Maoists at the Hearth: Everyday Life in Nepal's Civil War

By Judith Pettigrew and David N. Gellner

The Maoist insurgency in Nepal lasted from 1996 to 2006, and at the pinnacle of their armed success the Maoists controlled much of the countryside. Maoists at the Hearth, which is based on ethnographic research that commenced more than a decade before the escalation of the civil war in 2001, explores the daily life in a hill village in central Nepal, during the "People's War." From the everyday routines before the arrival of the Maoists in the late 1990s through the insurgency and its aftermath, this book examines the changing social relationships among fellow villagers and parties to the conflict.

War is not an interruption that suspends social processes. Life in the village focused as usual on social challenges, interpersonal relationships, and essential duties such as managing agricultural work, running households, and organizing development projects. But as Judith Pettigrew shows, social life, cultural practices, and routine activities are reshaped in uncertain and dangerous circumstances. The book considers how these activities were conducted under dramatically transformed conditions and discusses the challenges (and, sometimes, opportunities) that the villagers confronted.

By considering local spatial arrangements and their adaptation, Pettigrew explores people's reactions when they lost control of the personal, public, and sacred spaces of the village. A central consideration of Maoists at the Hearth is an exploration of how local social tensions were realized and renegotiated as people supported (and sometimes betrayed) each other and of how villager-Maoist relationships (and to a lesser extent villager-army relationships), which drew on a range of culturally patterned preexisting relationships, were reforged, transformed, or renegotiated in the context of the conflict and its aftermath.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9780812207897

Book preview

Introduction

On a cold winter’s afternoon in central Nepal I sat in the courtyard of the house of my village sister, Dhan Kumari,¹ with a group of neighborhood children who were amusing themselves by reading an English alphabet book. My neighbor, Lek Bahadur’s seven-year-old daughter, Rupa, read out loud: A, B, C, D, Maoists with large bags and guns coming along the path, E, F, G, H…. It was a casual observation, and Rupa did not falter nor was she frightened. She was simply acknowledging a fact and communicating as usual the arrival of Maoist insurgents to whomever might wish to be forewarned.

Some months later on a late pre-monsoon afternoon Dhan Kumari told her grandnephew, nine-year-old Raju, to dig up radishes. He opened the fence at the edge of the courtyard and disappeared down the steps into the kitchen garden. While placing some clothes to dry on the courtyard fence I glanced down at Raju digging in the garden below me. Unaware that I was watching him he rhythmically cleared the soil with his hoe and carefully dug out the vegetables, which he placed in a bamboo basket at his feet. He worked slowly and methodically and I was about to turn away when he suddenly transformed his hoe into a gun and sprayed the ground and walls of the garden with bullets. Ra, ta, ta, ta ta, he hissed as he fired his weapon. After completing a round of gunfire Raju returned to carefully digging out radishes for the evening meal. The warscape of rural Nepal was so routinized² that it was intertwined with saying the alphabet and digging up vegetables, and for Rupa and Raju these were typical everyday activities.

In this book I examine how everyday life and social relationships are reshaped in war. Although conflict brings challenging new circumstances, I agree with Stephen Lubkemann (2008) that people’s primary concerns continue to be the management and realization of their everyday lives and the challenges of their social interrelationships and life projects. Although the practices and material culture of violence may be overtly present, physical violence is not the centerpiece of life. Living in conflict is about realizing everyday projects under trying new conditions. My interests here lie in exploring how social life and cultural practices unfold and are reshaped within a landscape of danger and increased uncertainty.

In the following pages the challenging reconfigurations of social life during the People’s War in Nepal (1996–2006) are examined through the lens of the everyday lives of a group of politically nonaligned,³ predominantly middle-aged and elderly, middle-income women in the mainly Tamu⁴ village of Kwei Nasa in central Nepal before, during, and after the Maoist insurgency. Through examination of the concerns, priorities, and social relationships of these people I present a picture of a rural area during Nepal’s Maoist insurgency. This book is also about the complexities and contradictions of villager-combatant relationships, especially villager-Maoist relationships, which drew on a range of culturally patterned preexisting relationships that were reforged, transformed, or renegotiated in the context of the conflict (and its aftermath).

Violence is a feature of everyday life in Nepal contrary to its peaceful Shangri-La image. This includes the violence of exclusion on the basis of caste, gender, class, or ethnicity; poverty and inadequate health care; poor educational or employment opportunities; and state-perpetrated violence, such as the use of torture. The People’s War primarily affected rural areas, bringing a different type of communitywide, conflict-related violence that deepened the preexisting structural violence.

The term structural violence (Galtung, 1969; Farmer, 1997, 2010; Scheper-Hughes, 2002; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004) has been used to highlight how systematic social and economic conditions can result in severe social inequality and marginalization that can lessen people’s opportunities and increase their vulnerability. My use of the term draws on the work of Lubkemann, who in his writing about the Mozambican civil war takes structural violence to refer to the subjective sense of acute deprivation produced by changing socioeconomic and political conditions (2008: 112). The emphasis here is on the subjective sense of deprivation in contrast to the idea of breaching an externally determined objective. Deprivation according to Lubkemann is the subjective package of sentiments—of disappointment, disempowerment, loss, and frustration—that results when groups or individuals perceive that their own experience is falling short of some standard they expect (ibid.). Linda Green (1999: 13), writing about war widows in Guatemala, emphasizes the importance of including as key elements of structural violence humiliation and fear, as well as denial of dignity and integrity—that is, the psychological and spiritual effects of violence. These definitions drawn from other warscapes aptly describe the structural violence of the People’s War.

This book is not a story of the experiences of acute violence—by and large Kwei Nasa escaped these experiences—but rather of the deepening of structural violence shaped by war. Key life projects and social relations were renegotiated in the deteriorated circumstances of the Maoist insurgency. Most development initiatives ceased or ran in limited ways; much of the already limited infrastructure became further compromised; and the local administrative structure stopped functioning. Strategies were developed to cope with worsening structural violence, as well as the constant threat and sporadic reality of direct violence. People experienced increased uncertainty in social relations and deterioration in the sense of trust. Constant vigilance led to persistent unease. Social tensions were realized in unpredictable ways, and at times people both supported and betrayed each other. This uncertainty heightened fear as villagers tried to work out who was an insider and who an outsider. Decisions based on kinship, ethnicity, or locality might or might not work; and so new interpretations were fashioned, some more successful than others. All of this contributed to a heightened suspicion of others and their motives. People were vulnerable to fears that (known or unknown) forces were conspiring against them, and sometimes they were, however, as Michael Jackson notes in perplexing and perilous situations it may simply be one’s powerlessness and estrangement that produces this erosion of self-confidence (2008: 57, 71).

Despite the greater unpredictability and increased danger, daily life focused as usual on circuitous social undertakings, interpersonal relationships, and life projects. People’s primary concerns were their everyday activities and responsibilities such as managing agricultural work, running households, attending school, managing development projects, and organizing and attending life-cycle celebrations. I consider how these activities were achieved under dramatically transformed conditions. I discuss the new opportunities or struggles that people confronted in the course of these processes. And I examine the effect that conflict had on how social interrelationships with both fellow villagers and strangers (including Maoists, and soldiers and thieves who masqueraded as Maoists) were developed, maintained, or renegotiated. Personal and life differences played a significant role in how people lived through the People’s War: the judgments they made, the actions they took, their inner resources and resilience, their external supports, and potentially the degree of danger they faced. For example, the Maoist insurgency was experienced differently by fearful, middle-aged, somewhat socially isolated Dhan Kumari and her younger, less fearful neighbor, Asha, who was deeply embedded in her extended family network. Village-based pre-teen Raju, who was conflict street-wise, and his town-dwelling, teenaged brother, Damar, who was conflict-naive also had very different experiences. Dhan Kumari may have been more frightened than Asha; however, the former’s volatility sometimes attracted the danger that she tried so hard to avoid. Damar was considerably older than his brother, but Damar’s limited understanding of the nuances of the People’s War put him at greater risk.

Drawing on the Tamu concept of rhaba versus a-rhaba (competent, able, knowledgeable versus incompetent, uninformed, ignorant), I examine how different people’s circumstances, opportunities (or lack of), ability to read subtle nuances, and personalities informed their behavior and decision making and influenced (to a considerable degree) their ability to keep safe during the war. Competent people were vigilant (often while appearing not to be) as at any moment it might be necessary to change activity, and/or to appear to be engaging in an entirely different one, such as hiding alcohol production during Maoist anti-alcohol campaigns and appearing instead to be tending the hearth. They knew when (and how) to speak, when to change the topic, when to remain silent, and what to hide (and when), for example, personal guns that Maoists might requisition and gold jewelry that Maoist imposters might steal. The knowledge that informed such judgments was passed via the usual channels of everyday conversation and especially via the concept of norbe taa (inner talk, the whispered, furtive confidences of trusted relatives and friends) It was difficult to be rhaba in every situation, however, and even those people who were considered the most able were sometimes overtaken by the complexities and challenges of life in the People’s War. For example, a key figure on the village day-care center committee, Purna Maya, was taken in by a thief, a Tamu like her, who masqueraded as an ex-Maoist.

Furthermore, being rhaba only provided a certain degree of protection, and by looking at stories, such as that of the man who unwittingly sat beside a Maoist commander and ended up facing accusations of being him, I also examine the unforeseen and random circumstances through which some people ended up in dangerous situations.

Everyday Activities in Conflict

Despite the deteriorated situation, people strove very hard to keep the activities of everyday life going. It was essential to do so: crops needed to be grown, animals cared for, water carried, wood gathered and meals prepared. Everyday activities and routines are usually performed outside consciousness. As Sheringham notes, the everyday is a liminal region of experience that we can be aware of only at the fringes of consciousness, since it exists only through our unreflecting participation in the rhythms of existence (2006: 20). People become more attentive to their everyday activities (and social routines), however, when they are challenged or disrupted.⁵ For example, a common sight on village paths is people taking their animals (such as water buffalo or goats) to graze outside the village. Maoist-imposed occasional daytime curfews disrupted this activity and forced people to seek grazing within the village. This routine activity suddenly became challenging as people tried to work out where to find food for their animals and to make judgments about the acceptable boundaries within which to graze during curfews.

Disruption leads to reflection. Henrik Vigh notes the presence of "increased social reflexivity, the heightened awareness of the way we interpret the social environment, our perspectives and our horizons (2008: 19) in situations of chronic crisis (such as war). Because of the speed and/or unpredictability of change in such unstable situations it becomes increasingly necessary, even critical … to reflect upon reflections; to scrutinise … way[s] of anticipating and predicting what was, what is, and what is about to happen (ibid). The necessity of constantly reflecting on the taken-for-granted daily routine was an essential dimension of life in the People’s War. For example, women who were responsible for cooking suddenly found that meal preparation required a previously unnecessary level of reflection. As they prepared the evening meal they inevitably wondered if they might have to feed Maoists that day. Once Maoists arrived some women told me that they reflected on their ability to cook in a way that they had not done before Is my food tasty? What might happen if they don’t like it? Will there be enough for the Maoists and the family?" they wondered. Reflection facilitated the continuance of daily activities (such as managing to feed animals during curfews) and helped people keep safe (knowing where to go and where to avoid during curfews). But it also significantly contributed to people’s hypervigilance (ongoing worries about the arrival of Maoists, the acceptability, quality, and quantity of food).

Under the threat of the People’s War the activities of everyday life such as the routines of farming and of running households took on heightened meaning. Their disruption had serious implications for people’s livelihoods (for example, when the area was under Maoist curfew and people could not go out into the fields or forest to work or when the road to town was closed). The degree of disturbance of daily life was also a means of evaluating more generally the extent of deterioration in the village at any particular time, which was often based on whether or not people could adequately perform their cycle of everyday activities.

The continuance of the daily routine took on additional psychological and symbolic significance. Keeping the everyday chores going helped to keep anxiety at bay (as villagers themselves pointed out) and was also a metaphor for keeping life going. Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, referring to people whose lives are severely disrupted (by violence), note that to be able to secure the everyday life by individuals and communities is indeed an achievement (2001: 1–2). Kwei Nasa villagers faced extra challenges continuing their daily activities during the People’s War, and their ongoing success in this endeavor was a notable accomplishment which provided hope and ensured the future. As people planted rice seedlings in the spring, they looked ahead to the transplantation of the seedlings in the monsoon, the harvesting of the grain in the autumn, the repair of the terraces in the winter, the start of the next year’s agricultural cycle, and so on.

Monique Skidmore, writing about survival strategies under military rule in Burma, suggests that Burmese people escape from the politicization of everyday life into miniature worlds of everyday existence, in which the minutiae of everyday life take on an exaggerated focus or absorption (2004: 190). In such miniature worlds such processes as memory, reflection and emotion are shut out. Similarly, the Tamu cultural pattern of paying attention to, and talking about, daily activities (What are you doing? Where are you going? Have you eaten rice? and so on) was sometimes exaggerated during the conflict as people tried to evaluate the degree of risk. Aside from maintaining practical necessities of daily routines, this attention to the quotidian mundane activities was a way of distracting people from the unsettling realities of the conflict. It was also a means of shutting out and managing such difficult emotional processes as fear, and I explore how it worked in combination with other cultural models for tackling difficult emotions.

In usual circumstances the timeless order of society is no less an object of myth than in times of crisis, but in normal times its challengers can be more easily denied (Greenhouse, 2002: 27). Because the challenges and changes cannot be so easily denied during wartime, researchers have often considered it to be an event. Communities who live in socially unstable places (ibid.: 1–34) are taken to be interrupted, and the multiple social processes that anthropologists usually research are treated as if they have been suspended. Henrik Vigh points out that, Social positions, institutions and configurations do not just disintegrate [in endemic crisis situations] but are reconfigured and reshaped in relation to stable instability and chronic crisis (2008: 12–13). Stephen Lubkemann draws attention to the fact that for the inhabitants of warscapes, "war has not been an ‘event’ that suspends ‘normal’ social processes, but has instead become the normal—in the sense of ‘expected’—context for the unfolding of social life (2008: 1). This is what Michael Taussig refers to as the normality of the abnormal" (1992: 17–18). The challenge, Lubkemann suggests, is to focus on the culturally negotiated life projects of people in conflict zones rather than being mesmerized by the more violent and uncertain situations in which such projects are negotiated. The problem for most people who live in warscapes arises from the challenges that violence introduces to the realization of other projects rather than violence as such (ibid.: 330).

Agency

People in conflict zones are frequently divided into those with weapons (and therefore agency) and those without, who are thus essentially agentless victims. Nonaligned Kwei Nasa villagers often placed themselves in the latter category. While this representation communicated people’s sense of lost agency under the disrupted circumstances of the Maoist insurgency, it did not in fact fully convey their everyday practices and interactions. By drawing on multiple examples I examine the complexities and contradictions of agency in wartime and illustrate how people exercised agency through the management of particular experiences and events. The was not merely the tactic agency (de Certeau 1984: 37) of people who lacked autonomy and who had to act in the physical or social space which is not their own (ibid.). Although at certain times this was so. Nor was it the tactic agency of those who had lost their capacity to orient themselves to long term projects as has been put forward by some social scientists writing on war. Notably people in Kwei Nasa did not lose this ability. For example, while the delayed arrival of electricity in their village (long after it had arrived in neighboring villages) was due to the war; people tried, as far as they could, to facilitate the possibility that it would arrive, even if this was just to envision its future installation. Notably this was the major first development in the area following the signing of the peace agreement.

Writing about crisis and chronicity Henrik Vigh suggests that Agency … is not a question of capacity—we all have the ability to act—but of possibility; that is, to what extent we are able to act within a given context (2008: 10–11). As I illustrate in what follows the possibilities for agency were often significant. Conflict does not simply constrain or necessarily diminish agency, but rather it also provides new, unexpected, and reconfigured outlets for agency for some, while for others, it diminishes the ability to act. The overall impact of the war was complex and contradictory, however, as new opportunities for heightened agency coexisted with the imposition of new constraints. While some people saw the insurgency as a time of diminished opportunities, others saw it as a chance to further their personal and political ambitions or to play what they perceived to be a more meaningful role in society, or both. For others it brought different things at different times—lost opportunities during one period and the opening of new horizons at another.

Everyday life in conflict can bring empowering opportunities as well as constraints, and I explore the creative and generative effects of violence as well as the destructive effects (Nordstrom, 1995, 1997, 1998). For example, the women whose experiences I discuss in this book were not directly influenced by Maoist gender equality rhetoric nor by the Maoist women they encountered. However, through a series of unintended consequences—their unexpected leadership of a village development project during the People’s War—they gained greater confidence in participating in public life. Kwei Nasa villagers used a range of practical, creative, and innovative strategies to manage their lives during the People’s War. For example, members of development committees were forbidden by the Maoists from having official meetings, and so they held secret meetings or events that did not look like meetings. Aware that the existing committee records would be at risk, they copied and hid them. When the records were requested by the Maoists, they presented the copies for burning. While these resistances were empowering, provided a measure of control, and ensured that normal development-related activities continued, the cost was high because people feared that their actions would be discovered. Fear in turn generated alternative strategies as agency coexisted uneasily with constraint. A theme explored in this book is the manner in which the conflict reformulated social opportunities in ways that had an ambiguous impact on agency at different times.

Fragmented Spaces

A key element of the People’s War was the fragmentation of space. Writing about the Gurungs (the Tamu-mai), Ernestine McHugh notes that honor is inscribed in space because locale is central to personal identity (1998: 167). People move within nested identities: the household, the neighborhood, the village all define the individual. As people move from narrower to wider circles of belonging, their vulnerability and susceptibility increase (for example, to thieves and malevolent spirits). Conversely, incoming movements are risky, and there are multiple demarcations ranging from the boundaries of our own forest to the protective ritual threads stretching above the entrance to a hamlet, to the most intimate spaces of the house, where such barriers as gates, steps, and thresholds restrict entry. As space narrows to house and hearth, so too does access, which is never a given. Only those with whom the inhabitants are intimate, such as family, friends, neighbors, and selectively invited guests, enter houses. During the People’s War neither army respected these demarcations or the etiquette of entry into the most private spaces. Maoists entered houses demanding food and shelter, and the security forces carried out searches and sometimes entered homesteads with their guns firing. Both sides imposed curfews. Through an exploration of local spatial models and their adaptation I examine the transgression of space as well as the steps that people took to preserve their community when they had physically lost control of their villagescape. With the fragmentation of their personal, public, and sacred spaces people retreated into a parallel virtual world based on local knowledge and elusive communications in which they could talk to each other and try to keep safe. As such they engaged in forms of spatial tactics which de Certeau describes as the practices of the marginal: the furtive movement, short cuts, and routes used by those already caught in the nets of ‘discipline’ (1984: xiv-xv).

Historical Overview

Modern Nepal was created in the latter half of the eighteenth century when Prithvi Narayan Shah, the ruler of the small principality of Gorkha, formed a unified country from a number of independent hill states. Following his death his heirs continued expanding their conquests. The rise of the Gork-has coincided with the growing influence of the East India Company in India. Eventually the two expanding powers came into conflict in the Anglo-Nepal war of 1814 to 1816, which resulted in Nepal’s defeat. The court rivalries and intrigues that had begun following Shah’s death led ultimately to Jung Bahadur Rana taking absolute power. The Rana family entrenched itself through hereditary prime ministers and ruled Nepal as a personal fiefdom for the next 104 years. The monarch was reduced to the position of figurehead. The Ranas isolated Nepal from external influences, which ensured that the political movements that affected the rest of South Asia during the first half of the twentieth century largely passed Nepal by. The isolationist policy was one-sided, however, because although foreigners were kept out, Nepalis left the country in large numbers, most notably journeying to India to join the Indian Army, for other forms of employment, for schooling, or for exile from the ruling regime. It was among these expatriates that the first resistance against the Ranas began. The Nepali National Congress, set up in Banaras, India, in 1946, merged with the Nepal Democratic Congress, which had been founded in Calcutta in 1948 and became the Nepali Congress. They found an ally in King Tribhuvan, a direct descendant of Prithvi Narayan Shah. In 1950 Tribhuvan fled from the prison of his palace to newly independent India, an action that led to an armed revolt against the Rana administration. Eventually, India brokered a peace and worked out a compromise among the king, the Ranas, and the Nepali Congress.

This agreement allowed the return of the Shah family to power and eventually the appointment of a non-Rana as prime minister. A period of quasi-constitutional rule followed, during which the monarch, assisted by the leaders of fledgling political parties, governed the country. King Tribhuvan died in 1955 and was succeeded by King Mahendra, who held the political parties at bay as he strengthened the position of the monarchy. In early 1959 he issued a new constitution that made the premier position of the king apparent. The political parties had no choice but to participate, and so democratic elections for a national assembly were held. The Nepali Congress Party gained a substantial victory and its leader, B. P. Koirala, formed a government and became