Fragmented Land and Me
My ancestral home was in Jharuwarasi, within Godavari Municipality. After our ancestral house was destroyed in the 2015 earthquake, we built a new house on a small plot of land nearby and have been living there since. The area where my house was located started being called a ‘plotting’ area. It was a result of the rapidly expanding land trade that flourished after the earthquake. Even the land where my house stands was once farmland. To turn it into a plot, people brought soil from different places and filled it in. The sloping, fertile land has now been divided up. Our new house stands amidst these fragmented plots. I am looking at these fragmented lands from the windows of the second floor of this new house.
Many kinds of characters come to these barren lands every day. Sometimes various birds come to drink from the small artificial pond there; sometimes children come to play; and sometimes people use bulldozers to turn the land into farms and start planting rice. At times wild cats and jackals appear, and at others, bank employees and land brokers show up. This has been going on for the past 10 years, and I have been watching it unfold from the window of my room.
Despite the relentless flow of people coming here to buy and sell land over the past decade, no houses have yet been built. Those who leveled the sloping fields by forcefully filling them with soil hauled in from elsewhere forgot that part of the hillside would be lost in the process. As a result, the division of land here has never been quite right. This misshapen land feels like a stage where a cast of characters performs an ongoing act.
Perhaps this land and I are spectators to this drama.
All that the land holds
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.