Codifying Hierarchy: Legal Ideology and Material Interest in the Muluki Ain and Khasa Caste System of Nepal

Abstract

Caste remains one of the most persistent axes of social inequality in Nepal, traceable to the medieval Khasa Kingdom of the Karnali region and to the nineteenth-century codification of hierarchy in the state's first civil code. This paper offers a Theory of Meaning analysis of caste hierarchy among the Khasa of western Nepal, grounded in the structuralist claim that hierarchy is a system of relational meaning rather than a ranking of attributes. It reads the narrative of the pure and the impure against the legal history of caste codification, the history of the Khasa Kingdom, ethnography of a marginal alcohol-drinking caste in Jumla, and studies of gender and bride-price marriage among untouchable women in far-western Nepal, augmented by recent Nepali caste scholarship and classic materialist, interactional, and feminist critiques of structuralism. Using narrative review, theoretical analysis, and comparative synthesis rather than new fieldwork, the paper argues that the Khasa case complicates the India-derived model: it lacks a populated Vaishya category, has an anomalous alcohol-drinking intermediate stratum, and developed under a syncretic Hindu-Buddhist court religion. It also shows how legal codification transformed a plural, locally variable ideological field into a single hierarchy, legitimized mainly through chains of food- and water-transaction rather than one cosmological rationale. Locally, purity ideology is mediated by economic considerations, evident in an ecological division over irrigated land in Jumla and in the priority of women's labor value over ritual purity in untouchable marriage. Nepali caste hierarchy thus emerges as a historically sedimented structure in which ideology and material interest continuously condition one another, with direct implications for caste-sensitive development and social-inclusion policy in Nepal.