Swagat Raj Pandey and Sanjay Sharma The transition of Nepal from a Hindu Kingdom to a secular republic is believed to have institutionalized the religious freedom in the country. Earlier, individuals, including animalists and naturalists, who did not opt for any specific religion were by default regarded as Hindus curtailing their individual choice of religion.  Of various religions practiced in Nepal, Christianity is one. Because of a lot of factors fostered primarily by evangelism, the number of Christian converts here is ever growing. While there were only 31,280 reported Christians in the 1991 census, this number increased to 101,976 in 2001, and in 2011 it reached 375,699. Furthermore, the existing literature on the issue of religious conversion suggests that individuals from poorer socio-economic backgrounds, Dalits and Janajatis are mainly changing…

Austin Lord This paper blends a theoretical framework for understanding social and spatial change in areas affected by hydropower development in Nepal with ethnographic accounts of diverse ‘lived experiences’ of hydropower development in the watersheds of the Trishuli and Tamakoshi rivers. Discussing hydropower development in terms of the turbulences and negotiations that mark its fluid boundaries this paper poses a series of open questions about shifting patterns of work, mobility, access, and aspiration which are emerging in ‘developing’ watersheds. This analysis focuses on the different ways in which livelihoods and socialities are implicated within the processes, practices, and logics of hydropower development – within complex flows of labor, capital, imagination and power that support the transformative projects of Nepal’s evolving ‘hydroscapes’ (from Swyngedouw 1999). As hydropower development intensifies and proliferates…

Michael Baltutis The Nepalese Indra jatra, the autumnal festival of the Hindu god Indra, is the mul Jatra (root festival) of the city of Kathmandu. The origins of this festival lie in the Sanskrit texts of classical India: the epic Mahabharata (most likely its first appearance), the dramaturgical Natyashastra, the architectural Samarangana Sutradhara, and the royal-astrological Brihat Samhita. Rather than simply describing the festival, and certainly more than interpreting the festival as an occasion that peacefully brings together all of its participants, these texts use the Indra festival as a literary trope that indicates socio-political change and innovation. The contemporary Nepalese iteration of the festival is no different. The 1768 performance of the festival serves as the performative backdrop for the successful incursion of Prithivi Narayan Shah into the Kathmandu…

Bryony Whitmarsh This paper focuses on a particular time (the post-monarchy Nepali present) and site (the Narayanhiti Palace Museum) that I believe offers a compelling space for understanding the negotiation of Nepal’s recent past, thereby revealing as much about the Nepal of which it forms a part as the Nepal it institutionalizes – the on-going transition from royal to republican Nepal. The Palace Museum means different things to different groups of people and key objectives of my research are to identify these claims, how they are formed and the reasons for their existence. I propose to use the following definitions from Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998, 48) to discuss three different registers of meaning of the Narayanhiti Palace Museum. The first, the museum as 'a vault, in the tradition of the royal…

Ang Sanu Lama  Although community forestry (CF) in Nepal has been considered a successful program in terms of improving forest conditions, supporting forest-based livelihoods and enhancing local level community engagement, its exclusionary outcomes have been well documented. However, more focus has been given to the socio-cultural, economic and institutional factors at the community level as the causes of exclusion of women, Dalits, people living in poverty, and ethnic minorities. These marginalized groups are seen as being excluded from benefit sharing and decision making in CFUG as a result of community level elite capture and socio-economic attributes of marginalized groups themselves. Thus CF policy guidelines see Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) as the main actors in addressing exclusion. Although recent studies have looked at the impact of external actors, power relations,…

Katsuo Nawa In this paper I describe and analyze several basic elements of rituals among Rangs in Byans, Far Western Nepal and adjacent regions, focusing on three different named gestures or bodily movements carried out very frequently in their 'rituals'. Rang traditionally lives in several Himalayan valleys in Darchula District in Nepal and Uttarakhand in India, and is officially recognized as an adivasi janajati in Nepal. Though it has been considerable amount of discursive and practical transformation in various aspects of their rituals within last fifty years from the Panchayat era to the age of samabeshikaran, my focus here is on what Rangs have done in their 'rituals' despite, and in relation to, these changes. As far as I know there is no Byansi word for 'ritual' in general. Rather,…

 Prakriti Thami, Sanjay Sharma and  Neha Choudhary  Nepal, traditionally an agrarian society, used to offer limited employment opportunities. However, since this last decade it has witnessed drastic changes in its labour market. With an approximate 1600 youths leaving for foreign employment everyday and remittances accounting for a large 25 percent of its GDP, Nepal is slowly and duly coming to be regarded as a remittance-based economy. The significance of these large scale remittances on the concurrent poverty reduction seen in Nepal is indisputable and there have been many studies that explore the economic implications of this new trend. However, the role of remittances in bringing about social changes, for the most parts, remains unexplored. This study aims to foray into addressing the issue above by examining the effect of remittances on caste-based…

Harsha Man Maharjan This paper analyzes the notion of stakeholder participation in policy process by examining roles of various actors involved in the making of national media policy drafts. These actors include representatives of state machinery, donors and the media professionals. The standard discourse on participatory and collaborative policy process often finds no return for thinking about the complexity of policy process. To the contrary, the paper highlights the ambiguities of the notion by demonstrating how various actors control the process and the outcome of the drafts policy making. This paper provides an account of the preparation of drafts of Media Policy 2012‐2013 by Ministry of Information and Communications under a three years (December 2010 to October 2013) project funded by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) called ”The project for…

Sudeepa Khanal  HIV is often accompanied by unfavorable attitudes and behaviors of people around in the society. This paper tries to describe the different forms of stigma and discrimination that is prevalent not only in the community, but also in the health facilities in Nepal, resulting in various complexities in the lives of the infected/ affected people. This paper also illustrates some experiences of stigma and discrimination faced by HIV infected/affected people in their societies reinforcing the findings from previous studies, which suggest that despite the strong focus on reducing stigma related to HIV, efforts remain inadequate. This paper bases its findings on data acquired from an ongoing qualitative study, where peer ethnographic interviews are conducted by peers from the HIV network. These peer interviews help in gaining a better…

Swatahsiddha Sarkar Because of its innate ideological complexities and debatable subject matter any attempt to historicise nationalism has always been an uphill task. The study of nationalism in the Eastern Himalayan context has long been known to be the cup of tea of Nepal and West based historians. In this context the contribution of Kumar Pradhan, a historian by training from Darjeeling, India (who died in the recent past on December 20, 2013) seems to have added some fundamentally new dimensions in the Eastern Himalayan nationalist history. Pradhan did question the obsession of ‘glorifying the history of unification’ as the only paradigm of Nepali nationalist historiography at that period of time when we rarely heard about janjati politics that in fact, stymied the Bahunbadi discourse of Nepali nationalism in course…