The relationship between Parvati (left), and her husband’s first wife (right), was a very loving one, almost like that between a mother and a daughter. At the age of 12 Parvati had been married off to an already married man much older than her. For long, the man and his first wife had been unable to have children. So the couple thought of Parvati as a blessing. This woman acted as Parvati’s guide, says Shah, Parvati’s niece. Parvati would say, ‘The love that I did not get from my mother, I got from my husband’s first wife’. Parvati would wake up in the morning, and her husband’s first wife would bring her a glass of sweetened milk. She would say, “This is so that you can grow big and strong and bear healthy children.” Parvati did not go back to her parents’ house in Rautahat for 12 years after her marriage: her husband’s first wife would not allow it. She said that Parvati was better off with her, that she would grow stronger, healthier. In those 12 years, she gave birth to two children. Her return to Rautahat afterwards was a complete celebration.
Theme: Photographs of Friendship
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“I used to love watching movies, noting the latest trends, dressing up and then going to a photo studio to take pictures!” Sandhya Shah says. This is a photo taken at the Timla Photo Studio in Birgunj before she was married. She is wearing a ready-made sweater that she had bought, and the kind of long skirt that was very fashionable at the time. As the eldest daughter of a rich business man in Rautahat, she was allowed to go anywhere she wanted, do anything she wanted, and buy all the clothes she wanted. But Shah’s family background isolated her. Boys did not have the courage to talk to her, and the girls had neither the freedom nor the means to join her in her travels to Birgunj, Raxaul or Kathmandu, to dress in the latest fashion, or watch the latest movies with her. People around her probably thought that her father gave her too much freedom, but he did not care – he trusted her, and Shah remains very grateful for this. “He gave me freedom, and I made sure that I did nothing to dishonour him. I respected him greatly”.
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My aunt Laxmi stares into the pond and my mother, Sandhya, stands guard behind her. They were very close, as can be guessed from this picture, taken in 1976 at Godavari Kunda. Godavari was a sanctuary for them – a place where the two sisters could be on their own and nobody would complain or nag them. They lived in Gabahal and it would take them an hour to get there but the distance never stopped them. My aunt always spent her weekends at Godavari. My mother tagged along and tried to soothe her. Their alcoholic father caused so much chaos in the family that they were having serious financial problems. My mother remembers how sad they were the day this picture was taken. “I don’t want to talk about it,” my aunt would always say. She would spend hours in silence, contemplating her reflection in the pond. She enjoyed watching the fish swim about freely, and envied them. The fish would dive and dart around and my aunt could do nothing but stare at them, sometimes crying uncontrollably. She felt chained. She must have felt like she was drowning in waves of self-pity. Her sombre expression hints at just how melancholic she was, just how desperately she sought freedom and independence.
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Each member of the graduating class of 1966 from Thakur Ram Campus, Birgunj, received a copy of this photo. Of the nine new graduates, one refused to have it framed and hung on the wall of her house. Vidya Pradhan, the only female graduate, simply walked back with the photo tucked away in her bag. “We were one of the first to graduate and we were very proud of that fact,” she says. “Everybody was very excited, they were talking about the photo during the graduation ceremony. Most of my friends said they would frame it and preserve it.” But Vidya only wanted to keep the photo somewhere she would not be reminded of her struggle to become a graduate. “My father was not totally against education but preferred us to stay close to home,” she says. “He wanted us closer to the walls of our house. We had to struggle a lot to break through that wall.” “The last thing I wanted to do was to hang my graduation photo on it.”
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This is a photograph of my aunt Lalita Raj Gurung (third from right) – now married and named Laila Sanhulla – with her Senior Cambridge classmates. The photo was taken during a Loreto Convent social in Darjeeling, circa 1961. The girls are standing on stage to perform a song for their friends. Lalita bari – as I call my aunt – is wearing the traditional Nepali phariya cholo with the mujethro shawl hand tailored in silk and crepe, as her friends wear saris or western outfits. My grandmother, herself educated by missionary nuns, encouraged her daughters to take pride in wearing their traditional Nepali attire, despite educating them in English speaking convent schools. At the time it was considered prestigious to follow the English language and culture. My aunt later went on to marry my Uncle who is Malaysian, and now lives with him and their two children in Malaysia. She says it saddens her that she is not in touch with a single one of her friends from this photograph.
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This picture was taken in the late 1970s, in Singapore, where Bhimi Gurung (right) was the wife of a Gurkha policeman, R. B. Gurung. They had just moved to the small two-bedroom apartment seen here. The TV was a prized possession: Bhimi and RB’s daughter, Muna, remembers many photos with people posing next to this same television set. The photographer was someone else from the Gurkha community, a man who had his own camera, and was frequently invited from one home to another to capture the lives of other Nepalis. Bhimi’s and Aunty’s (left) matching outfits tell the story of their friendship, and the trend at the time for friends to dress alike. If one woman had a particular outfit or item of jewelry, her friends would try to get the same. Just before this photo was taken, R. B. had won a lottery. The prize wasn’t huge – somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand Singapore dollars – but at the time, it was a significant enough for R. B. to stay awake all night with the excitement of winning. Bhimi had always wanted a necklace like the one her friend had, so from his newly won riches, R. B. bought her this gift.
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Women spent most of their time raising the children. According to Shrestha, the children felt more comfortable with their mothers and aunts. “We were afraid to ask our fathers when we needed something,” he says.
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At the time when this photo was taken, women were forbidden from enrolling in nursing programmes. Many SLC graduates would enroll at Patan Multiple Campus in the Humanities stream, most of them majoring in Home Science. The women in this photo belonged to that majority. “We were the smartest ladies of our batch and we were always perfectly dressed in our pink saris,” Gyandu Pandey (third from left) recounts. This picture, taken at Patan’s Purna Studio around 1984, reminds Pandey of her youthful days and her campus life. She and her friends, 2nd-year IA students, were posed by the photographer. “He made us cross our hands for uniformity,” she remembers. Going to campus made Pandey feel very prestigious. She was a studious young woman and was the only child in her family who passed with second division in SLC. Most of her friends had failed the exam. “I don’t know why, but I always wore a gold chain when I went to college. I’d ask my aunt for it – it was hers, but I loved it. The watch probably belongs to my sister or aunt,” she says. “After getting marred immediately after my IA, my life changed. There weren’t many ways of communicating in those days and I lost touch with all of these friends,” Gyanu says with sadness.
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This is among the very few photographs of my mother’s friends, all of whom were married off young into villages at least half a day away, if not half a few days’ walk removed from their parental village, and the support of their friends. The Nepali woman’s lot was to be cut off from everything familiar at a young age, to be sent to slave away in households where they were often no more than chattel to work the fields. More than family, friends were lost: this severance must have added to the loneliness and despair of a young woman reduced to mere property, bereft of voice. At least, the joys of unexpected and rare reunions like this rekindled old friendship, and allowed daughters and sisters and wives to exist outside the parameters so strictly drawn by a patriarchal system.
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A shopkeeper from Gorkha Bazaar who was traveling to Kuringhat, Ghanashyam was Adhikari’s friend and photography guru. Adhikari had joined him with his Yashica A camera to promote his own roaming photo studio. The girl was from Kuringhat Bazaar. Ghanshyam and Adhikari were just having fun, teasing Gurung women. Adhikari says he doesn’t know where the girl is now.