The photo shows the inside of a restaurant with vibrant tiled walls. Photo by Pexels, Pixabay.

“We don’t want incense sticks, thank you,” the woman at the reception table had said when Bibek and Birsha had tried to enter a restaurant in Thamel, Kathmandu. Upon realizing that the blind couple had come to dine rather than beg, the woman had quickly apologized and tried to convince them to be seated.

In interviews,¹ Bibek presented the situation at the restaurant door as fairly typical of his experiences. Such dismissals often occurred when the couple tried to enter banks and offices throughout Kathmandu. They occurred because owners wanted to keep these places free from beggars. Selling incense was indeed a typical small-income activity pursued by blind persons in Kathmandu—one that was pretty close to begging in provoking feelings of compassion.

But what had they to do with incense? he asked. To Bibek, an educated Brahmin man in his thirties who had worked as a qualified massage therapist for many years, becoming associated with begging was an annoying and humiliating experience.

Ke garne?

 When recalling situations like these, Bibek often punctuated his accounts with the Nepali question “Ke garne?” (What to do?) before continuing in English. Ke garne is a phrase Bibek uses like an incoherent container for diverse intolerabilities and hampering circumstances. As he talks me through different situations, Bibek asks “Ke garne?” to remind listeners of the limitations of his agency.

Inspired by this collection, I view the ke garne? as a vernacular reference to “the mode of the despite,” as a condition of unbearable odds people have to encounter. Bibek’s routine use of ke garne expresses a sense of resignation, in accepting the overwhelming forces around him as “just there.”

Sometimes, Bibek uses the phrase to refer to the seemingly unchangeable, shared social suffering of Nepal’s low-income populations, suffering that has been reinforced by series of events that he lists in his narratives—the 2015 earthquakes, the economic downturn, and the COVID-19 pandemic. These events have disproportionately affected disabled populations and reduced socioeconomic possibilities for Bibek and his friends.

In other situations, for instance when recalling the encounter with the lady at the restaurant, Bibek asks ke garne? to express his incapacity to change anything about how people continue to classify Bibek as blind = poor = desperate = must be begging. Reductive modes of knowing a person through a single gaze have been explored by disability scholars (Michalko 2001; Titchkosky, 2020). Experiences like those of Bibek’s, where the mere appearance of a blind person provokes a wave of stark and direct associations, reflect what these scholars frame as the “total” experience of blindness. “[P]eople who lack sight,” Slomo Deshen (2012, 2) argues, “are not viewed by the able-bodied as merely people who have a condition of limited physical ability. Rather they tend to be viewed as people in whose existence sightlessness is all encompassing, over-arching, total” (my emphasis).

Blindness, it seems, invites a “total” experience by evoking immediate associations and feelings of misery, disgust, or compassion. This is what happens to Bibek at entry gates and other moments of encounter when people recognize his blindness: they categorize his person and the scope and direction of his actions in direct, totalizing ways, even to the degree that they cannot imagine Bibek to be anything other than a blind beggar.

Incense anywhere?  

But our usage of “despite” as a preposition also asks how politics unfold from the ways people “act despite” difficult conditions. Bibek did not always decide to reside with a ke garne? acceptance of totalizing moves. In his everyday encounters, he employs a distinct tactic of speaking back to challenge stigma and demand respect.

Once, for instance, he spoke back to a bank guard who, like the reception lady, presumed that Bibek was trying to enter to sell incense. Lifting his white cane, Bibek asked with a loud voice (speaking loudly raises discomfort in gatekeepers, he explained to me): “Do you see any [incense] sticks with me, Sir? I don’t even carry a bag. Where would I keep it? I don’t even have a free hand.”

Image shows glowing incense. Photo by Massariello, Pixabay.

In another situation, a female passerby had offended Bibek even as she had tried to be generous. Uninvited, she had pressed a five-rupee note into the hand of Birsha, Bibek’s wife. When Bibek realized what had happened, he angrily insisted that she discard the note, which she did. The surprised passerby returned, picked up the note, and insisted: “You are blind; take the money!” Bibek retorted: “Do we look poor? What would you say if I put ten rupees into your hand?” (Note that he raised the sum.) This is how Bibek talked back, confronting and correcting people who wrongly perceived him as poor, needy, or desperate.

Such situations, and Bibek’s vivid reports on them, show how he mobilizes political potential, despite the overwhelming notoriety of totalizing judgement, to maintain his dignity even as circumstances become more difficult to manage. Bibek’s is an acting-despite that works on an experiential level of destabilizing how able-bodied strangers apprehend his presence. It is a confrontational move that challenges the totality of blindness and pushes people to recalibrate their perceptions, to observe properly before judging.

Struggling for respectability

Bibek’s efforts to not appear poor must be viewed in the context of his upbringing and personal history. He comes from a low-income Brahmin family that used to own a small farm in Lumbini, Nepal. The family faced challenges such as unstable harvests, financial struggles, and malnutrition. Bibek and three of his siblings were born blind due to vitamin A deficiency in the womb.

Despite these challenges, Bibek received scholarships for his education and now holds a Bachelor’s degree in Nepali language. Like many educated blind individuals in Nepal, and not unlike deaf youth in India (Friedner, 2015), Bibek’s social connections are shaped by his disability and education. His wife, Birsha, is also blind and a former schoolmate, and most of his close friends are blind as well. In Nepal, blind individuals are limited to certain occupations due to structural exclusions. These include teaching (through quota regulations), music, begging, and door-to-door businesses.

Bibek’s life took a significant turn when he was recruited, trained, and employed by a blind massage social enterprise in 2006. This job opportunity allowed him to earn a decent income for some time. Unfortunately, the massage enterprise ran into difficulties following the departure of its British founders, and was negatively impacted by the 2015 earthquakes and the Covid-19 crisis.

Although Bibek earns a minor income through bookings from a few expat customers, there are weeks where he has no work at all. Bibek strongly identifies with the life of a respectable and economically stable massage worker, but he finds himself falling short of his own expectations.

In recent years, Bibek and Birsha have returned to a simpler lifestyle, focusing only on basic necessities. Bibek often grapples with existential issues, such as worrying about losing their apartment. How would they afford their medical expenses? Despite acknowledging that even street musicians earn more than he does, Bibek refuses to identify as poor in his public interactions.

As I talk to Bibek more, I realize that what saddens him is not just that people see him as poor but that they make this judgment based solely on his appearance. Why do people fail to see that blindness and poverty must not always go hand in hand, and why—to rephrase blind activists—is he not allowed to be more than poor-blind? What does he have to do with incense?

Notably, Bibek critiques something he himself is not capable of: categorizing a person according to looks alone. Bibek pays attention to his looks, and even though his clothes are not expensive, he always makes sure they are clean and neatly pressed. Birsha frequently presents her newest dresses in urban (and digital) space, and I remember her asking me from time to time whether her lipstick was still in place. They took care of themselves for other reasons, and yet it struck Bibek as odd that people constantly failed to read their investments in appearance as counterevidence of poverty.

Totalizing moves

Blindness fully defined apprehensions of Bibek and Bishra’s personhood in public space. But what kind of politics arise from confrontational moves or situations in which Bibek demanded that people recalibrate their judgement?

Bibek is not an activist or politically engaged person in any classical sense. He is uninterested in advocacy work, which for him is all about “hierarchy,” a reference to his broader critique of how NGOs working for blind people are shaped by corruption and nepotism, where only blind leaders can make a living and clients remain trapped in endless repetition of training courses and workshops. Unlike many of my other interlocutors at the massage enterprise, where we first met about a decade ago, Bibek never speaks of “the blind” as a maltreated or excluded group, nor does he engage in the collective struggles some of his friends participate in.

Yet, the situational shifts between political resignation of a ke garne and interventions into people’s experiential categorization of him is exactly what renders Bibek a political agent. While ke garne reflects Bibek’s resignation in the face of stigma, he takes pride in citing and reporting on his rebellious responses, and how he made people reconsider their first impressions. Bibek reacts with prompt and clear responses in public, and takes an active role in shaping the encounters, always drawing attention to the limitations of perception. He demands that people read him properly.

Photo shows an everyday scene of a street in Thamel, Kathmandu. Photo by the author.

Bibek’s is a case of how disabled individuals challenge widespread structures of immediate knowing and feeling. By speaking up or turning his back on the woman at the reception desk, Bibek destabilizes categorizations based on looks alone. Bibek works against reductive gazes by demanding that people take another look, and recalibrate their first impressions. “Do I look poor? Do you see any incense? How would you feel if I gave you small notes in public?”

What emerges from Bibek’s engagement is not only a longing for respectability (to be able to enter banks without challenge) but a micropolitical effort to make people see him differently, and to see him less totally, which may, in loop-like effects, advance to a richer, fuller perception of blind realities in Nepal. Bibek uses confrontations, and storytelling about these confrontations, to intervene in “normal people’s”² perceptions and demand a fuller, richer, presence in urban space.

Such everyday interventions represent a form of politics in the mode of the despite. They invert discourses of sympathy and pity (towards disability) through invoking feelings of shame. When Bibek positions himself as a paying customer, as somebody who is well dressed and clean, or as someone who can afford to donate money to a passerby, he seeks to force people to see him in a different light.

 Depending on Bibek and Birsha’s mood and situational factors, such interactions are shaped by varying levels of rebellious energy. Sometimes, the pair express their frustration simply by leaving, but not before reminding everyone that they could have been valuable customers: “Congratulations,” Bibek would say as they left, “you are losing two customers today!” In other instances, however, the challenges they would have faced to find somewhere else outweighed the inconvenience of staying. Bibek and Birsha would accept apologies and enter the places nevertheless, despite a deeply felt desire to rebel against social rejection. Ke garne – what to do?

Notes

[1] This note builds on three long interviews with Bibek, conducted in English (in which he excels due to his job) in 2021 and 2022. These broadly covered his childhood, upbringing, and occupational trajectory.

[2] Bibek uses the term “normal people” to describe the able-bodied. As Friedner (2015) has noted in India, calling majorities “normal” is a neutral description and does not imply that Bibek would consider himself “not normal.”

References

Deshen, Shlomo. 2012. Blind people: The Private and Public Life of Sightless Israelis. SUNY Press.

Friedner, Michele. 2015. Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India. New York: Rutgers University Press.

Michalko, Rod. 2001. “Blindness enters the classroom.” Disability & Society, 16, no. 3: 349–359.

Titchkosky, Tanya. 2020. Disability, Self, and Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Stefanie Mauksch is an economic anthropologist who has conducted research on market-oriented approaches to development, startup communities, and the effects of entrepreneurial initiatives in specific social groups, such as unemployed youth or disabled workers.

Cite as: Mauksch, Stefanie. 2024. “Ke garne? What to do?”. In “Living in a Mode of Despite”, edited by Rishabh Raghavan, Mascha Schulz, and Julia Vorhölter, American Ethnologist website, 3 October 2024. [https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/living-in-a-mode-of-despite/ke-garne-what-to-doby-stefanie-mauksch/]