Dialect Anthropol (2009) 33:365–381 DOI 10.1007/s10624-009-9136-3
From ancestral conflicts to local empowerment: two narratives from a Nepalese community Anne de Sales
Published online: 27 October 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
Abstract This article concerns the first region that the Maoists declared to be their base area, in the western part of Nepal. It examines how the 10 years of insurrection are reconstructed through two narratives by non-aligned villagers from the same community. These accounts concern two different phases of the conflict. In the first account, the violent irruption of the security forces into the village turned a spotlight on the structural features and historical conditions which made the community vulnerable to the outside intervention, whether by the rebels or by the state. The second narrative illustrates the obverse side of the same community: its capacity to stand up to oppression on the occasion of a Maoist ban on a sacrifice to the local god. The juxtaposition of the two narratives reveals a process of political maturation characterised by a critical analysis of the past and a nascent confidence in the expression of needs and rights. Keywords Nepal Kham-Magar Maoist Conflict Narrative Empowerment Local community Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. Mao Zedong National history and local communities This chapter concerns the first region that the Maoists declared to be their base area (adhar kshetra ilaka), in the western part of Nepal.1 The upper hills of northern 1
This was later extended to the three adjacent districts of Salyan, Pyuthan and Dang. Further away from the core ‘‘base area’’ is the model ilaka or ‘‘model region’’.
A. de Sales (&) Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative)-Paris Ouest Nanterre La De´fense, Paris, France e-mail:
[email protected]
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Rolpa and eastern Rukum, now known as the ‘red hills’, have remained the ultimate Maoist refuge, their historical heartland.2 The purpose of this contribution is to examine how the last 10 years of insurrection are reconstructed through two narratives by non-aligned villagers from the same community, some of whom I have known for 25 years, since my first period of fieldwork in the area. These narratives concern two different phases of the conflict; they show how the priorities and tactics of the Maoists changed over the years, and how the community was transformed in response to these developments. Although this region is systematically presented as a Maoist stronghold, reactions of the population to the insurgency are by no means homogeneous. Before proceeding to a detailed presentation of the two narratives, therefore, a few words need to be said about the area as a whole and the particular features of some of the localities it comprises.
The Kham-Magar and the Maoist insurrection: a fluid situation The region under scrutiny is the homeland of the Kham-Magar, a minority of about 40,000 people within the larger Magar group, the most populous ethnic minority in Nepal.3 They live in about thirty compact settlements alongside two service castes, the Blacksmiths and the Tailors-Musicians. These Kham-speaking localities are organised into 14 Village Development Committees, which in 2002 were chosen by the Maoists to form a ‘76th district’4 or ‘special district’ (bisyas jilla), with the aim of developing it into an autonomous region. This project was realised two years later, when the Magarat Autonomous Region (Swayatta Magarat Pradesh) was declared on 9 January 2004 in the village of Thabang, which features in revolutionary propaganda as the Maoist capital. The first question raised by this situation concerns the specific role of the Kham-Magar in the Maoist revolution. It is tempting to jump to conclusions and see this ethnic population as being at the root of the insurrection. This is no doubt what the Maoist leaders mean when they refer to Magar culture as the cradle of ‘original communism’, thus providing a label of authenticity for their movements in rural areas. However, recent works show that the implanting of communism in the districts of Rukum and Rolpa started in the 1950s, right after the opening up of the country following the end of the Rana dictatorship, and that, until recently, ethnic sentiment has been surprisingly absent in the political mobilisation of the Kham-Magar.5 As stated above, the commitment of this population to the revolution is far from being uniform within the base area. The media have focused on Thabang—like the Maoists themselves, who recently published a historical monograph on this village: 2
This is confirmed by Ogura, who has been covering Maoist activities in the country, and particularly in this area, for the last 15 years (2007, 2008).
3
The 2001 census reports 1.6 million Magar, about 7% of the population.
4
The country was divided into 75 districts following King Mahendra’s 1962 administrative reforms.
5
For the historiography of the communist presence in the area see Ogura (2007: 451–466); for a more cursory account see also Gersony (2003: 23–28). The question of ethnic sentiment in relation to Maoism among the Kham-Magar is developed in de Sales (2000, 2009).
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Krantiko Killa (The Fort of the Revolution) (Bhandari 1996). The rebels secured a strong position in a few other VDCs in the region,6 but the situation is much more fluid in other villages,7 where they confront daily resistance on a variety of fronts. The Maoists are conceived of as outsiders, even though some of them belong to the village. It seems that a determining factor in the early rooting of the revolutionary movement in certain villages rested on the presence of a charismatic leader who acted as an intermediary between the Party and the local community. A brief historical survey of two of the Maoist strongholds in the Kham-Magar area will illustrate this assertion. In Thabang, communism was first introduced in the mid1950s by a communist leader from a neighbouring district, Mohan Bikram Singh, and his group of activists and schoolteachers who kept visiting the village throughout the Panchayat period. But, the exceptional success achieved in Thabang by the Communists in the first general elections in 1959, then by the political wing of the Maoists in 1991,8 was due to a village leader, Barman Budha. Over 30 years of underground activities Barman succeeded in ‘growing’ communism locally and creating a consensus among the majority of the villagers—at the price of a minority of opponents having to leave the locality in the course of the insurrection. The brutality of the state’s response could not but deepen villagers’ opposition to the government.9 In Mahat, a neighbouring village located no more than 3 h’ walk away from Thabang, a communist activist known as Master Bahadur Shrestha was instrumental in implanting communism in the district of Rukum. His father was a Newar shopkeeper who had settled in Mahat and married locally. After finishing school, Master Bahadur studied in India, where he became acquainted with Communism. Back home, he was made headmaster of the high school in the district headquarters. His political teaching was also inspired by Mohan Bikram Singh and he influenced many schoolteachers and students in the district. He is proudly evoked by the inhabitants of Mahat, who claim that they owe him the fact that they are politically ‘‘aware’’ (cetan). Here also the random killing by the security forces of 26 alleged Maoists among the villagers in the course of a counterinsurgency operation in 2002 radicalised the position of the inhabitants in favour of the rebels.
Two narratives, two phases of the conflict The two narratives that follow take place in the village of Nakhar10 (south Rukum), where, contrary to the cases of Thabang and Mahat, there is no clear leader and 6
Uwa in Rolpa district, Mahat and Hukam-Maikot in the south and in the north of Rukum district, respectively.
7
Taka-Sera, Kol and Lukum in the district of Rukum are very large settlements where the situation is far from being homogeneous.
8
For a good overview of the history of the Communist Party in Nepal, see Thapa with Sijapati (2003: 20–32) and Hachhethu (2009).
9
This generally admitted view is developed by Karki and Seddon (2003: 13–37). Concerning specifically the village of Thabang, see the references in note 3.
10 The names of the village and the people—apart from well-known politicians and leaders—involved in the two narratives are pseudonyms.
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where no village headman has ever been elected more than twice. One local schoolteacher, Jiwan, acts as a mediator between the villagers on the one hand and both the state (police, army and development institutions) and the Maoists on the other. Following Master Bahadur’s teaching, Jiwan was a sympathiser of the Revolutionary communist party (Masal) that rejected the Maoist path of violence. His personal convictions did not prevent three of his former students from assuming important responsibilities in the Maoist movement. One of them, Basanta, led a battalion in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and will feature below in the second story. From this large village of more than 3,000 inhabitants, no clear political affiliation had emerged by the time of the event. In an article written soon after the beginning of the insurrection, I suggested that ancestral conflicts made the communities vulnerable to the ambitions of the political parties, who were quick to exploit the situation to their advantage, and that this may have contributed to the swift rooting of the Maoist movement in the area.11 The first narrative presents a case study of such multilayered local conflicts. Focusing initially on a violent and traumatic intervention in the village by the security forces in 2001, the narrators were led to retrace the history of these conflicts, suggesting a causal link between the two. This event takes place in the first half of the Maoist insurrection and reveals the structural fragility of the community. The second story, by contrast, shows how 5 years later the population learned how to question Maoist control, especially over the community’s ritual activities. The second half of the Maoist occupation sees the rebels’ will to uproot ‘bad practices’ and ‘blind beliefs’ in their base area in the name of the Cultural Revolution (samskritik andolan). This is set against the background of a complex articulation of several levels of governance that the Maoists established in this region from 2001. A glimpse into the Maoist politico-administrative organisation in turn reveals institutional weaknesses of which the population could take advantage. The two accounts therefore highlight two different phases of the Maoist movement in the same community, and suggest that in spite of the obvious downfalls of the insurrection, which put the population to the test, the villagers also acquired confidence in their ability to stand up to the rebels. I have reconstructed these two narratives on the basis of several accounts that I collected in the course of two visits to the village in 2003 and 2006 and during further meetings with protagonists in Kathmandu, and also in Oxford with an exserviceman of the British Gurkha Brigade.12 The narratives are not used here as objective descriptions of the events they relate, but rather as a means of understanding these events as the narrators themselves made sense of them.
11
de Sales (2000: 62–65).
12
The main narrators of the first story are Jiwan, the schoolteacher mentioned above, and his wife, who happens to be the sister of one of the two protagonists of the conflict. The British Gurkha is Jiwan’s younger brother. The other protagonist of the conflict, Ram Kumar, was my host in the village in the eighties. I met him again in Kathmandu several times, the last time just before his death in 2003. The other narrators include Ram Kumar’s widow; the schoolteacher’s cousin who accompanied me on my trip to the village in 2003; a shaman and his wife, and my porter on the way. They are all Kham-Magar, in their forties and fifties.
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Through ancestral conflicts: the narrative The history of the village conflicts is presented here in the first section. Then, the story develops around a more recent and bitter conflict between two protagonists. In the third section, what in normal circumstances would probably have remained an ordinary village dispute takes a dramatic turn in the context of the insurrection. Two factions in the village The landmark of the people’s upheaval of 1990 is often called ‘‘Democracy’’ (loktantra) in village speech. This is how I was told that, before Democracy, there were two factions in the village. One was led by the village headman (pradhan pancha), Ram Kumar Gharti, the other by Karka Bahadur Pun, a local schoolmaster. Both belonged to relatively wealthy families, who in the past, before the Panchayat reforms of 1962, were traditional office-holders. Thus, Ram Kumar was the son of the last tax collector (jimmawal), while Karka Bahadur the son of the last village headman (mukhiya). The two families intermarry or, more precisely, the daughters of Ram Kumar’s lineage marry into Karka Bahadur’s lineage. This formerly prescribed form of marriage of a man with the daughter of his classificatory maternal uncle is based on a complementary opposition between the two lineages of wife givers and wife takers. It is still valued and serves to structure the largely endogamous Kham-Magar communities.13 During the 30 years of the Panchayat period, the two Nakhar leaders were courted by politicians competing to occupy the only seat allocated to Rukum district in the National Council (Rastriya Panchayat), the Parliament of the time. The scene was dominated by three descendants of Thakuri kings, through ever-changing strategies of alliances against one another.14 During the 10 years preceding the multiparty system, Gopalji Jang Shaha and Druba Bikram Shaha occupied the Rukum seat in turn. Ram Kumar supported the former, while Karka Bahadur supported the latter. There was no reason for the local leaders supporting their respective patrons other than the necessity of belonging to a faction in order to participate in local politics. The parliamentary elections in 1991 shuffled the cards but the same factionalism was at work. The Nakhar leaders withdrew their support for the two politicians, who in the meantime joined political parties: Gopalji the Nepali Congress and Druba Bikram the National Democratic Party or RPP (Rastriya Prajatantra Party), which was in favour of the king. Ram Kumar campaigned for the United People’s Front, the political wing of the Maoists, which won one of the two seats that were at that time allocated to Rukum district. Although he used to walk around with a tape recorder playing revolutionary songs at full blast, he was unable to raise much enthusiasm on the part of his co-villagers.15 Karka Bahadur supported the more 13
On this subject, see Oppitz 1988 and my monograph (Sales 1991: 47–80).
14
See Ogura on the political competition of the three Shahs in the Panchayat period (2007: 445–450).
15
This scene took place in 1994 and is described at the beginning of an article devoted to the study of these songs (de Sales 2003).
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popular Communist Party or United Marxist Leninists (UML), and rejected the path to violence. In a radically different political landscape, the two local leaders kept the village divided into two factions. Ram Kumar’s arrest and false accusation In 1996, Ram Kumar left the village with a dozen porters from Nakhar, carrying on their backs loads of hashish to be sold in the bazaar of Nepalganj, close to the Indian border. However, just at the point where the mountain trails meet the road, in the southern district of Dangdeukhuri, the convoy was arrested by the police. Asked where his goods came from, Ram Kumar denounced Karka Bahadur as his supplier and gave a dozen other names, all friends of his enemy. Karka Bahadur was subsequently summoned to the police station in Gorahi. Friends and family begged him not to go, seeing in this denunciation a clear sign of revenge on the part of Ram Kumar. They also knew that, quite apart from being involved in the illegal hashish trade, the Nakharles would be suspected of Maoist sympathies—Rukum district was known as the rebels’ heartland—and that the risk of being jailed was high. Karka Bahadur nonetheless turned this into a point of honour and insisted on going to the police with six of his friends. As an educated man, he trusted that he would be able to defend himself. At the moment of departure, a little drunk, he even made a few jokes, convinced that justice would be dispensed and Ram Kumar would be making a fool of himself. However, the villagers’ fears were confirmed: the two parties were both jailed for 2 years. A large group of Nakharles from Karka Bahadur’s faction subsequently threw stones at Ram Kumar’s house, destroying a part of it. In response, Ram Kumar looked for protection from the royalist party—he might have resumed his relationship with Druba Bikram whom he had supported under the Panchayat. In the course of a brief visit back to his village, he even fixed the RPP’s flag on the roof of his house. But he stopped living there, staying instead in the district headquarters or in Kathmandu, where I met him again in 2003. The ex-village headman, son of the last Jimmawal, was a shadow of his former self, having failed in his political ambitions and lost all credibility in the eyes of his community. He died of cancer in 2006 and his funeral took place in Dang, where his brother, who had retired from the Indian army, had settled with his family 20 years previously. The security forces in Nakhar Karka Bahadur’s fate was hardly any more enviable. Released from jail, he was asked by the Maoist authorities to preside over the first ‘village people’s government’ (gaun jana sarkar) in 1999–2000. As already noted, he was a supporter of the communists (UML) and did not share the rebels’ choice of conducting a protracted war, but he felt that he could not refuse. The following year, just after the king sacked the prime minister and declared a state of emergency, a sizeable detachment of security forces—more than a thousand according to villagers—came from the south, all the way from the district of Arghakhanchi, searching for Maoists. Surprised by the military troop at a bend in the path, four
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young Blacksmith girls ran away. Soldiers fired at them on the grounds that only Maoists would run to escape. One fell down wounded. The story goes that a soldier, seeing that her life could not be saved, ended her suffering and finished her off. Pharki Kamini was 17-years old. After this introduction, the troops settled down in the village for their morning meal. The leaders stayed at Jiwan’s, the largest house in the village. In the meantime, Karka Bahadur, who was said to have been a little drunk again, was hiding in a house on a slope overhanging the village. The soldiers summoned a large gathering of villagers and enquired about Maoists: who were they? Where were they? Sentries with binoculars looked around carefully. The story goes that Karka Bahadur was so nervous that he could not help peeping out of his hiding place. One sentry’s attention was drawn to his strange behaviour; he was caught, then searched. Bills of goods transported by mules from the bazaar were found in his pockets and taken as evidence of his affiliation with the rebel movement. He was then interrogated, beaten and tortured for several hours until he gave the names of three members of the village people’s government. Satisfied with their capture, the soldiers decided to pursue their route towards the villages of Taka and Sera, a short day’s walk towards the north. The four Nakharle prisoners joined two other handcuffed villagers whom the soldiers had previously caught in the village of Jelbang, on their way up. When the troops approached the pass leading to the next valley, the two prisoners were shot dead. Their corpses were left behind, without burial. On reaching their destination, the Nakharles were locked up in the school at Sera, while the soldiers went off looking for more ‘‘Maoists’’: two women coming back from relatives were stopped on the way and four more villagers arrested. It seems that only one of these new prisoners was a Maoist supporter from Taka: a picture of him, his face covered with red powder, was regarded by members of the squad as evidence of his affiliation to the movement. The soldiers decided to leave the village at night with their ten prisoners. From this point versions of the story differ, but all agree that the Maoist sympathiser was separated from the group and killed while the others managed to escape. The favourite version is that one of the soldiers, a KhamMagar from Rolpa, took pity on the prisoners and at one point suggested to them secretly in Kham, which the other soldiers could not understand, that they run away. Karka Bahadur, who has been seriously afflicted by the bad treatment he had received and was anyway handicapped by poor eyesight, fell from a cliff and died. The others found their way back to their respective villages. The day after these murders, Radio Nepal announced that ten Maoists had been killed while trying to escape. The Nakharles buried their dead: the young blacksmith girl in the cemetery of the village, the two prisoners from Jelbang at the place known as Sungure, where they had been killed, and finally Karka Bahadur, at the spot where his body was found by a shepherd a few weeks later.16 Taking advantage of this opportunity to swell their ranks, the Maoists made them ‘‘martyrs’’ of the Revolution: the police practice of branding as Maoists individuals with no such
16
The Maoist supporter from Taka was buried by his co-villagers.
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affiliation ironically plays into the hands of the insurgents themselves. Whatever the real position of the local population may be on this matter is irrelevant to either side.
Commentary Local conflicts and national politics This account shows how an opposition in the village between two lineages of prePanchayat office-holders continued at the level of the district during the Panchayat period. This conflict between the two village leaders was carried on under new labels after the restoration of a multiparty system through an opposition between the Maoists and the Communists (UML). Factionalism has been analysed as the modality of political action in the hills; ideological justifications come second to this binary mechanism of affiliation to opposed coalitions.17 However, the conflicts that had been locally circumscribed were now part of larger networks that lay beyond the control of the local actors. In the first part of the story, Ram Kumar’s accusation against Karka Bahadur made public a village conflict between two factions. In the context of the insurrection, the situation was subsequently used by both the police, as suggested in the second part of the story, and by the Maoists who asked Karka Bahadur to chair the first village people’s government. Following the damage to his house by Karka Bahadur’s faction, Ram Kumar sought protection from the royalist party. It is not certain whether his denunciation of his enemy as being the chairman of the Maoist village people’s government was a token of his goodwill, but it is likely. When the security forces stormed into the village looking for Maoists, it is also likely that they knew whom to look for; more likely in any case than the scenario of Karka Bahadur giving himself away by popping up from his hiding place like an irresponsible drunkard. The ancestral conflicts of which the two local leaders were the most recent avatars opened the door to the greater intervention of both the state and the rebels. This story, involving two prestigious families whose opposition has partly oriented the history of the village, was obviously meaningful for the villagers themselves and was related to me on several occasions. The accounts would be accompanied by contradictory comments; although, the division of the village into two factions obviously predated the multiparty system, ‘Democracy’ was nevertheless accused of generating conflicts within the community and of causing rifts in lineages as a result of party politics: ‘Before we were all brothers, now brothers are enemies.’ At the same time, it was believed that before Democracy, villagers had no idea of the collective good. They were trying to get by as best they could, their horizon limited to their own family, lineage or locality. Now, by contrast, ‘people who understand’—meaning those with a little education and interest in politics— knew what opposition (birod) meant and felt ready to fight for a better world. This opposition is not of the structural kind that characterised conflicts between lineages 17
For the most recent analysis of such systems in Nepal, see Ramirez (2000: 243–264 and 281–289).
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and factions, but points to a new, emerging form of political action such as activism.18 For some of their co-villagers, the deaths of Ram Kumar and Karka Bahadur may have represented the disappearance of a world for which they felt no nostalgia. Others may have preferred to rejoice in the marriage, in 2007, of Karka Bahadur’s son with a daughter of Ram Kumar’s paternal uncle. In actualising the ancestral matrimonial alliance between the two lineages, this marriage brought out the traditional resources that the society had for the temporary resolution of the conflicts it had generated. A contrasted use of violence There is a contrasted use of violence by the security forces and by the Maoists. The story recounted above shows soldiers on a punitive expedition, searching for almost any victim who would enable them to show their superiors results after their return. Through torture, they obtained a few names and went in search of the ‘Maoists’ who had thus been denounced. Most often the people actually involved in the movement had left before their arrival. The state’s forces, finding themselves empty-handed, then looked for any alternative opportunity to fulfil their mission. By contrast, villagers can explain, if not exonerate, murders perpetrated by Maoists. These killings are presented as a response to a betrayal. Nobody was killed by Maoists in the village of Nakhar, but the two Maoist executions I was told of were understood as acts of revenge, reprisals against informers who had led the police to murder villagers. In both cases, it was also specified that the victims had had their throats cut with the emblematic dagger of the hill population, the khukuri. The explanation put forward for this particular method is that Maoists were short of munitions and wished to save their bullets for encounters with the army or the police. However, the descriptions of these killings could leave no doubt about the impact they had on the population: one victim had his throat cut only partially, in order to ensure a slow death, while the other first had his thighs skinned. The security forces obtain denunciations through torture, which is notably practised in secret, and their killings are seen as sheer persecution. The Maoists by contrast tend to stage torture as part of an exemplary process of dissuasion against spying, and their murders are understood as fair reprisals. Although the Maoists in charge of the killing may be unknown to the villagers, investigations would reveal how much these murders are woven into the social fabric of the communities and therefore make sense to the villagers, in contrast to the killings perpetrated by the security forces. The absurd murder of the young Blacksmith girl showed the soldiers’ incompetence in their search for Maoists, their nervousness and, most probably, their fear.19 The courage of the Maoist fighters, by contrast, is often 18
See Gellner and Karki (2007) for sociology of activism in Nepal.
19
Numerous reports remark on the poor equipment and the lack of proper training of the police in the first phase of the insurrection. The security forces, involved in the event related here, were better trained, but it shows nevertheless that these counterinsurgency operations were often characterised by panic and unnecessary brutality.
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praised by villagers. The Maoists do not fear anything; their use of violence is not a reaction to fear but an expression of their power. The first narrative, which concerns the initial phase of the insurrection and its local rooting, is dominated by physical violence or the fear of physical violence. However, villagers are also subjected to a more subtle form of violence concerning the image that others have of them to the extent of seeing no alternative, if the peace fails, to taking to the jungle or hiding in the city. While they are not rebels themselves, they are convinced that they would be seen as such and persecuted nevertheless. This is why his friends tried to dissuade Karka Bahadur from going to the police station in Gorahi. They knew that, coming from Rukum district, he would be cast as a Maoist and subsequently jailed. The second narrative will illustrate further this resentment in the face of prejudice that characterises the Kham-Magar’s relationship with the outside world. The episode in question occurred in the later phase of the insurrection when the Maoists, better established in their base area, felt they could undertake the re-education of the ‘‘backward peasants’’ in a more systematic manner. In spite of the lengthy writings on the necessity of replacing the ‘‘culture of the oppressors’’ with a ‘‘new scientific culture’’, the Maoist cadres in charge of implementing the Cultural Revolution ended up facing ideological contradictions to which they could find no better response than arbitrary sanctions. This second narrative concerns a village festival involving a blood sacrifice that was banned by the people’s village government on the grounds that it was a barbaric activity.
The Maoists and the ‘backward’ peasants: the narrative An occupied country This account is centred on a retired British army Gurkha in his forties who was returning to his village in the summer of 2005, at a time when the Maoists were establishing the Magarant Autonomous Region, holding elections at village and district levels.20 Saha is the younger brother of Jiwan, the schoolteacher mentioned above. The Maoists stored munitions in Saha’s old house, which had been empty since he had settled in Kathmandu with his family. One day, the house was blown up after someone mishandled the explosives. This accident encouraged Saha to go back to the village. While he had previously feared that the local Maoist authorities would ask him for substantial donations as a wealthy Gurkha pensioner, he felt now in an advantageous position to face the rebels, who were willing to organise collective labour to rebuild his house. From the moment of his arrival in the bazaar of Sullichaur, he saw the PLA parading through the streets with their guns, as if they were in a conquered land, while the Nepalese army was garrisoned in a camp no more than half an hour away. On his way up to the village, he had to pass two Maoist checkpoints, in Kasala and Uwa. The rebels let people go to the villages freely but travellers needed to show a 20
See Ogura (2008) for a detailed description of these elections.
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pass from the local people’s government in order to leave the district or to go to the headquarters. Identity cards and passports are obtained at the headquarters, and the Maoists’ concern was to prevent outmigration. Concerned by the history of his village and aware of its cultural wealth, Saha had had a retirement project to record local ceremonies and festivals. He organised his visit to coincide with two important festivals that he wanted to film with his new camera. The first is in honour of the god of the soil, Bhume, under the patronage of a notable, while the second is said to drive away the witch of white clay, under the aegis of the shamans. Both festivals are celebrated in order to secure the prosperity of the place. The ‘boycott’ of the dances It is customary for the young boys and girls to spend the night before the sacrifice to Bhume at the top of the hill that overhangs the village. They bring down pure water and wild flowers with which the sacrificial ram will be worshipped before being beheaded as an offering to the god of the place. This is not the place to provide a symbolic analysis of this festival,21 but it is worth adding that, after the sacrifice, villagers of all ages start dancing the famous Bhume steps and keep dancing until it starts raining. The dances, which are performed to the accompaniment of the drums and oboes of the Damai (Tailor-Musicians), may last several days and are the pride of the villagers. When the young people came down from the pastures that morning, numbering more than a hundred, the village people’s government banned the sacrifice to Bhume on the grounds that the ritual killing of animals is a barbaric and backward practice, though dancing was allowed. A long debate took place, and the president of the village people’s government ended the villagers’ protestations by threatening that the ram sacrifice would be at their own risk. The villagers decided to ‘boycott’ (sic) the festival: no sacrifice, no dancing. A few days later, Santos Budha, the chief of the people’s government of the Magarat Autonomous Region, came to visit. A native of Thabang, he had been a schoolteacher in Nakhar and knew Saha. When he apologised for the loss of the house, Saha seized the opportunity to question him about the banning of the festival: ‘Why do you destroy our culture? How shall we be recognised if we lose our festivals? Why don’t you let people enjoy themselves?’ Santos explained: ‘We tell our cadres to remove bad habits and carry out cultural revolution. We give them some power to do this. But they do not understand, they are not educated and instead of frightening the sheep they kill it [instead of acting gently, they are too harsh]. More competent people are given higher responsibilities in the Party.’ Santos agreed that villagers would be allowed to honour Bhume as usual the following year. The village festival called Rankhe (‘Torch’) or jhankri mela (‘shamanic gathering’), which is held a month later, should feature an assemblage of about twenty shamans, one per lineage, to drive away the witch of the white clay. However, the Maoist rule was that no more than three shamans could perform 21
See de Sales (1998).
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together and for no longer than a day. The reason given for this is that having a large number of ritual specialists involves unnecessary expenses, a high consumption of alcohol and many chicken sacrifices. The celebration of the shamanic ceremony was therefore seriously questioned when a brigade commander of the PLA, Basanta, alias Marshal, arrived in Nakhar to spend a few days with his family, having left his troops to the south of Rolpa. Basanta or the beginning of a legend Basanta had been a former pupil of Jiwan and was now in his late twenties. His father was educated and used to act as village treasurer. His elder brother, Cinte, was a sub-inspector in the police and was posted in Taka-Sera after the launching of the People’s War while he himself joined the rebels. Cinte was now retired from the police and was back in the village where he had the reputation of being a good-fornothing. By contrast, Basanta was both respected and feared. He was said to be brave, fair but hard, ‘like Hitler’. He had taken part in numerous battles with the army and the police and had often been wounded, needing to take analgesics to soothe his chronic pain. I was often told how clever Basanta was and how he could escape in any circumstances. Once he was captured and taken to the police station in Mahat—this was before he joined the PLA. Although he was handcuffed, he managed to jump from the first floor and hide among the tall stems of maize. He threw one of his shoes in one direction to attract the attention of the police, leaving him the time to run away and lose his pursuers. On another occasion, seeing the police approaching the village, he ran towards the river and threw his jacket into the water, then his shirt, then his trousers and all his clothes until he was left with only a pair of underwear. A group of women were on their way to the field and gave him the opportunity to hide among them. He then found the favourable moment to disappear safely into the forest. These anecdotes are the elements of a legend in the making. Saha joined Basanta in a game of chess and told him about the conversation he had had with Santos and the latter’s promise to let villagers perform the festival as usual. Basanta agreed on the need to protect local customs, but added: ‘Nobody from this village is going to join the Party. The Party does not think much of the Nakharles and blames me for not recruiting more people. Several times I have had to save the village from the Party’s anger. The Maoists could have been much harsher with people here. I argue that our villagers give good support when it is needed.’ Before he left, Basanta summoned a meeting at which the president of the people’s government apologised publicly for the ban on the sacrifice to Bhume and Basanta announced that Rankhe would be performed as usual. That day, seventeen shamans and their assistants gathered at the place known as the Bhume path. While they were singing and beating their drums, members of the militia were walking up and down, carrying their guns across their shoulders, but they did not interrupt the performance. Seeing Saha filming the scene, a militiaman started up a conversation and explained that he and his colleagues had been sent by the ‘area in charge’ of the Party to make sure that the shamans would not perform their ceremony, but that the order had been changed to let them gather as usual.
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Commentary The first narrative revolved around the rooting of the Maoist movement in a community made vulnerable by ancestral conflicts. Saha’s account, by contrast, reveals the overwhelming Maoist presence weighing on villagers’ everyday life, and the intransigent response of a population that ended up sticking together. It may be appropriate to recall here the quotation from Mao that provides the epigraph to this chapter: if indeed oppression elicits resistance, it also helped the community to paper over its cracks when confronting what was perceived as an outside threat against its traditions. The complex articulation of several levels of governance This second narrative clearly depicts an occupied country: checkposts, travel passes and armed soldiers parading in the bazaar offer ample evidence that this was the case in 2005. To this, the taxes levied on all sources of income should be added. These were mainly provided by the trade of natural resources: hashish, honey, hemp and wild herbs such as the famous ‘life plant’22 (Cordyceps sinensis). A specific analysis of the tax system would show how what was previously organised along kinship rules (such as the collection of honey by lineages) was now reorganised on a village—or more precisely ward—basis. Individual businesses are also reorganised, with a system of turnover on a ward basis. This allows the village people’s government, through the imposition of fixed taxes, to maintain efficient control over local trade. Other taxes were imposed on the three small shops of the village and on the mules necessary to carry the goods from the Southern bazaars. The economic burden imposed on the villagers by the Maoists and their guerrilla war is far from negligible.23 However, the use by the Maoists of the sums of money deducted from the village wealth was not questioned, in stark contrast with the profound distrust that villagers had of government institutions. Although most of the Nakharles did not agree with the Maoist path to violence, they would contrast the hardship endured by the PLA soldiers with the cosy lifestyle of the politicians in Kathmandu. It was the methods, not the morality, of the Maoists that were criticised. It seems that fairness or equity is the virtue that villagers most value. ‘Basanta is hard but fair’: in this case it means that he did not blindly apply the Maoist rule banning shamanic gatherings—unlike the village people’s government, he listened to people and bent the rules. He also had the power to do this as a legitimate leader. Again, this is unlike the president of the people village government, Bahadur, an uneducated Blacksmith from the neighbouring village of Mahat, who, in this story, looks like a loser: the ‘area in charge’ asked him to eradicate superstitions and carry 22
Nepali jiwan buti, and Tibetan yartsa gumbu or ‘‘Summer grass winter worm’’.
23
Jiwan put at 12,000 rupees per year the amount of the Nakharles’ donations to the Party and at 400 or 500 the average number of Maoists whom they had to feed in the course of a year. When a large number of rebels settled in the village for several days or even weeks before a military operation (as was the case before the Beni attack in March 2004), they used to take care of their own food, but rely on villagers for water, wood and shelter.
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out the Cultural Revolution, but he ended up having to apologise for what a PLA commander had in the meantime considered as a mistake. The people’s village government is subject to the orders of the Party, which is the highest authority, but the story above illustrates that the army may have the last word. Basanta’s decision is here in accordance with yet another authority—Santos, the chief of the Autonomous Region. The latter did not hide the fact that the Party was short of competent people, a fact that explains that the people’s village government is the weak link in the Maoist administrative structure.24 Moreover, the people village government had also to negotiate with villagers who were organised in what was loosely called the ‘village council’. This council was not in any way a formal institution and was composed of ‘interested’ villagers revolving around Jiwan, who was known for his diplomatic qualities. The president of the people’s village government would often come and discuss village matters with Jiwan. As a Blacksmith sitting at the fireplace in the house of a ‘master’ (bista), the term by which Magars were until recently called by service castes, he never seemed quite relaxed. One may wonder why both Santos Budha and Basanta showed so much clemency towards the Nakharles. As the chief of the newly elected people’s council of the Magarant Autonomous Region, Santos might have been in a position to show that, although the Party provided ideological guidance, local governments had the authority to make their own policies, notably in respecting local customs. The villagers knew how to take advantage of the overlapping spheres of influence (people’s village government, regional in charge, PLA, Magarant Autonomous Region) within the newly formed Maoist political and administrative organisation in their area. Basanta is a son of the village and may become a local hero as the stories of his escapes suggest. He acted as a leader, knowing what he could and could not ask of his people if he wanted to keep their support. It is a fact that villagers may accept economical restrictions, forced donations in cash and kind and even forced labour— as subjects of the King of Nepal they have been submitted to these hardships for as long as they can remember. However, ritual activities belong to a domain that is closed to negotiations. The Maoists’ contradictions How are we to understand this particular sensitivity of the population on religious matters? Anthropologists have put a great deal of effort into showing that in Nepal religion is not a separate domain of social life. If a few urban Nepalese may gradually convert to a more modern attitude that tends to limit religion to the private sphere, this is not the case of rural Nepal. The sacrifice to Bhume and the shamanic gathering mobilise the community as a whole and activate principles (clan, political, mythic) that lie at its foundation: clan organisation of the society, political history of the community and mythical representations of the relationships with nature. I once asked why, during Rankhe, the shamans had to gather at the house of a notable 24
This conclusion corroborates Ogura’s observations (2008).
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where they were fed: ‘In the past, chiefs would both lead people and secure their food for the year’ was the answer. This encapsulates the political morality that used to preside over the life of the communities, according to present-day villagers. Feeding the population and securing the prosperity of the community implied maintaining good relationships with the supernatural owner of the place. In this perspective, the villagers’ strong reaction against the Maoist intervention in their village festival could simply be seen as a refusal of social change. As a matter of fact, this is how the Maoists themselves see the villagers—conservative prisoners of their erroneous beliefs. However, the situation may be more complex. The young people who strongly opposed the Maoist ban on the sacrifice to Bhume would be the first to express doubts that offering blood and dancing bring monsoon rain. They would also deny fearing that the non-observance of the prescribed ceremony would automatically bring a cosmological catastrophe. And yet, dancing without sacrifice would deprive the festival of its transcendental dimension and therefore of its purpose. Reducing this ritual system of thought to irrational reasoning, and blood offering to a barbaric activity, is seen by the villagers as the Maoist condemnation of what is specific to them, the cultural language through which they interpret the world. The anger that they manifested in ‘boycotting’—although applied to religious activities, the use of this term is accurately borrowed from the political repertoire—their ritual dances, in spite of the fact that these were allowed by the village Maoist authorities, may be better understood as the rejection of the image of backward peasants that the Maoists imposed on them through their ban on the blood sacrifice to the local god. They denied the rebels the right to trim their culture and transform it into one of the folkloric performance that features in Maoist cultural programmes. Their boycott is an ethnic claim that puts the Maoists in the paradoxical situation of repressing the people for whom they are meant to be speaking.
Conclusion: towards local empowerment One common feature emerges out of the two stories recounted above: the game of hide-and-seek that villagers have to play with both the security forces and the Maoists. This is literally the case in situations of dangers, when they have to escape to save their lives. The nascent legend of Basanta put this predicament in pleasant terms, but oral tradition may have focussed here on what is actually the villagers’ perception of these 10 years of insurrection. Showing oral tradition at work, the figure of the escape artist evokes the happy de´nouement of a story characterised by uncertainty and fear. The game of hide-and-seek continues with the representations that each has of the other. Villagers are taken for Maoists even when they are not, and this may lead them to feel that they have no alternative to becoming Maoists. They are also seen as peasants blinded by wrong beliefs, and escaping this prejudice involves violence, even if this means turning this violence partly against themselves, as they did when they refused to dance. The purpose of this article was to reveal the parameters at work in the historical process of social change that is not always apparent if the observation remains at the
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level of the national events. In concentrating on the area known as the historical heartland of the insurrection, we observed first that the conditions of penetration of the Maoist movement varied considerably according to localities. The presence, previous to the People’s War, of communist activists or leaders explains the closer engagement of certain localities. In other villages such as the one under scrutiny, the situation is more fluid; although, the arbitrary violence of the counterinsurgency appears to have radicalised the population in all the communities in the base area. The two narratives aimed at showing the transformation of a community that had been under Maoist control for 10 years. In the first account the violent irruption of the security forces into the village turned a spotlight on the structural features and historical conditions which made the community vulnerable to the outside intervention, whether by the rebels or by the state. The second narrative illustrated the obverse side of the same community: its capacity to stand up to oppression. This capacity was mobilised on the occasion of a Maoist ban on a sacrifice to the local god. This takes place during the Maoist local governments elections within the newly proclaimed Autonomous Magarant Region. Although, as stated in the introduction of this chapter, ethnic politics did not develop at the outset in the Kham-Magar area, the fact that the confrontation took place in defence of a ritual activity suggests a gradual politicisation of local culture in response to the imposed Maoist ideology. Whatever path the Kham-Magar pursue in order to participate in national politics, the active resistance of the villagers who confronted the Maoist people’s government provides evidence of the empowerment of the community. The heavy toll taken by 10 years of violent insurrection cannot be neglected. The juxtaposition of the two narratives nevertheless reveals a process of political maturation characterised by a critical analysis of the past and a nascent confidence in the expression of needs and rights.
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Ramirez, P. 2000. De la disparition des chefs. Une anthropologie politique Ne´palaise. Paris: CNRS Editions. Sales, A. de. 1991. Je suis ne´ de vos jeux de tambours. Nanterre: Socie´te´ d’ethnologie. Sales, A. de. 1998. Dieu nourricier et sorcier cannibale. Les esprits des lieux chez les Magar du nord (Ne´pal). Etudes Rurales. 143–144, 45–65. Sales, A. de. 2000. The Kham-Magar Country, Nepal: Between ethnic claims and Maoism. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research. 19, 41–71. Sales, A. de. 2003. Remarks on revolutionary songs and iconography. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research 24: 5–24. Sales, A. de. 2009. The biography of a Kham-Magar communist. In Varieties of activist experience: Civil society in South Asia, ed. D. Gellner. London: Sage. Thapa, D., and B. Sijapati. 2003. A kingdom under siege: Nepal’s Maoist insurgency, 1996 to 2003. Kathmandu: The Print House.
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