Durga Puja is one of the most intensely celebrated festivals of the Hindus of the Hill and the Tarai communities, of the linguistic clusters belonging to the mountains and the plains, and in general of Nepal and India. The mythical deity is the same, the mantras and prayers are similar. There are ritualistic variations among the communities but the veneration for the divine feminine is equally intense among the Hindus. Amidst all such week-long Nepali holiday, one could sadly observe distinct cultural spaces where the great mother is worshiped. Apart from few exceptions where various community members shared faith and rituals together, one could see two Durgas and two Dashamis in Kathmandu. There were family rituals of the native Kathmanduites in the temples, and of the Tarai community and Indian Diaspora in the pandals.
The Nepali capital may have come out of the clutches of the medieval regimes but its cultural architecture is still provincial.
This was the general ritualistic spectacle – a sharp spatial religious isolation – which is the metaphor of all kinds of binarisms from economic to cultural. Dashami is not an exception; no other major religious festival in Kathmandu is celebrated multi-culturally. As soon as festivals arrive, the communities recede to their respective spaces in the capital. The Tarai communities, Hill communities, Indian Diaspora (which has a significant presence in the city being a capital) smoothly separate themselves into devotional zones.
Thus, Kathmandu looks a theoretical metropolis, a forcibly technically-defined metropolitan city, which is grossly devoid of cosmopolitan nature. Among many of the South Asian cities, Mumbai is intensely cosmopolitan, explained the north Indian business executive. The native communal resistance in Mumbai is a conceptual failure to rid the city of multiculturalism. New York is one of the most dynamic cosmopolitan cities in the world. But they are far off advanced urban spaces with which Kathmandu cannot be compared.
The Nepali capital may have come out of the clutches of the medieval regimes but its cultural architecture is still provincial. Such provincialism limits the city not only of it being a capital but it also limits national economic and cultural scopes of the country. My argument is that a nation must have cities of cosmopolitan nature, not only the capital but also two or three more cities in a country like Nepal.
An urban space with cosmopolitan nature is a modern necessity of a nation where dialogues among international intelligentsia, flow of technology, constant exchange of artistic and academic ideas, and plural ritualism make a city the cultural capital of international community, not only of a nation. Such a space needs economic and aesthetic centers of commerce and the arts, roads and buildings, universities and research centers. Kathmandu needs internationalization within from its festive moods to commercial attitudes.
Psychologically, Kathmandu is a hub of paranoid nationalism. Everything outside is anti-national – a gift of the Panchayat political rhetoric – from multinationals to English language. The political culture encourages us to think that the others are expansionists and want to destroy us. There is a new post-democratic breed of politicians who want to medievalize the city and the nation: The monarchial regimes successfully did so under the rhetoric of religious purism and contemporary politics is doing the same under nationalistic rhetoric.
Culturally, Kathmandu is still a tourist hub confined to narrow illuminated lanes of Thamel. The general urban psyche of touristic complacency makes it a platform city to travel into the Sangrila-spaces of Nepal. The city functions almost nothing beyond such tourism. There are some historical hits around the wretched traffics and dusty roads, which force to limit the visitors’ imagination. The agitating enthusiasts of democracy occupy the rest to make the city inactive in the day and criminal in the night.
Intellectually, we have hardly some academic institutions, research centers and universities, which discourse and act on contemporary international matters. The disciplines related with business and management, medicine and the pure sciences, and few disciplines of the Humanities have some respectability in terms with international standards, but the rest of the disciplinary domains are dysfunctional. A cosmopolitan urban space is a knowledge location of utmost professionalism. But apart from some disciplines where foreigners come out of necessity, Kathmandu space is not a knowledge space of cosmopolitan nature.
And, finally, ritualistically, Kathmandu seems to conceal the devotees into its religious homes. Festivals are primarily public in nature. It is carnival like in its functionalism. Kathmandu streets are empty during the most celebrated festival of the nation. I have no objection with such private nature of the festival. There are traditions that are culture specific but I would still like to think of a cosmopolitan space as a metaphor of festivals, of professionalism, of multiculturalism and of developmental multiplicities.
pallabi@pallabi.wlink.com.np
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