Close-Up: Nepali Cinema — From Aama to Numafung
There is an ongoing search for a national cinema. How should
this national cinema be? That is the question, and there is
a search. (Pradeep Bhattarai: personal interview)
November 2003 was a particularly busy month for those of us
academically concerned with, or merely following developments
in Nepali cinema. Director Navin Subba had just returned from
screening his critically acclaimed film Numafung (A Beautiful
Flower, 2003) at the Vesoul International film festival, where
it received the public choice award. He was preparing to premiere
it for a general audience at the popular Biswojyoti cinema hall.
Over mid-afternoon din and Nanglo’s momos, Navin spoke
into my mini voice recorder. His voice was calm, and his vision
steady.
Another conversation took place during the same month with
Pradeep Bhattarai - in his own words, “Nepal’s one
and only Ph.D. holder in Cinema Studies”- at his day job
with an advertising agency in Kamaladi. The recorder was put
on ‘pause’ mode several times to drink chiya (tea),
while I tried to grasp the journey that Nepali cinema had made
from Aama in 1965 to Numafung in 2003 – from an era governed
by (Hindu) state nationalization, to democracy, privatization
and transnationalism, to its current moment when a future direction
is yet uncharted.
The following essay is a result of these two insightful interviews,
among others. It also involved reading press clips on Nepali
films and literature on Nepali history, politics, society, and
culture, and not to forget hundred of hours of watching Nepali
films.
Close Up: Aama (Mother, 1965) …Nationalization,
Modernization, and The State Cinema
Official Nepali film history begins in 1965 with the highly
patriotic film Aama (Mother, 1965). Produced by the Ministry
of Information under the aegis of the then King Mahendra, Aama
was clearly a nation-building tool. ‘Desh suhaodo
panchayati bewastha’ - love the Panchayat
system that suits our nation -was the message communicated to
a diverse national public divided along regional and ethnic
lines. The image of the mother, a universal symbol of national
unity, was used to forward themes of nationalization. Characters
in the film were dressed in distinct garbs of the nation –
men in daura suruwal and dhaka topi and women draped
in saree and cholo fariya.
In an effort to show this film throughout the country, state
personnel were sent from Kathmandu with projectors
and generators so that even remote, mountainous villages like
Solu Khumbu where there was no electricity and where national
laws had not yet penetrated Sherpa life fully (1)
could receive this national imagery projected onto their farm
walls. (2)
Seeing the need to develop a national film industry within
Nepal, King Mahendra’s government
established the Royal Nepali Film Corporation (RNFC) in 1972.
National monies were invested in studios for recording, dubbing,
and editing. The films produced regularly by the RNFC were documentaries
on visits of the King and other state authorities to various
parts of the country. (3) It
has for long been argued that in a country as ethnically, culturally,
and religiously diverse as Nepal, the King is the one true ‘symbol
of unity’ that binds this fragmented nation together.
(4) The various royal visits to communities
in remote parts of the nation were recorded in documentary films
produced by the RNFC, and shown to a community in another part
of the nation. This helped create what scholar Benedict Anderson
(1983) the ‘imagined community.’
However, cinematic representations created by the state during
this period attempted to create a ‘tunnel vision’
of national identity based solely on a Hindu core. The center
was clearly Hindu, and the films’ narratives, costumes,
and cultural messages aimed to project this to the periphery.
Some, such as Pradeep Bhattarai argues that the first Nepali
film D.B Pariyar’s Satya Harischandra, which was made
before Aaama but did not make it into the history books because
the film was made without the Hindu state’s blessings.
He claims that part of the reason is also because Pariyar was
of the low-caste domai jat with whom there was a system of pani
chaldaina – higher castes would not drink nor touch the
water touched by someone of his caste.
Close-Up: Maili (Third Daughter, 1993) …Cultural
Masquerade and The Commercial Cinema
1990 was the defining moment for all areas of Nepali life.
This was the year of the Jana Andolan (People’s
Revolution) whereby multiparty democracy system was restored
after thirty years of the single party Panchayat system.
The king no longer had direct political power but remained a
symbolic head. Economic liberalization and privatization was
the main feature of this new era, and the fledgling film industry
witnessed a dramatic change. The Royal Nepal Film Corporation
(RNFC), housed in the Balaju Industrial Complex along with other
state-run industries, was considered a ‘weak industry’
and opened for privatization. A group of producers and filmmakers
took over the corporation in 1993 and promptly renamed it the
Nepal Film Development Board (NFDB). The NFDB has been run like
a pasal (shop) - assessing the taste of the public and catering
to its demands – which has given birth to a film industry
in the real sense of the word. Following in the footsteps of
the world’s major film industries — Los Angeles’
Hollywood and Bombay’s Bollywood — Nepal’s
film industry was named after Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu;
Kollywood.
While films made previously blatantly forwarded stories that
represented a core Hindu national identity based in the caste
system, post-democracy films tried to reveal the fallacy of
such social hierarchical structures. Thus narratives of films
made immediately in the wake of the 1990 revolution expressed
a desire for an equitable social order. Caste and class differences
were conveniently ironed out through themes of love and friendship.
Maili (Third Daughter, 1993) the first cinemascope film to be
made in Nepal by the NFDB was based on a ‘true-life story’
about a romance between two socially polar opposites —
a half-orphaned ‘low-caste’ Magar girl, Maili, from
a poor family, and a wealthy city Brahmin boy, Prabhat, who
comes to Maili’s village in the guise of as road engineer
‘saab.’
Although expanded in terms of themes that include previously
disenfranchised groups such as ‘low caste’ ethnic
groups, commercial cinema can be reduced to any song and dance
routine typical of this cinema. In almost all the commercial
films, the background dancers are of different racial and ethnic
groups while the hero and the heroine are without fail of Hindu
stock. When the narrative calls for an ethnic protagonist, the
mainstream actors of Hindu Aryan features take to masquerade.
In Maili, the female protagonist is supposed to be of the Magar
ethnic group but Maili is played by Bipana Thapa, a popular
actress with distinct Brahmin features. In commercial cinema,
the ethnic is marginalized in the background whereas mainstream
actors are not only fore-grounded but can also masquerade as
ethnics.
Close-Up: Caravan/Himalaya (2000) …Transnational
Images of the Nepali Ethnic
Although circulating widely in the transnational circuit, ethnic
images have traditionally always been both the interest and
the domain of the west. If the west was not creating, it was
consuming it. Through longitudinal relationships with ethnic
groups, western anthropologists and image-makers and others
have ‘spoken’ for ethnic groups for several decades.
A clear example is seen in Himalaya (2000) – a directorial
debut for anthropologist turned filmmaker, Eric Valli, famed
for his work of people in Nepal’s remote corners –
such as the Honeyhunters and the Tharus.
Shot in the Dolpo region in far northwestern Nepal, most in
the film are local Dolpopas, many representing themselves onscreen.
So Thinle plays Thinle, the angry village chieftain who has
to lead a group of men over Meng La pass to bring salt from
Tibet. Although Dolpo is politically within Nepal, the Dolpopas
maintain distinct Tibetan-Buddhist cultural and religious practices
owing to their geographical and cultural proximity to Tibet.
Nomadic herders and salt traders, the Dolpopas have historically
had very little contact with the rest of Nepal because of the
sheer distance and lack of roads. The administrative center
too has little presence in Dolpo, as seen through a lack of
basic infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals.
Over the fifteen years Valli spent on and off in Dolpo, it
was precisely the fact that the Dolpopas were ‘untouched’
by modern civilization that intrigued Valli. He romanticizes
the ties of Dolpopas to their isolated and natural world when
he says in an interview for a San Francisco newspaper; ‘you
see people who live in harmony with nature, where the land that
Thinle has given to his son is the same that was given by his
ancestor.’ To Valli, the Dolpopas’ daily adventures
of survival are comparable to those in a Jack London novel,
a John Ford Western, or the ‘Last of the Mohicans.’
Thinle on the other hand, when asked why he participated in
the film, responded that it was important to do this film ‘before
the Dolpopas’ tradition melts like snow under the sun.’
In return for the Dolpopas’ participation in the film,
Thinle asked Vialli to send his son to school in Kathmandu and
build a school in Dolpo. I read this request for a school and
Thinle’s reason for participating in the film as a response
typical of an ethnic minority group living in physical, cultural,
and political isolation within a nation-state framework.
The Sherpas of Solu Khumbu in far northeastern Nepal made similar
requests to the Sir Edmund Hillary after his conquest of Mt.
Everest in 1958. They asked him to send children to school in
Kathmandu and build a school in Solu Khumbu so that they could
be linked to their country’s economic and political structure
in the future. For both Sherpas and Dolpopas, this desire to
be linked to the center comes from a re-alignment of their political
destinies with the state of Nepal. The westerner’s fascination
with their remote mountain life merely became a way to negotiate
their identity and destiny with the Nepali social, economic
and political center.
Close-Up: Numafung: A Beautiful Flower (2003) …A
Search For a True National Nepali Cinema
The film tells the story of a girl, Numafung, of the Limbu
community who is married off twice to men of her parents’
choice. When her second husband, Girihang, turns out to be an
alcoholic who does not hesitate to beat her when he feels like
it, Numa flees his hold. This leaves Numa’s family at
the mercy of Girihang, who had paid a sunauli rupauli (bride
price) to Numa’s parents prior to the wedding. According
to Limbu tradition, Numa’s parents must now pay three
times the original bride price.
The film was shot on location in a rural village of Pashtar
district predominantly inhabited by Limbu ethnic community and
both actors and non-actors are employed to play the film’s
characters, giving the whole project a sense of un-melodramatic
realism.
Numafung is made partly in the ethnic Limbu language but mostly
in the national Nepali language – the older generation
speak in Limbu and the younger generation reply in Nepali -
depicting the reality of most ethnic groups in Nepal. The film
thus actively seeks to have a three-way dialogue - between an
international audience and the Limbu community and between the
Limbu community and national Nepali society – by reaching
three levels of viewing public; the international festival market,
the national audience, and the local ethnic group on which the
film is based.
Numafung is thus not only a milestone in the history of Nepali
cinema, but also in the project of redefining/rethinking/re-imagining
Nepali national identity. It is an attempt to re-conceptualize
what constitutes ‘national’ for Nepalis.
During a personal interview, director Navin Subba expressed
that there were two main reasons behind making Numafung. The
first was to represent minority ethnic groups in the national
sphere and the second was to create a cinematic form that can
be recognized as distinctly Nepali. In essence, he was asking
that Numafung although based on an ethnic minority group be
considered a ‘national’ film that can hold a mirror
up to other ‘national’ cinemas.
In thinking about a distinct Nepali form, the film’s
story, broken up into fragments seen from the point of view
of Numafung’s sister, could be treated as a thangka painting
in which various fragmented incidents make up the whole painting.
Or perhaps some attention could be paid to the rhythm created
by the editing. A subtle pattern in the editing – four
close ups and one extreme long shot –can be likened to
the familiar rhythm of a madal which can perhaps create a ‘Nepali
rhythm.’ ‘Although it is difficult to decide how
form is made, perhaps in the way that one can recognize Japanese
cinema and Iranian cinema, one can also recognize Nepali cinema.’
(Subba, personal interview)
Despite the international exposure, Numafung did not play to
packed theaters as had been hoped. While commercial filmmakers
say this is because Nepali films with ethnic subjects are not
commercially viable, Bhattarai attributes its lukewarm reception
to the fact that the Nepali public, ‘fed with an overdose
of Aryan faces and Aryan stories is not ready to accept a Pavitra
Subba or a Ojhang in leading roles.’ (Bhattarai, personal
interview) Meanwhile, filmmakers like Navin Subba are accused
by mainstream society of toeing the ethnic line. Ethnic activists
and community members, on the other hand, claim that Subba has
betrayed the ethnic sentiment by catering his films to the larger
mainstream society. Such is the dilemma of the Nepali ethnic
filmmaker!
While international film festivals accept films like Numafung
to be a ‘national’ Nepali film, the debate inside
Nepal is centered on the separation of Nepali films into two
categories; commercial cinema and alternative cinema. Films
made in the Bollywood tradition would be considered commercial
cinema while films made outside this tradition would be considered
alternative cinema.
At this point we can imagine two possible futures for Nepali
cinema. In the first, films made by ethnic directors and/or
in ethnic languages will become the alternative cinema, which
ironically will represent the nation in the global film circuit.
Commercial cinema will continue in the pre-charted path set
by cinema holding the view of the state in which national representation
remains forever problematic. If indeed in future Nepali films
are separated into these categories, commercial and alternative,
it is foreseeable that the trends described in this essay will
continue without ever converging.
Alternatively, a second possible scenario is one in which filmmakers
work towards building an image-life rather than fragmenting
it. This would require opening up of the fixed definition of
what constitutes ‘national’ – both in filmmaking
as well as in other major areas of Nepali life. This would result
not only in the inclusion of those marginalized in the national
life, but also move away from the blatant imitation of the Bollywoodian
formula of five song sequences interspersed with three fight
and two rape scenes. Nepalis might finally have a cinema they
can truly call their own.
Kesang Sherpa graduated from Yale University in May 2004,
where she majored in Film Studies, and Ethnicity, Race, and
Migration Studies. This essay is part of a larger essay titled
‘Un/Re-Imagining National Nepali Cinema’ which
won the Howard R. Lamar prize for the best senior essay in
the Film Studies Department, Yale University.
1. Many (Pradhan et al.) argue that Sherpas who lived very
geographically isolated from the administrative center did
not come under the direct impact of national laws like, for
example, the national civil codes. (back)
2. Personal conversation with former fight choreographer,
L.G Khambachhe, New York City, March 2003. (back)
3. Spotlight, Vol 20: No 07, August 17-2000, Interview with
Producer and Director, Yadav Kharel. (back)
4. This historically held view is expressed in contemporary
times as the nation struggles to come to terms with political
dis-unification owing to a longer and more chaotic experiment
in multiparty democracy. King Birendra who was made politically
inactive following the 1990 people’s revolution and
reinstatement of democracy, was often called upon by the public
and sometimes by political parties to mediate in party politics
and the Maoist insurgency. (back)
