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, who worked with me as a research assistant, told me that Rana Bahadur did not want to talk at all unless I was willing to record the entirety of his ritual knowledge. Rana Bahadur had apparently found his interactions with previous researchers unsatisfying: foreign as well as Thangmi and non-Thangmi from India and Nepal had wanted quick summaries of “Thangmi culture,” but did not want to spend the time observing or listening to the dense complex of ritualized action and recitations that comprised it.
Rana Bahadur explained that the problem with writing was that it allowed the writer to pick and choose what to represent, whereas his oral tradition required the full recitation of the entire ritual “line” from an embodied place of knowledge that made it impossible to extract any piece from the whole. (He and other gurus regularly used the English term “line” to denote the fixed trajectory of each invocation.) Therefore, if I was to write or otherwise record (since audio and video technologies were, from his perspective, just embellished forms of writing) anything at all, I had to be prepared to record everything he knew.
I told Rana Bahadur that I was ready to listen to as much as he wished to tell me. After several afternoons following the old guru’s schedule and recording whatever he said, I seemed to pass Rana Bahadur’s test. He announced that he was ready to “open” his knowledge to me, and every ensuing recording session began with a chanted invocation in the same idiom used to propitiate deities: “[So and so—names and nationalities of previous researchers] came but did not want to listen to all of my knowledge, so I bit my tongue…. Then they went back to their own countries, and this American woman came. She wanted to listen to everything, and so I have opened my knowledge to her. I have sent as much as I know in her writing … and now the funerary rites can be done for this dead man.” I first thought that these lines were simply part of Rana Bahadur’s standard invocation. Upon analyzing them closely with Bir Bahadur, I was embarrassed to discover that I had been written into the ritual recitation itself.
Initially I removed this part of the recitation from all of my transcriptions, bracketing out Rana Bahadur’s repeated references to me as an anomaly that I did not really know how to handle. If I had become part of the chant, was what I was recording the “genuine” Thangmi culture that I sought, or was it already transformed by my very presence? I was similarly disturbed when Darjeeling’s senior guru Latte Apa—whose life story is also presented in Chapter 3—began a funerary ritual with the statement, “Because she’s here [pointing to me], this time I’ll definitely do it by the real, old rules!”
Eventually I came to see that from Rana Bahadur’s perspective, I was a useful recognizing agent. I appeared at the end of his life, reassuring him that the knowledge he had gained through years of ritual practice remained relevant in an era when much around him was changing. Even after I thought I had recorded everything he had to tell me in 1999–2000, he contacted me several times in the remaining years before he died in 2003, telling me to come to Dolakha urgently so he could tell me one more thing before he died (an eventuality for which he was carefully preparing). For Rana Bahadur, my recognition of him as a holder of culturally valuable knowledge became a personal obsession, which seemed to have little to do with a desire for political recognition. My recognition of his special relationship with the Thangmi deities who had been the primary recognizing agents throughout his life seemed to augment the feeling of self-worth that he gained from that divine relationship. Rana Bahadur never asked me to publish what I had recorded with him, or to submit it to the Nepali or Indian state (as others later would); he accepted my terms of recognition and in exchange simply asked me to write down what he knew in its entirety—to document his knowledge as a totality.
Despite the superficial differences in their approach to Thangmi culture, it was also in this holistic sense that the Thangmi ethnic activists whom I later came to know wanted me to contribute information to their efforts to portray Thangmi culture as an embodied social fact. As the late Gopal Singh, then vice president of the Bharatiya Thami Welfare Association (BTWA), phrased this sentiment, “Language is our breath, culture is the whole body,” Yet Thangmi identity, he continued, as embodied in “our pure language and pure culture,” has “not been fully brought to light.” In order to achieve these goals, Gopal Singh admonished “all the Thami-loving brothers and sisters to remain honest and loyal to this ethnicity and to collect and publish proven facts relating to the Thami” (Niko 2003:7). This echoes a similar emphasis on “scientific fact” in Thangmi publications from Nepal, where “truth” about the group and its history is depicted as the hard-won fruit of “research” on a positivist “reality.” One such essay suggests that such myths are to be discounted as “unscientific” since they are only “stories collected from the elders” rather than the results of “comprehensive research” (Samudaya [2056] 2061 VS:17).
If elders were not a legitimate source of authority on the culture and history of a community, what did this mean for my “research”? In “reality,” there was no alternative, more legitimate source of evidence for the claims that Thangmi activists in both Nepal and India wanted me to help them make. My sources—like Rana Bahadur—were
