In The Land of Manjushri and Pashupati

I am finally back from Nepal. Did I miss anything while I was away?

Bhaktapur Durbar Square, just before sunrise

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As my readers may have noticed, I haven’t been here for a while. That’s because I’ve been in Nepal, and I purposefully declined to bring my computer along, taking the opportunity of the trip to step back a bit from being on line. (I did take my phone, so I wasn’t completely disconnected.) I spent about a week in the Kathmandu Valley and about a week in the Annapurna Conservation Area, traveling the whole while with Music Arts Adventures. Add in travel time, including missing my connection returning through Doha, and time to adapt to the time change both ways, and I’ve been absent from this newsletter for about three weeks—my longest absence since directing my film last year.

So first and foremost, I greatly appreciate your commitment to sticking with me while I was away. And I sincerely hope you don’t all decide to pack up and leave now that I’ve returned.

I have a handful of thoughts about the trip that I’ll share in a moment, but first I want to say that I had a wonderful time. That’s partly because Nepal is a lovely place: fascinating history and culture, unbelievable landscape, and extraordinarily nice people. Great food too! I didn’t see nearly enough of the country given how long I was there, and it’s a testament to how much I enjoyed at that I’m therefore tempted to go back. But in part I had such a good time because the trip was unlike any other I’ve been on, for one simple reason. Tara Linhardt, the woman who runs Music Arts Adventures and leads the tours, is a Bluegrass musician from Virginia who has lived and studied in Nepal, and her intention with the tours is to bring other Bluegrass musicians to Nepal to introduce them to Nepali folk music, and to bring non-musicians along to introduce them to both. I was in the non-musician category, and I can attest first, that “Himalachian fusion” music is pretty cool (here’s a good example, a band we got to hear and meet called Himalayan Highway), and, second, that everyone should travel with a bunch of Bluegrass musicians. If nothing else, it makes waiting in an airport a whole lot more fun than usual:

A bunch of Bluegrass musicians were also the perfect ambassadors to Nepal because the America they represent is so different from the America that America presents to the world, and so much more congruent with what Nepal presents itself to be. I was struck, over and over on the trip, by how alive the traditional religious culture of Nepal is—there are shrines everywhere, and they are used extensively. Indeed, just about every doorstep is marked by the signs of morning puja. I was also struck by how much art is everywhere—for sale, of course, because a major business of the country is tourism, but also in use by locals, such as the ubiquitous artfully carved wooden doors and doorframes and windows, more elaborate in the older parts of the city but also present in the newer parts and in the countryside. A group of people who make their own music in a traditional style, carrying their traditional instruments with them, just seemed more in tune with that world than, well, than I would have on my own.

I really do wonder, though, how long that world will be there. Nepal is still very poor, and the widespread presence of traditional arts and crafts and religious practices, their integration into everyday life, felt very much of a piece with the country’s poverty, because they are labor-intensive and therefore their ubiquity is a reflection of the low cost of labor. If Nepal’s economy, long dominated by small-farm-based agriculture and heavily dependent on remittances, starts to follow the proven growth trajectory of export-led development, the cost of labor will rise and the culture, inevitably, will change to suit the demands of market efficiency. There were already plenty of signs of that change, reflected in the fact that the musicians and artists we were interacting with were already aware that they were going to have to preserve a culture, because they could not count on its getting passed on organically.

But preservation, while far preferable to abandonment and loss, is never quite the same thing as simply living. Perhaps Nepal will chart a development path that aims to leverage what makes them special, and will wind up something like New Mexico—far more prosperous and developed than it is today (though poorer than its neighbors), and turning its physical, cultural, spiritual and artistic distinctiveness into an asset. That would still mean evolving into a more self-consciously presentational version of itself. And they’d be presenting, substantially, to us, to the tourists.

Whether they’re going there or more in the direction of export-led development and rapid cultural change, I’m glad I got to go there before the transition is complete. I’m especially glad I got to do it in a context that felt much more like an exchange and less like an extraction. I hope, sincerely, that the Nepalis find a way to square the circle, to grow and thrive and live and be active agents in the world and also to hang on to so much of what struck me as special about the place. I wish I knew better how to that’s done.

(The title of this post, by the way refers to two stories of the origin of the Kathmandu Valley. According to Hindu mythology, Pashupati, an incarnation of Shiva, first settled in the Kathmandu Valley as a deer because of its extraordinary beauty, and charged a Hindu sage named Ne with protecting the valley; Nepal’s name, according to this story, derives from the name of the sage. According to Buddhist mythology, Kathmandu Valley was originally a lake filled with serpents until the Bodhisattva Manjushri came, saw a beautiful lotus flower in the middle of the lake, and drained it. The flower became the Swayambhunath Stupa. The Pashupatinath Temple and Swayambhunath Stupa are both must-see landmarks of the Kathmandu Valley. Among the many charming things about Nepal is the easygoing tolerance, often extending to syncretism, between its Hindu majority and its Buddhist minority.)