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Restructuring States, Restructuring Ethnicity: Looking Across Disciplinary Boundaries at Federal Futures in India and Nepal*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2014

SARA SHNEIDERMAN  and
LOUISE TILLIN
SARA SHNEIDERMAN
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Yale University, USA Email: [email protected]
LOUISE TILLIN
Affiliation:
King's India Institute, King's College London, UK Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

India and federalizing Nepal represent distinct types of federal polity: their origins lie not in the unification of previously autonomous states, but in the devolution of power by a previously centralized state. The boundaries of their constituent sub-units are therefore open to debate, and settling their contours is central to the project of state-building. Written by a political scientist and an anthropologist, this paper presents a comparative exploration of the reciprocal relationship between state structuring and ethnicity in India and Nepal, with a focus on the effects of territorial versus non-territorial forms of recognition. It pushes against recent tendencies within South Asian Studies to see ethnic identity as called into being solely by state practices or ‘governmentality’ on the one hand, or as a newly commoditized form of belonging produced through neoliberal reforms on the other. Instead it argues that ethnicity must be understood as a multivalent concept that is at once embedded in specific histories of state and sub-state formation, and generative of them. Comparative in scope yet driven by qualitative data collected over years of engagement across the region, the paper charts a middle way between detailed ethnographic studies and large-scale comparative endeavours.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 1 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

The authors express their gratitude for comments and discussion on this paper (or portions of it) in numerous locations: the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies Conference at Macalester College (October 2011); The Conversations on South Asian Politics seminar, New York (December 2011); The Comparative State Politics workshop hosted by Lokniti at the University of Pune (December 2011); the Inequality and Affirmative Action conference in Kathmandu (July 2012), co-hosted by the Central Department of Sociology/Anthropology at Tribhuvan University and Social Science Baha; ‘Forests, Rights, Insurgency: A Workshop on the State-Society Interface in South Asia’ at the University of Connecticut (November 2012); and the Political Studies Association annual conference, Cardiff (March 2013). Louise Tillin is grateful to the South Asian Studies Council at Yale for the opportunity to visit in December 2011, and both authors acknowledge input from colleagues and students at Yale University and King's College London through discussion over time. Thanks are due to Sebastian Ballard for map design, and to Dambar Chemjong and Saul Mullard for comments on the text.

References

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33 These are both contested terms, the history of which is beyond the scope of this paper. See Hutt, Michael. 1997. ‘Being Nepali without Nepal: Reflections on a South Asian Diaspora’, in Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom: The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Nepal, Gellner, David, Pfaff-Czarnecka, Joanna and Whelpton, John eds. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp. 101–144Google Scholar; Sinha, A. C. and Subba, Tanka. 2003. The Nepalis in Northeast India: A Community in Search of Indian Identity. New Delhi: Indus Publishing CompanyGoogle Scholar; Chettri, Mona. 2013. ‘Choosing the Gorkha: At the Crossroads of Class and Ethnicity in the Darjeeling Hills’. Asian Ethnicity 14 (3): 293–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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36 Middleton (2011) provides a useful chart showing how such demands are processed by the bureaucratic apparatus of the Indian state. Groups must first be recognized by their own state, which must then forward the file to the central government for national recognition.

37 Middleton ‘Across the Interface’; Middleton and Shneiderman, ‘Reservations, Federalism’; Shneiderman ‘Ethnic (P)reservations’; Shneiderman and Turin ‘Seeking the Tribe’.

38 http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/a-conversation-with-gorkha-leader-bimal-gurung/ [Accessed 20 February 2014].

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42 Vandenhelsken, ‘Tribal Unity’; Mullard, Saul. n.d. ‘History, Politics, and the Tibetan-Sikkimese Impasse: Community Change and Challenges in Sikkim’, conference paper presented at Himalayan Impasse, University of Bonn, January 2013.

43 Sikkim was officially admitted to the North Eastern Council of states in 2002, making it the eighth member.

44 Middleton, ‘Scheduling Tribes, p. 18.

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52 Both terms mean ‘forest region’.

53 Inder Singh Namdhari, 14 January 1984, addressing a meeting of party workers at which he introduced the idea of Vananchal, Dutt B. 2005. Kahani Jharkhand Andolan Ki (the Story of the Jharkhand Movement), Ranchi, Crown Publications, p. 242Google Scholar.

54 The Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution applies in tribal majority districts denoted as ‘scheduled areas’ of states outside Northeast India. In theory, it allows for the Governor of a state to order that certain laws, or parts thereof, do not apply in scheduled areas; the regulation of land sales by tribals to non-tribals, and the regulation of activities of money-lenders in scheduled areas, but it has been patchily enforced.

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57 Sinha, ‘Battles for Gorkhaland’.

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59 Madhesi is a regional identity claimed by many residents of Nepal's southern Tarai region. Madhesi political leaders position themselves in opposition to the historically dominant elites of the hill region.

60 Janajati is an umbrella term for ethnic communities who refer to themselves as ‘indigenous nationalities’. The Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NEFIN) prefers the term adivasi janajati, but since this is contested and denotes a narrower category, we follow the convention of most Nepali media outlets in using janajati as the general descriptive term.

61 http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:12100:0::NO::P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312314, [Accessed 20 February 2014].

62 Lawoti and Hangen ‘Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict’, p. 9.

63 The proceedings from a 2011 symposium on ‘Ethnicity and Federalisation’ in Kathmandu demonstrate how these debates have been framed. See Mishra, Chaitanya and Gurung, Om, eds. 2012. Ethnicity and Federalisation in Nepal. Kathmandu: Central Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Tribhuvan UniversityGoogle ScholarPubMed.

64 An overview of Dalit perspectives on federalism is provided by Darnal, Suvash. 2009. A Land of Our Own: Conversations with Dalit Members of Constituent Assembly. Kathmandu: Samata FoundationGoogle Scholar.

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72 The term ‘plurinational’ is borrowed from Bolivia's 2008 constitution, framed under the leadership of Evo Morales’ Movimiento Socialismo (MAS) as a means of moving beyond the problematic concept of ‘multiculturalism’. In the Bolivian context, plurinationalism has been promoted as a philosophy of governance that combines redistributive social programmes alongside comprehensive indigenous rights, in part but not exclusively through rethinking forms of territorial autonomy. See Gustafson, Bret. 2009. ‘Manipulating Cartographies: Plurinationalism, Autonomy and Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia’, Anthropological Quarterly, 82 (4): 985–1016CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gustafson, Bret and Nicole, Fabricant. 2011. ‘Introduction: New Cartographies of Knowledge and Struggle’, In Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Territory, and Indigeneity in a Plurinational State. Fabricant, Nicole and Gustafson, Bret, eds. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. We thank Gabriela Morales for these referencesGoogle Scholar.

73 ‘Rai Declares Federal Socialist Party-Nepal,’ The Himalayan Times, 22 November 2012.

74 See, for example, Baral, Lok Raj ‘Strong on the Inside’, The Kathmandu Post. http://www.ekantipur.com/the-kathmandu-post/2012/08/20/related_articles/strong-on-the-inside/238630.html. Jha, Prashant ‘The Centrality of Identity’, The Kathmandu Post 7 December 2011. http://www.ekantipur.com/the-kathmandu-post/2011/12/06/oped/the-centrality-of-identity/229043.html [Both URLs accessed 20 February 2014.]