Paroma S Mukherjee picks her favourite reads of 2023

To have willing women become part of a nation’s history, and then be recorded in photographs as public memory for posterity shows how the publicness of life, activism and photography is key to feminist strategy, whether past, present or future. Right at the beginning of the book is a five-page list of contributors, from individuals to families as well as collectives. In the first section, Women of the People, there’s a striking image of a sixteen-year-old girl with her friend raising slogans against the Rana regime in 1951, that was incidentally published in a newspaper in India, generating widespread talk about the “revolutionary women of Nepal,” even forcing one of the girls to go into hiding for a few months. While the pro-people movements in Nepal were perceived to have been dominated by men, this section presents enough visual evidence of how women laboured to create spaces in public life, politics and even in military intelligence, as one sees towards the end of the section.

A chunk of the book houses remarkable photographs and documents that show how women pioneered education in Nepal as not just a basic right, but a significant tool for collective empowerment, especially in public life and policy. This section has some of the most endearing images of girls in school, of certificates and degrees, of women studying together, posing at training sessions, hostels and as classmates — the form a bit informal like a teenager’s diary, the outcome as powerful as liberation itself. A very candid conversation between the Director of the Nepal Picture Library, NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati and Diwas Raja KC (Head of Research and Archives) throws to the fore important questions and even critique of the book itself, such as the challenge of having to address a plethora of publics, priorities and having to contest contemporary arcs of feminist thought that might not lean on archives for respite, or strength. A kind of accountability that I find liberating, to begin with.

READ MORE: HT editors pick their best reads of 2023

I first saw a wall of photographs and text from The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project by the Nepal Picture Library at the India Art Fair, New Delhi, in 2020, and I thought immediately how important a book that contained this archive would prove to be. Three years later, an exhaustive yet comfortably-sized book has been published, holding an extraordinary visual archive of Nepal’s feminist history. The research for this began in 2018, aided by a Magnum Foundation grant.

To have willing women become part of a nation’s history, and then be recorded in photographs as public memory for posterity shows how the publicness of life, activism and photography is key to feminist strategy, whether past, present or future. Right at the beginning of the book is a five-page list of contributors, from individuals to families as well as collectives. In the first section, Women of the People, there’s a striking image of a sixteen-year-old girl with her friend raising slogans against the Rana regime in 1951, that was incidentally published in a newspaper in India, generating widespread talk about the “revolutionary women of Nepal,” even forcing one of the girls to go into hiding for a few months. While the pro-people movements in Nepal were perceived to have been dominated by men, this section presents enough visual evidence of how women laboured to create spaces in public life, politics and even in military intelligence, as one sees towards the end of the section.

A chunk of the book houses remarkable photographs and documents that show how women pioneered education in Nepal as not just a basic right, but a significant tool for collective empowerment, especially in public life and policy. This section has some of the most endearing images of girls in school, of certificates and degrees, of women studying together, posing at training sessions, hostels and as classmates — the form a bit informal like a teenager’s diary, the outcome as powerful as liberation itself. A very candid conversation between the Director of the Nepal Picture Library, NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati and Diwas Raja KC (Head of Research and Archives) throws to the fore important questions and even critique of the book itself, such as the challenge of having to address a plethora of publics, priorities and having to contest contemporary arcs of feminist thought that might not lean on archives for respite, or strength. A kind of accountability that I find liberating, to begin with.

READ MORE: HT editors pick their best reads of 2023