Red, Love, Women, and Revolution

This is a photo I took of a photo of a poem, in Photo Kathmandu’s Women in Public Exhibit in Mangal Bazaar, ending Nov. 16, 2018.

This poem was written by Rashmi Rajya Laxmi Shah, daughter of the progressive playwright Balkrishna Sama, and wife of Jagat Prakash Jung Shah, a member of Nepal’s royal family. The exhibit caption says: “After Jagat Shah was killed in action during a revolt against King Mahendra’s government in 1962, Rashmi Rajya stayed in Calcutta as a political refugee before she committed suicide in full bridal wear a day before Teej of the same year. The poem was penned during that time in memory of her husband.”

The caption on Nepal Picture Library’s own site adds another interesting note: “Son Naveen Prakash Shah recalls that it was only after her husband’s death that she fully adopted the red insignias of a married woman.”

Exhibit captions further tell us:  They were both fully involved in the Nepali Congress Party-led anti-Rana movement in the 1940s, and in the 1950s, she worked as the assistant director of Radio Nepal. She and her husband both fought against King Mahendra’s coup in the early 1960s. They held feudal land rights (birta) in Nuwakot, Jagat Prakash ran for parliament from that area in 1959 (the last year of democracy before King Mahendra’s 1960 coup), and Rashmi Rajya was involved with a Tamang women’s uprising against King Mahendra’s government in 1961. In 1962 Jagat Prakash was killed in another uprising against King Mahendra (and there is a school named after him, Shahid [Martyr] Jagat Prakash Jung Shah Sanskrit Secondary School, in Nuwakot). The photo of the poem is from their son Naveen Prakash Jung Shah’s collection in Nepal Picture Library.

This has me thinking about how to interpret her suicide in its time, as protest, in the context of the imagery of sacrifice for the greater good–from Yogmaya to Gopal Yonjon’s Deshle Ragat Mage to Nepali Maoist imagery and songs of blood and sacrifice to Tibetan self-immolations–to the echoes of sati and the possibility that she simply could not see how to go on living without the love of her life. And also about translation.

The calligraphy here is Rashmi Rajya’s own; the translation below is mine. Another translation can be found on Nepal Picture Library’s site. I did my translation without knowing of this one. Mine is a bit more literal–or maybe just a bit more bloody due to my years of reading and listening to Nepali Maoist songs and imagery–than the other. Are both translations “presentist” in their own ways, mine steeped in the communist imagery of the past 50-60 years, the other leaning away from communism and so making the blood imagery more metaphorical? How to read and translate this poem in its historical context? They were Nepali Congress, not communist, revolutionaries, so is all the red imagery mostly…Hindu? And if mostly Hindu, then is it also mostly feminine? What kind of red revolution would she have supported had she lived, and what kind of red revolution was her death meant to ignite, as she imagined it while writing this poem and adopting all the red symbolism of love and marriage to highlight at her chosen moment of death?