Voicing Subjects: Public Intimacy and Mediation in Kathmandu

Epilogue: Royal Victims, Voicing Subjects

242 roughly a decade after the firstjanaāndolan(People’sMovement), King Bir Birendra Bikram Shah Dev, Queen Aishwarya, and their entire immediate family were murdered. The massacre occurred on the evening of Friday June 1, 2001, during a family dinner party at the royal palace in the heart of Kathmandu, where ten members of the palace’s inner circle were shot to death. Reports emerged in the days that followed declaring that Crown Prince Dipendra was the killer, who after single-handedly having murdered most of his family finally turned one of his many deadly weapons on himself. The official version of events held that the Crown Prince Dipendra, intoxicated on the drink and drugs he was known to consume, had quarreled yet again with his mother, Queen Aishwarya, about his desire to have an unarranged “love marriage” with Devayani Rana, over the Queen’s objections. At the time (and still today), most Nepali citizens categorically rejected this widely circulated explanation of the murders. By the next morning , Nepal had become the center of an international media spectacle, with the event appearing immediately as major news headlines on the BBC, The New York Times, Indian national newspapers, and many other news media throughout the world. Inside Nepal, on the morning after the massacre, all state media were shut down. Radio Nepal and Nepal TV were silenced. One friend, then a girl living in a far western village, told me that her father thought there was something wrong with the radio set and sent her to the store to buy new batteries. As they were to discover, the meaning of the technical “breakdown” was rather different, and they only learned the news of the disaster, like many of those living outside the Valley, through the Nepali-language BBC report at 9 a.m. the next day. Radio Nepal played solemn religious mourning songs, epi logu e Royal Victims, Voicing Subjects epilogue • 243 figure 15. Portrait of King Birendra and family that circulated widely after the massacre. Courtesy of Photo Concern. and the government-controlled Nepal Television showed shots of Pashupathinath Temple, and images of Vishnu, reiterating the purported divine genealogy of the king. Virtually no daily papers were released.1 Even the FM radio—a symbol of democratic “free speech”—played mourning music for days on end, framing the event as one of traumatic personal and national loss, suited only for the ineffable modes of music and ritual. Most Nepalis in Kathmandu learned about the incident via telephone calls, often from the diaspora, and rumors that reverberated throughout the city during the night. By Saturday morning, people clustered around Internet 244 • epilogue cafes to read reports from abroad and the web bulletins published by Nepali Times throughout the next day, since all satellite television transmissions were also blocked. Gyanendra Shah, the widely disliked younger brother of the murdered king, who had been conspicuously absent the night of the massacre , was hastily crowned king and conspiracy theories quickly circulated about his role in the murders. Who, in this moment of silence, were the voicing subjects of Nepal? • • • I end with this unsettling and unresolved incident in Nepali history because the event juxtaposes so many of the themes of this book: the complex relationship between mediation, technology, and transparency; the politics of public intimacy and affective publics; the deep interconnection between personal subjectivity and the experience of having, raising, and losing “voice”; and the relation between genealogy and political subjectivity. The events at the royal palace and the swirl of mass mediation, uncertainty, censorship, and performance that emanated from it speak to the complex contradictions involved in an ongoing process of creating what I call voicing subjects. The events of the massacre, including their mystifying mediation, represented a rupture on several levels. The initial terrifying silence about what happened in the palace provoked serious questions about the ability of ordinary Nepali citizens to know anything transparently through mass media, particularly when it concerned the palace. It was a shock to a social system that, since the liberal revolution of 1990, had become increasingly self-conscious about its freedom of speech and the often dizzying links between the powers of increasingly pervasive technologies of the voice and the liberation presumed of such agency. This disruption in the public sphere itself revealed and resonated deeply with a persistent discomfort that went to the heart of political subjectivity. The massacre at Narayanhiti palace and...