The damage caused to the perimeter wall of the Narayanhiti Palace by the 2015 earthquakes revealed the construction site of the republic memorial (Ganatantra Smarak), to anyone walking past the North East corner of the palace compound. The design competition was launched in 2009 with initial fanfare by the (then Maoist-led) government (and the entries and process critiqued by members of the architectural community); since then construction and design has continued concealed behind the palace walls. This paper will examine the design competition (including the intentions of those who entered)1 and process to date, to reveal the politics of this difficult project that embodies the problems of re-imagining the nation and proposing a credible resolution to the recent conflict. The foundation stone of the (as yet uncompleted) republic memorial was…

The Nepali nation-state that emerges in the late eighteenth century, like most nations of the world, bears a definitive male signature. However, the patriarchal historiography of the nation and its subsequent contestations and problematization have seldom been attempted in the Nepali or international academia using the folk corpus in the form of Tīj songs: an archive that continues to remain in the periphery of the margin as writing continues to be privileged over speech, written literature over orature in the international academia that ‘commonsensically’ associates folklore with atavism, primitiveness, pre-historicity and rusticity. The recourse to the Nepali folk archive seems all the more urgent as the indigenous academia still predominantly controlled by the upper caste, male scholars tends to dismiss these songs as āimāiko rā͂ḍiruwāi i.e. the crone’s cry in…

Plantations share a tiny slot in the colossal Himalayan space but have encapsulated adequate scholarly attention. One among the many peculiarities of plantations that ensued from their colonial roots is attributed to the presence of the women who actually outnumbered their male counterparts as the major constituting body of the labour force. The fact that Sikkim plantations preclude a colonial legacy nevertheless they do also share the same phenomenal presence of the women workers may lead one examine the plantations of this region from gender perspective. This paper claims that the women workers of the Himalayan belt may not share a similar past, they may vary even in several other respects, but they do share a common misfortune of being a plantation woman. Drawing experiences from Darjeeling hills and Sikkim…

Background:Suicide occupies an ambiguous, politicized, and morally fraught space at the nexus of violence, voluntary death, and murder. Although largely absent from the cultural anthropological literature, recent suicide scholarly inquiry has raised deep questions about human nature, culture, and sociality. Such investigations have exposed important heterogeneity in local discourse of suicide, shaping different moralities, perceptions, and justifications for suicide deaths. Such discourse shapes the ways the living ascribe motivation and meaning to certain. Research from anthropology and allied fields indicates that predominantly western archetypes of psychopathology, which underlie suicide categorization in health systems, may distort important socio-contextual factors contributing to suicide. Recently, the World Health Organization estimated Nepal to have the third highest female suicide rate in the world, and ranks eighth highest overall. However, little research has explicitly with…

Though it is banal to say the series of earthquakes that hit Nepal this last spring will radically change the country, what this change will consist of still remains undetermined. As government-led reconstruction efforts meander forward with little noticeable effect, and as many earthquake victims learn to make do in broken houses, tents or corrugated tin structures, post-earthquake Nepal seems held within a frustrating kind of stasis, wherein temporary hardship is often impossible to distinguish from lasting consequence. Yet this sense of stasis is in part misleading. While the act of building houses remains stymied for many, reconstruction has nevertheless radically changed the relationship between everyday life and bureaucratic documents. This, I argue, is an effect of major importance. While historically the relationship between everyday life and bureaucratic documentation—including land…

Nepal is the third poorest country in Asia according to the World Bank’ standards, and the one with a wide gender gap (World Economic Forum, 2013). Therefore, the country has become a priority in the cooperation intervention, particularly in the scope of girls’ and women’ education. With a schooling enrollment tax below 70% and a 10% gap regarding gender, UNICEF has prioritized Nepal as the 25 most needed countries of intervention. Following a classical approach to development, access to schooling is understood as a basic tool for measurement as well as to promote gender equality, in line with most international programs (UNESCO, 2000; United Nations, 2010; World Economic Forum, 2013). Other critical approaches question currently used global and homogeneous indicators to conceptualize and measure inequalities and its policies, as well…

Taking the writings of three literary figures in mid twentieth century Nepal, this paper shows how a close reading of literary texts allows us to access the constitution of particular kinds of selves at a particular historical moment. Drawing on the literary texts of Balkrishna Sama and Laxmi Prasad Devkota, and Bisweshwor Prasad Koirala, well known figures in Nepali literature, the paper asks, how do these writers write about the the becoming of modern middle class Nepalis within their texts? The attempt is to suggest that different levels of mediation with notions of respectability, progress and nation are at the heart of the literary projects of these authors. The historical conditions that pushed for self-reflection, self-definition and readjustment of ideas of the self in Nepali literature were perhaps greater exposures…

Conservation, management and utilization of forest resources primarily depend upon policy provisions and legislations. However, participation and contribution of stakeholders in the whole processes, including public policy debates, is more crucial to shape forestry sector governance. This paper attempts to discuss and analyze the undercurrent discourses in Nepal's forestry sector. In doing so, this paper has attempted to discuss presence and contribution of indigenous peoples (now onwards adivasi/janajati) in overall forestry sector public discourses in Nepal. The analysis is based on seven multiple dimensions: (a) constitutional provisions; (b) provisions in policies and legislations; (c) presence in the forestry sector governing institutions; (d) number of publications; (e) number of authors appeared in the publications; (f) presence in the civil society forums and networks; and (g) presence and voices in the public…

Natural disasters like flood, earthquake and landslides are common occurrences in Nepal. Along with the socio-economic costs, the bigger disasters have more often than not brought political consequences too. We choose the 1934 earthquake to argue that revisiting such a natural disaster through archival sources will not only provide a more nuanced understanding of the event, but also compel the research community to ask questions that will have implications on how states and societies can better cope with natural disasters and what kind of bearing the nature of the state will have on the aftermath.