A Royal Transformation
By Samrat Upadhyay
When I was growing up in Kathmandu in the 70s, the image of the royal family was always carefully managed. My school textbooks extolled the virtues of the one-party Panchayat system and portrayed voices of dissent as unpatriotic, even treasonous. Our national anthem spoke of an ageless king, with scant mention of the people’s aspirations. King Mahendra became a highly regarded poet, writing heartbreaking songs about his love for his nation and his people. Our queens wore their hair in bouffant, attended charity functions and often adopted causes like literacy for women. Radio Nepal, after the early morning hymns, somberly repeated the monarch’s aspirational sayings. King Tribhuvan, Mahendra’s father, was described as liberating Nepal from the century-long Rana oligarchy. The monarch was more than a king—he was a spiritual figure who not only hovered above the mortals but also united their diverse cultures, languages and politics.
During those years, I attended a Jesuit-run school in Kathmandu and was more interested in Neil Young and The Grateful Dead than in politics. I didn’t buy into all that manufactured reverence for the crown. My house in Lainchour was two blocks from the Royal Palace, and every time my friends and I walked past it, we suppressed our urges to laugh out loud, or to wink subversively at the guards. But there was no question in my mind that the palace, and therefore the king, was a permanent fixture of my country … and of my neighborhood. The formal, long-sounding names of the kings were deeply engrained into my psyche: Shreepanch Maharajadhiraj Prithvinarayan Shah Dev, Shreepanch Maharajadhiraj Girvanya Yuddha Bir Bikram Shah Dev, Shreepanch Maharajadhiraj Tribhuvan Bir Bikram Shah Dev.
The solemnity of these names received its first blow in 2001 when Crown Prince Dipendra went on a drug-induced spree and massacred ten members of his family, including the king and the queen. The institution of monarchy no longer appeared rock-solid; the inner corridors of the palace became stained with blood. “We have been orphaned,” one Kathmandu resident was quoted as saying. Those days I taught at Baldwin-Wallace College, a liberal arts college outside of Cleveland. My daughter had just been born, and my wife and I were in a kind of an exhausted high. Our days were filled with loving gazes at our daughter and shopping for baby clothes and toys. But after the news of the massacre, which I learned about from an Internet kiosk in a mall, snippets of how the killing took place cohered into a running film in my mind: During a family dinner party, Crown Prince Deependra appears drunk, prompting his father, King Birendra, to scold him and ask him to leave the room. Dipendra’s younger brother Niranjan and cousin Paras take him to his room; in a short while Dipendra returns, brandishing rifles. He shoots his father, then an aunt. When his uncle Dhirendra tries to stop him Dipendra shoots him at close range. He moves in and out of the room, firing. He tracks down his mother Queen Aiswarya and younger brother Niranjan in the garden and kills them before he finds his way to a small bridge, where he shoots himself in the head.
Certain details of the massacre had the ring of a low budget, badly-made movie: the Crown Prince decks himself in military gear before he returns to the party room to wipe out his family. King Birendra’s last words to his son are, “Ke gardeko?”–What have you done? The reason Dipendra commits the carnage? His mom doesn’t approve of his girlfriend. A haze hung over my head as I taught my classes, discussing with my students the contrasting visions of Africa in the work of Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad; as I cooed to my daughter; as I wrote comments on my students’ stories; and as I went for evening walks on the campus ground. It seemed physically impossible that much of the royal family would be completely wiped out. I had been twelve in 1975 when during his coronation King Birendra rode an elephant on the crowded streets of Kathmandu. When he held a referendum a few years later that decided, by a narrow margin, that his one-party system was what people wanted after all, I was a teenager studying for the mighty School Leaving Certificate exam. I was twenty seven and a poor student in America when King Birendra was videotaped on his balcony, sipping wine as a few hundred yards the police gunned down pro-democracy protestors. This king, and his family, had been a part of my life.
Although Gyanendra was quickly throned, he remained an unpopular king, in sharp contrast to his now-dead brother, who, after he acquiesced to the demands of the 1990 pro-democracy movement, was praised by the people. Some suspected Gyanendra was behind the killings; others feared that he had the dictatorial aspirations of his father, Mahendra, the founder of the repressive Panchayat system. Within a few years of his rule, however, Gyanendra came to be seen as a bulwark against Nepal’s Maoist rebels, instigators of an insurgency that cost 13,000 lives within a decade. So when King Gyanendra dissolved the Parliament and sacked the prime minister, many Nepalis, tired of the party leaders’ corruption and inability to tame the Maoists, applauded the king’s move. Panchayat-era figures whose names were once etched in Nepalis’ minds as groveling royalists returned to prominence. Then Gyanendra made a critical mistake: in 2005 he assumed absolute power and began a brutal suppression of political and journalistic dissent. Close to half a million people took to the streets, leading to Gyanendra’s disgraced fall.
Early in 2008, in an anticipated yet still breathtaking change, King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev became Gyanendra Shah—or even Gyane to his enemies. He was forced to leave the Narayanhiti Palace without even the dignity of a formal ceremony, only a final press conference that was, even by Nepali standards, a horribly undisciplined affair. The reporters were loud and obnoxious, often standing on, and breaking, the furniture to get a better view of the monarch. A woman was caught red-handed trying to steal small statues from a palace room. After the conference, young journalists jostled to occupy the chair in which the monarch had sat only moments ago. In contrast, Gyanendra smiled with grace and carefully enunciated his words as he defended his 2005 coup.
Still, observing the king’s downfall has been hard on some Nepalis. My wife, for example, was aghast at how everyone suddenly and fervently turned anti-king. “Do you trust these politicians to do any better?” she asked me, repeatedly, as though I had spearheaded the crown’s dissolution. “Do you think these Maoists are any better than the king?” I found it difficult to explain to my wife that there was an inevitability to all of this. Everything that rises must fall. The monarchy’s dissolution could have been predicted the moment it began, in the mid-1700s when great King Prithvinarayan Shah, the founder of Nepal, surveyed the Kathmandu Valley and contemplated how he was going to “conquer” it. Perhaps something was also set in motion in 1960 when Mahendra sacked a democratic government and installed the repressive one-party Panchayat system that lasted for three decades. Who knows how many people were killed or falsely imprisoned under the Panchayat? Who knows how many lives were shattered?
Gyanendra has moved atop a mountain to the west of Kathmandu, into a two-storied bungalow, euphemistically called a summer palace, that has cramped rooms and a twenty-one-inch television. Some of us continue to wonder why Gyanendra hasn’t left Nepal. Why not quietly pack your bags and migrate to, say, Luxemburg? A wealthy businessman until he became king eight years ago, Gyanendra no doubt has riches stashed elsewhere—foreign stock investments, Swiss bank accounts—and he could live the rest of his life in luxury in a picturesque European village. But Gyanendra might have hopes of returning to politics, perhaps after a few years of licking his wounds. There are enough “royalists,” as supporters of the monarchy are called, still milling around.
Whatever Gyanendra might end up doing, something has definitely changed for us: we no longer can blame the Royal Palace for our ills. It has been turned into a museum, where the Maoists, who recently have been in and out of power, want to construct a “republic monument” to honor those who’ve died at the hands of the monarchy. The monument, in a typical Communist sense of aesthetics, will house a conference hall, a parking lot, and a cafeteria. But the change in the former palace’s ambience has already started. Since the museum opened in February 2009, visitors literally have been having a field day inside the compound. They’ve broken glass lamps and plucked rare flowers in the garden, they’ve smeared the walls inside the palace, they’ve trampled the well-manicured lawns. And as a symbolic gesture against the propriety and decorum of monarchial Nepal, the garden has also become popular—much to the chagrin of the long-time gardener—with lovers, who have found it a good place to kiss and cuddle.
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