In search of symbols
Whatever may go on during Dashain celebrations (or not, as the case may be), one inescapable feature of the season is the smell and sound of new banknotes. At least for those of us who live in places serviced by banks that dispense freshly printed notes just prior to the beginning of the festive season.
Sometimes the new notes add mirth to the Dashain fun. It happened most memorably some years ago when then-king Gyanendra’s visage on the five-rupee note made him look like the comic figure he ultimately became. And, in the year Nepal was declared a republic, the designers forgot that the watermark featured a crown, and had to resort to a last-minute camouflage job of daubing a red rhododendron over it.
While lazily fingering this mint-condition money on a slow Dashain day it suddenly struck me that in their great haste to get rid of all signs of the king from our bills, the central bank seems to have forgotten that imprinted on the front side of all the notes is something that looks like a coin carrying an invocation to Gorakhnath, the patron saint of none else than the Shah kings.
It does not behove a secular republic to continue to revere any religious figure, especially not one so closely linked to a lineage that has just been booted out. Neither does it behove a secular state to sport embossed images of gods, as some of the larger denominations do. Unless, of course, it is an attempt to celebrate our artistic heritage, which, I doubt, is the intent. Our coins also nonchalantly retain the Hindu symbolism of the past. But that, like much else with the Nepali version of secularism, is the way things are.
What is also striking about our paper money is the manner in which Mount Everest has now replaced the king in all the notes. And images of exotic animals and exotic locales do little to dispel the boring monotony.
Some countries adorn their banknotes with images of their notable citizens, and that could have been an example we could have emulated. We do have our own national luminaries, the rastriya bibhuti, who could possibly have graced our notes. But the list is actually quite irrelevant at present even though demands are made now and then to expand the pantheon to include others thought to be equally deserving of national adulation. Do we even remember that one of the ‘luminaries’, King Tribhuvan, was once posited as the ‘father of the nation’?
When Nepal emerged from its long hibernation back in the 1950s into a world in which independent nation-states were becoming the norm, it may have been necessary to cook up a list of national heroes to engender a sense of nationhood. But if we are to continue to set great store in such an inventory more than half a century later, we need a serious rethink about who should qualify. Particularly because some of these luminaries are mythical figures, a fact that is as ridiculous as it would be were the French to consider Asterix the Gaul among its worthies.
Come to think of it, we really do not have national heroes who would be accepted with unqualified acclaim. There are problems galore with the list as it stands now. Prithvi Narayan Shah’s contribution may have been the country of Nepal as we know it today, but he is also vilified as a ruthless conqueror by those whose forebears had been at the receiving end of his armies. Bhanubhakta may have elevated Nepali to make it a literary force, but with the Nepali language considered to personify the hegemonic tendency of the Nepali state, he, too, would be a no-no. Balbhadra Kunwar may have impressed his enemy with the steadfast loyalty he commanded from his soldiers as they repelled attack after attack against the superior English forces, but that was just one battle in a war we eventually lost.
Bhimsen Thapa led Nepal to its greatest military defeat ever. Ram Shah and Amshuvarma were rulers of small kingdoms, and whatever their contributions, they certainly did not affect most of Nepal. We could go on.
As a hero of modern-day Nepal, Tenzing Norgay might have qualified had he not gone on to live in India even after we honoured him with the Nepal Tara and also made him part of our popular culture. We have not had a sportsperson of world standing or a scientist or a filmmaker or a doctor or a scholar on whom the mantle of national hero could stand easy. It seems the only people of more general repute in Nepal have been writers and poets. These men (and a few women) arouse strong devotion but all of them wrote in the Nepali language and that at present could pose problems for the same reason mentioned above.
It is perhaps just as well that we have chosen to go with Mount Everest since we have no more powerful identity in the world stage than being the Land of Everest (even if half of it actually belongs to Tibet-China). Imagine the alternative in this age of apportionment of any and everything among the political parties. Better banknotes with Mount Everest than a revolutionary endorsed by the Nepali Congress, or a soldier by the Maoists, an industrialist by the UML, a politician by the MJF, a writer by the TMLF, and so on.
Posted on: 2011-10-13 08:06
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