History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities

4 From Women’s Suffering to Women’s Politics Reimagining Women after Nepal’s 1990 Pro-Democracy Movement

93 Like the other chapters in this volume, ours began with the study of contentious practices in a particular time and place—a Hindu women’s festival in a rural area of central Nepal. In the area we call Naudada,1 women used the Tij festival as an opportunity to criticize Nepali laws and cultural practices that privileged men. During the years when political dissent was dangerous, the festival was also occasionally a place where subversive songs against the government were aired. In the theory guiding us, not every argument, fight, biting comment, or other form of contentious local practice is significant, only those that interrelate with long-term, translocal, enduring struggles. Critical commentary voiced at local Tij festivals has been important in, and shaped by, ongoing gender struggles and political conflicts in the district and the nation. Here we follow remarkable changes in women’s dissent during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period that coincided with the growing expression of political unrest across the country. In 1990, protests and demonstrations by the Pro-Democracy (or People’s) Movement led the king of Nepal to acquiesce in replacing the 30-year-old, repressive, 4 From Women’s Suffering to Women’s Politics Reimagining Women after Nepal’s 1990 Pro-Democracy Movement Dorothy Holland and Debra Skinner single-party panchayat system of government with multiple parties and popular elections. Especially consequential for the Tij festival were the diminished controls on political expression. Under the new conditions , criticism of the government no longer endangered an author’s freedom. In the festival of 1990, the women’s groups composed and sang mostly dukha (hardship) songs, similar to those that one of us (Skinner) had earlier heard during the 1986 festival. In 1991, they composed and sang mostly songs of a different type—raajniti (political) songs. In addition, a Tij singing group composed entirely of schoolgirls and based on political party affiliation rather than on neighborhood and kinship ties appeared for the first time in Naudada. Earlier that year, a procession of women had marched through Naudada shouting for equal rights and for better treatment of wives and daughters. Also, a group of irate women had banded together to threaten a local man known to drink excessively and abuse his wife. The complaints of the marchers and of the women’s posse were old themes from Tij songs, but the forms of contentious practice (the march and the threats) were new. In examining such changes, social practice theory guides attention to two sets of dense relations: one between local contentious practices and enduring struggles, and the other between these practices and subjectivities . The focus in this chapter is on the latter set of relations, on “history in person.” For the women in the area of our study, Tij songs and other practices related to the festival have special significance as media of both political action and self-understanding. Changes in the songs reverberated not only in the shaping of contentious behavior but also in the formulating of personal issues and concerns. In the analysis of Tij songs that follows, we look closely at the articulation or orchestration of the parties to the struggles depicted in the songs. In particular, we draw upon “dialogism,” a way of conceptualizing social and intimate life articulated by M. M. Bakhtin and his associates and adherents (e.g., Holquist 1990). Dialogism posits that human existence is continually constituted in dialogues carried out both in the social world and in inner speech. It pays attention to the relations among participants in the dialogues, and it assumes that the boundaries of identification can shift. Viewed through the lens provided by dialogism, Tij songs critically depict the adversaries who cause women pain and deny them resources. Relying upon Bakhtin’s notions of DOROTHY HOLLAND AND DEBRA SKINNER 94 FROM WOMEN’S SUFFERING TO WOMEN’S POLITICS 95 authorship and orchestration, we explore the songs’ positioning of self among their casts of characters.2 This analysis of the songs helps in understanding the texture of contentiousness and the permeability of the boundaries between the participants, both before and after the ProDemocracy Movement. Through improvisations that responded to the changing political climate, the makers of Tij songs contributed to a dramatic shift in their collective and intimate identities. THE TIJ FESTIVAL The Tij festival in some form is most likely several hundred years old, predating...