Four Ana and One Modem House: a Spatial Ethnography of Kathmandu's Urbanizing Periphery

I Four Ana and One Modem House: A Spatial Ethnography of Kathmandu's Urbanizing Periphery Andrew Stephen Nelson Denton, Texas M.A. University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, December 2004 B.A. Grinnell College, December 2000 A Disse11ation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Anthropology University of Virginia May 2013 II Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: An Intellectual Journey to the Urban Periphery 1 Part I: The Alienation of Farm Land 23 Chapter 2: From Newar Urbanism to Nepali Suburbanism: 27 A Social History of Kathmandu’s Sprawl Chapter 3: Jyāpu Farmers, Dalāl Land Pimps, and Housing Companies: 58 Land in a Time of Urbanization Part II: The Householder’s Burden 88 Chapter 4: Fixity within Mobility: 91 Relocating to the Urban Periphery and Beyond Chapter 5: American Apartments, Bihar Boxes, and a Neo-Newari 122 Renaissance: the Dual Logic of New Kathmandu Houses Part III: The Anxiety of Living amongst Strangers 167 Chapter 6: Becoming a ‘Social’ Neighbor: 171 Ethnicity and the Construction of the Moral Community Chapter 7: Searching for the State in the Urban Periphery: 202 The Local Politics of Public and Private Infrastructure Epilogue 229 Appendices 237 Bibliography 242 III Abstract This dissertation concerns the relationship between the rapid transformation of Kathmandu Valley’s urban periphery and the social relations of post-insurgency Nepal. Starting in the 1970s, and rapidly increasing since the 2000s, land outside of the Valley’s Newar cities has transformed from agricultural fields into a mixed development of planned and unplanned localities consisting of migrants from the hinterland and urbanites from the city center. The scholarship of Kathmandu’s transformation reflects a common assumption in anthropology to understand space as a product of social relations. In Kathmandu, urban sprawl is often attributed to ethnic shifts in the urban population or economic transformations that have produced a shift from a caste to class social structure. Given the inchoate social nature of the urban periphery, I find it more fruitful to reverse the question to ask how spatial processes produce social outcomes. Rather than starting with the categories and practices of ethnicity, caste or class, I give analytical primacy to the material conditions, symbolic conceptions, and everyday practices regarding land, mobility, houses, and community. In part one, I show how current sprawl patterns follow a history of land value altering in meaning and practice from a system in which land is an ‘inalienable’ good to one in which it becomes an exchangeable gift or commodity. I understand the current ethnic tone of Newar farmers’ claims to land within a trend of land expropriation by ‘outsiders.’ In part two, I introduce the perspective of new residents in the periphery through the category of the Hindu householder. The move into the urban periphery reflects the householder’s aspirations of social mobility, which combine the short-term demands of social status, migration and consumption with the long-term cosmic concerns IV of kinship and morality. In part three, I reconsider the social organization of the urban periphery within debates of caste, class, and democracy in South Asian cities. Through a study of how space is used, I argue that the society and politics of the urban periphery reference nostalgia for Nepal’s pre-democratic Panchayat era in which certain social positions of geography and ethnicity are privileged within the rhetoric of nationalism. V Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of many people in Nepal, England, and the United States. Foremost, my parents, Carol and Don Nelson, are responsible for instilling in me a spirit of exploration. This spirit led me to discover a home away from home in Kathmandu in 1999 when I went on the Pitzer College in Nepal program. Particularly, my host stay with the family of Sanat Tamang convinced me that Kathmandu was a place to where I wanted to return. With the help of the Grinnell Corps Program, I did return in 2001 to teach at LMV in Patan. Thanks to the support of the family of Madhab Sitaula and comradery of my fellow teacher, Molly Davis, I was able to see a completely different side of the city and Nepal. The Pitzer and LMV experiences provided the central questions of this project. When not in Nepal, I found the best avenues for thinking through these questions in the anthropology departments of Grinnell College, London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and the University of Virginia. I thank the following friends for the many conversations about South Asia, anthropology and politics: Joe Green, Max Muller, Luna Ranjit, Zorka Milin, Ian Huntington, Vivek Boray, Anshuman Rane, Amanda Lee, Subin Nijhawan, Nitin Sinha, Projit Mukherjee, Florence Winterburn, Jason Hickel, Lydia Rodriguez, Sergio Lopez, John Osterman, Claire Snell-Rood, Adam Watson, Arsalan Khan, and Harri Siikala. I am grateful to all of the professors who helped focus my scattered interests over the last sixteen years as I have wondered from cinema to land, post-colonialism to architecture: Jonathan Andelson, Mark Hobart, Annabelle Sreberny, HL Seneviratne, Prista Ratanapruck, Katya Makarova, George Mentore, Shiqiao Li, Fred Damon, and Nicolas Sihlé. I would also like to thank my instructors of Nepali and Newar VI language: the Pitzer gurus of Surya, Sadhana, Sanjiv, and Shova, Michael Hutt, Ramesh Dhungel, Sunder Krishna Joshi, Indira Joshi, Rina Magar Thapa, and Budhendra Joshi. For my dissertation fieldwork, there are countless individuals who deserve my gratitude. I am particularly appreciative of the residents of Maitri Nagar and Civil Homes who accepted me into their neighborhoods, tea-shops, and homes. Specifically, Shyam Pradhan, the family of Rajendra Shrestha, Siddhalaxmi Shrestha, Nilkantha Pokharel, Hari Dhungel, and Sudharson Thapaliya went out of their way to answer my questions and welcome my constant presence into their lives for one year. Outside of my fieldsite, Peter Moran and the US-Fulbright office provided generous support, time, and energy to work. I thank Uday Sunder Shrestha and Spaces Magazine for publishing my early thoughts from the field, and Martin Chautari for providing a place to meet Nepali academics and present my research. Finally, I thank my wife Melissa Alejandra for being with me through the many ups and downs of the dissertation process. She has supported me (and this project) from the first day of the PhD program through fieldwork and writing. It would not have been without her help and love. For Mateo Andrés, the love of our lives, you came just in time to motivate daddy to reach the finish line. 1 Chapter 1. An Intellectual Journey to the Urban Periphery Spring 1999: Pitzer in Nepal, Golfuṭar, and the Janajāti Movement This dissertation stems from my own experiences living in and thinking about Kathmandu, Nepal, particularly through the disciplinary lens of anthropology. From the people I have lived and worked with and places in which I have resided, two prominent themes have guided my academic interests: (1) the rapid urban expansion of Kathmandu Valley; and (2) the relationship between social relations and place. When I first traveled to Nepal in February 1999 as a student on the Pitzer College in Nepal program, I lived in the house of a family belonging to the Tamang ethnicity in the settlement of Golfuṭar. Golfuṭar is located six kilometers north of Kathmandu’s city center and 1.5 kilometers north of Ring Road (which encircles Kathmandu and Patan). For the Tamangs, Golfuṭar is a village, one in which they and their neighbors have inhabited for multiple generations. Their house is located on a steep ridge overlooking a large valley of rice and wheat fields next to the Dhobi River. The hour walk from these fields to the locality of Chabahil, where Pitzer’s school was located, felt very rural. To reach the school, I traversed footpaths cutting through rice paddies and curvy dirt roads moving through neighborhoods of farming households. Walking in the opposite direction from the Tamang’s ridge-top house to the Golfuṭar Chowk (intersection) revealed a far different landscape. This route passed by large cement houses and straight paved roads organized along a grid pattern. Golfuṭar was selected as one of two government ‘town- planning’ projects initiated in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the Ministry of Urban Planning and Physical Development. While the other town-planning project in Kuleshwor was designated for state employees (discussed further in chapter 4), Golfuṭar 2 was open to private investment. Most of the inhabitants are retired members of the British military, Gurkhas. As opposed to the Tamang and Chhetri (caste group of Kshatri ranked below Brahman in Nepal’s caste code) ethnic composition of the farming community residing along the ridge, most inhabitants of Golfuṭar are wealthier ex-Gurkhas of Gurung, Magar, Rai and Limbu ethnicities. From the Golfuṭar farmer’s perspective, the city represented the incursion of outside people, business and money. Newcomers to Gulfuṭar had built large cement houses that dwarf the mud-brick and modest one-story cement houses of the original inhabitants. The Tamangs and their older neighbors worried about the influence of the affluent new houses’ children, who, they say, do not value work and engage in drinking and gambling. But the newcomers also brought certain benefits. They bought milk produced by the Tamang’s two cows and employed the Tamang’s children at a local computer institute and at a local athletic facility. Additionally, as more outsiders moved in, the value of the Tamang’s land had rapidly appreciated, leading some of their neighbors to sell their farmland and move away.

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