Indra Bahadur Rai (1994)

On 27 May 1964, the light that was Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of an independent India, went out. Tilbikram (“Bairagi”) Kaila, one of the foremost modern Nepali poets, could not restrain himself from making poignant and impassioned outburst:

Oh, where is the star of the north
By whose guidance we planted our feet in the sea?
Stuck to the rock is the white string of doves aflight,
Where is that cluster of light?
Once again today
Death’s victory over man is secured:
Anything resembling human motion
Is petrified at the crossing of roads.
Oh! Where is the star of the north
By whose guidance we planted our feet in the sea?

Kaila ceased being merely a Nepalese poet. The occasion of this great loss dictated that he should give vent to a truly pan-Indian feeling.

Indian Nepali Nationalism

Here at the very start the concept of the ‘nation’ as it is used in the Indian context has to be clarified. The governmental view insists that India is one nation—the Indian nation—composed of a number of ethnic and/or linguistic collectivities officially designated as sub-nations. We do not subscribe to this rather politically idealistic view. For us, India is a home for many nations—Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Muslim, Sikh, Naga, Nepali and many others— and they are not sub-nations. By “Indian Nepali nation” we mean the ethnically and linguistically distinctive community of people who are of Nepali origin and are Indian citizens.

We are aware that votaries of cosmopolitanism view this kind of nationalism with distrust when it enters literature. Nationalism in literature, they suspect, is a descent into the Avernus of chauvinism. Yet a Pound or an Eliot with the European tradition as his literary forte possibly would not look at the nationalist Pushkin or Whitman with scorn. Others would go beyond internationalism too and would not rest content until they had merged themselves with humanity at large. The obsession with larger ideals has resulted in a total rejection of way-stations where wise ones could have rested on their journey.

Will one be at fault if (s)he fails, in the context of present day India, to equate official, repeat official, nationalism alone with patriotism? A nationalist of the official description will surely be a patriot. Thus far the equation holds. But then does it, of necessity, follow that any patriotic soul worth the name must be a nationalist of the official measure? Patriotic feeling fastens itself upon more than one expressive embodiment, and the ethnic and/or linguistic consciousness of us Indian Nepalis is certainly one such. One can finally emerge as a pan-Indian nationalist by inductively working one’s way up from premises of patriotically loving your own national people and serving one’s own national community.

The national literatures of India that have not yet produced pan-Indian national works, but have produced what we have classed as ethno-patriotic words, should, it is proposed, be accorded due encouragement seasoned with justice. As a result of uneven development in the country, some units of the Indian nation have fallen behind the others, and these facts, together with the attendant feelings, have to be reflected in their literatures. Esthetic impulses find expression within socially prescribed emotional bounds. And one has to admit the possibility of there being as many manifestations of nationalism as there are stages of societal development.

Here it will not be out of place to correct a misconception that still persists and which is rather deliberately fostered regarding the genesis of Indian Nepalis. Those who claim to be delvers into the past and yet describe Indian Nepalis as “settlers” or “immigrants” betray their blatant ignorance of the history of this region. After the Anglo-Nepalese War, by the Treaty of Sugauli of 1816, Nepal was made to cede lakhs of square miles of Nepalese territory to the British East India Company, together with the Nepali people living thereon. These were the forefathers of today’s Indian Nepalis. They now number six million in India.

Indian Nepali Literature

Permit me now to present some prominent Nepalese poets who have been able mediums for the expression of this consciousness. We will have, however, to deal with a few minor poets too who owe their prominence to the historical situations of their times. Bhanubhakta (b.1814) wrote his Rämayäna as much with the objective of enabling everyone to obtain spiritual salvation as to reform the Nepali society as it then existed. There was a shift of emphasis from the purely spiritual to the temporal-spiritual. For him, to secure a blissful collective life there could be no better model for a society than the one portrayed in the ancient Indian epic. Traditional Indian thoughts and beliefs were indeed very deeply embedded in his spiritual and social being, and Bhärat (India) was his spiritual home. Not for nothing has Bhanubhakta sung eloquently:

Ati durlabh jänos bhärat bhümiko janma janale
Blessed is the man who is born in Bhärat.

Towards the latter half of the eighteenth century a vigorous religious movement indigenous to Nepali society was founded by Shashidhar (b.1747) and known as the Joshmani sect. One of the later Joshmani saints, Jñändil Däs (b.1820) made Darjeeling in India the centre for his crusade. He completed his major work Udaylaharí containing one hundred and nine stanzas while in Darjeeling in 1877. The movement protested against the prevalence of the caste system, against superstition, and against animal sacrifice. The Sant poets who flourished in different parts of India at different times resembled one another in their spiritual and social exhortations. In Nepalese poetry, till a very late date, the poet was regarded as the next of kin to a sage. One of Jñändil’s couplets reads:

Flour pounded of millet from the Rumja plain [a Gurung area]
is spiced with nothing but water or nirguna (Brahma).
Gurungs [who are Vaishyas] mastered spiritual knowledge and
religious duties, and Brahmans were left wondering.

The Joshmani movement spread like wildfire in the Nepali-speaking regions of Darjeeling and Sikkim, and embraced all the tribes, now called castes, that constitute the Indian Nepali nation. Jñändil Däs worked indefatigably among them and, indeed, deserves to be called one of the foremost makers of the Indian-Nepali nation. His poetical compositions, however, might in a way be regarded as a spill-over into India of traditional Nepali religious writings, of which Nepal was the original and main centre.

Indian Nepali literary writing had its beginnings in the sawäís penned mainly by Gorkha soldiers stationed in Assam, and in the laharís composed in the main by Gorkha or Nepali labourers working in the tea gardens in Darjeeling Gorkha or Nepali soldiers were enlisted in the regiments of the British East India Company from 1815, and Nepali or Gorkha labourers worked in the tea gardens owned by the British planters from 1856. An important point to note is that while in Nepal literary writing was begun by ëlite Brahmans (Aryans) who wrote in praise of their king, in India the beginning of Indian Nepali literature was made by common soldiers and labourers who were mostly from Mongoloid ethnic groups and who wrote of their actual experiences of battles fought and lives lived in India. Indian Nepali literature can justly be proud of its popular and proletarian beginning.

Tulachan Aley of the 43/44th Gorkha Regiment composed his Sawäï of the Battle of Manipur in 1893 and Dhanbir Bhandari of the 44th Gorkha Regiment composed his “Sawäï of the Battle of the Abhor Hills” in 1894. The Battle of Manipur was fought in 1891-93 between the British East India Company and the King of Manipur, and the Battle of the Abhor Hills was fought in 1893-94 between the Company and the tribals of the hills that are now in the Arunachal State of northeastern India. Quite noticeable in the two sawäïs and others that followed them fast is the felt identity of Gorkhas or Nepalis as a nation irrespective of their tribal castes, cultures or religious beliefs.

While the sawäïs were narrative poetic compositions in a particular kind of folk metrical rhythm, laharïs were waves, or a succession of waves, of feelings or emotions in the form of popular songs. The completely different set of difficult circumstances which then obtained in the tea plantations prompted the writing of the laharïs. The Nepalis had fallen victim to what might be called the “liberation for exploitation” game of the capitalist economy. All emotions—most of all that of love—suffered new forms of distressing constraint. Love and marriage through mutual affection were seen to be both desirable and possible, but the constraints of the caste system and disparities of income and wealth were all the more strongly operative. Hajirman Rai, Taraman Gurung and others produced several laharïs which merit close sociological analysis.

Coming to the modern times, Lakshmi Prasad Devkota (b.1909), whose equal as a prolific poet Nepali literature has not seen, could write the voluminous epic Shakuntal in three months, dictate a second epic Sulochana in ten days, write Kunjini, a narrative poem of considerable length, in one single night, dictate a poetic composition of ninety-five excellent stanzas, Änsu, in one hour and twenty minutes by the clock, and dictate a collection of short stories at one sitting. It suffices for our purpose here to quote a few lines from the first canto of Shakuntal to see how dear to his heart were the ideal and memory of ancient Bhärat which he bequeathed to the Indian Nepalis:

Dear to me are fond memories of the ancient world,
Of our Bhärat, of her rise, shining forth as snow-glow.
As in winter the cuckoo remembering spring-fragrance awaits
The northward return of days, so does this poet.

Let us journey to the times past, let us remember that Bhärat,
Let us arouse past emotions, throw a curtain over this present,
Let us forget this din and bustle, forget this mortality,
Sweet is Vrindavan to this poet, gentlemen, let us proceed on.

Another able poet, Pandit Dharanidhar Sharma, served as a catalyst for the crystallisation of the feeling of Indian Nepali nationalism. He was a keen observer of Nepali society and people. Of course, there was never a dearth of writers who thought the poet’s diagnosis and dispensation were not revolutionary enough. The enraged poet confronted critics with pointed questions:

Do you really have abilities? Then lift up the nation.
Your mere prattles will not uplift the nation.
Broaden the nation’s bosom, arouse consciousness,
Has any nation ever, eschewing truth, embracing self-centredness,
Achieved greatness in this wide world?

Naivedya (1920), a collection of poems by Pandit Dharanidhar Sharma, was accepted by the Indian Nepalis as their national Gïtä. Agam Singh Giri (b.1932), a youth who was later to become the poet most representative of Indian Nepalis, imbibed deeply the teachings and message of Naivedya. Giri gave expression, through poems that excelled in their lyrical rhythm and diction, to the feeling of general frustration prevalent among his people. Indian Nepalis had contributed their mite to bring about Indian independence. But in the new “democratic” dispensation in which numbers (votes) alone matter, the Indian Nepali community is, as all other minority communities are, reduced to the position of ineffectual spectators—often of their own extermination. The literature of these minor nationalities of India and the discordant notes therein, should be viewed in this light too. And no real blame should be apportioned to them if they have not so far produced works of pan-Indian national significance.

In his last work, War and the Warrior (1970), written a year before his death, Giri dealt with the keynote of Nepalese life in India— the search for self-identity. Nepalis are a martial but maligned race; they have all along been fighting other men’s battles; it is not at all pleasant to be branded as “mercenaries of war.” Giri would forbid all Nepalese mothers from bringing forth sons who are only to die in alien battlefields:

O warrior, your son is yet to be born,
he shall be then a part of your life,
allow him not to be wounded
spilling blood for others;
forbid him to sharpen his khukuri
to fight other men’s battles,
to add shine to other’s existence;
history will only brand him a murderer,
let him not be accursed by all
or consigned to insults and injuries.
We are in the midst of war.
We have fought and have somehow survived.
There is a cry of fear in our heart.
War, not understood,
is starkly visible in our eyes.

For us, poets perform two functions. First they give full expression to the feelings of their people, and no poets worth their salt will shrink from telling the social truths. Indian Nepalese poets, I must say, have acquitted themselves creditably in this, in being the spokesmen of the society. However, a poet’s responsibility does not cease there. A poet is inalienably a prophet too. (S)he obtains glimpses of that faraway land to which all people belong. Before we reach it we must pass through a country to which many people belong—our own country and nation. Indian Nepali poets are encamped at this point for the present.

The paper first appeared in Journal of South Asian Literature (Vol. XXIX, No.1) in 1994. It has been republished here with permission from the editors of Indra Sampurna.