To better appreciate the Asia-wide impact of Nepal Picture Library, it is helpful to zoom out and observe two specificities. The first is the poisoned legacy between South Asian nations soldered by the British Empire, most familiar in the eighty years of border tensions between what Salman Rushdie called “midnight’s children”—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Separated peoples continue to enact history wars over border lines that some refuse to accept; this is manifested not only in the post-1947 Indian annexation of Kashmir and the decades of conflict that ensued, but also in the rupture of “two-wing” Pakistan into independent Bangladesh and reduced Pakistan. The toxin of disputed geographies spills into both Sri Lanka’s Tamil-Sinhalese civil war and into Myanmar, which has been pushing the Rohingya people into Bangladesh. The second aspect is the journey of the photographic image in South Asia, where technological limits and the rupture of events have led to collections of images being destroyed through neglect and subterfuge. This twinned context of neighbors as “intimate enemy”[1] and photography as a site of neglect inspired Nepal Picture Library to be a paradigm reset (for image, archive, and memory) that pushed against the vectors of antagonism and erasure.

Nepal has struggled with internal schisms that owe to both colonialism’s toxins and the effluence of postcolonial disappointment. From 1996 to 2006, Nepal was caught in a brutal civil war between the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the government. The Peace Accord signed in 2006 ended a period of death squad executions, massacres, kidnappings, and other war crimes. This internal war bore similarities to Maoist uprisings in northeast India, earlier uprisings of the Jumma people of Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, and the Mohajir Qaumi movement in Pakistan. In a subcontinent with multiple nations fighting against each other over British-drawn borders, internal minorities are subjugated to a degree matching what they faced under empire. The library project wanted to push back against this shared history of violence—the manifesto was to build a community memory and map of Nepalese peoples, cultures, and lives from collections of everyday snapshots that often recorded “unimportant people.” Through the dissemination of this project across Asia, the intent was also to push against the veil of ignorance about each other that fed border schisms and internal wars.

Photography archives, especially based on family and personal snapshots (the fragments that can make up national history), have often surfaced in environments where the state is actively destroying, or suppressing, official records. One practitioner is the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation, which was founded in 1997 by a group of Lebanese photographers. Within this archive is an explicit linkage to the region’s upheavals—thus, the collection may be of studio portraits, but there will be within that a Fedayeen soldier dressed in fatigues and carrying an unloaded gun. In contrast, Nepal Picture Library focused on collections that were quotidian and comprehensive. It was also a divergence from the first Nepalese project that we encountered in Bangladesh in the early 2000s. Designed by senior journalist Kunda Dixit, the 2009 project Nepal: A People’s War premiered with haunting images of Maoist guerrilla fighters in hiding.

Dixit’s People’s War came from a journalistic impulse to document “important” events (Sanjay Kak’s Witness: Kashmir 1986–2016 makes similar use of photographs). Nepal Picture Library proposed a different method—its co-founder NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, and supporting organization Photo Circle,[2] worked in a space of visual arts where photographs were a primary means of communication and exchange, especially in a South Asian context with many competing vernacular languages.[3] While Photo Circle and Photo Kathmandu established a reputation for showcasing beautiful photography, Kakshapati and her colleagues on the Library project built a database and living archive of everyday snapshots taken by families. The Collection began with this appeal, and has kept its resonance for ordinary Nepalese: “Do you have old family photos sitting in boxes, dusty and molding, close to destruction?”

While the initial call went out to everyone who may have personal snapshots, studio photographers are well represented, including Amrit Bahadur Chitrakar, Karuna Sthapit, Surendra Lawoti, Aata Husai Sheikh, Purna Bahadur Shrestha, and Ravi Mohan Shrestha. These images remind us of the Arab Image Foundation as well—both the variety and symmetry, in the way people pose for formal portraits with their families and loved ones. Posed portraits in front of staged backgrounds also come from personal home archives—the collections of Karuna Sthapit and Surendra Lawoti have many studio photographs, but they themselves are not studio photographers. Start delving into the Library’s searchable database (still a work in progress and in need of funds to make it truly comprehensive), and its thematic groupings reveal the beauty in the ordinary. “Politics” is one keyword, but far more numerous are the categories that matter to Nepalese across time—“Travel,” “Leisure,” “Fashion,” “Festivals,” and, for the union of the whole, “Weddings.” What does all this mean for a history of intertwined South Asia? This is where the open source, collaborative nature of Nepal Picture Library comes in. Their objective is to digitize and make available their full holdings online, with an invitation to researchers to dig through the collections, and from there write reports, make films, or give lectures based on the material. The library has been keen to not take on the authoritative “last word” on the meanings of these images. Rather they have left that to the viewer as a citizen-researcher.

I have mentioned the eroding condition of the archives in South Asia, accelerated by local climatic conditions, and also hostile state organs and officials. Writing about the destruction of the Bangladesh image archives, I wrote in 2012: “I asked the custodian where the originals were. The documents he had shown me were pristine yet distant, copies of copies. The originals are long gone, he explained. Every time there is a change in government, an official inevitably comes down to the storeroom and asks to see what is inside. With a tradition of abrupt and forced pala bodol, every state functionary assumes that nothing that came before his time will help his cause. Therefore, the safest path is to destroy all documents, which the official does with mechanical and unemotional efficiency.”[4] It is not only meddling bureaucrats that make records vanish, weather and related lifeforms also eat away (figuratively and literally) at the archive. An anthropologist researching the roots of the idea of “Islamic banking” recently posted a heart-breaking photograph from the National Archives of Bangladesh. The ledgers of the British Colonial administration were too far in the past to be sensitive or censored. But when she opened up bound volumes that had not been touched in a decade, a small rivulet of paper-eating worms spilled out—the ledgers were scarred by dozens of worm food channels across each page.

Such archives face rapid decay in South Asia, and Nepal Picture Library’s drive is to build a digital archive before materials are lost. There is an intensely urgent feel to the Library’s communications: “If you want to contribute your photographs to Nepal Picture Library, digitization and archiving facilities WILL NOT COST YOU a single rupee.” followed by “Please send us an email with your information and we will schedule a meeting as soon as possible. There is not a day to lose!” With this sense of urgency, Nepal Picture Library has become the repository for one of the largest image collections in Nepal within five years. Scanning from every vintage format, including glass plates, negatives, and printed photos, the current count is 120,000 images and growing. This spans 380 named collections (either after a photographer or a family), of which the largest are Sridhar Lal Manandhar Collection (9,000), Betty Woodsend Collection (6,000), Bikas Rauniar Collection (2,400), and the Amod Dev Bhattarai Collection (2,500). 

Working with citizen-researchers, the Library has begun to produce curated exhibitions, books, and standalone websites as visitors find new ways to think through what arrives as a “raw dump” of images. Gleaning a sprawling catalogue, Nepal Picture Library has published the books Facing the Camera—A History of Nepali Studio Photography and Juju Bhai Dhakhwa—Keeper of Memories. A key publication that aligns with the Library’s mission of fighting casteism, racism, and nationalism in South Asia is Dalit—A Quest for Dignity. This book collates photographs on Dalit (subaltern peoples within Hinduism’s caste system) resistance over six decades using archival photographs to “demand an accounting of obscured histories” and the “processes of inclusion and exclusion.” The commitment shown in Dalit expands further into a new project begun in 2019, which looks at the idea of “Indigenous Pasts, Sustainable Futures.” Through archive building and storytelling, the Library reimagines conversations around traditional knowledge systems, and indigenous ideas of futurity. Expanding from the book form, the online project The Skin of Chitwan looks at terrestrial change through images and sounds of personal memories of the past. 

One of the Library’s significant new projects, The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project,[5] came to Bangladesh in the form of a traveling exhibition, and I saw it again in Delhi at India Art Fair. Building from a public call put out in 2018, the project collected photographs, letters, diary entries, pamphlets, and other formal and informal records documenting the role women have played in Nepal’s contemporary history since the 1930s. It announced the challenge of a “past [that] needed to be freed from the grips of economically and culturally dominant groups.” Standing at 8,000 photographs two years later, it has brought a feminist history of Asia outside the familiar stories of work in domestic spaces to take in the full possibility of participation in public life. In a fast-evolving economic scenario, South Asian women are now in factories, offices, and organizations in unprecedented numbers. This dramatic increase in women’s public visibility, and men’s fears of losing space and power, has faced backlash across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The propaganda arm of that backlash has proposed that these jobs, and the necessity for women in those spaces, are “new,” “imported,” and in spite of a long history of local feminist organizing, “foreign.” The response to these intrigues is the Feminist Memory Project, which insists, we have always been here, and we won’t go back inside. 

Nepal is a vital nerve center in the fight to reclaim a common memory, against the dark centrifugal forces that drive people further apart. The future takes shape because of this sharp look back at where we came from—to understand where we go next.

Naeem Mohaiemen (b. London, works in Dhaka and New York) combines essays, films, photography, and installations to research socialist utopias, incomplete decolonization, shifting borders, unreliable memory, and family histories. He is author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta, forthcoming) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); co-editor (w/ Eszter Szakacs) of Solidarity Must be Defended (Tranzit/ Van Abbe/ Salt/ Tricontinental/ Asia Culture Institute, forthcoming); and co-editor (w/ Lorenzo Fusi) of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007). His work is in the permanent collection of Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum, London; and Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates. He was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a finalist for the 2018 Turner Prize. Naeem has a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and is currently Research Fellow at Heyman Center, Columbia University, and Senior Research Fellow (non-residential) at Lunder Institute of American Art, Colby College, Maine.