Prismatic Village: The Margin at the Center in the Nepali Maoist Revolution

Abstract

While the influence of peasant politics and agrarian struggles is growing extraordinarily in Nepal’s political landscape, their historical centrality and leadership in social transformation are undermined. This article demonstrates how the subaltern peasant politics of the 1970s and the subsequent Nepali Maoist revolution of the 1990s inversed the orthodox political imagination of peasants as primitive and pre-political, and argues that villages have always been a locus of political change in Nepal. By exploring the political history of Thabang Village in western Nepal, this article argues for a prismatic approach of studying peasant politics to understand how the structural changes of a particular village can instigate national political transformation. The main argument is that the internal dynamics of a village can enter into an articulated relationship with national political processes, which can swiftly transform the structural importance of the village and its nature of connections to other wider socio-political processes, allowing for unexpected political possibilities such as the Maoist revolution to emerge.