Vietnam is
just an example of the story of colonialism. Great Britain, on the
other hand, never colonized Nepal. That is true for an ignorant
nationalist who takes the term colonialism as an escape. How much of
the west is there in Nepali culture? The use of English language and
its cultural influence, MTV, western dresses, Jennifer Lopez, to the
popularity of Hollywood movies, coke, jeans, and western technology,
Nepal, or almost any other nation for that matter, cannot think about
their lives without American or western images.

Orthodoxy
laments about the loss of culture by the influence of the western ideas
and values. We write here and there that the west is destroying our
tradition and the age-old faiths and believes. There are many such
complaints and grudges, and we still cannot do anything except
negotiating and living in these hybrid cultural situations. Look how a
Nepali groom has to put on traditional dhaka topi (Nepali cap) and
still needs a western three-piece suit to go for the wedding. Look how
a Terain wraps dhoti and joins a wedding procession dancing with Hindi
songs tuned with western musical instruments (it is another thing that
we ignore the fact that the popular �band� music of the men in red and
black is a western import). Look (columnist Sanjeev Uprety wrote once)
how a school kid in a Jhapa town has to attend the morning school
prayer putting on tie over his sweating neck in the summer heat. Think
how much of the western technology has penetrated in our lives from the
Internet to the western modes of democracy, from using the ordinary
spoon to eat (aloo chiura) beaten rice and potato during the office
breaks to the use of cell phones to go to political processions.

The west
does not use military force to colonize us, which it did during the
times of the western expansion. Colonization with guns and marching men
is an outdated mode. The power of the digital images, advertisements,
modes of education, fashion and entertainment and their popularity have
left deeper impacts on our minds than the physical impact of the
political and military colonization. Their armies have left from Asia
and Africa but the popular western images have become our habits, our
modes of behaviors. They have penetrated into our inner psyche and most
of the times we are not even aware of them. This is more dangerous than
fighting and loosing to the visible invading armies. This is even a
stronger form of colonialism. A defending nation can fight against the
invading foreign armies face to face, you can see the opponent in such
wars, but when digital images and lucrative consumer goods invade, you
surrender to the armies-without-guns.

The clich�
Nepal was never colonized is a historical imagination to gratify us and
escape from facts of our daily lives. This is a statement to construct
a national allegory, which lives in the nostalgia of some poets and
which gives us momentary satisfaction, but nothing more than that.

We depend
on western technology, western arms to think about our freedom. We are
the vast consumers of the west, we buy their products every moment, we
copy them. You wear western dresses and drink Pepsi like a fish. What
is left is to live in mimicry (as VS Naipaul says) and negotiations. A
country like Nepal is at the receiving end in its cultural, economic
and political negotiations and mimicry. We may not like it but that is
a harsh fact, a historical determinism.

The
five-party alliance these days is around Tundikhel, the Kathmandu
central park, demanding the return of the lost democracy. The modern
political system, which we so very dearly call democracy, its basic
rules of functioning, its processes of election, its parliamentary
procedures, its emphasis on secular and liberal constitution is a
western intellectual gift. None of the non-western traditions, their
economic and political philosophers have ever thought of replacing it
with other political forms except altering, modifying, and improvising
on its structures and contents here and there. The most emphatic form
of democracy is western capitalism. The closest in popularity to the
western capitalistic democracy is communism. There are many other
nuances of capitalistic democracy and communism, and all are brilliant
western political ideas with its good as well as ugly traits we know
about. Nations have accepted them for their liberation and Nepal is
just a tiny example of such approvals. Nepal is a colonized cultural
space.