revealing the far-reaching impacts, as well as the limits, of the discourses and practices of democracy and communism in Nepal, India, and the TAR. The ethnographic present of this book spans a decade, from 1998 to 2008, with the broader time frame primarily that of remembered history. I made special efforts to work with older people who could recount details from personal experience dating back to the early 1940s in some cases. This locates the beginning of my narrative at the very end of colonialism in India, the final phase of Rana rule in Nepal, and the years immediately preceding the assertion of Chinese control in Tibet. Supplementing ethnography with documentary evidence occasionally allows me to project further back into the past, locating the roots of political transformations that occurred during the period of my research in ongoing processes of state formation and ethnic classification that began much earlier.
In the wake of Indian independence in 1947, followed by the Constituent Assembly of 1948–1950, democracy became an important vector shaping political subjectivity across South Asia. In a novel application of a core concept of liberal democracy, the Indian constitution enshrined a commitment to the “upliftment” of marginalized communities. However, the implementation of such ideals in administrative practice remains a contentious issue, underlying debates over affirmative action, usually called “reservations” in India, which in turn point to larger questions about the nature of political subject formation.
The year 1951 saw the beginnings of Nepal’s first experiment with multiparty democracy, as activists from Nepal used their exile base in India to overthrow the Rana oligarchy in collaboration with King Tribhuvan. This first phase of democracy came to an end in 1959, when King Mahendra acceded to the throne, banning political parties and establishing the so-called panchayat partyless democracy. The 1962 constitution legally defined Nepal as a unitary nation with only one culture and one language. Much later, in 1990, the country returned to multiparty democracy, after what is commonly referred to as the first jana andolan (N: People’s Movement). Only after the 1990 constitution officially recognized Nepal as a multicultural, multilingual state (although still a Hindu one) could ethnicity and other forms of cultural difference be discussed publicly without fear of persecution.
Communism was a simultaneously important ideological and political force in both Nepal and India. It constituted a site of cross-border linkage between the two countries, as well as with China. In South Asia, communism and democracy are not always radically opposed ideologies nor sequential forms of governance, as in much of what is now referred to as the “postsocialist” world. Rather, democracy and communism are parallel, mutually influential political trajectories that intertwine in often unexpected ways over time to shape localized forms of political consciousness.
Founded in the 1920s, the Communist Party of India (CPI) played a crucial role in early nationalist politics. In the 1960s, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), split from 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
