Being Nepali Across Borders

This research for the book began with a series of questions. The attempt to answer these question entailed long journeys, the shedding of my inhibitions and preconceptions, a great deal of listening and conversations over hot water, tea, and millet beer (tongba). These journeys became more about understanding people lives and developing friendships and less about whether their answers could be used as ‘data’. These experiences were important in obliterating conceptual as well as cultural borders. I travelled through three different political units, but these areas were an extension of the same hills, inhabited by the same ethnic groups with shared linguafranca, familiar social configurations, similar socio-economic issues, and identical approaches to resolving them. Sikkim, Darjeeling, and east Nepal are geo-political borderlands, but given their centrality to the history of people, religion, culture, and politics in the region, they can be best defined as cultural cross-roads with historical and unique connections to different countries of the region. The book was an attempt to portray the lives and politics of the people entangled within these cultural cross-roads.

In the case of the peoples of the eastern Himalaya, weak intra-ethnic boundaries, linguistic and cultural amalgamation of different ethnic groups, geographical interconnectedness, and trans-border cultural contact have all combined to enable the active re-construction of ethnic culture and history. The malleability of ethnic identity and its increasing importance in the public sphere has converted Nepali ethnic identity into an important political resource. This process has been facilitated by institutional changes and the inculcation of democracy as a standard political practice in the eastern Himalaya. The result has been the proliferation of new bases of collective action. This instrumental use of ethnic identity is heightened by the fact that there is not a level playing field in a region, which is experiencing accelerated changes in social mobility. In this context, it is the aspirations of individuals and groups that are, in turn, re-defining state-society relations.

Understanding ethnic politics, therefore, necessitates a contextual appreciation of the socio-economic and political structures, and their apparent disconnect with the existential realities and aspirations of the people. It is this disconnect, in fact, which ultimately fuels collective action.