Rituals of Ethnicity. Sara Shneiderman
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results for the performers. Many Thangmi in India told me that the experience of performance gave them a hint of what practice might be like and encouraged them to seek out practice experiences in the company of Thangmi from Nepal, which in turn gave them a different feel, at the level of the body, for what it meant to be Thangmi. Such interlinkages begin to show how ethnic actors themselves view both practice and performance as integral to their own identity, within a frame of reference that includes individual states, their policies, and the borders between them.
When I asked Laxmi, one of the choreographers of the Sikkim performance, how she and her colleagues conceptualized these dances as Thangmi ones, she shrugged her shoulders and said: “We just choose whichever steps look good. We want to create something that people will want to watch, and will make them remember, ‘those Thangmi, they are good dancers.’ That will help us.” When I pushed further to ask what made these dances particularly Thangmi, she said, “Well, we have Thangmi from Nepal in the group, and they know how to show sakali Thangmi culture, so we just trust them.” For her, the very presence of the dancers from Nepal—who were stereotyped as having some experience with practice owing to their background in rural villages and their competence in the Thangmi language—was enough to provide an aura of authenticity, although she admitted she did not know what constituted it. She was aware of the aesthetic differences between what she had created as performance and Thangmi practice as such—and their concomitant differences in efficacy. Later, however, she confided that she had been overwhelmed by the experience of the funerary rituals that a Thangmi shaman from Nepal had conducted after the recent death of her brother. This was the first time that Laxmi had participated in a full-blown Thangmi ritual practice because her family had been in the habit of using Hindu priests as officiants, as had been typical for many generations of Thangmi families in India. She was surprised by the positive effect that participating in the ritual as a practitioner, following the shaman’s instructions, had on her own fragile emotional state in the wake of her brother’s death—a stark contrast to the orchestrating role she was used to playing as choreographer.
That experience motivated her to seek out shamans from Nepal for subsequent rituals, such as her son’s haircutting ceremony. She spoke candidly about how participation in these had transformed her experience of what it meant to be Thangmi. She saw these serious, complicated practices as a separate domain from the upbeat performances she choreographed, but it was the former that energized her commitment to the BTWA’s political agenda, thereby producing the latter.
In the contemporary cross-border political and cultural economies that shape Thangmi lives, maintaining the pragmatic conditions in which practice can be reproduced necessarily entails mounting performances. Those performances, in turn, must allude to the ongoing life of practice in order to establish their own legitimacy as representations of a culture worthy of recognition. It follows that those with the sakali skills of performance cannot advance their own projects without collaboration from those with the nakali knowledge of practice, and vice versa. As Surbir would have put it, the beads of the broken necklace must be strung together. The combination of competence in both fields of ritualized action in a single individual is rare, although that is changing, as the examples of relatively young Thangmi like Rana Bahadur and Laxmi show.
For now, in order to advance their shared goals of reproducing the sacred object of Thangmi identity and securing “existential recognition” from a range of audiences, Thangmi with a diversity of life experiences—in Nepal and India, circular migrants and settled residents of both countries, young and old, gurus and activists, practitioners and performers—continue to work together in a synthetic manner to maintain the rules of conduct governing Thangmi ethnicity. This text is my part of the production, fully costumed in the garb of social scientific authority.
Chapter 3
Origin Myths and Myths of Originality
In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality. (Lévi-Strauss 1979:20)
“I need photos of very ‘original’ Thangmi,” said Paras, as he pushed a stack of photocopied documents across the table toward me, indicating the terms of our exchange. With his signature plaid cap, dark glasses, and Nehru vest stretched over an expanding paunch, the president of the BTWA was the picture of a successful civil servant at the height of his career. Paras had been at the helm of the BTWA since the early 1990s, but due to his posting in the customs office some hours away in urban Siliguri, he was rarely present at BTWA meetings or events. Other members of the organization complained that Paras received credit for successes that he contributed little toward achieving, but his status as a well-educated senior government official lent the organization an air of credibility that even Paras’s critics admitted was necessary. In much the same way, albeit on a different symbolic register, Paras now hoped that I could contribute images from my fieldwork across the border in Nepal to lend credibility to the BTWA’s application for ST status—the draft materials of which he had just given me on the condition that I contributed to the final version as requested.
“What exactly do you mean by ‘original’?” I asked. “You know,” he said, raising his eyebrows, as if the fact that I even had to ask diminished his assessment of me, “‘Natural’ types of Thangmi, with less teeth than this [he gestured to his own mouth], wide porters’ feet with no shoes, clothes woven from colorless natural fibers. But what we really need is more photos of people like that doing puja (N: rituals), at jatra (N: festivals), you know, bore (T: weddings), mumpra (T:funerals), all of those things that we can’t ‘videoalize’ so easily here.” For Paras, the term “original” conveyed the triple entendre of “authentic” (in the literal sense of “original”), “primitive” (in the sense of “originary”), and “distinctive” (in the sense of possessing “originality”). He located the source of the “original” in the poor economic conditions and ritualized lifestyle that he stereotyped as characteristic of Thangmi in Nepal. For descendants of migrants who left Nepal to settle in India several generations earlier, like Paras, Nepal served as a convenient metonym for an “original” Thangmi culture locked in a static past.
At the level of personal practice, Paras and other relatively elite BTWA leaders distanced themselves from such markers of “originality.” It was therefore a relief to them that these characteristics seemed more common among Thangmi in Nepal. However, at the level of political performance, BTWA activists sought to appropriate and package such “primitive traits” and “geographical isolation”—both perceived criteria for a successful ST application—in the service of their own agenda. For this reason, it was frustrating to them that such originality was difficult to document in Darjeeling itself. This is where my photos came in.
At first, I thought that this obsession with locating the “original” in practice and packaging it in discursive terms was exclusive to activists in India like Paras, emerging from a sense of inadequacy that they themselves did not possess such “originality.” But I soon realized that in some way or another, the concepts condensed in the root word “origin” played an important role in constituting feelings of Thangminess for almost everyone I worked with. Gurus in both Nepal and India used the terms shristi (N: creation) and utpatti (N: origin, genesis) to describe the process of ethnic emergence as recounted in their paloke, the centerpiece of Thangmi ritual practice that narrates the community’s origins. Most Thangmi laypeople were familiar with such stories, which will be recounted later in this chapter, experiencing them as a positive statement of originality that countered feelings of marginalization.
Thangmi ethnic activists in Nepal also used the concepts of “original” and “originality” regularly in their speeches and writings. They typically used the Nepali words maulik and maulikta, respectively, instead of the English terms as Paras had.1 For instance, in an argument against misrepresentations of Thangmi as a subgroup of the Tamang, the Jhapa-based activist Megh Raj concluded that “Thami is a complete ethnicity with its own original identity, existence and pride” (Niko 2003:46).2 Maulik, often translated as “authentic,” is to some extent analogous with the term sakali, as introduced in