While doing so, the cities do not recall their pasts in some realistic or exact orders and forms. As the great poets or creative minds and souls possessed with powerful ‘secondary imagination’ defined by the great English poet S T Coleridge combine it with the faculties of imagination, cities too merge the layers of their times and vibrations of various cultural and artistic natures into newer forms. Cities, therefore, are as complex and creative as the minds of poets and artists.
As one walks through Thamel, a tourist zone in Kathmandu, these days, one comes across, among great many other things, a recently constructed space called the Mandala Street. This is a passage situated in the Sagarmatha Bazaar, a newly-built commercial building in the central part of Thamel. About a 100-meter long, this Street leads the visitors to several shops and offices run with the purpose of addressing the needs of the tourists on a daily basis. This Street also leads us into several staircases, corridors, balconies and passages that look partly traditional in their color and contours and partly cosmopolitan in their look. As one walks through them, one comes across several units of traditional architecture such as windows, doors, balcony, roofs, railings and walls re-interpreted in modern forms and fashions.
In no time do we find ourselves pondering over these streetscapes and the hybrid architectural ambience and we become part of it all. As we face them, we come to realize that we are peeping into some pages or lines from the memories of the Kathmandu city of the present times. As the texture of memories seen in the form of the space of a certain magnitude, the Mandala Street is a new-historical architectural ‘text’. It gives an impression as though the Kathamandu city is remembering its ancient times with ancient trails, hamlets and villages at this juncture of time when the global culture in the form of tourism business, local entrepreneurs and modern ‘critical’ architectural minds has found itself being rolled onto a single forum. This text can also be taken as a very apt metaphor to trace down how Kathmandu city of the present times is recalling its history, the trails and traces left behind long ago.
Gone are the times when the kings and lords used to invest ‘money’ and the plebeians’ muscle power to keep alive Kathmandu’s memories through the constructions of some magnificent temples and palaces, instigating theatre, festivals and ceremonies of great many characters. It looks as if the cities in the Valley are nothing but the memories that they have lived through at different times. Many archeologists and cultural historians of our times opine certain hypothesis that the first generation settlers in the Kathmandu Valley found themselves occupied with instilling memories of the cities of a certain distant land that they had migrated from as soon as they landed in this beautiful Valley.
Much water has flowed out of the Chobhar gorge since then. Great many memories of the cities have become lost. This makes us feel very sad because we all love to decode memories of the cities. As we do so, we feel a great energy running through our bodies and minds. But entrepreneurs who are showing some interests on the Valley’s traditional architectural parampara are emerging as they have constructed several modern commercial complexes which evoke memories of the cities in some newer forms and texts. This proves the fact that entrepreneurs these days hold important power to inspire the cities in the Valley to go nostalgic and to recall their pasts and narrate them to their new comers and audiences of new times and cultural contexts. Such modern buildings with paramparik architectural looks and vibrations are like beautiful tales that the cities in the Valley find themselves busy reciting to make us feel happy.
Various forms of temples, palaces, pagodas and great many others artistic and cultural monuments, of which many have survived several natural and cultural changes, are some of the very powerful form of memories that the cities in the Valley have written or carved out at different times in the past. Similarly, there are great many lore and myths that are the vehicles of the memories of the cities. Written or conceived at different times, such texts are circulated and given both ‘continuity and change’ even in the present times as they are still celebrated throughout the year.
When people, especially the Newars from the Valley come out in the streets in every new season with their deities in colorful palanquins and set out on a march to some culturally- and historically-significant spaces with love and faith on a culturally-assigned date and occasion, the cities here wake up happily watching some lines from the texts of their memories being performed or restaged in various forms. Moreover, across times, poets and artists, writers and thinkers too have spent their creative energies in decoding the memories of the cities. In this process, they have carved out varieties of texts out of a repertoire of the mélange of their memories of personal life with that of the cities in some excellent forms. They often find that the cities here are nothing but texts of memoirs written over earlier memoirs. Therefore, they find it very challenging to ponder over such palimpsest of memoirs and narrate them in words and images, which in turn become very complex for us to decode.
Now, back to the Mandala Street in the Sagarmatha Bazar again! This commercially- as well as pragmatically-designed architectural space interestingly allows us know how the cities here are writing their memories at a time when entrepreneurs have become the most influential force in the developmental domain of the cities in the Valley. Houses and lanes that have come into existence during several decades in the past look very indifferent from the ancient or older trails and lanes, streetscapes and chowks, traditional architectural contours and vocabularies that the cities here once lived by in the past. Despite it, they still form a mainstream pattern of the urban development in our times. Though, they too are memories, they do not much evoke the recollection of the cities of the earlier times. This is not a mere departure but a state of decadence seen in the urban development of the cities that many of us strongly believe in.
We live in a developmental context when pieces of the land in the Valley are being sold at a much faster pace at much expensive prices. New apartment buildings of various price ranges are mushrooming in different parts of the cities. And, by the same token, not many lanes and houses built in paramparik architectural forms are left now. But when some entrepreneurs happily and cunningly dream of making smart money by evoking traditional façades and facets of the houses and lanes into modern forms and shapes, we regard this as an act that needs to be welcomed publicly. This act of bringing out the tangible memories of the cities in the Valley do not only cause major intervention in the ongoing mainstream pattern of the urban development but also make us feel that the cities here are alive and vibrant.
Every living being lives with memories, so does a city. Newcomers to a city like Kathmandu look into its memoirs. The livelier the city, the more beautiful are its memoirs. The Mandala Street thus makes one feel fresh and happy thinking about this city.
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