Porn and the Kathmandu lady

Over the past decade, a new kind of restaurant has appeared in the Kathmandu Valley – the dance bar or, similarly, the 'cabin restaurant'. These places cater to an all-male crowd who come to drink local spirits, eat snacks and ogle girls dancing suggestively to Hindi and Nepali pop songs. Such establishments appear to have done a roaring trade even during the most fraught years of the Maoist 'people's war', and can now be found throughout the valley, from the backpacker district of Thamel to respectable suburbs. It is not sex tourists that are being catered to here, but a new kind of customer altogether – the middle-class Nepali male.

The emergence of the dance bar is one of the most immediately striking of a variety of cultural transformations taking place in the Kathmandu Valley, which are the subject matter of this new collection of essays. Liechty's focus on urban cultural practices marks a departure from the existing body of anthropological writing about Nepal, which has been dominated by studies of rural societies. These essays deal exclusively with Kathmandu, since the city is a place where Nepalis are feeling the impact of globalisation in a unique way.  The dance bar is significant because it takes food and sex (both traditionally controlled by strict ideas about 'purity' and 'contamination' among Nepal's predominantly Hindu middle class), and repackages them as commodities for the free market.

This is not the only area of middle-class life where such a process is occurring. Other forms of consumerism, such as viewing of English- and Hindi-language videos, eating in restaurants, wearing make-up and even watching 'blue' movies have similarly brought the most intimate aspects of Nepali life out of the recesses of the home and into newly constructed public spaces. Out Here in Kathmandu explores a city where new, enticing foods, goods and services, ranging from momos and apple pie to Chinese electronics and sexual favours, are appearing on nearly every corner.

On first glance, the consumer choices of Kathmandu's middle class might seem like a frivolous subject given that Nepal continues to struggle amidst massive poverty and rampant food insecurity. However, the country's middle class has become a subject of growing interest over the past year for a variety of reasons. In May 2010, members of the urban middle classes were instrumental in pressuring the Maoists to abandon their 'indefinite shutdown' of the country, called as a means to bring down the 22-member coalition government. Small-scale business owners and urban professionals formed the bulk of the counter-demonstrators, who gathered in the capital to vent their anger at the strike, which had brought daily life to a crippling standstill for six days. Less than 24 hours after their protest, the Maoists backed down.

In August, the Asian Development Bank made the first-ever attempt to quantify of the size of the Nepali middle class, putting the figure at 6.1 million people (23 percent of the population) with an average daily income of NPR 1500 (about USD 20) per day. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of Nepalis with disposable income has climbed sharply over the past two decades, largely thanks to remittance inflows. In this context, Out Here in Kathmandu offers an intriguing insight into how the middle classes are spending their newly disposable rupees, and the ways in which the march of globalisation is shaping their identities. The anthology deals with neither political nor economic change directly, but instead takes readers on a tour of the most intimate corners of the lives of the Kathmandu middle class.

Modern and blue
Modernity has brought new choices and opportunities to the middle classes, but has been a painful experience for some of the people with whom Liechty, an anthropologist and historian, speaks; especially young people. Exposure to the West through media and interaction with foreign tourists has led many of them to begin to crave a lifestyle beyond their means, and an increasing sense of being on the 'global periphery'. These might not be particularly groundbreaking observations, of course; more interesting is Liechty's history of the appearance of consumer goods in Nepal and encounters with the West, which provides the backdrop for his arguments about the middle classes of today. In one essay, he argues that while Nepal was largely closed off from the rest of the world until the 1950s, the advent of Western ideas and goods is no recent phenomenon. He also debunks the idea of Nepal as an ahistorical society – a view popularly held by backpackers and guidebook writers. As Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler, once put it, 'Nepalese History is really non-History. While things were happening elsewhere, they weren't in Nepal, which accounts for the way things are today.'

Liechty's history starts with the arrival of the first European Catholic missionaries, during the 17th century, followed by the hiring of military advisors in the 18th century and, later, by Jung Bahadur Rana's visit to Europe, the first journey of its kind to be undertaken by a Nepali royal. He goes on to locate the development of a mass market for consumer goods in the 1920s, partly thanks to Nepali servicemen returning after the World War I had acquired a taste for foreign consumer items – and the means to afford them. The ruling Rana clan promptly cashed in by opening up the Nepali market to duty-free imports through India, which opened the floodgates for cheap Japanese imports, eventually devastating many Nepali cottage industries.

Elsewhere, Liechty explores a different kind of interaction with 'modernity', between tourists and locals in Kathmandu. Here, the author suggests that the readers look at Kathmandu as what he calls a 'translocal' space – one that is simultaneously many places at once, constructed from the fantasies of both tourists who arrive with dreams of the 'exotic East', and by locals who crave the 'temptations' of the West. Both groups, Liechty argues, are acting out rehearsed fantasies:

In the drama of their vision quest they [western and East Asian tourists] play the leading role in the pursuit of 'vision' of romance that they have already imposed on the imaginary place of Kathmandu … Most tourists find the place that they are looking for, even if that place comes and goes with them.

The tourism-focused area of Thamel, Liechty suggests, is an urban space that is overcrowded with the ideas projected onto it by these different groups. While the tourists engage in a process of orientalisation, Nepali youths hanging out in Thamel act out their own imaginings of the West, perhaps drawing on American gangster movies and video games. One Nepali informant, a middle-class young man who had fallen into drug abuse, tells the author that going to New York and visiting the Bronx represents his ultimate dream. So strong is his imagining of the Bronx that it seems that it has become 'a kind of shadow universe where his mind roamed while his body navigated the streets of Thamel'.

A regular theme in Out Here in Kathmandu is the ways in which globalisation impinges differently on men and women. More and more middle-class women in Kathmandu are leaving their homes for work, but this liberty, Liechty suggests, has come at a price. The new 'public' Nepali woman finds herself under pressure to dress in ways that make her appear 'modern', or, to use a phrase coined by a few of the interviewees, to 'do fashion'. At the same time, however, she must appear modest and restrained, or risk damaging her reputation. The economy of ijjat (prestige) is still at the core of middle-class life in today's Kathmandu, and the burden of maintaining it seems to fall squarely on the shoulders of women. While middle-class males are free to indulge in an evening at a dance bar, middle-class females risk damaging not only their own but their family's ijjat if they are seen going to a cinema or restaurant without an escort.

Thus, greater freedom to move around has not always been a liberating experience, since many women must still behave according to patriarchal norms. The difference is that they have to make their virtue 'portable'. Sexual harassment is seen by Liechty's female interviewees as another burden that comes hand in hand with modernity, and report that they feel more under threat than ever before from unwanted male advances.

Liechty stretches his examination of female experiences of 'being modern' almost to the limit with the final essay in the collection, 'Dissonant desires: Women as consumers of pornographic media in Nepal'. Western and East Asian pornographic films, brought home by their husbands, confront Nepali women with an especially disturbing picture of the 'modern woman'. It might seem incongruous to think of well-to-do Nepali women as consumers of pornography, given that men are seen as the traditional consumers of such material, but Liechty insists that the viewing of 'blue movies' was a topic that cropped up with some regularity in discussions about media consumption among women. 'Are you kidding? Even girls are watching this all the time!' a young married woman exclaimed when asked if she has heard of women watching pornography.

Some women had been asked by their husbands to watch 'blue movies' together, a practice that they report having found distasteful. Others said that their friends watched them in order to 'educate themselves'. Some even said that they gathered with groups of female friends while their husbands were out of the house to watch pornographic films. While middle-class women approach pornography with trepidation as something that could teach them about being 'modern', what they find in these films is an image of 'modern' womanhood that threatens to disempower them by turning them into sex objects. 'I mean, while watching these films, in what a bad manner they [men] think of others! Even their own sisters they begin to look at in this way,' said one woman.

While Liechty's analysis of the viewing of pornography makes for engrossing reading, it seems to be based on very little ethnographic material. Nearly all research for this chapter was done in the form of interviews conducted by his assistants, which he then analysed. The gulf between the ethnographer and his subjects comes through in this final essay, and the conclusions he draws feel insubstantial. Women are at the crux of Liechty's project of analysing the pleasures and pains of modernity in Kathmandu throughout Out Here in Kathmandu, but even by his own admission, his access to them is very limited. Had Liechty had better access to middle-class women, perhaps he could have made far more convincing and nuanced arguments about their experiences of modernity. However, it is doubtful how deep a relationship a foreign anthropologist could ever realistically hope to establish with a group of high-caste Kathmandu women, especially when such taboo subjects are being discussed.

Visible and vulnerable
The other area where the collection lacks depth is in its forays into discussing the Nepali political context. Liechty begins to explain the relationship between the aftermath of the Maoist insurgency and middle-class experiences of modernity in the essay 'Paying for modernity', but stops short of any serious discussion of how the two are related. For example, he posits that the new 'freedom' that has come with the advent of multiparty democracy is seen by the middle classes (and, in particular, by middle-class women) as more threatening than empowering. As one of his interviewees put it:

Since the multiparty system began … people seem to be wilfully harassing women. Before people felt safe. The police would take action. But now nobody cares. Some people say it's because of the multiparty system … Everyone is shouting 'we have the right of speech! They say, 'one can do whatever one wants!' So now it's difficult for us women.

The essence of Liechty's argument is that the arrival of democracy in Nepal has complicated ways in which urban women negotiate public spaces. Women feel that they have become more 'visible', but that at the same time men have lost their respect for social boundaries. This connection is one that is not explained fully enough, therefore raising many more questions about the psyche of the middle class during a period of intense political change than Liechty can answer in this setting.

Out Here in Kathmandu, rather like the urban space of Thamel that Liechty describes, feels overcrowded with ideas. The author offers a rich and sometimes dissonant mixture of themes and ideas, but only develops a few of them in real depth. Nevertheless, the story that Liechty tells about modernity and changing social practices in Kathmandu is an engaging and even moving one.

~ Sophia Furber is a writer and political analyst currently based in Kathmandu.