Abstract
Gellner, Hausner and Letizia’s study offers a cultural account of secularism as it unfolded in Nepal during its long transition during and after the 10-year People’s War led by the Maoists. Nepal’s fourth constitution was annulled in 2006, but it was not until 2015 that a new, fifth constitution could be promulgated. This book begins with a broad proposition— the view that ‘Nepali legislators had voted for secularism without agreeing on what it meant’ (p. 11), thereby being caught by surprise that the state was to end the privileges bestowed earlier on Hinduism so as to ensure equality of all religions. What this book offers in its 491 pages is a collection of ethnographic and analytical case studies which demonstrate the complex intertwining between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ as mediated through changing rituals of celebration and resistance.
Under Part I, the chapter by Chiara Letizia claims that the Indian election of April–May 2014—which gave the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a clear majority—had repercussions on Nepali politics. It planted the seeds of anti-secularism in Nepal and soon after, the royalist and Hindu nationalist party, the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) went on to organise Hindu propaganda rallies just as the Nepali political elites had vowed to ‘fast-track’ the drafting of the long-awaited constitution in the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes of 2015. Based on field interviews conducted among political leaders and civil society as well as the representatives of the state in Kathmandu and three other cities on the Nepal–India border, Letizia reports that most of her informants considered that the way secularism was ushered into Nepali politics was ‘dictatorial’. Their grudge was that the Maoists who were considered the harbingers of the secularist outlook had prevented a grassroots discourse from emerging by declaring secularism ‘mission accomplished’. She then goes on to show how the opposition to secularism is dichotomous: on the one hand, Hindu clerics and their followers denied any non-Hindu cosmology altogether and on the other hand, other opponents argued that sanatan dharma (eternal religion) was already secular in its internalisation of earlier movements that had ensured equality of all religions within Hinduism.
The chapter by Ina Zharkevich offers an ethnography of Thabang, which was declared by the Maoists to be a ‘model village’ during the People’s War. She discusses the changes in the ways people worshipped gods during and after the war. She observes how a public pilgrimage to Jaljala (the highest peak in the Thabang region) underwent a modification of meaning when the Maoists called for abolition of religion even if they did not directly ban the Jaljala fair. Fearing the Maoists, villagers refrained from public pilgrimage and instead worshipped in the privacy of their homes or the secrecy of night. The common wisdom behind this seemed to be that villagers did not want to provoke the Maoists nor did they want to catch the attention of the police by allowing public gatherings in their places. Eventually, after the war ended, the Thabang community instituted a new youth club to oversee safety and order as the Jaljala pilgrimage was revived. This repackaging seems to have turned the Jaljala trip into modern tourism more than a religious hike.
Gerard Toffin’s chapter problematises the rise of new religious practices in urban spaces which do not anchor in temples and statues but revolve around concerns for spirituality and a healthy lifestyle. Examples of these include vipassana, yoga and ayurveda, jyorei, etc. What is significant about these somewhat fragmented movements is their eventual geographic and religious interconnection that makes them especially attractive to the middle and upper classes.
The remaining chapters in this section explore the ideas of possession, bodily sacrifice and genealogy. The chapter by Pustak Ghimire probes gender among the followers of cults that worship spirit possession and deity incarnation in the eastern hills. Axel Michael’s chapter examines the changing beliefs about the symbolism of blood sacrifice, suggesting that both protest and counter-protest against ‘blood’ increasingly takes Western modernism as its central point of reference. The chapter by Krishna Adhikari and David Gellner revisits the question of blood sacrifice among the Bahun–Chhetri communities in the western and central hills as they embark on ancestral worship or kul puja.
Part II of this book focuses on state–society relations and asks how diverse ethnic traditions in Nepal have negotiated the new state since its fundamental restructuring between 2006 and 2015. Astrid Zotter’s chapter discusses the ritual dilemmas faced by the first president of Nepal post-monarchy and asks whether these can be compared with what had happened three centuries ago when King Prithvi Narayan Shah ousted the Newar Malla kings of Kathmandu Valley and unified Nepal into a single kingdom in 1769. The chapters by David Holmberg and Martin Gaenszle show how adivasi–janajatis have reconfigured their religious celebrations in new Nepal. Brigitte Steinmann’s chapter looks into the possibilities of secular imaginations and practices available to Nepal’s Buddhists. Ben Campbell’s chapter brings to the table the issue of Christianity which is probably the most contentious topic among those who oppose secularism in Nepal today.
Rajeev Bhargava’s Afterword contextualises the Nepali secularism discourse within a global discourse and also offers a theoretical anchoring for this book. Differentiating ethical secularism from political secularism, Bhargava suggests that what is significant about the Nepali movement is its rejection of the state religion of brahmanical Hinduism. In this, he observes that Nepali political agents had understood the need for delinking the state from brahmanical Hinduism before it could be geared towards a sustained trajectory of incremental democratisation and secularisation. What has to be said, however, is that political secularism as Bhargava seems to be interested in, is not the primary focus of this book. With the exception of a few chapters that offer rich analyses of activism for and against the constitutional guarantee of a secular state, most chapters in this book are concerned with religion as everyday culture.
While well-written on the whole and much recommended for scholars interested in cultural and political change in Nepal, with an insightful theorising in its Afterword, the chapters in this book are less about the state’s interactions with multi-religiosity and secularism and more about changing cultural practices. The book could have benefitted from a closer reading of regional scholarship on the politics of religion, which routinely examines everyday dilemmas of localising secularisation and religious reforms of the state. For instance, social science literature which looks into the oppression of Hinduism in Bhutan and Sri Lanka could have offered important insights into the way elite rejection of minority religions can be theorised. Further, engagement with the scholarship on political revitalisation of Islam in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and Hinduism in India could have offered useful insights on the way everyday religiosity is transformed and redefined as it responds to calls for post-religiosity which some may consider integral to global modernity, while others may call hegemonic.