'When Gods return to their homeland in the Himalayas': Maoism, religion, and change in the model village of Thabang, mid-western Nepal

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in the former Maoist base area of Nepal, this chapter explores the impact of the People’s War and Maoist ideology on religious beliefs and practices in Nepal. Drawing on the parable of the ‘flight of Gods’ and on the life history of one of the village elders, the chapter explores the gradual demise of Hinduism as a dominant mode of religious practice and weaves together key themes for understanding religious change engendered by the conflict -- de-sacralisation of once sacred spaces and once sacred polity, transgression of the boundaries between purity and pollution, increasing privatisation of religious practices, and creation of the vacuum in transcendent authority which in many cases is filled by new religious or quasi-religious movements, such as Christianity and Maoism itself