By Dr. Janardan Subedi

In the contested and evolving terrain of Nepali gender discourse, a quiet crisis is unfolding—one not rooted in the chaos of public protest but in the subtle distortion of thought. A borrowed ideology, draped in the vocabulary of liberation, has begun to echo through policy rooms, university halls, and NGO workshops. It speaks the grammar of Western feminism, yet falters when translating it to Nepali soil. Empowerment has become dislocated. Liberation has lost its location.

As a student of sociology, I have attempted to write from a place of contextuality and value-free observation, and I trust that this intention will resonate with the discerning reader. For what good is an ideologue, however well-read, if they fail to listen, reflect, and adapt? Without rational thought, pragmatic awareness, and value-neutral discernment, even the most passionate voice becomes like a rock—hard, immovable, and unresponsive to the living river of real lives.

Today, many among Nepal’s educated elite—especially women shaped by Western academia or donor-funded feminist training—have begun to reproduce foreign narratives with such conviction that they appear to forget their own mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and neighbors. In this process, feminism is no longer a bridge—it becomes a wall. Not a path to dialogue, but a platform of indictment.

This new voice too often flattens all Nepali men into a single archetype: patriarch, oppressor, obstacle. It replaces solidarity with suspicion. One may well ask: Is this the voice of Nepali women, or an echo of distant campuses in Berkeley or London?

Nepal’s feminist awakening was long overdue. The subjugation of women is a historical and social fact. But justice, to be just, must be rooted in the soil. And this soil, rich with its contradictions, offers both oppression and wisdom. The average Nepali woman still struggles to feed her family, access health care, or send her daughter to school. She is shaped less by theory and more by toil.

And so we must ask: whose feminism is this? And who does it serve?

To adopt theory without anchoring it in place is to commit a form of epistemic violence. Karl Mannheim and Pierre Bourdieu remind us that knowledge, when stripped from its sociological grounding, can become ideological dogma. Imported theories, if not localized, risk turning into new forms of elitism.

This is precisely what is happening when some feminist discourses in Nepal selectively target Hinduism and the so-called Brahmanical caste structure as uniquely oppressive, while Buddhism and Christianity are curiously spared. But is this not an ideological sleight of hand?

Hinduism, complex and often contradictory, has long envisioned women as manifestations of shakti—power. Goddesses like Kali, Durga, Saraswati, and Parvati symbolize knowledge, strength, and creation. Yes, patriarchal practices exist, as they do across all religions. But to erase the empowering dimensions of Hinduism while holding only its shadows is to engage not in scholarship, but in strategy.

Moreover, the tendency to depict men as inherently oppressive or as perpetual beneficiaries of patriarchy is not only factually inaccurate but emotionally unjust. It overlooks the millions of Nepali men who work under the sun in foreign lands, who live apart from their families, who die quietly on scaffolding or in desert heat—only to be sent home in coffins, unacknowledged by either feminist praise or nationalist pride.

These men are not patriarchs; they are pawns. They do not hold power; they hold debt. Their wives and mothers bear their absences, and their children inherit their poverty. In such a landscape, to frame gender only through the lens of male privilege is a distortion of tragic proportions.

Social identity theory, developed by Henri Tajfel, reminds us that the formation of rigid “in-groups” and demonized “out-groups” is a fundamental human tendency, especially when identity and injustice intersect. When elite feminist voices paint all men with a single brush, they fall into the same trap as the structures they critique.

Even the revered feminist theorist bell hooks—whose name, notably, is written in lowercase as a gesture of humility—urged that feminism must dismantle all forms of domination, not create new ones. For her, love, community, and mutual care were not sentimental afterthoughts but foundational principles of justice.

Sadly, the feminism imported to Nepal today is often anything but loving. It is weaponized through grant proposals, translated through the sterile prose of development reports, and enforced through a subtle disdain for Nepali culture. It is performative, curated for international platforms, and emotionally divorced from the ordinary woman’s pain.

Edward Said warned against such “intellectual colonialism,” where Western modes of knowledge are imposed upon non-Western cultures, not with guns but with syllabi. The new feminist orthodoxy in Nepal increasingly speaks not to the people—but to donors.

What is erased in this transaction is the grandmother who quietly resisted domination without theory. The mother who managed a household, budgeted a husband’s wage, educated her daughters, and held her family together with the wisdom of lived resistance. These women were not loud, but they were powerful. Their agency was not found in slogans, but in survival.

And yet, young urban feminists—educated in borrowed curricula and funded by Western logic—sometimes dismiss these women as mere victims of patriarchy. This is not feminism. It is amnesia.

True feminism in Nepal must be rooted in the lives and labors of its women—and inclusive of its men. It must acknowledge that the same caste structure that disadvantages women also marginalizes lower-caste men. That the same patriarchy that stifles a wife’s voice also breaks a husband’s back under economic burden. And that justice, if it is to be called by that name, must be whole.

A contextual feminism would reform without ridiculing, challenge without condemning, and build without breaking. It would recognize that Hinduism, like Nepal itself, is a field of contradiction—where misogyny and divinity coexist. It would critique caste without equating all Brahmins with oppression, and promote gender justice without promoting gender warfare.

To the extent that feminism becomes a doctrine of blame rather than a vision of healing, it will alienate the very people it claims to liberate.

Let us move beyond imported rage toward indigenous wisdom. Let us decolonize not only our institutions but our ideologies. Let us speak to each other—not past each other. Let us hold in one hand the truths of theory, and in the other, the truths of lived experience.

And above all, let us remember: a borrowed voice may win applause abroad, but only a rooted voice can transform a nation.

The author is the Professor of Sociology in Miami University, Ohio, USA