Class State and Struggle in Nepal

This comprehensive collection of writings on class, struggle and the state in Nepal flows out of the author's commitment to a reflexive, socially engaged anthropology and raises issues widely pertinent to developmental, political and cultural processes in the subcontinent. The different chapters were written in the years 1989-95, a key transitional period of Nepal's history that saw popular uprising, basic constitutional change, parliamentary wrangling and instigation of an armed guerrilla insurgency in the countryside. Refusing to take these events at face value, the author seeks to bring wider theoretical, historical and regional perspectives to disclose the social content and significance of these events.

The book starts by explicating the author's theoretical and methodological framework, with an emphasis on human agency and process as opposed to the normative and structural approaches that characterize much of South Asian ethnography. Next come critical appraisals of the history of the struggles, constitutional changes and parliamentary processes of the 1989-95 period, followed by case studies of intellectuals and the constitutional, legal and institutional processes used to domesticate and co-opt struggle. Struggle is strategized in terms of class development and comparison with contemporary struggles elsewhere in the world. Identifying commercialization as the preponderant process of the modern' period, the penultimate section scrutinizes the merchant bazaar as the institutional and cultural mechanism of commercial subjugation of Nepal. The last two chapters first correlate caste with citizenship, not class as commonly done, and second, in a review of Levi's Bhaktapur, criticize the reduction of urban social analysis to ritual while providing a historical materialist alternative.