Memories of Nepal's 1990 revolution

The popular withdrawal of consent from the Royal regime was physically written upon the urban landscape of Kathmandu. People’s contestation of space inscribed upon the city a mosaic of signs which spoke of the ferment in its streets: broken windows of government offices; burned-out skeletons of government buses; torn-up street stones, used in battles with the police, lay strewn across streets and sidewalks; pro-democracy and political party slogans began to appear on the walls of the city and its temples; on the burning streets of Patan, peasant women formed an impromptu road blockade. At night the darkness was aglow with the orange spectre of street fires casting giant shadow arabesques against the buildings of Kathmandu’s Durbar Square. Riot police swamped the square, heralded by the whine of sirens, the explosion of tear gas canisters, and the firing of guns. After the demonstrators retreated, the windows of local hotels and residences were stoned by the police in order to intimidate local people. Down a sidestreet the bloody bodies of activists were loaded onto the back of a military jeep. In the morning the streets were strewn with rubble and speckled with the charred remains of car tires, buildings were blackened and burned by the incendiary of protest, buses and police vehicles lay abandoned, overturned and burned out.