Email: sujan.dangal@u.nus.edu

Affiliation: National University of Singapore

Nationality: Nepalese

Enclosure by the Commons: Land Grab and Indigenous Peasant Resistance in Nepal's Dang

Abstract

Lal Chaudhary traces his index finger to demonstrate an imaginary cadastral map on the mat on which he was sitting with eighty others. He asks me "If the temple purchased our land from our great grandfathers as they claim, why are their landholdings scattered in small patches across Dang? How did a Tharu's land end up with the Temple's Guthi while the adjacent land of a Pahadi – a person from the hills – became private land?" The Tharus are indigenous to Western Nepal, particularly to the fertile valleys of Dang, a district in Southwestern Nepal. A small group of Tharu peasants has been traveling over 400 kilometers in small groups in turns for about a fortnight at a time to organize a sit-in protest in Kathmandu for over 40 days. They demand the title deeds of their land. As the state sought to "modernize" and "reform" land administration through cadastral surveys, land titling and landholding ceilings in the 1960s and 1970s, these Tharus, a historically marginalized and often enslaved people, discovered that the titles to their land were handed to a Guthi in the name of a temple a hundred kilometers North of Dang. They were handed tenant titles of their own land in the 1960s, thus turning them into raiti – peasants. What was worse, in 2006, the Supreme Court of Nepal scrapped these tenant titles rendering almost sixteen thousand Tharus landless. The Supreme Court argued that the priest purchased these lands while the Tharus contest that the land was "grabbed, dacoit style" from illiterate, unsuspecting Tharu farmers by temple administrators in collaboration with cadastral surveyors. I interpret Lal Chaudhary's demonstration of his understanding of cadastral maps as a way by which a dispossessed people reclaim the agency lost at the turn to modernity.

Guthi, a dominant form of land tenure in Nepal, is an ancient commoning practice wherein individuals and rulers alike would donate land, often to temples, for religious and philanthropic purposes. To the Newa people of the Kathmandu Valley, Guthi lands sustain urban commons: temples, water spouts, rest houses, street festivals, arts and so on. The peasant that tills these lands is virtually invisible in this understanding of Guthi as cultural and heritage commons. In Dang, however, the violent dispossession of peasants wrought by the coming of Guthi is painfully visible. In this article, to make sense of the oppressive way in which a commoning practice travels to an indigenous frontier, I introduce the concept of "enclosure by the commons", a not-so-clever turn on the notorious "enclosure of the commons". Scholars have attempted to overcome the eurocentrism in Marx's interpretation of enclosure of the commons by emphasizing indigenous land grab in colonial US and present-day Palestine. The case of Dang's Tharu peasants, I argue, further enriches our understanding of enclosure by tracing how commons institutions such as Guthi, in consortium with cadastral surveys and land reforms, create conditions for indigenous dispossession rather than distributive justice in land. Facing dispossession, indigenous peasants advocate privatization rather than commoning of land.

Bio

I am a PhD Scholar at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore. My doctoral research is on the political economy of Guthi, an ancient communal land tenure that continues to be a dominant form of tenure alongside private and state ownership. In my research, I follow the divergent meanings attributed to Guthi which has become a site of contestation as members of Guthi seek to defend it from the State's attempts to wrest control over land away from them while indigenous peasants are organizing to demand privatization of Guthi land as a tool for land defense. Thinking against the binary of culture and economy, I trace the ways in which contesting actors navigate the liminality of culture and economy even as these actors actively mobilize culturalist versus economistic interpretations of Guthi to defend their control over land. My broader research interests include but are not limited to economic anthropology, political economy, diverse economies and decoloniality. I am interested in alternative, decolonial interpretations of the economy.