De-mythologizing ‘the Village of Resistance’: How rebellious were the peasants in the Maoist base area of Nepal?

It has become something of a cliché to speak about Nepal’s districts of Rolpa and Rukum as the heartland of the Maoist base area, where the Maoist Movement enjoyed most popular support during the People’s War of 1996–2006. The Kham Magar village of Thabang, known as the capital of the base area, has been furthermore hailed as a ‘village of resistance,’ and its inhabitants are often portrayed as rebellious peasants who resisted the state since at least the 1950s. Based on the analysis of ordinary peasants’ narratives from Thabang, the paper will argue that this reading of Thabang’s history, which privileges resistance, does not give due to the complexity of power relations within the village, to inequalities between the village notables and ordinary people, and to the view of peasants themselves. Furthermore, it will be argued that Thabang—one of the most extensively researched villages in Nepal due to its ‘revolutionary history’—represents an interesting case study of how the project of writing history from the margins can, in fact, obscure the mere voices of those, it claims to represent