In my 43 years of living and working in Kathmandu, I’ve rubbed shoulders with the ruling feudal and minister-makers of Rasputinian Nepal, Wallendas-like captains of industries, business and commerce, Czarist decision-makers – or at least with their scions and uncles besting the Medici and Borgia clans as wily movers and shakers– while pursuing my own higher academia and professional experiences among my own class of fellow Nepalis. In all these decades, I’ve found power-placed Nepalis of Nepal retaining two uncanny sides to their inherent culture:
One is the confused sense of time, chronology and history in Nepal. While a Nepali, like any generational human, lives a limited span of time in the world, human-made governance and institutions have longer-lasting chronologies of their own; while the country continues on to form its own history in a longer course of time. But somehow, we Nepalis are accomplished in making nonsense of the entire structures and schemes of things. Call it religious fatalism or bankrupt spiritualism, but this singular sense of time makes each Nepali frantically myopic and gears him to make hay while his sun shines – and the rest is “I damn care!” The result is tragic confusion, which is the lot of Nepal’s to this day. Time is misconstrued for selfish opportunity; chronology is a fabled timeline to be gossiped around at tea stalls; and history, consequently, is all bunk – better still, for the victorious, to be rewritten at will. There is thus no commonsense saved for tomorrow, no vision for the present five-year plan, nor any policies earmarked for the decade, and no aspirations for the next era beginning in 2020.
Our elected and appointed leaders perpetrate penuries upon us, and we accept them as our fate. Just as our food lacks sufficient fibers, our morality also needs some ethical textures for its own lasting good.
The second characteristic is the absence of moral shocks among us in Nepal. We love to suffer from chronic blunders and indifference as a BDSM package gifted by our governments as rewards for electing them, as if Nepal’s natural calamities and tectonic shivers are not punishments enough in our diverse existential angst and geopolitical miseries. Our elected and appointed leaders perpetrate penuries upon us, and we accept them as our fate. Just as our food lacks sufficient fibers, our morality also needs some ethical textures for its own lasting good. However, this very practice of mutual obligations based on trust, goodwill and kindred spirit are absent from our national characteristics. Woe to the visitors who find Nepal “beautiful” while its natural harshness is one of the cruelest in the world; fie on those who find the Nepalis “smiling, friendly, hospitable” and what not: just scratch below the grainy surface and you shall face fangs to bite you.
Our foolproof thick hide against moral shocks is amply proven: The Royal Massacre was a passing sideshow and the abolition of centuries-old monarchy was but a sigh. We’re rather more conversant on 9/11 and Tiananmen Square than on our own basic givens of daily life.
Bikash Sangraula’s lamenting observations are suggested by Dai Wei in Ma Jian’s novel, “Beijing Coma,” on the Tiananmen Square Massacre: “What was wrong with our generation? When the guns were pointing at our heads, we were still wasting time squabbling among ourselves. We were courageous but inexperienced, and had little understanding of Chinese history.”
Multiply Dai Wei’s generation from Prithvi Narayan Shah’s amalgamated Nepal to this day, and the many tumults visited upon the bonded serfs and not yet fully liberated citizenry, and the multitudes of draconian treatments unleashed by the state to this day, but the peoples at loggerheads among themselves, as is seen at its worst at present.
Ma Jian’s bedridden and vegetative Dai Wei in Beijing can be found in Banepa of Nepal, too. Didn’t PM Madhav Kumar Nepal visit Mukesh Kayastha the other day? Well, Mukesh found his Tiananmen Square on the streets of Banepa, and like Dai Wei, his skull was rammed by a bullet. The results have been the same in both cases: permanent coma in Beijing and Banepa.
Nepal’s malefactors, consequently, have converted their own country into something much hotter than Hell. This reminds me of Juan Rulfo’s novelette “Pedro Paramo” and its 19th century village of rundown Comala whose exploitative feudal have rendered the place so thermal that they find Hell freezing cold, compelling them, therefore, to come back to Comala to take some warm blankets with them back to Perdition.
Nepal has also become similar to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo where revolutions and bloodbaths happen repeatedly for ostensibly noble purposes, with leaders of the same family names appearing, reappearing and disappearing so boringly. Time, chronology and history are all mixed up, one confused for the other two, and vice versa. Magic and realism are two different things for Nepal: It must choose between its past “myths and mysticism” and modernity while the world has already entered post-modernism in the new millennium. The choice to be made is between magical and mythical fables and fairy tales, or civilization’s realistic facts made or unmade by human foibles. In the last ten years alone, Nepalis have already been dragged from petty Panchayat to premature Prajajantra, reactivated Rajtantra to Maobad, then Loktantra, Ganatantra and Janatantra, and now Nagarik Sarbochchata under unipolar Maobadisatta.
But some old gory imprints are still fresh in Nepal: the Klu Koirala Klan is but just one instance. This is moral fibers at the lowest count – two political paramount leaders gracing the “kirtan” of a monarchist who had once thought nothing less than having them disappeared. Mao’s China petted Nepal’s monarchy as their lambs for decades, and Nepal’s Maoists made mince meat of the same institution. Trashing the mountaineering and adventure records of Nepal’s Sherpas, the ferocious fame of the Gurkhas/Gorkhas, and the universal artistry of Newars, two absolute Thakuri Chhetri royals – Birendra and Dipendra – reddened the golden roster of Eton as bloodbath students. It is the notoriety of misdeeds, and not the nobility of performances, that carries the day in Nepal.
Can deliverance then be so deadening? Yes, it is so in Nepal, with democrats, socialists, progressives, communists, Panchas, Maleys, Masals, Mandaleys, monarchists, Maoists all promising Singaporean and Switzerlandish manna and honey but delivering the same old bad dreams to Nepalis. What moral shocks then, pray?
In these fusions and confusions, my suggestion is that we suspend our learning for quite some while, and spend time on unlearning our national fallacies before relearning Nepal’s unadulterated facts and truths, then tool ourselves for the future. In this, perhaps, an essential reading for Nepalis could be Clive James’ “Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts.”
Simultaneously, we also must remind ourselves that our own friends and supporters are not any better, either. The two grandest democracies of the world preach us good governance and clean accountability; but to pursue the same aims and objectives from the very grassroots where their strong medicine is needed, they subcontract as “partners” the same elitist and feudal fraternities of Nepal who have undone for their own benefits what other Nepalis have laboriously built up over the years. For one aid dispenser in particular, Nepal is soon to become their third Babel, after the agency’s colossus debacles in Colombia and Afghanistan.
While the same aid agencies fatten the same old aristocratic parasites of Nepal, their resident team leaders also doubly fail to “see” and “hear” the many conflicts raging around them.
For another thing, our foreign Friends of Nepal have also helped inbreed uncountable I/NGOs in Nepal, who are our own Lords of Poverty. Nepal’s endemic evils and ills are an industry they work day and night to perpetuate for their own deep pockets. They are mostly Nepali castes who stoop to beg and belittle themselves while other ethnic Nepalis climb, fight and carve to enrich Nepal’s reputation abroad and fill the national coffers with their honest labor.
In conclusion, it must but be admitted that Bikash Sangraula’s piece is merely a voice in the wilderness. So is this rejoinder of mine, too.
What is there, then? Perhaps a little dose of catharsis, to soothe our own troubled souls, instead of boasting “Wetoldjaso, didn’t we?”
Readers, I hope, will accept us on their own terms.
pjkarthak@gmail.com
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