Republic or Death! (9 page)

After the massacre, Birendra's brother Gyanendra was named king (he had actually been king once before, for a few weeks at the age of four, when the rest of his family fled to India fearing they were about to be killed). Fat and with a drooping mouth, Gyanendra was known as a hard-nosed businessman with interests in everything from turpentine to incense sticks. He had an air of arrogance, disdain even, and was far from popular. Many Nepalese actually assumed he was behind the massacre, trying to secure the throne for himself with the help of Indian security forces. The fact he was not at the dinner that night was apparently all the evidence they needed; his wife might have been one of those shot, but that was clearly just a ploy to divert people's attention. (The Maoists tried to encourage this conspiracy theory, Baburam writing in a newspaper that no one should accept Gyanendra as king and suggesting they'd been negotiating peace with Birendra all along.)

When Gyanendra received the crown, the Maoist uprising had already been going for five years but had been confined mainly to the western hills. It had begun with Baburam's forty demands, which were issued in a very polite letter in February 1996 (Baburam was the group's second in command behind a military leader called Prachanda). The letter pointed out that over 70 per cent of Nepal's population was in poverty, then called for everything from the abolition of the royal family's ‘rights and privileges', to Nepal being declared a secular state; the confiscation of landlord's property to free medical care. ‘If there are no [positive moves] we would like to inform you we will be forced to adopt the path of armed struggle,' it added, politely. The ‘people's war' began a few days later. The next few years saw attacks on police and government offices, mixed in with periodic ceasefires. But after Gyanendra assumed the throne, the rebellion stepped up a gear. The Maoists killed forty policemen on his birthday – an unwelcome gift if ever there was one – and a few weeks later they attacked the army for the first time.

It was about this time that Pradip first learned that the Maoists were banning the old royal anthem. ‘I was at home and I read in the newspaper they were making people sing communist songs instead and it made me feel that maybe there was something wrong with it. “Why would they ban it?” I asked myself. “Was there a problem with the king or not?”' It was the first time he'd ever questioned the monarchy.

Gyanendra went on to do everything wrong in his quest to stop the Maoists. He called in the army to attack them. He repeatedly dissolved parliament. In 2005, he took full power for himself, then started banning newspapers and cutting off phone lines and internet access. He also started having anyone who showed opposition arrested. At one point, he declared a curfew and ordered those who broke it to be shot. Because of all this, he soon didn't just have the Maoists against him, but most of the rest of the population too. Baburam knew an opportunity when he saw one. The Maoists announced a ceasefire and began to work with the existing political parties to create a future without the royal family in it.

On 3 May 2006, Nepal's government and the Maoists jointly announced an end to the uprising. The king's days were numbered (although he somehow scraped along with his title until May 2008). Two weeks later, the anthem was scrapped. A few weeks after that, the competition for a new one was launched and Pradip started to write his song. The rules to the contest said the new anthem should be a maximum fifty words; the description of what it should be about – ‘Nepal's natural beauty, its special cultural identity' and so on – ran to twenty-seven, not exactly leaving much room for creativity.

*

I can tell we've reached the point in Pradip's story where things are about to go wrong when I ask him a simple question: ‘So, were you always patriotic?' It's the sort you'd expect the briefest of answers to: ‘Of course! Why would I have entered the contest if I wasn't?' But once Pradip starts answering, he seemingly can't stop. He talks about his childhood and the day ‘I literally touched the soil and decided I'd never leave'. He talks of listening to patriotic songs on a radio an uncle bought for him. He talks about everything he did to improve the life of his village, and his work in a lawyer's association fighting to improve people's rights. And then he talks about attending protests against the king in Kathmandu, getting shot at with rubber bullets and having to hide in a ditch. He speaks for so long my tea gets cold and my interpreter Ram's voice starts to crack from talking so much. It's as if Pradip feels he needs to prove his credentials to himself, let alone to me, which is somewhat understandable given what happened after he was named as the lyricist of the country's new anthem.

For almost two weeks, Pradip was one of the main news stories in Nepal. The national newspapers were filled with comments about him; it was the same on radio and television. He was famous. But it wasn't all the overwhelmingly positive attention he might have hoped for. Much of it was instead people arguing about whether he should have won or not. There were the kind of complaints you'd expect: people who didn't like his words, who complained he didn't mention the ‘martyrs' who died during the people's war, or who, conversely, complained he'd used the word ‘blood' and who felt the country needed to move on from the fighting. Then there were also those who complained about his ethnicity – Pradip is a Rai, a group that makes up just 2 per cent of the country's population. One of the main reasons the Maoists had risen to popularity was by promoting minority rights, saying people could speak their own language and celebrate their own culture rather than having to follow the traditions of the dominant high-caste Brahmans. Giving Pradip the anthem was clearly just a sop to them, some said. ‘I was the victim of a dangerous ethnicist contraction,' claimed the competition's runner-up, despite none of the judges having known Pradip's name, let alone his ethnicity, until he was into the final three.

All of this was, by and large, silly – jealousy mixed with conspiracy – that was always going to die down as soon as people ran out of breath. But there was one accusation that couldn't just be shaken off: that Pradip was a monarchist. It took journalists all of a day to discover he'd once edited a poetry collection that included a poem by Gyanendra. ‘We are very proud to have the opportunity to include a composition by His Majesty,' Pradip had written in that book's introduction. That one sentence – fifteen short words – was like a match to paper.

The level of scrutiny became such that it wouldn't have been much of a surprise if people had been found going through his bins, or breaking into his house hoping to find hand-drawn pictures of Gyanendra with hearts around them. Few people seemed to ask why a monarchist would enter a competition to create an anthem for a new, soon-to-be-republican Nepal. And fewer still pointed out the book had been published years before, when practically everyone was a monarchist. To their credit, Pradip's publisher did. ‘If we are going to ask questions about [him] on the basis of one sentence, who among us is pure?' they said in a letter to Nepal's main newspaper. But a few weeks later, Pradip's anthem was still ‘in quarantine'. He had won the competition, he was due a £4,500 prize, and he was being invited to ceremonies and getting phone calls from his future wife, but there was seemingly no guarantee his words would become the anthem. Pradip was just left anxious and confused, unable really to relax for months: the committee didn't approve the final anthem until the following April; the government until a few months after that.

I try to get Pradip to talk about this time, but it's clearly hard for him to do so. It's what he's been trying to avoid ever since I walked into his house. He looks at the floor and speaks quietly. ‘The attention, the interviews, all of this went on for so long. It was like being stuck in a black hole. I had heart pains, headaches. Everything was hurting. Obviously it was a stressful time, but I tried to suppress my anger and fear and fury with what was happening. I was trying to be a man! Maybe I had some shortcomings and weaknesses, but I told myself I had always done the right thing. One of my uncles was so shocked he said, “If I were you I wouldn't tolerate this – just say, ‘Let it go. Mine won't be the anthem.'” But he knew I wouldn't listen.'

Pradip finishes saying all this, then looks at me expecting another question. He seems pained as if dreading what's about to come and I decide I can't put him through any more. The smile of relief that appears on his face when I say I'm finished couldn't be wider.

*

After speaking with Pradip, I go to meet Benju Sharma, a middle-aged poet who was one of the fourteen judges of the contest, and the only woman. I want to check that the judges were really affected by the controversy.

Benju smiles fondly at the memory of the first time she met Pradip. He was called in for interview after making the final three. ‘This really rustic-looking guy came into the room, tiptoeing like he was afraid, and it was amazing to think he'd done this. We were sitting there wondering if this guy could even be a writer, he was so simple and naive.'

She loved the song – ‘This anthem can unite all the religions and languages and cultures here. It can make everyone feel Nepali, and it is working' – but even she had her doubts when the controversy built up. She started calling everyone she knew from Okhaldhunga, Pradip's home region, and it was only they who convinced her he wasn't a monarchist. And it was only her assurances that convinced the prime minister to approve the anthem. She looks through a file and pulls out her original copy of Pradip's entry. She'd scored him eight out of ten.

*

A few days later, I finally get to meet the man who's the reason I wanted to write about Nepal's anthem in the first place: Amber Gurung, the musician who was asked to come up with a tune for Pradip's words, and who decided that some beautiful, bewildering Nepalese music was as deserving of being a national anthem as any brass flourish or stately hymn. So many people have told me he's Nepal's greatest musician and made him sound like a towering figure, larger than life, that it's a shock to find he's in his mid-seventies and suffering from Parkinson's disease, which has made his face and neck rigid and causes his hands to shake slightly.

‘Oh, it was so hard to write the music,' he says, once his son, Kishor, has made sure Amber is comfortable and happy to talk. ‘They told me this song should be so simple that even an old man or small child could sing it and that idea got stuck in my mind. I became really conscious of it; found it very hard to compose. It's very easy to make difficult songs, you know; it's very difficult to make easy ones.'

Amber was one of the judges who chose Pradip's words. The government then asked him to write its music, having failed to get a good enough tune out of the army or police bands. Everyone expected him to knock it out quickly. It would take him a few hours, they were sure. A day or two at most. But he started and restarted tunes for weeks, writing a melody then giving up halfway, having an idea then scrapping it in doubt. ‘It was making me sick. One day my family took me to a resort to see the mountains, and left me there with a harmonium to get inspiration. I stayed for two days and when they came back: nothing. I couldn't even sleep, I was so restless with worry.'

Somehow he eventually wrote thirteen and a half songs, all in different styles. Most of these he's forgotten about, but he remembers the final three he offered the government. The first was your typical run-of-the-mill military anthem, of the kind that you hear the world over and that would never have made Nepal stand out. Amber's inspirations for that were ‘God Save the Queen' and ‘Jana Gana Mana', India's anthem – both of which he'd had to sing as a child while studying at missionary schools in Darjeeling. His second potential anthem was a raga – the classical Indian style of music, the kind of tunes you hear in films whenever the director's trying to sound mystical. His final suggestion was the song you hear today, the folk song.

I ask Amber how the government chose between the three, but he doesn't really explain, instead getting philosophical. ‘This is not great music,' he says. ‘Anyone could have done it, and any government could have accepted it. But it's a lucky tune. Time made this song the anthem, not me.'

As if sensing his father is flagging, Kishor comes into the room and suggests we end it there. But before I go, he invites me up on to the roof of their home for a drink. It's covered in multicoloured prayer flags fluttering in the wind and there's a breathtaking view over Kathmandu's northern suburbs. The sun is setting behind a mountain in the distance, spraying orange and red light over the city, making the metropolis seem peaceful for the first time since I arrived. There are children playing chase on a roof opposite. On another a man's feeding some birds. I feel as if I could stand there for hours, as if Nepal's spiritual image might have some truth to it after all.

Kishor points to a road below and tells me that during the final days of the revolution it was flooded with peasants who'd come from the countryside and got lost trying to find their way into the capital to protest against the king. ‘They'd walked two or three days just to be there. That's the grip the Maoists had on rural people,' he says. ‘Over half the people in the countryside live in poverty and the Maoists had given them so much hope in their speeches.' He asks how I got on with his father, and I tell him the only thing Amber didn't explain was how the government chose between his final three tunes. I want to know if they ever came close to picking something far less unique. Kishor laughs.

‘The selection process, now there's a story,' he says. ‘I went to a small office in the Singha Durbar – my father asked me to go on his behalf – and all the ministers gathered to hear the songs. I was about to press play when one of the ministers took out a CD. He'd brought his own song to play! I couldn't believe it. The guy must have been out of his head. But then another did the same thing, saying that
his
song should actually be the anthem. That man was one of the Maoists and – I don't know if I should say this – but his song had words like, “Wake up, rise from every village. Wake up, rise from every town. Wake up and rise with hammer. If you don't have a hammer, rise with fists.” And no one told them not to be stupid. They played the music!' He shakes his head. ‘Sometimes the politics in this country is something else.'