Full Description
This volume discusses issues of tribal identity and the Maoist rebellion in the face of Hindu Kingship and caste organization. The 1990s witnessed the rise of two successive but interrelated movements that transformed society in Nepal- ethnic revivalism and the Maoist rebellion. The author, who lived for some months in central Nepal before the emergence of these movements, studied a multi-caste and a multi-ethnic village community. The site of the author's fieldwork is a place where Hindus have been in very close touch with the tribal population. As far back as the fifteenth century, Hindu rulers had forged ties with the tribal chiefs. Of the indigenous people-who form a third of the country's population-the Magars are the largest group and developed the closest relationship with Hindu rulers. The essays explore the strategies of the Magars in building relations with high-caste Hindus and how these strategies were determined unilaterally by the Hindu rulers. Over a period of time, this created ground for tribals to join hands with the Maoists to construct a model of society in opposition to caste organization and Hindu monarchy.
Contents
LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND MAP ; ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ; PUBLISHER'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ; INTRODUCTION: STEREOTYPES, ALTEROCENTRISM, AND ALTERIZATION IN NEPAL; ; 1. Spirits, Shamans, and Englishmen: Perception of the Others in Vir Caritra, a Nineteenth-Century Nepalese Novel; ; 2. Hindu Power in a Tribal Territory: The Cult of Bhume among the Magars; ; 3. The Enigmatic Pig: On Magar Participation in the State Rituals of Nepal; ; 4. Desanskritization of the Magars; Ethno-History of a Group with No History; ; 5. The Messianic and Rebel King Lakhan Thapa: Utopia and Idelology among the Magars; ; 6. The Transgressive Nature of Hindu Kingship in Nepal; ; 7. Regicide and Maoist Revolutionary Warfare in Nepal: Modern Incarnations of a Warrior Kingdom; ; 8. 'Kill one, he becomes one hundred': Martyrdom as Generative Scarifice in the Nepal People's War; Postscript ; BIBLIOGRAPHY ; INDEX
