ByRagini Tharoor Srinivasan
Like many Asians who come to the United States for graduate school, the Nepali journalist Kanak Mani Dixit hoped to eventually return home. He arrived in New York in 1980 to pursue a master’s in international affairs at Columbia University, and stayed on to earn a second graduate degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. In 1987, inspired by American publications like Harper’s and The New Yorker, he founded a magazine from New York called Himal, devoted to Himalayan politics and culture. Three years later, a multi-party people’s movement forced the long-standing Nepali monarchy to establish a democratic parliament; a new era of pluralism and open expression was under way, and Dixit was eager to continue Himal’s work from his country. He moved back to Kathmandu with his family in 1990. The city at that time, he told me recently, was “a chaotic capital where you could be critical of authority like nowhere else.”
In its early years, Himal was focussed on the Himalayan and Hindu Kush sections of the subcontinent, but Dixit was interested in using his publication to counter nationalist orthodoxies across the region and to emphasize, instead, the shared cultures, histories, and sensibilities of broader South Asia—a commitment that he signalled with the unusual, and much discussed, coinage “Southasia,” which he added to Himal’s title in 1996. In the decades since, Himal Southasian has covered the region with imagination and rigor, seeking contributions from academics and intellectuals across South Asia and in the diaspora, and paying special attention to events that have gone overlooked in the international press. The magazine reported from Afghanistan long before the attacks of September 11th catapulted the Taliban into world view. While the rest of the world was celebrating the human-rights activism of the newly freed Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi, in 2012, Himal criticized her silence about Burma’s treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority. When Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” was on the international film circuit, in 2013, Himal drew attention to the filmmaker’s complicity with Mahinda Rajapaksa’s dictatorial regime in Sri Lanka, where the film was shot.
At a time when the freedom of the press is increasingly imperilled across South Asia (and across the world), the suspension of Himal is particularly alarming. Nepal has, in recent years, been an oasis of relative openness in an otherwise fractious region. The rise of nationalist movements in neighboring countries has led to a range of assaults on civil liberties, from the “beef bans” designed to marginalize non-Hindus in India and the overreaching blasphemy and cyber-crime laws in Pakistan to the wave of machete attacks that has resulted in the deaths of nearly two dozen secular and atheist writers in Bangladesh. Himal is not the first South Asian publication to experience a methodical stifling at the hands of the state. In New Delhi, the well-known muckraking magazine Tehelka was forced to cease operations temporarily in the early aughts, after becoming the target of governmental investigations. In Bangladesh, the editor of the The Daily Star has for years been under government pressure to resign, and in Jammu and Kashmir the newspaper Kashmir Reader was banned by the Indian government for threatening “public tranquillity”—as if Kashmir, an embattled region divided and administered by China, India, and Pakistan, had much tranquillity to begin with.
As one of the few South Asian countries that was not a British colony or protectorate, Nepal has been less vulnerable to nationalist ideologies and regional disputes. While travel restrictions between the rivals India and Pakistan are notoriously inflexible, Nepal has enjoyed comparatively relaxed visa regulations, enabling intellectuals and activists from across the region to gather in Kathmandu. Since 1997, Himal has helped organize a biennial documentary festival in the capital, which often screens films that have been censored elsewhere in the region. Reflecting on Himal’s suspension, many “Himalers,” as its readers and contributors are known, told me that the magazine could only have come of age in Nepal. The Indian historian Ramachandra Guha told me that a magazine with Himal’s regional ethic could never have been published from Delhi or Islamabad.
“Kathmandu was an ideal neutral location,” he said, and Dixit an “utterly nonpartisan” voice.
Even before Himal’s current ordeal, though, there had been signs that the magazine was not exempt from the region’s broader upheavals. Himal was accustomed to losing distributors when neighboring countries imposed restrictions on citizens’ speech and movement. Once, Dixit told me, a staffer from the Bangladeshi embassy came to a Himal-sponsored screening posing as a government official in order to intimidate organizers. The magazine’s playful “south-side-up” map of South Asia, drawn by the artist Subhas Rai and sold on Himal’s Web site, was rejected by the Delhi Book Fair in the early aughts for provoking “anti-Indian” sentiment by placing Sri Lanka at the top. In the years since Nepal transitioned to democratic rule, its young republic has struggled to gain stability. Its Constitution has been rewritten numerous times, and its leadership shuffled and reshuffled. Dixit told me that there is still great optimism about the new Nepal, but that the years of administrative tumult have rendered the nation’s democracy “moth-eaten inside.” It has also made the country vulnerable to outside meddling. Many believe that the anti-corruption commission’s appointment of Karki—a former royalist who, in 2006, was found guilty, by an investigative judicial commission, of directing police actions against pro-democracy groups—took place with the backing of Indian political operatives based at the embassy in Kathmandu.
Dixit’s arrest in April sparked an international outcry. After suffering a health scare in police lockup that landed him in the I.C.U., he was released from jail in May on order of Nepal’s Supreme Court. A motion to impeach Karki was registered in October by a hundred and fifty-seven Members of Parliament. But it is too late for Himal, whose regulatory obstacles in Nepal have become, Dixit told me, “too deep to be sorted out.” Still, Dixit and Mojumdar are determined to carry on the publication’s “Southasian” commitment, no matter where it is based. “We could re-start Himal’s editorial work in a week, anywhere, right now,” Mojumdar told me. But developing a sustainable administrative framework in South Asia will be a challenge for a magazine that is “not going to be friends with any government.” What will be, for now, Himal’s final issue, titled “Fact and Fiction,” is devoted to chronicling attacks on freedom of expression across the region. In a defiant closing note, Mojumdar writes, “The very reasons that have contributed to the crisis at Himal make it imperative that it should survive.”