At the time when this photo was taken, women were forbidden from enrolling in nursing programmes. Many SLC graduates would enroll at Patan Multiple Campus in the Humanities stream, most of them majoring in Home Science. The women in this photo belonged to that majority. “We were the smartest ladies of our batch and we were always perfectly dressed in our pink saris,” Gyandu Pandey (third from left) recounts. This picture, taken at Patan’s Purna Studio around 1984, reminds Pandey of her youthful days and her campus life. She and her friends, 2nd-year IA students, were posed by the photographer. “He made us cross our hands for uniformity,” she remembers. Going to campus made Pandey feel very prestigious. She was a studious young woman and was the only child in her family who passed with second division in SLC. Most of her friends had failed the exam. “I don’t know why, but I always wore a gold chain when I went to college. I’d ask my aunt for it – it was hers, but I loved it. The watch probably belongs to my sister or aunt,” she says. “After getting marred immediately after my IA, my life changed. There weren’t many ways of communicating in those days and I lost touch with all of these friends,” Gyanu says with sadness.
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This is among the very few photographs of my mother’s friends, all of whom were married off young into villages at least half a day away, if not half a few days’ walk removed from their parental village, and the support of their friends. The Nepali woman’s lot was to be cut off from everything familiar at a young age, to be sent to slave away in households where they were often no more than chattel to work the fields. More than family, friends were lost: this severance must have added to the loneliness and despair of a young woman reduced to mere property, bereft of voice. At least, the joys of unexpected and rare reunions like this rekindled old friendship, and allowed daughters and sisters and wives to exist outside the parameters so strictly drawn by a patriarchal system.
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A shopkeeper from Gorkha Bazaar who was traveling to Kuringhat, Ghanashyam was Adhikari’s friend and photography guru. Adhikari had joined him with his Yashica A camera to promote his own roaming photo studio. The girl was from Kuringhat Bazaar. Ghanshyam and Adhikari were just having fun, teasing Gurung women. Adhikari says he doesn’t know where the girl is now.
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Shrestha’s eldest daughter Minaruwa and her best friend Vidya at Purna Studio in Patan. They are wearing the uniforms of the Scouts, which had just been introduced in a few schools in the capital. The women in the photo remain close friends even today.
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Although he visited the house in Jhonchhen often, Shrestha says that he was never very close with the girls, at least not as close as he was with Kedar: it would not have been appropriate. Still, they let him photograph them, and so the memory of the visits remains.
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Although these picnics were one of the few ways in which groups of the more privileged people from Kathmandu could socialize beyond festivals, it was very rare that women went on picnics on their own or with their friends. In fact, Shrestha remembers fondly some picnics that he went on with his friend Kedar. But, he notes, it was not customary for the women around him to go on picnics.