Tender
I have been seeing the nature of my village changing day after day. The stones I used to play with are disappearing, the forests I used to see are thinning, hills bigger than the roads are falling everywhere, while the streams are disappearing, the rivers are getting bigger. It seems to me—how does change seek to transform the natural form into a new one? Is change just the arbitrary expansion of roads, buildings and markets? Or is it a process that takes us further away from our connection with nature?
No matter how beautiful my village was, living a traditional lifestyle, it was considered incomplete until it was touched by modernity. My village is located in the Chure-Bhawar area of the former Yangshila (Kerabari Rural Municipality), which lies between the Mahabharata and the Terai. These stones, rivers and forests were not just objects for me, they were the basis of life and culture. We grew up with them, we lived as a part of them.
While I am constantly being told that I should leave the village for a brighter future, and if possible, leave the country, I am repeatedly returning to my own village. I am looking at the appearance of my village that I knew before and the appearance it has today.
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.