Ji ta Newa Bhyaa Mawa
I don’t know Nepal Bhasa.
I was born in Kathmandu to Newar parents, the original inhabitants of the Valley, yet I grew up without learning my mother tongue, Nepal Bhasa. My parents, with the best of intentions, taught us English and Nepali—languages of success and survival in a world that had set ours aside. They believed they were giving us a future. But in that choice, I lost more than words. A Newar without language, I felt alien in the very culture that was meant to be mine.
The quiet disappearance of Nepal Bhasa has been so normalized in daily life that I was shocked to find out it had entered UNESCO’s “definitely endangered” list. This slow, subtle and devastating loss has stretched across generations, affecting us in ways we are yet to fully grasp.
Our textbooks glorified the “unification” of Nepal by Prithvi Narayan Shah, concealing how his vision of Ek Bhasa, Ek Desh (One Language, One Nation) was achieved by erasing linguistic diversity. In a country of 123 languages, mine did not merely disappear—it was deliberately muted in the name of nation building.
I began to learn my language by asking my parents to teach me, and slowly, our relationship shifted. My father, a former coin-maker, counts money in Nepal Bhasa with me, joking that I might finally get a discount at the local shop. My mother, who had been pressured into using only Nepali after her marriage, lights up when I get a word right. I try to tread with care as a lifetime of pent up shame, anxieties and yearnings meet the fragile joy of learning.
No census counts the intimacy of a shared memory, the tenderness of language passed between generations, or the weight of an inherited silence.
The idea of progress brings with it conflicting impulses, promises of better futures shadowed by debilitating losses. These often invisible, unacknowledged, and unaccounted-for losses form the bedrock of the stories in this exhibition. For many of the storytellers, personal histories intersect with larger histories of development, nation building, political repression, and ecological destruction.
From Buipa to Manang, Jhumlawang to Jharuwarasi, Ramhiti to Kerabari, Thankot to Piskar, the sites of these stories span hills, forests, fields, and settlements. Land is a common refrain in these stories. It surfaces as memory, as belonging, as inheritance, as loss, as unhealed wounds. It appears in stories of extraction, speculation, waiting, and endurance.
How do we take stock of all the “collateral damage” that progress keeps depositing on our doorsteps, again and again? How do we unravel its fraudulence? How do we record what we have lost?
Storytelling becomes an act of remembering. Remembering becomes an act of resistance.
Presented as part of the second iteration of the photo.circle Fellowship Program, a six-month-long initiative designed to support our growing community of visual storytellers, this exhibition brings together eight practitioners examining what “bikas” and” samriddhi” mean for Nepali society. It invites deeper reflection on the questions, challenges, and contradictions around the modes of “development” and notions of “progress” being promoted in Nepal today.