Dolpo is a Himalayan Indigenous minority community currently settled within the northern political boundary of Nepal, bordering Tibet, China. Since the territorial conquest of Mustang and other regions within the Himalayas, initiated by King Prithivi Narayan Shah and his forces under Bahadur Shah during the 1800s AD, the Dolpo community, primarily composed of semipastoralists engaged in subsistence farming and barter exchanges, appears to have followed a trajectory akin to that of Mustang (Regmi 1995). Subsequently, the Nepalese government exerted active control over northern border points with China by the 1950s, largely in response to the increasing presence of the Khamba rebellion in the border areas (McGranahan 2018). Prior to this governmental oversight, the people of Dolpo predominantly adhered to their customary governance system, sustaining subsistence-based agriculture, relative autonomy, and trans-Himalayan trade for nearly a century. Upon the consolidation of territorial control, the rural region witnessed not only the presence of Indian police and officials from the Nepali government, but also the segmentation of Dolpo communities into various political administrative divisions, including village development committees (VDCs) and wards, which were subsequently integrated into the district-level administrative entity known as Dolpa. These mechanisms emerged as a moral framework to proselytize the recalcitrant raite (subject). Despite the inclusion of certain community members within these lower-level structures, Hindu authorities implemented these social and political realities without consulting the Dolpo community.

With the strengthening of Indigenous movements during the 1990s and the subsequent institutionalization of the National Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NFDIN) in the early 2000s, the Nepalese government recognized the Dolpo as one of the 59 Indigenous nationalities.

This chapter gives a basic introduction to the topic of erasure coding.

Nepali Dalit literature is a recent development in the literary history of the country. Nepali is one of the many modern Indo-European languages widely spoken in Nepal and in some parts in India. It is primarily written in the Nāgarī1 script. It was recognized as the national language of Nepal in 1958. Besides, it has been recognized as a major Indian literary language by the Sahitya Akademi2 in India (Hutt 1991: 5). The oldest literary specimens in Nepali are the royal edicts inscribed on stelae and copper plates, dated to the thirteenth century. Since the seventeenth century the literary canon in Nepali has been dominated by high-caste Hindu writers. The first notable Nepali poet was Suvanand Das who composed panegyric verses to praise King Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha in the eighteenth century. Brahmin writer Bhanubhakta Acharya (1814–68) is widely considered as the “Father of Nepali Literature” (Hutt 1991: 5). Although high-caste Hindu writers dominate the field of literature in Nepal, many writers from different ethnic groups and marginalized castes have emerged in recent years to write about their struggles and experiences. Nepali Dalit literature is unquestionably the literary expression of Nepali Dalits. Emergence of Dalit literature in Nepal represents the act of writing back to power and caste hegemony by the Nepali Dalits.

The social structure in Nepal, much like in India, was heavily influenced by the caste system, resulting in a social hierarchy among the various groups of people. This system impacted the traditional customs and practices of the people, leading to the establishment of untouchability. Before introducing Nepali Dalit Literature, it is important first to introduce the broader sociocultural context which the Nepali Dalit literature is an integral part of.

Erasure codes find various applications: Each of those puts different constraints on the erasure code, for example, on the blocklength, code rate, decoding complexity, or number of decoding operations. This chapter discusses some of them.

In Chapter 4, we introduce low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, a class of powerful and efficient channel codes which admit a graphical representation based on sparse bipartite graphs. This chapter introduces fundamental concepts in LDPC coding theory and guides the reader through unstructured and structured LDPC code ensembles, including the important case of protograph-based LDPC code ensembles.

No sooner had the House of Gorkha under the Shah kings succeeded in conquering its neighboring principalities during the end of the eighteenth century than it followed the policy of distributing the newly acquired land as salary and reward among its bhardars, that is, royal members, military officers, priests, and local landlords beyond the Gorkha. This paved the way for the rise of an influential elite class of confederates responsible for collecting taxes from peasants and also for the economic gap between landlords and peasants across the nation known as Nepal in later years. On top of that, this elite class promoted their language, known as Khas-kura, and their version of the Hindu religion mainly through promulgating the Muluki Ain in 1854. With it, the ruling class hegemonized their social and moral values among the castes and communities of diverse historical and cultural origins. This research aims to examine the way the feudal characteristics of Nepal as a nation manifest in modern plays of the 1930s. The question it aims to address is: how did “land,” “language,” and “religion” become dominant forces in the plays of the period? For this, I have chosen two plays, Mukunda Indira and Sahanshila Sushila, written by Balkrishna Sama (1903–1981) and Bhimnidhi Tiwari (1911–1973), respectively, in the last years of the 1930s, the decade that also saw the first wave of political uprising that gradually set the ground for the 1950 democratic revolution.

Rise of the Elites/Indigenous

The formation of Nepal as a new nation mainly from the 1770s under the leadership of the Gorkha king Prithvi Narayan Shah (1723–1775) paved the way for the rise of the elite class of the Khas Arya ethno-linguistic group.