Idea of fun

September the twentieth is supposed to be a joyous occasion. Nepal’s six-decade-long dream of constitution through the sovereign Constituent Assembly is finally coming true. On cue, the government has declared two-day national holiday and asked people to celebrate the new constitution with deepawali. Yet most of us are in no mood for fun. In a spate of violence in the Tarai belt, over 40 people have already been killed in the past few weeks, including unarmed police officials, civilians and children. Indications are that this vicious cycle of violence could continue long into the future.

When I talk to my friends, even those who are not politically inclined, I hear anger in their voice. My (few) Madheshi friends are outraged at the decision of the Koirala government to ram the new constitution down their throat; at how, after nearly a decade since the ‘historic’ changes, they are still treated as second-class citizens. My (many) Pahadi friends, similarly, simmer with rage at the grave injustice being done unto them: Why are they being punished, they ask, for the crimes of their forefathers? Their foreign dreams already shattered for want of hard cash to pay off wily middlemen, many of them have also given up any hope of getting into the lucrative I/NGO sector which, increasingly, gives preferential treatment to candidates from marginalized communities.

But how did we get to this stage of mutual hatred? For starters, the Nepali monarchs, never short of harebrained ideas, tried to build a ‘harmonious society’ by foisting on it a single culture based on the Hindu varna system. It’s incredible to think about it now; how the rulers came up with the ingenious idea of arbitrarily dividing people based on their skin color and facial features, and their docile subjects had to accept it all, no questions asked.

During my schooldays, every morning we had to line up outside in the early morning sun and sing the national anthem. Even my pea-sized brain was piqued at how a paean to a single person, however great, came to be established as our national anthem. We weren’t spared even when we were out for a movie: everyone had to stand up, ramrod straight, lip-synching Shriman Ghambir that rang down the rafters of pitch-dark Ranjana.

Inside our classroom, we had to study history, in English, in what was a veritable hagiography of the Prachanda Pratapi Bhupatis. Then there was the Mahendramala. The only book in Nepali in our entire course again tried to hammer home the message of how the Nepali people needed to be eternally grateful to the brave Shah kings who, lest we forgot, took such pains to unite the country for posterity. But, then, we were also told that for most of the past 250 years these godly kings and their retinues of devotional courtiers were literally at each others’ throats, plenty of which were slit open in various blood-soaked parvas.

So many things didn’t make sense. In our ancestral home in Bhadrapur, Jhapa, there used to be this old man who tended our fields. When I asked for his name with an acquaintance, the one-word answer I got was: ‘Tharu’. I never saw him wear anything but a small, white loincloth. And for a long time I actually believed
that Tharu was a person’s name, not a race that were probably real owners of the place where we had built out home.

Other prejudices we simply imbibed from the society we grew up in. All dark-skinned people we encountered in our bus journey between Kathmandu (where we stayed) and Jhapa (where we went for our winter vacations) were, we were repeatedly reminded, somehow inferior to us. They were ‘Madhise’, ‘dhoti’. We were not to go anywhere near them because they were ‘dirty’. As people of high birth, we needed to learn to keep these barbarians in their place. In fact the first time my generation really started seeing Madheshis as real people was after the 2007 Madheshi Andolan, when they said enough is enough. If Kathmandu was not ready to give them their rights, Madheshis would wrest them away. While their pleas for statehood were repeatedly ignored in the past, the first words they spoke in anger had shaken Kathmandu to its bare bones.
As I look back, I see many similarities between my cultural indoctrination on the ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ castes and the Christian evangelicals trying to convince a 12-year-old that if only he took Jesus as his personal savior, all his problems would simply disappear.

This was the society I grew up in, suffused with prejudices of every kind. This is the society I still call home.
After year of subtle indoctrination and brainwashing, coming to terms with the new realities we have been exposed to of late is not easy. Challenged about our easy assumptions, we tend to lash out. Or silently suffer, the ultimate humiliation of being forced to share the lunch table with the dirty Indian.

biswas.baral@gmail.com