JUST ACROSS THE BORDER from Nepal’s eastern Tarai lies Naxalbari, a small town in the north of West Bengal that gave us the name “Naxal,” now shorthand across India for armed peasant insurgents. In March 1967, sharecroppers there rose up against jotedars, large landholders who dominated a plains economy built on Adivasi labour. The uprising was crushed within months, but it set in motion an armed Maoist movement and a longer parliamentary struggle over land. This culminated, a decade later, in Operation Barga, a land-reform programme launched by West Bengal’s Left Front government in 1978. This programme registered sharecroppers and strengthened tenancy rights, significantly weakening the hold of landlordism in the state.
Nepal had its own history of land reform in the 1960s, followed by a Maoist insurgency launched in 1996 that sought to abolish the ruling monarchy and address land inequality. But decades of social, political, administrative and economic change have done little to transform land relations in the Tarai. Two adjoining stretches of the same eastern Himalayan lowlands, with similar Adivasi populations and landlord classes, have come to follow radically different political and economic trajectories. Why, despite decades of political upheaval and economic change, did landlordism prove so difficult to dislodge on the Nepal side of the border? That is the question at the heart of geographer Fraser Sugden’s Land, Labour and Agrarian Change in Nepal’s Tarai-Madhesh, a title that brings together the region’s geographic name, Tarai, with Madhesh, a term that evokes its political and cultural identity.