1 - Thabang: From Remote Village to Revolutionary Myth

Summary

One might ask how helpful a study in a distinct village is for understanding the People's War in Nepal and social processes at war more generally. Well, Thabang is no ordinary village. In fact, it is quite an extraordinary case of how a relatively ‘remote’ place situated on the margins of the state was turned into the capital of the guerrillas’ base area and later constructed as a ‘cradle’ of the Maoist revolution in Nepal (Figure 1.1). A particular position of Thabang within the history of Nepal's conflict has been noted by A. de Sales (2013, 65):

Thabang's commitment to the revolution is of interest, not because what happened there also happened in other villages—something that the Maoist propaganda wants us to believe in an effort to present the whole Kham Magar population as being equally fervent about the revolution—but because it is an extreme case.

It is precisely because of its unique location in the midst of the Maoist controlled areas that the study in that village reveals the intensity of the wartime social processes and the scale of the Maoist project of Cultural Revolution that studies in other localities cannot provide.

While one might be wary of yet another village study and wonder about its wider relevance, this chapter shows that the case of Thabang presents us with several theoretical and methodological dilemmas, such as the romance of resistance (Abu-Lughod 1990), the problem of ethnographic refusal in the studies of resistance (Ortner 2006b), and the perils of writing history from below. It also raises the question about knowledge creation in social sciences. It illustrates how research in the same locality conducted around the same time—with three DPhil theses on Thabang written within a span of some years—might yield very different analyses, the difference having a lot to do with the methodological approach as well as with the theoretical framework of the research, especially when this framework is preconceived.

By weaving together different periods of fieldwork, this chapter shows how a distinct methodological stance adopted by the researcher and a distinct experience of fieldwork shaped the perspectives and analytical approaches of this book. Drawing on a number of personal experiences from the field, the chapter illustrates that questions of positionality and inter-subjectivity have a crucial bearing on the process of research and its outcome.