Nepal

hi everyone-- yes, i succumbed to the usual curse of the blogger. ie i started strong and then fizzled out and never wrote again. actually i wrote a lot about my winter break but then never posted it because i kept wanting to check my information and not tell lies. this is related to the other curse of the blogger which is wanting to put up something that is of worthy interest and not just completely self-centered, and yet also just keep my friends and family posted...for which purpose, in part two of our academic year, there was not much that was qualitatively different to report then what was new in the first half, only now it felt as if everything starting coming together and bearing fruit. so lots happening but nothing that i was able to really tell about. plus, ironically the more there is to write about, the less time there is to write. and here i go succumbing to the third curse of the blogger, plain old self-reflexivity for this whole last paragraph.

anyway, my time in India is almost over for now; i’ll be back in the US in just a few days. although i hope to come back lengthily and often. so i suppose i should try to give some sort of overview or wrap-up of this phase of things.

of course it’s too late to go into detail about various anecdotes i could have talked about if i’d been on the ball-- like the time i saved the honor of the Indian Army by rescuing the olive beret of a hapless soldier perched in his little guard post above the road where it had fallen and, gallantly asking, "aapki topi?" i threw it up to him with some brilliant fluke of wind that made it sail up perfectly through the alcove as if i was a person with professional ballplayer aim [which you all know i am definitely NOT!]... or the time school was closed due to Sunni-Shia altercations which led to what most people thought was ridiculously disproportionate security crackdown and everyone said was because it was routine stirring up of trouble before the big elections, in which parts of the city were placed under full curfew for a week, including the part where a lot of our teachers live.

overall...

oh bother. i’m just going to slap this up without reflection. why the hell not.

i just got back from a quick trip to Nepal to celebrate the end of the Lucknow Urdu program. it was a grueling train plus 2 buses, a full day and 2 nights of travel, each way. the weather in the mountains was a big relief from the sweaty Gangetic plain [and thrilling nightly thunder and lightning displays with refreshing showers] but unfortunately i couldn’t see much of the landscape we were driving through since it was dark for much of the way through the hills. beautiful starts when we took pit stops though.

once in Kathmandu, we tried to balance admitting we were tourists with trying to educate ourselves about the political situation...which was a constant shadowy presence just off stage you might say.

first of all i should mention that Kathmandu and the rest of Nepal are two completely different worlds, and on this trip i only had time to experience the former. this is where the vast majority of the country’s wealth, media, power, infrastructure etc are concentrated whereas 90% of the population is in poor peasant communities throughout the central valley, the mountains, and the lowland part [aka the terai] along the Indian border.

you can see lots of Indian and lots of Tibetan cultural influence; the clothes and faces of the people i saw too tend to look either Indian, Tibetan, or anything in between. there are tons of Hindi words recognizable in Nepali, and many Nepalis also know Hindi; but there are also many Nepalis whose native tongue is other than Nepali. i saw women wearing saris with long-sleeved shirts, or salwar-kameez, and men wearing sort of a different variation of a skinny-legged kurta-pajama with a [soft pillbox sort of topi] but i also saw a lot of young people wearing hipsterishly western clothes. the popular music sounds really different than in India though; maybe more Tibetan-inflected, and also maybe more ethereal and less poppy.

actually it’s possible to say thatNepal would probably have been incorporated into postcolonial India except for the fact that the kingdom was never conquered by the British, [thanks to the mountains and the proverbial valor of the Gurkhas who of course were then recruited into the British Indian army in large numbers, to this day] so it remained independent when the British left; nevertheless there’s also a lot of longstanding resentment toward Indian cultural and economic domination. all the cars are Maruti and all the trucks say Tata. the industry and world commerce all go through India and large numbers of Nepali laborers go from their villages down to India to work and back. in India the newspapers and politicians often talk about the fear of destabilizing radicalism across the border, but i’ve read in other sources that the completion of this labor circuit and the contact the migrant workers thereby found with the Indian radical left while working here contributed in large part to the radicalization of the Nepali militants, at least the peasant segment as opposed to the urban intellectual segment.

as you probably know, there’s been a Maoist guerrilla-led People’s War going on in Nepal since 1996, but in April 2006, a historic popular uprising united the Maoists and the 7 major moderate/mainstream political parties for the first time along with civil society groups to abolish the monarchy and demand a constitutional republic. ever since then there have been non-stop deliberations and debates over how to convene the constituent assembly, over the Maoists’ retention of their weapons, over the way to achieve equitable representatio for Nepal’s many languistic and ethnic groups, etc etc, along with sporadic violence ongoing.

here are the signs and echoes and shadows that we saw, without ever confronting the reality head-on.

on sat, our bus through the terai was stopped for awhile because there have been alot of bandhs [ie closures and strikes] called by the ethno-nationalist/separatist organizations representing the Madhesis who feel marginalized by the Kathmandu government and also tend to be anti-Maoist. they are encouraged in this tendency by a lot of moral and financial support by the Indian Hindu right wing. so more often than not these days all the traffic on the highways through the lowlands stops.

on sun, we saw a play at the famous Gurukul theater by the Aarohan national theater company. it’s their 25th anniversary festival-- they formed in the early 1980s with a group of 5 or 6 actors who were determined to make theater socially relevant and get people to engage with critical issues; initially they were very influenced by Ibsen. they alternated between English-language works and adaptations or original works in Nepali, now moving toward more Nepali. so we couldn’t understand the language of this play but we figured what the heck, we’d at least get the feel of things and learn what we could before and after. it had some nicevisual imagery and like i said there are many many Hindi words recognizable in Nepali-- from namaste-kripaya-dhanyavad to inqilab zindabad. from what we could make out it was about this guy who’s all depressed and fatalistic about the state of society and perhaps disillusioned with revolutionary politics as well. he also had a pregnant wife, a flirtation with a prostitute, and a missing important paper of some sort that was causing him to freak out. unfortnately the female characters didn’t get to do much but serve as accouterments to our sensitive heroe’s misery.

[by the way i also got to see some excellent Hindi and/or Urdu-phone theater in Bombay and Delhi and even Lucknow. Bollywood Shmollywood. there’s great stuff with political, social and literary depth and fine technical acting. much of it has some connection to the Prithvi theater in Bombay. and also, as it happens, to the Urdu Progressive Writers tradition. i saw Essay Communications’ Kharaashein making a statement against communalism as part of the Prithvi festival in Delhi, and Naseeruddin Shah’s Manto Ismat Hazir Hain in Bombay, and Kaifi aur Main from Kaifi Azmi’s personal papers read by Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar in Lucknow. check out these links.
www.prithvitheatre.org
www.ipta.org [Indian People’s Theater Assoc.]
www.aarohantheatre.org

and also read this book: Anthems of Resistance by Raza Mir and Ali Husain Mir.
and see the old Guru Dutt/Sahir Ludhianvi movie Pyaasa.

on mon, we visited the social science baha where they have various talks and research facilities and share a building with the Himal magazine office, in the neighborhood of the university. too quick a trip to do much that was worth while, but good to discover for futrue reference. we also continued with our informal study group...in which each day of our travels we tried to continue our Urdu work [whether over many momos in a succession of cafes, or on a carpet of pine needles in the ex-Royal Nagarjuna forest reserve-- to do which we had to leave our passports with some soldiers and answer questions] by reading part of Sardar Jafri’s Lucknow ki Panch Raaten and also by reading and discussing a couple of books on the Maoist movement and the People’s War that i bought there.

in the same neighborhood we also happened to arrive in time for a big festival in which 2 carts drag swaying, towering cones 3-4 stories tall, which are covered in pine branches and topped with flags and red bunting, which i believe represent images of spiritual beings who in practice from what i can see kind of fuse aspects of Buddha with Hindu deities. don’t quote me on this though. again, we’re deducing from scraps of Q&A with friendly people, and a mention in our borrowed guide book. the interesting part, we thought, was that the crowd in the wake of this tug of war was completely quiet-- no music, no chanting, no drums, no slogans, no shouting or cheering. but it wasn’t grim, just focused.

on tues, it was the first anniversary of Democracy Day, or apr 23 2006, when the uprising i mentioned was consolidated last year. so there were big celebratory rallies and lots of news coverage along the lines of “how far have we come so far, what problems are we still dealing with” etc. i wanted to attend the big thousands-strong demonstration but due to a misunderstanding we didn’t discover the correct location until the next day. but maybe this was for the best as it gave us the opportunity for a lot of discussion about what it means to be a foreign traveler who has the means to just show up to such things without longterm local engagement in the struggle...even if we are people who are committed longterm to other points of struggle linked to this one in the global sense, to which the activists here too are quick to assert the links. still, to the naked eye, what makes the difference between a genuine gesture of solidarity, and opportunistic adventure-travel voyeurism? would we have been welcomed or resented? and of course, the old favorite, should one feel guilty to be a temporary visitor spending recreational money in a place where tourism is the primary industry? if so, how guilty? are we contributing in a small way to some economic redistribution, or just being exploitative? should we just embrace our role as tourists for a few days, quit thinking so much, enjoy the yummy food and buy some pashminas?

on weds, i was thus sitting touristically in our hotel drinking a cold coffee when i noticed that the staffers were all standing raptly around a speaker unit from which sounds were coming that had first registered on my consciousness only vaguely, as if someone were watching an action movie in the next room: spurts of rapid gunfire, explosions, shouting, excited voiceover. then i realized it was the radio. so to confirm, i asked them, is that the radio?yes. is this happening right now? yes. what exactly is happening? the Maoists are fighting the government. where? west of city.

i wasn’t sure if they meant the western part of the city, or if they meant somewhere outside of the city to the west. i also wasn’t sure who exactly they meant by the government, since these days that’s precisely the question: who is the government and how is it constituted, and what role in it the supposed-to-be-disarming Maoists themselves now play in it, as fuller participants than they have been at any previous time. but before i could get more answers the manager came and made the staffers turn it off. i’m not sure if it was more that he wanted them to get back to work and not stand around, or if he didn’t want them to upset the guests [marring our touristic experience in this idyllic mountain shangri-la].

either way, as soon as the sound was switched off, it was eerily easy to forget. i’m just here sipping cold coffee in a lovely mountain garden amongst the spiritual pilgrims and action trekkers and new age hippies. for the city is also dotted with many unobtrusive and a few flamboyantly magnificent Hindu and Buddhist shrines and stupas and temples. if you go out early in the morning before the tourist commerce starts, the air is full of bells ringing as people do their daily prayers and offerings all over the place. on our last day we walked up to the iconic Shahbhunath stupa where we weren’t allowed all the way in without paying, but we still got a great view of the valley and got to enjoy lots of statues and prayer flags and sacred monkeys.

on the way back the bus ride was pretty scary because the bus broke down with a diesel leak before we’d even left the outskirts of Kathmandu, and then from the sound of things as we squealed our way downhill through the night, the brakes were none too reliable either. then there was the drunk guy who had to get kicked off around midnight. and the high-strung high-maintenance hippie couple chopping raw ginger on bread and spilling their herbs and veggies in the aisle and then chewing out rickshaw drivers who the rest of us thought had charged a perfectly reasonable price to carry their mountains of boxes and backpacks to the border. and the full of himself white-boy adventurer wanna-be who kept bragging about the 30 exciting countries he’d been to of which out of all of them “South Asia’s the craziest...in South Asia you just never know..anything can happen in South Asia, know what i mean?....you don’t? you mean you DON’T think South Asia’s a crazy place? and you’ve been LIVING here?...well, i’ve been to a lot of parts of South Asia. how many parts have you been to?” [of course we knew what he meant. but there was no way we were going to give him the satisfaction of agreeing with his orientalist pseudo-cosmopolitan cracker ass who thinks knowledge of the world is measured purely in coverage and never in depth and points to the dhaba by the side of the road where the driver has elected to take a several-hours’ midnight nap while we kill time looking at the stars from the top of the bus, with a knowing “well THAT’s sure a dose of culture, right?”.]

i’m now in Delhi hanging around for a day or two before my plane back to the US. another post coming [really!] when i return.