Editorial»
Why only Newars?
NOV 06 - Dame Edith Sitwell, an English poet wrote a poem to express the pain of the World War that was raging around her in 1940. She wrote— “still falls the rain like nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the cross!” She looked back at the Christian era and saw each year as one more nail on the body of Christ. To her, time had become a pain. Each time you marked the calendrical time, you suffered a bout of agony. This is a very difficult moment for a sensitive person and a society that has lived on its own small labour without causing anybody any harm. We are marking time with pain now. But when the Newars celebrated the Nepal Sambat 1124, they celebrated life, they celebrated arts and they celebrated the last cry of a civilisation that is the glory and asset of this land.
Newar is the name of people whose diversity surprises a postmodernist dabbler. The art forms they represent, the times they lived, the historical modes of transformation they experienced, the multiplicity of faces, food and ethos they represent has lured many scholars from places far and wide. Some foreign scholars have produced brilliant books, but others have produced patronising trash. They have simply recorded their touristic impressions and sought to give them a tone as though they have produced the most authentic works about them. Still they deserve appreciation on one score—they have seen and recorded either through photographs or their encounters with the Newars some very important moments and visualities that have been ignored by us and by the Newars themselves. To the non-Newar scholars, this amazing power of a plurimorphous culture and forms is invisible.
Edith Sitwell was writing at a time when but to think of the historicity of a civilisation, to use another poet John Keats’ words again, was ‘to be full of sorrow’. When the Newars celebrate a new year with Shankhadhar Sakhwa as the figure who saved poor people’s lives and transformed sand into gold, they are at once creating a form of art as a tangible object such as seen in the countless sculptural forms, real as the history of the civilisation and mythopoetic as the combination of myth and life which the countless images and Sakhwa himself represent.
The artefacts and artistic forms of the valley make up the greatest part of the visible culture of Nepal. This visible culture is seen as the work of artistic excellence. The unique combination of myth, imagination of the agrarian populace with the classical forms of art has created the artistic miracles in the Valley. Nepal shows this very texture of culture to the visitors from the metropolitan countries known as tourists. But I have a caveat here. The ethos that hides behind these forms is not considered in such interpretations. The history of power, the transformations that came at different times under the Indic influences and how the Kings of the Nepal Mandala used those influences to structure the society along the major religions Hinduism and Buddhism stand ignored in the new touristic culture of voyeurism. This is not unique to Nepal, though.
When a visible culture with a great tradition attracts the viewers’ attention, when people pay some price for such seeing, it gets commodified. In such commodification, the backgrounds are available in printed pages, in the spaces of the ‘lonely planets’. But the lonely planet type of information structure too ignores the source. The late artist Chandramansingh Maskey’s painting that shows King Prithvi Narayan Shah contemplating before making the final attack to Kathmandu in 1767 is printed in a guide book titled South Asia. Maskey had heard about it but not seen. I found the book and showed it to him. Nowhere was/is the artist’s name mentioned. The artist was angry. The editors must have found the painting in the metropolitan cities because most of Maskey’s paintings were bought by the Europeans. So, to a European the painting must have only looked like one visual representation of a historical anecdote. To a Nepali, both a Newar and a non-Newar, this painting was nothing more than an illustration, too.
The same artist Maskey has painted illustrations of a different order for the Newar epic Sugat Saurabh (1948) written by poet Chittadhar Hridaya. Both the poet and the artist were in jail during the Rana rule that ended in 1950. The visual representation of the strongest spots of the epic narrative is an example of a combination of myth with visuality in Newar culture.
To me the strongest aspect of the Newar culture is its performative power. Travel is power that binds gods and human beings together. As in ancient Greece, gods and human beings travel together and feast together and dance together in Newar culture. Nepal Mandala offers one unique example. When a deity travels to another place, it causes commotion. Cultural boundaries become tense. People loose happiness and lives when cultures travel from one space into another. In the Kathmandu valley, gods travel to another power zone without causing any harms. Travels within similar cultures may not cause earthquakes. But the wounds remain. I had seen beautiful Elgin marbles in London Museum earlier. I loved/love them. The exquisite marbles look glorious. It was said they were acquired by Lord Elgin in Greece. But when I saw where they were taken from at the Acropolis in Athens, they looked like wounds to me. The discourse read—Lord Elgins had stolen them.
But during the colonial times, when deities travelled they transformed the other culture or caused excessive pain to the others. Nepali deities also travel incognito. Bangdel has written a whole book about these Stolen Images. Recently, a 2000-year old exquisite idol of Amitabh Buddha returned from Korea. When a deity in Kathmandu travels from one space into another, it does not involve any tension and raise cyclones by the displacement or impositions of cultures. The intra-cultural travels and the meetings of deities are different from the inter-cultural movements. The first type as represented by the travels of deities from one locus into another in Kathmandu does not involve serious tensions and big transformations. The second type is the subject of great post-colonial cultural discourse. But in both cases, such travels create performative cultures. If they are intra-cultural travels celebration becomes the main part of the movement. If they are inter-cultural travels, the meetings of cultures create performative forms like dance, theatre performances like Peter Brook’s drama of the Mahabharata and other encounters of the colonial times.
The answer to why only the Newars travelled on the occasion of the New Year 1124 is not simple. First, I guess, the non-Newars are insensitive to the important performative culture of the valley and its dynamics. Second reason is, it is only the Newars who have carried down the performative and artistic heritage of the valley to this day.
Nepal Sambat should be a great occasion for all Newars and non-Newars alike for the celebration of a performative culture and liminal changes that happen in our lives every year. Let us usher in the new hopes and power of performance with the New Year 1124.Posted on: 2003-11-05 10:02
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