A Look at Nepali Art Criticism

By Ajit Baral

Nepal gets a chance, now and then, to participate in biennale and triennnale exhibitions. Through these exhibitions a few selected works help international audiences to get acquainted with Nepali art. But our participation in these exhibitions is so rare and the works selected so few that the selected works can’t be a representation of the Nepali art. So rather than letting Nepali paintings speak for themselves we have to resort to writing, which doesn’t lend easily to visual interpretation, to give fuller picture of the Nepali art to the international art audiences.

A cursory glance at the Nepali section on the catalogues of the biennale and triennale exhibitions, however, doesn’t fulfill that need. Because the writings on the Nepali art are monotonously same even though different people might be writing them. These writings talk just about how the Nepali art has evolved from the Mallakaleen era which was rich in artistry and designs, and how much King Birendra has contributed to the Nepali art by establishing Nepal Association of Fine Art. As these writings have nothing to say about the contemporary Nepali art, where our modern art stand, what short of idiom of expression our artists are using, what our artists are striving for, etc., these writings inevitably begin with the reference to the Mallakaleen era and end with the saying that the present Nepali artists are striving to find their own medium of expression, technique and certain definite trends in art will shape up in a near future and blah, blah, blah. As a result, these writings become very parochial and predictable-a sure sign of pseudo intellectualism. But we would have settled happily if the contents of Nepali art Chinaris were written decently. Sadly, these writings are written in Pidgin English with occasional bombastic flourish which truly reflect where our art and art criticism stand.

Now having pointed out the relatively underdeveloped state of art criticism and art writing in general, it will be germane to reason out why it is so in Nepal.

Art is a light which fosters the aesthetic and intellectual growth. And corollary to it, longer the history of art, more refined the aesthetic, and higher the intellectual development of people. But the history of Nepali modern art doesn’t date back far. So we have neither higher intellect nor adequate understanding of art. Owing to this, the Nepali art criticism is still nascent and much to be desired.

There is complete absence of vigorous, ongoing debate on art. And in the absence of lively debate, a critic is prone to weave things out of his own mind. Or lap up everything that an artist ladles out as a universal truth. This is what is actually happening, blunting the probity of eyes and mind of critics. Also our artists are a divided lot, living in a small sambadbihin enclave. Thus hardly a talk and debate on art happens in Nepal. These don’t help to enrich our understanding of art either.

We also have no tradition of serious art criticism in books, newspapers and journals. Books and journals on art are non-existent. But, though some newspapers have been carrying the writings ‘about’ art, they are doing so just to enhance their cultural profile. Otherwise why would they sit on art reviews and publish them when the exhibition is well over. This tendency to sit on reviews makes reviews irrelevant and the critic’s role of being a guide to the audiences, who would tell spectators if the exhibition is worth investing time and money on, redundant.

Most of those who have been writing about art are journalists cum art critics or those who have only a modicum of writing ability. And those who have the understanding to say which work is good or bad (not why they are good or bad) at best. As everything these people are writing is passing as the review, there is no challenge in art criticism, nor a need to write polemically. Further more, art criticism is a creative urge, quite like painting and one has to be passionate about it. However, this passion is evidently lacking in Nepal. Maybe it is due to the lack of passion that many who tried their hand at art criticism put down their pen after some time.

As artists elsewhere, the Nepali artists regard reviews as self-promotion. And funny thing about the Nepali artists is that even a news coverage of their exhibition, it doesn’t have to be flattering review mind you, makes them overtly delighted. However, to go with this delight, there is a fair doze of intolerance regarding criticism in the Nepali artists making art critiquing a hazardous job. I felt this hazard vicariously when I was told that an artist had stormed into the office of the Nepali Times to vent his anger against the review I had written of his exhibition. (Humorously, he has written that our artists always expect praise and don’t talk for months when something unpleasant is said against their work). This kind of intolerance deters one from being objective (objective to the extent possible, for objectivity isn’t possible beyond the realm of physical science) in one’s writing. Or even writing the art reviews. A case in point is Mukesh Malla, who has written a book (only one has come to my notice) on art, who reportedly stopped writing on art because of vitriol lashed against him

What the artists should be reminded is, a critic’s opinion is his own opinion and not a universal or an unquestionable truth. And how adverse the review may be, the good works and the artists doesn’t remain long hidden from applauding eyes. If these points could be driven home to the artists, they would be more tolerant about criticisms, which will facilitate qualitative and objective writing. But somehow antagonism between the artists and critics doesn’t seem to go away. This is the case in India where, despite the presence of quality art writers like Prayag Sukla, Mulk Raj Ananda, Nirmal Verma, Ranjit Hoskote to name just a few, Indian artists quibble that there is no art critic. This quibble might be the result of groupism among the artists and the critics’ fallibility to align themselves to certain art group, and the artists’ desire to lend credence to their work. The same is here in Nepal, as anyone who has been closely following the happenings in the Nepali art will know. Given these tendencies and relatively shallow Nepali art writings, it’s very easy for the Nepali artists to dismiss the art critics by saying that there is no art critic as such. In this background, it is imperative for any aspiring art critic to strive for the deeper understanding of art and quality art writing. But for this, media, particularly print media, should act as a facilitator by giving a space for art writings but not as a mere filler. And newspaper wallahs should remember that art criticism is a specialized field that needs some specialized knowledge, and they should tender some respect and give adequate pecuniary rewards to the critics. Lastly, the people at the helm of newspapers should do what Pritish Nandy did to art as the editor of the Illustrated Weekly.

(A. Baral is interested in art)

Echoes of Silence

By DB Gurung

One of the parochial tendencies of Nepal’s literati is to notoriously remain reticent in showering plaudits for a good work of art, and similarly in pulling punches for a bad work of art. I believe, without "noise, action and reaction", there cannot be revolution in any area -may it be cultural, political or literary. We need revolution for better changes and evolution. This menacing silence must have been one of the plausible reasons that dampened the spirits of Nepali literature to soar up high in the international firmament. Thus a handful of Nepali writers who are making creative efforts in English have virtually too scanty a room in our literary culture infested by foul politics and nepotism. Yet the dawn of the new millenium didn’t show up that disheartening situation: Manjushree Thapa is going to go global; her fiction is reportedly coming out from Penguin House sometime by the end of this year, and last year someone (blah, blah, blah) has already gone into the catalog of UBSPD, New Delhi. Not a bad news. But what is more heartening is, a bunch of promising women writers have emerged with their own idiosyncratic voices above the surface pushing the boundaries aside - breaking the old rules and setting new ones, in a society rife with female subjugation and discrimination. Probably a bad news for dominant husbands and domineering relatives. One of these rule-breakers is LD Rajbhandari, a dedicated wife, a dutiful daughter-in-law and an ideal mother, who started writing rather late, yet with a marked success. "Writers need time," says Jumpa Lahiri, "some money and a lot of encouragement." She is most likely blessed with all. Over the period of one decade, she has rounded out over a dozen volumes of poems in Nepali and English. Her latest title is Hundred and One Poems for New Millenium.

LD Rajbhandari’s works distinctly stand apart from most female writers of the past generation and her contemporaries as well: she neither writes of the extreme feministic values, nor of the hard-to-crack philosophical issues, but offers us mostly with the ideas of her spiritual awakenings in a state of epiphany. She spells out the nature of silence laconically without letting us know who the possessor is:

The silence is silent

Never disturbed

Deaf to appraisal

Or admonishment

Equanimity it maintains (Firmament p.117).

This is a trick and triumph both. Who else could be going through this equanimity?

Her manner of crafting verses may be aptly called as "genteel", yet they are charged with an undercurrent of intense isolation and pain. And in the core of her oeuvre, she weaves an intricate fabric of leitmotifs steeped in spiritualism. A cool contemplation on life and its grace is held out for us to mull over in one poem, which ends thus:

...The wool of life that was rolled

Into a ball

Is unrolling by itself

Is being knitted away

Into a tapestry of

Pure consciousness (My Life a Drawing p. 23-25).

This is spiritual revelation - a raison d’etre. Not alert/Warning falls/On deaf ears/The waterfall/Runs continues/To its own downfall (Unconsciousness p.98) - for its own salvation? Here LD shows us a dazzling comparison of life with that of a tyre:

...That inflated rubber tyre

Is but only full of air

With a little prick of a nail

See how it deflates

Now wonder it falls flat

A flat tyre

For its reliance

Is only on air (Tyre p.70).

The expression is simple nevertheless insightful. She probably knows how to brazen out her crises, but is reluctant to show us the gimmick.

We are given a requiem for her own self; she assumes of dying a satiated death, perhaps an unearthly death. Fine. And she wishes and thanks to all and the Lord for her wonderful experience of life. But she drives us all at sea in the end when she asserts: I am ever the present (Requiem for Myself p.135-137). Is she going to rise like phoenix out of the ashes of her dreary past? Or her memory she insists deserves to be preserved? If not this is resurrection about which she further testifies in Revive, in which a neglected earthen crock is refilled with gorgeous flowers and returns to life and beauty.

With a frequent switch in themes in this selection, she talks about the dignity of woman without being a die-hard feminist, and tells us why she writes in I Write. She shares her idea about the universality of the terms divine and divinity, that she doesn’t see the difference between Mother Mary and goddess Kali or Durga. True, this is too high a civilized concept. LD furiously explains of our rotting democracy, recklessly handled by old-schooled four-flushers and self-seekers in Lapen Wails, representing metaphorically as a ten-year old child: The child is terribly sick, and the care-takers are too heavily wrapped up in tending their own future. She worries about it.

Going closely over LD’s works, she is certainly not very ambitious in her drive, which is also not the same assertion as she is not a poet of merit. A visible shortcoming of Hundred and One Poems for New Millenium, in my view, is that the structural peculiarity and absence of punctuation marks have made her poetry frustratingly unique. This bizarre trend has not only overshadowed the essence of her oeuvre but also damaged the beauty of the language. It is passionately wished that the superabundance of her haiku-tanka sort of those short pieces should have been gathered collectively under one caption, rather than treating each of them as individual poem. This would have saved some trees and papers of an ailing country suffering from chronic economic diseases. What is the price of the book? Nothing. Amazing.

Situation in some way analogous to Emily Dickinson, who being torn apart by her passion, driven back to cover she imprisoned herself in her father’s garden, and scribbled scores of poems, a Kalimpong bred LD put herself into confinement in her room to sing her songs of passion, spiritual awakening and at times, of resentment. She makes no bones in letting her rendition flow on relation:

Relative is

A phobia

A tail that just follows

A decorative piece (Relative p. 91).

Sure, it’s not difficult to imagine how things must have been to acclimatize herself in Kathmandu’s hard social climate. She surely knows why the caged bird sings: let’s give our ear to her songs, who knows, some of them may sound very much akin to our own songs that remained unsung in our heart.

(DB Gurung is a poet and a novelist)

Unravelling the Change

By Rhoderick Chalmers

The publication of a second edition of Land and Social Change in East Nepal (hereafter LSC) is a welcome and timely development. Lionel Caplan’s study is of great anthropological and historical value. That Himal Books has made it available at an affordable price in Nepal itself is commendable. Moreover, despite the interval of some thirty years since its original publication (and even longer since the completion of the fieldwork on which it is based), LSC remains highly relevant in today’s changed academic and political environment.

Lionel Caplan sets out to assess the dynamics of social and economic interaction between Limbus and Bahuns in a settlement cluster of Ilam. These complex, and at times seemingly contradictory, dynamics are broadly categorised into cleavage between the two communities counterbalanced by deep interdependence. The analysis is based on a thorough examination of the traditional kipat system of land tenure and the ways in which Bahun incomers (from the time of the Gorkha conquests onwards) have both gained the rights to the usufruct of much Limbu land and established an economically dominant position primarily through moneylending in an otherwise cash-starved local economy.

A few features of Caplan’s methodology and findings deserve particular mention. First and foremost, his is a pioneering study, and a bold one. In the near total absence of groundwork by other scholars (Mahesh Chandra Regmi’s seminal volumes on land tenure and taxation were just coming to the press during Caplan’s fieldwork), his attempt to unravel the historical and contemporary complexities of kipat landholding remains impressive today. That subsequent research has extended, and in some cases revised, our understanding of the extent and nature of the kipat system does not detract from the detailed and methodical fieldwork on which LSC is based. In particular, the analysis of land and kin groups that forms the third chapter is an essential basis for understanding the complexities in the relationship of individual, family, household, lineage and ‘sub-tribe’ to kipat land.

As indicated above, I believe that the re-issue of LSC is timely despite (or perhaps because of) the major changes in the political and academic context since 1970. The most significant development was, of course, the abolition of kipat tenure and the conversion of all erstwhile kipat lands to standard raikar status. This forms the subject of a 15-page postscript to the new edition based on the author’s return to Ilam in 1988. Despite the brevity of this chapter and its somewhat impressionistic nature (the author’s short visit did not allow for extensive fieldwork), Caplan’s observations are revealing, especially his evaluation that "what seems certain is that a major shift in the allocation of kipat land from mainly Brahman creditors to the original owners did not occur". Although the process did not occasion any significant organised opposition or violence (and had indeed become a ‘hazy memory’ for most of Caplan’s informants), this postscript is infused with a sense of sadness. More than an epilogue, it stands as an epitaph for a lost world, a memorial to the destruction of an intense bond between people and its land. As one informant comments, "After kipat was abolished Limbus had no names. We became beggars - with no place, no land. How can there be Limbus without kipat?"

There may be no simple answer to this question but it resonates with many similar questions about senses of self and identity being asked by minorities across Nepal. And re-reading this Panchayat-era anthropology in the light of all the developments of the last decade, notably the ‘restoration’ of democracy and the growth of ‘janajati politics’, is a revealing exercise. LSC in its new edition takes its place among a growing body of literature on eastern Nepal that has done much to enrich our understanding of fundamental historical and contemporary issues in Nepali state and society. In his own preface, Caplan notes the proliferation of new work on Limbus. More than this, however the social and economic questions addressed by LSC occupy an increasingly central position in recent accounts of the formation of the Nepali state and its ongoing or potential re-formations. Later works by M.C. Regmi have clarified the nature of Gorkha imperialism and its economic bases; Kumar Pradhan’s important The Gorkha Conquests (1991) takes eastern Nepal as the focus for its distinctly revisionist reading of Nepali nationalism, a reading which prefigures much janajati discourse; finally, and most neatly in terms of timing, we have the opportunity to reread LSC alongside Tanka Subba’s Politics of Culture (1999) which reassesses the history of kipat tenure from an anthropologist’s standpoint within a wider context of contemporary Kirata identity politics. In short, LSC relates to many pressing current issues of both academic and wider social and political concern; for many of them it can be considered essential background reading.

Lionel Caplan’s study is focused, rigorous yet sympathetic and his personal sensitivities clearly remain in tune with his informants. It is perhaps this sensitivity that gives his closing comments an emotional edge. "To the Limbus... the loss of kipat represented not simply a material loss, for kipat exceeded its own materiality. With its abolition, the Limbus were denied a part of their past and so, inevitably, of their sense of continuity in the present. Kipat provided a means of belonging, to a place and a distinctive community - the one was not separable from the other. Conversion of the land to raikar severed that connection, and transformed the land into what it had never been before - a commodity. The inalienable had been alienated... As never before [Limbus] had become part of a multi-ethnic, unitary state, one, moreover, in which they remained far removed from the centres of power and privilege."

(R Chalmers is a student now residing in Kathmandu)

Tourism Development in Nepal

By Jagannath Adhikari

Tourism is one of the issues that has occupied the central place in the development debate of Nepal. Many critical questions raised about tourism are related to its contribution to the economy and employment, and the impact on society and nature. Even though studies conducted in this regard show a contradictory picture, government policy makers see tourism as a potential sector for increasing income and employment opportunities, and earning much needed foreign exchange. Moreover, Nepal is considered to have a comparative advantage in tourism, especially in nature tourism. Accordingly, the policy makers identify this sector as a major field in which Nepal should concentrate in the wake of globalization, especially after it becomes a member of World Trade Organization. Nepal’s tourism: Uncensored facts takes up many of these pertinent and practically important issues on tourism in Nepal and then offers some solutions to solve various problems and face the challenges in tourism sector in the 21st century.

The novel aspect of this book is its historical approach in analyzing the development of tourism in Nepal. And the political and economic history since the time of Prithiwi Narayan Shah (1746) has been analyzed in the book. Thus, while going through the book, one feels that one is reading the political and economic history of Nepal, rather than the tourism history. This analysis however is presented in order to find reasons for the late development of tourism sector in Nepal. And plethora of old pictures and interviews of living historians have been incorporated in the book, maybe, to help the readers to have a good grasp of the events and people responsible for the promotion of tourism in Nepal.

The historical analysis of the book clearly indicates that it is the opening of the country to the outside world after the downfall of Rana regime in 1950 that led to the inflow of tourists to Nepal, even though the enlistment of her people in British army and their participation in the world wars, and the visit of Rana Prime-minister Janga Bahadur to Britain and Europe had already popularized Nepal to the outside world. Later the coronation ceremonies of the late king Mahendra and the present monarch Birendra helped in promoting Nepal as many distinguished personalities from many countries and their media participated in these ceremonies. As a result, flow of tourist to Nepal rapidly increased after these ceremonies. Similarly the visits of the head of states and the development of hotel industries, particularly after the establishment of Royal Hotel by Boris N. Lissanevitch, were instrumental in increasing tourists in Nepal. In the 1960s and 1970s, Nepal’s tourism was affected by the international political developments, particularly the conflict in Vietnam and the system of conscription, which led to the increased flow to Nepal of hippies, who wanted to find solace in Oriental culture and environment. These have been succinctly discussed in the book.

The critical issue in Nepal’s tourism has been its low value addedness. The book frankly admits this fact. It says that about 62.3 % of the tourist expenditure is used to import commodities for tourism. The use of local commodities has been minimum in tourism sector. For example, Kathmandu alone, as the book argues, imports food worth of Rs. 9.2 million per day from India, of which 30 % goes into its tourist hotels. My own study of Kathmandu’s food security reveals the similar picture of Kathmandu’s dependency on Indian markets for food. As a result, the multiplier effect of tourism in Nepal is very low. Moreover, the contribution of tourism to national income is also significantly less, as it stands to about 3 % of the GDP. But about 18 % of the foreign exchange comes from tourism. This might led us to believe that tourism sector might be receiving more attention than that could be justified from its contribution to the national economy.

Distributional aspect of income from tourism has remained as an unknown field. And how and to what extent the different people and regions benefit from tourism has not been explored in detail as yet in Nepal. This book is also silent on this aspect, which has led to various hypotheses regarding the potentiality of tourism and its essentiality to different groups of people. To take an example, various arguments were forwarded regarding the impact of hijacking of Indian Airlines plane in Kathmandu on tourism of Nepal. Tourism entrepreneurs, especially those belonging to star hotels, claimed that tourism business declined in the aftermath of the hijacking. But in opposition to this argument, other arguments were forwarded which claimed that the impact was not significant. For the decline in the number of tourists is not the sole criteria to understand the benefits tourism brings. And it is the poor tourists spending a long time in Nepal who have helped in running many small hotels, restaurants and tea-shops in urban areas as well as in remote areas, thus benefiting common people and small entrepreneurs. So in line with these arguments, a concern was raised to allow just quality tourists to Nepal. But the book is mum over these arguments.

The book touches many sensitive issues like security and Indian factor in tourism, quality tourism, and new approaches of tourism. And one can say that the book gives a comprehensive picture of different issues related to development of tourism in Nepal. But the lack of objective analysis is the book’s glaring shortcoming. This shortcoming notwithstanding, the book will set a foundation from which future researchers could easily take this task forward. And the impressions and experiences - on which the discussion is largely based - of the author will be practically valuable for tourism planning of the country.

(J. Adhikari is a researcher based in Pokhara)