The Forbidden Love Stories of Nepal’s Caste System

KATHMANDU, NEPAL — The constitution here guarantees the right to marry anyone, but that didn’t matter when Manoj Kumar Ram, a 22-year-old Dalit, married a woman from a higher caste. Instead, his wife’s family accused him of kidnapping her, and Ram landed in jail.

Ram’s wife, Babita Isar, says her father wanted to marry her off to a man in India, even though she was romantically involved with Ram. So, the couple ran away. In response, Isar’s father filed a complaint, claiming that Isar, who was 21 at the time, was 12 years old, and kidnapped by Ram.

“She looks big and older because of her diet,” says Rohit Isar, Babita Isar’s father. “She’s not old enough to distinguish between good and bad.”

A court later confirmed that Babita Isar was 21 when she and Ram left.

That was the second time Babita Isar and Ram ran away. The first time, they were gone for a week before incessant phone calls from their families lured them back. Isar says her family locked her in the house when she returned.

“I didn’t see the light of the sun for a month,” she says.

Since then, Ram has been jailed twice on kidnapping charges, one for each time he and Babita Isar ran away.

In Nepal, the caste hierarchy places Dalits at the lowest rung among Hindus — a social structure that is broadly adopted throughout Nepal. Since Dalits have historically been treated as impure and untouchable, intercaste marriage with them is viewed as a violation of caste purity. Marrying a Dalit lowers a person’s social status.

“A family’s honor is lost if a daughter marries someone from the lower caste,” says Dipesh Ghimire, a sociologist at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu.

Discrimination, especially legal action taken against Dalit men who marry higher-caste women, is widespread, says Devraj Bishwokarma, chairperson of the National Dalit Commission. At least 40 intercaste couples each year seek the commission’s protection from violence and backlash, especially from upper-caste communities.

Sunita Neupane, GPJ Nepal

Babita Isar alleges her parents forged her birth certificate to lodge a false complaint against her husband and in-laws.

One-third of 70 Dalit men surveyed in 2023, all of whom married women from castes considered higher than their own, faced legal action from their wives’ families, according to research by Tilak Bishwokarma, an assistant professor at Ratna Rajyalaxmi Campus, Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu. There’s no official data to show how many people were jailed.

Caste-based discrimination is punished by up to three years in prison and 30,000 Nepali rupees in fines (about 223 United States dollars), or both. At the same time, marriage of anyone under the age of 20 is technically not recognized, and consensual sexual relations with anyone under the age of 18 is considered statutory rape. If a complaint is filed against underage people who get married, both parties can be imprisoned and fined. Underage couples who elope can be sent to juvenile homes and their families can be jailed.

But in Nepal, about 40% of women are married before they turn 18, according to a Nepal Demographic and Health Survey cited in a 2019 report by the United Nations Children’s Fund, known as UNICEF. Complaints related to underage marriage are few. In 2020, 64 cases of child marriage were registered with the police, and 443 cases were reported through a helpline, according to a joint UN Population Fund and UNICEF review. Underage marriages that aren’t reported are generally uncontested.

It is Dalit men who face the knife’s edge of the law, even when they’re marrying women or teenage girls who are of an age that is acceptable for marriage in Nepal. Men and teenage boys who try to cross the border into India with their higher-caste wives might be charged with human trafficking if they’re caught, says assistant professor Tilak Bishwokarma.

The teenage girls and women face consequences too. Like Babita Isar, they’re often locked up by their families, says Sailendra Ambedkar, a Kathmandu-based lawyer.

Prosecution and jailing of Dalit men who marry women of higher castes is a “mockery of the law and the government,” according to Jeevan Pariyar, a Dalit and member of the House of Representatives, in a July 2023 statement issued along with 15 other Dalit parliamentarians.

Despite that formal statement, there’s no sign that the practice of discrimination against Dalit men will end.

Kabita Kshetri says she grew up in a house where Dalits were only allowed inside when manual labor was required. When a Dalit touched a utensil, Kshetri says her mother sprinkled it with holy water to make it pure again. So when Kshetri, then 17 years old, fell in love with 19-year-old Bipin Sunar, a Dalit man, she knew the road ahead would be difficult. When they ran away together, she says her aunt filed a case in court claiming that Sunar had lured Kshetri with the promise of marriage, and raped her. Global Press Journal contacted Kshetri’s aunt, but the call was disconnected. Attempts to get in touch with other members of Kshetri’s family were unsuccessful.

Sunita Neupane, GPJ Nepal

Kabita Kshetri shows a photo from her wedding with Bipin Sunar.

Sunita Neupane, GPJ Nepal

Kabita Kshetri and Bipin Sunar have a young daughter and struggle to make ends meet. Fighting the court case exhausted all their resources.

In November 2021, Sunar was sentenced to 12 years in prison on charges of rape. He and Kshetri, by then 19 years old, had a 6-month-old girl. Kshetri worked with lawyer Surendra Thapa Magar to appeal, and the rape charge was repealed. Sunar was again sentenced, that time to one year and six months in jail. He was released in April 2023 for time served.

“She lived with him willingly,” Magar says. “When their daughter was born, she continued to live with Sunar, who contributed actively in taking care of their child.” It was “morally wrong” to charge Sunar with a crime, he says.

In Ram’s case, his entire family was implicated. When Ram and Isar ran away, the police found Ram’s father and set bail at 75,000 rupees (about 565 dollars), which he managed to pay to avoid time in jail.

Ram’s brothers — Rupesh, himself a police constable, and Ranjaye — were arrested in March and June 2023, respectively, and both were jailed.

Meanwhile, Isar and Ram, far away in Kapilvastu district of Lumbini Province, decided to get married. They assumed that legalizing their relationship would prevent the police from coming after them. The newlyweds returned to their home district a few days later, but Ram was arrested when they arrived.

“I started crying as the police took me away,” Ram says. “They said I was going in for a long time. I got scared that I will not see my family and wife again.”

A few weeks later, in June 2023, Ambedkar, the lawyer, filed petitions that led to all three brothers being released from jail. The court noted that because Isar and Ram had registered their marriage in court, the kidnapping allegation didn’t hold.

Isar says her father warned her that he would take legal action if she ran away with Ram. But the problem wasn’t running away for love, she says. If she’d left with a man from a higher caste, she says, her father would have forgiven her.