Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan

Abstract

This book recounts the plight of some hundred thousand refugees of Nepali ethnic origin (also known as the Lhotshampa or ‘Southern Borderlander’) who claim to have been wrongfully evicted from Bhutan. None of them have returned to Bhutan after their eviction in the early 1990s. The author begins his examination of their plight by discussing the history of Bhutan as it appears in British colonial archives and in current standard national narratives. He then discusses the history of Bhutan from the point of view of ‘Bhutanese’ refugees (housed in camps in Nepal) presented to him as a foreign researcher. After reviewing Lhotshampa society in Bhutan during the first half of the twentieth century, the book presents the encounter between the culturally Nepali southern part of Bhutan and the Bhutanese state. In its drive towards modernization and development after Indian independence and the Chinese invasion of Tibet, new legislation on citizenships and a homogenizing nationalism lead to Lhotshampa dissidence and the ‘demotion’ of the Nepali in Bhutan. The book then elaborates how the Lhotshampa became refugees, and why they continue to live in camps in Nepal even at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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