Terms of Inclusion: Notes on Tharu Indigenous Activism after 2015

Abstract

This article explores the state of contemporary Tharu indigenous activism in western Tarai. It reviews the historical evolution of Tharu activism since the mid-twentieth century and up to the Tikapur incident in 2015 and provides ethnographic analyses of contemporary activities aimed at reinvigorating Tharu cultural practices. The article discusses writings on Tikapur incident immediately after the event, and the ways in which the words, “identity” and “rights, ” were used in them. Terence Turner’s anthropological understanding of universal human rights and the politics of indigenous people’s struggles is discussed, in order to reexamine the relationship between claims of collective identity and human rights. The article presents ethnographic sketches from contemporary western Tarai, including those relating to everyday interactions between the Tharu and non-Tharu, and a public speech made by a Tharu activist advocating the official recognition of a Tharu system of local self-governance called badghar pratha. Following Turner’s argument, the article seeks to understand these contemporary Tharu activities as attempts to exercise their human capacity for the production of cultural difference—a “universal right to difference”—and argues that social inclusion should be understood as a process in which heterogeneous elements are included in a wider society while retaining their heterogeneity and differences.