We walk around inside a
Nepali museum, and see, among the artifacts and animal bones in
exhibition, the late Prime Minister's car and wristwatch on display, and
they appear lustrous, as if full of an aura which speaks of their
historical importance in the making of landmark political decisions.
What is problematic about this placement of the Prime Minister's possessions in the museum is that it cuts off these
possessions from any political significance they may have carried into
politics today; these items are not used and suggest that the
politics of the past is not important in the present. It is part of a
wider problem in the relationship between an older generation and a
younger generation in politics: at no point does a Prime Minister who
is close to natural death write down a “political will" on the side, a will document which would give over his/her possessions to future politicians rather than abandoning them to the
public sphere of the museum. In fact it is their abandonment which
gives the Prime Minister's possessions a luster and aura, it is their
lack of use in the world which ensures that they are dust-free.
And yet we stand before
the late Prime Minister's car or watch in a museum exhibition space
to look at them and expect them to suddenly burst to life, for the
car's engine to start or the watch to tick again. This is a way in
which we fantasize and are expressive of the need for the late Prime
Minister to contribute to the current political climate and
activities of Nepal. If there had been a will that the Prime Minister
had written, we would have in our hands a document which was a
gesture that defied death, that essentially suggested that the Prime
Minister was challenging natural death, and hence we would feel his/her resolution, positive stubbornness, and power at trying to challenge
natural death and maintain himself/herself as a political actor even after
his/her natural death. Instead, we have a significant
depoliticization of the late Prime Ministers after his/her biological
death, suggesting that in politics too the link between the
biological body and professional activity is very close. We have the
myth of the importance of the body in shaping one's identity and
legacy: when the body passes away, so do one's identity and legacy.
Perhaps we see the Prime Minister's car or watch as extensions of
his/her biological body, so that all these “possessions” (we mean
possession here also in the sense of being possessed by the Prime
Minister's “soul” or “ghost”) become identity-less once the
Prime Minister passes away, as if they were parts of his/her body,
and hence too we expect these possessions of the late Prime Minister
to burst to life in the silent museum, before our eyes, as if they
were body-parts.
Perhaps the unspoken
transfer of politician's possessions from political realms to
cultural spaces is due to the need for the objects to be kept
secret in a way for current political acts and events to function. In
a museum, the car or the watch is severed from the political agendas
of which they were integral components, because in a museum we think
these objects are symbols of the whole
of the politician's politics and not practical elements that
contributed to the evolution of the politician's political thought
and action/work, and can continue his/her work for him/her even today. We have in Foucault the idea that being too visible
to outside eyes causes one to be understood/disciplined by
knowledge-based power, yet we have the disproof of this idea in the
museum: the more visible/prominent a political object in a museum, the more
secretive it is, the more it does not link with the political
activities of which it was a part in the past.
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