Session 3: Mallika Shakya
Performing Aspiration: Protest, Popular Culture, and Maithil Mobility in Nepal–India Border Towns
Chair: Dev Nath Pathak
Respondent: Camille Buat
- Tuesday 2026-07-07 14:00-15:30
- Location: Seminar Room
- Type: session
This paper offers an anthropologically grounded account of how poetry and cinema are produced, performed, and consumed in the Nepal-India border towns across the central and eastern Tarai of Nepal. Through an ethnographic reading of Maithili and Bhojpuri poetry, songs, and films, the paper examines how popular cultural practices are embedded in layered local, national, and regional histories, while also entangled in everyday politics of emulation and belonging.
Maithil life beyond the formally designated Mithila region is inherently cosmopolitan, as are Maithil engagements with non-Maithili cultural forms. To understand this cosmopolitanity, this paper situates cultural production within shifting governance structures and political transformations. It focuses on the expressed aspirations of Nepali-Maithil communities across two defining political moments in contemporary Nepal: (i) the 2006 uprising which imagined the southern plains of the Nepal–India borderlands as a shared cultural-regional space of Madhesh; and (ii) the promulgation of the 2015 Constitution which fragmented the political category of Madhesh into smaller cultural-linguistic identities while reframing earlier uprisings as claims to agency, prosperity, and belonging.
The paper locates Maithil communities within cosmopolitan border towns proximate to, yet distinct from, the designated Mithila region, and explores their aspirations for social mobility and belonging in the context of Nepal’s prolonged post-conflict transition following the Maoist People’s War. By approaching the creative corpus anthropologically, the analysis attends both to textual content and to the socio-political conditions of production, circulation, and reception. It argues that these cultural forms function not merely as aesthetic expressions but as articulations of livelihood aspirations and mobility.
In doing so, the paper contributes to broader debates on borderland subjectivities by foregrounding the anthropological nuances of mobility as a lived and poeticized condition in the Nepal–India borderlands.