The Desire to Make Nepal's “War Jungles” into Historical Objects

There are many efforts underway, during and after a war, to try and make history. One way to make history is to make a certain portion of the territory relevant to the masses for a long time to come. This historical territory is usually the “No-Man's-Land,” such as the border regions between nations in traditional war, or the jungles in a guerrilla war. One of the issues that propels sides in a war to convert a piece of land into a historical land of dispute is that it is a way to subvert insertion of that land into the monetary economy: the no-man's-land or the jungle is exempt from economic valuation as it becomes an object of history, to be remembered because it was a special territory fought over rather than something to be utilized for building, agriculture or mining purposes eventually. In this way, a common desire from both sides of a conflict converts the contested territory into a historical object; both sides in a conflict demonstrate a fixation with history-making. That there is so much loss of life and other hardships during a war implies that the conversion of a territory into a historical object via the overcoming of its economic valuation is a tremendous feat indeed; it is as if a piece of land 'naturally' tends to be more friendly towards economic valuation rather than history-making. Ultimately, however, economic valuation and utility is short-lived; all objects are ultimately historical objects.

The exact history of the conflicts that criss-crossed a certain piece of land, such as a Nepali jungle, is however hard to preserve and disseminate. We therefore forget that a piece of land has history attached to it, and this forgetting is what enables us to put the land into the economic logic of buy/sell, boom/bust, profit/loss etc. Land, in particular, is hard to put within a historical framework of conflicts, harder than it is to submit houses and peoples to history and to remember them. Conflicts are therefore renewed, repeated again and again, in order that the land these conflicts occur on and for may be inserted once again into our memories, and hence, in this regard, conflicts would be entirely unnecessary if our historical memories were more longer and more pronounced. The necessity of war, then, is not economic nor is it political, but it is historical, it is the need to repeat history that brings two sides towards an enactment, a dramatization, of War. Thus, there is a need to re-evoke and preserve in history those conflicts that took place on the land from the oldest periods of known human history, as a way of subduing the desire to make war and re-submit territories into history again and again. It should be argued and asserted by witnesses that the re-enactment of a war in the present does more to trample on the past wars than it does to preserve them. 

But a factor of concern is whether the contemporary moment is characterized by an amnesia deeper than in previous times. This amnesia is a real possibility: the forces of globalization are inserting the local land upon which history-making processes take place into much wider global channels which ultimately means that history-making processes are being "colonized" by neo-imperial powers that utilize land far and away to re-enact the wars that they themselves do not want to repeat in the peaceful homeland. All the wars that are taking place today all over the world collectively re-enact the massive World War 2 that took place in Europe. Wars take place here, but have a greater significance over there, which causes amnesia of the local residents here. All this to say that if the memories and historical production at the local level concerning the war is weak, then it can perhaps be speculated that such a war has greater significance abroad, where it is depicted in detail by the media, than it does at the local level.