Ani ghar chain kata paryo ni? (And where is your home?)Laddu Prasad Khadka, a prominent leader of the sukumbasi movement in Nepal, once vented out his frustration to me: “Everybody needs a bloody home in this country. Everyday conversation starts with ‘where is home?’ which makes it necessary that we own a piece of land or a house somewhere in this country to call it ‘home’. Otherwise, we are made to feel like we do not belong here.” Laddu dai’s experience is different from mine. Different histories brought us to the city, and our everyday lives, as much as they overlap in our brief encounters, are also poles apart. [break]
Growing up, my sister and I would follow our parents wherever the government sent them. Life was good but everything seemed temporary. What made it feel even more temporary was, in all the places to which we travelled and in which we lived for a few years, we never owned a house, anywhere, until we finally moved to Kathmandu, and built one. Prior to owning house, I remember having interesting ‘ice-breakers’ with acquaintances about ‘home’—“Ani ghar chain kata paryo ni?” “Satdobato”, I would reply, partly because Tikhedewal, a little north of Satdobato, was a place not very popular.
Dharan was a birth place but not ‘home’ in the sense of property ownership, and also because for Terhathum, the ancestral home, I had little sense of belonging because I didn’t spend much time there. Then a follow up question, “Aafnai ghar?” “Not own, rented, dera”. “Where is your own house?” Because we didn’t really own a house for the longest time, I would then have had to go into a flashback, recuperate the family lineage and respond, “Well, I was born in Dharan, but if you ask about my parents and grandparents, my father is fromTerhathum, and my mom from Ilam.”
Then a patronizing remark, “Ah! Then ghar is Terhathum, Satdobato is only dera.”
The comparison I make between my life and Laddu dai’s is not really to collapse our difference or reduce his struggle to my middle-class comfort. However, what is common between us is that we’ve shared similarly interesting conversation around home as we were/are ‘home’-less. When one takes the conversation away from the momentary time and place in which it takes place, and instead situates it within a broader history, few insights begin to emerge. On this note, allow me to take a brief detour of our shared history that weaves its way through landownership, citizenship, home, and belonging, which individuates us more than it binds us.
Land and citizenship
Historically, studies suggest, land reforms have largely been political attempts by the state to exert its sovereignty on local populations. By bequeathing land on local elites under different land ownership and management systems such as raikar, jaagir, or birta, the intentions of the feudal state, run by the Ranas or the Shahs, were at times to govern the peasantry from afar, while at other times there were more benevolent interventions to address unequal landowner-tenant relationship. Some efforts did address the inequality by creating conditions for tenants and peasants to have more share of the surplus, importantly the Land Act of 1961 and 1964 during the Mahendra era, but they also led to the alienation of peasants and tenants from their land. In the mid-1990s, the insurgent Maobadi politicized this contradiction as one of their central strategies to galvanize the peasantry and wage a class struggle against the ‘semi-feudal/neo-colonial’ state.
Very broadly speaking, the resulting ‘People’s War’, together with the failure of the state to ‘modernize’ Nepal’s agriculture sector, the under-developed non-agricultural sector, failed land reform attempts, and the general lure of city-living, all and more may have triggered migration to Kathmandu from the countryside. Many of the migrant families that get identified as ‘sukumbasi’, or landless, may be seen settling wherever there is open land: on riverbanks, the inner core of the city, as well as the peripheries outside Ring Road.
Interestingly, candid conversations in teashops in the sukumbasi settlements suggest that the Maobadi party established many of the post-2006 settlements as their ‘urban base’. As the Maobadis joined the ‘mainstream’, many now occupying the riverbanks were brought to the city by the busloads with a promise of landownership in Kathmandu. In a rather ironic twist to the tale, a settlement under the Bagmati Bridge was destroyed last year under the government led by Baburam Bhattarai. However, majority of sukumbasi families from new settlements and old settlements—some dating as far back as 1970s—without ‘official’ affiliation with political parties claim that it is hard to find affordable dera in the city, therefore they occupy public lands.
‘Nepal hamroghar ho, derahoina’ is a political slogan of one ‘Bibekshil Nepali’. It is a recently formed political party claiming to carry ‘wisdom,’ bibek. “Only a ‘gharwala’ owns the wisdom of building/repairing a ghar. A ‘derawala’ wouldn’t have one because he/she can always find a new house to rent; they need not worry about building home”, says one of their promotional videos on Youtube. The call is to inspire citizens to rebuild the ghar that Nepal is. It is rather discomforting that they mobilize metaphors—of ghar and dera—that symbolically end up equating property ownership with responsible citizenship. In the process, they also casually re-inscribe the material basis of class difference among residents in Kathmandu—ghar/dera. Interestingly, similar slogan of ghar/dera is gaining currency among another groups of population in the city, majority of whom claim they can afford to have neither ghar nor dera.
Ke ghar, ke dera
Claiming something that is not yours, at least in legal/constitutional terms, as your own is radical. Majority of sukumbasi families in Kathmandu are in no position to make legal claims over home or landownership. Yet they occupy public land, build temporary houses, and through a federated network expanding across 44 districts in Nepal, they make claims that they deem legitimate—claims for the right to own house and land that would guarantee the right to live in the city.
Such claims seem to say ‘Nepal hamro ghar ho, dera hoina,’ pretty much in keeping with the theme—in slogan if not spirit—of the ‘Bibekshil Nepali’ party. Instead of the ‘Bibekshil Nepali’ in Kathmandu, however, one could argue that the sukumbasi spirit is in closer solidarity with similar demands citizens are making in cities like Mumbai and Manila for the right to home and land ownerships, or even in the American cities, led by ‘Right to the City Alliance’, a collective of homeowners, homeless, teachers, students, journalists, filmmakers and so on, who demand for homeownership against foreclosure. Different as the histories are, but much like the many families in these cities elsewhere that are homeless and landless, a sukumbasi here inhabits an uncertain future infused with a sense of place that has no anchor in the present—a ghar, or a dera.
The author is a researcher interested in urban issues and is willing to
collaborate/meet people of similar interests
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