Marxist past to speculative futures: migration, land markets, and political storytelling in Nepal’s Tarai

ABSTRACT

In southeastern Nepal, international labor migration has led to complex socioeconomic changes, including expanding smallholder landownership, class differentiation, and the transformation of land from a productive to a speculative asset. Based on ethnographic research focusing on villagers’ narratives, this article finds that political imaginaries drawing on rural Marxist thought play a crucial role for interpreting recent historical experience but are losing purchase amidst increasingly dispersed, opaque, and contradictory processes of accumulation. It then identifies the emergence of a new speculative imaginary, through which villagers attempt to navigate but also reinforce these new constellations of inequality, capital, and labor.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational migration
• rural land markets
• speculation
• political imaginary
• South Asia

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for feedback on earlier versions of this article to K. Sivaramakrishnan, Douglas Rogers, Sara Shneiderman, Erik Harms, Sahana Ghosh, Dhirendra Nalbo, Tri Phuong, and participants of the Yale South Asia Research Group. Both K. Sivaramakrishnan and Sahana Ghosh have commented on several iterations. The three anonymous reviewers of this journal and JPS editor Shaila Seshia Galvin deserve special thanks for their incisive and productive comments, which similarly helped to significantly improve this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 This article uses measurements commonly used in Nepal’s Tarai. One bigha corresponds to approximately 0.677 hectares. Twenty katha make up one bigha and twenty dhur one katha.

2 Unless indicated otherwise, all quotes are paraphrased rather than verbatim translations, since I had conversations in Nepali but took notes in English, either during or after these conversations.

3 To maintain confidentiality, I use pseudonyms for individuals and places below the district level and keep certain identifying details deliberately vague or omit them from descriptions. Exceptions are made for places, histories and historical individuals that are already a matter of public record, and for public personalities, depending on their preference.

4 The distinction between ‘migrants’ point of view’ and structural dynamics is taken from Shah and Lerche (2020, 2).

5 The term asset class commonly refers to ‘a set of assets that bear some fundamental economic similarities to each other, and that have characteristics that make them distinct from other assets that are not part of that class’ (Greer 1997, 86; cited in Fields 2018, 120, fn. 2). I use the term in this broad sense. For one example of its use in economic geography see Fields (2018).

6 These numbers are based on the estimates of different Kamalpur residents and I have further rounded them both to avoid the impression of definitive accuracy and to avoid making the village identifiable. They should therefore be taken as an approximate guide to the village’s size and sociological composition.

7 Four sher, a now obsolete unit of measurement, amounted to approximately two and a half kilograms.

8 The fact that location near roads, and therefore also the construction of new roads, dramatically increase the sales value of land has long been noted in the scholarship on rural political economy in Nepal (see Rankin et al. 2017).

9 A large body of scholarship has argued that a primary effect of the transnational circulation of labor is to be found in restrictions of labor organizing in destination countries. For an overview, see Besteman (2020), chapter 4, and Wright (2021) for a focus on the Persian Gulf region.

10 The erosion of the Maoists' initial support base has been widely noted among analysts. For example, see Adhikari (2017).

11 I thank one of the three anonymous reviewers for pushing me to think about this question.

Additional information

Funding

I gratefully acknowledge research funding by the Yale South Asian Studies Council; Wenner-Gren Foundation; Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.

Notes on contributors

Jacob Rinck

Jacob Rinck is an anthropologist studying global inequality through a focus on migration, agrarian change, and economics as storytelling in Nepal. Jacob is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD (2020) in sociocultural anthropology from Yale University. In a professional capacity, he has worked for the World Bank and at the International Crisis Group among others.