A Himalayan Case Study

HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Volume 35 Number 2 Article 11 January 2016 Reconsidering State-Society Relations in South Asia: A Himalayan Case Study Sanjog Rupakheti Loyola University New Orleans, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya Recommended Citation Rupakheti, Sanjog. 2016. Reconsidering State-Society Relations in South Asia: A Himalayan Case Study. HIMALAYA 35(2). Available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol35/iss2/11 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This Research Article is brought to you for free and open access by the DigitalCommons@Macalester College at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Reconsidering State-Society Relations in South Asia: A Himalayan Case Study Acknowledgements I acknowledge with gratitude the support and guidance of Sumit Guha and Indrani Chatterjee on the larger research project, from which this article is drawn. For their careful and insightful suggestions on the earlier drafts, I thank Ashley Howard, Paul Buehler, and the two anonymous reviewers of Himalaya. I am especially grateful to Catherine Warner and Arik Moran (editors of this special issue), for their meticulous work on the earlier drafts. Any remaining mistakes and omissions are entirely my own. This research article is available in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol35/iss2/11 Reconsidering State-Society Relations in South Asia: A Himalayan Case Study Sanjog Rupakheti Since the mid-eighteenth century when armies population, in the attempt to redress wrongs, serving the English East India Company (EIC) particularly problematizes the received notion clashed with the Gorkhali power, British of that society being ruled by arbitrary system. officers depicted Nepal as an example of Repeated emphasis on justice administration classical Hindu despotism. Subsequent enabled the Gorkhali state to simultaneously scholars of the region have not quite challenged incorporate multifarious groups into its these representations, mostly taking such expanding network through grants and titles, colonial descriptors as ‘facts.’ and subordinate them to rules created at the center. The essay offers glimpses into a This essay demonstrates that the Nepali state state that was simultaneously coercive and evolved through methods of rule rather than consensual, extractive and re-distributive. through the performance of rituals and war. It traces a brief trajectory of the development Keywords: caste, justice, kingship, law, Nepal, state. of the Gorkhali legal sovereignty by examining the processes of governance including alliance building, management of disputes, and rationalization of administrative, and judicial structures. I argue that the frequency and volume of petitions to royal authority made by the subjects from a cross-section of Nepali HIMALAYA Volume 35, Number 2 | 73 Introduction its rulers. Few western scholars have documented the post-1816 state as a qualitatively different entity (Burghart Nepal’s ‘non-coloniality’ has often precluded its compara- 1984; English 1985). Notwithstanding the importance of the bility to the larger sub-continental historic experience in Treaty of Sagauli (1816), these scholars however did not the scholarship (Des Chene 2007). Ironically, the colonial fully explain (beyond theoretical speculations) as to how knowledge regimes operating from India were at the the Anglo-Gorkha War engendered concrete steps towards forefront of generating the earliest and most authorita- Gorkhali state-making from within.6 Locating the agency tive accounts of Nepal.1 The military and administrative of change in Nepali society elsewhere equally risks missing officers of the East India Company (EIC) traversing the the deeper and indigenous roots of Gorkhali power ex- foothills of the Himalayas provided the first paradigmatic tending back into the eighteenth century. Some influential interpretation of the modern Nepali polity (Hamilton 1819; bodies of anthropological works on Nepal have alternative- Kirkpatrick 1971; Hogdson 1880). Borrowing heavily from ly underscored the role of rituals in the making of Gorkhali the ubiquitous template of ‘Oriental Despotism’ in Asia, the kingship and state (Höfer 1979; Lecomte-Tilouine 2009; EIC depicted Gorkhali rulers too as quintessential Hindu Michaels 2005; Quigley 2005). However, the general conclu- tyrants for whom violence was innate not instrumental.2 sions of these works have not moved the debate away from Particularly, the EIC accounts emphasized the ‘savage’ na- the Dumontian and Hocartian paradigms of power.7 This ture and ‘oppressive’ violence of its emerging rival, as both has particularly overshadowed the study of the 1854 Ain, competed for territory along the Himalayan corridor in the which remains prodigiously focused on caste hierarchy wake of receding Mughal authority. Subsequent scholars and its associated purity.8 As a result, the conspicuous role of the region have not quite challenged these represen- played by administrative legislations in regulating wide tations, taking such colonial descriptors at face value.3 arrays of socio-economic relations in nineteenth century Nationalist historians on the other hand have glorified the Nepal remains poorly examined. Gorkhali military conquests as constituting the fulcrum of its sovereignty, and assigned it the honorable title of Without dismissing the role played by the early Gorkh- ‘unification’. In nationalist narratives, ‘unification’ appears ali military success, this essay proposes an alternative as a logical telos uniting a fragmented nation, guiding it to narrative of Gorkhali rule wherein Gorkhali manipulation modernity (Pant 1985; D. R. Regmi 1975; Shah 1990).4 Yet of social and cultural practices played an important role this representation of the state as a sovereign historical in molding the building blocks of the state alongside the object and a collective subject of modernity elides a rather management of land and rituals. It particularly sheds light complex trajectory of its formation and evolution. Both on aspects of state-society relations that have hitherto the nationalist and the colonial representations of Nepal warranted the least attention, especially those pertaining do not examine state building as a process, the outcomes to the construction of early state authority. I hope to show of which were not pre-ordained but contingent (Michael that the foundations of the Gorkhali state were built on the 1999; Onta 1995). projection of its legal sovereignty that encompassed both secular and religious aspects of social life. From the closing Mahesh C. Regmi, who offered the first sustained critique decades of the eighteenth century, the nascent kingdom of the nationalist narrative, placed the land-tax nexus at expanded its judicial power to check both official irregu- the center of the Nepali state-making account (M. C. Regmi larities and manage a gamut of social relations. Overtime, 1963; 1971). The doyen of Nepali economic history howev- the Gorkhali emphasis on building legitimacy through er held the ‘motely character’ of the land tenures and tax deliverance of justice and regulation of intimate aspects of assessments as illustrative of a state marked by unpre- social lives bonded diverse populations to the state on the dictability and extractive nature (Regmi 1977: 51). Regmi one hand, and became a vehicle to project power in areas argued that the lack of private property in land, arbitrary controlled by competing groups on the other. rules, and oppressive tax demands on peasantry precluded the growth of a strong state. Regmi’s firm focus on land It was not simply centralization of rituals and taxes, but tenures and the policy driven nature of his works prevent- also of information, loyalty, and justice administration ed him from evaluating differential systems of labor, dues, that deepened Gorkhali sovereignty in rural Nepal. For and rights operating under the ambit of the evolving state sovereignty to be effective at the grassroots it had to be power to which he inadvertently imputed a despotic char- relatable in everyday life and imagination. The swiftness acter.5 An explicit economic determinism underpinning his and impartiality with which the state delivered justice works did not challenge the prevailing imagery of Nepal as rooted it in popular imagination, and the resulting order a static society caught in tyranny and disconnected from was processual—not homeostatic. 74 | HIMALAYA Fall 2015 Markers of Early Gorkhali Rule: Whose Leviathan? tion of multitudes of intermediaries anchored on an idea of shared sovereignty, these recipients of Gorkhali titles When the small chiefdom of Gorkha emerged into a large and grants were more than just office-holders. They were territorial unit during the mid-eighteenth century, it had “partners and co-sharers of the realm”, acting as a vital to accommodate various local power holders (Acharya & link between the state and society (Wink 1986: 187), a point Naraharinath 2061 VS: 44). The immense ethnic, geograph- aptly summarized in a letter of Prithvi Narayan Shah to the ic, cultural, and

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