8 - When Gods Return to Their Homeland in the Himalayas: Maoism, Religion, and Change

Summary

‘The gods have left for their homeland in the Himalayas,’ said Baje, an elder from the Roka clan. It was only my second month in the village of Thabang, so I did not pay much attention to Baje's statement. Seven months later a Bahun elder in Baglung district repeated the exact same phrase, and it struck me that Baje's view was not just the individual opinion of a Kham Magar villager but a more general statement about the current epoch and the kinds of religious change engendered by the People's War:

The Elder (in Bhuji): All the gods have left to the Himalayas, to Kailash, and that is why one should worship the gods while facing the direction of the Himalayas. Only the Goddess Kali lives in the south.

Ina: Why have all the gods gone to Kailash?

The Elder: It has become polluted [here] (phohor bhayo), and the gods’ power is gone (shakti gayo). People no longer trust one another; the Kali age has settled in and people have started killing each other. When the gods saw this, they just left…

Thus, it is not only people but also the gods who had to migrate during the war in order to escape the era of slaughter and violence (maramar, kutapit jamana). According to the villagers, the gods, not being able or willing to endure the impurity and defilement brought about by war, returned to the pristine places they once came from—to the unpolluted Himalayan peaks.

While the Maoist demand for a secular state was satisfied in 2008, it is important to explore whether this legislative change has been accompanied by changes in people's everyday lives, their religious practices, and their values. The idea of the ‘flight of the gods’ has important implications for understanding the legacy of the People's War and of Maoism on religious practice in post-war Nepal. It shows that, while lawmakers in the capital debated the meaning of secularism, villagers in Nepal's mid-western region simply stated that the gods had departed, once sacred places had become polluted, and the gods’ power was gone. Furthermore, religious beliefs and observances that were taken for granted in the past and performed as a matter of habitual practice have increasingly been questioned in the wake of the war, at least in the heart of the former Maoist base area.