Being Previous…Doig’s Kathmandu

My Kind of Kathmandu

An Artist’s Impression of the Emerald Valley

Desmond Doig

Indus, 1994

Kathmandu residents have become a little disinterested in their home valley. But ask most visitors or returning natives what it is about the place they find most memorable, and the answer will invariably be the colours.

That explosion of emerald as the aircraft suddenly breaks through monsoon clouds on final approach, the ochre-and-white dolls’ houses on the edge of terraces, blinding white cumulus towering over purple hills on the valley rim, terra-cotta temples reflecting the pale sun of a winter afternoon…

Desmond Doig’s artist eyes were mesmerised by this beauty and light. It was love at first sight, and his view of Kathmandu is coloured by this affair.

When he died in 1983, the artist and writer left behind a folder-full of sketches and watercolours and the text for a book which languished in a publisher’s attic in England. Ten years later, Desmond’s friends in Kathmandu have helped retrieve the manuscript and artwork and publish My Kind of Kathmandu.

In the text, Desmond is constantly “being previous”—some sixth sense must have told him that by the time it saw the light of day the book itself would document a previous Kathmandu, an ex-Kathmandu. It was a Kathmandu that was already, in the late 1970s, decaying in front of his eyes as its colours faded, to be finally smothered by malignant concrete monochrome. The Valleys transformation in the decade since Desmond passed away has made this book one artist’s celebration of what was Kathmandu. The pages of My Kind of Kathmandu are like a pilgrimage to the past and a glimpse at the vanishing treasures of Asia’s Florence. They fade even as we talk.

Desmond knew what was going on. He fled Calcutta to escape the squalor because, as he said in a conversation in 1981, he was “neither a charity-worker nor a revolutionary”. But in the late 1970s he saw the blight was spreading to Kathmandu as well. In his text, Desmond grieves for a Kathmandu where the “desire to be modern has hit… and the rich are hurtling to pull down their centuries-old houses and replace them with concrete and glass”.

He yearns for a less-concrete Kathmandu of as recent as the 1960s where there were no straight lines, the streets were still flagstoned and the houses were “all mellowed brick and russet tile and weathered wood”. Toyotas and Datsuns had not made their appearance and out-of-the way shrines of Dhum Barahi, Maiti Devi and Kwa Bahal were still shrouded in hoary legends and awaiting discovery.

Call it romanticism. But then Desmond was a romantic. His drawings studiously avoid the ugly. The loving lines of the portrait of Sweta Bhairav meticulously detail the tufts of grass growing out of the tiles, but blot out the squalor of the adjoining square.

Elsewhere, Desmond was there before the rot set in. Bucolic scenes of Swayambhunath from the Ring Road capture the texture of the fields, trees and hills that have now been washed away by Kathmandu’s trans-Bishnumati sprawl. Ten years after Desmond’s eyes and fingers scanned the scene, the spot is unrecognisable.

Desmond’s roof of the Chobar Ganesh temple still glistens in the afternoon sun, and is not coated in cement dust. The hill beyond does not yet carry the scar of a limestone quarry.

There is an evening view of Patan’s old bridge sitting on “a forest of wooden legs” as the Bagmati flows silently below reflecting the sunset off Jugal Himal peaks. The water and colour evoke a languid sky that has long disappeared under Kathmandu’s smog. The dream-like quality of bright afternoon light on Ganesh Himal framed in red-yellow cottages and harvests suffused in gold is impressionistic—recording for posterity the light and colours that struck the retina of an artist’s eye a decade or more ago. The sepia dawn on a Bhaktapur street is timeless.

Desmond wrote as well as he painted, and does not try to hide that he is looking at Kathmandu with the blinkers of an outsider, tourist-guide’s eye. But as a perfectionist he would have frowned at the sloppy editing, distracting proof errors and odd words that appear disconcertingly in bold throughout the book. As artist, he would be pained by the ungainly size, poor layout and uneven printing which stand out despite the publisher’s lavish efforts.

The text weaves in the tale of two coronations (Mahendra and Birendra), introduces us to celeb expats like Boris Lissanevitch, Han Suyin, Barbara Adams, Marshall Moran SJ, Col. Jimmy Roberts and local luminaries like Field Marshal Kaiser Shumshere and Prime Minister Tanka Prasad. It reveals the secrets of Thecho village’s mustard presses, Taleju’s barking bell, the hill of the camphor tree, and a temple where a god lies sleeping…

On the rare clear evening these days when the cement plant is not belching dust, you can still stand below the Bridge to Ye Rang and see what Desmond saw: “The snow ridge to the north turning from silver to gold to rose and fading lavender and the flaming sky reflecting in the shallow river.”

Sometimes in the midst of Kathmandu’s mad dash into a nondescript future, the past shines through the smog and grime.