Articles

• Véronique Bouillier

  The Royal Gift to the Ascetics: The Case of the Caughera Yogi Monastery
  This article examines state-monastery relations in Nepal over a two hundred year period. It first compares Hindu state-monastery relations with those of Christian and Islamic traditions elsewhere in Asia and Europe, and then concentrates on the Caughera Yogi Monastery in Dang, West Nepal as an example of the former. The religious gifts given to the monastery by the state are shown to enmesh renunciants in a web of worldly concerns - the status of guthi attributed to the lands attached to the temple places the monastery firmly within the land-owning set-up of the country. The rights to tax and fine collection given over to the monastery turn it into an effective enforcer of secular policies of (often harsh) extraction of labour and produce from the peasantry, and renunciants into stakeholders in such extraction. For its part, the state, even if genuinely seeking the merit and prosperity said to issue from religious donations, nevertheless frequently also seeks a part of the profit from lands given as guthi. The examination of a history of sustained conflict between the state as a fiscal agent and the monastery as a large landholder importantly revises the sometimes rather romanticized portrait of the guthi as an institution whose essence is community well-being and charity.
  pp. 213-238
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• Gregory G. Maskarinec

  A Chronicle of Saru, Jajarkot/Saru, Jajarkotko Itihas
  Most of what has come to be regarded as Nepal's "history" either concentrates on the Kathmandu Valley or simply lists genealogies and purported affairs of petty kings, with most of the country's populations reduced to a silent past. This article suggests, by example, that the oral histories of traditionally obscure, remote, and powerless areas of the country document core cultural values and concerns of people too often ignored as marginal, including their enduring struggles for land, sons, security, and status. The effective political use of spirit possession as an aggressive means of attaining power and enhanced prestige demonstrates that such possession cults, far from being merely superstitious vestiges of archaic religion, have long been one of the few cultural resources available to negotiate new power relations from below. Those relations and the embedded social conflicts that they conceal, it is suggested, must be acknowledged and documented if "history," "indigenous knowledge," or "cultural anthropology" are to play serious roles in Nepal's present and future self images. Chronicle of Jajarkot history in both English and Nepali. Introductory reflections on the siginficance of oral history in English only.
  pp. 239-310
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• Timothy Whyte

  The Legacy of Slavery in Nepal
  The received history of Nepali emancipation is quite scant. Historians generally let the story end with Chandra Shumshere granting freedom to the slaves in 1923. They point to Amalekhgunj, a small town in the Tarai, as a new settling place for the emancipated, and close the books on the legacy of slavery in Nepal. Based on oral history research conducted in Amalekhgunj and Jumla, I argue that this presentation of freedom has more to do with ideas of national progress - emancipation functioning as a marker of modernity - than with the actual lives of slaves or their descendants. In practice, freedom was hampered by the legacy of slavery, which left freed slaves and their descendants without the social prerogatives of land, caste and community. I use the life story of the son of two freed slaves, a resident of a community founded by "Gharti" (freed slaves), to show how people have struggled with this reality in the nearly eight decades since emancipation.
  pp. 311-39
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• Dinesh Prasain

  In the Name of the People": Writing Bikas in Post-1990 Nepal
  abstract will be posted shortly
  pp. 341-94
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• Biresh Shah

  Urban Conservation in the Kathmandu Valley: A Crisis of Institutions
  abstract will be posted shortly
  pp. 395-418
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