Til Ganga, as is it popularly known, is more than just another eye hospital in Kathmandu. It is an internationally known and respected institution that has done more for preventable blindness in Nepal (and other developing countries) than anyone would have dared to dream of. But then, the two doctors at the heart of the first dreaming – Sanduk Ruit and the late Fred Hollows – are more than dreamers. They are doers who made their Himalayan dreams come true.[break]
Photo Courtesy: Penny Bradfield
Working on this exhibition was a dream come true for me, too. Within a week of my landing in Kathmandu, I had been driven off, on a 15-hour, hilly and bumpy drive (some of it in total darkness) to Doramba. I was to photograph one of Til Ganga’s countless remote eye camps. That camp was an eye opener for me, in so many ways. It was the beginning of a relationship with Dr Ruit that I treasure.
This exhibition, then, is just a small payback for the eye-opening experiences I have had with him.
Photo Courtesy: Jonathan Chester/Extreme Images
Working on it was also an eye opener. There are photographic treasures buried deep in Til Ganga. And like all treasures, they are not easy to find. I am sure I have not seen all the photographs that Til Ganga has in its vast visual collection. A collection that can certainly do with a better photo retrieval system.
Photographs shot by well known and internationally acclaimed photographers like Ami Vitale and Michael Amendolia were easier to find. And because of the Australian funding of the exhibition, I had to foreground the Australians – Anne Crawford, Penny Bradfield, Jon Reid, and even the well known media star like Ray Martin. And their work too, was easy to access.
Photo Courtesy: Micheal Amendolia
Michael has been shooting Til Ganga from the beginning. And luckily for me, some of his original black and white prints were easily found from the mountain of photographs that Til Ganga has. His earliest pictures from Vietnam and Mustang made the show. They have become the focus of the exhibition.
I did feel a little uncomfortable with too much of a western gaze and tried to locate Nepali photographers who might have photographed Til Ganga. It turned out to be a hard task because they are, strangely enough, an almost nonexistent entity. When I asked Dr. Ruit about the lacuna in the local gaze, he was quite direct in the answer he gave. Nepali photographers, according to him, don’t seem ready to invest the length of time and the effort needed to attend remote camps.
Hetauda eye camp Photo: Satish Sharma
That is something local photographers need to wake up to. They have to invest the time and make an effort to make the gaze on Til Ganga more local and homegrown. The Western photographers looked at Nepal only through its mountain and hill people. One of them actually said that the people from the Terai looked too “Indian.” It is stereotyping like this that needs to be countered by the local knowledge of Nepali photographers because even the ‘Medical’ archives of an institution like Til Ganga can create and add to the stereotypes of Nepal and Nepalis.
Most faces in the Western documentation seem to stereotype Nepalis as just the Hill people. The Terai Nepalis are ´too Indian´.
The writer is an eminent independent photographer, writer on photography and an occasional curator.
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