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| Kathmandu, Thursday June 19, 2003 Ashadh 05, 2060. |
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Filming
politicians and poets
By ABHI SUBEDI
The restoration of
democracy in Nepal in 1990 deconstructed among other things the old notions about the
creation and valorisation of national heroes. People wanted to project the images of their
heroes through the medium of film even by using some techniques of those who had
monopolised the image making process in this land. Personality traits like rigidity,
repetitiveness and egoism of the heroes, which is created by the propaganda machinery of a
non-democratic regime, would be avoided in such films. But the voyeurs of the
post-democracy times wanted their heroes too to imitate certain qualities of the heroes of
the earlier times. To the filmmakers the personality of BP Koirala was a challenge. It
would defy the norms of hero-making of a non-democratic society.
In Nepal, storying the
lives of the rulers and projecting their narratives has always been accepted as part of
the hegemony of power. The Panchayat polity used the scanty visual resources to create the
heroes and a culture of voyeurism or darsan. These voyeurs or those who were supposed to
make darsan of the heroes, not so much of the heroines as far as power of personality was
concerned, silently accepted the narratives produced in prints and electronic media. But
after 1990, the same voyeurs wanted to see new faces on the screens of the Nepali history.
Immediately after the restoration of democracy in 1990, the charismatic personality of the
late leader and rebel, BP Koirala was filmed. Poet and politician Jagadish Shumsher Rana
was assigned the task to write the script, provide ideology, and create an ambience of
power that a film based on the life of such a personality would be expected to achieve.
Poet Rana and his team
worked with zeal to project the narrative of BP’s life and works by combining the
documentary and storying techniques. Matching these two techniques is a very difficult
task. Storying the lives of politicians, who have played great roles in history, would
require creating a system of reference in the national and individual histories. Secondly,
mixing a documentary film with the fictive narrative would involve serious challenges,
which a modernist film would solve by using non-linear narratives. But how was it done at
a modest level in Nepal?
A team of dedicated
youths was formed. Available resources were tapped and used. Jagadish Rana, a long
associate of the Nepali Congress must have received help in terms of sharing information,
one can guess, from BP Koirala’s party comrades, his wife Sushila bhauju and family,
historians and custodians of various mini-archives, and ironically, the Rana families
themselves to end whose rule in 1950, BP Koirala had played a very important role.
The main objective of
Jagadish Rana was the creation of a new kind of voyeurism by storying the self of a rebel
like BP Koirala. But the question is, was he able to create the voyeurs of a new order or
was he glibly relying on the sources and forms that projected the image of BP as a
politician who was working within the bourgeois structure of power that he always, though
unsuccessfully, fought against all his life?
BP’s power lay in
the fact that he was one of the very few politicians in this country who was a true rebel
with great faith in democracy. As a literary person, I would consider his literary
power— his recognition of the deeper problems of men and women and their capacity to
act in the moments of crisis, yet another attribute of his personality. I read even his
political writings from this perspective. His self-defence at the Supreme Court is an
example of that textuality which combines power with a creative perception of our future
and present conditions. To write an article for the first issue of Studies in Nepali
History and Society at the request of its editor Pratyoush Onta, who started it with the
Mandala Book Point in 1996, I went searching for the text of BP’s court defence.
Surprisingly, many enlightened Congress Party people had not even heard about it. Finally,
a political scientist Krishna Khanal gave a photocopy of that document to me, which I have
used in my article written on the subject of literary resistance to the Panchayat polity,
in the first issue of the magazine.
I have allowed the
above episode to intervene my discourse in order to put my argument about the difficulties
of matching documentary evidence with the fictionalisation of life. The time space in
Nepali history that was chosen to make this film and the change of voyeurism that
everybody who was involved in it wanted to see, reflects a common desire to effectively
use a medium called filmmaking, which in Nepal however, mostly imitates the Bollywood
styles. The BP film thus makes a combination of the bourgeois melodrama with the
documentary techniques and fails. There is very little the producers could have done about
it given the complexity of the task and the filmmakers’ non-professionalism.
Cinema reflects the
moods of the nation. For example, at one point Indian cinema became the double of the
post-independent mother India. But Nepali film makers created some very pathetic modes of
voyeurism during the Panchayat times, and many films made after the restoration of
democracy do not have any strong forms, either. The BP film is sandwiched between these
two modes of confusions, the extreme legacy of which is the very recent film based on the
life and works of the late leader and great freedom fighter Ganeshman Singh, titled Bir
Ganeshman or ‘the brave Ganeshman’, which is the subject of a separate
analytical essay.
In essence, the very
desire to recreate the images of these charismatic politicians should be considered as the
tacit agreement reached between the actors in the arena of politics and the voyeurs, who
want to see different images and patterns cast on the walls of their history, but can get
seriously disillusioned, if it fails.
There are other
problems associated with the task of filming and storying the lives of heroes in Nepal.
Only last week a veteran filmmaker and producer Yadav Kharel invited me to see his works
on a film based on the life and works of poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota. I sat looking at the
unedited series of images, and listening to sounds and words of the text with which Kharel
would like to create a post-democracy literary voyeurism. To sit with a seasoned and
talented filmmaker and to discuss about the problems associated with the filming of the
heroes was a revealing experience. As he was telling me about the struggle he had to make
for this film, I began to see Kharel’s own story on the screen. As a Nepali literary
critic, I was shocked and ashamed to know that only half of about 30 works of this poet
are found today. The rest are not available at all. Photos are not available, neither are
any other resources that he would need to productively use to create a convincing texture
of this film. Kharel relies then on the familiar voyeurs who on their part rely on the
often-repeated metaphors related to the poet’s life and works bandied about by
critics and Nepali departments. Critics and Nepali departments use a limited repertoire of
ideas to create the texture of this poet’s life and works just as the political
parties and historians rely on the repertoire of clichés that they often bandy about
while creating discourses about the power of BP Koirala and Ganeshman Singh as freedom
fighters. There is one difference. Yadav Kharel taps on the creative energy embodied in
the works of Devkota and dramatises it through actions that are impersonated by poets and
critics.
Filming or storying the
lives and works of the politicians and poets in the changing perspectives of the times
represents a major shift in the interpretation of the grand narration. But it involves two
challenges—using the complex yet productive form of filmmaking and addressing the
tension between the tendency of projecting fixed metaphors and transmitting what the
Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci calls ‘ideological currents’ by means of this
medium. The post-democracy euphoria of creating heroes’ images is in a quandary
because the ideals and charisma of individual leaders are not working as convincing
factors in the image-making regime, nor as uniting factors in today’s Nepal.
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