Marxist past to speculative futures: migration, land markets, and political storytelling in Nepal’s Tarai

Abstract

ABSTRACT In southeastern Nepal, international labor migration has led to complex socioeconomic changes, including expanding smallholder landownership, class differentiation, and the transformation of land from a productive to a speculative asset. Based on ethnographic research focusing on villagers’ narratives, this article finds that political imaginaries drawing on rural Marxist thought play a crucial role for interpreting recent historical experience but are losing purchase amidst increasingly dispersed, opaque, and contradictory processes of accumulation. It then identifies the emergence of a new speculative imaginary, through which villagers attempt to navigate but also reinforce these new constellations of inequality, capital, and labor.