Himalaya
Page 13
In the 1880s the French government commissioned Le Bon to travel though the subcontinent and report back on the cultures he found there. Thus he became one of the first Frenchmen to visit Kathmandu, more or less closed to foreigners beyond the few British servants of the Raj then stationed there. He arrived in 1885, first visiting Kathmandu and then the ancient Buddhist stupa at Swayambhunath, the most sacred site in the valley for Buddhist Newars. Nothing, with the possible exception of Coleridge’s poem, had quite prepared him for what he experienced at Patan, as he walked among the temples and palaces:
I doubt that an opium-eater has ever dreamt, in his wildest dreams, of a more fantastic architecture than the one of this strange city. Although I have visited Europe, from London to Moscow and the whole of the classic Orient, from Morocco to Egypt and Palestine, I had until then never seen a more striking scene than the main street in Patan.
Le Bon was strong on theorising and opinion but often in too much of a hurry for the detailed work that underpinned proper scholarship. While in Kathmandu, he took lots of photographs and dashed off a travelogue about Nepal’s ancient past. Then he moved on to fresh intellectual pastures: the psychology of crowds. Having witnessed the Paris Commune as a young man, he developed an aversion to socialism and a fascination for how humans behave in large groups. His groundbreaking book on the subject, Psychologie des Foules, was an instant bestseller, influencing everyone from the public relations guru Edward Bernays to Benito Mussolini.
Sylvain Lévi would prove a much more reliable scholar. Born in Paris in 1863, the son of a cap-maker, by the age of twenty he was studying Sanskrit at the Sorbonne under the brilliant Indologist Abel Bergaigne and tutoring the children of France’s chief rabbi Zadoc Kahn. Five years later, when Bergaigne died in a hiking accident in the French Alps, Lévi took his place. One of his chief concerns as a scholar was how Indian Buddhism had shaped the cultures of Asia. Lévi believed that in Kathmandu he would find examples of Indian art that had disappeared from the rest of the subcontinent: ‘India in the making’, as he put it, a living fossil from which he could extrapolate whole worlds that had faded elsewhere to extinction. In 1898 he arrived in Kathmandu, fuming that the local population was ‘absolutely, totally, radically ignorant’, and lecturing to them from their own temples in perfect Sanskrit. When the priest at the temple of Changu Narayan refused him admittance, he had the maharaja lend him four soldiers to trace an important inscription from the fifth century, pinning down details of the Licchavi dynasty’s rise to power. Marshalling all that he had learned, Lévi was able to write a three-volume history of Nepal, producing a sweeping narrative that has underpinned Nepal’s historiography ever since.
When Lévi returned to France, he got a letter from Gustave Le Bon, who had maintained his interest in Nepal and was asking to meet. Lévi wasn’t keen. He had bitter memories of Le Bon, who had sought his help in securing a grant from the government for a book of his Kathmandu photographs. Having pocketed the cash, Le Bon had then publicly dismissed Lévi’s work on the impact of Ancient Greek culture on India, despite not knowing the first thing about it. Lévi wrote back that Le Bon, a photograph man, would find his manuscripts and inscriptions too boring. He then invoked his meticulous and open-minded Sanskrit teacher, Abel Bergaigne, telling Le Bon how he shared Bergaigne’s ‘wonderful incomprehension’ of India, a sly dig at Le Bon’s grandiose complacency.
This wasn’t merely a spat between academics. Ancient Indian culture carried a contemporary political edge in an era when spurious racial theories were held by leading intellectuals. The eighteenth-century discovery of a proto-language, Indo-European, common to ancient languages like Latin and Sanskrit, not only galvanised academic interest but also inspired dangerous ideas. Racial theorists came up with a common human ancestor so superior that their culture spread throughout Asia and Europe: an Aryan master-race. The publication of Eugène Burnouf’s Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, the most influential book on Buddhism in the nineteenth century, gave similar prominence to fringe ideas, such as those of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophists, involving the lost wisdom of ancient non-Christian philosophies. Burnouf’s own cousin Émile, another Sanskrit scholar, was one of those who argued for the existence of an Aryan master-race, believing not only that Jesus was an Aryan, but that the swastika was a symbol of this ancient race’s fire-altars, a notion that appealed to the Nazis.
Gustave Le Bon wasn’t so extreme, but he was cut from the same cloth, and Lévi knew it. As a Jew, he could see where such talk was headed. In 1925, eight years before Adolf Hitler came to power and ten years before his own death, he told an interviewer of his enduring debt to his old teacher Abel Bergaigne:
if you write four lines about my work I would like at least three of them to be about Bergaigne. It was he, after [Eugène] Burnouf, who put Vedic studies in the path, which they have followed ever since. The Germans, assured of their antiquity and purity of their race, proclaimed themselves the direct heirs of the ancient civilizations of India . . . Bergaigne was the first to cause this fiction to crumble.
Lévi would remain a committed defender of Jewish rights for the rest of his life, denouncing antisemitism in a speech at the Trocadéro Palace in Paris in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.
After the Second World War, as Nepal became accessible and began to develop a modern economy, interest in and knowledge of Kathmandu’s architectural heritage deepened and broadened but followed in essence the lead of Lévi’s formative narrative. A notable example was the work of Mary Slusser, who arrived as the wife of an American aid worker and then spent decades in a systematic study of the valley’s cultural heritage, culminating in groundbreaking books, Nepal Mandala and The Antiquity of Nepalese Wood Carving. At the same time, the Kathmandu valley’s rapid development raised concerns that its unique architectural legacy would be swept aside. Bhaktapur’s main temple and palace complex was the subject of a visionary and brilliantly led conservation effort and is now a hugely popular stop for tourists exploring the valley, which means it can at times feel rather selfconsciously like heritage. Götz Hagmüller and Niels Gutschow, both long-time residents of the town, were among several influential Austrian and German conservation architects to work in the city. Hagmüller later led the restoration of Keshav Narayan Chowk, an eighteenth-century palace in Patan Durbar Square, which now houses the Patan Museum, among the finest in South Asia, housing some of the best examples of Newari art. Another Austrian architect working on the project, Thomas Schrom, persuaded Patan’s authorities to close the square with its palaces and temples to motorised vehicles, turning one of the glories of world architecture into a haven from the city’s manic traffic and a window onto the labyrinthine complexities of the religious culture that produced it.
6
The Rise of Gorkha
If you want to tune in to the mood of a nation, look to its statues. For example, in March 2015 students launched a successful campaign to remove the 1934 bronze of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town, a campaign that spread to universities around the world, including Rhodes’ alma mater, Oxford. In the summer of 2017, a white-supremacist rally marched through the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting against the removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee. One of them drove his car at speed into a group of counter-protestors, killing the 32-year-old anti-racism activist Heather Heyer. In India, in early 2018, prime minister Narendra Modi appealed for calm after a flurry of statue vandalism. An image of Vladimir Lenin, widely admired among Indian communists, was destroyed in the north-eastern state of Tripura. In retaliation a bust of the famous Hindu nationalist Syama Prasad Mukherjee was destroyed in the communist stronghold of Kolkata.
The infant republic of Nepal had its own statue moment in September 2017, although in this case it was a statue going up, not coming down, that prompted debate. With great fanfare, Bidya Devi Bhandari, modern Nepal’s second ever president and the first woman to ho
ld the post, unveiled a golden statue of Prithvi Narayan Shah, the founder of the modern state of Nepal. And yet, this took place less than a decade after the new republic got rid of the last Shah king, Gyanendra, thus terminating the dynasty that had sat on the throne for two hundred and fifty years. Ten years earlier, as the people struggled to drag democracy out from under Gyanendra’s autocratic weight, Maoist cadres from the Young Communist League and other left-wing groups had got to work, systematically smashing up statues of kings. One activist boasted that ‘the vestiges of the Shah kings are being removed as the country is heading toward a republic’. It seemed then that monarchy would have no place whatsoever in the new Nepal.
Those intent on erasing the past didn’t discriminate: all the recent members of the Shah dynasty suffered, irrespective of reputation. Mahendra, another autocrat, crowned in 1955, was considerably less popular than his father Tribhuvan, who had returned the family to power in 1951 after a century in which the Shah kings were mere figureheads. Nepal’s leading university and national airport are still named after Tribhuvan: he had steered the country away from oppression and towards the light. It made little difference: images of both father and son were destroyed. Mahendra was the glowering type, inscrutable in his trademark dark glasses. In 1960, shortly after the UK government made him a British army field marshal, he threw Nepal’s first democratically elected prime minister into jail. Mahendra’s son Birendra, who inherited the throne in 1972, seemed milder but it still took almost two more decades before democracy was restored. In 2001, in the middle of the Maoist civil war, the crown prince Dipendra, drunk, stoned and angry, murdered his father and mother and seven other members of the royal family before turning the gun on himself. The crown went to Birendra’s widely disliked brother Gyanendra and five years later the Shahs were out.
Maoist cadres didn’t stop their destruction at Nepal’s more recent kings. They also targeted Nepal’s founding father Prithvi Narayan Shah, who completed his conquest of the Kathmandu valley in 1769, bringing the Malla era, with all its dances and temple building, to a close. In 2003, the Maoists blew up a statue of Prithvi at Nuwakot: a town of totemic importance in his story and the place of his death in 1775. In 2006, protestors attacked the most famous statue of him in the country, which stands on a tall plinth outside the government secretariat in the middle of Kathmandu. While they weren’t able to bring it down, they did manage to damage it, removing his crown and sword. Afterwards it was shrouded from view, much as the statue of General Lee was in Charlottesville after the death of Heather Heyer. The new prime minister announced that National Unity Day, held on 11 January, Prithvi Narayan Shah’s birthday, was henceforth cancelled. The following year, after the last Shah king had already been deposed, another image of Prithvi, this one in his hometown of Gorkha, the starting point of his brilliant career of conquest, was demolished on the orders of local Maoist leaders.
Some senior Maoists drew a comparison between their destruction of royal symbols and that following the French Revolution in 1789: scraping away the iconography of a repressive regime. Yet there was also an ethnic dimension to this hostility, tension that the Maoists had skilfully exploited during the war. Populations speaking Tibeto-Burmese languages, like Newars in the Kathmandu valley, and other ethnic groups throughout central and eastern Nepal – Gurung, Magar, Tamang and Rai – saw the collapse of the monarchy as a chance to overturn centuries of domination by a Hindu elite speaking an Indo-European language that had emerged in western Nepal a thousand years earlier. Originally it had been known as Khas kura, literally Khas ‘word’ or ‘speech’, Khas being the Indo-Aryan group that spoke it. As the Shahs took power, it became known as Gorkhali; this language is now modern Nepali, the region’s lingua franca and the single most unifying cultural feature of the nation. Nepali is similar to Hindi, in the way that Italian and Spanish are alike. More than any other king, Prithvi Naryan Shah was emblematic of this Hindu Khas group; so that many from other ethnic groups who spoke different languages were delighted to see his dynasty gone and the restrictive caste system they embodied put into reverse. Throwing off this narrow interpretation of what being Nepali meant was a relief for those marginalised for so long.
Then, just at this moment, as Nepalis settled in without their kings, Prithvi Narayan Shah made a comeback. Khadga Prasad ‘K P’ Oli, a powerful nationalist, albeit from the main grouping of Nepal’s communists, suggested boosting tourism by erecting a new statue of the nation’s founding father at the top station of a cable car recently opened to the Kathmandu valley’s rim at Chandragiri, a significant location in Prithvi Narayan Shah’s story of conquest. A year later, in September 2017, the statue was ready to be inaugurated by Oli’s old political ally and new president of Nepal, Bidya Devi Bhandari. On 11 January 2018, a decade after king Gyanendra was voted out of office, National Unity Day was also resurrected with support from across the political divide. A member of the ruling Nepali Congress told the newspapers: ‘Prithvi Narayan Shah should not be punished for what his descendants did. He should be respected for giving us a sovereign and unified Nepal.’
The country’s president and the Nepali Congress prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba laid flowers at the statue that had been defaced a decade earlier. A leading diversity campaigner, Om Gurung, warned that ‘by reviving Prithvi Narayan Shah’s legacy, politicians have proved they love the status quo’, the ‘status quo’ being the social and religious hierarchy the Shahs had embodied. And yet, when the nationalist-communist K P Oli replaced Deuba as prime minister shortly thereafter, the Maoists entered into negotiations with his party, once their sworn enemies, for a merger: it was a stark indication of how compromised the Maoists, despite their talk of inclusivity, had become. Prithvi Narayan Shah had proved a more lasting influence on the people of Nepal than Chairman Mao.
What message were politicians recruiting from the life and times of Nepal’s founding father? What did Prithvi’s contested legacy reveal about a nation whose steep mountains and deep valleys create such cultural complexity? Teasing out the answers to these questions reveals the unique challenges of identity and politics in the Himalaya, a mountain range caught between the two most populous nations on earth: India and China. Those challenges obsessed Prithvi Narayan Shah. Only by sticking together, he believed, could the diverse people of Himalaya find enough space for their disparate cultures to survive, even though in practice he favoured some of those cultures more than others. (‘It is merely a matter of interpretation,’ the Nepali writer Kamal P Malla observed, ‘whether one calls it a “vision” of unified Nepal or a vulture’s gaze upon its prey.’) In the modern world, with China’s occupation of the Tibetan plateau and India’s huge military presence in the Himalaya, it’s a message that has more political potency than ever, one that modern kings and politicians alike have been swift to exploit.
*
The image of Prithvi Narayan Shah most familiar to Nepalis shows a richly dressed figure wearing an ornate khukuri (the traditional Nepali blade) at his chest and a crown dripping with jewels, topped off with feathers from a bird of paradise. This fabulous headgear was worn by all the modern Nepali kings; the artist and polymath Desmond Doig described it on Birendra’s head at his coronation in 1975: ‘No other crown could be so fantastically devised, so priceless. It is a glitter of closely set diamonds and pearls, hung with drop rubies and emeralds the size of plums and atop it, clasped by more diamonds, is a cascade of bird-of-paradise plumes.’ (The crown hadn’t been refurbished since Mahendra’s coronation in 1956 and its feathers were droopy. Trade in bird of paradise feathers had been banned so the US government helped out with some fresh feathers confiscated from smugglers.)
Although he is depicted wearing it, this was never Prithvi Narayan Shah’s crown. In fact there are almost no contemporary images of him at all; a bronze figure at Nuwakot, the town where he made his name, may or may not be Prithvi and shows him kneeling piously, hands together in prayer. The image Nepal has of him was painted by a tw
entieth-century artist called Amar Chitrakar, who started his career painting posters for Bollywood movies and moved on to state insignia: stamps, portraiture and statues. It was Amar Chitrakar who gave us the painting of Prithvi Narayan Shah that now hangs in Kathmandu’s National History Museum; this is the image Nepalis have in their minds when they think of their founding father. It’s the same image used for the statue in front of Nepal’s government secretariat, the Singha Darbar, erected for National Unity Day in 1965, part of the autocratic king Mahendra’s propaganda to legitimise his reactionary putsch and the termination of Nepal’s first attempt at democracy. It’s the same image used for the golden statue that now looks down over the Kathmandu valley from the cable car station at Chandragiri. Prithvi is evidently a warrior, but he is leaning on his sword and it’s in his left hand. This image is about more than martial prowess. His right hand, his sword hand, is raised above his head, the index finger extended. It’s tempting to see him as testing the political winds, but the message is clear: one nation, the Nepali equivalent of e pluribus unum. The implication is equally clear: we’re complicated but we have to get over that. No wonder Prithvi Narayan Shah remains relevant more than two centuries after his death.