Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anne M. Rademacher is Assistant Professor of Environmental and Metropolitan Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

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Reigning the River

Duke University Press

Contents

About the Series..................................................viiiForeword..........................................................ixAcknowledgments...................................................xiiiIntroduction. A Riverscape Undone.................................11. Creating Nepal in the Kathmandu Valley.........................422. Knowing the Problem............................................573. War, Emergency, and an Unsettled City..........................914. Emergency Ecology and the Order of Renewal.....................1165. Ecologies of Invasion..........................................1396. Local Rivers, Global Reaches...................................155Conclusion. Anticipating Restoration..............................175Notes.............................................................185References........................................................211Index.............................................................237

Chapter One

IN THE HEART OF KATHMANDU's old urban center, the braided, seasonally shifting flows of the Bagmati and the Bishnumati rivers converge. Depending on the season of the year, the rivers may swell and churn with monsoon rains, or they may barely form a trickle. Depending on your route, you may find the banks and riverbed laden with foul-smelling heaps—mounds of garbage flecked with colorful plastics, shiny chemical slicks, and discarded consumer goods that persist beyond their utility or fashion. You may find the banks host to human settlements: some are the makeshift huts of those just arrived or just barely surviving; some are the more permanent homes of those who have saved enough to build shelters of brick or concrete on the eroded riverbed; still others are the imposing mansions of the urban elite. Settlements give way to temples—some crumble under the weight of passing time and neglect, while others are alive with the sounds, colors, and meaning of ritual activity.

The wastes of contemporary urban life, the settlements of thousands of urban residents, and the vast ancient templescape that line much of the rivers' urban reaches do not fit into neatly defined territories. They overlap, stretching into and out of one another in uneven, and often unpredictable, ways. To walk the banks of the Bagmati and Bishnumati rivers is to encounter simultaneously the natural, cultural, and political history of a city and the nation-state it dominates. It is to observe grand temples, the surviving built forms of the past, and to see the sometimes desperate shanties that make up the built forms of the present. Amid both lay deposits of waste that a contemporary city has expelled in hopes that they will simply disappear. It is to witness before you the tensions between land and water, past and future, and waste and wealth being lived in this growing, changing city.

Teku Dovan, a large temple complex, marks the confluence of the Bagmati and Bishnumati, and it descends into the river waters by a steep ladder of stone stairs. The complex is the mythological place of origin of Kathmandu, a cultural birthplace for the city. According to a vamshavali, an ancient text that ascribes pious beginnings to Nepal's early history, the then-king Gunakamadeva (ruled 980–998) founded Kathmandu, called Kantipur at the time, in accordance with a vision. In a dream a goddess instructed him to build a city at the junction of the two rivers. According to the vamshavali, it "was the sacred place where, in former times, Ne Muni had performed devotions and practiced austerities, and here was the image of Kanteswara devata. To this spot Indra and the other gods came daily, to visit Lokeswara and hear puranas recited." The king thus moved his court from Patan to Kathmandu (Wright 2000 [1877]:154).

Like walking the riverscape, tracing the social and natural threads that weave the ecology of this site demands flexibility; we are at once compelled to understand the present situation, in which the environmental state of the rivers seems primary and urgent but also to find the roots of that urgency in the history of the rivers and of the larger city that envelops them. Kathmandu is, after all, a point of convergence itself. Politically, it is the capital of a nation-state, and as such it has long served as the center of the state's bureaucratic apparatus. Economically, it is a locus of concentrated wealth and elite privilege, especially in relation to the rest of Nepal. Since the eighteenth century, Kathmandu has served as the most important center of political and economic power in the country. It has also been the seat of the monarchy. In short, the city is in many ways the center of material and symbolic power in Nepal.

Yet by the beginning of the twenty-first century the Bagmati and Bishnumati were regarded as almost intractably degraded. Environmental conditions declined as political dissatisfaction intensified, and the two rivers were increasingly regarded as being connected in some ways. Engaging environmental degradation inevitably required attention to broader debates about the political past, present, and future of Nepal. The question of the environment, then, turned on a question of the polity, and how change could happen within it. Would the monarchy, the international development apparatus, the democratic Parliament, or some other entity eventually rise to the enormity of the problem and reverse river decline? Just who held the power to make change in Kathmandu, and when and how would that power be mobilized?

These questions point to the nation-state's history, in both the capital and the larger territory over which it held sway. By beginning this inquiry with a focus on power, specifically the power to enact environmental change, we move away, for the moment, from the biophysical features of the riverscape and toward the people who organize it and, in so doing, organize themselves. To do so is also to note historical continuities between contemporary concentrations of power in the capital and longstanding processes.

MANDALA SPACE AND POLITY

In fact, political and symbolic power have long radiated outward from the center that is the Kathmandu Valley and from Teku Dovan within it. I return to the idea of the mandala for conceptual orientation in a historical moment riddled with turbulence, dissatisfaction, and environmental decline. Recall from the introduction that various schools of analysis engaged the form and symbolic meanings of Valley architecture through the conceptual and diagrammatic dimensions of the mandala. This work extends from the German tradition of approaching the city as a unitary built system (e.g., Gutschow and Kolver 1975; Mary Slusser's famous cultural historical work, Nepal Mandala [1982]; and many others). Much related scholarship develops analytical associations between cartographic space and the organization of political and social life; scholars use the mandala primarily as a means for understanding how the physical spaces of the Kathmandu Valley's cities were historically arranged, in concentric circles, along a gradient of socioreligious purity and impurity (Bledsoe 2004:5). As I suggested previously, the idea of tracing power as its concentrations radiate outward lends important insights to an analysis of the politics of improving the...