further reading 10/01/09

so, i spent the last few days out schlepping around the valley rim...in the mornings and early afternoons anyway. late afternoon and evening was cold beer and reading/studying nepali/admiring the (stunning) views time. this means, among other things, that i finally finished "forget kathmandu: an elegy for democracy" by manjushree thapa. a little of everything-- memoir, reportage, historiography-- and more than the sum of its parts, it provided an interesting narrative counter-point to the straight academic history in the whelpton book from my previous post. the books starts with the apparent 2001 drug and drink-fueled massacre of the royal family by the crown prince. thapa uses this moment of upheaval and confusion (conspiracy theories about the massacre abound) in nepali political life to give a brief overview of the rest of nepal's admittedly tumultuous political history. thapa doesn't pull her punches, dishing out equal blame for the repeated failure of democracy to take hold in nepal post-1950 on the royal family, the squabbling political parties, and "the kathmandu bourgeoisie," in which she includes herself. (in fact, thapa brought the heat so much that when the king established absolute control in 2006, revoking almost all established civil liberties, thapa felt compelled to flee the country). the meat of the book comes in her 2002 trip through a few districts of the crushingly poor and conflict-affected western nepal. there, although she, like so many others, found herself incapable of proffering a solution to the crisis, her despair and frustration crystallizes, and she offers valuable observations and insights into the root of the problem for conflict resolution and democracy: the desperate state in which so many rural nepalis live.

coming here almost three years after a formal peace agreement was signed, despite the daily newspaper reports of the conflicts among political parties and the CA's struggle to meet the it's constitution-writing deadline, it's actually easy to forget that the events of the last 10 years are not, in fact, distant history. walking alone through places (while they were never maoist strongholds) where red, spray-painted sickles remain on concrete walls and reading this book, with its intensely personal view of history and reportage of the horrors of the conflict, was an immediate and sometimes anxiety-inducing reminder that that "history" very much remains this country's present.

you can read an excerpt from the book here.