were recognized by Nepali law from 1961 until 2008, when Nepal transitioned from a Hindu monarchy and parliamentary democracy to a secular federalist republic.
In Logé, the local variant of Tibetan language, Bista was called Lo Gyalpo, wherein gyalpo means “king.” This title evokes respect and deference akin to that given the king of neighboring Bhutan as well as royalty from the erstwhile Himalayan kingdoms of Ladakh and Sikkim in India. The fact that this nobleman was stripped of his “raja” title in 2008 by the new Nepali state did little to affect his importance in the lives of Loba, the people of Lo. To them, he was far from “petty” in his influence. Many Loba referred to this man as Kundun, which means “presence.” It is the same term of address used by Tibetans to speak of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This shows just how important he was locally. The Lo Gyalpo helped to define and defend a people, a place, a way of life, and a sense of rootedness in the high pastures and valleys, the canyons and plains, the monasteries and villages of this Himalayan enclave.
Bista’s lineage dates to the founding of Lo in 1380 by Amepal, a noble from the western Tibetan kingdom of Gungthang. Amepal’s son and heir, Angun Zangpo, established the city of Lo Monthang, a place named for the “plain of aspiration” on which this settlement was built and where Bista was born. In 1964, when Bista was in his mid-thirties, he assumed his title after the death of his father. He was his father’s youngest son. Bista married Sidol Palwar, a refined, elegant woman who traveled from Shigatse, Tibet, to Lo as a bride in 1950. They had no surviving biological children, so the couple adopted their nephew as son and heir. Over the past half-century, Bista ushered his community through massive political-economic and sociocultural transitions, which it is the work of this book to describe.
When I picture the king, I see his stately dignity. Framed by a broad face, his expressive lips formed words of advice or considered action for his people and, especially in his last years, shaped the syllables of Buddhist prayer with humility and devotion. He was a beautiful, intense presence. During our meetings, be they formal audiences at Khar, the palace in Monthang, or over quiet cups of tea with his family in Kathmandu, I remained in awe of him. He could be serious, even stern, but then his regal countenance would melt into a smile, his gold-plated tooth and turquoise earring glinting brightly.
One of my most cherished memories of the king is from 1997, when I traveled with him and his entourage to his summer pastures for days of sheep shearing, yak wrangling, picnicking, and ritually bathing his horses. It was here that I saw the king as a man at work, filled with purpose. I will hold on to that memory, as I do the ones of him and his male companions each morning circumambulating the wall that borders Monthang. There was a sense of routine in these movements but also dedication and communion, kinship and connection to place.
The king’s heir, along with others who belong to his generation of Mustang nobility, are invested in the future of Mustang. The family remains central to many aspects of local life—cultural, political, economic—even without continued recognition of this kingdom as a kingdom by the Nepali state. And yet the death of Jigme Dorje Palbar Bista marked the end of an era. A Nepali media report in República, which came out in the wake of his death, said that his last words to his family were, “Never migrate from the village and the district.”
I cannot confirm the veracity of this statement, but I believe in its essence. The late king loved his home fiercely, with his whole being. Even so, this dying wish is a promise that is impossible to keep.
When I traveled with the Lo Gyalpo to his summer pastures, momentous changes were beginning to occur in and through Mustang. People were leaving their villages for the village of New York. Like so many migrants the world over, they were departing in search of economic opportunity, life experience, and the chance to offer their children a different future. As is the case for the millions of humans on the move across our Earth today, for those from Mustang, it is not easy to parse the pull of socioeconomic advancement and the rite of passage of youthful migrations from the push of political oppression and environmental change. By the late-1990s, a civil war that would last a decade had crippled many sectors of Nepal’s economy. Although wage labor abroad and a deep reliance on remittances at home had yet to become the national norm, seeing migration as a pathway to economic and social well-being had taken root as an ideal.
This is not to say that people from Mustang were new to movement. Subsistence in the high Himalaya, where growing seasons are limited and weather can be fierce, demands creative strategies. For centuries, people from Mustang have combined agriculture, pastoralism, and trade to lowland Nepal and northern India as a way of life. Beginning in the 1980s, locals, mostly men, began traveling as contract laborers to Korea and Japan. Like their neighbors from Manang District, some did business in Asian centers of wealth: Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore. However, these moves were not viewed as permanent. Rather, they were annual or life-stage tactics for generating cash for school fees, medical expenses, acts of religious sponsorship, or investments in land or business opportunities back in Nepal. But the movements between Nepal and New York have been different. They have become more permanent, even as they are allowing for further cycles of mobility and opportunities for finding home in more than one location. This change has happened rapidly—within about two decades and one generation.
Now, as lives are forged between Nepal and New York, survival no longer depends solely on agriculture, animal husbandry, and regional trade but also on service-sector employment (running tourist lodges in Mustang, painting nails in Manhattan) and the potent entanglements of remittances. Based on demographic trends in Nepal’s 2000 and 2010 censuses, Mustang District has experienced one of the highest rates of depopulation in the country. Numbers vary, but from records kept by villages and rural municipalities in Mustang as well as by diasporic social service organizations in New York, it is estimated that about a quarter of the nine to ten thousand culturally Tibetan people from Mustang District live in New York. In most cases, this number does not include Mustang-American children born in the United States. Nor does it account for those from Mustang who are living permanently in urban Nepal. The demographic transition grows ever starker when examining age cohorts of educated and able-bodied people, now gone from the mountains. Yet these numbers are nearly imperceptible when considering the immigrant populations in places like Jackson Heights, Queens. I am left contemplating the interplay between the profoundly visible depopulation of Nepal’s Himalayan highlands and the relative invisibility of Himalayan migrants in New York.
New York is not the only destination for people from Mustang. In addition to those who have established residence in India, and monastic and lay youth who are educated there, others have migrated to cities in Europe and Asia. They have worked on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan; some now serve in the U.S. military. Others work as contract laborers in Japan or Korea, as their uncles and fathers might have done before them. Many of Mustang’s senior monastics take regular dharma tours across cosmopolitan East Asia, North America, and Europe.
At a broader level, migration and remittance defines contemporary Nepal. Since 2000, there has been a tenfold increase of Nepalis laboring abroad. Of Nepal’s approximately thirty million people, about four million have migrated for work, or about 15 percent of the population. As documented by the work of Nepal’s Centre for the Study of Labor and Mobility (CESLAM) and by other scholars, approximately 1,500 people leave Nepal each day, and remittances account for a third of the country’s GDP. I have met Nepalis—including people from Mustang—at train stations in Lisbon, on public buses in Auckland, in Parisian cafés, and many places in between. As Nadeem Aslam describes in his novel The Wasted Vigil, “Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.”
The embodied act of walking clockwise around a sacred space—which the Lo Gyalpo would do at dawn around Monthang and which many Himalayan people do each morning and evening around the Boudha and Swayambhu stupa in Kathmandu—is known as kora:
This term is linked closely with another word, khorwa