Introduction

1Identifying the gendered nature of Maoist women ex-combatants’ war-time and post-war experiences is crucial to our understanding of their contributions. The gendering of memories and an imposed or strategic forgetting of the war-time past deeply affects their self-perceptions and representations. Focusing on a set of war-time photographs that belong to some of these ex-combatants, I identify gendered labour and resistance to these processes through mnemonic practices. The analysis of this memory work centred on these photographs – taking, storing, sorting, captioning, seeing, showing, preserving, protecting, editing and manipulating them – highlights the value these women seek to accrue for their war-time identity, commitment and labour within gendered, hierarchical experiences. Analysing moments of seeing and showing, along with given descriptions, I examine the way these photographs are used or reused for strategic therapeutic ends and for the formation and circulation of identities. In this context, ‘memory work’ is understood as a conscious and purposeful staging of memory through which one actively constructs meanings: it is remembering with an inquiring attitude and the activity of (re)constructing the past through it (Kuhn 2000: 186). Consequently, understanding the meanings produced by (re)using photographs enables the identification of the gendered objectives towards which memory is engaged and subjectivities are generated. Memory, it is argued, is as much social and collective (Halbwachs 1992) as it is individual and intimately personal. The mobilisation of memory by groups and individuals to meet desired ends, to resolve conflicts of interest and spaces regarding it add to the temporal nature of memory work. Hence, the significations and memories that photographs (re)produce are not fixed but have to be deconstructed at different stages of their making and moments of seeing, in order to unravel the meaning.

2Wars are followed by the formation of norms that dictate how the former should be narrated, recalled and what should be remembered and forgotten. Such a process often entails silencing the experiences and actions of women perpetrators of violence because their roles and lives within armed militaries challenge norms and notions about women as being physically, emotionally and culturally incapable of violence. As their battleground experiences are deemed unfitting for women and societies to know and remember, they are erased using diverse methods and means. As women generally lack visual representational agency, it becomes essential to include women perpetrators’ visual decisions and choices in identifying the creative crafting of subjectivities. As Eyal (2004) observes, memory work results from particular historical discourses and practices, entrusting memory with specific functions and goals. Individuals and groups may invest memory routinely with a goal and as an institutional matter, with specific hopes and fears about what it can accomplish (Eyal 2004: 6–7). Following these insights, I identify the personal, political and ideological expectations in opposition to which Maoist women ex-combatants perform their memories. Such an approach enables an unfolding of the gendered nature of their fears and anxieties as well as the creative crafting of resistances through everyday mnemonic exercises. Although the use of photographs as memory material in personal and institutional spaces is a widely prevalent practice, it is regulated by gendered norms. In the context of war, the visual misrepresentation and underrepresentation of the role and lives of women perpetrators of violence have resulted in the distortion of facts and identities (Berger and Naaman 2011, Petö 2016, Tamang 2017).

Women combatants in Nepal’s Maoist People’s War

Memories, narratives, photographs and the field

9I chose Kathmandu as one of my main field sites because newspaper reports and articles suggested that many ex-combatants had settled in the capital city after the end of the war to explore livelihood opportunities. Kathmandu also provided access to libraries and scholars working on the area, and these interactions enabled me to develop insights into the dynamics of the research. Conducting fieldwork in Kathmandu made it possible to meet women ex-combatants who were Constituent Assembly (CA) members or who held important party positions. With the money they received as part of the retirement plan, many ex-combatants purchased plots of land next to each other and settled there in clusters. My primary ethnographic sites in Dang were Sarra, a village with around 70 Maoist households, and the township of Ghorahi where they rented houses. 

12Photographs are a primary means by which women ex-combatants have controlled the means of knowing and remembering their guerrilla role and lives. I came across some surviving photographs in their homes – tacked on walls, placed on shelves, inside family albums and uploaded on Facebook. Some were brought to me and explained. Women ex-combatants spoke of lost war-time material viz photographs, diaries and notebooks, of what they contained and of testimonies hence lost. In order to avoid forgetting, the names of comrades, places or events were written on the back of some photographs. The ex-combatants I met in Kathmandu wanted to see the photographs I had collected from Dang. Even though they did not recognise most people in the photographs, they examined each one with utmost attention. The emotions and memories thus triggered helped to initiate conversations and to introduce new dimensions to the mnemonic exchanges we engaged in. During my fieldwork, these periods and conversations helped me build a rapport, start a dialogue and express my willingness to know more. For my research partners, it served as a memory aid, directing telling and a channel for expressing acceptance and willingness to support my work.

Nepal’s posing women guerrillas

13For women involved in political violence, systematically forgetting war-time experiences is often conditioned by patriarchal structures and cultures. The visual representational deficit and misrepresentation caused by producing objectified and sexualised images of female perpetrators of violence have had severe political consequences, denying women agency and legitimacy in war-time narratives (Berger and Naaman 2011, Petö 2016). In Nepal, visual representations of women combatants by the media during the war cleansed them of the violent roles they played and, in the post-war period, depicted them as passive, fragile mothers (Tamang 2017). Such (mis)representation contributes to the project of re-inserting them in the private and appropriately feminine sphere (Tamang 2017), a process which – among other methods – denies them memory, forges forgetting and engenders a silencing of the past. Under such conditions, by taking and safeguarding photographs of their experiences, women guerrillas combat both the misrepresentation and oblivion of their war-time role and identity. These efforts at creating and retaining means of self-representation, knowing and remembering signify a subjective crafting of identities.

15My first direct encounter with war-time materials took place at Samjhana’s place where she showed me letters, photographs, diaries, notebooks and combat dress. With an utter sense of pride and contentment in her ability to protect, possess and produce them for me, she narrated how, during the war, she packed them in layers of plastic and secretly buried them in the stable at her uncle’s house when she passed through his village. While burying was standard practice then, not everyone could bury them in places where they could be easily retrieved. Even when objects were buried in an identifiable spot in the forest (by a stream, a huge rock, or a large tree) in the hope of retrieving them, it was not always possible to go back there.

17Susan Sontag warns in her book On Photography that people’s reactions to images are contingent upon the broader political consciousness within which they appear (Sontag 1977: 17). Such a condition led me to view only specific photographs as representative of women ex-combatants’ feelings, experiences and identities. For example, in Kathmandu and Dang, I came across pictures (of individuals and groups) where women combatants posed in places of scenic beauty (fig 1 and2). I failed to comprehend the political significance and mnemonic value until I viewed them alongside the joy and accomplishment expressed in their descriptions of such places. Feelings of inefficiency and inadequacy, caused by restricted mobility which characterised pre-war days, were one factor that motivated women to join the war. Indeed, war-time experiences of travelling to and seeing far-off corners of the country, meeting and establishing ties with people from different communities and regions highlight the uniqueness of their combatant lives. During interactions, they rejoiced at having witnessed ‘scenes otherwise seen only in foreign lands or in cinemas or posters sold at the market as decorative pieces’, expressing the extraordinariness of their experiences. Knowledge of geography, culture, cultivation, food, languages, accents and dress forms thus acquired through practical experience, not merely through books and formal education, established the distinctiveness, accuracy and depth of what they knew. These photographs, which otherwise looked naive and out of context, in reality testify to their ability to overcome multiple forms of marginality through war-time participation, depicting their political relevance. 

19During my fieldwork, as I flipped through the albums, I came across photographs with names of comrades (Fig 3 and 4) and details of events (Fig 5 and 6) inscribed on the back of them. For instance, one picture (Fig 3 and 4) that belonged to Kirti had the names of people written on it, Sadhana and Sapana with a plus symbol (+) in between the two. On another (Fig 5 and 6), belonging to Samjhana, was written ‘Sita B K with the PL section of Khotang District (Khotāngjillāko aeselukhko PLke section sanga Sitā B K)’. The image showed Samjhana with seven PLA combatants (five men and two women), posing in a firing position – four kneeling, the others (including Samjhana) standing behind them with their gun held at waist level. An Indian Small Arms System (INSAS) rifle lay on the ground propped up at an angle in front of them. The group stood on the edge of a hill, a mountain range in the background. While explaining the photograph, Samjhana drew my attention to the weapon she was carrying – as commander, she carried a smaller but technologically more advanced weapon. She showed me a pistol tucked into her waist band that was otherwise hardly visible in the photograph. The centrality of her experiences in Khotang is portrayed in an elaborate way in the chapter ‘Days spent in the East and fronts (Purbāmabiteka din ramorcāharu)’of her autobiography and, in particular, her ability to meet and interact with people and comrades from eastern Nepal – she was from the mid-western district of Pyuthan. During the war, there was a move towards eradicating caste, class and gender hierarchies by transforming thoughts and attitudes towards group members and by forging comradeship, friendship and other relationships to create an arena for progressive politics. Use of the plus symbol and of the word ‘with’ (sanga) reflects efforts to safeguard the empowering, enlivening experiences within these war-time bonds.

Beholding the female warrior’s body

21Ex-combatants use different forms of labour to create and transmit the meanings of the uniqueness of their war-time identities, and their experience and bonds through photographic self-representation. Even if taking photographs was no doubt a ‘social rite’ (Sontag 1977:8), the choice of the timing, the persons, the poses, the times when ex-combatants look at and show the photographs and the ways of preserving and protecting them reveal the photographs’ continued relevance. To generate a more nuanced understanding of the use of photographs as a tool for memory and identity, I address in this section the use of a specific type of photograph, that is of a militant guerrilla warrior in combat dress, holding a gun at different times and for different ends.

22One distinct feature of the five images (fig 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7) previously discussed is that they feature militarised female bodies, that is female PLA members in combat fatigues and carrying a gun, which was the most emblematic symbol of the MPW (Tamang 2017: 226). In the initial years, the publication and circulation of this kind of image substantiated the presence and participation of a large number of women in the movement (Shrestha-Schipper 2008–2009: 105). These pictures of women in uniform, living outside the home and performing life-taking and life-protecting tasks challenged patriarchal core values in Nepali society because, until then, women had been denied entry into state security forces, had been refused participation in life-taking tasks in most communities (Lecomte-Tilouine 2009: 224–225, Gayer 2013: 338) and were considered incapable of executing the physically, emotionally and intellectually challenging tasks required on battlegrounds (Shrestha-Schipper 2008–2009: 105). For Maoists, circulation of these images helped substantiate their claim and commitment to equality within the collective and their non-acceptance of traditional role models (Tamang 2017: 227).

24Kranti’s invitation for me to visit her Facebook profile and Roka’s to show me hers spoke poignantly of their continued endeavour to portray their militarised selves. One cannot ignore the fact that Kranti’s invitation is a simultaneous effort to substantiate the claim that, ‘she is not afraid of the past’. The creation of spaces to show, debate and discuss their war-time identities, roles and work for the public by staging their militant past by posting photographs of their war-time pasts on social media (here, Facebook), because of the veto on and unavailability of other spaces, demonstrates how subjectivities are construed through visual choices and decisions. Even amidst the post-war resurgence of tradition, rejection, humiliation and the marginalisation they were subjected to, the women ex-combatants I interacted with often claimed: ‘Only the war has come to an end, the revolution continues’. Utilising surviving photographs as an important component of the revolution and their accessibility on Facebook to assert the women’s militant past and identities and their continued dignity informs the work of memorialisation. 

• 20 Personal interaction with Silpi, July 2016. The quote has been translated from the original conver (...)

Can you see these marks on the sides? They came from the way we kept them in our wallets. During the war, we kept a photograph like this in the transparent folder of our wallet as a mark of our PLA identity. Since the entire photograph couldn’t fit in the transparent folder of a wallet, we folded it on both sides. That’s how we kept it. I kept this one which has these marks on it. During our free time, we would take our wallets out of our bags or pockets and look at the photo. We feel how big (thulo) we’ve become. Now those days are gone, and so are the photographs.20

26I was quite moved by Silpi’s desire to inform and ensure recognition for every form of struggle and happiness that embodying a military body and identity involved. This desire and striving for recognition astounded me just as much as my exposure to the various uses of photographs during the war. Photographs were utilised not only to combat (inevitable) forgetting or the anxiety associated with it, but also as a means of attaining and embodying desired identities and bodies, as well as of enhancing and galvanising the joy of it. It speaks significantly of a photograph’s ability to acquire new signifiers, meanings and memories over time. During the war, Silpi’s body in combat dress and armed with a gun signified her transformed role and identity and served as the most meaningful signifier. However, by the time of my fieldwork, the folds in the photograph had added new meanings of change, transformation and memories of the loss of the combatant’s body. More importantly, Silpi’s description revealed a newly active audience for these photographs: the combatants themselves, who used them to combat inner conflicts and to revive the pride and joy of achieving what was forbidden and deemed impossible for women in Nepali society.

• 23 Personal interaction with Barsha, 31 July 2016. The quote has been translated from the original co (...)

Then we were brought to the barracks and, to keep us occupied, they assigned us duties and we had to undergo physical exercise and training too. We were free, but the government was formed, agreements were signed and decisions were taken. And after that, everything happened at the will and agreement of the government, the leaders and the commanders. After the peace agreements, we could not achieve the war’s objectives and goals. The leaders kept on giving up on the ideology. They surrendered our dreams one after the other. Jhukdai gayo! Jhukdai gayo! (They gave in! They gave in!). It shouldn’t have been like that. The policies, ideology and goals of the party should have been given priority even after the war. But that didn’t happen. As time passed, the process took pace and they gave up everything we cherished. There cannot be anything more painful than that.’23 

29Silpi’s photograph represents these feelings of isolation, betrayal and loss that characterised the period, but, as Barsha recounts, Silpi denies responsibility for this state of affairs. On the other hand, through the photograph, she strives to emphasise the pride and dignity of her combatant identity by clinging on to her undefeated, invincible status. As an active audience and user of her own photographs, she undoubtedly used this to combat the feelings of indignity and defeat that post-war politics and conditions have subjected her to. Ideology influences the making, seeing and understanding of a photograph and, when subjected to new ideological uses, photographs can be misread and misremembered; under such circumstances, a caption defends an image against being misread and misremembered (Sontag 2004: 24). As the producer and owner of the photograph, Silpi therefore strives, through the text, to pre-empt any possible misinterpretations that her civilian attire and the artificiality of the space could lead to.

30PLA cadres in the MPW, as Cowan observes, were not blinded or driven by the ideology of the war alone. They were, like soldiers elsewhere, vulnerable to demoralisation and appreciated sound plans and military tactics (Cowan 2013: 303). The photographs discussed in this section inform of their use in diverse spaces and forums for speaking of and overcoming multiple vulnerabilities that women combatants experienced as armed guerrillas. The return to the domestic sphere, with its meanings and chores, and understood as a ‘doing-nothing’ zone, has placed many constraints on women’s performances of war-time memories. For example, Khadka (2012: 55) writes of an ex-combatant who divorced her husband, frustrated that while he would go around the village and talk of the war, she remained confined to the house and its chores.

Framing the past, fixing the present

31During the MPW, the politicisation of marriage by initiating love marriage, intercaste marriage and remarriage was used to achieve the revolutionary goal of eradicating hierarchical practices. Despite strict Maoist policies on sexuality, the movement became a space for young people to fall in love, find a partner and get married outside of their caste and class. Revolutionary marital unions in the Maoist movement subverted hierarchical relationships between spouses (Zharkevich 2019: 150). However, the Maoists’ reformulation of the institution of marriage and their claim of having initiated love marriage in Nepal have also been questioned (Gayer 2013, Shrestha-Schipper 2008–2009). During the interactions I had, many women ex-combatants remembered these unions as being a remarkable achievement because their husbands were more respectful and understanding than those of their friends who had not joined the war. The centrality of this as an important war-time experience was also evident from the sizable number of photographs of their progressive weddings and of women soldiers in combat dress, denoting their equal physical constitution and the similar labour and status they enjoyed during the war. However, there has been a decline in the value of this – widows are marginalised both within and outside the party because of their remarrying; women ex-combatants are questioned and rejected by families and neighbours because of their intercaste marriages, especially when husbands are from an upper caste; and war-time egalitarian practices regarding the sexual division of labour between men and women (also spouses) have declined. These gradual resurgences of tradition erode any opportunities to make the domestic sphere, where most women ex-combatants now find themselves, a potential space for politics. 

32Like that of many women ex-combatants, Samjhana’s decision to remarry was politically and ideologically motivated. Although she was initially hesitant, her commitment to a continuous and cultural revolution left her with no choice. In her autobiography, she details the ideological debate between Nabina and herself that convinced her to remarry in order to unravel feudal cultures. Both of the marriages Samjhana entered into were intercaste. Her first husband Jalan, killed in the battle of Khara, belonged to the Tharu community, and her second husband Sabin, a commander in the PLA, was a Brahmin bachelor. To convey the political significance of her second marriage, Samjhana showed me a photograph (fig 11) of a massive crowd in an open field with people sitting on the ground and tree branches strewn everywhere. Samjhana explained the photograph: it was of the crowd gathered to witness her second marriage – the marriage of a Dalit widow with a Brahmin bachelor. Celebrated at Sargadwari Multiple Campus, at Punya Khola, Pyuthan district, where caste rules are rigorously practised, the event created shockwaves, with people not believing that such an alliance was possible and therefore flocking in from neighbouring areas to witness it.

33However, Samjhana’s use of pictures to accrue value for her war-time past, her marital unions and the political and ideological purpose they are expected to serve became distinctly apparent from a photograph tacked onto one of the walls in the front room of her house (fig 12). In the picture, Samjhana and Sabin hold a similar pose and wear similar combat uniforms. More significantly, the photograph has been edited: an image of Jalan has been cropped from a picture taken at his wedding with Samjhana and has been pasted between the images of Samjhana and Sabin. In the photograph, Jalan wears a garland around his neck, is smiling, his eyes lowered and with abir on his right cheek, nose and forehead. The manipulation of the original photograph by adding Jalan is absolutely evident and overtly portrays the labour invested in a meaning-making activity. Another framed photograph of Jalan stood on a bookshelf in the same room. Creating and preserving spaces for the ongoing practice of war-time egalitarian norms, the photographs simultaneously inform of Samjhana’s courage (himmat) in questioning and challenging rigid norms even under post-war pressure to return to the pre-war order. Analysing the journey Samjhana’s war-time photographs had travelled, the work she had invested in and the use of the photograph – her choice of moments and events to be immortalised, safeguarding and protecting them against every war-time vulnerability, editing, manipulating, displaying and showing – depicts the continuous conscious (re)use of photographs to provide evidence, accrue value and legitimise woman combatants’ participation and practices. While Kranti’s and Roka’s uploading of photographs to Facebook spoke of the use of photographs as a medium for communicating with the public and of Silpi’s of communicating with herself, Samjhana’s usage, and in particular the manipulation, framing and displaying, indicated the use of photographs to make the domestic sphere a potential space for political dialogue and to (re)construct meanings associated with it as a ‘doing-nothing’ zone to which women combatants have returned in order to be (re)disciplined. Time and time again, Samjhana mentioned feelings of ‘directionlessness’ and ‘shame’ that engulfed her every day because of the failure to achieve the revolution’s goal and of betraying their ‘dreams’, and for allowing the martyrs’ sacrifices to be in vain. In this context, in her daily existence overwhelmed by painful emotions, her labouring over the photographs highlights her efforts to create direction amidst the directionlessness and to disperse the feelings of shame.

34In the post-war period, women ex-combatants are accused – for their participation in violence – of being incapable mothers. During my interactions, many shared the joy and stress of their ability and simultaneous inability to instil egalitarian values and practices of gender, caste and class equality in their children. Samjhana’s apathy stems from the ideological compromises she has made to satisfy her children’s desires. Under such circumstances, Samjhana’s decision to keep Jalan’s framed photograph on top of a bookshelf and the edited one tacked to the wall becomes a medium for communicating her thoughts and ideas and her continued faith and practice of egalitarian war-time values to the next generation and to everyone who comes to her house. This creative carving of space for communication and dialogue is substantially subversive because it is meant to combat simultaneously the dispiriting effects of pain, isolation and, as Samjhana say, shame and directionlessness.

Conclusion

35The visual endeavours made by Maoist women ex-combatants illustrate that they are the creators, manipulators and projectors of their war-time photographs. Their use of these photographs suggests that, despite the gendered experiences within and outside the war that limited their growth and agency, they have been careful about shaping narratives of their experiences. In response to the gendered experiences and the resulting joy, fears and anxieties, women combatants have worked to maintain a visual account of their participation, and of the transformations in their bodies, role and identities owing to their participation and the changes in the party and in the country’s power dynamics, thus informing of crafted subjectivities. Different methods have been applied to save these photographs from being lost and to inform of their significance to memory and identities. This work of preserving them in the current post-war situation continues as they are transformed into different forms: some framed, others scanned to be uploaded onto social media, printed in album size and a few in poster format to be stuck to walls.

36In People’s War, the armed wing, which was recruited as martyrs-to-be at the time of their service, worked as living martyrs guided by the overt drive to record their testimonies before facing death (Lecomte-Tilouine 2010). Lecomte-Tilouine (2010) also mentions an album belonging to a cultural warrior from Rolpa, which contained a large number of photographs of people who had been martyred. She notes that the cadre and his comrades were in the habit of photographing each other before a battle in case they never returned. This drive towards creating lasting memories has been further ensured through tactics such as photo manipulation, adding a text or placing a note on the back, primarily to assign specific meanings to the memories these photographs are meant to represent. However, continued use of them to meet various ends – to speak the unspeakable, to assert one’s undefeatedness, to open the domestic sphere to politics – also conveys the use of photographs to question and interpret past and present experiences. This informs the active use of photographs to (re)construct memories, knowledge, legitimacy and recognition for women ex-combatants’ war-time bodies, identities and labour. Multiple and varied usages also suggest expectations of keeping these photographs to serve their primary function as evidence of women ex-combatants’ lives and transformations. These (re)usages undoubtedly combat these women’s post-war invisibility, caused by the rejection and marginalisation of their war-time experiences. Women ex-combatants’ photographic choices and decisions must be read in the context of their desire to reach and engage an audience, thus establishing communication and dialogue. More importantly, they themselves are an active audience, using photographs to overcome the trauma of betrayal, separation from friends and comrades and the rejection and delegitimisation of their war-time roles.