SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Overview

Name:

Ms Bryony Whitmarsh

Email address:

bryony_whitmarsh@soas.ac.uk

Thesis title:

Modernity, nationalism and identity: 19th and 20th century palace buildings in the Kathmandu Valley

Year of Study:

1

Internal Supervisors

• Michael J Hutt

Biography

I am a Senior Lecturer at Portsmouth School of Architecture, at the University of Portsmouth, where I teach across two disciplines – architecture and interior design, which share an interest in time and space, particularly experience of space.

Prior to joining the School of Architecture, I spent 10 years working within Museums and have an interest in material culture and its relationships to both memory and identity. Whilst the material evidence for my proposed research project is architecture, I am informed by the view that building, space and society are (re)constitutively connected. My research proposal outlines my interest in taking space as a starting point for a cultural analysis of the modernities of 19th and 20th Nepal.

PhD Research

This project proposes to research the relationships between the cultural constructions of ‘Rana’ and ‘modern’ Nepal through the formal construction, operation and performance of the palace complexes built throughout the 19th and 20th centuries by the Rana and Shah elite. The intention is to examine their operation and performance as spatial frameworks in which the everyday practices of social life were enacted as well as more overtly political rituals. Capturing the material and representational functions of architectural form, “the frame” also allows architecture to be understood in space and time as a frame of practices, rather than finite and permanent form (Scriver & Prakash, 2007, pp. 6-10).

These palaces continue to act as physical manifestations of power, wealth and separateness. As frames of a continuous process of cultural construction, they can provide insights into the economic, social and cultural changes that have taken place in Nepal over the last century or more. They have materialised and mediated social relations and therefore power: spatial analysis of the palaces can inform our understanding of the identity-building and power-relations of the Nepalese aristocracy, in relation to that of Nepal as a nation, and the outside world. As ideological constructs within the fabric of the city, the palaces form part of a wider system of cultural production: an understanding of how they have gathered meaning and value over time could inform our understanding of modernity in 19th and 20th century Kathmandu. Analysis of cultural practice within the palaces has the potential to reveal a range of realities constructed by those living and working in them as part of the wider urban fabric.

Whilst 30 of the Rana palace buildings were included in a 1975 UNESCO sponsored Protective Inventory of Architecture in the Kathmandu Valley, there is currently very little scholarly work on the 19th and 20th century palace buildings within Kathmandu. The UNESCO survey represents the start of a body of conservation reports written in the last quarter of the 20th century. These reveal perceptions of the buildings as neither ‘traditional’ nor ‘modern’, the implication being that they bear little relevance to local or global histories.

The palaces can be approached then as visual objects/forms, being careful to avoid definitions of ‘traditional’, ‘modern’, ‘east’ or ‘west’ and instead allow for examination of interaction, adaptation of the new and reconstitution of the familiar, as with Hosagrahar’s “indigenous modernities”(2005, pp.5-7). But it is also possible to situate them at the interstices of a number of disciplines. This project will utilise in particular material culture and spatial analysis. Material culture as an interdisciplinary field which allows for significance to be placed on the interrelationships between things and the effects produced by dynamic interactions, rather than compositional arrangements of objects/surfaces (Appadurai, 1986). Spatial analysis (allowing overlap between architecture and cartography, geography, anthropology and cultural theory) can account for temporality and the “territorial, political and psychological social processes that flow through space” (Corner, 1999, p. 227).

Recent treatment of the palaces provides an example of how the past is understood and represented in Nepal, thereby informing our understanding of the country’s present. The Rana regime is beginning to be looked at in more subtle terms, but the Panchayat authorities portrayed the Rana regime as an autocratic blip, between people-centred regimes run by the Shah family (Whelpton, 2005, p. 50).The majority of their palaces now house government offices and are in a dishevelled state. However, recent projects evoke the ‘luxury’ of the Rana era: For example, the Austrian-funded restoration of Kaisher Shamsher Rana’s Garden of Dreams.

This research is timely because, in the light of the massacre of the royal family in 2001, subsequent intensification of the Maoist ‘People’s War’ and more recent installation of parliamentary democracy, abolition of the monarchy and institution of a ‘secular’ state, many have started to try and make sense of Nepal’s present. For example, the palace at Narayanhiti (the site of the massacre of the Royal Family in 2001 and now a museum) is playing an active role in framing the construction of public memory and the writing of history and this research offers the chance to examine this process as it occurs.

References:

• Corner, J. (1999). The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention. In Cosgrove, D.(ed.) Mapping. London: Reaktion Books.
• Hosagrahar, J. (2005). Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating architecture and urbanism. London and New York: Routledge.
• Pruscha, C. (1975). Kathmandu Valley: The Preservation of Physical Environment and Cultural Heritage. A Protective Inventory. Vienna: Anton Schroll & Co. Publishers.
• Scriver, P. & Prakash, V. (eds.). (2007). Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and architecture in British India and Ceylon. London and New York: Routledge.
• Whelpton, J. (2005). A History of Nepal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.