Monday, December 20, 2010

Race war and the known facts

In east Nepal in 1997, activists of a small political party called the Mongol National Organization (MNO) held a rally on a windy village hilltop. Seated on the ground was an audience of about 50 children and adults from many of the ethnic groups who live in this part of Nepal: Rai, Limbu, Sunuwar, Magar, and Gurung. Among the first speakers of the day was the president of the MNO's district committee, a stout Rai man in his thirties. Broadcasting over a loudspeaker rigged to a car battery, he explained to the crowd what it meant for them to be Mongol:
We are a Mongol community, we are not a caste either; we are Mongol. For example, in this world there are three types of people. One is white with white skin like Americans, for example like sister here [referring to me].... The other has black skin and is called Negro. The other is called the red race like us: short like us; stocky like us; with small eyes and flat noses like us. Altogether you find these three types of people in the world. So from these three groups, we call one group Mongol. Mongol, meaning, we are this country's Mongols. People called Mongols are found in many places in the world. One [group of] Mongols is also found in China and other Mongols are found in Malaysia. There are Mongols in the world but we are not those foreign Mongols. We are the Mongols of Nepal. We are Nepal's Mongols and our fight is with the Hindu rulers here.
By asserting that these peoples were Mongols, this MNO leader defined them as a race. He argued that they are members of one of the major biological groups of people in the world, and that Mongols in Nepal could be identified by a specific set of physical features that they shared with Mongols in other parts of Asia.
The idea that this heterogeneous group of people belonged to a Mongol race was a recurring theme in MNO communications during my research in the mid-1990s. These frequent references to the racial identity of Mongols were necessary because it was an uncommon way for people to identify themselves in Nepal. Many of the people that the MNO sought to mobilize in east Nepal had never thought of themselves as Mongols prior to the arrival of the MNO. One young Magar man expressed what many other party supporters would say in conversation: "We didn't know that we were Mongols until the MNO came here." Previously, the peoples that the MNO began to call Mongols had thought of themselves as belonging to a jati, a caste or ethnic group; in this framework, it was not biological differences but cultural practices, language, religion, and their social ranking below high-caste Hindus that were the key attributes of identity.
By a process of racialization (see Barot and Bird 2001), this group of people came to be represented and categorized in racial terms as part of the mobilization of the MNO (Omi and Winant 1986; Winant 1994). This essay analyzes why the MNO asserted a racial identity for this diverse group of people, and the meanings of the MNO's invoking race in this political and historical context. In addition, it deepens anthropological understanding of uses of race by people who are subaltern; i.e., economically and politically subordinate within a society.
It was not inevitable that the MNO would define the population it sought to mobilize as a race. Race is not the primary framework of identity circulating in Nepal, and it was not used by most other organizations working on behalf of the same group of people. Rather, the MNO's adoption of a racial identity was selected from a range of options, which must be understood in light of the political objectives of this organization. The MNO began to mobilize support in rural eastern Nepal after a multiparty system was established in 1990 as part of a larger social movement aimed to increase the social, economic, and political power of the country's numerous ethnic groups. The MNO seeks to end the dominance of high-caste Hindus from the hill regions, who have controlled the state since the unification of Nepal in the late eighteenth century under a Hindu king. The state promoted the language and religion of these high-caste Hindus as the national culture of Nepal, pursuing policies that aimed to create a homogeneous nation of Nepali speakers who followed Hinduism, the state religion. In response to the negative effects of these policies on Nepal's ethnic groups, one of the central goals of the movement is to revitalize their cultural practices. As a result, there has been a resurgence of interest in Buddhism and other non-Hindu religions, Tibeto-Burman languages, dances, dress, and the histories of these ethnic groups.
The Mongol National Organization (MNO) is one of the few political parties in the movement, and it seeks to unite these ethnic groups, whom they call Mongols. The MNO argues that Nepal's population is composed of two distinct racial groups: Mongols, who make up 80 per cent of the population, and Aryans, referring to Hindus, who make up 20 per cent of Nepal's population. (2) Insisting that gaining political power is a prerequisite to improving the position of Mongols in all sectors of society, the party aims to gain control of the state, through elections if possible, by armed revolution if not. The party's ultimate goal is to enact fundamental changes in state policies and institutions that will benefit Mongols, such as restructuring Nepal as a federation of states where Tibeto-Burman languages are used, and abolishing the monarchy, a buttress of Hindu political dominance.
As Nepal's 1990 Constitution forbids the Election Commission from registering political parties that are explicitly community or region based, the MNO is illegal. Although the MNO was denied registration on this basis, throughout the 1990s it continued to put up candidates for elections, although they had to run as independents. The party became popular in rural eastern Nepal, particularly in the Ilam district, where it was able to gain control of several village governments.
Asserting a racial identity was a means of furthering these political goals, as it was a powerful discourse, backed by the authority of social science and British colonial rulers in India; yet it also enabled the MNO to break with the state's hegemonic frameworks of identity that emphasized caste, language, religion, and ethnicity rather than race. Not least, the MNO's assertion of a racial identity was part of their strategy to differentiate their party from other organizations working for ethnic groups in Nepal.

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