12 January 2026
This short essay examines the emergence of what can be considered ‘Mundhum Theatre’ as a form in contemporary Nepali theatre, drawing on ethnographic observations and conversations with actors and writers of Mukkumlung: Cho:t-lung of Yakthung. My aim is not to provide a full account of this form, but to explore how this particular production navigates the intersection of artistic experimentation, ritual, and a specific political moment.
The rise of indigenous theatre
Across Kathmandu’s contemporary theatre scene, folk stories, oral traditions, and indigenous mythologies have entered the stage with striking force. The rise of theatre invested with ethnic and indigenous themes can be linked to socio-political changes over the recent past, especially the democracy movements of the 1990s and 2000s and the ethnic revival they spurred, as well as to global indigenous discourses and transnational movements advocating for cultural and human rights. Recent productions include Bakhamma: Mundumma Manche (‘Bakhamma: Man in Mundum’) by Rajan Mukarung, adapting the story of the first man according to Rai mundum tales, while Umlindo Kharani ra Lemlemma (‘Simmering Ashes and Lemlemma’ by Pashupati Rai, explored Kiranti myth and its patriarchal distortions. Similarly, Sorathi by Sangeeta Thapa and Sanjay Kaucha Magar, interwove the story of a Magar princess forced to marry her father into a parable on village life and the legendary origin of the Magar Sorathi folk dance.
The primary audience for these plays is an urban, middle-class public of mixed ethnic backgrounds, who encounter these performances as both cultural entertainment and as a space for reflecting on contemporary social, cultural, and political issues. The theatre functions simultaneously as an arena for ‘in-group’ engagement and identity-making, and as a mode of representing that identity to wider publics within that cosmopolitan setting.
Among these productions, the Rai muddum and the Yakthung-Limbu mundhum—the vast oral corpora of these Kiranti communities—have become particularly rich sources for adaptation. Comprising ritual texts in an intricate and highly poetic idiom, along with origin myths, narratives, ethical reflections, philosophical insights, and song, the mundhum situates human life within a web of ancestral, environmental, and cosmic relations rooted in the landscapes of eastern Nepal.
‘Mundhumi natak’ highlights how Yakthung-Limbu mundhum traditions, with their resonance across other Kiranti oral traditions, are recontextualised and made accessible on stage. Within this field, two recent productions stood out for their explicit engagement with contemporary indigenous struggles: Mukkumlung: Aba Andolan directed by Pabitra Rai and adapted by Rajan Mukarung from Chitra Mabo’s short story, and Mukkumlung: Cho:t-lung of Yakthung directed by Anil Subba, written by Geelu Ratos, Anil Subba, and Rinchen Kunchok Moktan. The latter play, the focus of this essay, marked a particularly ambitious experiment in staging complex mundhum ritual and mythology.
Staged in Kathmandu amid protests against the cable-car project on Mukkumlung in Taplejung, the play turned the theatre into a space of solidarity and a site for learning about mundhum traditions. The transmission of mundhum faces multiple challenges, which take distinct forms in urban settings, including the dispersal of the community within Nepal and globally, economic pressures, generational shifts in employment and a resulting shortage of ritual specialists, and loss of language as well as of meaning of rituals connected to ancestral lands in migratory settings. At the same time, new forms of transmitting knowledge are emerging, and we may observe that mundhumi natak offers one such medium.
Mukkumlung: Sacred and contested
Mukkumlung, a 3,794-metre peak below the Kanchenjunga Himal, holds profound meaning in Yakthung-Limbu cosmology. In Yakthung language, mukkum signifies power or potency, and lung denotes stone or hill/mountain, together suggesting a ‘mighty stone’, a locus of sacred power, and a part of the mundhum landscape. These are places invoked in ritual recitations by the community’s ritual specialists, or shamans—phedangma, samba, yeba/yema or yemani, and yuma—all of whom possess and transmit the knowledge of the mundhum.
However, the site is more widely known as Pathibhara, after the Hindu goddess whose temple is also located at its top and attracts large crowds of pilgrims every year. The plan to construct a cable car to the summit, promoted by private investors as a tourism project, drew fierce opposition from local communities and their allies, who consider it a violation of sacred landscape and ancestral rights as well as a disruption of local pilgrimage economies and the natural ecology of the biodiversity-rich area. The ‘No Cable Car’ movement, linked to the broader Limbuwan and No Koshi indigenous movements, made Mukkumlung a symbol of the ongoing dispossession of indigenous land rights in Nepal, and an echo of the historical erosion of communal kipat tenure for the Limbu community in particular.
It was against this background that the cooperation of the Mandala Theatre group, Ek Theatre and Chulachuli Rangamanj produced Mukkumlung: Cho:t-lung of Yakthung. The play opened in January 2025, coinciding with violent confrontations at Mukkumlung itself, including the use of gunfire by the Armed Police Force against protesters. The play thus gained extraordinary immediacy: attending it at that moment was not merely cultural entertainment but a political act, offering a platform to express solidarity, which was further amplified by its wide circulation across social media.
The play
Clinging bells and the beating of brass plates announced the arrival of the yeba and his assistants, wearing bell-chains crossed at their chests that jingled with each step, along with the iconic ritual feather headwear, wassang. Moving in a steady rhythm, they circled the nine-tiered ritual pole at the centre of the theatre courtyard.
Mukkumlung: Cho:t-lung of Yakthung unfolded across two spatial frames: the open courtyard and the black-box stage. It began outdoors, with the audience gathered around a tongsing ritual marked by its distinctive set-up and ritual sounds. Tongsing is a core ceremony for the well-being of the household, linking the family with the wider community and the ancestors.
The outdoor scene carried the seeming naturalness of a village community gathering around a ritual site, until a dispute broke out between a Limbu character and a Bahun character. Expectations were purposefully reversed: the Limbu defended the cable-car project as beneficial development, while the Bahun upheld the sanctity of Mukkumlung. The clash escalated into a fight that pulled the audience into the conflict, momentarily blurring the line between performance and reality, and maintaining a deliberate ambivalence without resolving who is right and who is wrong.
The second part, moving indoors, entered the mythic world of the mundhum to tell the story of Mukkumlung, which is connected to the story of Mujingna Kheyongna, the first woman. Mujingna Kheyongna becomes pregnant by the wind and gives birth to Susuwen Lalawen, the first male ancestor. He ventures into the forests on hunting expeditions, meets four women—Thosolung Phiyatlungma, Susanglima, Yosulung Mukkumlungma, and Tusanglima—and their unions give rise to the Limbu clans. Love, jealousy, and death intertwine, culminating in Susuwen’s demise. Mujingna Kheyongna emerges as the emotional and moral centre, embodying the strength to continue despite loss. The story featured numerous encounters with animals who act as helpers and messengers, underscoring the interdependence of humans, non-human beings, and the environment.
The stage design visualised mundhum cosmology: a rock formation represented Mukkumlung, threaded with strands stretching upward like the warp of a handloom. This weaving imagery is central to the Yuma Mundhum, where the ancestral goddess Yuma gifts weaving to the people, and the craft serves as a metaphor for the continuous weaving of life itself.
Challenges of rituals on stage
More than representing the mundhum ritual, the production performed it. For actor-writer Rinchen Kunchok Moktan, who played the main yeba role, the distinction between acting and ritual dissolved into a shared responsibility. As he explained:
If in terms of speech, we were to use it wrongly for artistic purposes, then it would no longer be mundhum in its entirety, would it? It would become diverted. If the interpretation goes astray, that would cause great damage.
Moktan was cast because of his command of the Yakthung language and his ability to recite mundhum passages accurately. Coming from rural Sankhuwasabha district, he had grown up witnessing these rituals. The decision to begin in the courtyard, Moktan noted, was not merely aesthetic but ritually necessary: Tongsing must be performed in the angan, the open yard of the house, never indoors. The production thus respected the spatial logic of the ritual even as it translated it into theatrical form.
Director-writer Anil Subba described the making of the play as profoundly collaborative and grounded in extensive research and consultation with experts, including some of the most renowned community figures and mundhum scholars such as Bairagi Kainla:
I had actually spent a long time working together with mundhum experts. Also, I had read many books written about the Limbu, written about our mundhum, written about our culture. And I had interacted with knowledgeable people—phedangma, yeba, and other mundhum experts together with all the Tutu Tumyahang—sitting together, discussing, consulting with them.
The primary agents shaping this form are the theatre ensembles themselves: young artists, mostly in their twenties to thirties, of mixed ethnic backgrounds and genders, who understand their work as a meaningful contribution beneficial to the community and society. They consult ritual experts, scholars, and respected community figures, navigating the tensions this entails—as there is, inevitably, no single way to ‘do it right’ for everyone. This careful negotiation between conveying authenticity and adapting parts of an expansive mythology and ritual tradition lay at the heart of the play’s ethical and artistic vision.
Alongside staging ritual performances, the play also employed ritual as a metaphor for the presentation of the play as several interwoven journeys: the ritual ascent during tongsing undertaken by shamanic priests; the mangenna rite of ‘raising the head’ (shir uthaune), symbolising dignity and pride; and the audience’s own passage from the courtyard into the mythic interior. These layers relied on culturally specific concepts that required audiences to engage with largely unfamiliar and complex ideas. Cho:tlung, already signalled in the title, denotes ‘summit’ or ‘achievement’. D.B. Angbung and Bishnudatta Angbuhang’s Limbu Namkosh glosses it as siddhisthal in Nepali, a place of spiritual accomplishment reached by shamanic priests during the ritual journey and identified with Phaktanglung (Nep. Kumbhakarna/Mt Jannu) in the Kanchenjunga Himal. The play reframed these ritual metaphors, casting the ascent to cho:tlung as a figure for social and political uplift, parallel to the journeys enacted in tongsing and in the ‘raising of the head’ during mangenna. In this way, ritual practice and symbolism were used to express the play’s political message.
Although performed in Nepali, the play retained the bilingualism and code-mixing typical of eastern Nepal. Terms of address, greetings, and ritual language reflected Yakthung-Limbu cultural norms, while key concepts and place names—Phaktanglung, Chenjenlung (Kanchenjunga), and Mukkumlung—remained in Limbu, signalling their significance as ancestral geography within the mundhum.
Memory and resistance
Was the play explicitly politically motivated? The production’s booklet framed it in unequivocal terms, emphasising that it stood apart by reaching back to ancestors while acting as a form of resistance:
‘Mukkumlung’ means a cho:tlung of the Yakthung community. For thousands of generations, the indigenous ancestors spent their lives so that this human society could stand upright like cho:tlung, like Phaktanglung […] For thousands of years hundreds of boots of encroachment have come to trample in countless attempts upon these thousands of cho:tlungs that make us aware and proud […] The play ‘Mukkumlung: Cho:t-lung of Yakthung’ is precisely a resistance and a mangenna against such encroachments.
The note from the authors read: ‘This is not a play—or rather, not just a play’.
The connection to ancestrality, place, and memory is central to the mundhum’s potency within the protest. During the ‘No Cable Car’ protests, scholar Amar Tumyahang remarked, ‘There is no movement without the mundhum.’ The mundhum provides both the idiom and the emotional force through which resistance is articulated and sustained, drawing its authority from ancestral knowledge.
As a place-based mode of remembering that ties ritual and narrative to specific sites in the landscape, the mundhum becomes a political resource in resisting encroachment on sacred lands. In largely non-monumental Kiranti religions, where claims to place rely less on temples or built structures and more on terrain, oral text, performance, and memory, this form of remembrance becomes a political resource. At the same time, recent decades have also seen a considerable increase in material culture and built structures within Kiranti communities, reflecting ongoing transitions in ritual practice and religious life.
Stage theatre is clearly a new arena for transmitting mundhum contents. As traditional modes of oral transmission face pressures, new forms of mediation gain importance. Alongside religious scripturalisation and scholarly efforts to document mundhum texts, artistic practices offer additional channels through which mundhum circulates. Theatre is perhaps particularly well suited to this task: it can draw on the rich repertoire of traditional performative genres while remaining responsive to contemporary social and political discourses. Although many ritual and mythological intricacies inevitably exceed what can be realised on stage, Mukkumlung: Cho:t-lung of Yakthung resisted flattening their complexity, adapting them carefully within the limits of the theatrical form.
In conclusion
Mundhumi natak emerged at the confluence of theatre, the creative adaptation of oral tradition by new agents, and contemporary politics, bringing the rich and multivalent world of the mundhum to new audiences in Kathmandu’s theatre scene. Beyond entertainment, such performances create spaces for transmission, education, and reflection. Conversations with actors and writers showed that they can become collective, intergenerational, and multi-ethnic efforts that seek to represent indigenous traditions responsibly while acknowledging their transformation. As genuinely collaborative projects, they celebrate mundhum knowledge—knowledge that, it should not be forgotten, has been historically marginalised and suppressed under the Nepali state. Yet, it is precisely through such creative reinvention that mundhum retains its vitality within the shifting conditions of contemporary Nepal.
