Parijat, the Nepalese Literary Figure: Through the Interiors

One of the primary themes of The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project (2018) involves the personal as documented through familial archives, and the creation of a political landscape that blurs the line between domestic and public spaces. Several women leaders’ political commitments were reflected in their families, suggesting that the domestic space nurtured political sentiment and debate. 

This album looks at Parijat, a renowned literary and cultural figure, and her home, which became the centre of Kathmandu’s intellectual and cultural life in the 1960s and beyond. Paralysed at the age of 26, and thus unable to walk or travel extensively, Parijat’s family and friends would often visit her at home. In this series of images derived from Parijat’s archive, we witness her interior space as it permeates the public sphere into the domestic, where her house became a space for discussion, debate, protest and intellectual stimulation. 

Here, the idea of the public sphere reflects a desire for democratic ideals to be translated into radical outcomes. The household becomes a pivotal point between the purported interior and exterior lives, where the domestic space is rendered political, no longer neutral or nullified. Prior to the radical movement against the monarchic regime, feminist literacy as well as intellectual opinion and debate were potent as responses to the officiated exclusion of women from the educational sphere. In the later decades of the twentieth-century, Nepalese women who had access to education—inevitably a marker of class—were able to attain greater social mobility and autonomy.

All images from the Feminist Memory Project (2018–) curated by Diwas Raja KC and NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, Nepal Picture Library. All images courtesy of the Sukanya Waiba Collection and Nepal Picture Library. 

Read Sukanya Deb’s piece on the Feminist Memory Project by Nepal Picture Library, which is on display as a part of the Kochi Biennale, 2022-23.

Click on the image to view the album