Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan

Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan is a scholarly monograph by Michael Hutt, Professor of Nepali and Himalayan Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Published by Oxford University Press in 2003, the book is widely regarded as the definitive academic account of the Bhutanese refugee crisis, providing a deeply researched analysis of the political, cultural, and historical processes that led to the forced displacement of over 100,000 Lhotshampa from Bhutan in the early 1990s.

The book's title encapsulates its central argument: that the Lhotshampa did not simply lose their citizenship through administrative error or voluntary emigration, but were actively "unbecome" as citizens — systematically stripped of their national identity through a deliberate state project that redefined Bhutanese nationhood in terms that excluded the country's ethnically Nepali-speaking population. Hutt's work is essential reading for understanding the crisis and has been cited extensively in subsequent scholarship, human rights reporting, and policy analysis.

Author Background

Michael Hutt is one of the foremost Western scholars of Nepali language, literature, and Himalayan societies. His academic career has been centred at SOAS, where he has specialised in the cultures and politics of Nepal, Bhutan, and the broader Nepali-speaking world. Hutt's engagement with the Bhutanese refugee issue began in the 1990s, when the crisis was unfolding and relatively few scholars were paying attention. His linguistic expertise — he reads and speaks Nepali, the language of the Lhotshampa — gave him direct access to refugee testimonies, community publications, and primary sources that were unavailable to most English-language researchers.

Prior to Unbecoming Citizens, Hutt had published extensively on Nepali literature and had edited several volumes on Himalayan politics and culture. His work on the Bhutanese refugee crisis built on this regional expertise while addressing a subject that demanded engagement with broader theoretical questions about citizenship, ethnicity, nation-building, and human rights.^[1]

Research base

The book grew out of seven fieldwork visits Hutt made between 1992 and 2001, primarily to the Beldangi, Khudunabari and Sanischare camps in Jhapa and Morang districts of southeast Nepal. Over that decade he conducted interviews with several hundred refugees, including ordinary cultivators and market traders as well as political organisers and teachers, and collected oral life histories covering the period from settlement in Bhutan through expulsion and camp arrival. The fieldwork was conducted in Nepali without translators.^[2]

Alongside the oral material, Hutt worked from Bhutanese government publications and legislation (the 1958 Nationality Law, the 1977 and 1985 Citizenship Acts, census circulars and ministerial speeches), Nepali-language pamphlets and newsletters produced in the camps, UNHCR and Amnesty International documentation, Indian diplomatic correspondence available in the public record, and the academic holdings of libraries in Kathmandu, London and Delhi. The methodological choice to privilege Nepali-language sources — routinely inaccessible to English-only researchers — is the feature reviewers most often singled out as distinctive.

Argument and structure

The book proceeds roughly chronologically, working from the nineteenth-century settlement of the southern belt to the camps of the late 1990s.

The early chapters reconstruct the history of the Lhotshampa population. Hutt traces Nepali-speaking settlement in southern Bhutan from the 1860s onwards, documents the recognition of Lhotshampa citizens by the Wangchuck dynasty in the twentieth century, and shows that the government's later characterisation of the community as a body of recent illegal immigrants is not supported by the state's own records. Several Lhotshampa families held land grants, government posts and military service records predating any disputed cutoff date.

The middle chapters analyse the construction of a modern Bhutanese national identity in the 1980s. Hutt argues that the Royal Government under King Jigme Singye Wangchuck promoted an official culture centred on Ngalop Drukpa norms — Dzongkha language, Tibetan Buddhist religious practice, and the dress and etiquette code of Driglam Namzha — and that the framing of this culture as timelessly Bhutanese was itself a recent political construction. Within that framing, the Hindu, Nepali-speaking southern population was recast as a threat to cultural integrity rather than as a component of a plural society.

The core chapters examine the legal mechanisms of denationalisation. Hutt reads the 1985 Citizenship Act as a retroactive instrument that required proof of residence in Bhutan on or before 31 December 1958 — a cutoff many long-resident Lhotshampa families could not document. He then analyses the 1988 census in southern Bhutan, showing that census officials exercised wide discretion to reclassify residents into non-national categories, and that the process took place in an atmosphere of intimidation that deterred appeals.

The final narrative chapters cover the 1990 demonstrations in the south, the government's military response, the forced signing of so-called "voluntary migration forms" under arrest, the confiscation of land and property, and the movement of people across the border into India and then into camps in Nepal. Hutt distinguishes direct violence from slower forms of coercion — harassment, denial of services, exclusion from schools and markets — and argues that both were part of a single, state-directed operation rather than a spontaneous exodus. A closing section examines the failure of bilateral Nepal–Bhutan negotiations through the 1990s and the limits of the international response, including India's role in discouraging external pressure on Thimphu.

Reception

Unbecoming Citizens was reviewed in Journal of Refugee Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Asian Ethnicity, Pacific Affairs and Himal Southasian, among other outlets. The general line in the academic reviews was that the book was the most thoroughly researched treatment of the subject available, and reviewers highlighted the depth of the Nepali-language material and the author's unwillingness to flatten the crisis into a single-voice victim narrative. The Journal of Refugee Studies review of December 2003 is the most frequently cited assessment.^[1]

Not all reactions were uniformly positive. Some readers within the exile community felt the tone was too detached given what the book describes, and argued for more explicit use of terms such as ethnic cleansing. A separate line of criticism, largely associated with official Bhutanese commentary, has held that the book relies too heavily on refugee testimony and underweights the government's position on illegal immigration. Hutt has responded in subsequent essays and interviews that the documentary record, including the state's own census and citizenship documents, supports the general picture the book lays out.^[4]

Influence

The book is cited in virtually every subsequent academic treatment of the Lhotshampa expulsion and in the major human rights reports on the subject, including Human Rights Watch's 2007 report Last Hope: The Need for Durable Solutions for Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal and India, Amnesty International's country reporting from the 2000s, and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention's 2024 opinion on the Bhutanese political prisoner cases. Diaspora organisations in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom use it as a standard reference in educational and advocacy work. Hutt's continuing commentary on Bhutanese political stories — for example, his July 2025 NPR interview on the deportation of resettled Bhutanese refugees back to Bhutan and Nepal — is generally framed around the research that went into the book.^[5]

Editions and availability

The book exists in two main editions: the 2003 hardcover jointly issued by OUP Oxford and OUP New Delhi, and the 2005 revised paperback from OUP India. OUP India has kept the paperback in print and copies circulate through academic libraries worldwide and through OUP's online catalogue. In Bhutan itself the book is not openly sold, and the Royal Government has not formally responded to its analysis; it is nevertheless held at several South Asian university libraries and is accessible through interlibrary loan.^[3]

See also

• Michael Hutt — author biography
• Bhutanese refugee crisis
• Lhotshampa
• 1985 Citizenship Act
• Driglam Namzha
• Third-country resettlement programme
• SOAS, University of London

References

1. Review of Unbecoming Citizens, Journal of Refugee Studies 16(4), December 2003.
2. "Michael Hutt," staff page, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
3. Hutt, Michael. Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan. Oxford University Press, 2003 (hardcover) / 2005 (paperback). OUP catalogue entry.
4. Hutt, Michael. "Unbecoming Citizens." openDemocracy, 2003.
5. Human Rights Watch. Last Hope: The Need for Durable Solutions for Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal and India, May 2007.
6. Amnesty International. "Bhutan: Nationality, Expulsion, and the Right to Return," ASA 14/004/2002.