Oped»
Against normative Nepali-ness
SEP 01 -
A couple of weeks or so ago a friend found herself in Biratnagar with some time to kill. With due apologies to anyone who have the right to feel offended, one can freely state that there is not much to see or do in Biratnagar apart from perhaps taking in the hulking structures of its ancient jute mill if one is interested in a bit of history. But after trying to conjure up scenes of the famous workers’ strike there more than half a century ago, there is not much else to do. Unless, of course, one is attracted by another sort of history, like my friend was, and feels the urge to take a look at the home of BP Koirala.
Since the driver of the vehicle she had hired was from nearby Itahari, he had no clue about the whereabouts of Koirala Niwas, and so she did the next best thing; she asked a policeman. The answer from the cop is worth recounting here. Paraphrased in translation, it went: BP Koirala? Hmm. He must be a relative of Girija’s, right? I know where his house is.
The point of this longish preamble is to bemoan the state of general knowledge about our own country. After 20 years of democracy and recurrent paeans to ‘Maha Manav’ BP, not to mention many spells at the country’s
leadership by his decidedly-less-colourful brother, GP, a policeman in his thirties, and posted in Biratnagar to boot, had no idea that such a person had even existed.
A somewhat less-dramatic example of ignorance can be witnessed in one of the inane commercials movie-goers are subjected to at Kathmandu’s fairly new multiplex, Big Cinemas. As the new college admissions season is currently on, educational institutions vie with each other to attract would-be students, and tall claims are the order of the day. In its enthusiasm to prove its supposedly ecumenical orientation, one such institution proclaimed that it stands at the service of Janajatis from Himal, Pahad and the Tarai; presumably, Dalits, Madhesis, Muslims and ‘Others’ need not bother applying. That obviously is not the intent of the promoters but it is certainly what the ad implies. If even those who presume to educate our young are not aware of what ‘Janajati’ means, after so many years of the term having entered mainstream public discourse in the sense it is currently understood, perhaps it seems a bit unfair after all to pick on the poor policeman from Biratnagar.
A little over a year ago, this very newspaper had published a photograph of some girls belonging to a Janajati group during celebrations to mark the ‘International Day of the World’s Indigenous People’. Unlike in the case of wire-service images which provide all details related to the photograph, necessary or otherwise, and which are duly published in the papers here, the photographer had not even bothered to identify which group the girls belonged to. Janajatis in their traditional finery do make for an attractive photography subject, but for the cameraman it seemed as though one group is as good as the next without the need to be precise. That is a sure way of demonstrating lack of respect towards one’s own compatriots.
The categories Janajatis, Dalits and Madhesis are all somewhat recent formulations. The boundaries demarcating these groups are still not quite clear, and may never well be. I would even posit that a random survey of the everyperson on the street would find most folks quite confused by these labels. But for the seemingly well educated to be happily unaware of the distinctions is quite unpardonable. Each group has a different set of grievances against the Nepali state and which have been articulated differently and at different times. But I have noted even individuals in highly influential positions conflate all these three groups and view them simply as those that have to be somehow accommodated in a new Nepal—without any acknowledgement of their particular histories.
Recognition of a country’s diversity is a first step towards creating a truly multicultural society, and this has been achieved in Nepal in the formal sense. But we have so far failed to educate each about the other—what American political philosopher Michael Walzer calls the ‘study of otherness, especially of all the local othernesses’. Rewriting of textbooks to celebrate the socio-cultural diversity of the country is one way of going about it. An even more powerful and quicker way would be to use popular culture.
Unfortunately, the idea of what stands for a Nepali in all kinds of media, electronic or traditional, continues to be dominated by what can only be described as a normative Nepali-ness. Deviations from the norm are introduced only as parodies. For instance, never, and I hope I am wrong, has a Madhesi character come onscreen without spouting that awful caricature of an accent that is supposed to be hallmark of people of Tarai origin. Even after years of seeing MJF President Upendra Yadav take on talk-show
hosts in his perfectly idiomatic Nepali that would put any native
Nepali-speaker to shame, and hearing political commentator C.K. Lal hold forth in what can only be described as chaste Nepali, the senseless caricatures continue. Quite the same is true of Janajati characters, with the exception being the rather exceptional TV series Dalan. That was perhaps because it had a Janajati director.
Some time earlier, Pradip Meyangbo, correspondent for Kantipur in Dharan, had recounted his frustration at making government officials understand his surname over the phone. The most common mishearing, he told me, is ‘mango’, and that really riles him. Another Dharan-based journalist, Sita Sodemba, chimed in to say that she faces the same problem. ‘They’ also have difficult sounding names—Guragain, Luitel, and so on, she said, but we learn to become used to them; it’s time ‘they’ should do the same about ours too. That seems to me part of what understanding the ‘local othernesses’ is all about.
Posted on: 2010-09-02 08:36
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