ABSTRACT
In a recent survey article (Onta, 1993), historians of Nepal were taken to task for ignoring the emphasis on 'history from below' now prominent in work on other parts of South Asia and continuing instead to concentrate almost exclusively on the Nepali state and on elite activities and attitudes. That warning reminded me of two conversations with individual Nepalis. In 1972, shortly after my first arrival in the country, when I was walking only a few miles from Kathmandu I asked a villager where he was going and received the same reply that initially puzzles many foreigners: Nepal jane ("I'm going to Nepal"). For this man, 'Nepal' retained its old meaning of the Kathmandu Valley, not the country of which he was a citizen. Eighteen years later, in the aftermath of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, I was discussing the current situation with a Nepali scholar, whose background was very traditional and who, I think, spoke spontaneously without any influence from Marxist theories of 'petit-bourgeois nationalism'. "It's only we, the middle class, who are really concerned about Nepal," he said. "The poor are just interested in getting enough to eat and the very rich people around the palace are only worried about getting more money and storing it in India." Being Nepali, then, means different things to different Nepalis and we need to be constantly aware of the gap that may exist between official aspirations and the actual feelings of a population divided along ethnic, caste, and class lines.
