Nepal's Dalits in Transition

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For too long Nepal's Dalits have been marginalized, not just socially, economically, and politically, but from academic accounts of Nepalese society as well. This volume forms part of a welcome new trend, the emergence of Dalit Studies in Nepal, led by a new generation of Dalit scholars. It covers a wide range of issues concerning Nepal's Dalits and offers a snapshot of the advances that they have made-in education, in politics, in the bureaucracy, economically, and in everyday relations. At the same time the book documents the continuing material disadvantage, inequality, discrimination, both direct and indirect, and consequent mental suffering that Dalits have to face. It also touches on the struggles, hopes, and dilemmas of Dalit activists as they seek to bring about a new social order and a relatively more egalitarian society. Nepal's Dalits in Transition will be essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, or future of social change in Nepal.

David N. Gellner is Professor of Social Anthropology and a Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford; Krishna P. Adhikari PhD (University of Reading) is an expert on social change and development in Nepal and elsewhere, and a Research Affiliate of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.

This book began life as a panel at the July 2017 Annual Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya organized by the Social Science Baha at the Hotel Shanker. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 were first presented there. Chapter 2 was first presented a few days earlier in Bangalore at the conference, organized by the Government of Karnataka, 'Reclaiming Social Justice, Revisiting Ambedkar'; it was subsequently published in A.S. Rathore (ed.) B.R. Ambedkar: The Quest for Social Justice, Vol. 2: Social Justice. We are grateful to OUP Delhi for permission to reprint it here. Chapters 9 and 13 were first presented in a panel on 'Dalits and Other Stigmatized Groups: Imagining Changed Lives and Livelihoods' at the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) conference in Oxford in September 2018. Chs 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, and 12 appeared late in 2019 in a special issue of Contributions to Nepalese Studies, 46(2) and have been slightly revised and updated for republication here. We are grateful to the director of the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies, Tribhuvan University, Dr Mrigendra Karki, and to the editorial board of Contributions, for permission to reprint. Chapters 7, 8, and 10 were commissioned for this expanded book version. We thank Dr Dambar Chemjong for permission to reproduce the maps on p. 22 and p. 210.

Our work on Dalits began with the ESRC-funded project, 'Caste, Class, and Culture: Changing Bahun and Dalit Identities in Nepal' [ES/L00240X/1], 2013-17, on which Arjun Bahadur BK was a full-time researcher (see Chs 2 and 4 below). It continued with work on Dalits in the school curriculum, funded by GCRF (the Global Challenges Research Fund) through the University of Oxford. Most recently, it has been supported through the British Academy's Heritage, Dignity, and Violence programme (also ultimately GCRF- funded), with the project 'The Dalit Search for Dignity: State, Society, and Mobilization from Below in Nepal' [HDV190020], 2019-23 (www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/the-dalit-search-for-dignity-state-society-and-mobilization- from-below-in-far-west-nepal). Gopal Nepali of the Samata Foundation participated in these last two projects. We would also like to thank the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME), All Souls College, and the University of Oxford, for their administrative and financial assistance. We are grateful to all the institutions mentioned for their support. The research they have sponsored has fed directly into chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, and 13.

In the course of the research we were privileged to come into contact with many colleagues working on similar themes. We thank Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka for advice and for suggesting the title of the volume. Though fieldwork was often interrupted by Covid-19, and the production of this volume has been severely delayed by unavoidable academic duties, the transnational scholarly collaboration represented by this collection of essays has, we hope, continued to flourish. Those collaborations include Tribhuvan University, CNAS (Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies) TU, Prithvi Narayan Campus Pokhara, the Far Western University, the Samata Foundation, and RSDC (Rural Self-Reliance Development Centre).

At long last research on Dalits in Nepal is starting to reach the level that it should have been at many years ago. It is a matter for celebration that many of those doing the research have social-science PhDs and come from a Dalit background themselves. We hope that this collection will give further encouragement to the growing community of scholars and activists embraced by the term Dalit Studies.