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Subjects, Selves, and the Politics of Personhood in Theravada Buddhism in Nepal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2010

Lauren G. Leve
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On june 30, 1990, between twenty-five and thirty thousand people took to the streets of downtown Kathmandu to protest the possibility that a new constitution, then being drafted, might reassert Nepal's official legal identity as a Hindu kingdom. Carrying banners and chanting slogans, they demanded the country's redefinition as a secular state. The march was arguably the largest demonstration in modern Nepali history, with protestors representing a range of religious, ethnic, political, and cultural groups. Even more significant, the marchers explicitly rejected the longstanding alliance between religion and the state in Nepal by challenging the interpolation of Brahmanical Hinduism into the country's political and civil institutions, and its centrality to Nepali nationalism as a collective identity.

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , August 2002 , pp. 833 - 860
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2002

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