First of all, we are all human beings. Division – ‘we’ and ‘others’ - is an idea or rather social construction. Category is power. Power is temporal. It can be good for bad or good for nothing. We were manipulated by ‘others’, we were forced to internalise duel identities, (even though we also had agency then). If we think of the days gone by, we will be ‘static’. Our history has a problem; it is because it was constructed by ‘others’. My intuition is: our generation cannot be blamed for what had happened in the past, both ‘we’ and ‘others’. If we do, I am sorry – we are off the track.
I do advocate the idea of dichotomy between 4 and 16 ‘category’ is untrue and constructed by ‘others’. For now, I would like to believe that we live in a global village, a borderless world of shared cultures, sustained by reciprocity and the exchanging of ideas globally. The Hindu caste system, what I term ‘Museum Master Piece of yester years’, has been a really sad history of modern Nepal. Today, in one aspect of modernism, we are all human beings, the cleverest of all animals, just travelling; visiting temporal spaces, wish for a re-visiting is a just ‘dream’.
May I suggest all Tamumai to read chapter on ‘Identity and Change Among the Gurungs of Central Nepal by Alan Macfarlane’ in Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom Edited by David N. Gellner, Joanna Pffaff-Czarnecka and John Whelpton 1997.
Last but not least, it is our moral duty to ensure that our future generations (all the people of Nepal) will have no such issues, whatsoever.
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Chandra Sing Gurung ,
PhD Candidate,
Department of Social Anthropology,
University of Edinburgh, UK.
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