Witnessing Sanjaya*

I met sons, daughters, wives, husbands, mothers, and fathers who could not find answers or mourn the chasm the Civil War left behind. There were groups of widows whose husbands fought against each other – mourning the void that looked, felt, and hurt the same – the victims of a war they did not choose. In Nepal, the situation is made worse by the legal requirement that a person must be missing for 12 years to be declared dead. During this period, family members cannot move on, sell property, remarry, or perform funeral rites. Until they obtain adequate proof of death, relatives live with guilt.[3]

Here are three experts of the stories I witnessed:
A story of a father: Ahmad, a father, husband, and a tailor by trade in south-central Nepal near the Indian Border. The village's local Maoists and Maoist sympathizers suspected he was a government informant. Many of these Maoists and Maoist sympathizers were people he knew and were his neighbors. He was ambushed and blindfolded, and masked Maoists smashed his shinbone and ankle with a sledgehammer. After many surgeries and debts, he could not repay; his wounds were still fresh and bleeding seven years after the war was over.
A story of a young son and a mother: Maoist guerrillas ambushed an army post in a small highway town in southwest Nepal. Many army members and Maoists died in that ambush, as did a thirteen-year-old boy. Maya's only son, he was energetic, full of life, and hopeful for Dhanmaya’s old days. He was playing when he died in the crossfire. She was paid a small sum in compensation, which her relatives promptly swindled. Now surviving on less than $2/day, all she has are the memories of her son that she cannot let go.
A story of a partner and a friend: During the height of the civil war, the general population living outside of the protected realm of the capital had to live with threats from both the Maoists and the Army. While in the field, Sita and her friend were interrogated under suspicion of being Maoist sympathizers, and then they were gang-raped by the Army. Sita and her friend’s bodies were left in a shallow stream to seem like they drowned. Her decomposing body was found after 30 days—the proof of her existence: her citizenship card.

War, when it ends, it is up to those who are left behind to pick up the pieces. Those who pushed them to war, the politician, the government, and those who stood on the sideline – they move on. But the void created by the fog of war and the scar left by the violence stays in the collective psyche for years to come.

These absences become real when witnessed through memory and/or in the story. Those who died do not speak for themselves; there is a need for a translation, mediation, or interpretation between the language of images and stories, the language of objects, and that of people.[4]

My work is mediated acts of witnessing physical and political violence through the stories of the victims and the stories embodied in materials, objects, images, and space – visible and invisible. These works invoke rituals of memorialization, as mediated and permeated through materials (ritual pigment, salt, muslin, felt, velvet, wood, paper, video, projections, plaster, resin, ritual incense, etc.) referencing the socio-political and cultural body. They exist to open a dialogue as a crucible to memorialize absences. The forms and materials relate to memories of victims witnessed through stories, referencing the significance of these encounters.  Drawing upon memories rooted in political upheavals and absences, of making the past present, of making memory into matter, of making memory matter, even if it is a matter of representing an embodied and mediated experience. These experiences of war are often marked by a sense of displacement, of evoking experiences not only taking place in the past at a temporal distance but also experiences marked by a great physical distance from their place of origin, a longing that marks any sense of belonging to a place.[5] Absence is not just a mark, a body, but something more: a consciousness, a self-reflection, remembering, transcending, experiencing presence, a cosmic perception, or even a self-housed in aesthetic contemplation that can be experienced by witnessing silently.[6]

We know the events of the war in Kurukshetra, or the Bhagavad Gita in the Mahabharata, through Sanjaya’s vision; otherwise, we are as blind as King Dritarashtra. Sanjaya’s vision and narration of the war are embodied and mediated, as his narration ends with the phrase “Mati Mama…h,” meaning “in my opinion.” Without mediated experience, the embodied experience and the narrative have no meaning, since the narrative has a temporal consequence. The act of witnessing a story is the sensation of time collapsed into layers of embodied contemplation.

The history of humanity is a history of violence and absence.

Binod Shrestha

[1] International Committee of the Red Cross, 2011 (Nepal Red Cross Society)
[2] Missing person in Nepal, Nepal Red Cross Society, 2011.
[3] Ibid
[4] Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman, Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics, Frankfurt: 2011, Sternberg Press.
[5] Alter to Alterity, Kevin Richard
[6] Ibid

(From the presentation on the panel The Global Art of War, @ Crossroads, 2023 SECAC Conference, Richmond, VA; Chaired by Dr. Margaret Richardson and Dr. Rebecca Wolf, Christopher Newport University.)

*During the Kurukshetra War in the Mahabharata, Dhritarashtra, the blind king, was offered a gift of vision (by Vyāsha); he refused. However, he said he would listen to a trusted person describe the war. Vyāsa granted Sanjaya the gift of vision. Thus, Sanjaya is the voice through which we witness the war in the Mahabharata (and the Bhagavad Gita).

Fast forward to the 20th century in 1989-1991, the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall and Tiananmen Square were pivotal in the desire for democracy across the world. Operation Desert Storm was the first televised war we witnessed in our living room. An astonishing embodying experience that is common these days.

In the winter and early spring of 1990, Nepal’s democratic opposition parties, known as the United Left Front (ULF), organized citizens, students, and shopkeepers against one of the world’s last divine monarchies. In the ensuing protest movement, from February through April 1990, dozens of people were killed in clashes and mass marches at the monarch’s palace in Kathmandu.

Soon after, the deteriorating law and order created a political vacuum ripe for conspiracy and violence. Neighborhoods were patrolled by local youth wanting to protect, but also conducting vigilante justice – and on April 23, 1990, in the chaos of confusion and conspiracy, ten people, as suspected counterrevolutionaries, were beaten to death. The movement in 1990 succeeded, bringing a constitutional monarchy and multiparty democracy, until corruption and another political crisis interrupted it. However, the price was steep; demonstrators were killed near the Royal Palace – for this dawn of democracy. After four prime ministers in five years and squabbling among political parties, Nepal plunged into political turmoil again. The events I witnessed left an indelible mark on my psyche as an individual and as an artist.

In 1996, the communist party went underground to pick up arms after the ruling party promptly rejected their demands and started a crackdown on suspected communists, which became Nepal's full-blown Maoist Civil War. It lasted for ten years. The Civil War between 1996 – 2006 took 17,800 lives; 1,383 are still missing[1]. Since the end of the Civil War and the rejection of the monarchy, no one has yet been held accountable for the atrocities committed in the war on either side. The agony of uncertainty has not yet ended, and people have not begun mourning the loss of a husband, mother or father, son or daughter, brother or sister. [2] Ironically, the Maoist Party is one of Nepal's governing parties.

This is also the story of Durga Thapa — one of the participants in the protest against the monarchy in 1990 and again in 2006. Her iconic 1990 photo (taken by Min Ratna Bajracharya, with a double victory sign) symbolized hope for democracy, which still seems out of reach. Nepal, landlocked between China and India, is a geopolitical playground for the United States, India, and China. In many ways, democracy in Nepal is not for the people, by the people, but a pawn in a strategic game of influence and resources; its leaders' corruption only makes it harder for its people. 

I have since witnessed the socio-political strife in Nepal from a distance and with empathy through the lens of the ‘Global War on Terror’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ amid emotional and socio-political conversation in my adopted country – mediated through the news, television, talking heads, social media, stories, and friendship.

The journey is surreal; the act of witnessing, however, is real.

Photo by Min Ratna Bajracharya, April 9, 1990.