Illustration by Ben Jones.
Balen Shah, the 33-year-old rapper and mayor of Kathmandu, is a man on various missions. Since his unlikely victory in 2022, he has waged war on government ministries, landlords, Nepal’s civil aviation authority, roadside hawkers and landless slum dwellers. Now he is taking on Bollywood because of a supposed historical slight.
It is widely accepted in Nepal that Sita, the mythological hero of the Hindu epic Ramayana, was born in the country. Her father, king Janak, is said to have ruled from the city of Janakpur in the Terai plains, which separate Nepal from India. In Janakpur is a great temple dedicated to Sita, who is one of Nepal’s official national heroes.
In June 2023 a new Bollywood film, Adipurush, was released. An adaptation of the Ramayana, it (supposedly) perpetuated the claim that Sita was a daughter of India. In response, Balen decided to ban all Bollywood films from Kathmandu’s cinemas. A Nepali High Court rejected the ban and encouraged Bollywood screenings to continue. Balen – who once sang ‘all politicians are thieves, robbing the country blind’ – responded by calling the court and Nepal’s government ‘slaves of India’.
Akhand Bharat
In reality, the film does not contain dialogue explicitly stating that Sita is Indian. But that is not an issue for Balen, whose ad hoc policy decisions have earned him the respect of nationalists (and the ire of the media). It also does not seem to matter that the ‘birthplace’ of Sita – a mythological character – has also historically been located in Sitamarhi, India, or that Hindu epics, by their very nature, are not history.
In reality, the film does not contain dialogue explicitly stating that Sita is Indian. But that is not an issue for Balen, whose ad hoc policy decisions have earned him the respect of nationalists (and the ire of the media). It also does not seem to matter that the ‘birthplace’ of Sita – a mythological character – has also historically been located in Sitamarhi, India, or that Hindu epics, by their very nature, are not history.
Nationalists like Balen who attempt to weaponise history eventually come up against others attempting the same thing. This is currently happening across South Asia, where national insecurities are a sensitive subject. A mural inside India’s new parliament building is a case in point. The mural is a depiction of what one Indian minister has described as the subcontinent under the Buddhist Mauryan emperor Ashoka. But it has been interpreted by states such as Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan as, instead, representing ‘Akhand Bharat’ (‘Undivided India’), the vision driving the ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing paramilitary movement founded in 1925, and the parent organisation of Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). ‘Undivided India’ is what it sounds like: the idea that Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Tibet should all be part of one India. The RSS has long desired a reunification of all post-Partition states and the mural –which dissolves modern political borders – seems, to some, to nakedly portray this, despite governmental clarifications to the contrary.
Greater Nepal
In his first term as mayor, relying heavily on populism, Balen is eager to cement himself, and grand gestures seem to be his method of choice. When the mural was revealed, Balen installed a map of ‘Greater Nepal’ in his office. Nepal was a collection of small Himalayan principalities before the Shah kings embarked on a unifying military campaign in the second half of the 18th century. By the first decades of the 19th century, Kathmandu ruled over swathes of what are today the Indian states of Uttarakhand and Sikkim. It was forced to give up these territories in the 1816 Sugauli Treaty with the East India Company, but irredentism continues to encourage Nepali nationalists, just as it does RSS hardliners.
Balen has also learnt from former Nepali prime minister K.P. Oli, who pushed back against a Modi-fied India by claiming that yoga was invented in Nepal and that Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, was born there too. Such pushback is also visible in the historicity around Gautam Buddha, whose birthplace, Lumbini, today falls on the Nepali side of the border. From time to time, Indian officials err and claim otherwise. As a reminder to India – and the world – ‘Buddha was born in Nepal’ has become the country’s most popular graffiti.
Asal Hindusthan
The great divide between India and its smaller neighbours is fought as much in the arena of mythology and history as in other more tangible ones. India’s muscular Hindutva agenda has become an irritant for the smaller South Asian states, whose nationalist histories are often specifically designed to de-hyphenate themselves from India. Even as Delhi pushes cultural links as part of Modi’s neighbourhood diplomacy policy, it must traverse a tightrope between domestic RSS nationalists vying to reshape India – and South Asia – in their image, and nationalists from smaller states, like Balen, who are pushing back against what they perceive as another attempt in India’s long history of cultural and political subsumption.
Adipurush, a grotesque caricature of the Ramayana’s epic scope and nuanced lessons in morality and dharma, is part of Bollywood’s newfound romance with the RSS. All antagonists have to ‘look’ Muslim, replete with a long beard and kohl around their eyes – even Ravan, the Brahmin king of Lanka and a devotee of Shiva. To India’s credit, the film has been rejected by the masses for its shoddy VFX, street-inspired dialogue and outlandish depictions of characters who have been loved for thousands of years.
Like the mural, Adipurush is an example of how the RSS’ cultural nationalism has permeated India under Narendra Modi. Since its very beginnings, the RSS has argued for a revival of the Hindu consciousness, a revival that also involves overthrowing ‘the 1,000 years of slavery’ that India suffered, referring not only to British colonialism, but also Islamic rule over large parts of the subcontinent.
It is not surprising, then, that the RSS would have developed links with Nepal’s rulers. Nepal was conceived as an Asal Hindusthan (‘authentic Hindu kingdom’), free from the rule of British mlecchas (‘foreigners’). As the Nepali prime minister Jung Bahadur said in 1866: ‘In this Kali Age, this is the only country in which Hindus rule.’ Nepal emphasised its Hindu status with severe laws protecting cows and the codification of the caste system into a legal statute. Its kings were heralded as avatars of Vishnu.
‘Mutually beneficial’
After the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by an RSS acolyte in 1948, the RSS was proscribed and ostracised in India under Jawaharlal Nehru. While this was happening, the Nepali king Mahendra expanded his monarchy’s links with the RSS in what would be ‘a mutually beneficial relationship’. Nepal at the time had a tenuous relationship with India, arising from Kathmandu’s decision to allow the construction of a highway from Tibet and Delhi’s support for anti-monarchy Nepali Congress activists.
In January 1963, the leader of the RSS, M.S. Golwalkar, met with Mahendra and invited him to an RSS function in India. Controversy erupted in India after reports emerged that Mahendra would address the annual Makar Sankranti celebration in Nagpur in January 1965. One Indian newspaper asked whether the Indian government ‘approved of [Mahendra’s] intention to participate in a rally held by a militantly communal and fascist body like the RSS’. Mahendra’s participation in the Nagpur rally, it concluded, ‘will be viewed as interference in our internal affairs’. In the end, the visit never happened, but Mahendra sent the RSS a message: ‘Nepal has been a source of perennial inspiration for the Hindus of India … We Nepalese are the only independent and sovereign Hindu kingdom of Nepal, representing in a sense the Hindus of the whole world.’
The RSS continued to maintain close links with Nepal’s monarchs after Mahendra’s death. It declared both his sons, Birendra and Gyanendra, to be Vishwa Hindu Samrats (‘World Hindu Emperors’) and helped establish the Vishwa Hindu Mahasangh, now among the world’s largest Hindu organisations, as well as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, its international arm, in Nepal. Since the abolition of monarchy in 2008, Hindu nationalists in Nepal have demanded both a return of the king and the Hindu state. Anti-Indian nationalism has long been a feature of Nepali politics, encouraged by the kings themselves, who saw their links with the RSS as a ballast against Congress-ruled India. But the RSS is now mainstream, so Nepali nationalists are by turn flirting with and opposing the RSS.
Powerful neighbours
India under Modi has subscribed to a more potent Hindu nationalism, but the country has also emphasised cultural links between India and the rest of South Asia. In Janakpur, ‘Ramayana diplomacy’ has led to new trains serving Hindu pilgrims, while in Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha, India is building a new Buddhist monastery. While Nepal’s leaders have accepted this, they draw the line when it comes to Indian claims upon their history. The question, then, is how far India can push its historical links with its neighbours without infringing on their cultural identities and earning the ire of nationalists.
Nepal’s emphasis on its unique identity is a typical manifestation of the anxieties felt by smaller states hemmed in by larger, more powerful, neighbours. The contours of Nepali nationalism ignore the historical realities of migration and interconnectedness in South Asia, as nationalism tends to do. In a reversal of roles from the past, Nepal’s Hindu Right is today a minority, while in India, the Hindu Right is in power. But the increasingly assertive nationalism on both sides of the border means history will continue to be contested in the realm of foreign relations, whether based on fact, or on critically panned fictions.
