Out of Sequence: Reading The Public Life of Women

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Out of Sequence: Reading the Public Life of Women

From the Series The Photo Book Written From Here : Amit Madheshiya

I keep returning to this photograph. It resembles the ones in my family album. The painted backdrop is recognizable. A river flows through the mountains, spilling improbably into the photo studio. In front of it, a woman gathers her children. She does not look at us. Her eyes drift downward, away from the camera. Her daughter stands beside her with a bottle pressed close to her mouth; her toddler son sits on her lap.

The photograph appears in The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project, curated by Diwas Raja Kc and NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati. Their accompanying text unsettles its familiarity by naming the woman as Astalaxmi Shakya, an underground communist activist. She had run away from home to commit her life to organizing and mobilizing peasant communities in rural Nepal.

It is 1984, Kathmandu. She has returned home for a clandestine visit, leaving her daughter behind in her family’s care.

The photograph offers no explanation for why she comes to the studio, nor for what the decision would later demand. It offers instead her long, sinewy hands tightening around the children – an embrace that knows exactly what it costs. It makes us notice the children’s shoes, stiff and unworn.

The image feels less like a keepsake than a preparation, staged in advance of separation.

She does not meet the camera’s gaze. Her downward glance interrupts the photograph’s usual promise of futurity. It forecloses the later self who would be asked to account for this moment. What, then, does the photograph demand of us as readers, as historians, as citizens?

The gesture is easily read as refusal. Yet to do so is to translate averted gaze into intention, and intention into politics – an authority the photograph does not grant. The downward glance may be a matter of chance. What the photograph insists upon instead are the conditions under which self-memorialization occurs when disappearance is anticipated. This gesture is not anomalous; it belongs to photography’s earliest uses.

Consider a distant echo.

It is 1845, during the infancy of photography. Jonathan Walker enters a Boston studio and asks for a daguerreotype of his right hand. A year earlier, in Florida, he had been tried for attempting to smuggle enslaved people out of captivity. His sentence included solitary confinement, a heavy fine, and a branding: the letters S.S. (Slave Stealer) burned into his palm.

When he emerged from a year alone in a cell, Walker went straight to a studio. In the resulting daguerreotype, his branded palm thrusts forward from a dark void, held upright like a declaration.

The Public Life of Women returns repeatedly to such acts: moments when proof is produced precisely where no official record was intended. It is 1990. Four women sit for a studio portrait shortly after their release from prison. They had been arrested for chanting anti-government slogans. Their eyes lock into the camera with startling precision, as if to insist, “This is the record the state refused to keep.”

This demand is echoed by the watches on two of their wrists, probably in sync. They appear to mark the approximate hour of release – time accounted for privately, preserved only in the photograph.

The book gathers such small, stubborn acts of self-memorializing by women across Nepal and across decades. It scavenges photographs from aluminum almirahs, collapsing albums, and silverfish-gnawed boxes, presenting them not as discoveries but as returns to a historical field from which they had been displaced.

This gathering locates political life inside the household. I am now looking at a meticulously staged family portrait. The father sits at the center, radiating authority: bespectacled, topi in place, coat buttoned, a pen tucked erect into the pocket, a rolled document held like an emblem. The family is arranged on the steps of a doorway. The children are placed with careful symmetry. The youngest sits between her father’s legs, barefoot, already half-prepared to step out of the frame. Her feet press lightly against his shoe; he steadies her with two fingers.

The son stands beside his mother, an almost perfect double of his father – same coat, same pen in the pocket. The six daughters wear identical clothes: striped skirts, collared shirts, cardigans with raised floral patterns – all except the eldest. Her cardigan is plain. She alone looks visibly displeased. Was she scolded for breaking formation? Was the plain sweater a last-minute substitution? The photograph invites these questions and offers no way to settle them. Her mother stands against the wall, sari pulled over a full-sleeved sweater. She appears unsettled too.

I recognize the pull of these conjectures as a temptation to narrate domestic drama where the image withholds evidence. And yet, the temptation itself is instructive. What becomes visible here is not the certainty of a rebuke, but the work of dressing six children alike, of knitting flowers, of holding bodies in place. The cardigan does not testify to a moment of discipline. It testifies to the uneven, largely unrecorded labor required to produce the appearance that the household holds together.

The curators’ text names another absence the image cannot fill: the father himself, who was often away on revolutionary work. The text recenters the woman in the photograph, Hira Devi Yami. She had married Dharma Ratna Yami, a social outcast, nonconformist, and political prisoner, against her wealthy family’s wishes. In his long absences, she bore the weight of supporting an impoverished household. She provided for all of them – a detail scarcely noted by history. At night, after labor and mending, she moved through the city pasting political pamphlets in the dark.

The curators read the photograph against itself. They attend not to what it displays, but to what it displaces. Their method follows a long feminist tradition of archival reading that understands the archive as a field structured by omission – by caste, class, patriarchy, and the state. This is the labor Sharmila Rege undertakes in her scholarly work, how women’s histories persist not as official record but as residue – in chores, fragments, endurance.

Though the father occupies the center of the image and its received history, his frequent absence from the household complicates any assumption that its sustaining labor ran through him. The missing flowers register this displacement; the curators’ text reframes the portrait, directing attention toward what the photograph cannot stabilize.

To see deeper, the book cuts away.

Often, the reader encounters fragments first. Enlarged faces of women activists, protesters, revolutionaries. The scale monumentalizes them. Only later does the whole photograph appear, reduced, contextualized, delayed.

One sequence renders the method legible. It is 1951, Kathmandu: a women’s rally demanding the right to vote. A double spread offers only a sliver – women riding on a truck, framed against an old building whose windows spill over with women onlookers. Turn the page and another fragment appears. Only on the following page does the full photograph appear, smaller in scale and anchored by text. The sequence risks being read as refusal rather than delay, as it withholds the coherence the reader expects.

In this arrangement, coherence is strained – never fully relinquished – so that these faces can be encountered without being absorbed into explanation.

Valentina Abenavoli’s design enforces this rhythm: fragments first, context deferred. The method recalls another fractured archive from the subcontinent: Muktir Gaan (1995), assembled by Tareque and Catherine Masud from orphaned reels filmed during Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War. The footage is rough, incomplete, scavenged; yet seeded with poetry and music it begins to smolder, not into heroic narrative, but into a record of everyday endurance.

This book sharpens the strategy. Context arrives late or not at all. The archive stutters. The delay forces us to encounter these women not as figures orbiting history, but as its primary material.

Chronology, the state’s preferred instrument of authority, loosens.

It is 1940, Kathmandu. A young couple stands for a portrait. The man wears a buttoned coat; the woman is anchored by the downward-spiraling floral motifs of her sari. Near her head, a bloom of fungus on the photograph curls into a thought bubble, tempting me to supply an interior life I do not see.

Turn the page and it is 1956, Japan. Sixteen years disappear into the thickness of a page. The couple returns, but is recast in another alloy. Revanta Kumari Acharya now travels in an official capacity. Her husband, Tanka Prasad Acharya, is Nepal’s Prime Minister. The transformation is instantaneous, disorienting. The book offers no passage between these states. Time collapses without explanation. What intervenes is not narrated but inferred: imprisonment, underground work, exhaustion, compromise.

The book leaves them unentered. The absence produces an ache for continuity the book does not resolve. The sequence denies the comfort of a biographical arc. It skips, compresses, leaves stretches without account.

The ruptured timeline does not gather into a counter-history. It does not settle into an archive. In its stutters and leaps, one begins to sense histories made enterable, while withholding the assurances such entry usually promises.

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