Introduction

As is well known, the first Jan Andolan (People's Movement) of 1990 put an end to the autocratic reign of the Shah monarchy in Nepal. The subsequently promulgated Constitution of Nepal, 1990, reflected this political transition and, in turn, legally guaranteed many changes in the nature of the Nepali state. These changes made possible the realization of a different kind of public sphere in Nepal in which critical commentary on erstwhile off-limit subjects became a routine affair. We use the term ‘public sphere’ in a very general sense to refer to the public domain in a descriptive and empirical manner. Hence, for the current purpose, the term ‘public sphere’ encompasses all of the arenas and media in which public discourses take place. The transformed public sphere of Nepal during the early and late 1990s manifested itself in both print and audio-visual media but we are only concerned with the print media here. The transformed print public sphere was constituted by, among other things, mainstream media produced by newly formed private companies with commercial interests (Onta, 2002; Mainali, 2006), ‘alternate’ media produced by not-for-profit non-governmental organizations claiming to work for the public good (Basnet, 2003), critical commentary and journalism from an explicit ‘left’ political persuasion (Shrestha, 2007), and social movement-assisting media that emerged from and was part of the women's (Dhakal, 2013), Dalit (Ramtel, 2013; Biswokarma, 2013, Chapter 2) and Adivasi Janajati movements.

In this chapter, we look at the contents of magazines published by Janajatis during the 1990s to show how they managed to transform the hitherto dominant public sphere of the Panchayat era (1960–90). We do so by paying attention to various texts published in these magazines that provided critical commentaries on or analyses of cultural, historical, linguistic and religious aspects of Nepali identities from various Janajati perspectives. In other words, issues that had been hardly available for critical public scrutiny from these perspectives during the Panchayat years were reported, discussed and analysed in the pages of newly started Janajati magazines after the political transformation of 1990.