Exhibition: The Public Life of Women, A Feminist Memory Project

The FLA Network would like to thank Yutsha Dahal, Research Coordinator at Nepal Picture Library (NPL), for all her work to curate this extract of The Feminist Memory Project exhibition for the FLA Network website.

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INTRODUCTION

Since 2011, Nepal Picture Library has been collecting, digitizing, and documenting photographs from all types of sources with the objective of safeguarding a visual repository of ordinary life, social history, and public culture in Nepal. The creation of such an archive, we believed, would thrust historical awareness in Nepal from the stodgy register of Great Men to a vision of the past where Nepali people can see themselves reflected. By the same token, we also felt that the images and the narratives of the past needed to be freed from the grips of economically and culturally dominant groups and presented to disclose—in the true spirit of inclusion and democracy—the diversities, differences, and dissensions of Nepali history.

The current exhibition is based on an ongoing archival campaign started by Nepal Picture Library in April 2018 that we titled The Feminist Memory Project. This was shown as a public exhibition at Patan Durbar Square in Lalitpur at Photo Kathmandu 2018, an international photography festival held by Photo Circle.

The Feminist Memory Project research team met over a hundred individuals who have directly given shape to the feminist landscape of Nepal or have been working to preserve the memory of past women. During this period, it became clearer to us how intensely the need for women’s history was felt. We encountered many instances where women were attempting in formal and informal ways to build chronicles and chronologies of a feminist past. The archive we are creating through The Feminist Memory Project will hopefully provide a nexus to connect these efforts.

The idea of claiming place in public life was one of the most significant themes that emerged from the materials we collected. The distinctions between the private and the public have a complex history in Nepal, as elsewhere, but these concepts are also repeatedly mobilized by women in the narratives about their own lives—describing their moves from one sphere to the other as a major transition or a breaking of barriers that held them back. By organizing this exhibition around women’s relationship with public life, we want to highlight what feminist experience has felt like in Nepal. Furthermore, we think this can also show how the structures of history that push women into oblivion are in fact contingent and changeable.

We hope this exhibition can lay bare how the project of speaking and acting in the name of the common identity of “women” has unfolded in Nepal, even as it tries to do so by showing how the actual diversity of women’s lives has elaborated the different ways of being public. This exhibition is essentially a display of materials we have collated through The Feminist Memory Project.

Our attempt is not to be comprehensive nor does it seek to produce a canon of exceptional and individual accomplishers. A history of women, in our opinion, is first and foremost a social history. We have curated this exhibition as a call to contribute to the archive we have started building. We seek and welcome more materials that will help us achieve this mission of a more inclusive history and future of Nepal.

– Exhibition Curators, Diwas Raja Kc & NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati

The Public Life of Women, A Feminist Memory Project

Exhibition by: Nepal Picture Library

Curated by: Diwas Raja Kc & NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

To become public is to be seen and accounted for in history. The journey of Nepali women from within the boundaries of domesticity to the openness of public life is a move from obscurity to memory. This exhibition showcases materials gathered by Nepal Picture Library in its effort to create a dedicated women’s archive. It rides on the feminist impulse to memorialize women’s pasts in the belief that their historical visibility will advance the case for liberation.

This multi-part exhibition is an act of willing Nepali women en masse into public memory. It flashes instances from the past when women have taken on political struggle, addressed assemblies, paved new paths through education, published and shaped opinion, travelled and described the world, become figures of authority, and broken social norms. What we see is a view of how publicness itself has emerged as a key feminist strategy in Nepal.

This multi-part exhibition is an act of willing Nepali women en masse into public memory. It flashes instances from the past when women have taken on political struggle, addressed assemblies, paved new paths through education, published and shaped opinion, travelled and described the world, become figures of authority, and broken social norms. What we see is a view of how publicness itself has emerged as a key feminist strategy in Nepal.

Kathmandu | 1981

Women from all walks of life gather for a mass meeting in Kathmandu to submit a letter of protest to the government following the rape and murder of sisters Namita and Sunita Bhandari in Pokhara that rocked the country. – Hisila Yami Collection/Nepal Picture Library

PART ONE: THE WOMEN OF THE PEOPLE

The history of Nepal’s struggle for democracy and progress over the last century is dominated by men and treats women as auxiliary, delineating their participation within certain prescribed norms of gender. Women themselves, however, were guided by this new era’s promise of inclusion in a universal community. In peering at this history from women’s perspective, this section brings attention to the ways in which women made new positions and new subjectivities possible through their entry into popular politics and public life—and also the ways these possibilities made the contours of male- dominated history susceptible to new meanings.

Kathmandu | 1947

Photograph of the members of the pioneering Nepal Women’s Association formed to support the anti-Rana, pro-democracy movement. – Shanta Shrestha Collection/Nepal Picture Library

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When Sahana Pradhan returned with her family to Kathmandu from Burma at age 13, her schooling was suddenly stopped and her movement controlled. She could not tolerate it. The desire to continue her education led her to join the struggle to end Rana oligarchy of the time. After her first arrest for attending a political protest in 1947, she was one of the protesters who was granted an audience with Prime Minister Padma Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana. She used the chance to demand the opening of Durbar High School to women. When he replied he would think about it, Pradhan boldly retorted, “We need to know by when.” “Within two weeks,” he replied. And surprisingly Padma Kanya School was established as a woman’s wing within weeks of that encounter. The following year, she became one of the first four women to clear their SLC exams. – Sahana Pradhan Collection/Nepal Picture Library

Daughter-in-law of Badakaji Ratna Man Singh and the wife of the political rebel Ganesh Man Singh, Mangala Devi was pulled into the limelight very early by her circumstances. Despite the enormous constraint she faced at home, she was making her presence felt in key debates over women’s rights to education and suffrage. She always felt that women’s primary revolt happens at home. By the time the Rana regime was overthrown in 1951, she was in the position to give the women’s movement a wider organizational form. Nepal Women’s Association, officially inaugurated in 1951 under her leadership, was the public face of mainstream feminism until King Mahendra’s coup in 1960. – Mangala Devi Singh Collection/Nepal Picture Library Kanta Singh Manandhar Collection/Nepal Picture Library

Photographs of Tharu women from Karjahi, Dang who led a peasants’ revolt against the abuses of local landlords in 1980. The landlords had started intimidating peasants and vandalized their property with police help following the national land tenure reform of 1979, compelling these women to take action. – Karjahi Movement Collection/Nepal Picture Library

Syangja | 1990

Women seen at a mass assembly in Syangja following the success of the 1990 people’s movement. – Shanta Manavi Collection/Nepal Picture Library

PART TWO: THE WORDS OF WOMEN

The tyrants of our past treated the culture of literacy and learning, reading and writing, as dangerous. For the written word works remotely and independently, and they can travel even into the most secretly guarded chamber. The rise of print culture and the struggle for democracy in Nepal are therefore deeply intertwined.

For women, too, participating in progress and democracy meant in the first place being literate, having opinions, and becoming part of the world of letters. Since the 1950s, women’s magazines and journals sporadically appeared reflecting the dream of a women-centric reading public.

PART THREE: READING UNDER THE CANDLELIGHT

Women’s education is an important part of feminist history, perhaps even the most important for the quiet and dramatic ways in which it transformed everyday life. To pursue education, Nepali women had to go against the common wisdom that saw girls’ education as an aberration, a waste, or even a threat to social order.

Feminist pioneers in Nepal all emphasized education as the key to overcoming women’s subjugated position in society. From the middle of the twentieth century, circumstances began to change and women started attending schools and colleges in ever-growing numbers. Teaching in schools also became the most significant route for women to begin their professional lives.

Berkeley, USA | 1975

Shanta Thapaliya during her student years at the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed her Masters in Law, following which she went on to found one of the first NGOs of Nepal in 1987 providing free legal aid to women. – Shanta Thapaliya Collection/Nepal Picture Library

PART FOUR: A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman needs the means to confine herself in a room in order to have the freedom to think and to write. As much as women are curtailed from having a relationship with the outside, seldom do they have a room—let alone a quiet room—in her house to call one’s own.

Through a recreation of Parijat’s room, we interrogate the feminist possibilities emerging from the literal and figurative space of women. Parijat was one of the most beloved and influential Nepali writers of her times. Her room was where she spent much of her time due to rheumatism. It was also the place where Kathmandu’s intellectuals routinely gathered to discuss freedom and progress. We displayed some of Parijat’s original belongings, preserved by Parijat Smriti Kendra and Sukanya Waiba, along with a few recreations of memorabilia and memories associated with her room.

Kathmandu | 1994 Sukanya Waiba in her study where she works to memorialize the legacy of her sister Parijat. – Sukanya Waiba Collection/Nepal Picture Library

PART FIVE: OUT IN THE WORLD

When one mines the memories of feminist awakening in Nepal, travel emerges as a special and distinct theme. In the fifty years of history the following pictures represent, women of different classes and cultural backgrounds have become travellers, tourists, and migrants for different reasons. But all their travels have occurred against contentious debates about “women’s place” and “women’s nature”. Out in the world, women can still appear out of place—defined by the dangers of becoming spectacles and objects rather than by the power of becoming observers and discoverers. Women travelling may be an ordinary and everyday event, but it can be deeply felt as abandonment of fixed positions and subversion of gender norms. This series teases out the wanderlust of Nepali women, seeking to expose the ways they utilize travel to express their presence, their freedom, and their agency.

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London, UK | 1971

Shanta Shrestha with friends Janaki Manandhar and Savitri Sharma in London while working for BBC as the Nepali language presenter. She worked at Radio Nepal for 35 years from 1956-1991. – Shanta Shrestha Collection/Nepal Picture Library

Kolkata, India | 1966

Actors Bhuvan Chand and Basundhara Bhusal at Victoria Park, Calcutta, while shooting for Hijo Aaja Bholi. – Bhuvan Chand Collection/Nepal Picture Library

Japan | 1994

Prativa Subedi sees the ocean for the first time. She was in Japan to launch the Japanese translation of her book Nepali Women Rising. – Prativa Subedi Collection/Nepal Picture Library

Shanghai, China | 1963

Shashikala Sharma stops by Shanghai during an international tour that covered the Soviet Union, China, Burma, and East Pakistan. – Shashikala Sharma Collection/Nepal Picture Library

PART SIX: WOMEN FOR WOMEN

With the move towards grassroots organization and especially with the proliferation of civil society activities in the 1990s, the women’s movement in Nepal has grown leaps and bounds. The rise of women-led non-governmental organizations and advocacy forums raising issues of gender and women’s rights has critically transformed women’s lives across the country.

Women’s groups have been the main vehicle for issues of property rights, sexual violence, trafficking, economic empowerment, reproductive health, governance, representation, and political participation to gain ground. What we present here is merely a fraction of the immense archive of NGO and other civil society activities on gender issues.

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Kathmandu | 1993
Members of Women’s Security Pressure Group take a rally. Chaired by Sahana Pradhan, the group started as a united forum of women activists, politicians, and professionals of all affiliations. It was founded in 1991 after the Home Minister of the newly established democratic government said that women should simply grow their nails and carry chilli powder when women activists petitioned him about the watershed case of a 11-year-old girl’s rape in Kathmandu. Seen in the photographs are Sahana Pradhan, Durga Ghimire, Astalaxmi Shakya, Savitri Jangam Thapa, and others. – Sushila Shrestha Collection/Nepal Picture Library

Kanchanpur | 2010

A mass meeting of former kamaiyas (bonded laborers) in Kanchanpur. GEFONT Collection/Nepal Picture Library

The following images show The Feminist Memory Project exhibition when it was showcased at Photo Kathmandu 2018, an international photography festival held by Photo Circle. Patan Durbar Square in Lalitpur.

This multi-part exhibition is an act of willing Nepali women en masse into public memory. It flashes instances from the past when women have taken on political struggle, addressed assemblies, paved new paths through education, published and shaped opinion, travelled and described the world, become figures of authority, and broken social norms. What we see is a view of how publicness itself has emerged as a key feminist strategy in Nepal.

Kathmandu | 1981

Women from all walks of life gather for a mass meeting in Kathmandu to submit a letter of protest to the government following the rape and murder of sisters Namita and Sunita Bhandari in Pokhara that rocked the country. – Hisila Yami Collection/Nepal Picture Library

These images show The Feminist Memory Project exhibition when it was showcased at Photo Kathmandu 2018, an international photography festival held by Photo Circle. Patan Durbar Square in Lalitpur.

Nepal Picture Library, digital photo archive run by a non-profit organization, Photo Circle, has been  continuously working since its inception in 2011 to create a broad and inclusive visual archive of Nepali social and cultural history. As part of its objective to create a visually dense version of Nepali history for and with public audiences, NPL initiates various research projects that focus on bringing marginalised histories into the foreground.

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