A XANADU IN THE MAKING
Evidently, the most distinctive feature of Kathmandu is its architecture both in its chief glories and pious follies. While the chief glories like the Basantpur Palace and the Durbar Square are in steady ruins, the architectural follies of the city are multiplying. Most unlikely state buildings and monuments are rising in Kathmandu: the Martyrs’ Memorial, the Town Hall, the Central Telegraphic Office, the General Post Office, the Academy, the Mint, the Bureau of Mines, the Supreme Court, the National Archives; the NIDC Office, the Police Club, the Warehouse and so on. But the bemused tourist is bewildered at his inability to distinguish one from the other. Except the Cottage Industries Emporium, these buildings are in no way different from the public utility buildings like the Saraswati Sadan or the Police Station built by the Ranas before the 1950s. At this steady pace soon Kathmandu will be an unenviable wilderness of reinforced concrete buildings, a lesser Xanadu where the descendants of Changhis Khan might have hunted for a roof over their heads. Because by now the city plebeians too have cultivated the cheap taste for plastering their aging mansions with cement. The engineers, draughtsmen and architects are also showing a soft corner for architectural patriotism by curving the roof-corners of otherwise unearthly structures. While this craze for humourless reinforced concrete buildings rages in the Nepalese capital a great many of the locus classicus of Nepalese architecture, including the Basantpur Palace and the Durbar Square, are steeped in the slimy public urinals. The ancient Nepalese propensity to fuse the sublime and the sordid is irresistible. While our ancestors built the temples of delicate symmetry supported by the beams teeming with erotic details, we fulfill our animal urges by pissing at their foot. It is not shocking if the ancient royal palace in Patan is used to house the city police. In these matters Kathmandu has always been ahead of Patan: Kathmandu is only a step further in its avant garde vandalism.
A TRAGIC INSTITUTION OF BABYLON
The Nepalese have not gone much further since the deluge, except in the glossy brochures of the Department of Tourism and the Publicity Department documentaries. In the meantime, tired of the computerised wisdom of the West, tourists of one sort or another are pouring down at the Gaucher Airport. But as soon as they drive down to the city office of the Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation they are disenchanted. The mythic Shangrila, the Forbidden City which a great many tourists obstinately hope to find in Kathmandu, is being swallowed by the woolly cosmopolitan replica of Baudelaire’s Paris and Eliot’s London. Today Kathmandu holds out the prospect of a muddle where one loses one’s identity in a maze of dark alleys enticing one to a confused destiny. The narrow alleys of the city have no logic; the tall new buildings have no character; the old city is in steady ruins; the new city centres are breeding cosmopolitan philistines. No one can stop for a quarter of an hour in the New Road without being suffocated, both mentally and physically, by the muddle that is Kathmandu. Here are the exposed nerves of the kingdom; here is the cream of the nation’s confused elite. Evening is the time to stand and stare, a time to stand on your inch of the pavement. In Kathmandu the cement pavement is a tragic institution from where men rise and whither they fall. So the elite stick to it with grim determination. Many of them stand in a kind of mystic trance in collusion with the sagacious cattle and cold machinery. The motley crowd that assembles every evening on either pavement of the New Road does not have a place to go, anybody to see or anything to do. For a few chosen hours here is a perfect Georgian dream kingdom of Walter de la Mare – each man a pair of legs and eyes. (Oh, what is this life so full of care/ If there is no time to stand and stare?) Where does this crowd come from? Presumably, the crowd that gathers every evening at the pavements is the same crowd of urban robots who run the efficient ten-o’-clock rat race to their desks and destinations. Having played its part the crowd steps out and stands apart on the pavements to watch the perfection of the spectacle it has collectively conjured up. The crowded pavements reveal that evening pursues Kathmandu’s private life with void and loneliness. It is from this prospect of a gnawing mental and physical void that the lonely crowd flies to the cement pavements. After all, there is no fancy dress show or fireworks display all 365 nights a year at the New Road.
Kathmandu has no articulate intelligentsia other than those who stand every evening on the New Road pavements. The intellectualism of Kathmandu is confined to the machine-cast columns of the local dailies. There is no third avenue of articulation, no societies, no clubs, no fruitful gatherings, no place to get together except the pavements and the movie theatre. A great many take a fancy to the literature of anxiety in vogue in the West. Kathmandu’s precocious literary nerves are more and more exposed to Camus and Kafka, Sartre and Gide, Eliot and Yevtushenko. But to what gross consequences? Speaking of the contemporary culture, literary or otherwise, Nepal’s sudden exposure to the Western culture has ended up either in an insular recoil or in an exhibitionistic fiasco. The only two tribes who seem to have profited creatively from the exposure are the young poets and the young painters. Here, as elsewhere, the borders between the prodigy and the charlatan are constantly overlapping. Out of its assimilative spasms the new poetry or the new painting has yet to produce a Devkota or a Bala Krishna Sama. Elsewhere there never was a preparedness for a creative assimilation of the intellectual inroads from the West. The young men who strike Byronic postures in front of the shop windows, are a monument to Kathmandu’s cultural failures. Today if they stand culturally indifferent, it is because yesterday the generation of young men looked at the world with pious eyes. The worldliness of the present generation of Kathmandu’s virile youth is a vengeance upon the idealism of the lost generation of their predecessors. If a sample sociological survey of the present youth is undertaken the data may be shockingly Babylonish: a white collar job, a sleek transport, a reinforced concrete bungalow, the stainless steel wares and the plastic bric-à-brac, a fulfilled wife, and a steady bank-balance. Today in this city of shopkeepers and clerks the endemic daemon that haunts the intelligent youth is the petty-bourgeoisie ideal of breeding a fulfilled family. In its consummate perfection Kathmandu will groom a trinity of casualties, intelligence, sensibility and articulateness, to be crucified on the shop windows displaying all the new-fangled wares from Hong Kong to Helsinki.
THE UNLIKELY OFFSPRING OF THE HINDU SOCIETY
In the meantime, the shopkeepers display their wares; the clerks stick to their desks, the elite to their pavements. While the impious go to the Hindi movies the pious continue to pray at the Hindu temples. From the sanitation point of view every Kathmandu street is a nightmare, but there is invariably a chorus of radios blaring in full blast round the clock, no matter whether it is the Hindu hymn or the sentimental Hindi film songs. There is invariably a wide stretch of public wall displaying the natural history of Hindi movies in ugly, loud and gaudy posters. In a sense, Kathmandu is metaphysically steeped in Hindu lore. The city priests and patricians are spiritually enchanted by the higher mythology of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Gita and the epics; the plebeians are mentally addicted to the lower mythology of the appetising Hindi filmdom. In this confused anatomy of Kathmandu’s Hindu society run arteries of alien blood which provoke the prodigal Hindu youth to dress tighter and tighter, wear shorter and shorter skirts, dance to wilder and wilder beats of the brass, and drink more and more exotic cocktails. The transistor-carrying, picnic-minded, twist-obsessed, Hollywood-sinister gangs of Kathmandu’s youth eat a crazy salad in expensive restaurants and every midnight fly past the dark alleys of Kathmandu at a record speed. This unlikely offspring of a Hindu society is on the tide, and its hedonist delinquency is an insidious commentary upon the inadequacies of the Hindu upbringing. The mlecchha-detesting xenophobia of the Hindu parents is visiting upon their children with a vengeance. In such a context, the Hindu piety of the Gorkhapatra editorials reads as a verbal utopia, particularly when every two patrician and priestly Hindu families breed a dozen hippies who swing to the twang of the
beat melody. Yet Hinduism is eloquent in the most unlikely niches of Kathmandu’s clerical and mercantile society. It is eloquent in Kathmandu’s mass-addiction to the trendsetting Hindi movies. In this hippie capital of the world it is eloquent in the civilised clichés of the Radio Nepal, in the opaque journalese of the Gorkhapatra. It is eloquent in the strangled cry of the Nepali language which is groaning under the dead-weight of unpalatable Sanskritised Hindi. Above all, it is eloquent in all the pious social and religious processions in Kathmandu. For in Kathmandu all processions – except the funerals, march to the hit tunes of the trendsetting Hindi movies.
RHETORIC AND REALITY
If Kathmandu were the junkyard where time deposits all the relics of the receding civilisations, including the latest of the homo sapiens – the hippies, the most incongruous heap of the deposits is the Hindu ideologue. The Hindu ideologue is a romantic creature. He has just crept out of the Vedic caves, and is obstinately looking at the world with blinkered eyes. To him the world has not changed much since the Hindus fought at Kurukshetra. His romanticism is betrayed in his rhapsodic over-simplification of the complex ethnic, linguistic and sociological realities of Nepalese life. The Hindu journalists of Kathmandu parade mythic clichés to mask their ignorance of the Nepalese sociological realities. The first tribe who should go to the villages – the teeming villages of the Sherpas, Limbus, Rais, Tamangs, Gurungs, Dolpos, is the tribe of Hindu doctrinaires who formulate Nepalese values in terms of Vedic jargons. Let them see for themselves that the Nepalese societies are not monolithic and that no societies are further from the Vedic-Aryan or the Hindu-Brahmanical society of the Indo-Gangetic plains than the societies which characterise the interior of Nepal. The research works like Dor Bahadur Bista’s People of Nepal, Iman Singh Chemjong’s History and Culture of the Kirat People, Gopal Singh Nepali’s The Newars, S. K. Shrivastav’s The Tharus, Furer-Haimendorf’s The Sherpas of Nepal, John T. Hitchcock’s The Magars of Banyan Hill, or the relevant works of Brian H. Hodgson, Dr David Snellgrove and others are never read by Kathmandu’s insular Hindu journalists, partly because some of these are written by the mlecchhas, but mainly because they speak a barbarous tongue and speak of all unpalatable sociological realities. Kathmandu is not the whole Nepal. Its metaphysical absurdity lies precisely in its pretensions that it is. The primitive, animistic and elemental society of the Sherpas, for example, compels the sociologist to conclude that Hindu piety in Nepal is a rich fantasy largely anchored in Kathmandu – a child of the creative Indophile nostalgia of the Nepalese Hindus who wistfully trace their ancestry to one of the gotras of the Indian rishis. Kathmandu houses a great many of their descendants. As ancestor-worshippers they tell us that the Hindus are the most civilised and the purest of the Aryans, and that the Hindus had, once, excelled in every conceivable mode of human activity – from aircraft engineering and guided missiles to yoga, mysticism and metaphysics. Ask them and they will tell you that the roots of the Nepalese societies, both ethnic and cultural, are somewhere in the Indus Valley. Yet the irony of Nepalese history is that it was the Hindu priestly and patrician conspiracy of the Rana regime which had left the Nepalese people in a century of stagnation, breeding parasites at the top and all ignorance, superstition and poverty settling at the bottom. Today Hindu mysticism and metaphysics have little relevance in Kathmandu, the home of shopkeepers and clerks; Hindu rhetoric has much less relevance in the rest of the kingdom, the home of indigenous folklores and folk cultures, of animism and primeval rites. In Kathmandu Hinduism has survived, not as a creative force, but as a fabric of fossilised rites and rituals, feasts and festivals to which both the believers and the non-believers subscribe, not as an act of conscious faith, but as a matter of inherited habits.
In fact, even in India the rhetoric of Hindu spiritualism, like the rhetoric of the Old Testament prophets, was a product of the exile mind, perpetually at the mercy of the tyrannical tropical environment. Hindu spirituality was a metaphysical hill-station of the world-weary exiles. It was not for nothing that the ancient Hindu exiles came to the cooler foots of the Himalayas seeking a metaphysical asylum. The epic heroes of the Mahabharata, after gaining victory at Kurukshetra, had nowhere to go but the Hindu heaven, and significantly they chose the Himalayan passes as a way out to their Garden of Hesperides.
Today in India Hindu rhetoric has a pragmatic value as a political ideology or a party programme. But in Kathmandu vocal Hindu journalism sounds a little out of place, not only because the natural landscape is softer, the Himalayas closer, but also because the disguised sycophancy of the orthodox doctrinaires sounds frightfully out of touch with the country’s socio-cultural realities. The sociocultural realities of Nepal are not what these stargazing doctrinaires have made out of them. They never see Nepal for themselves with the detachment or involvement of the social scientist. Scanning the country’s dust is a much more salutary occupation than gazing at the stars through the Indophile lenses. The discrepancy between Kathmandu’s Hindu journalism and the country’s rich, indigenous and variegated folk traditions is not just the classical antithesis between the town and the country: it is also the fatal inconsistency between rhetoric and reality.
WAITING FOR THE BEAST
Everything conspires to make Kathmandu a muddle, an absurd city, a city without walls, a city without a symbol. The muddle is both physical and metaphysical; the incongruities are both material and cultural. Today at the heart of Kathmandu, from Jung Bahadur to Juddha Shumshere, all the Rana Prime Ministers stand in an undisturbed bronze repose and shed dark tears of satisfaction at the consummate perfection of their fantasy. Not that like Lazarus they rose from the dead. They had never been buried. Kathmandu does not bury its dead. Meanwhile, Kathmandu is flooded with the tourists who come to see this last stretch of Orient, hoping to find it still bathed in the mystique of the Forbidden City. But they go back to write books of disenchantment, telling the world that Kathmandu is waiting not for tourists, nor for Messiahs, but for comedians, satirists and cartoonists. Of course, the Second Coming is not at hand; if it were the Beast slouching to be born in Kathmandu must be a Yahoo – a Cervantes, a Swift or a Hogarth.
Meanwhile, the streets of Kathmandu are thick with forebodings. The omniscient eyes of the Buddha are transfixed in a searching gaze upon Kathmandu your Kathmandu.
POEMS
Bhūpi Sherchan
Bhūpi Sherchan (1936–1989) was a Nepali poet. He was awarded the Sajha Puraskar for his 1969 poem collection Blind Man on a Revolving Chair. His other collected works are entitled Waterfall and New Songs.
THIS IS A LAND OF UPROAR AND RUMOR (YO HALLAI-HALLAKO DESH HO)
This is a land of uproar and rumour,
where deaf men wearing hearing aids1
are judges at musical contests;
and those whose souls are full of stones
are connoisseurs of poetry;
where wooden legs win races, and bayonets of defense
are held by plastered hands;
where, basket upon basket,
truckload after truckload,
souls are offered for sale
along the roads, in front of doors;
where the leaders are those who can trade in souls
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