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.

Among the most recent proposals for error corrections there are the Polar codes. These are described in Chapter 10. This chapter describes polar codes, which are block codes designed for simplifying the implementation of the decoder. Specifically, polar codes are designed assuming a successive cancellation (SC) decoder. Channel polarization and subchannel ranking are discussed in this chapter.

Basic definitions and tools for error correction: In Chapter 2, we provide the basic elements of classical error correcting codes, how to perform operations in finite fields, the decision rules, the structure and properties of classical block codes, and finally a description of the Reed–Solomon codes which are particularly important for the erasure channel.

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 chapter offers an analysis of two sources. The first follows the personal testimony of the conversion of an Argentine middle-class man, Matías Fernández Quinquela, an accountant for the Argentine National Congress. This account was originally published in English in the journal of the Anglican South American Missionary Society and contains a very typical exposition of the personal reflections of doubt and dissatisfaction with Catholicism as well as the atheistic positivist freethinking that led educated people, like Quinquela, to look for an alternative in Protestantism. The second offers an account of the proselytizing activities of M. F. Quinquela's wife, Carlota Lubin, and her arrest by order of a Catholic priest in a suburb of Buenos Aires. The story was published in a local magazine, La Reforma. The story demonstrates the active and provocative militancy with which these converts spread their message, the irritation they provoked in the Catholic Church, and the informal power ties between priests and local government office. The Quinquelas were convinced of the possibilities of moral and social renewal that evangelical Protestantism could offer Argentine society.

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 chapter analyzes the history of the first Pentecostals in Puerto Rico through the memoir of Juan L. Lugo. This document, published by Lugo circa 1950, recounts his memories as an immigrant in Hawaii, his initial experience with Pentecostal faith, and details his eventual development as a minister ordained by the council of The Assemblies of God Church in the United States. Based on his account, this chapter will address several historiographical considerations about the relationship between forced migration and the exponential growth of Pentecostal movements, particularly in the transition from the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth. It is no coincidence that this religious current found fertile ground among the most vulnerable and marginalized populations. As such, the socioeconomic and political panorama in which the birth of Pentecostalism in Puerto Rico took place will also be explained. Finally, the discursive and doctrinal trends emblematic of the founding period of Pentecostalism on the island will be highlighted.

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.

Although basic freedoms (such as freedom of thought) in Nicaragua were decreed in 1869, their implementation did not have major repercussions until 1893 with the approval of La Liberrima – an important transformation in the country. Its introduction reflected a great change in the relationship of religion and the Constitutions of 1838 and 1858. An analysis of La Liberrima is necessary to study the original development of Protestantism as a social phenomenon within modern Nicaragua. Following the irruption of radical liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century, Protestantism expanded and developed new forms of association. In this context, the emergence and meaning of the phenomenon can be linked to modernizing forms of civil participation that created local bases and fomented its expansion including churches, schools, health-related projects, and publications. The chapter also includes an examination of a Protestant publication, principally the magazine Antorcha, to highlight the evolution of Protestantism as a historical process. Based on these documents, this work aims to broadly assess the emergence of local Protestant actions that developed in a less than welcoming environment.

In the early days of the twentieth century, missionaries from the United States were in a spiritual battle for the hearts and minds of Brazilians. As a result, in 1901, the Baptists founded “O Jornal Batista.” Four years later, the Catholic Church established its first paper, “A União.” In their pages, these papers reflected the spiritual battle that was being fought. A significant part of the struggle focused on the idea that the United States was either a civilizing agent (“O Jornal Batista”) or an agent of barbarism (“A União”). Social and political topics gripping the northern country, such as lynching, racism, and prohibition law, were regular topics of discussion in both papers. This chapter aims to provide a brief discussion of the significance of these debates and their meaning in the context of North American missions in Brazil, especially in the northeastern part of the country. The sources highlight how locals used religion to understand and articulate changes in local political dynamics as well as the various ways Protestantism changed the parameters of local political debates.