“The land belonged to Nepal but the people belonged to Tibet”: Overlapping sovereignties and mobility in the Limi Valley Borderland

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on the lived experiences of borderlands has foregrounded and theorized the pervasiveness of anxiety, violence, and lawlessness. While useful, these do not capture all of the ways in which borderland residents relate to diverse constellations of power. This paper examines the China (Tibet Autonomous Region) – Nepal borderland through the case of the Limi Valley, in the northwest corner of Nepal’s Humla district. Before 1959, the valley was considered part of Nepalese territory, yet its residents belonged administratively to the Tibetan government, an arrangement at odds with contemporary understandings of state territorial sovereignty. The non-postcolonial state formations of Nepal and China have created their own specific forms of border citizenship and overlapping sovereignties. The article shows how multiple sovereignties can stretch beyond state borders in unexpected ways by tracing how Limi Valley residents negotiate overlapping sovereignties of the Nepali and Chinese states, as well as the non-state sovereignty of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Furthermore, it demonstrates that these in turn overlap with a form of social sovereignty grounded in the community’s body of laws, codes, and practices, which are at once a historically sedimented trace of Limi’s governance before the nation-state, and a product of navigating political transformations. However, challenges to this social sovereignty, expressed through the idiom of statist law, have recently emerged. Whereas states typically exert sovereign power in borderlands by restricting mobility, some Limi villagers now selectively invoke state sovereignty through law to enable greater mobility.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the opportunity to undertake the fieldwork, which was provided by Ashok Gurung at The New School’s India China Institute with funding from the Luce Foundation. I also thank Tsewang Lama and Martin Saxer for their insights about Limi; Yonten Gyatso (Sagar Lama) for his assistance in follow-up research; Astrid Hovden for sharing her dissertation with me; Mark Henderson for cartography; and Jason Cons, Jennifer Fluri, Andrew Grant, Phurwa Gurung, Galen Murton, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Correction Statement

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

Notes

1. Sagar Lama (Yonten Gyatso) conducted the follow-up interviews in Limi in November 2016 with questions I provided. In 2018, after my submission of the initial version of this paper for review, Astrid Hovden made her 2016 dissertation available to me. It reinforced and deepened my understanding of many facets of what I theorize as Limi’s social sovereignty.

2. Limiwas’ relationship with India, and India’s assertions of sovereignty in relation to Nepal, are also relevant, but beyond the scope of this paper.

3. Ironically, there are cases in upper Humla where a close connection with Burang has resulted in households being unable to travel to Burang. In Yari, the father of one household was from Burang and had married in to the village. Because the Nepalese Constitution does not allow citizenship to pass through the mother, the father and children are not Nepalese citizens and thus cannot obtain a border exit-entry card that would allow them to travel to Burang (Phurwa Gurung, pers. comm.)

4. Some also attended in the past, but to do so they had to pretend to be Tibetan refugees.

5. In 2016, the average household income for ethnically Lama (culturally Tibetan) households in the Humla district was 268000 Nepali Rupees, or roughly 2400 USD (Gautam and Anderson 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Henry Luce Foundation [granted to India China Institute, The New School].