Where time never started and will never end.
Review of Rabi Thapa's Thamel (2016)
The line between merriment and debauchery is probably the thinnest of lines imaginable. Similar seems to be the width of the lines between traditional and modern, spiritual and material, virtue and vice, the past and the present, the present and the future. That is, if you are to be convinced by Rabi Thapa’s depiction of Thamel in his eponymously titled work of non-fiction.
Thamel grew out of Thabahi, one of the thirty-two symbolic tole occupied by the Maharjans, under the guardianship of Bikramashila Mahavihara which is next to the now (il)legally muddled Chhaya Center. It has witnessed the imprints of the Shahs and the Ranas, the Shakyas and the Manageys, and everyone else who dares to either spare or make a rupee for themselves. The ‘locals’ keep on changing and to whom Thamel really belongs to is a question that can only extract a muddied response.
Thamel is clearly an erudite work collapsing ethnography with flâneur writing. It is well-researched, albeit at instances under-explained perhaps to leave the reader to carry out their own exploration of the place and its history. Ones unfamiliar with Thamel get to understand the many layers that make up its physical and spiritual stratigraphy, while those who boast familiarity get to excavate a few extra layers.
Most chapters are detailed as the author traverses the theoretical as well as the physical spaces that makes up Thamel. A few chapters in the middle are dedicated for first-person narratives of a few of his interlocuters — an ex-black-metal-artist, a ninety-year old jack of all trades, a dancer from a dance bar, a hairdresser, a recovering druggie. The structuring of the chapters is a symbolic nod to Thamel itself: one can make the most out of their own mental version of the neighborhood but the diversity of lives that people live in Thamel are innumerable, uncountable, everchanging through the ebbs and flow of history and politics, and somewhat irreducible through a third-person synthesis.
Thapa’s own personal history with Thamel comes alive within the book. Growing up near Thamel and subsequently with and in it, Thapa brings his own relationship to this place on paper. Some of his subjects are his old friends and a few of his hangouts are interlinked with the time of the hippies. An anthropologist new to the place would never be able to bring forth the kind of intimacy that Thapa himself has accumulated with the people and their junctions. Thapa is able to tame the beast that Thamel is, given that it hosts perhaps the largest volume of businesses in the city per square meter as well as visitors flocking in from everywhere — from within the country and many miles beyond it.
While Kathmandu is ever-growing with new neighborhoods being formed and named (and renamed) on, what once can assume to be, a daily basis, a hyperlocal exploration like Thamel adds to the richness of the city’s historiography. The lovers of Kathmandu, and I am sure there are many, deserve more literature on locales understudied as well as unstudied. With time, literature like Thamel, which I picked up from the hard-earned next-to-the-reception section of Thamel’s Pilgrims Book House, is bound to be appreciated by the present-and-future dwellers of the space.
Thamel swoops one in, makes it difficult for them to get out, but makes them curious about what the many sounds, the many lights, and the many people bustling in and out of old-and-new buildings alike. And if you, like me, are one of those people, go pick up Thamel.
