After the Earth's Violent Sway: the tangible and intangible legacies of a natural disaster

The physical impact of a natural disaster such as a major earthquake is immediately visible: lost lives, displaced people, destroyed houses and a shattered cultural heritage. However, the longer-term impact of such an event is less apparent. This project will study the impact that the earthquakes of 2015 had on Nepali society. It will examine public discourse to understand social change; study efforts to reclaim and reinvent material culture; and study archival material to identify the permanent marks left by previous disasters.
First, the project will investigate the earthquakes' impact upon ongoing cultural and political discourse in Nepal. Nepal emerged from a ten-year civil war in 2006 and since then the country's main political players had been engaged in a seemingly interminable process of transition from a monarchical Hindu state to a democratic federal republic. Much of the debate and contention concerned the content of a new constitution for Nepal which would enshrine the new federal structure, safeguard democracy, and ensure greater inclusion of historically marginalized groups and communities. The earthquakes had a major impact upon this process: a new constitution was promulgated less than five months after the disaster, but its content proved to be highly divisive. The researchers on this project will investigate the ways in which the disaster changed the direction and content of the national debate on a number of key cultural and political issues over a three year period beginning on 25 April 2015 (the day on which the first quake occurred). Their analysis will focus on media, literary and cultural production ranging from newspaper op-ed columns to poetry, songs and urban graffiti (with a particular emphasis on material produced in Nepali), and on interviews and focus-group discussions in both provincial and metropolitan locations.
Second, the project will ask who it is that decides which elements of an aid-dependent country's destroyed physical heritage is worth restoring. Early photographs of earthquake damage showed heaps of rubble in Kathmandu's world heritage sites. This gave the impression of extensive devastation in the capital and led to an early media focus on the loss of cultural heritage in the Kathmandu Valley. It seemed to be generally assumed that the restoration of the Valley's historic built environment would take place uncontentiously, and that the international community would contribute to the cost of this restoration. However, the discussion is only just beginning of what the priorities of the restoration project will be, or how they will be set. The project will investigate the extent to which the selection and prioritisation of sites and buildings for restoration is driven by what is held locally to be most 'dear', and to what extent by the evaluations of external donors and heritage experts.
Third, the project will draw historical comparisons between the sociocultural and political impacts of the 2015 quakes and those of the major quakes that struck Nepal during earlier periods of political and cultural transition in 1833 and 1934. A handful of brief accounts of these earlier quakes and their aftermath and impact have been published in Nepali and English (eg. Joshi 2015, Rana 2013), and several Nepali journalists referred to these accounts in their reporting on the 2015 disaster. However, little of this material has been utilised by scholars writing in English, and archives in London, Delhi and Kathmandu contain contemporaneous accounts that have not been published or analysed in any detail.
This study across the three strands aims to determine what changes in Nepali society take and have taken place after a major disaster. Do the rules and conventions that governed life and political decision-making before a disaster continue to be valued in its aftermath? What kinds of change occur as a result of such a disaster? Which of these changes is temporary and which is permanent?

This research will contribute substantially to understandings of the longterm sociopolitical and cultural impacts of natural disasters, especially in aid-dependent low-income countries where the state is weak. It will deliver impact in a range of contexts.

First, the project will be of considerable interest to Governmental departments and international agencies engaged in delivering relief and development aid to countries in the global South, including Nepal. Even nine months after the disaster, the country directors of many agencies are frustrated by the Nepal government's failure to realise or spend any of the $2.7bn of relief aid pledged by foreign governments and donor agencies. It came as a surprise to outsiders that the Government of Nepal gave a higher priority to the promulgation of a long-delayed constitution.

This research will encourage policy-makers to consider the local political and historical contexts of future natural disasters and their responses to them. It will take more fully into account the discourses that take place in spheres inaccessible to those not versed in local languages. Our analysis of the political impact of the 2015 Nepal earthquakes, especially as articulated in the Nepali language discourse, will enable donors and policy-makers to consider alternative rationalities and take decisions that are based more firmly on political ground realities, thus increasing the effectiveness of interventions in future situations in Nepal and elsewhere.

Second, the research will critically analyse the way in which national and international actors relate to one another in decision-making processes and policy making related to the protection, documentation and reconstruction of Nepal's physical cultural heritage. It will analyse how this conversation is framed through domestic legislation and assess the extent to which laws reflect vernacular 'heritage' concepts and influence decisions about the allocation of international funds. This will be of interest to international organisations (ICOM, ICCROM, ICOMOS, UNESCO etc.) as well as local institutions and projects such as the Guthi Sansthan, the Department of Archaeology, the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust, the Patan Conservation and Development Programme, the Patan Museum and the Bhaktapur Development Project.

Third, the project will add to UK public understanding of the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake. The Disaster Emergency Committee's Nepal earthquake appeal raised over £50 million in its first fortnight, exceeding even the sum raised during the first three months of its Ebola appeal (£34 million). This demonstrates considerable sympathy for Nepal on the part of the British public, and continued interest in the aftermath of the disaster. While a great deal of information (much of it disheartening) can be found online in respect of the ongoing humanitarian relief effort, much of this is presented apolitically, devoid of any contextual framing. The project will therefore fill a significant gap in the public understanding of the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake, to the alleviation of whose effects the British public contributed with such generosity.

Finally, the project will aim to contribute to Nepali public understandings of the tumultuous series of political events that followed in the wake of the disaster. It will do this by subjecting Nepali public and media discourse to non-partisan and critical analysis, and by placing these events in a deeper historical context through a comparison of the events of 2015 with disasters that struck Nepal during the 19th and 20th centuries. As such, the project, with its focus on processes and negotiations, will contribute to the understanding of the making of the collective memories that remain as the tangible and intangible legacies of a disaster: these are, after all, the sociopolitical contexts within which international interventions take place.