Rituals of Ethnicity. Sara Shneiderman
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the larger party, rising to prominence in the state of West Bengal, where Darjeeling is situated. By the late 1980s, when the Gorkhaland agitation for a separate Nepali-speaking state in Darjeeling began, reopening calls for autonomy that date to the turn of the twentieth century, the CPI(M) had been in power at the state level for over a decade. The CPI(M) reign continued until 2011. Many analyses of the first Gorkhaland movement suggest that it was in fact a proxy for anti-communist mobilization in a context where it was extremely difficult to challenge the status quo (Subba 1992), highlighting the complex relationships between ethnic and class-based mobilization in this part of the world.
Also in West Bengal, communist party hardliners known as the Naxalites led a peasant insurgency in the late 1960s. Their base in the town of Naxalbari was along one of the primary vehicular routes I traveled between Nepal and Darjeeling during my fieldwork. The legacy of the Naxalbari revolt deeply influenced Thangmi who traveled regularly through the Naxalite heartland as circular migrants, just as it did the trajectories of the contemporary Maoist parties in both India and Nepal today. The former maintains a strong presence in central Indian states like Jharkhand and Chattisgarh, provoking violent responses from Indian state forces, while the latter won the 2008 elections in Nepal and led two of the country’s subsequent governments.
The Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) was founded in Calcutta in 1949. After many splits and mergers, the CPN yielded both the contemporary Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (UCPN-M)—popularly known as the Maoists—and the centrist Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML). These entities constitute two of what are commonly referred to as the three major political parties in Nepal at the time of writing. The third is the center-right Nepali Congress (NC), Nepal’s oldest party. Established in the late 1940s in northern India, with close ties to the Indian National Congress party, the NC led Nepal’s earliest democracy movements. All of these parties were forced underground during the panchayat era.
In the late 1970s to early 1980s, there was a brief moment of greater liberalism around a constitutional referendum called by King Birendra. During that period, activists from the CPN-UML traveled to the Thangmi regions of central-eastern Nepal to establish local bases (Shneiderman 2010). Their efforts were brutally quashed in a 1984 police massacre in the Thangmi village of Piskar, which, as detailed in Chapter 5 and elsewhere (Shneiderman 2009), remains a crucial moment in the formation of both ethnic and class consciousness for many Thangmi. This local event was part of the larger trend of state repression across the country through the 1980s, which eventually led to the democratic revolution of the early 1990s (Hachhethu 2002).
By the time I first traveled to Nepal in 1994, the country had the world’s only democratically elected communist government under a Hindu constitutional monarchy. This period was short-lived, as the communist government lasted for only nine months before a vote of no confidence led to one of the countless political reshufflings throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The complexity of the country’s political landscape baffled me, and my initial research focus was on questions of ethnic and religious identity, not political mobilization. As I began working on what I imagined to be “basic ethnographic research” with the Thangmi while on a Fulbright fellowship in 1999, the linkages between these superficially separate domains became increasingly apparent.
I was not the only outsider visiting Thangmi villages at that time. Maoist activists had launched the People’s War in western Nepal in 1996 and by the late 1990s were scoping out prospective base areas in the east. My encounters with them in Dolakha and Sindhupalchok significantly shaped my research. Documenting the early phases of Maoist mobilization in the region became an important project, leading to several publications in which I and my coauthors described the experience of insurgency at the village level, as well as its implications for us as scholars (Pettigrew and Shneiderman 2004; Pettigrew, Shneiderman, and Harper 2004; Shneiderman and Turin 2004; Shneiderman 2009, 2010). Yet I remained committed to the question of Thangmi ethnicity and its absence from the ethnographic record that had drawn me to these villages in the first place. This book therefore does not substantively describe Nepal’s Maoist movement, its ideology, or its operations. Yet the Thangmi story presented here tells us much about the context in which that movement emerged and the larger set of ongoing political transformations of which the Maoist insurgency was just one part.
By the time I returned to South Asia in 2004 for doctoral research, civil conflict was at its height. King Gyanendra Shah imposed authoritarian rule through a royal coup in 2005. The combination of Maoist armed insurgency and popular protest led to the second jana andolan (People’s Movement) in 2006. Later that year, the king was stripped of his powers (although the dynasty was only formally deposed in 2008), and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement officially ended the conflict. The interim constitution of 2007 declared Nepal a secular federal democratic republic, building upon long-standing Maoist demands for both a Constituent Assembly and federal restructuring along ethnic lines. I watched members of the Thangmi community vote in the 2008 Constituent Assembly elections, which yielded a victory if not an outright majority for the Maoists, among whom was the first ever elected Thangmi parliamentarian.
In late 2007, just as Nepal was gearing up for Constituent Assembly elections, a renewed movement for a separate state of Gorkhaland was launched in Darjeeling. This time under the leadership of the Gorkhaland Janamukti Morcha (GJM) rather than the Gorkhaland National Liberation Front (GNLF), which had led the agitation in the late 1980s, activists demanded a separate state within the Indian federation, free from Calcutta’s control. Encouraged by the creation of new states like Jharkhand and Uttarakhand in the early 2000s, the agitators claimed that the DGHC established as part of the resolution to the 1980s movement did not have the teeth to deliver genuine autonomy as promised. The year 2011 saw a sea change in West Bengal’s political landscape, as the communist government finally fell to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress after thirty-three years of rule. Soon after election results were in, the GJM engaged in extended tripartite negotiations with the center and the new state government, which led to the formation of the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration. At the time of writing, the territorial and political limits of this body remain unclear.
Over time, Thangmi have participated in all of the parties and movements described here. As detailed in Chapter 5, the formation of ethnic consciousness has been critically linked with that of class consciousness, but often in unexpected ways that challenge received ideas about the relationships between these two forms of mobilization. Just as communism and democracy have been intertwined on the macro level of national politics in South Asia, ideas about class and ethnicity have been deeply interconnected at the micro level of Thangmi experience. Neither paradigm for understanding social difference and inequality exists in isolation (Lawoti 2003; Tamang 2006), nor is there a teleology in which one leads inevitably to the other. Rather than engaging in over-deterministic arguments about whether class or ethnic mobilization is more effective in challenging ingrained inequalities like those from which Thangmi have unquestionably suffered, here I demonstrate how each of these paradigms has differently deployed “the currency of culture” (Cattelino 2008) for political purposes, in the process contributing to the affective production of identity.
Understanding Thangmi ethnicity formation over the longue durée yields important insights into how ethnic claims—whether in the context of demands for identity-based federalism in restructuring Nepal or campaigns for tribal recognition and the state of Gorkhaland in India—come to be lived, embodied, and felt deeply by the people who make them. This window into ethnicity-in-the making for one small group at a particular geographical, historical, and political conjuncture tells us much about how and why the substantive content of ethnic consciousness is produced in general, and suggests that states and policy makers would do well to consider the affective dimensions of this process that make it such a compelling force for mobilization.
A Total Social Fact
My first serious Thangmi interlocutor in Nepal was Rana Bahadur, whose life story is presented in Chapter 3. This senior guru was a vast repository of cultural, historical, and ritual knowledge, but he was at first reluctant to speak with me. Bir Bahadur,