Contents of this Issue

• Kathmandu Whose Kathmandu? (Mary Des Chene)

Reviews

• Long Walk to Freedom (Nelson Mandela)
• Indra Jatra (Dinesh Adhikary)
• Imaginary Maps: Three Stories (Mahasweta Devi)

Mary Des Chene

Cities are impossible edifices that nonetheless endure. While planners plan, residents go on living, changing the face of the city in unexpected ways. Tomorrow's plan at best will describe yesterday's city, and even then only a lifeless shadow in which tols become "sectors", and history-laden streets "transportation corridors". The multiple realities that are a city seethe beneath every tidy characterization. Cities defy description, elude categorization. They remain fugitive from words that try to capture their enduring qualities or their lightening-speed transformations alike.

But cities are also built of words; Kathmandu no less so than any other. Kathmandu groans not only with the weight of its concrete entombment, but with the weight of words that would explain to us where it is that we are, this place: Kathmandu. Bookshops overflow with descriptions: guide books for tourists, forbidding tomes by social scientists, mind-dulling statistical reports by bikas-wallas. In the next great earthquake, government offices and ministries will be buried in dusty reports describing deficiencies in the city's infrastructure. Newspapers give us daily, weekly and monthly updates on the state of the city and its scandals. Kathmandu is awash in a perennial monsoon of words. Which Kathmandus are to be found there, whose Kathmandus?

Social scientists filter their perceptions through theory-sieves. Too often what they give us in writing is not whatever sparkling insights they may have gleaned from their studies, but the thick, impenetrable goo that remains in the sieve: Kathmandu as pre-modern Newarland. Bikas-wallas give us facts, often of dubious origin, that similarly leave the life of the city behind. Newspapers give us fleeting glimpses of the messiness of everyday life: concrete monsters rising from foundations of fetid garbage, Kathmandu becoming invisible to itself in a swirling fog of pollution, and shadowy glimpses of politicians massaging desbhakti statements into baksis. But in-depth investigative reporting is as rare as a glimpse of Sagarmatha from the Tundhikhel.

This leaves literary writers as our last best hope. It is in literature that lived Kathmandus, full of pain and history are met: reflections of Kathmandus we may know, introductions to ones we do not. Oddly, although it is guidebook authors, social scientists, bikas writers and journalists who claim to write true accounts, while literary writers claim only an imaginative engagement with their subjects, it is in literature that the most realistic portraits are often found. Moreover, in the former kinds of accounts although objectivity is claimed, we often get the narrow perspective of individuals further constrained by genre limitations, while literary writers, who claim only to draw on their own life experience give us the most compelling accounts of the many worlds that Kathmandu's residents inhabit, and the most incisive analyses of the city's problems. Let us compare.

There are a thousand portraits of the city like the following by Patricia Roberts that are aimed at wealthy consumers of exotica: "Kathmandu: The name evokes images of a fertile Shangri-laŠa Never-Never land where time stands stillŠan isolated land where ways of thinking are as different from those of the West as light from darkness" (Kathmandu, City on the Edge of the World, 1989). In 1962, when this image industry was in its infancy Shankar Lamichane wrote what should have been its obituary in his essay (often treated as fiction) Ardhamudhit Nayan ra Dubna Lageko Gham. The Orientalist incarcerating gaze of the ostensibly knowledgeable traveller seeking spiritual enlightenment is there confronted with another way of seeing, born of poverty and lack of medical care. Moreover, the blinding wit of Lamichane and his sophisticated representational techniques themselves put the lie to the "Never-Never land" mode of writing as a portrait of Kathmandu. But of course, travel/guide literature is an industry for profit, not an exercise in understanding, so despite Lamichane's obituary for it, it thrives today.

Planners and bikas-wallas in an effort to impose order overlay a geometric city comprised of quantified objects upon the living, bustling one‹population not people with histories and hopes, numbers of polluting vehicles, not means of getting around, piles of garbage, not food for hungry dogs, sectors not tols, and capital flow not money changing hands in myriad ways. Such ways of looking can bring into view things not otherwise visible. But these portraits of the city which are meant to describe what's broken and show how to fix it leave out how things actually work, making them impractical guides to the city even for their intended purpose. Practical guides exist in stories like Bharat Jangam's Sombar in Kalo Surya in which a man roams Kathmandu searching for (and never finding) sugar, but gradually unearthing the story, gleaned from shopkeepers and other sugar-hunters, of a cartel buying up supplies, creating a shortage in order to sell at a large profit. Another central aspect of Kathmandu business never inspected in bikas-reports is the culture of bikas itself. For this we can turn to Sharad Paudel's series of essays in Bikas (2049-51) where we meet the bikas-walla as Chaturman in three avatars: hunchha bahadurs, hunchha-hunna bahadurs, and hunna bahadurs. No bikas report will ever look the same again, nor will any bikas office you might enter.

Social scientists who study Kathmandu tend to be obsessed with the ritual life and caste calculations of Newars. Perhaps these are insightful portraits of some people's lives, but they neither exhaust the social worlds of Newars, nor do they teach us about others' Kathmandus. Social science's Kathmandu is akin to that of the guidebook writer, exoticized and caught in a time warp. Many of its residents hopes, desires and interests cannot exist, others are simply ignored and so effectively do not exist in the Kathmandu it portrays. Journalists are attuned to contemporary Kathmandu but often treat the issues of the day as brand new phenomena. Both would do well to read Kamal Prakash Malla's Kathmandu Your Kathmandu. Perhaps the most brilliant essay yet written in English on Kathmandu, his portrait of Kathmandu as a "absurd city" visits many of the problems debated in the papers today: the suburban sprawl, excessive traffic, pollution, and "architectural follies" of the physical city; Hindu cultural hegemony and simultaneous decline as a younger generation seeks moksa in commodities and pop culture, Sanskritized language, journalism's failings, constraints on intellectual life in the "muddle that is Kathmandu". Much of Malla's essay might have been written today. That it was written in 1967 shows the need for historical analysis of the contemporary scene, physical and social, and should also make us pause and ask why there has never been another essay like it.

Kathmandus yet unwritten: Where, in writing are the Kathmandus of those who bring tea to lubricate the throats of those who will explain the nature of poverty at the new Convention Centre? The Kathmandus of those who emblazon white letters on red banners for every kind of public occasion? Where, in writing, are the Kathmandus of the guards who protects the describers and explainers from the perils of the city? Where are the Kathmandu streets on which, as in Khagendra Sangraula's poem (Mulyankan, Jeth, 2053), "the Jangabahadurs' horses" still gallop, and where are the tortured lives of those trampled by them? The Kathmandus of these and many other people mostly remain to be written. As living realities they may always escape fixed description, but they can be best known, and thus added to the composite word-portrait of the city if they are written about in the mode of Shankar Lamichane or Kamal Prakash Malla. Those essays of old still speak to the present of Kathmandu in ways that much contemporary writing does not. And they have much to teach us about how to describe the new absurdities and hardships of today's Kathmandus.

(Des Chene is an anthropologist)