Stranded in Shangri-La

There are few other countries in the world that are more open to and dependent upon foreign largesse. Not just the foreign tourists, but the foreign aid and grants that make 70 per cent of Nepal8217;s budget ought to make it a more open society. Yet censorship is routine, civil liberties non-existent. Few other countries are such an object of curiosity, yet Nepal8217;s history seems all but to have vanished under a fog of Orientalism. What8217;s Nepal about?

Manjushree Thapa8217;s sensitive portrayal of this country out of joints, as it were, will induce a kind of political vertigo. The book, part memoir, part history, part reportage is roughly divided into two halves. The first is, for the most part, centered on Kathmandu. It opens with a gripping account of King Birendra8217;s murder. These pages make the nervous anxiety that surrounded the event come vividly alive. The book is at its best in portraying the ways in which our sense of self and purpose come to bear the imprint of the events that surround us. You almost come to feel the psychological burdens such events can produce. In many ways, the rest of the book is an attempt to overcome that strange combination of farce and futility that such political events often induce.

Thapa gives a splendid brief history of Nepal centered on the evolution of its monarchy in relation to the rest of society. This is largely a tale of missed opportunities with monarch after monarch frittering away an opportunity to introduce real reform. It is to Thapa8217;s credit that she does not let this history overwhelm her. Her analysis is astute and her observations often wry and illuminating. But running like a thread through the argument is the sense that there was nothing over determined about Nepal8217;s fall from democracy. Its two brief democratic moments could have succeeded, if only it had not been reduced to a hollow shell by the machinations of Nepal8217;s leading protagonists. Democracy did not fail in Nepal, its elites did.

The rest of the book is an account of her travels through Maoist controlled territory. Thapa paints a bleak portrait of a land mired in poverty and desperation, whose fragile equilibrium was made even more complicated by the atrocities of Nepal8217;s security forces. She lets her Maoist interlocutors speak for themselves and their stories make for compelling reading. But most readers will come away from this section a little unsatisfied. While the reporting is valuable, it is not accompanied by the clear analysis of the first half. It is almost as if her subjects have overwhelmed her. While Thapa does a lot to make the Maoists intelligible as a phenomenon, you are left wondering what to make of it all. She argues Maoists filled a political vacuum created by Kathmandu, they filled in where state structures were absent and were given political momentum by the astonishingly misdirected actions of the security forces. But there is possibly less acknowledgment than there ought to be that many Maoists have become an extortion racket in their own right, rather than a source of emancipation.

This book is most successful at a conveying a sense for what it means for a nation to lose its way. What is the truth of Nepal? This question haunts the book at many levels. At one level, this book is an act of recovery, trying to make more transparent all the complexity that has been rendered invisible by state hagiography, orientalist exotica and plain ignorance. At another level, its quest for truth is forward looking. What should Nepal be about? Thapa8217;s answer is clear: democracy. But whether this is more a declaration of her admirable and steadfast faith, or an accurate accounting of possibilities within Nepal only time will tell.