and community wildlife management areas, have proliferated worldwide since the 1980s. Many of these conservation territories are critical components of community-based conservation (CBC) strategies meant to reduce the social and political conflicts historically associated with traditional protected areas such as national parks. There is a growing body of evidence, however, suggesting that CBCs and associated conservation territories often not only fail to defuse conflicts but also may even create new ones. Using the case of Nepal, the proposed paper seeks to understand how and why social and political conflict around ethnic identity and property rights is either reduced or exacerbated within new conservation territories. In particular, my paper examines whether and how the conservation interventions around the buffer zones of Chitwan National Park are shaping new conflicts around property rights…

Modernization and development are the two logical and practical instruments of the State or the state-makers. Through these two instruments, the state-makers not only promote their own culture, language, religion and economic mode of production but also expand their politico-economic and cultural hegemony simultaneously colonizing over other cultures and economic systems. On one hand the State implements all these in the name of state-making and development of nation, the same process imposes colonial impacts upon other cultures and societies on the other. On the whole such a process unsuccessfully tries to create a homogenous  'nation-state' by incorporating and assimilating 'other'  cultures and societies into the state-makers'  'own'  culture, religion, language and economic mode of production. In this regards, the state making process, if it is controlled by a certain hegemonic…

Nepal and the East India Company expanded into the Himalayan foothills and adjoining tarai in the late eighteenth century by employing a number of similar strategies but quite divergent understandings of state formation and power. Nepal dismantled a number of hill polities consisting of self-proclaimed Rajput lineages that controlled trans-Himalayan trade routes along with some area of agricultural land in the tarai; disputes between the Company and Nepal formed around these tarai holdings of the former principalities. The former hill polities had gained authority over largely indigenous groups of subjects, as well as an increasing monopoly on local property regimes, from the sixteenth century. In order to gain political traction in the northern tarai and southern Himalayan foothills, both Nepal and the East India Company had to negotiate with former…

Kathmandu today exists in a conjuncture framed through multiple layers of overlapping moments: On the one hand, there is an evolving politico-economic landscape of municipal and local governance owing to projects of economic liberalization that might be termed ‘gentrification of state-spaces’ (Ghertner 2011); on the other hand, there is a changing aspirational landscape for the unpropertied working class tied to the fading promises of Nayaa Nepal and the failure of radical politics to reimagine ‘the urban’. In this context, this paper seeks to interrogate the demand for the right to the city advanced by squatter communities, or sukumbasi, in Kathmandu, as a category of analysis with recourse to an account of extreme marginality. As a starting premise, this paper seeks inspiration from Kristin Ross’ (1967) take on everyday life incubating not just…

In the wake of economic and political instability, high rates of unemployment and outmigration and the decade-long violence of the “People's War,” increasing cases of “mass hysteria,” also known in Nepali as chhopne rog, among adolescents have been reported in government schools throughout Nepal. Investigating the phenomenon of mass chhopne rog, which affects mainly female adolescents in rural Nepal, this paper traces connections between new forces of social change which have taken shape in the post-conflict period, and the psychocultural dimensions of people’s lives. Why are adolescent girls disproportionally afflicted by chhopne rog and how might this be connected to relations of power? What is the public discourse on “mass hysteria” in Nepal, and how do families, healers, and psychiatrists understand, explain, and treat this illness? What is the nature…

In this paper, I will uncover the politics behind the use of new label- the indigenous as an umbrella category to denote former ethnic groups of Nepal. The former ethnic groups known as ethnic nationalities (Janajati) shifted into indigenous nationalities (Adivasi/Janajati) in 1991 on certain global historical process. As Adam Kuper (2003) states, that it is not a bad idea to call people by the name they recognized themselves, but some discredited old arguments are lurked behind new names. As culture is a euphemism of race, the word indigenous is a euphemism of primitive. The term Indigenous is a fancy word used in the place of what we call ancient, hunting gathering, tribal, native and aboriginal peoples etc. For Kuper (2003), the politics behind the construction of indigenousness is no…