Panchardobato
Panchardobato, a village in Buipa, Khotang had a tradition of holding a fair every 15 days since 2025 BS (1968). Nowadays, there is a market every Friday. There used to be a big banyan tree in the middle of the market. Now, that tree is gone.
There is our ancestral burial ground on the hill above the market. Now, a 110 feet high statue of Yalambar, the first Kirat king who ruled 5 thousand years ago, has been erected here, destroying hundreds of tombs. Locals continued to oppose the construction of the statue but it didn’t stop.
In the Kirati community, a tomb is not just a stone and earth structure to bury the dead, it’s a sacred place for ancestors. There is a Mundum belief that a dead body “is not dead but moved to another place”. My grandmother’s tomb was almost destroyed during the road construction. Fortunately, my father saved her tomb. Destroying our ancestors’ tombs means erasing our very existence.
Is it a necessity to erect monuments on the pretext of preserving our cultural customs and traditions?
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.