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Abstract
Beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, a transnational Buddhist reform movement has been remaking ethnic, religious, and national identity among urban Newar Buddhists in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. This dissertation analyzes the relationships between religion and the state at various periods of modern Nepali history, and explores how changing notions of self and society intrinsically embedded in modernist Theravada Buddhism challenge the moral and political authority of the Hindu state with important cultural and political consequences.
The study revolves around two intersecting themes: (1) nationalism and the production of cultural identity, and (2) religion and the transformation of moral subjectivity. The first two chapters draw on historical materials to examine the construction of Nepal as a Hindu nation-state, and the rise of Theravada. Buddhism as a semi-articulated strategy of Newar ethnic resistance to this project. Following this, it examines the social, personal and political negotiations that are taking place as individuals move away from the performative, ritual, and collective orientations associated with traditional forms of popular Newar Buddhism and assume the rationalizing, ethical, and individualizing focuses of “pure” Theravada devotees. Rituals, meditation, and the often taken-for-granted routines of caste, class, and gendered daily life are important sites at which subjects are produced and identities performed in Nepal. Theravada Buddhism repositions, its practitioners vis-à-vis Newar society and the Hindu kingdom by transforming their very experiences of body and self.
As a whole, this dissertation explores the changing national landscapes and shifting subjectivities—personal, political, cultural and religious—associated with Hindu nationalism and Buddhist reform in order to understand the ways that religion, culture, and power transfigure each other in the formation of new identities and epistemologies. By demonstrating how Theravada Buddhism and the Hindu state have competed to control subjectivities and truths, it reveals the role of religion as a powerful subjectifying—and hence political—force in Nepal.
