The 104-year-long Rana regime (1846–1951) prevented writers from writing for lay people, let alone the voices of the marginalized or janajatis, Indigenous people in this context. Writing remained a practice in praise of the Rana regime or the people in power. Literature became the genre belonging to societal elites. Social change through writing became a far cry from reality. Playfulness and freshness in writing – which could be obtained through the voices of the marginalized or through the projection of human relationships and their interactive minds – remained a distant shore. Krishna Lal Subba was imprisoned for nine years for writing a book, Makaiko Kheti (1920), meaning the cultivation of maize (Pandey 2012). Writing was fully censored. It would be a dangerous matter to attempt to write in a regime that did not want the lay people becoming aware and educated, and they always remained as “others” or marginalized. Freedom of literary expression was strictly limited by the Rana government (Hutt 1990). If anyone published a book without the Gorkha Language Publication Committee's approval, the publisher would be fined 50 Nepali rupees, and they would be punished if the book did not meet the Committee's guidelines (Acharya 2022).

However, toward the end of the Rana regime, “some writers had started rejecting the classical conventions of the older tradition, others adapted traditional genres and styles to express new concerns” (Hutt 1990: 5). Laxmi Prasad Devkota's “Muna Madan” (1936) has remained immensely popular over the years, establishing itself as a cornerstone of Nepali literature. It transcends genres, becoming a literary and jhyaure masterpiece, deeply resonating with the masses. Despite its widespread appeal, the content candidly delves into the lives of marginalized communities, shedding light on the “other” and offering a vivid portrayal of society and sociocultural milieu during that era.

As a country situated in the Himalayan belt, Nepal is prone to various natural disasters, from earthquakes and landslides to floods and famines. For Sabrina Regmi, who works on gender and disaster in rural Nepal, it is the unique topography of the country that makes it prone to disasters like landslides in the mountainous areas, floods in the lowlands, and earthquakes in the hills (Regmi 2016: 224). Indeed, who can forget the massive earthquake in 2015 that alarmed and alerted the world to the dangers of inhabiting this Himalayan zone. If these natural disasters that have led to Nepal being ranked 20th in the highly disasterprone zones of the world (Khanal 2020: 7) were not enough, then the country has had to contend with various man-made disasters in the form of the Maoist civil war that lasted for nearly a decade (1996–2006). Therefore, it is no surprise if disaster emerges as a major theme in contemporary fiction from Nepal, be it in Nepali or the English language. Nepali writers such as Maheshbikram Shah, winner of the Madan Puraskar, the highest literary honor in Nepal, and journalist, filmmaker, and writer Sushma Joshi, in her debut collection of English-language short stories, depict various natural and man-made disasters plaguing Nepali society. Sushma Joshi's English-language collection of short stories titled The End of the World (2008) contains stories about the plight of the urban poor within the city of Kathmandu. Maheshbikram Shah's collection titled Chapamar ko Choro (2006), which translates as “The Guerrilla's Son,” depicts narratives about the plight of ordinary people in rural Nepal, drawn from Shah's own experience of working as a police officer within the Nepali state. These short stories by Shah and Joshi depict different kinds of disasters, from floods, famines, and imagined apocalypse to war, while placing women at the center of these disintegrating worlds. This chapter aims to understand what placing women as central protagonists within a rapidly disintegrating world means.

In her memoir, Ilina Sen reflects on the political currents that shaped a generation of civil liberties activists in the 1960s and 1970s, including her own journey and that of her partner, Binayak Sen. Both were members of the PUCL, having served as its office-bearers. She describes how Gandhian, democratic-socialist, and communist political traditions in India inspired a generation of young, urban thinkers and activists who sought to reimagine their role in public life. For some, this political commitment demanded a renunciation of middle-class comforts of city life, to move to and live in rural areas, immersing themselves in grassroots social movements and taking on leadership roles within emerging movements. For others, like the members of the PUCL, it meant channelling their energies from the urban centres, supporting various movements using available resources to sustain and amplify movements. Through this, a politics of allyship took shape, through creation of platforms that provided emerging movement groups visibility and voice.

As allies, civil liberties activists have often reflected on normative questions and searched for shared, general and internally consistent principles to act upon. G. Haragopal and K. Balagopal, both members of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC), raised the questions in the above quote. Others like Smitu Kothari and Harsh Sethi asked similar questions of themselves and their fellow activists. They ask, for instance, ‘How are we to react to the violence that the “revolutionary” groups engage in—be it against the state apparatus, other revolutionary groups, or against a general mass of the population?’ (Kothari and Sethi 1989, 13). A second dilemma emerged from the state being both the ultimate appellate authority and the perpetrator. In the context of communal violence, where the government and the local administration might have been complicit, civil liberties groups wondered who the appropriate appellate authority should be. ‘When communal violence is at its fever pitch, do we have any instrumentality other than the state to appeal to?’ (Kothari and Sethi 1989, 14). As we can see, these questions have both a political dimension (that is, to do with strategy formulation) and an ethical one (that is, to do with developing a code of conduct for themselves). These debates helped allies understand and build their own identity. In this chapter, I analyse two recurring debates within and across civil liberties groups to understand how these debates shaped the organisational identity of ally groups.

Background

Madhesh, a region rich in culture and history and the heartland of the ancient Mithila kingdom, is celebrated as the birthplace of revered figures such as Sita and Gargi, women who embody wisdom, power, and empowerment. As daughters of Mithila, their legacy should have been one of empowerment for all Madheshi women, fostering a sense of strength and agency among those residing in their homeland. Yet, contrary to this legacy, Madheshi women today find themselves marginalized in their own land, treated as outsiders both by their own patriarchal society and by the nationalist discourse of the Nepali state, which views Madhesh as a peripheral and contested space. This dual marginalization places Madheshi women in a complex state of “otherness,” where they are not only excluded from the mainstream narratives of Nepali identity but also subjected to restrictive patriarchal norms within their own community (Gautam 2008; Ghimire 2018). To understand this paradox, we must delve into the forces that have conspired to marginalize these women and examine why the legacy of empowerment has not been passed down to the women of Mithila, that is, “Madhesh.”

In the sociopolitical landscape of Nepal, Madheshi women endure a unique form of intersectional oppression that intertwines gender-based and ethnic discrimination. They face the multidimensional nature of marginalization that includes patriarchal constraints within their community and systemic exclusion from the broader nationalist discourse. As a result, Madheshi women find themselves “doubly othered,” experiencing dual layers of discrimination that render their struggles distinct within Nepal's feminist and social justice movements.

Background

Bala Krishna Sama (1902–1981), the doyen of Nepali drama, wrote an epic entitled Chiso Chulho (1958), or “cold hearth.” This epic is woven around the theme of a silent but very strong love relationship between Gauri, a so-called high caste girl, and Sante, a Dalit young man. Sama has chosen to write an epic on the theme of inter-caste love, which was not accepted by the traditional Nepali society. In this epic Sama has dramatized the moments and conditions of alterity. Sama chooses the epic genre to write about othering in a caste-ridden society that he experienced and inherited because this genre gives him space to play at once with tradition and individuality. Sama has chosen to describe the agony of the characters by giving them poetic elevation, thereby deconstructing the canonical norm, which requires that the hero of the epic should be one who hails from the upper echelon or caste of society. By selecting a Dalit or the so-called low-caste male character named Sante, who tailors clothes as part of his traditional occupation, Sama has used all the accoutrements of the epic genre in this oeuvre.

Sante's love for the higher-caste woman Gauri has introduced an unsolved theme that reverberates even in today's Nepali society, which claims to have made achievements in terms of eliminating the excesses of casteism and improving the conditions of women. We can imagine what would have happened if Gauri and Sante had taken a rebellious stand nearly seven decades ago. As a reminder, we can take the widely reported and discussed tragic incident resulting in the death of several young men of Rukum Karnali that happened on May 20, 2020, perpetrated to foil the love between a high-caste girl and a Dalit boy.

The title of this volume, The Other Nepal, implies that there exists a more visible, globally recognizable, widely represented, and geopolitically marked entity called “Nepal” to which the other Nepal merely plays a shadowy, sketchy, and spectral sidekick that is routinely overlooked, forgotten, and silenced. The origin of this internal schism may be traced to an ideologically fraught and rancorous debate between two camps of Nepalese historians and philologists over the denotation of the letter “ने” (Ne) in the word “Nepal.” Hindu historians of Nepal see in it an ancient Hindu sage named “Ne” and claim that he is the protector (palak) of the land. Those opposed to this anthropomorphizing and Sanskritization assert that “Nepal” derives from the Tibeto-Burman words nhyet, meaning cattle, and pa, meaning man, and claim that this non-Hindu and zoomorphic signification has gradually been displaced and erased from Nepali history, languages, and cultures. This erasure in their eyes represents and embodies a larger and more sinister pattern of internal colonization of Indigenous and ethnic populations and cultures of Nepal.

This book carries tentative inscriptions of this eclipsed, erased, internally colonized, and othered Nepal. It intends to probe into the apparent dyad between the Nepal that arrogates to itself the role of defining and representing the entire nation and the Nepal that is effectively silenced by the hegemonic discourses and practices of nationalism and by the hierarchies premised on caste, ethnicity, and gender. The tenor of the analysis and research collected in this book, therefore, is at once investigative, critical, inclusive, and ethical. To inquire into and bring to light what has hitherto been largely invisible and to investigate the causes, conditions, and consequences of such invisibility are the primary goals of this volume.

The two excerpts cited above are just two examples among many instances where civil liberties activists have identified and positioned themselves as concerned citizens. For more than four decades, a segment of middleclass activists in India has adopted this self-identification, which is an important aspect of the ongoing normative contestation surrounding the notion of good citizenship. Despite its significance, the history, specificity and practice of this self-identification remain underexplored. This chapter examines concerned citizenship as an urban, middle-class, civil-societybased form of allyship, which has facilitated a distinct mode of collective action within the Indian socio-political landscape.

On February 24, 2021, two Newar activists, Suman Sayami and Birochan Shrestha, found themselves behind bars for speaking their native language. As representatives of an advocacy group for the victims of the city's road expansion project, they had visited the police station to meet six protestors who had been arrested earlier that day at the construction site of a major highway exit at Bajalu, Kathmandu. These protestors were part of a group of locals who were demonstrating against the city for unfairly appropriating their land and demolishing their homes for road expansion. At the police station, Suman and Birochan spoke with the jailed activists in Nepalbhasa, a language the police officers did not understand. When the police told them to speak in Nepali, they refused to comply, and they too were taken into custody (Deśasancāra 2021).

Although they were all released by the Supreme Court's order the following week, the incident ignited a wave of outrage and protests across the city. In the days following their arrest, protestors gathered at Indrachowk in Kathmandu, holding placards and chanting slogans declaiming language rights, land rights, Newar unity, and justice for the victims of the state's land encroachment (AawaajNews 2021). This incident was a reminder that language is a crucial aspect of power dynamics, especially in the context of a multilingual nation like Nepal where language hierarchies have shaped unequal access to social, economic, and political power. As Nepali is widely recognized as the official language of the country, the police officers saw Nepalbhasa as a threat to their authority and sought to silence it. This rendered the act of speaking in the language – especially in institutional spaces like the police station – an affront to authority and, thus, a political act.

Suyogbir and Sakambari, though they look well-matched, are worlds apart. Shirishko Phool (translated as Blue Mimosa), a critically acclaimed novel by Bishnu Kumari Waiba (1937–1993), who went by her literary sobriquet “Parijat,” revolves around a one-sided love entanglement between two characters with radically different personalities. Suyogbir, an ex-Gurkha1 in his mid-forties, falls in love with Sakambari, an alpha female half his age. He is a deeply troubled womanizing hedonist full of self-doubt. Sakambari, on the other hand, is a young, strong-willed rebel in her mid-twenties. She is the antithesis of a cliched Nepali woman – she is assertive, smokes a lot, has short hair, and is sharp-tongued – in short, a woman without the normative feminine grace. Although Sakambari is out of Suyogbir's league, he gets attracted to her. Over time, his feelings toward her evolve into an all-consuming obsession, making him confess his love with a “kiss” that leads to Sakambari's subsequent death.

Within the linearity of this deceptively simple unrequited love, Shrishko Phool weaves a complex tapestry of passion and desire, and questions on the twisted realities of life. The text has been able to garner mixed critiques – praised as a compelling text providing an astute observation on the absurdities typical of modern life and criticized as a depressing text lacking originality with heavy Western influence. Nevertheless, the novel has established itself as an existentialist classic in the Nepali canon.