1 Postprint of Adhikari, K.P. & D.N. Gellner 2018. ‘The NRN (Non-Resident Nepali) Movement’ in D.N. Gellner & S.L. Hausner (eds) Global Nepalis: Religion, Culture, and Community in a New and Old Diaspora, pp. 437– 66. Delhi: OUP. Chapter 18 THE NRN (NON-RESIDENT NEPALI) MOVEMENT Krishna P. Adhikari and David N. Gellner Introduction It is a common mistake—a methodological trap—in the analysis of ethnicity, nationalism, and other social movements to focus exclusively on formal organizations and activists. 1 Such a focus leaves out of account ‘banal nationalism’, ‘everyday ethnicity’, ‘lived diaspora’, and so on. Yet, while an exclusive focus on formal organizations is likely to lead to mistaken concreteness in one’s conceptualizations and an underestimation of the fluidity and creativity of social life, it would be equally one-sided and mistaken to go to the opposite extreme and ignore entirely formal movements and their deep impacts on [p. 438:] ‘ordinary life’. In the context of the present volume, it is essential to provide some account of the Non-Resident Nepali or NRN movement, which has set out to try and establish, for each country where they live, a formal Non-Resident Nepali Association (NRNA), federated to the worldwide NRNA. We aim to document the rapid growth of the NRN movement and the campaign for dual citizenship, which has not been done in a scholarly way before. We also need to raise the question of how successful (or otherwise) the movement has been in representing Nepalis in diaspora as it aspires to do. As described in other chapters in this volume, Nepal has a long history of migration, with large numbers of people of Nepali origin settled in India, Myanmar, Thailand, and even Fiji. However, the beginnings of the most recent wave of international mobility, moving abroad for work and education beyond India, can be dated to a much more recent period, namely, the 1980s, and turning into a flood only after 1990. Compared to other South Asian countries, Nepal has a relatively short history of international migration. As a consequence, the formation of community organizations among these diaspora populations has been compressed into a comparatively short timeframe. 2 1 We would like to thank Hemraj Sharma, Alan Gamlen, Daniel Naujocks, and Sondra Hausner for comments and suggestions; we take full responsibility for any errors that remain. The chapter draws on our work as part of the Vernacular Religion project [AH/HO15876/1, described above, p. **] and a University of Oxford John Fell Fund, grant [103/758]. It was revised while we were both supported by the Caste, Class, and Culture project [ES/l00240X/1]; we thank the AHRC, the John Fell Fund, and the ESRC for their support. 2 Community organizations were formed as early as the 1920s in Darjeeling (see p. ** above), but these were consequent upon an earlier and distinct wave of migration.