Permanent and Passing: Informal Squatter Settlements
As a kid, I once went to the Nepal Electricity Authority office at Chabahil to pay the electricity bill. People were standing in line, paying their bills in turn. When it was my turn, I handed the electricity bill card to the staff member. He glanced at the card and said, “Thai-asthai? What’s this Thai-asthai? That’s quite a name!” (In Nepali, “Thai” means permanent and “Asthai” means temporary.)
As it turned out, the card had a different name written on it—Thai-asthai Lama.
At that time, I was not really concerned about what “Thai-Asthai” meant. My grandfather’s name was on the card, after all.
Now that I think about it,
why did Grandfather have to come here
and build a shack on government land?
Why did he have to change his name?
What was he hoping for?
And why did they call him a “sukumbasi”—a landless squatter?
I had the opportunity to talk with Som Bahadur Tamang, the first chairman of my community committee, about some old stories of my grandfather. When he asked Grandfather what “thai-asthai” (permanent–temporary) meant, Grandfather gave an even more puzzling reply:
“The sun rises in the east — thai!
It sets in the west — asthai!
So there you have it — thai-asthai! That’s it!”
I was born in Kathmandu. I grew up among the paddy fields, the Bagmati River, the forests, temples, and stupas of this city. I lived within its culture and traditions. Amidst various political and social upheavals, I kept pressing forward to safeguard my existence, my history, and the promise of the future.
The shack my grandfather built has now become a concrete house. The settlements and neighborhoods turned into a city before our very eyes, yet our identity remained the same — “sukumbasi”, the landless squatters.
There are 133 households in our Ramhiti settlement. The area we inhabit is not recorded on the land survey maps of the Nepal Government’s Land Reform and Revenue Office. Grandfather’s name was Thai-Asthai Lama — a distinctive name that perhaps reflected how he could never fully claim his own home, society, or community, nor ever attain his civil right to a secure residence.
From birth to birth certificate,
From funeral rites to death registration,
From the ward office to the metropolitan hall,
From the Prime Minister’s office to the Land Reform Commission,
From the Panchayat era to the dawn of the Republic,
From party affiliations to the path of independence.
After the Gen Z uprising, the country is now charting a new path. In the government and policies to come, will there finally be a resolution for communities like ours — the “Thai-Asthai” people?
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.