Rituals of Ethnicity. Sara Shneiderman

“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.

       Chapter 1

      Of Rocks and Rivers—Being Both at Once

      We are solid like rocks and viscous like mud. We have offered incense to our deities …

      Come, deities, strung in a straight line like the necklaces of the sparrow, of our ancestors … come strung in a straight line … As the deities rose, the rocks dissolved. It was light and the wood dissolved. As it dissolved, everything became fluid…. Let’s create humans, the deities said.

      Chanting these lines, the voices of Thangmi shamans rise and fall to the beat of an animal-skin drum. Monotonous yet captivating, every ritual event begins with these recitations about the origins of the world. This is also the soundtrack I always hear in my mind as I write about Thangmi lives. I can almost smell the incense, recalling myself in the midst of one ritual after another, some over a decade ago now. Weddings, funerals, supplications to territorial deities for a good harvest, most taking place late at night, lit first by kerosene lamps and candles and in later years by bare electric bulbs strung along mud walls. Some Thangmi listen attentively, some drink grain beer and joke loudly about the shamans’ performance, others coo children to sleep in corners amid the hubbub. I struggle to stay awake and make sense of what the words, actions, and beliefs behind them might mean.

      These chants are part of the Thangmi paloke, a narrative cycle about origins and being in the world. It is a story that Thangmi tell themselves about themselves and their relations to others. It is a story heard from childhood onward that plays a crucial role in shaping Thangmi sensibilities about who they are, as individuals, members of an ethnic community, inhabitants of particular pieces of territory, and mobile citizens of multiple states. Repeated again and again throughout each ritual cycle, the first line sums up an apparent paradox of Thangmi being. As they propitiate their deities, the speakers are at once “solid like rocks and viscous like mud,” both immovable objects and malleable forms. For a group of people who openly acknowledge themselves as peripheral to dominant formulations of national, ethnic, and religious identity, and who practice circular migration between three countries as a primary socioeconomic strategy, this fluid state of being is not only a ritual metaphor but a fact of daily life.

      I was listening to academic addresses—eerily