The Land Remembers Our Name
Though iron mining hasn’t started in Jhumlawang, East Rukum, yet, the Department of Mines and Geology has confirmed the presence of iron ore in its lush green hills. According to locals, a Kathmandu-based private company has won the bid at 43 crore Nepali rupees. If the project indeed takes off, a majority of the Jhumlawang households will have to be evacuated.
When I first heard the news about Nepal’s biggest iron mining project, I believed it would end our dependence on foreign steel. This seemed like something that would benefit all citizens. However, my optimism vanished after reading about a local resident’s fears for his village’s future. For most residents, this project will strip them of everything precious. Not only will they lose their houses, land, and forests, but their roots, culture, and autonomy are also at stake. How can this project be considered of national benefit when it forces the very people it should serve to live in fear of their future?
What is unfolding in Jhumlawang reflects a troubling but familiar pattern. Economic development exploits the natural resources of native and indigenous communities. Such projects may boost GDP and corporate profits, but they rarely improve the lives of the people whose land is being extracted from.
The people of Jhumlawang are waiting. They’re watching their future being decided by others, knowing that no amount of compensation can replace what they call home. This work reflects the uncertainty felt by the local people about their village’s future.
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.