“Kathmandu, Your Kathmandu!”
Though it was mostly of a very unchallenging and uniform kind of studio musicianship most of the time, it was indeed nice to play music at Radio Nepal. [break]
There were many mixed reasons for that. First, something was better than nothing. But what we did at Radio Nepal was just one part of what we pioneered in Darjeeling – namely, creating and playing Nepali music which we defined as “Devkota Sangeet,” a modern genre but based on folk traditions.
Yet, at Radio Nepal, we felt we were contributing uniquely to the sounds of Nepal by playing in its national and official studios in Kathmandu where all Nepali music artistes worth their names recorded their compositions, and their renditions were broadcast from Radio Nepal to the whole wide world.
If what we did in Darjeeling and its peripheries were provincial and regional, Kathmandu and Radio Nepal provided more and much wider exposure to our musicianship via its airwaves.
I mean, there was a feeling of something noble and purposeful which were manifest in our holistic deeds with almost missionary zeal; that is why we worked for pittance at the only broadcasting networks of the nation state.
Nepal was extortionist, yes; extractive and a hoarder, even more so, and Radio Nepal practiced these traits in its own ways: it optimized our talents at the least possible wages and payments.
Among these plusses and minuses, what I also missed in Kathmandu were the other kinds of band, club, ball dance and jam session music we played in cosmopolitan Darjeeling, a town dotted on all sides of a lofty hill range.
We made seasonal music in the neighborhoods in Gangtok, Kalimpong, Kurseong, and Siliguri as well. The hills indeed were alive with the sounds of many genres music in those days.
Then there was Calcutta, too, a musical metropolis which we visited in winter. Calcutta had become highly “Frenchified” in our time because Calcuttans wanted in their fabled city neither any residues of British colonialism in any form nor the ascending influences of the new American world imperialism! Calcutta, Rangoon, Saigon and Shanghai were the original cities of Asia in those days.
Delhi, Bombay, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo were nowhere near what they were to later become as the Cold War heated in the ensuing decades.
In comparison to Darjeeling and the Hills, Kathmandu was musically a wasteland. Truth be told, I greatly regretted being here, and I have the feeling even today, some forty-six years later.
I had planned to leave this scatological, snotty and bipolar city in ten months anyway. But a few factors altered my plan. Among them, one should suffice: I fell in love with a Newar girl from the heart of the Old Town.
She was from Jana Bahal, a few steps from Indra Chowk, and she ended my chronic bachelorhood in which I had prided myself for quite a while.
Now, being ensnared, it meant a few more years of residence in this village-like habitat that had tried to be a capital city since the arrival of King Prithvi Narayan Shah in the 1760s.
Kathmandu, since then, has looked like a deliberate Blunder and a well-planned Mistake, making “blunder mistake” a Kathmanduized expression in English.
Kathmandu Valley was a study in unexpected contrasts. The first thing I noticed the evening of my arrival was the absence of Indian vehicles: No Tata trucks or Fiats or Ambassadors and Standard Heralds were visible on the roads; in their place were Hino haulers, West German Volkswagen minibuses and Mercedes and Daimler Benz limousines, Japanese Datsun and Toyota sedans and Bellett taxis, American Impala, Pontiac and other half-a-mile-long cars. BSA, Triumph and Honda motorbikes and Indian Hero bicycles rolled on the roads.
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
But the roads were in hopeless condition – the entire road in front of the luxurious Hotel de l’Annapurna was simply gravelly and amply dusty; so was the stretch from Teku along Kali Mati to Soaltee Hotel, another modern oasis in the middle of Jyapu rice fields. But the Putali Sadak and Battis Putali road looked like boulevards to me.
Kathmandu and Patan were dotted with huge-acreage and ostentatious Durbars, massive Mahals and gargantuan Bhawans of the Ranas and other elites but very few modern bungalows for affluent families; most dwellings were modest and lower middle class.
Whatever self-sufficient villas and bungalows were there were built as if to be leased to USAID expatriates, UN experts and diplomatic corps, thus engendering the culture of rent economy in Kathmandu as early as the 1960s.
The great divide between the haves and have-nots was already prominent in the first decade of the Panchayat Raj. There were virtually no restaurants and bars in town for our economic and social class except in exorbitant five-star properties; so we had our own favorite Newar “tharra pasals” and “bhattis” in the dark and damp corridors of Ason, Thahiti, Bhota Hiti, Kamalachhi, Masa Galli, Pako, and Maru Ganesh.
In the gist of these contrasts, Radio Nepal was but one of the continuing manifestations of the perpetuated halfhearted measures synonymous with modern Nepal, which was still attached to its old and selfsame ad hoc habits, these false values forming the core of the oral traditions of its feudal lords which were imposed on the bureaucracy, civil society, and the kingdom’s unfortunate serfs.
The three cities of the Kathmandu Valley – Kathmandu (Kantipur), Patan (Lalitpur), and Bhad Gaon (Bhaktapur) – were a sorry sight to see when I arrived here. Also, the three medieval Malla Durbar Squares of the Valley were beyond hope.
In classical Kathmandu, the Hanuman Dhoka royal palace complex of yore, where I had first landed, at the far end of the Basantpur Chowk, was derelict, with its bricks, tiles and woodworks tittering, falling off and rotting.
It was being repaired and re-erected by UNESCO under one consultant called John Sanday & Associates when I arrived here in 1965.
Come the 1970s, and Bhaktapur’s Durbar Square and the entire city would be renaissanced by West Germany by refurbishing the entire courtyards of the principal palace square, the Dattatreya Chowk and the Nyatapola quadrangle.
The West Germans would also supply water to the city’s homes, introduce sewage and drainage as well as eliminate TB that was the scourge of the city dwellers.
The same was the dilapidated state of the Patan Durbar Square which was later, beginning in the 1980s, to be made anew by European partnerships and cooperation. Even Panauti, outside the Katmandu Valley, would be saved from its centuries-old neglect and indifference by French and other foreign donors.
These were the very first instances of INGOs operating in Nepal, something that was started by the UMN – United Mission to Nepal, a cross section of western Protestant denominations – the Tom Dooley Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the Jesuits, in the very 1950s when the “first dawn of democracy” arrived in Nepal.
In all these reconstructive modern movements, however, the Nepali Guthis and organizations were quiet and dormant in Nepal’s socio-economic, cultural and educational initiatives of the day. The standing splendors of the Rana palaces and the doddering decadence of the Malla Durbars were a shock to an arriver like me.
One century of Ranarchic Rule had wounded the Newar civilizations of the Kathmandu Valley, and international doctors had arrived to patch up the damages as early as the 1960s.
I borrowed this section’s caption from Dr Kamal Prakash Malla’s slim ethnography in English, entitled “Kathmandu, Your Kathmandu,” published by Ratna Pustak Bhandar of Kathmandu in the late ’60s.
Professor Malla was one of our venerable teachers at the Master’s Program at Tribhuvan University’s Department of English at Kirtipur. For us, his pamphlet was a sort of what Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” or “J’accuse” by Emile Zola could have been in their respective days in their individual countries.
For Kathmandu’s somewhat homogenous or less diverse populace of the ’60s, this tract – one of the first specimens of Nepalis writing in English – was contemporary in its content but its message was tacitly futuristic, which is far more evident today in 2012.
Much earlier, there was an essay written in Nepali by Bal Krishna Sama. It was entitled “Baani” (simply, Habits) which described the socio-cultural state of affairs in Kathmandu.
His views and the observations he made in this essay are still pertinent to Kathmandu, even more so today. The Kathmandu of “Baani” was even much sparser, a pre-urban terracotta habitat of ancient Newar visages on one hand while also horribly pockmarked by mock-Victorian and pseudo-baroque monstrosities called palaces, erected by the Ranas and their fellow aristocrats.
Sama’s essay was written during the last years of the absolute Rana Raj in the 1940s while Malla’s opus was published in the first decade of the Panchayat Raj, pre-1970.
Yet, combined, the two texts form a powerful pair of social studies chapters, and still pose as a damning moral science canon to the Kathmandu Valley’s by-now unchecked demographics and its predetermined and passive denizens.
To be continued in the next edition of The Week.
The writer is the copy chief at The Week and can be contacted at pjkarthak@gmail.com
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