| Summary/Abstract |
This paper examines the role of Dalits in Nepal's 1996–2006 civil war (or ‘Maoist People's War’) through field research conducted in 2014 in three villages in mid-western and mid-eastern Nepal. The aim of the paper is to illuminate Dalit struggles at the village level which have gone more or less unnoticed both in academic literature and in civil society debate in metropolitan Nepal. Dalit activists in certain locations had been mobilizing under the radar for many years before the People's War. These activists were able to co-opt the Maoist guerrilla movement at the local level to oppose caste discrimination, while arguably, being themselves afterwards co-opted into the Maoists’ national campaign for state power. Empirically, this paper uses detailed findings about changes in caste discrimination practices in three villages where Maoist–Dalit interactions varied greatly to assess the successes and failures of this local level Dalit activism. Theoretically, it parses this episode of activism through debates about the nature of struggles for modernity in rural Nepal, arguing that we might be missing forms of locally grounded ‘modernizing’ struggles that do not fit some typical conceptualizations in social theory.
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