Padma Devkota
Where Readers and Writers Meet
The literary text is a public space where readers and writers converge. Some such public spaces are multifariously large and open while others are less frequented so that they are almost private and seem to belong only to a close circle that visits them. If Nepali literature occupies the first sort of public space, at present Nepali writing in English occupies the second sort of public space because of the linguistic medium and public taste. Despite the fact that English has been taught in Nepal for a long time, only a few people have been able to use it with any degree of mastery over it for literary production and consumption. Therefore, one of the problems of Nepali writing in English today is how to broaden this public space where more sympathetic and competent readers and writers may converge.
By writing I basically mean literary writing as an act of attempting to grasp and to express reality through language. For the philosopher, the real is often a subtle deception: a play between what is perceived as real and the impossibility of such a perception. For the poet, the subjective truth-value of each fragmentary perception of the real is heightened by the powers of the imagination. This is what Devkota calls the heart, which rapturously embellishes such (fragmentary) insights with a sense of novelty and beauty so that reality transformed into truth lies enmeshed in the symbolic order of subjective perception. Thus truth becomes beauty, becomes authenticated by beauty and this authenticated truth becomes valid to the rational, active mind of both the reader and the writer, for both of whom celebration of life remains more appealing than its eternal questioning.
This process of validating truth is functional, for instance, in Shreedhar Lohani’s “The Hawk” (5). A “sudden clamor in the sky” (1) causes the poet to look up and suddenly spot “a flash of silver wings/ a silent swoop in the air” (14-15) whose beauty predates the literal act of perception: “it was a hawk” (16). This perception is next imaginatively expressed as a metaphor: “an acrobat amidst an arthritic crowd” (21) whose “power pack of grace and speed” (22) is the authenticating beauty that mesmerizes the poet with a vision “of one and many/ of the hero and the multitude/ each unique” (29-31). The hawk’s beauty, which is here understated as “just a flash of flame” (27) to avoid sentimentalizing it, has offered the poet an insight into the truth of the hero’s “awful majesty” (24) amidst “an arthritic crowd” (21) of “common wings” (20).
All literary celebrations are, therefore, powered by imagination, which allows a subjective cognition or recognition of reality to be accepted as truth. The heterogeneity of subjective perception resulting from the uniqueness of the individual promotes an even spreading out of human experience like grass in a meadow on whose green beauty the trees of knowledge have to one day lie supine. It is not that grass has no vertical growth: Devkota admits in an essay titled “Darshan” that all poets and writers have their own inclination to philosophy just as philosophers probably write poetry sometimes (1). But the force of the grass is not spent in growing tall to become visible; it is spent in covering as large an expanse of the meadow as it can. And what the grass evenly covers is simply beautified for our senses. This spread of green upon our perception of the world appeals to our sense of living well and gives a signification to our own existence.
Nepali literary writing in English does not appear to cover a significant patch of the literary meadow at first sight. The names we can name are few and mostly insignificant. Nevertheless, with a major chunk of his original writing in English yet unpublished, Laxmi Prasad Devkota stands out as the most significant writer both in terms of the coverage of human experience and the command over the linguistic medium. Nityaraj Pandey, his biographer, writes, “Because his competence in English increased, he started composing poems in broken English from 1923 when he was in class 7” (7) in Durbar High School. His earliest published poem in English, to the best of my knowledge, is titled “To the Moon.” He was to produce the greatest bulk of Nepali writing in English: both original writing (Bapu and Other Sonnets, Shakuntala Epic, fifty-nine prose pieces, many poems, plays, etc.) and translations of Nepali literature into English (Indreni vols 2 and 7, The Lunatic and Other Poems, translation of Shyam Das Vaishnab’s poetry, etc.). No other writer in Nepal has produced such a bulk of original literary writing in English. A master poet, Devkota stands on that same (non-linguistic) altitude where John Barth places Jorge Luis Borges: “a type of the familiar writer-genius—somebody who combines an ‘intellectually profound vision with great human insight, poetic power, and consummate mastery of his means’” (qtd. in Niall Lucy 107). Devkota’s vision, insight, and power of poetry do not wait for the readers’ sympathy; like sunshine, the burden of poetic truth and beauty floods the chambers of the reader’s heart. His literature is a heart to heart talk with his audience.
For other Nepali writers in English, this is an ideal to aspire for or to avoid in their quest for other individual identities away from the overshadowing personality. In the decades that followed Devkota’s demise in 1959, Nepali writers in English sought to pay a tribute to him through the mere act of producing literature in English—a tradition that the master poet had begun. Some of them in their zeal to be recognized as Nepali writers in English translated their own Nepali poems into this foreign tongue and claimed that it was an original composition in English. Another malpractice was to have a native speaker smooth out the flaws of the English language and, without acknowledging such help, pretend that this was their own original writing in English. Besides that the effort to write poetry in English was either imitative of prescribed British poets or feeble in its attempt to eulogize the Hippies. Thus, writers of the sixties and the seventies present themselves as mere foils to Devkota. Then, other younger writers who emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century, again seeking to establish themselves in the literary field, preferred to ignore the master poet’s contribution to the mere bulk and weight of original literary writing in English and, with a journalistic fulfillment of a practical end, claimed international recognition as the nation’s first significant writers in English. Their Icarus flight has not yet reached the sun and Devkota is right again:
Falling low, coming downward there’s
Fire in this world,
Going high beyond the limits, there’s
The cold snow of eminence
Living in the middle
Modest fluttering
One lives in pleasures sweet!
(“The Swallow and Devkota” 9-15)
On the positive side, it must be admitted that the works of these young writers have received some publicity outside the national frontier. Publicity is a gnawing hunger of the aspiring writer, which grows more poignant with the felt reality of globalization. Times have changed and meeting the demands of this hunger has also prompted many writers, columnists and critics to discover other survival strategies, one of which is the use of the English medium itself. For Devkota, the urge to write was an urge not only to unfold the fragrance of his own heart but also to communicate, to educate the masses and to cry out against injustice and inhumanity. For some writers today, especially those desirous of international recognition, it appears that personal identity construction and visibility remains a major goal. To become visible, one has apparently to grow tall and big like the tree of knowledge full of the fruits of deception or cover a sufficiently vast patch of greenery in the literary meadow so that the single stalk of the self is not lost in a crowd of mediocrity. Recognition, yoked to impact, is certainly positive in its fulfillment of a delivered message. A writer without a message flops like a fish upon the ground. This is why a critical readership that weighs the delivery of a text must exist in tandem with aspiring writers in the production of good literature.
So, while for Devkota the function of a writer as a nation builder was to discover the self and to reconstruct it within the bosom with years of hard work, faith in one’s own inner vision and deep love for humanity at large, many writers, columnists and even critics today apparently aspire for the publicity of a raw self lost in the virtual reality of its own two-dimensional screen. If honesty is strength of a writer, Laxmi Devi Rajbhandari’s poetry is strong. She is truly herself everywhere—no art, no aspirations, no embellishments, no coterie of fawners lifting her up to the empty heights. But honesty alone is hardly sufficient qualification for poetry and it is seldom a survival strategy in a competitive world where migrant writers, for instance, who claim themselves to be culturally displaced, label themselves as Nepali Diaspora writers because nobody exists or has existed in a new environment without a struggle to assert oneself. Therefore, to draw attention to themselves, we expect them to beat their drums. Our sole dissatisfaction arises when they beat the drums of exoticism, whereas an honest meditation on what it means to find oneself in a different cultural environment would have sufficed to produce good literature. The fun and fact of everyday life of the Nepalese in a foreign country and in contact with the colonizers of that nation emerges more convincingly in Devkota’s Nepali short story titled “Mem Shahebasangha” than in what has been written off as Nepali culture in the United States with, of course, an eye on the market. If one of the attributes of publicity is exaggeration, only the real worth of what is publicized can compensate for this fictionalization.
It would seem that recognition within one’s own national, linguistic or cultural zone should really suffice for a writer because this in itself is an indicator of the impact a piece of writing has upon a group of readers who really matter to us. All national literatures including Nepali writing in English is best consumed within the nation itself. Any contention to the contrary must also learn to cope with such guilt and anxiety as was expressed by South Asian writers in English at the Literary Festival in Jaipur in the last week of January 2011. From complaints of the cultural insufficiency of English as a second language to confessions of having to use it as a survival tactic, from complaints against linguistic imposition of the public literary medium to confessions of overriding love for the mother tongue in their private lives, South Asian writers wavered between delight in their real use of English as a medium of literary self expression and guilt at having forsaken their mother tongue. Devkota, who used both the mother tongue and English as a second language with equal felicity, would have laughed at such complaints and confessions. Bilingualism (or multilingualism) in itself is not a threat to indigent languages and cultures; the lack of good cultural expressions in the mother tongue is. Although the homogenizing force of English in the absence of a national cultural cargo can lead to skewed or colored lens of the world-viewing eye, the felt insufficiency of English as a medium of cultural self expression underscores the presence of heterogeneous cultural perspectives. However, any good literature is never really against the welfare of the reader or the community to which he or she belongs. I as a reader would prefer to read that literature (irrespective of temporal, linguistic or geographical origins) which appeals to my sense of what great and entertaining literature is. And such a literature is one which is capable of making a real difference in my attitudes and beliefs, of at least appealing to my sense of poetic justice and of making me feel like my goal is part of a common human goal. Yet, in Nepal, many aspiring writers who strive to be visible are yet among the poorest readers of all literature except the ones they write.
It should really suffice to make a difference through writing in the lives and behavior of those that matter to us. But we keep looking forward to making a difference to the whole world because we are in love with some vague incorporeal immortality of the creative personality within us. While other ideals are necessary, Icarus flights habitually drown in the sea, idealists turn into dream-weavers and narcissism goes blind to the world. Stated differently, although Shakespeare did not mean anything to our grandparents for whom Bhanubhakta meant a great deal, on an international scale of influence, Shakespeare stands on a higher plane without reducing the significance of Bhanubhakta to his Nepali audience. Yet, what difference can it make to the lives of the Nepalese people if they have never heard of Shakespeare or of the greatest writers from Vietnam, Indonesia, Chad or Czechoslovakia? If a writer is good enough, s/he will one day be read by more people than one can imagine today.
Yet writers also want to be visible during their life time.
To keep visibility at the level of a political performance is an outright denial to work hard, to excel oneself and to produce honest literature. This must cede to the creative urge of a writer more bent on grasping the grounds of reality whereon s/he stands. Visibility as a foremost motivation for writing is political; literary creations need to be visible on their own. And, of course, someone has to take notice of such creations. An absence of reading culture can only predict the production of poor literature. We have yet to learn to learn from our fellow writers, to admire the sparks of insights in the poetry of Shreedhar Lohani and Durga Prasad Bhandari, the jovial but often biting presentation of daily events in the poetry of Mohan Prasad Lohani, and the critical and sarcastic moods in the poetry of Hrisheekesh Upadhyay. As a short-story writer and a poet, Ammaraj Joshi has been writing about a territory that is all too familiar to him in all its realistic details and has peopled the landscape with real Nepalese folk. And then there is Sushama Joshi, a new and budding fiction writer who is often present in the newspapers too. What is the overall effect of these writers on their audience? How are they capturing their times with their perception? How do they compare, on the one hand, with the master poet Devkota and, on the other hand, with the Nepali Diaspora in the US? How is the experience of feminity or the perception of the Nepalese situation expressed in the literature of Sushama Joshi and Manjushree Thapa? Furthermore, should epic poetry die in modern Nepali writing in English? And again, what is nationalistic about Nepali writing in English today that we need to take this tradition to certain fulfillment?
I do not intend to answer these questions now. However, it is my conviction that Nepali writing in English, although still in its formative period, has gained good grounds and is making headway with young writers here and abroad. First of all, we need to shed off all guilt and anxiety based on sentimental nationalism against the use of English as a medium of national cultural expression and rise to accept what was once a tool of the Empire as a gadget of the global community for a greater propagation of national art, culture and literature. Then, there is the need to examine, to discuss and to explain the strengths of such cultural expressions in various forums. To do so, we need to begin talking more about texts than about authors. And, finally, we need to remind ourselves often that no great literature can cover any patch of greenery if its roots are not deeply sunk in the national soil. We anticipate with more delight the convergence of readers and writers in the public space of the text not because of the linguistic medium alone, but because of the beauty of a vision or an insight that transcends language to cast a bespangled spell over the presence of our mind.
Works Cited
Devkota, Laxmi Prasad. The Lunatic and Other Poems. Mahakavi Laxmi Prasad Devkota Study and Research Centre: Kathmandu, 2009.
Lohani, Shreedhar. “The Hawk.” Of Nepalese Clay 5 (October 2003): 5.
Lucy, Niall. Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell: Oxford, 2005.
Mulmi, Amish Raj. “English and the Lit-Fest.” The Kathmandu Post Saturday, January 29, 2011.
देवकोटा, लक्ष्मीप्रसाद । “दर्शन ।” देवकोटा अध्ययन ९ (कार्तिक २०६७) : १–२ ।
देवकोटा, लक्ष्मीप्रसाद । “मेम साहेबसँग ।” लक्ष्मी कथा संग्रह । दोस्रो संस्करण । साझा प्रकाशन : पुलचोक, २०३९ ।
पाण्डे, नित्यराज । महाकवि देवकोटा । ललितपुर : मदन पुरस्कार गुठी, २०१७ ।
Where Readers and Writers Meet
The literary text is a public space where readers and writers converge. Some such public spaces are multifariously large and open while others are less frequented so that they are almost private and seem to belong only to a close circle that visits them. If Nepali literature occupies the first sort of public space, at present Nepali writing in English occupies the second sort of public space because of the linguistic medium and public taste. Despite the fact that English has been taught in Nepal for a long time, only a few people have been able to use it with any degree of mastery over it for literary production and consumption. Therefore, one of the problems of Nepali writing in English today is how to broaden this public space where more sympathetic and competent readers and writers may converge.
By writing I basically mean literary writing as an act of attempting to grasp and to express reality through language. For the philosopher, the real is often a subtle deception: a play between what is perceived as real and the impossibility of such a perception. For the poet, the subjective truth-value of each fragmentary perception of the real is heightened by the powers of the imagination. This is what Devkota calls the heart, which rapturously embellishes such (fragmentary) insights with a sense of novelty and beauty so that reality transformed into truth lies enmeshed in the symbolic order of subjective perception. Thus truth becomes beauty, becomes authenticated by beauty and this authenticated truth becomes valid to the rational, active mind of both the reader and the writer, for both of whom celebration of life remains more appealing than its eternal questioning.
This process of validating truth is functional, for instance, in Shreedhar Lohani’s “The Hawk” (5). A “sudden clamor in the sky” (1) causes the poet to look up and suddenly spot “a flash of silver wings/ a silent swoop in the air” (14-15) whose beauty predates the literal act of perception: “it was a hawk” (16). This perception is next imaginatively expressed as a metaphor: “an acrobat amidst an arthritic crowd” (21) whose “power pack of grace and speed” (22) is the authenticating beauty that mesmerizes the poet with a vision “of one and many/ of the hero and the multitude/ each unique” (29-31). The hawk’s beauty, which is here understated as “just a flash of flame” (27) to avoid sentimentalizing it, has offered the poet an insight into the truth of the hero’s “awful majesty” (24) amidst “an arthritic crowd” (21) of “common wings” (20).
All literary celebrations are, therefore, powered by imagination, which allows a subjective cognition or recognition of reality to be accepted as truth. The heterogeneity of subjective perception resulting from the uniqueness of the individual promotes an even spreading out of human experience like grass in a meadow on whose green beauty the trees of knowledge have to one day lie supine. It is not that grass has no vertical growth: Devkota admits in an essay titled “Darshan” that all poets and writers have their own inclination to philosophy just as philosophers probably write poetry sometimes (1). But the force of the grass is not spent in growing tall to become visible; it is spent in covering as large an expanse of the meadow as it can. And what the grass evenly covers is simply beautified for our senses. This spread of green upon our perception of the world appeals to our sense of living well and gives a signification to our own existence.
Nepali literary writing in English does not appear to cover a significant patch of the literary meadow at first sight. The names we can name are few and mostly insignificant. Nevertheless, with a major chunk of his original writing in English yet unpublished, Laxmi Prasad Devkota stands out as the most significant writer both in terms of the coverage of human experience and the command over the linguistic medium. Nityaraj Pandey, his biographer, writes, “Because his competence in English increased, he started composing poems in broken English from 1923 when he was in class 7” (7) in Durbar High School. His earliest published poem in English, to the best of my knowledge, is titled “To the Moon.” He was to produce the greatest bulk of Nepali writing in English: both original writing (Bapu and Other Sonnets, Shakuntala Epic, fifty-nine prose pieces, many poems, plays, etc.) and translations of Nepali literature into English (Indreni vols 2 and 7, The Lunatic and Other Poems, translation of Shyam Das Vaishnab’s poetry, etc.). No other writer in Nepal has produced such a bulk of original literary writing in English. A master poet, Devkota stands on that same (non-linguistic) altitude where John Barth places Jorge Luis Borges: “a type of the familiar writer-genius—somebody who combines an ‘intellectually profound vision with great human insight, poetic power, and consummate mastery of his means’” (qtd. in Niall Lucy 107). Devkota’s vision, insight, and power of poetry do not wait for the readers’ sympathy; like sunshine, the burden of poetic truth and beauty floods the chambers of the reader’s heart. His literature is a heart to heart talk with his audience.
For other Nepali writers in English, this is an ideal to aspire for or to avoid in their quest for other individual identities away from the overshadowing personality. In the decades that followed Devkota’s demise in 1959, Nepali writers in English sought to pay a tribute to him through the mere act of producing literature in English—a tradition that the master poet had begun. Some of them in their zeal to be recognized as Nepali writers in English translated their own Nepali poems into this foreign tongue and claimed that it was an original composition in English. Another malpractice was to have a native speaker smooth out the flaws of the English language and, without acknowledging such help, pretend that this was their own original writing in English. Besides that the effort to write poetry in English was either imitative of prescribed British poets or feeble in its attempt to eulogize the Hippies. Thus, writers of the sixties and the seventies present themselves as mere foils to Devkota. Then, other younger writers who emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century, again seeking to establish themselves in the literary field, preferred to ignore the master poet’s contribution to the mere bulk and weight of original literary writing in English and, with a journalistic fulfillment of a practical end, claimed international recognition as the nation’s first significant writers in English. Their Icarus flight has not yet reached the sun and Devkota is right again:
Falling low, coming downward there’s
Fire in this world,
Going high beyond the limits, there’s
The cold snow of eminence
Living in the middle
Modest fluttering
One lives in pleasures sweet!
(“The Swallow and Devkota” 9-15)
On the positive side, it must be admitted that the works of these young writers have received some publicity outside the national frontier. Publicity is a gnawing hunger of the aspiring writer, which grows more poignant with the felt reality of globalization. Times have changed and meeting the demands of this hunger has also prompted many writers, columnists and critics to discover other survival strategies, one of which is the use of the English medium itself. For Devkota, the urge to write was an urge not only to unfold the fragrance of his own heart but also to communicate, to educate the masses and to cry out against injustice and inhumanity. For some writers today, especially those desirous of international recognition, it appears that personal identity construction and visibility remains a major goal. To become visible, one has apparently to grow tall and big like the tree of knowledge full of the fruits of deception or cover a sufficiently vast patch of greenery in the literary meadow so that the single stalk of the self is not lost in a crowd of mediocrity. Recognition, yoked to impact, is certainly positive in its fulfillment of a delivered message. A writer without a message flops like a fish upon the ground. This is why a critical readership that weighs the delivery of a text must exist in tandem with aspiring writers in the production of good literature.
So, while for Devkota the function of a writer as a nation builder was to discover the self and to reconstruct it within the bosom with years of hard work, faith in one’s own inner vision and deep love for humanity at large, many writers, columnists and even critics today apparently aspire for the publicity of a raw self lost in the virtual reality of its own two-dimensional screen. If honesty is strength of a writer, Laxmi Devi Rajbhandari’s poetry is strong. She is truly herself everywhere—no art, no aspirations, no embellishments, no coterie of fawners lifting her up to the empty heights. But honesty alone is hardly sufficient qualification for poetry and it is seldom a survival strategy in a competitive world where migrant writers, for instance, who claim themselves to be culturally displaced, label themselves as Nepali Diaspora writers because nobody exists or has existed in a new environment without a struggle to assert oneself. Therefore, to draw attention to themselves, we expect them to beat their drums. Our sole dissatisfaction arises when they beat the drums of exoticism, whereas an honest meditation on what it means to find oneself in a different cultural environment would have sufficed to produce good literature. The fun and fact of everyday life of the Nepalese in a foreign country and in contact with the colonizers of that nation emerges more convincingly in Devkota’s Nepali short story titled “Mem Shahebasangha” than in what has been written off as Nepali culture in the United States with, of course, an eye on the market. If one of the attributes of publicity is exaggeration, only the real worth of what is publicized can compensate for this fictionalization.
It would seem that recognition within one’s own national, linguistic or cultural zone should really suffice for a writer because this in itself is an indicator of the impact a piece of writing has upon a group of readers who really matter to us. All national literatures including Nepali writing in English is best consumed within the nation itself. Any contention to the contrary must also learn to cope with such guilt and anxiety as was expressed by South Asian writers in English at the Literary Festival in Jaipur in the last week of January 2011. From complaints of the cultural insufficiency of English as a second language to confessions of having to use it as a survival tactic, from complaints against linguistic imposition of the public literary medium to confessions of overriding love for the mother tongue in their private lives, South Asian writers wavered between delight in their real use of English as a medium of literary self expression and guilt at having forsaken their mother tongue. Devkota, who used both the mother tongue and English as a second language with equal felicity, would have laughed at such complaints and confessions. Bilingualism (or multilingualism) in itself is not a threat to indigent languages and cultures; the lack of good cultural expressions in the mother tongue is. Although the homogenizing force of English in the absence of a national cultural cargo can lead to skewed or colored lens of the world-viewing eye, the felt insufficiency of English as a medium of cultural self expression underscores the presence of heterogeneous cultural perspectives. However, any good literature is never really against the welfare of the reader or the community to which he or she belongs. I as a reader would prefer to read that literature (irrespective of temporal, linguistic or geographical origins) which appeals to my sense of what great and entertaining literature is. And such a literature is one which is capable of making a real difference in my attitudes and beliefs, of at least appealing to my sense of poetic justice and of making me feel like my goal is part of a common human goal. Yet, in Nepal, many aspiring writers who strive to be visible are yet among the poorest readers of all literature except the ones they write.
It should really suffice to make a difference through writing in the lives and behavior of those that matter to us. But we keep looking forward to making a difference to the whole world because we are in love with some vague incorporeal immortality of the creative personality within us. While other ideals are necessary, Icarus flights habitually drown in the sea, idealists turn into dream-weavers and narcissism goes blind to the world. Stated differently, although Shakespeare did not mean anything to our grandparents for whom Bhanubhakta meant a great deal, on an international scale of influence, Shakespeare stands on a higher plane without reducing the significance of Bhanubhakta to his Nepali audience. Yet, what difference can it make to the lives of the Nepalese people if they have never heard of Shakespeare or of the greatest writers from Vietnam, Indonesia, Chad or Czechoslovakia? If a writer is good enough, s/he will one day be read by more people than one can imagine today.
Yet writers also want to be visible during their life time.
To keep visibility at the level of a political performance is an outright denial to work hard, to excel oneself and to produce honest literature. This must cede to the creative urge of a writer more bent on grasping the grounds of reality whereon s/he stands. Visibility as a foremost motivation for writing is political; literary creations need to be visible on their own. And, of course, someone has to take notice of such creations. An absence of reading culture can only predict the production of poor literature. We have yet to learn to learn from our fellow writers, to admire the sparks of insights in the poetry of Shreedhar Lohani and Durga Prasad Bhandari, the jovial but often biting presentation of daily events in the poetry of Mohan Prasad Lohani, and the critical and sarcastic moods in the poetry of Hrisheekesh Upadhyay. As a short-story writer and a poet, Ammaraj Joshi has been writing about a territory that is all too familiar to him in all its realistic details and has peopled the landscape with real Nepalese folk. And then there is Sushama Joshi, a new and budding fiction writer who is often present in the newspapers too. What is the overall effect of these writers on their audience? How are they capturing their times with their perception? How do they compare, on the one hand, with the master poet Devkota and, on the other hand, with the Nepali Diaspora in the US? How is the experience of feminity or the perception of the Nepalese situation expressed in the literature of Sushama Joshi and Manjushree Thapa? Furthermore, should epic poetry die in modern Nepali writing in English? And again, what is nationalistic about Nepali writing in English today that we need to take this tradition to certain fulfillment?
I do not intend to answer these questions now. However, it is my conviction that Nepali writing in English, although still in its formative period, has gained good grounds and is making headway with young writers here and abroad. First of all, we need to shed off all guilt and anxiety based on sentimental nationalism against the use of English as a medium of national cultural expression and rise to accept what was once a tool of the Empire as a gadget of the global community for a greater propagation of national art, culture and literature. Then, there is the need to examine, to discuss and to explain the strengths of such cultural expressions in various forums. To do so, we need to begin talking more about texts than about authors. And, finally, we need to remind ourselves often that no great literature can cover any patch of greenery if its roots are not deeply sunk in the national soil. We anticipate with more delight the convergence of readers and writers in the public space of the text not because of the linguistic medium alone, but because of the beauty of a vision or an insight that transcends language to cast a bespangled spell over the presence of our mind.
Works Cited
Devkota, Laxmi Prasad. The Lunatic and Other Poems. Mahakavi Laxmi Prasad Devkota Study and Research Centre: Kathmandu, 2009.
Lohani, Shreedhar. “The Hawk.” Of Nepalese Clay 5 (October 2003): 5.
Lucy, Niall. Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell: Oxford, 2005.
Mulmi, Amish Raj. “English and the Lit-Fest.” The Kathmandu Post Saturday, January 29, 2011.
देवकोटा, लक्ष्मीप्रसाद । “दर्शन ।” देवकोटा अध्ययन ९ (कार्तिक २०६७) : १–२ ।
देवकोटा, लक्ष्मीप्रसाद । “मेम साहेबसँग ।” लक्ष्मी कथा संग्रह । दोस्रो संस्करण । साझा प्रकाशन : पुलचोक, २०३९ ।
पाण्डे, नित्यराज । महाकवि देवकोटा । ललितपुर : मदन पुरस्कार गुठी, २०१७ ।
