The Politics of Purity: Democratic Transformations in Nepal's Southern Borderland

Abstract

This dissertation considers the relationship between endurance and change within political life in Nepal. Over the preceding decades, the country has been part of a regional phenomenon that scholars have called the “democratization of democracy”—a process in which groups historically marginalized in formal democratic politics have mobilized to assert their presence, demand social justice, and claim political power. In Nepal, these struggles were institutionally realized in the 2008 abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a federal system, developments that many Nepalis heralded at the time as the beginning of “New Nepal,” one no longer based in the inequalities and hierarchies of history. Drawing on data collected from two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Birgunj in the country’s southern plains, the dissertation examines this transformation through an analysis of political life in Nepal over the longue durée. The southern plains region, known locally as the Tarai or Madhesh, has a history of political marginalization, and activists there were at the forefront of struggles for a federal system. The dissertation considers why, in the years after the establishment of a federal republic, there is nostalgia for the king in some circles in Birgunj. The chapters illustrate the ways in which older social and political forms of space, community, legitimacy, and rule have inflected newer political formations and dynamics, shaping how things like democracy, political belonging, accountability, and nationalism are imagined and practiced in contemporary Nepal. In doing so, the dissertation contends that historical orders and imaginaries have a continued resonance in contemporary political life even as they are changed through processes of modernization and democratization.