Tourism and Nationalism in Nepal

A Developing Country Perspective

Kalyan Bhandari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367606589
• eBook ISBN: 9781317291398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book explores the role of tourism in the expression of nationalism in Nepal. It investigates assemblage of images, emblems, and symbols of Nepali nationhood in various touristic representations and narratives from Nepali travellers and diasporic visitors to showcase how they express nationhood and stimulate a strong sentiment of national feeling and belonging. The book suggests that touristic settings in Nepal provide a venue for articulation of nation, first through internal ascription, that is, the construction of identity by citizens with the nation; and second, through the promotion of distinctive touristic identity through the assertion of national uniqueness and distinguishing the nation within the larger international community.

Given the recent great political changes, post-conflict nation rebuilding, and development, Nepal offers a fascinating case study on the role of tourism and nationalism. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and professionals working in tourism and heritage studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, and area studies, as well as those interested in the study of developing societies.

1
Introduction

This book examines the interface between tourism and nationalism in Nepal. It investigates how tourism provides a stage to showcase Nepal’s national identity and helps in the expression of nationalism. Scholars have argued that tourists’ practices do not only involve the purchase of specific goods and services, but, through touristic representations, tourism produces a way of viewing a destination. They suggest that a perception produced in tourism can play a significant role in the evolution of the viewing of a place or producing a distinctive narrative of a nation: for example, the use of symbols, artefacts, icons, and imagery, through which both visitors and natives are reminded of the heritage and cultural kinship of a nation. This book is about this role of tourism and illustrates the articulation of nationhood and nationalism in touristic settings in Nepal.

Tourism is a product of a middle-class consciousness of modern society and the sociocultural differentiation created by it (MacCannell, 1999; Urry, 2006). According to this view, the desire for tourism primarily originates from the curiosity of seeing another culture, people, and place; and the touristic consciousness is motivated by this desire for authentic experiences (MacCannell, 1999). For this reason, people as tourists travel to places different from those encountered in their everyday life, and the social, historical, cultural, and natural elements of the place they travel to are organised into a stream of impressions. These impressions help make tourism activity more than an isolated incident of just a tour or a visit to a place but rather a composite imagination of the place they travel to. In a sense, tourist attractions become a cultural experience of the society they represent and embody a discourse that reflects social meanings, relations, and entities to express nation and nationalism.

At the same time these attractions can mean different things to domestic tourists and other travellers who share their cultural identity or familial belonging with the destination. Unlike for foreign tourists who are driven by a desire to visit and know new and interesting people and their pasts, the travel aspirations of the domestic or diasporic visitors originate in the search for familiarisation and identification with others (Bhandari, 2016). For them, travel becomes associated with the individual quest for identity and self-realisation, and experiences become highly individual, subjectively interpreted, intangible, and ephemeral. For this reason some scholars have regarded tourism practices and the ways in which they are imagined and enacted as central to the construction of the self (Desforges, 2000, p. 930). According to Giddens (1991) self-identity is not something that is given but is something that is routinely ‘created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual’ (p. 52), and for travellers who have a close cultural affinity with the destination or the attraction, tourism can become one of the media for such reflexive activity to connect and identify with their nation.

In the case of Nepal, tourism has played an instrumental role in the early development and articulation of its identity and the positioning of Nepal as a unique nation in the world. This happened through the use of the Himalayas and the selective cultural representations that relied on the imagery of ethnic groups that complemented the Himalayan narrative. Such narrative was dictated partly by commercial necessity because the Western travellers expected exotic and out-of-the-ordinary accounts (Urry, 2006; Riggins, 1997), though in doing so it denied the narrative that contradicted this image. Projecting such an image was largely a political project of the Monarchical regime because creating Nepal’s uniqueness strongly supported the model of Himalayan Shangri-La, in which the monarch was cast as a fulcrum of Nepali culture and society. It defined Nepali national identity through the cultural traits of the hill and mountain regions and the representations of Nepal that did not comply with this image of Nepal were not given enough attention. In this book I will show that despite huge change in the political landscape of the country, the touristic image of Nepal still relies on the Western-created image, and to a great extent there is a continuity of the agenda of constructing a singular Nepali ‘national identity’ and representing a particular ‘version’ of nationalism.

However, I also look into other ways of exchange between tourism and nationalism and a national and a personal level. The case of Lumbini discusses that heritage monuments and sites constitute repositories of national identity that make the site a resource for the articulation of national imagination. At a national level, a strong opposition to the development project at Lumbini proposed by a Chinese firm highlights the collaboration between tourism and Nepali nationalism in defending the ‘perceived’ invasion into its ‘(inter)national’ heritage. At a personal level, the book discusses how a visit to a heritage attraction or a travel to one’s home nation helps in making emotional connections to their nation and in reminding them of their common heritage and cultural identity. Visitors at the Buddhist heritage site in Lumbini find themselves exalted by happiness, honour, and sense of pride while experiencing the Buddhist heritage. Same with the diasporic visitors who demonstrate that travelling to Nepal is a way through which they reconnect their association with Nepal and reaffirm their allegiance with the Nepali nation.

I must clarify here that nationalism in the book refers to the ‘ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential nation’ (Smith, 1991, p. 73). Thus, the main quest in this study is to examine tourism activities that are geared towards affirming the above characters of the Nepali nation. Such activities are driven by nationalist doctrine that contains three fundamental propositions: (a) the world is divided into nations, and each nation has its own culture, history, and destiny that make it unique among other nations; (b) nations must be united, autonomous, and free to pursue their goals; and (c) each individual belongs to a nation and that allegiance to the nation overrides all other loyalties (Triandafyllidou, 1998). The discussions in this book are mainly focussed on examining how tourism complements those nationalist doctrines through the use of various symbols, icons, images, texts, and the experience of Nepali travellers and their reflections. In another way, the book illustrates how narratives of the nation produced through the medium of tourism articulates the above principles.

In recent years, there have been some interesting studies into the role of tourism in articulating nation, nationalism, and national identity (Frew and White, 2011; Pretes, 2003; Pitchford, 2006; Park, 2010). These studies have shown that national identity and tourism intersect, overlap, and traverse, providing an opportunity for authorities to capture the imagination of tourists by referring to various aspects of national identity (Frew and White, 2011). Frew and White (2011) take the view that the connection between tourism and national identity is apparent via the promotional activities of tourism authorities. They recognise a need to better understand the multi-faceted and complex connections between people and places and argue for the development of national identity-related products, though this can be debated, because in many cases national identity is a source of aggression. According to Hobsbawm (1999), nationalism by definition excludes ‘all who do not belong to its own nation, that is, the vast majority of the human race’ (p. 169). Thus, deliberately having products that boast of national pride can be highly political in nature and can create uneasiness in some types of visitors, especially if they are not part of that heritage or if they are from a former imperialist power.

There are numerous other studies which have shown such a ‘nationalist’ role played by tourism in various contexts. Pitchford (2006) has shown that tourists who visit Wales are exposed to almost every piece of the national story in some form, for example, through museums and other attractions that focus on a group’s history and culture. It serves as a medium to project ethnic and nationalist messages and helps to build a revalued collective identity. In another study of Wales, Pritchard and Morgan (2001) argue that the influence of both repressive and liberating historical, political, and cultural discourse is importantly enshrined in tourism representations. In the Scottish case, McLean and Cooke (2003) have shown how heritage visitors to the National Museum of Scotland actively identify through their gaze, constructing multifarious meanings of national identity that are dynamic rather than static. However, most of these studies are based on European experiences, and a study of such a role of tourism in a non-Western context would be a helpful addition to scholarship.

In the above context, this study of the articulation and expression of Nepali nationhood in tourism has a contemporary relevance. Nepal has witnessed some of the biggest political changes in its history in recent years. Nepal experienced a huge constitutional change in 1990, when a parliamentary democracy was restored and its ethnic diversity was embraced after three decades. This was followed by an even bigger political change in 2008, when it abandoned the traditional Hindu monarchy and adopted a federal republican state. This brought about a huge change in ‘national’ identity and the way the Nepali nation is imagined. Hutchinson (2001) writes that state modernisation ignites competing ethnic traditions with their different versions of community, and it is important for nationalists to legitimise both traditionalism and innovation. This has been strongly witnessed in Nepal in recent years. There has been strong demand for forging a new national identity based on pluralist ideology because many of the older references to Nepali identity have outlived their purpose. This is reflected in the emergence of various ‘sub-national’ movements demanding due recognition of their vernacular identity in Nepal. Studies examining the discourse of the Nepali nation produced in alternative narratives, such as that of tourism, have not received enough attention in current scholarship.

There are other reasons for choosing Nepal. With the preliminary estimate of one million international visitors in 2017, tourism in Nepal is poised to become the most important feature of Nepal’s sociocultural life. Rojek (2006) contends that leisure and consumption are conflated in modern life experience, which in the case of Nepal was strengthened with the implementation of neo-liberal economic policies in the early 1990s and the growth of a service economy. There were also other contributing factors for the growth of tourism: for instance, the end of decade-long internal conflict and relatively improved political stability and the recognition from all quarters of the importance of tourism for Nepal’s socio-economic development. Additionally, other influences such as globalisation and access to media and communication have brought about a huge change in the values, practices, and organisation of Nepali tourism. As a result there has been a remarkable increase in the number of domestic Nepali visitors. It is estimated that about 4 million Nepalis visited various ‘home’ attractions in 2017 (Dhakal, 2018). Since there were alone more than 1 million home visitors to Lumbini, the birthplace of Lord Buddha, the above estimate of domestic Nepali travellers is reasonable.

Interestingly, sociological studies on tourism in Nepal are still emerging. Some interesting studies are focussed on investigating the touristic phenomenon of the 1970s and Nepal’s golden ‘hippy’ era. For example, there are a number of studies by Liechty, who has investigated the growth and expansion of tourism during the 1970s, specially focussing on the hippy culture and its influence in the society and culture of Kathmandu (Liechty, 2005, 2017). More recently, Linder (2017) has investigated the growth of Thamel and argues how tourism has suppressed the other narratives of Thamel and underlying contestation over its cultural significance. There are very few studies looking into the implications of the end of monarchical rule and the Hindu religion in tourism. In one study on Narayanhiti Palace Museum, Whitmarsh (2017) shows how the conversion of an erstwhile palace marks the transition of Nepal from a monarchy to a republic. She argues that the opening of the museum ‘is a particular instance of the reconstruction of a Nepali national identity’ (Whitmarsh, 2017, p. 89). Considering the changed socio-political context after the 1990s and the recent introduction of a new constitution in 2015, more studies on the implications of changed national context on various aspects of Nepali society and culture through their own respective disciplinary platforms would be highly relevant. This book is intended to fill this gap.

Brief outline of tourism in Nepal

However, it is important to first outline the growth and scope of tourism in Nepal. Tourism has received much attention in Nepal since it was recognised as an important moneymaking sector. Interest started after the successful ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953 that gave Nepal unprecedented media attention all over the world and helped raise the country’s tourism potential. The Coronation of the then-King Mahendra, in May 1956, further added to the international exposure of Nepal, with more than 60 foreign correspondents covering the event. Tourism infrastructure was improved, with the construction of hotels for accommodating dignitaries, guests, and journalists to this event. Tourism was included in the First Development Plan (1956–1961), a document that mentioned the ‘travel profession’ as an important tool for ‘popularising’ Nepal and earning foreign currency (Chand, 2000). The government followed this with the creation of the National Tourist Development Board (NTDB) and also created the Department for Tourism, together with the Hotel and Tourism Training Center. The institutionalisation of tourism began in 1962, when the government started to keep records of incoming visitors, which stood at 6000 that year. Various measures were taken to develop tourism during the Second Development Plan (1962–65), for example, increasing tourism investments with better provisions of loans and the diversification of tourism to other areas like Pokhara and Chitwan, and airports were built in many parts of the country. This was followed up with the publication of promotional booklets and documentaries, a survey of tourism products, the setting up of tourism information centres, and the establishment of training centres for producing a middle-term labour force (see Chand, 2000).

In 1990 a significant political change took place, and Nepal adopted a constitutional monarchy, ending three decades of the old autocratic regime of the absolute monarchy. The new system was also instrumental in fully adopting an open-market economic policy and liberalisation. Tourism was one of the several industries for which state protection was lifted. With orientation towards the market economy, significant changes occurred in tourism with a new Tourism Policy in 1995 that laid a strong emphasis on the role of the private sector in tourism, development of village tourism, introduction of quality-control mechanisms, and maintenance of a regional balance while developing new tourism areas; added to this was the integration of tourism with other compatible sectors such as agriculture and cottage industries with a view to increase the length of stay, especially of Indian tourists. The year 1998 was officially promoted as Visit Nepal Year ’98 and was marked throughout the year with various promotional and other events. The campaign also encouraged foreign investment in the tourism sector, and as a result, foreign investment was attracted for infrastructure projects, primarily hotel and resort developments. The new tourism policy also recognised a need for an autonomous body for tourism marketing.

During the entire 1990s, the operation of tourism remained largely in the hands of private-sector tourism entrepreneurs. Restriction was lifted for operating travel agencies and trekking agencies. Foreign investment in the tourism infrastructures was welcomed, although no foreign investment in travel agencies or trekking agencies was permitted. Only registered guides were allowed to carry out sightseeing activities. Most of the areas of the country were opened for tourists, with few exceptions pertaining to the so-called restricted areas, for which a special entrance permit was required. In 1999, Nepal Tourism Board was established, and since then marketing and promotion of tourism are taken care of by it. The Board has been carrying out promotional activities in the selected target markets, involving the private sector in all its marketing activities. Besides marketing and promotion, the Board now is also responsible for the improvement of existing products and development of new ones in order to diversify tourism activities in the country.

Tourism remained relatively smooth until 1999, the year that saw half a million visitors. But the political turmoil triggered by the violent revolution led by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Nation, nationalism, and tourism in Nepal
• 3 ‘National’ imagery in tourism representations
• 4 Expressing nationalism at Lumbini
• 5 Earthquake and diasporic travel to homeland
• 6 Conclusions
• Index