Political Economy of Caste and Rituals: Hierarchy and Power in the Himalayas

The Nepali rulers deployed combination of treatises, maxims and royal orders to regulate caste structures, which were driven by the political-economic imperatives of the eighteenth century state-making projects. After 1854 the Ain broadened the legislative and judicial power of the state to intervene swiftly in matters related to caste, marriage and commensality rules. In this paper I illustrate how various labor relations within caste structures were embedded in and generated by the process of state-making at a particular historic juncture.

I suggest that the core of the process was constituted by the dispersals of the rights to take and perform certain labor-services. Categories such as enslavable/non-enslavable suggest the centrality of this to the  development of political hierarchies in the early modern Nepali state. The very categorization and reshuffling of diverse ethnic groups in the Ain was, as I show, driven by the eighteenth and nineteenth century need of labor and the centralization of state power. Understanding these shifts requires us to examine the role of state interventions in defining both caste and marriage rules, which gradually led to the crystallization of differential status assignments in the Ain. While the scholarship on Nepal has ignored the central link between caste structures, labor relations and marriage systems in reproducing and regulating caste based division of labor, my paper demonstrates that manipulations of caste relations through marriage and control of symbolic and ranking order made the intersection of many other systems cohere as a ‘state’. Other axes of differentiation did appear over time, as different members flexibly rearranged the various dues and honors involved.