Karnali People and Places

With no roads and few visitors, Karnali, the rugged mountain region of northwestern Nepal, stayed almost 'unchanged' for centuries. However, by the first decade of the 21st century, most of that was about to rapidly change.

Authored by two professionals working for change, the photobook 'Karnali: People and Places' captures impressions between 2005 and 2016 - the final days of Karnali's transition from isolation to exposure. The book presents a running commentary highlighting 'what is good' as well as 'what could be better'. It incorporates a part of the immense cultural and geographical diversity contained within the region. Illustrating different sectoral domains such as agriculture, education, gender relations and tourism it attempts to reveal the Karnali of dalits, women, janjatis and Khas-Aryans alike.

Karnali: People and Places'is a historic documentation of Karnali thoroughfares and its value will increase as more changes engulf the region. The book should provoke a critical discourse on development of Karnali, both in and outside the region.

Teeka's journey started at six, when he and his family walked for 25 days from their native village to Kathmandu. In 2003, he came to Karnali for the first time, on board of an army sky-van to prepare a management plan for Rara National Park. Often with a camera in his hands, he has visited most of Nepal's 77 districts. His studies and missions have taken him to some 30 countries. A vegetarian, social justice and ecology are at the core of his being. His present interest lies in the introduction of agro-ecology to young children. Third among four living siblings, Teeka has married interculturally and is blessed with a mother in her 90s and a son approaching 30.

Samrat first travelled to Karnali in 2005 to research human-snow leopard conflict. Ever since, Karnali has remained at the top of his bucket-list. His current work with Fastenopfer, a Swiss developmental organization (that brought the two authors together) provides frequent opportunities to visit community projects in some of the most marginalized parts of Karnali. In the last few years, Samrat has been involved with dalit communities, supporting them in establishing community homestays. He holds a Master's Degree in Sustainable Development Practices from TERI University, New Delhi, India. Born in Jhapa, the eastern plains, Samrat is father to a three-year-old son, Arth.

This is indeed a beautiful book on Karnali, one of Nepal's remotest, most rugged and yet most scenic regions. The book is attractive because of the awesome photographs it contains - photographs that have captured the various facets of the lives of the people of Karnali, their daily work, their culture, the natural habitat they live in and the efforts they are making to enhance their life conditions. This region ranks as the most food insecure regions in Nepal thanks to its roughed mountain topography and harsh climatic condition that has limited agricultural land and growing season and the poor accessibility and lack of basic services. The book is immensely enriched by the notes that Teeka and Samrat have written on almost each page describing or commenting on what are depicted in the photographs.

18 Many a time the notes go beyond or further than "what meets the eye" and talk about various subjects such as food and agriculture, housing and architecture, health and hygiene, school and education, festivals and cultural practices and so on. While making comments, the duo photographers do not shy away from making critical remarks on some of what they consider as ill practices still in existence in the region. This is after all a book prepared not by casual visitors but by 'professional activists' who have spent days,

weeks and months with the people of Karnali and have developed sympathetic, albeit critical understanding of the people and their culture.

For many people, including many city dwellers who have never visited Karnali, this remarkable book should prove invaluable in understanding this remote part of our country. But, as the internationally acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand once warned, "You may see (photographs) and be affected by other people's ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will eventually have to free yourself of them." Viewing from that perspective, this book is a challenge, or an offer for the viewers to visit Karnali and see with their own eyes and mind, without anyone getting "between them and their vision", this ancient land of rich traditions and cultures, now struggling to come out of centuries old isolation and seeking a rightful place in modern Nepal. This is a book that feed both the eye and the mind.

This book is a pictorial account of the Karnali region. Geographically, the Karnali region covers the upper watershed of the Karnali river, namely, Humla Karnali, Mugu Karnali and Sinja Karnali (drainage area of the Sinja and Tila rivers). During the Gorkha conquest in the 1790s, Jumla, which was the largest among the 22 principalities in the west, covered much of the Karnali watershed. This became the administrative district of Jumla after unification and remained so throughout the subsequent periods. The reorganisation of districts in 1962 placed the four districts of Jumla, Humla, Mugu and Tibrikot under the Karnali zone. In 1972, Dolpa district to the east was included under the Karnali Zone in 1975, Tibrikot was renamed Kalikot with some boundary readjustments. Since then these five districts of the Karnali Zone - Humla, Mugu, Kalikot, Jumla, and Dolpa (drained for the most part by Thuli Bheri) have generally been known as the Karnali region. Karnali region in the present book includes these five districts as well as Bajura, which displays many of the landscape and livelihood features of the Karnali but which, strictly speaking, is not part of the upper Karnali watershed or the Karnali Zone.

In its upper reaches, Karnali threads through a harsh semi arid landscape with occassional green valleys, and a scattering of often small settlements tenuously linked with difficult trail networks. Karnali is very sparsely populated by a mix of Chhetri-Bahun, Khas with intermittent population of dalits gradually giving way to ethnic groups of Tibetan origin as one moves north. In the 12th and 14th centuries, this was the cradle of the Khas Malla Empire that extended from the middle hills, across the Himalayas and the trans-Himalayas to western Tibet. Karnali nurtured the Nepali language (Khas kura) from whence it spread throughout the hills. Karnali witnessed the cultural interface of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the remnants of which lie scattered throughout the region.

In the popular imagination in Nepal, Karnali evokes many images. The most common is one of remoteness, underdevelopment, poverty and wilderness. Complimentary news about Karnali in the national press and media is a rarity. Drought, food scarcity, health epidemic of one kind or the other, ill-served and unattended schools and healt services, accidents and deaths in corruption-rid and hastily built, sub-standard highways plying old, ill-maintained and over-crowded buses and trucks, exorbitantly expensive air fares - are some of the staples of the news about Karnali in the national press. Karnali is more often than not presented as a begging bowl, a basket case if you like.