The best, and first book that anyone should read, on Nepal. I wish I had read this as soon as I had arrived in Kathmandu, it would’ve helped me understand the politics and history much quicker. Manjushree Thapa is a brilliant writer, no less so in her non-fictional works than in her fiction. Forget Kathmandu begins with the infamous 2001 massacre of almost the entire Nepali royal family (including the king), and ends in the midst of the Maoist insurgency in Western Nepal in 2003. The essays in between are all attempts at explaining contemporary Nepal–both to explain it to others, and for Thapa herself to come to terms with the chaos and instability of her country. Much of this book is akin to her novel The Tutor of History, in its elegant style as well as its vigorous, political content.
An admirable and unusual characteristic of Thapa’s writing (here and elsewhere) is her owning of her bourgeois urban privilege. When she travels, in 2003, into the heart of the Maoist insurgency, she admits her background that enables her to make the judgments she does, far removed from the realities of Nepal’s rural working class, yet she doesn’t apologise for it. There is a fine balance to be struck–between an over-compensatory liberal guilt, and an arrogant dismissal of the ‘masses’–and Thapa does it perfectly. She strongly disagrees with the Maoists, particularly their violent and disruptive tactics, yet concedes that if she were an uneducated young peasant woman, she, too, would have been drawn to the movement. Thapa’s bewilderment at everything that is happening in her country around her could come across as naive or self-indulgent in a lesser writer, but her anger, her deep knowledge of politics and the centuries-long inequities of Nepal turns what could be a book of catharsis into something so much more important.
Forget Kathmandu, though several years old now, is certainly not outdated. The events recounted here are important for Nepal’s history (and its present) and Thapa’s speculations as to what could happen to Nepal are still largely relevant today–things are far from decided, here. Yes, parliamentary democracy has been reinstated, and a fairly successful election was held this past November. But democracy here is young, and there is still no constitution (successive Constituent Assemblies have failed to produce anything) and here the country is, six years later, treading water. The subtitle of Forget Kathmandu is An Elegy for Democracy, and in the years since the book first appeared, that subtitle could very well have become A Eulogy for Democracy. This updated edition, published in 2013, includes updated paratexts, but in 2011 Thapa produced another book to follow the story. The symmetry is clear and jolting: the final essay in Forget Kathmandu is called ‘The Massacres to Come’, and this newer book The Lives we Have Lost. I started that immediately after finishing Forget Kathmandu, to complete the picture.
