4 - The Marital Economy of War: Reconfiguring Kinship Loyalties and Conjugality

Summary

It was a quiet evening in the Maoist commune in the spring of 2011. The commune members had come together to share the evening meal. The sudden arrival of several villagers disrupted the peace and quiet of the evening: one of the ‘daughters’ of the Maoist commune, Asana, a student of class nine, had eloped with another school student. The wife-takers, that is, the parents of the boy, arrived with a modest gift of flatbread and milk, which served as a substitute for the usual gift of alcohol to accommodate the commune's ban on liquor. Getting the blessing from the girl's kin was impossible at this stage, because the girl's mother was in Kathmandu undergoing medical treatment. On hearing the news, Asana's mother broke down crying. She had big plans of providing education to Asana and now, since her daughter would go to ‘another person's house’, those dreams might never materialize. To make things worse, the members of the commune felt particularly uneasy and ashamed (saram), because these were the ‘children’ of the commune who were breaking the rules that the Maoists had tried so hard to instil during the war: the ban on early marriage having been one of the pillars of the Maoist programme to eradicate ‘backward traditions’ in the marital domain.

This chapter seeks to understand how Maoist policies and ideas about love, marriage, and sexuality impacted on the real-life practices of young people in the Maoist movement and on young people who were coming of age in the Maoist base area during the war. Delving into the life-stories of several Maoist activists and interviews that had more personal than ‘party voice’, I explore how Maoist female activists lived through the years of war, went about their romantic relationships while respecting Maoist regulations and local cultural norms, how they forged fictive ties and intimate bonds in the Maoist movement, and how they combined the personal and the political during the years of the war.

By discussing Maoist policies on child marriage and premarital sex, this chapter explores why the Maoist people's governments put such emphasis on regulating marriage and sexuality and what role libidinal politics played in furthering the Maoist revolutionary project.