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Preface

This book is the first comprehensive ethnography of the Thangmi, also known as Thami.¹ They are a Himalayan community of approximately 40,000 who speak a Tibeto-Burman language. Their religion synthesizes aspects of shamanic, Hindu, and Buddhist practice. The Dolakha and Sindhupalchok districts of central-eastern Nepal are home to the largest concentration of Thangmi, with smaller numbers in Ilam, Jhapa, Ramechap, and Udayapur districts.² There are also substantial populations in the Darjeeling district of India’s West Bengal state and the neighboring state of Sikkim.³ Cross-border circular migration between these locations, as well as to Nyalam county of China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), which immediately borders Nepal, is an important feature of Thangmi life. Thangmi experience forms of economic and social marginalization in all of the countries in which they live.

The ensuing chapters flesh out this brief description with ethnographic details that unfold across three countries over more than a decade, complemented by oral and archival histories that extend the narrative back still further. The story is told by many voices, of which mine is just one. It is a story of commonality and difference, specificity and generality, emplacement and mobility. I hope that Thangmi everywhere will recognize something of themselves in it.

I first traveled to Nepal’s Thangmi villages in 1998 with Mark Turin, a linguist and anthropologist then conducting doctoral research toward the first comprehensive grammar of the Thangmi language. We married in 2004, and much of the ethnographic research presented here was conducted collaboratively. The scholarly division of labor upon which we agreed means that the linguistic dimensions of Thangmi identity are not addressed comprehensively here; I direct interested readers to Mark Turin’s publications, which are cited at relevant points throughout the text.

The village setting of my early work in Nepal lent itself to the traditional ethnographic method of participant-observation, both of daily life and ritual practice. I also conducted many formal and informal interviews. I sought out guru (shamans) and village elders, as well as laypeople of all genders, ages, and class backgrounds.⁴ Most Thangmi with whom I worked asked explicitly to be recognized by name and place of residence. I therefore do not use pseudonyms in the text, although I occasionally omit personal names to honor the anonymity of those who requested it.

Throughout these encounters, I used photography to document events and to provide a springboard for discussion when I later returned photos to participants. Later, I incorporated digital video into my fieldwork practice. Recording video of practice and performance events in one location and showing it to people in others became a defining methodology of my multisited work. I organized small viewings in villages, as well as large public programs in Kathmandu and Darjeeling, at which I presented video footage and elicited comments. These programs, some of which are described in the chapters that follow, became forums for broad-ranging discussions among Thangmi who might not otherwise have met. My own role—and the role of ethnography in general—in “producing” Thangmi identity through such events is a central theme of this book. I can only reproduce a few photographs here, but I direct interested readers to two online portals where more audiovisual material is housed: Digital Himalaya (www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/thangmiarchive) and the Tibetan and Himalayan Library (mms.thlib.org/topics/2823).

Sources and Languages

Throughout this book, I draw upon four compilations of writing published by Thangmi organizations: Nan Ni Patuko (2054 VS), Dolakha Reng (1999), Niko Bachinte (2003), and Thami Samudayako Aitihasik Chinari ra Sanskar Sanskriti ([2056] 2061 VS).⁵ I cite these by their titles (using the following one-word abbreviations, respectively: Patuko, Reng, Niko, and Samudaya). Although each publication lists the editor(s), articles are only erratically attributed, making it difficult to ascribe individual authorship in some cases. Several more recent Thangmi-published books and articles exist (notably a regular series of Thangmi language pieces in Nepal’s Gorkhapatra daily), along with many audio collections on cassette and CD, and documentary films on VCD and DVD—not to mention lively debates via social media. While I cannot analyze these in depth here, they constitute a rich archive for ongoing analysis.

Most speakers of Thangmi are bilingual in Nepali, the lingua franca in Darjeeling and Sikkim as well as the official language of Nepal, and my primary research language. Ritual practice is conducted largely in a special register of the Thangmi language in which I gained basic competence. To understand the details, I worked with Bir Bahadur, a Thangmi man my own age fluent in both Nepali and Thangmi. He provided on-the-fly translation as events or conversations unfolded, detailed transcription and translation of recorded materials, and a wealth of knowledge and analysis. The term “research assistant” does not adequately recognize Bir Bahadur’s contribution to this project over fifteen years, but I use it to describe the formal aspect of our relationship in the scholarly context of this book.

Frequently in India, and occasionally in Nepal, informants chose to speak with me in English or sprinkle their otherwise Nepali conversation with English words. Documents were in both Nepali and English. Sanskrit and Tibetan words also appeared occasionally. When possible, I indicate the language in which statements were made or in which a text was published, using single quotation marks to set off English words in otherwise non-English sentences. Non-English terms are presented in phonetic form without diacritics, in italics, with the following abbreviations: (N) Nepali, (T) Thangmi, (T*) Thangmi ritual language, (Tib) Tibetan, and (Skt) Sanskrit. Proper place, ethnic, and personal names (i.e., Kathmandu, Thangmi, Bir Bahadur) are capitalized but not italicized. I hope that specialist readers will understand my eclectic approach as an effort to make the work accessible to a broad interdisciplinary audience.

Terminology and Locations

“Nepalese” was once the commonly agreed upon English term for citizens of the nation-state of Nepal, as well as for the country’s lingua franca. However, many Nepali-speaking intellectuals view it as a colonial invention that does not match the ethnonym they use to talk about themselves and their language, “Nepali.”⁶ Others, however, seek to reclaim “Nepalese” to refer to citizens of Nepal, arguing that “Nepali” only fully includes mother-tongue speakers of the Nepali language, while excluding native speakers of the many other languages spoken within Nepal’s borders. For the most part, contemporary scholarship in English follows the convention of using the term “Nepali,” as established by Nepal-based writers.⁷

“Nepali” is more open-ended, since like “Tibetan,” it refers to the language, as well as to a broad cultural complex, neither of which carries an inherent indication of citizenship. This usage is most widespread in Nepali-speaking areas of India, including Darjeeling and Sikkim, where people identify themselves as linguistically or ethnically Nepali yet are Indian citizens frustrated by assumptions that “Nepali” refers only to citizens of Nepal. In its most extreme form, this frustration manifests in the attempt to do away with “Nepali” altogether in favor of “Gorkha” or “Gorkhali”—the term preferred by those agitating for a separate Nepali-speaking state of Gorkhaland within India.

Many people with whom I worked in India used “Nepali” and “Gorkhali” interchangeably. Some insisted on the exclusive use of “Gorkhali,” while others dismissed “Gorkhali” as associated with a political agenda they did not support, opting simply for “Nepali.”⁸ For those who used “Nepali” to describe themselves, the implication was not “citizens of Nepal” but rather “citizens of India belonging to an ethnic group defined by its shared Nepali linguistic and cultural forms.” To describe this large category of people—including many Thangmi in India but also extending beyond them—I use “Indian citizens of Nepali heritage.”

To Indian citizens of Nepali heritage, the usage of “Nepali” for people who are presumed to hold citizenship in Nepal but who come to India for short-term labor effectively implies that everyone of Nepali heritage is de facto a Nepali citizen and therefore does not have rights to citizenship in India.⁹ This complicated logic emerges out of the terms of the Indo-Nepal Friendship Treaty of 1950, which forecloses the possibility of dual citizenship in the two countries. Indians of Nepali heritage therefore harbor a constant anxiety that they may be expelled en masse, as people from similar backgrounds indeed were in the 1980s and 1990s from the Indian states of Meghalaya and Mizoram, as well as from the neighboring country of Bhutan (Hutt 2003).

For all of these reasons, I do not use “Nepali” as a noun to refer to people. I do, however, use it as an adjective for complexes that transcend national boundaries: language, literature, society, history, heritage, media, and the public sphere. When necessary, I also use “Nepali” to denote entities specifically linked to the modern nation-state of Nepal: “the Nepali state,” “Nepali citizenship,” “Nepali legislation,” “Nepali state policy,” and “the Nepali national framework.”

The category of “Indian” is equally vexed for different reasons. While Indian citizens of Nepali heritage fight for recognition of their Indianness in India, when they travel to or live in Nepal, they downplay it as much as possible. Only citizens of Nepal may own land in Nepal, and Indians are stereotyped as the imperious big brother next door whom everyone loves to hate. As described in Chapter 4, many Indian citizens of Nepali heritage in fact continue to own land in Nepal and work in the private sector as teachers, doctors, and entrepreneurs. All of these occupations entail the production of Nepali “paper citizenship” (Sadiq 2008), despite the fact that these individuals already hold Indian documents. The possession of dual-citizenship documents puts these individuals in a large, quasi-illicit category. For this reason, although many Thangmi I encountered in Nepal had been born, educated, or otherwise spent much of their lives in India, they preferred not to be set apart from other Thangmi in Nepal as “Indian.” The latter term did not have the same connotations of a particular ethnic, cultural, or linguistic heritage that “Nepali” did; so I use “Indian” only in a manner equivalent to the second usage of “Nepali” above: to refer to the “Indian state,” “Indian citizenship,” “Indian legal framework,” and so forth. These issues, which have great implications for how Thangmi identity is conceptualized and produced, are discussed in Chapters 4 and 6.

In Nepal, the majority of Thangmi live in rural hill villages in Dolakha and Sindhupalchok. Some of the largest Thangmi settlements are in Alampu, Chokati, Dhuskun, Dumkot, Lapilang, Piskar, Surkhe, and Suspa (although members of other ethnic groups also usually live in or near these settlements). A small number of Thangmi live in urban Kathmandu—Nepal’s only truly metropolitan city—along with a similar number in semiurban towns in the Tarai districts of Jhapa and Udayapur.¹⁰ Both of these groups are composed largely of individuals who settled in these towns later in life, having grown up either in rural Nepal or in Darjeeling. I refer to such groups as “Kathmandu-based Thangmi” and “Jhapa-based Thangmi” because their locations—and the life experiences associated with them—set them apart from the majority of Thangmi living in hill districts. Each district, village, and hamlet has its own particularities. With the exception of a pronounced dialect difference between the Thangmi language spoken in Sindhupalchok and Dolakha, these are almost impossible to describe schematically.

The majority of the Thangmi population in India lives in urban Darjeeling municipality or adjacent quasiurban settlements, such as Alubari, Jawahar Basti, Jorebunglow, Mangalpuri, and Tungsung. There are also small concentrations of Thangmi in rural areas throughout the district, both on tea plantations like Tumsong, and in such villages as Bijen Bari, Rangbull, and Tin Mile. In the neighboring state of Sikkim, several Thangmi reside in urban Gangtok, while others are dispersed across rural areas. Thangmi residence patterns in India are rarely ethnically homogeneous in the manner that they are in Nepal. Yet there as in Nepal, place is central to the cultural politics of Thangminess, so I pay careful attention to locality. Throughout the book, whenever possible I mention the village or town with which an individual has connections, or where an event took place.

Areas of Thangmi residence and mobility in Nepal, India, and China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). Map courtesy of Stacey D. Maples.