War Memories of Nepali Women: Experiences from the Battlefield

Abstract

People want to hear stories of war. When a storyteller is the person who has fought at the forefront, audiences find the story even more engaging. For fighters who lived through traumatic experiences, life and death demand new definitions. This study uncovers the narratives through in-depth interviews with six women who fought or witnessed the civil war in Nepal to explore how such narratives transform into collective memory. Combining different methods within the thematic analysis and narrative mode for interpreting stories and utilizing research poetry as a tool for art-based analysis, this study explores how these women share their unique perceptions of the conflict in terms of violence, victory, war, peace, family and relationships.

1. Introduction

Post-conflict studies in Nepal suggest that the country’s conflict resolution can be viewed as a successful example (Subedi, 2018; Upreti, 2012; Muni, 2012). Particularly, its indigenous and unique process guided by the Seven-Point Agreement among the major political parties and stakeholders is often recommended as a “model for post-conflict countries with regard to the integration and rehabilitation process” (Wagle & Jackson, 2015, p. 430). However, the negative consequences of the war are yet to be resolved. Scholars have argued that civil conflicts generally lead to the devastation of lives and property, resulting in the accumulation of grievances among victims (P. Adhikari & Hansen, 2013). These grievances, which can include material, personal and intangible losses, play a pivotal role in driving the demand for reparations. Robins (2011) disclosed that study participants in Nepal have prioritized monetary compensation while also voicing a desire for long-lasting justice. Studies have recognized the need to address varied perspectives and demands of the people who were affected by the war (Robins, 2011, 2013; Pokharel, 2022). Though a sense of pride can be observed among the affected who later got involved in state mechanisms as civil servants or politicians, others, who are left with nothing but memories, criticize the leaders and state authorities for leaving the process of transitional justice incomplete (Shneiderman et al., 2016; Lawoti, 2009; S. D. Bhandari, 2015). In this scenario, studying individuals’ reflections of their past in relation to traumatic events is considered an important task because “conflict and memory are often two sides of the same coin, which seamlessly feed into each other” (Wagoner & Brescó, 2016, p. 3). Understanding memory’s role can help societies learn from history, heal wounds and prevent future conflicts because memory shapes interpretations of the past, influencing whether conflicts persist or are resolved (Wertsch, 2008).

Nepal’s civil war ended in 2006, but transitional justice has still lingered (Robins, 2011; C. Bhandari, 2024). Amidst the high demands for the conclusion of the transitional justice and reparations, I aim to explore and understand the collective memory of the people affected by the war from the perspectives of those who participated in it, suffered it or were caught in the crossfire. I attempt to do so by first exploring concepts like victor, violence, war, peace, family and relationships from the memories recollected by those who experienced the same war in different ways. Second, I analyze the participants’ narratives through the concepts of remembrance and forgetting in collective memory theory.

1.1. Context and Background

Nepal’s democracy was still in its infancy when King Mahendra Shah took over the democratic government in December 1960 and declared the Panchayat, a political system that comprised a council of five members serving the King’s rule and restricted the presence of political parties (Khadka, 1986). In April 1990, the first mass revolution in Nepal toppled the king’s direct rule and democracy was reestablished (Hachhethu, 1990). Eventually, a new constitution was drafted. However, having reservations, including with the bicameral parliamentary system and the process by which the constitution was drafted through a commission of nine members established by the interim government, a group of communist ideologists that formed the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (Hachhethu, 2009) presented 40-point demands to the government and expressed their serious disagreements regarding the newly introduced constitution. With their demands unaddressed, the party eventually declared a civil war against the state in 1996 (see Hutt, 2004; A. Adhikari, 2014). The war that started with as few as 200 combatants “pushed the state forces into defensive positions” within five years (Acharya & Muldoon, 2017, p. 1009). By the start of the peace process in 2006, the party claimed that it had recruited and trained 32,000 People’s Liberation Army combatants capable of fighting the war, of whom 19,600 were officially verified by the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) later in 2007 (Mabuhang, 2015).

During a decade of the war, approximately 17,000 people were killed from both the Maoists’ and the state sides combined; many others sustained physical injuries or were abducted, and many of them are still missing (Mallik, 2024). The country also saw major political upheavals with the Royal Massacre in 2001 that killed most of the members of the King’s family, however, leaving Gyanendra Shah, one of the siblings of King Birendra Shah, and his family alive (for more about Nepal’s history of monarchy, see Gellner, 2022; Taras, 2006). Although there is no clear and formal connection so far between the Royal Massacre and the civil war, both events greatly impacted Nepali society and its politics around the same period. In 2006, the Maoist party negotiated with other political parties and signed a comprehensive peace accord. Consequently, the newer political atmosphere overthrew the monarchy and introduced Nepal as a new republic with a promise to soon promulgate a new constitution through the constituent assembly (Martin, 2012). Nepal then held a constituent assembly election in 2008 to draft a new constitution. The first CA election did not meet its purpose; the country then had a second CA election in 2013, which drafted the constitution in 2015.

The peace accord that ended the civil war had promised to work on transitional justice in the post-conflict period to address the victims of the war through the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. However, even after two decades of signing the peace accord, the process has lingered and been slowed until recently. The formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was delayed, and the judiciary has not processed any war-related issues, citing the comprehensive peace accord as a guiding principle for adjudicating wartime violence. As a result of the delay in addressing war-related crimes, victims of the war are losing hope for justice (Robins, 2011).

1.2. Theory of Collective Memory

Often, the term memory may sound like an experience or reflection of past experience. However, it makes more sense to say that experiences create memory, which can be reflected in various forms such as a narrative. Likewise, collective memory is defined as a “body of knowledge shared by a culture of individuals” (Dudai, 2002; Wertsch & Roediger, 2008). This concept is defined differently by different scholars and it has emerged in the literature primarily in studies related to war, conflict, history or identity or discourses regarding historical events. In post-conflict politics, memory of the war is regarded as a collective and intentional way of recalling past experiences through stories, narratives, poetry, and more. Even though collective memory occurs within public consciousness, it cannot inherently contain truthful knowledge (Chernysh, 2015). One of the several possible reasons for collective memory not necessarily containing truthful information is that it gets interpreted and carried on with modifications by the storyteller.

Orianne and Eustache (2023) define collective memory in terms of “shared memory” and “collaborative memory,” wherein shared memory refers to individual memory as a part of the group memory (such as what one remembers of group events). Likewise, collaborative memory refers to individual memories created and shaped by the interaction within or among the participants (such as how one’s memories were shaped by interaction in groups). Often, it may be difficult to access someone’s memory purely as shared or collaborative. Mannheim’s (1952) theory of generational differences can add another layer to this understanding, which suggests that people or youths living in a shared time and context will form a similar understanding of events or phenomena they witness. This theory provides a foundation for understanding collective memory as a shared memory held by individuals of the same generation or different generations living in the same location. Collective memories can also be passed on to future generations through telling or narration. Particularly, generations who lived through violent situations together will then have a higher potential for forming shared memories, whereas those who had deliberate participation and got involved in the framing of war narratives can be said to have collaborative memory. This type of collective memory offers better scope for memory politics, especially as “networks of institutions and entrepreneurs work together across borders when constructing narratives of memory, and to explore how such narratives are received and put to use in different places” (Jones, 2017, p. 17).

Collective Memories of War

Discussing the sufferings of war is facilitated more by temporal distance in a post-conflict situation than when war is ongoing because the end of violence reduces the chances for fear, insecurity or repression (Jelin, 2003). This post-conflict period is utilized differently by various actors involved in the war: political parties and the state utilize it as an opportunity to solidify political advancements (Cunningham, 2017), whereas the combatants who performed in the battlefield can find solace in reflecting on their past and looking forward. For those who have suffered during the violent conflict, however, traumatic memories can still hinder the process of recovery. Laub highlights the importance of recognizing and expressing difficult memories that may linger in the mind and resist being spoken about: “One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life” (Laub, 1995, p. 63). Laub argues that survivors need to tell their stories and confront hidden truths to move forward with their lives. This process of narrating one’s own stories and impressions of their past can, however, go beyond individual memory and progress toward the formation of collective memory when people or generations witnessing the same events of conflicts tend to reflect a similar understanding about the events they witnessed or the situations they lived through. Renan (2012) articulates how individual or private memories are edited to create master narratives, often leading to collective memories: “Public narratives present their audiences with sanitized versions of the past, in which all the inner contradictions that characterize the private memories of specific individuals are smoothed over or edited out” (Renan, 2012, p. 247).

A narrative of the past can make present or future discourses about a past event politically relevant (Sierp, 2025). While the growing scholarship on memory politics entails the notion of collective remembrance, it also highlights the concept of collective forgetting or silencing as a deliberation through political intention (Vinitzky-Seroussi & Teeger, 2010). Memorial silence in a post-conflict transition is considered essential to promote peace and stability, post-war studies of Mozambique’s case, for example, show how hard it is to achieve such silence, especially in politically divided areas where political elites seeking to make amends with former rivals frequently use official silence as a potent instrument (Igreja, 2008): In an extreme condition, the ruling party and the opposition party both moved away from maintaining silence and instead fueled heated debates with recollections of past atrocities.

Silence is important in the sense that it helps people move into their daily lives and forget their traumatic experiences. However, engaging victims of the conflict in social and political activities is crucial in a post-conflict situation (Upreti et al., 2010) because they are believed to forget their traumatic past once they become involved in their social spheres. In a different study from Nepal, Pokharel (2022) highlighted the importance of victims’ expression of their personal and collective trauma, instead of silencing, for concluding transitional justice.

1.3. Nepal’s Post-Conflict and Collective Memory

Several scholars have approached studying the war-induced issues and related topics in post-conflict Nepal in the last two decades. Zharkevich (2019) studied Nepal’s civil war from the Hindu perspective of Apaddharma that contextualizes transgressing norms where people adapt to their new beliefs about their dharma (norms) about how they should behave morally during the exceptional times of war. A comprehensive and early study by Lawoti (2009) investigates the “insurgency” from different perspectives, including anthropological, economic, political science, peace, conflict and sociology, among others. It also elaborates on how the Maoists used violence selectively and killed many innocents, deliberately created fear in society to control the population; for example, they killed village elites and engaged in demonstrating torture through publicity (Fujikura, 2003; Lawoti, 2009). Many of the publications based on the memory of Nepal’s decade-long civil war appeared as memoirs or bibliographies of former Maoist combatants (examples: Rai, 2010; Lama, 2007; Biswa Karma, 2011; Magar, 2009). Though these publications are presented more as literary non-fiction than scientific texts, they are increasingly being analyzed in scientific studies. For instance, Acharya and Muldoon (2017) analyzed some such autobiographical narratives and found that these authors, who once served as combatants, demonstrated their partisan attachment through their expression of friendship and relationships as well as the influence of social happenings and political ideology. Likewise, Bhatta (2023) and Thapa (2025) have analyzed the text Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy by Manjushree Thapa, which is considered a strong non-fiction literary writing based on the author’s personal observation, impression and witnessing of the war. The study uses cultural trauma theory to analyze how victims’ sufferings have been represented in the text. It concludes that the non-fiction narratives do less in resolving the traumatic memories and rather transfer those as collective memory into future generations. Bhatta (2023) analyzes the text and studies the use of memory from an ethical perspective of “moral witness” as discussed in Margalit (2002) and Blustein (2014), which assumes that such a witness is not just someone who saw the event but also suffered it and hence is entrusted with preserving and transmitting the collective memory (Blustein, 2014; Bhatta, 2023). According to Bhatta, the text by Manjushree, at the collective level, draws on the voices of people in the region to uncover the truths behind the conflict and demonstrates how painful memories of the conflict were collectively maintained through victims’ narratives.

Though most of the non-fiction literary writings in the form of memoirs or autobiographies can provide qualitative data for scientific analysis of memory studies, they also incur methodological limitations of content analysis; they cannot gather fresh firsthand data or narratives generated through the researcher’s inquiries. Fewer studies have analyzed the text from the theoretical lens of collective memory theory. For instance, Chettri (2025) conducted an analysis of Tara Rai’s memoir The Diary of a Guerrilla Girl, where she writes: “remembering is a function of the post-war politics of reconciliation and rehabilitation.” This study shows how personal stories like those in Rai’s memoir contribute to the creation of collaborative memory as readers can find the author’s experiences aligned with their own. However, Chettri (2025) also does not make a direct theoretical connection to the concepts in collective memory. Another study draws on the wartime writings and personal diaries, which the study calls “Maoist writings” to denote ideological and strategic documents, memos, circulars and statements issued by the Maoist leadership and their battle plans (A. Adhikari, 2014). In addition, the author incorporates interviews with different militants and weaves the personal stories to illustrate Nepal’s Maoist rebellion as an event made through “individual choices and destinies” (A. Adhikari, 2014, p. xii).

Dahal (2019) investigates war memories in Nepal’s post-conflict context and uses primary qualitative data from study participants to illustrate how war stories travel through newer generations. This article proposes that collective memories can be transferred or forgotten based on the different levels of emphasis they get, either from those who experience them or by the media that can archive such stories. Though the article conceptualizes forgetting as resulting from a lack of attention or emphasis, it does not adequately create a theoretical extension to the idea of collective forgetting, which would have helped to see if forgetting can be viewed as deliberate silencing instead. Likewise, Gogoi (2023) analyzes wartime photographs of Nepal’s women guerrillas to understand their “gendering of memories” and “strategic forgetting” that influenced their self-representation and self-perceptions. Gogoi, however, found that despite the gendered experiences they encountered within and outside the war, the visual narratives depicted that women emphasized expressing their “trauma of betrayal, separation from friends and comrades and the rejection and delegitimisation of their war-time roles” (p. 21). Despite the gradual increase in the literature on post-conflict Nepal, studies designed to investigate collective memory through first-hand narratives are scarce. Thus, aiming to further extend and elaborate on the two concepts, remembrance and forgetting, from the theory of collective memory, this study seeks to explore the following questions:

RQ1:

How do women who participated in Nepal’s civil war express their collective memory about violence, victory, war, peace, family and relationships?

RQ2:

How do the participants render their collective memories of war through remembrance and forgetting?

2. Research Methodology

2.1. Site Selection and Data Collection

Casey (1993) argues that memory is not just stored mentally but is reactivated through embodied return to place, emphasizing place as structurally central to recollection. Thus, after 12 years of signing the comprehensive peace accord between the Government and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), I visited Liwang, the headquarters of Rolpa district of Nepal, to study how people recollect their own experiences of fighting or encountering traumatic events. Rolpa, which was called the “epicenter” (Holtermann, 2016) of the Maoist rebellion, was an important site that became relevant for this study mainly because the war was declared here in 1996. But the traditionally unique position of women (see Molnar, 1984) makes this region a strategic site for starting the war. The district lies in a remote hilly region of the current Lumbini Province of Midwestern Nepal. Before and during the war, it was considered one of the least accessible and most neglected terrains. However, when I visited this place, it was well connected by roads, and people from its peripheral villages had flocked to the headquarters for better living, education, and access to the market (see Kunwar, 2018; Zharkevich, 2019).

I spent the first few days interacting with the local people in the district headquarters and its surroundings and asked them about the individuals most affected during the war. Based on their recommendations, followed by snowball sampling, first I called potential participants over the phone, explained my research topic and its sensitivity, and requested their voluntary participation in the study. Interviews were conducted once their consent was secured to use their data for academic publication in the future. I invited 10 people for intensive interviews and three others for short interviews. For this article, however, only the narratives of six selected female participants are analyzed. These selected participants included Maoist combatants, victims, and martyrs’ daughters. Each interview lasted between 1 and 2 h. The participants were asked general questions: about how they encountered the war and what they remembered the most about those traumatic events or what they wished to forget. More theoretically informed questions were knit into the conversation during the interviews. This article stems from a secondary analysis to understand how women participants described and narrated their unique experiences of the war. While the initial set of data comprised both male and female participants, this article has purposively chosen a data set from among the women participants to analyze how they remembered the conflict and their participation in the war. However, as a limitation, this research has not framed its research question from a feminist or gendered lens, although such theoretical frameworks could have benefited the study and contributed with a gendered perspective. Nonetheless, the article considers exploring war memories from the recollections of the women because their participation in the war was significant. Studies have found that around 30–40 percent of the Maoist combat force were women fighters (Gautam et al., 2003; Sharma et al., 2004; K.C. & Van Der Haar, 2018). They have also argued that the high number of women participating as combatants provided the Maoist party with an incredible human resource as volunteers, fighters, and team players. However, despite their important role, studies on Nepal’s civil war have approached women participants mostly as victims but not as combatants (Pettigrew & Shneiderman, 2004).

2.2. Narrative Mix Approach

In this article, I propose to use narrative mix as an approach (see Figure 1) to narrative inquiry, utilizing a mix of thematic analysis (Riessman, 2008) and art-based research (Patrick, 2016). Thus, this analysis has combined two different techniques within narrative inquiry to create a narrative mix.

Figure 1. Narrative mix as an overlap between thematic analysis (Riessman, 2008) and art-based research (Patrick, 2016).

2.2.1. Thematic Analysis of Narratives

The thematic analysis is a commonly used approach where qualitative data is analyzed using inductive or deductive coding of the data, either collected from the field or those that exist in some form or media. Riessman (2008) describes the use of thematic analysis when researchers take different approaches to their work: (i) when they analyze data from interviews, (ii) while analyzing archival data, or when they use ethnography as their method for data collection. This approach focuses more on what is told than on how it is told. The main aim of thematic analysis is to identify patterns and themes from qualitative data (Clarke, 2005).

In this article, I followed a free writing approach as discussed in Charmaz (2014). This approach allows one to compose fresh material, ideas, and thoughts related to the data while coding. I started analyzing data and writing analytical memos as soon as I collected the first interview. These interviews encompass a spectrum of experiences, ranging from individuals victimized by the state to those affected by rebels. Notably, perspectives from the newer generation, who encountered the war indirectly through stories without direct participation, were also incorporated. This step provided an adequate foundation for theoretical sensitivity: “the ability to know when you identify a data segment that is important to your theory” (Chun Tie et al., 2019, p. 6). For example, memorial silence and forgotten truths stood out as important concepts during the fieldwork as well as in this analysis. The thematic analysis included several steps: First, I read the narratives to find out what happens in the stories and what is told by the participants. Second, I used an inductive approach to label data into open codes that closely matched ideas based on my understanding of the situation in the story. Third, I used broader terms to categorize those codes into concepts or constructs. This step provided me with the themes and concepts, which I looked for in the data to further analyze and to create research poems. As a constructivist, I allow the presence of subjectivity as a resource rather than a threat in knowledge creation and recognize “meaning and knowledge as contextually situated, partial and provisional” (Braun & Clarke, 2023, p. 2). The long narratives recorded in the Nepali language during the fieldwork were transcribed and translated into English before data analysis because I intended to publish the work in English.

2.2.2. Creating Research Poems

Found poem or poetic inquiry, also called research poetry, is a combination of art and empirical data. Poetic inquiry is a qualitative methodology located along the spectrum between artistic and scientific approaches to understanding. “It is written from and about research subjects and data; more specifically, research-found poetry is written from the words of study participants” (Patrick, 2016). Research poetry in the form of art-based inquiry is not a newer phenomenon in academic work. Poetry has been used in anthropological research in 1982 (Flores, 1982), in nursing research (Oiler, 1983), and narrative work on voice and representation (Glesne, 1997; also see Prendergast et al., 2009). Elevating the potential that constructivist narrative inquirers see in qualitative data, and particularly coming from the war memories in this case, this article incorporated research poetry as a process of analysis, form of data, and presentation of the findings because art-based representations (including poetic forms) allow researchers to “re-present experience” in ways that preserve subtle meaning, emotion, and voice that standard prose analysis may reduce (Butler-Kisber, 2010). For instance, research poetry can embody emotional and sensory dimensions of lived experiences that traditional academic writing can miss (Leavy, 2015); as such, poetry preserves voice, emotion, silence, and nuances and resists flattening of the lived experience of people (Faulkner, 2009). In addition, I found this approach effective for artistically summarizing the narratives of the study participants.

I used this technique following the thematic analysis, where I identified the patterns and themes from analyzing the interview narratives, using similar techniques utilized by scholars in their art-based inquiries (Paceley, 2020; Parsons & Pinkerton, 2022; Olson et al., 2023; Pease & Galupo, 2025). Then, I used the participants’ stories and data representing those themes to present them in the form of poems. During this process, I read through the narratives and focused on lines and sentences that contained information related to identified themes or concepts. I collected exact phrases and wording present in the narratives, adhering to the approach in found poems (Patrick, 2016), but used my own analytical and creative approach to compose the research poems out of those phrases and information. First, I used exact words from the data and made fewer noticeable edits only where necessary, keeping the meaning of the words intact. Once the poems were created, I further interpreted those and found meaning within the data based on my understanding of the context, where I present myself as a co-constructor of knowledge. This was important because the purposive assemblage of the phrases would make more sense as the process of reconstructing meaning when the researcher is an insider to the Nepali society. Thus, I was able to reorganize those extracts into meaningful expressions. Finally, I used space, directions and labels to give poems some guided perspectives.

2.3. Researcher as an Insider

Coming of age in war-torn Nepal myself, I had witnessed fear, loss, and the lasting effects of a decade-long civil war that once influenced Nepali society. Observing such a conflict was itself a horrific experience, shaping our understanding of what war entails. I observed numerous instances and events that instilled fear among civilians and claimed many lives from both the rebel forces and the army. I have understood that this war has left enduring impacts that are difficult to erase from people’s memories. Being a student of conflict, peace, and development studies, I had both an added interest and familiarity with the topic and context.

During the conversation with me, despite enduring grief and sorrow, participants openly discussed the consequences of the war as they awaited truth and reconciliation for transitional justice. I explained the research purpose and topic to the participants before starting the interviews. Oftentimes, I had to share my own understanding of the war during the initial conversation with them to assure them of the transparency of my intentions. For example, I shared how I had to relocate to a different city to continue my school education when the Maoist party declared the closure of private schools in my hometown, and how the Nepal Army used to force passengers of public buses, including me, to walk for several miles with their backpacks while traveling to Kathmandu from outside. But the fears of war were beyond this hassle. The everyday news of the number of deaths and the sounds of crossfires coming from nearby places had made every citizen’s life miserable. When I presented myself as a student researcher and requested participants to share their stories to the extent that they would experience the least emotional harm, the participants felt comfortable sharing stories in narrative form. In this research, ethical considerations centered on the methods and study design. For a constructivist, I believe narrative inquiry provides room for researchers to guide themselves within their own ethical boundaries, where being transparent and reflexive is equally important as in other methods. During the fieldwork, I encountered some ethical issues; for instance, I walked into a community college and asked for consent to interview teachers and students of age 18 and above. Then, I happened to talk with some war-victims irrespective of their emotional state, which could have put them at inconvenience due to their traumatic past. As soon as I realized this, I empathized the participants and backed off, discontinued the conversation and excluded their data from the entire project. I intended to cause no harm to the participants in any way, and I reassured the participants of it before and during the interviews.

3. Findings

The presentation of the findings includes found poems created from the narratives of each participant (deidentified with pseudonyms) selected for this study. These poems reflect stories they have shared based on their experiences and witnessing of the war. The first and fourth poems are from Srijana and Ramita, respectively, who were war victims but did not participate in the fight. The second and fifth poems are from Deuki and Rupa, who fought in the battles as combatants, and Supriya is a daughter of Deuki, whereas Meera is a daughter whose parents actively took part in the war.

3.1. Participants and Their Stories

Deuki participated in the war when she joined the Maoist Party in 1997 and volunteered on the front lines. Though she did not use any weapon, she was with the combatants in the battles of Khara, Beni, Tansen, and many other places. Along with her companions, she fought hard to survive during several crossfires that had the downpour of bullets from many sides, including from the helicopters that were chasing them in the dense forests. The worst moment was when she lost her husband during a fight in Dang.

Ramita was 23 when her husband died. At the time of this interview, she lived with her daughter, while her son was studying in Kathmandu. She and her husband had an arranged marriage before the war started. Life was peaceful, but everything changed with the war. Her husband, a schoolteacher, was kidnapped twice. Ramita never saw him alive again. Eighteen days later, his body was found mutilated, abandoned by the side of a road. Ramita fainted reading the letter he had written asking his parents to support her. His words lifted her.

Srijana never participated in the civil war, but she became its victim when her father was killed by a rebel group. She describes her father as being a simple, honest member of the Nepali Congress, not involved in any major political activities. At that time, the political climate was filled with hate and violence. Both Maoists and government forces were cruel, killing innocent people like her father. Srijana believes that her father was murdered because he refused to join another party, and his denial cost him his life.

Rupa was born in Rolpa into a poor family. At the age of 9, her father died, and her mother left, following tradition. Separated from her siblings, Rupa moved from one relative’s home to another, unable to study due to financial hardship. Her childhood was spent collecting driftwood and working to survive. When the insurgency began, Rupa, unaware of the politics, was drawn into it through her involvement in a women’s association. When she was 16, she became an underground cadre, participating in their campaigns. In 1997, she married a fellow Maoist who died after five months in a military clash.

Supriya, a college student who is the daughter of Deuki, reflects on her limited understanding of the past conflict in Nepal, particularly the Maoist insurgency. When the war officially ended, she was only around seven years old. Supriya’s father was a martyr, and she benefits from attending a Model School, where children from conflict-affected families can enroll for free. Her mother rarely talks about the war with her. Supriya once watched a movie called Jaljala, which shaped her understanding of what war was like.

Meera lived with her mother in her maternal uncle’s home. Her parents were actively involved in the Maoist movement. Meera never witnessed the war herself, but her father often spoke of it. He told her how people, including some of her own relatives, were killed. Her parents were part of the Maoists, and the police relentlessly hunted them. Her father used to travel by night, always in fear of being caught. Sometimes, the police hurt Meera’s grandparents. She still remembers how they once broke her grandfather’s hand.

The following section presents six found poems (see Figure 2, Figure 3, Figure 4, Figure 5, Figure 6 and Figure 7) that were created from the long narratives of these participants.

Figure 2. Found poem 1: Srijana.

Figure 3. Found poem 2: Deuki.

Figure 4. Found Poem 3: Supriya.

Figure 5. Found Poem 4: Ramita.

Figure 6. Found Poem 5: Rupa.

Figure 7. Found Poem 6: Meera.

3.2. Violence and Victory

In a war, violence is generally regarded as a brutal activity that brings physical injuries and an emotional toll to the victims. The women, who suffered or were victimized, portray it as an inhumane act causing sorrow, grief, and trouble to the innocents (see Srijana, lines 5–12; 19–22). Srijana, whose father was killed for believing in a different political ideology and for joining a party of his choice, does not blame it all on just one side. Her concerns are about both sides discarding humanity and being cruel during the war, which she saw as unnecessary. She described the violent activity that led to her father’s death:

My father was attacked by a sharp object in his eyes, which was deep. He was beaten to death at first. There were bruises on his body. His head was separated from the body. His head was found 40 m away from the body. I was totally broken by the inhumane death of my father.

Vivid visuals of violence have been deeply ingrained in Srijana’s perception of the war. Her description of the scenes of her father’s death suggests that the war brought people in the villages a kind of terror, particularly for those families who were targeted by the rebels, the state army, or both sides. As Srijana interpreted, war creates a ground for the parties in conflict to go beyond their battlefields in spreading terror and harming others. However, for those who voluntarily participated in the war and fought against their enemies, violence is the only means to get their voices heard and to position themselves as changemakers.

In contrast to how Srijana described violence as an unnecessary act, Deuki defended wartime violence by mentioning it as the need of the moment, although she also described it in terms of the trauma one brings home from a battle. Deuki, who actively fought in the war zones and was mainly assigned as a volunteer, shared her vivid memories of her experiences in the crossfire. She remembered how violent a war can be and how it leaves no alternative for survival. Deuki recalled that the presence of violence made life full of uncertainties for the fighters. She realized that her survival was precarious. War, as she recollected, brings a lot of physical injuries and pain. But it also takes an emotional toll on the fighters. Deuki said, “I think of those who died, and now I realize that I would not have been here at this moment. This is how I understand it.” For warriors too, no matter who starts it, violence becomes the worst part that creates long-lasting trauma in those who experience it.

Likewise, for the fighters in war, violence is often justified by victory; alongside the enormous amount of violence, the war entails victory as the endpoint of a battle. For those who fought as Maoist combatants, victory gleamed in various forms; sometimes it appeared immediately after winning the fights, whereas at other times, they felt it in terms of social and political changes after the peace process began in 2006. Deuki mentioned how she and her team had wanted to return from the fight with a victory. She defined victory in two different ways: First, she referred to it as “winning battles,” like winning a brutal game. She articulated that physical endurance, emotional strength, and tactfulness for survival are all necessary for victory. But as a war volunteer, all she could offer to her team was to become a part of it and help in the process of attaining victory. For her, a war is not just a simple conflict. In that sense, victory is overcoming an encounter between life and death. But in the long run, as she recollected, victory is the achievement of the power one needs to establish their version of the truth. This form of victory represents the end of the war and brings their party to the forefront of politics and power-sharing.

For the victims who did not volunteer, victory was merely being able to gather the strength to overcome the suffering, loss, and grief, and being able to continue to live. Ramita, whose husband worked as a schoolteacher but was killed by the rebels, recalled her tragedy (see Ramita, 45–52). She also mentioned that the war took away her husband from her and separated her from family and children. There was nobody supporting in her livelihood until she learned some skills to earn for herself. She compares victory with how she was eventually able to overcome such memories and hardships in her life.

3.3. War and Peace

Study participants who had actively volunteered as Maoist rebels or combatants described war and peace based on their witnessing of different moments that brought them disappointments and grief, as well as victory and happiness. They associated war with an outcome of ideological battle—moments of armed struggle when society gets separated into multiple sides and loses grounds for common understanding. Deuki reflected: “We call it a people’s war. The word war itself is a call to violence. There, you make up your mind to kill others. You think of nothing else and just jump into it.” She found that war was an armed struggle between two sides with opposing thoughts. They fought to win over each other. She thought conflict and violence were inevitable in such situations. She reflected that war is a time of abnormality, where the rules of normal times do not apply. But she also admitted that wars are full of traumatic and uncertain results that can bring emotional strain when losing family members, friends, or loved ones. Though Rupa connected how war provided her a moment to find her love (see Rupa, 21–23), her life was full of struggle even before the war started. Fighting the poverty she was born into and losing her family during her childhood were all like a war throughout her life. For Ramita and Srijana, who did not participate in the conflict of their own will, war was a violent and unjust activity full of traumatic experiences, struggles, and fear.

In contrast, peace refers to hope and healing. It starts with the absence of conflict and violence. For some people who lost their loved ones, real peace felt as if it had gone missing forever. Thus, peace is also taken as a relational concept that can be felt after the end of the conflict: how people can easily talk and share about the atrocities and violence they once lived through (see Deuki, lines 40–50). For victims like Srijana, peace resembles a state of mind that does not refer just to the absence of violence but rather to the justice that victims need. They expressed their desire for justice and compensation, truth and reconciliation. The unfulfilled quest for transparency and truth is what may prevent people from embracing peace in the absence of violence. In this regard, peace is more connected to a post-conflict situation, where governments are expected to provide compensation to the victims (see Srijana, lines 25–32). Despite monetary compensation and acts of reconciliation, without proper justice, victims may still undergo a war of memories.

3.4. Family and Relationships

Family and relatives are the ones who suffer from the loss of lives. Wars will eventually end at some point. But for those who survive, what continues is the absence of someone they love. All the participants of this study who narrated their stories expressed sincere feelings for their loved ones who did not survive the war. Three of these women had lost their husbands, while two others lost their fathers. Their stories emphasize the presence of family and relationships as a necessity during hard times. Though Ramita did not receive much love and care from other family members, including her own children, after the death of her husband, she has always missed the care, love, and support she once got in the family. She recalled some of the moments she had spent with her husband: “We lived together in a family of love, but now it is filled with silence and broken bonds.” Ramita wished she could have had her loving husband back in life.

Rupa had a similar fortune when it came to family life. She did not receive care and support from her parents in her childhood, which was even before the war started, because her father died and her mother abandoned Rupa and her siblings. Rupa had to struggle in her life and take care of her younger siblings. Rupa described war as an opportunity to flourish in relationships, though she also lost her first husband in the war and later remarried in an inter-caste relationship with her present husband. Despite the social context that did not appreciate inter-caste and second marriage, her story was an exception (see Rupa, lines 21–23). She did not have to face many challenges in an inter-caste marriage because they were both in the Maoist party, which opposed caste-based discrimination. She expressed that war brought them together during times of struggle. Though they still face financial hardships, they are together, fighting such challenges too.

Deuki also missed her husband, who was in the same party as a rebel but died in an encounter with the state army. But for her, relationships with her relatives and neighbors also matter a lot. She wanted to see families and neighbors living in peace again. These relationships were once ruined due to the severity of the war, when no one was in a condition to trust anyone else. An excerpt from the poem (Deuki, lines 1–12) illustrates how people who once fought with each other are now on the same page, sharing the grief of losing their loved ones.

Beyond the circle of family members, relationships can also grow stronger among neighbors, friends, and colleagues if they share solidarity. During the war, such relationships are bound by moral responsibilities, strategies, and emotions one develops through shared memories, missions, and moments. Deuki presents the emotional part by describing how she and her friends carried both weapons and injured combatants on their backs at the same time:

I have had my fellow friends on my shoulders. I have carried weapons and friends. That was the reason I was there. A lot of people died while returning from Beni. Many died, and their bodies were thrown away. The Army used to lay traps on our way back, and we had to search for new ways. And so, keeping our friends safe, we returned. I think we could have saved many of our friends if we had taken them to the hospital sooner.

Similarly, Supriya and Meera, who were the children of the generation that fought the war, said they did not know much about the war. But they missed one of their parents or knew stories of how their parents had to suffer because of the war. Supriya, Deuki’s daughter, did not have a picture of her father in her mind or know what he looked like. But she knew that the school she had joined for free came as compensation for her father’s death in the war, a conflict she does not understand (see Supriya, 25–27). Similarly, Meera, a college student, shared how both of her parents were Maoists and how they left their homes to participate in the war as combatants. Meera expressed love and concern for her parents during the war. She had been worried when, as a child, she knew that they were being chased by the police or the state army.

3.5. Collective Memory: Remembrance and Forgetting

Based on the participants’ narratives, the study finds that collective memories can be broadly categorized into celebrated, traumatic, consolatory and silenced. These memories may be unique to each participant and can be mapped anywhere within a field based on the level of emphasis they put on remembrance and forgetting (see Figure 8).

Figure 8. Types of collective memory based on emphasis on remembrance and forgetting.

3.5.1. Celebrated Memories

Celebrated memory includes cherished moments, chosen glory, and shared memories of victory that the combatants want to keep remembering. Deuki reflected most of such memories when she expressed glory in fighting for a cause, such as social justice for the historically suppressed or marginalized communities; when she missed the moments of her friends and comrades being able to trick their enemies; and, most importantly, memories of winning the battles. Deuki shared: “It was fun winning the battles. Like you enjoy when you win a volleyball match, it’s the same.” When Deuki sees war as a game, winning the battles accounts for her cherished moments, even when realizing that death is unpredictable and she could have lost her own life. Similarly, Rupa, who struggled all her life fighting poverty, also saw war as a playground where she got to mingle with friends, get united, and live and fight together. “We danced and performed dramas to unite and motivate combatants in fighting vigorously.” Rupa found her love during the battle and got married during wartime. When she interpreted war as more than just a battle, she explained how much she still cherishes her wartime memories: “I do remember the war as a cause that had brought us together.”

3.5.2. Traumatic Memory

Traumatic memories are understood as collective memories that form after encountering violence, unpleasant moments, or one’s past sufferings. Victims of war and warriors endure memories of intense trauma, which are hard to forget. When traumatic memories build as collective memory, they can transfer across generations and can also become a starting point for another conflict. Supriya, the daughter of a combatant woman, shared the trauma that the war had created in people. She recalled:

One couldn’t tolerate the other. They only fought. Conflict arose and they fought against each other. It was hard to live, survive. The country was full of conflict. One would raise a gun to another as soon as they saw each other. The brothers and sisters fought against each other. That is all I know about the war.

Traumatic memories are hard to forget even when one wishes not to remember. These memories can be easily used as a collaborative collective memory by narrators. Srijana shared how she could not forget the details of her father’s inhuman death. She then created a narrative of how the rebels used to treat people: “They used to torture and kill lots of innocent [people].” She further noted that both Maoists and the state Army were responsible for the violence that she thought was unnecessary: “Both parties didn’t hesitate to commit crimes.” No matter who wins the battle, trauma can easily emerge as a memory for anyone who has had a traumatic experience. Deuki, for example, sees how people are now in a post-conflict situation, mourning the deaths and loss of their relatives and family members. No matter which side they fought during the war, they are now on the same plane, missing the ones they loved or needed the most. Deuki remembered, “The most painful and disturbing incident for me was when the whole village (Khara) was burnt.” She referred to the event when Nepal army burnt a village, accusing the villagers of supporting the Maoists whom the state had declared as “terrorists.”

3.5.3. Consolatory Memory

Consolatory memory forms through selective remembrance of certain events. When the former warriors need to justify the acts of violence, they often emphasize the positive changes or outcomes of the war, such as social changes and women’s empowerment. Consolatory memory can also take the form of blame or wrongdoing by the other side in the conflict. For example, Rupa mentioned that women’s conditions before the conflict were dire: they were uneducated and thus unaware of their rights, they could not speak up for themselves, and they were financially dominated and dependent. Though she also remembered the tragedies of the war, she emphasized things that could justify such acts of violence. She considered that women’s empowerment had flourished in a post-conflict situation in Nepal, recognizing the role of the war in this transformation. Rupa said, “Now, women can speak up and raise their voices even if they cannot read and write, and they have become financially more independent as a consequence of the war.” Likewise, Srijana admitted that the post-war situation had made village women involved in businesses. She remembered: “Traditional beliefs and cultural practices have transformed; conflict-affected people have got some compensation.” Consolatory memory is also reflected in Ramita’s description of victory: “Holding the victory of survival in the face of everything we have lost” (line 50–52), where she considered that survival itself was a kind of victory.

3.5.4. Silenced Memory

Silenced memory is the past moments people forget deliberately, intentionally, or due to the lack of importance they receive over time. People in politics or under the influence of politics deliberately gatekeep those memories from passing on to the next generations or to the public domain because such memories can become politically problematic in the future. Srijana blamed the government and political leaders for engaging in silencing the memory of violence and atrocities. She said, “Victims have been asked not to flash out the news and go against the government today. But the victims want justice from the government. But the government has been protecting the cruel people and hiding the truth.” People also naturally wish to forget certain memories because they want to live their lives normally, irrespective of how hard their past has been. Meera said that the war had “a huge effect on society. But people began to forget their wounds with the passing of time.” When the post-conflict period has been elongated, many victims have focused on their current affairs. Meera added: “When the peace process was established, people started settling and now it seems like they have forgotten everything.” Rupa also expressed similar reasons for why people want to forget or suppress their memories of the war: “After many years of the end of the war, people are now forgetting the past and focusing on development issues. The war, however, affected our culture and social values. These values have started to erode and become extinct.”

Silenced and consolatory memories progress towards forgetting. In contrast, celebrated and traumatic memories are remembered with or without will. To pass these memories to the next generations, however, they need to be shared and archived like how Supriya and Meera described that their impressions about the war were shaped by movies.

4. Discussion and Conclusions

Remembrance and forgetting are two opposing forces of collective memory. While remembrance emphasizes that memories should be preserved and recalled, forgetting is a willingness to omit such memories from not just the individuals but also from public storage of such information such as memorial artifacts, media and storytelling. The findings of this study presented several instances when remembrance appeared as a strong force, either through the reflection of celebrated, cherished or glorified moments as described by Deuki about her friendship and victories in war or through the past traumatic events that participants could not forget even when they wished, like that of Srijana (lines 32–36) and Deuki (lines: 49–50).

In contrast, forgetting happens when individuals gatekeep stories. Though forgetting is not always controlled, it can also happen naturally when memories lack emphasis. This notion of forgetting has been conceptualized by Dahal (2019) in a study similar to this. In a politically motivated scenario, forgetting happens due to the gatekeeping or framing narratives in a way that only the desired stories are told or known by the future generations. In this study, participants emphasized forgetting of several memories related to violent and traumatic events because they did not want to tell such stories to their newer generations. In the found poems, Meera (lines 25–36) and Supriya (lines 25–36) both expressed that they did not know much about the war because their older generations like family members or teachers, did not say much about the war. These participants were children during wartime and had their own schemas about the wartime happenings.

The findings suggest that collective memory is not only shaped by what people choose to remember but also by what they choose to forget, similar to how women combatants like to understand their “gendering of memories” and “strategic forgetting” that influenced their self-representation and self-perceptions in Gogoi (2023). Moreover, memories related to war and violence can have political implications too, which are generally controlled or gatekept by people in power to influence master narratives. For example, some of the participants of this study mentioned how victims were compensated and asked to remain silent regarding their negative experiences. Thus, remembrance and forgetting can operate simultaneously as social and political processes that shape how the civil war is recalled and transmitted.

This study categorized collective memory into four different types: celebrated, traumatic, consolatory and silenced. The first two types are shaped by the force of remembrance, where forgetting is either difficult or not preferred. The latter two are mediated by the force of forgetting, where remembering is either discouraged or not preferred. Findings suggest that even during the war, people can have moments they want to cherish and celebrate. Those moments can be achievements such as victories or pleasant surprises, including in relationships. At the same time, traumatic memories persist because participants continue to associate the conflict with violence, suffering, fear, and grief. Other memories become consolatory or silenced when individuals and communities selectively withhold experiences that are painful, politically sensitive, or socially undesirable.

Having lived through a decade-long civil war in Nepal, participants shared their unique accounts of wartime memories. These perceptions, however, are shaped by the collective memory they rendered during the war that densely impacted society. For example, for the innocent sufferers, war always appeared in a violent form. But for those who were in it, they found life full of excitement, enjoyment, and opportunities mixed with uncertainty, sorrows and mourning. Participants’ beliefs and perceptions, built primarily from their experiences of witnessing or fighting the war, denote that the concepts and discourses related to violence, fear, and grief have become a part of their shared collective memory. They admitted that the civil war caused people to live in fear, distress, and insecurity; it caused innocents to suffer, and violence became the only tool to fight and prove themselves during the time of the conflict, forcing the whole society to live in uncertainties, betrayals, and suspicions. They shared the same pain and grief that had woven not just a few individuals but society. Likewise, war caused people to migrate. The violent armed conflict not only displaced people, but it also made some disappeared or bear physical disabilities. These are the stories commonly found in any narratives about the civil war in Nepal, thus forming shared collective memories.

Memories about family and relationship matters in the formation of collective memories. These memories can further develop as a starting point for newer conflicts; such as traumatic events experienced by a family can lead to feelings of retribution or demands for justice in those who survived. In the found poems, Srijana and Ramita have expressed how their family members were inhumanely killed by the Maoists. These types of memories function as generational location or site in collective memory where the events of deaths, fights and victories function as turning periods (Mannheim, 1952).

Justice, social change, and opportunities are other concepts that emerged as collaborative memories. Participants talked about justice for people, especially women who were dominated traditionally in Nepali society. While others admitted that the victims of the civil war were still not provided the proper justice, the government and the political parties were not able or willing to address the issues concerning truth and reconciliation, which were expected to have fulfilled transitional justice in the process of peacebuilding.

However, participants mostly admitted that the conflict has resulted in social changes for women’s empowerment. For example, the rebel groups discarded wearing dresses of a certain color based on different traditions, such as women were not meant to wear red dresses once they became widows, or red clothes were mandatory during weddings. Apart from culture and traditions, changes occurred in terms of women’s independence and their realization of rights and freedoms, the power of being heard or speaking up. People also found conflict as an opportunity to grow, find better positions, and power-sharing, particularly at the end of the war. However, children or the offspring of those who fought the war got better opportunities to study for free in Martyrs’ Memorial Residential Schools for belonging to a victim’s or a martyr’s family. Taken together, these findings suggest that collaborative memory of the civil war extended beyond recollections of violence and suffering. It also encompassed memories of justice, empowerment, social transformation, and opportunity. These memories have shaped how participants interpreted both the conflict and the post-conflict period, demonstrating that collaborative memory is simultaneously a record of the loss, the resilience, the change, and the aspirations of the people involved.

Memory is a difficult topic of study. And more so when it relates to conflict. An individual cannot become truly objective, no matter how hard one tries, in studying the memories of different people concerning the topics that are conflicting by nature. A civil war is a similar phenomenon where people get divided and influenced by many factors. Studying their narratives can, however, become meaningful in the context of collective memory because it is linked with history and discourse about certain actions or events. This study tried to explore how different participants had commonly understood their own experiences of war.

In this study, I have attempted to fulfill multiple goals: First, I designed and utilized a narrative mix approach (NMA) as a unique and useful way to combine thematic analysis with research poetry to study the narratives of people who had experiences of living through a war. I found that mixing methods within narrative inquiry, such as thematic, discourse, or positioning analysis with any or multiple art-based analyses, provides a richer ground for looking at the meaning from diverse perspectives. This opens the door for a fuller analysis of the phenomenon or a situation; I used themes and patterns from the narratives to create found poems and used them to revise thematic codes and write the analysis and discussion. I utilized research poetry as a process of inquiry (Faulkner, 2009), presentation of findings (Glesne, 1997), and data for further analysis (Prendergast et al., 2009). This approach can be further developed and utilized in the future to study similar topics such as identity and representation, conflicts and collective memory, historical events, and more. Second, I attempted to describe and define the concepts of violence and victory, war and peace, and family and relationships from the perspective of the people who encountered the war. Though the participants’ descriptions and definitions can be limited, this qualitative assessment provides a glimpse of the participants’ state of collective memories, studying which can be meaningful for resolving future conflicts or evaluating the potential for immediate conflicts. Third, this study has conceptualized and categorized collective memories into four newly identified types: celebrated, traumatic, consolatory and silenced, which can be further developed and utilized in studying post-conflict memory politics in similar contexts.

Though this study does not aim to generalize its findings, it can be used as a framework to design larger studies in the study of collective memories in the future.