Review essay: Wider Worlds - Manjushree Thapa’s illuminating view of a changing Nepal
All of Us in Our Own Lives
by Manjushree Thapa
Reviewed by ROSS ADKIN
IT WAS NOT UNTIL the second decade of the twentieth
century that Tri Chandra College, in Kathmandu, became the first institution in
Nepal to offer degrees in English. This was arranged through an affiliation
with the University of Patna, but Nepal’s rulers—the Ranas, hereditary prime
ministers who exercised power in the name of an ostensibly sovereign Hindu
monarch—made sure that students took their exams in Kathmandu, and did not
allow them to travel to Patna. The arrangement was in keeping with a
long-standing policy of restrictions on higher education, partly aimed to
insulate young Nepalis from the nationalist and political ferment then sweeping
Indian campuses.
The Ranas were
overthrown in 1951, inaugurating a brief experiment with democracy that ended
with Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah, the king of Nepal, imposing royal rule in 1960.
Mahendra took on a nation-building project to unite his diverse state under a
prescribed set of symbols that reflected the history and culture of the upper
castes. The Nepali language, enshrined as the national tongue in 1958, became
one of the main pillars of this project. Nepali-language literature from the
preceding century or so congealed into a canon, comprising works such as Laxmi
Prasad Devkota’s epic poem Muna Madan and BP Koirala’s realist
fiction, which still accounts for a large chunk of the country’s literary
curriculum.
Nepal’s first
English-language newspaper, the state-run Rising Nepal, appeared in
1965. KP Malla, the early doyen of English writing in Nepal, wrote a few years
later that the paper was launched into a “resenting world” for a “virtually
microscopic” English-speaking audience. By then, after Nepal ended its earlier
isolationism and officially allowed foreigners to visit the country in the
1950s, the hippies had arrived. The writers among them set about creating the
image of an idyllic spiritual kingdom—such as in Han Suyin’s novel The
Mountain Is Young and Peter Matthiessen’s non-fiction account The
Snow Leopard—that defined English-language writing on Nepal, and so much of
the Western view of the place.
It took a while for
literary writers from Nepal to start wielding the imported tongue
themselves—though in the Nepali language, of course, literary production kept
growing steadily throughout.
Arresting God in Kathmandu, a short-story
collection from the US-based author Samrat Upadhyay, released in 2001, was the
first English-language book by a Nepali to receive widespread attention
abroad—and prompted gripes in Nepal about émigrés ingratiating themselves with
Western audiences by exoticising their home country. Since then, there has been
a steady trickle of both fiction and non-fiction books in English from Nepali
writers, which, with the publication of a range of fresh titles in the last few
years, has swelled to a stream.
One of those new works
is All of Us in Our Own Lives, the latest novel by Manjushree
Thapa, who has done more than any other writer to raise the prominence of
English-language writing from Nepal. She is, without doubt, the best-known
Nepali writer in the language today. All of Us, released by Aleph
Book Company in May, is her third novel, and part of a body of work that also
includes four books of non-fiction, a collection of short stories and a
collection of translations of contemporary Nepali poetry and prose.
Thapa’s fiction is
firmly grounded in social issues—caste and class, patriarchy, access to and the
abuse of power—which she approaches with a journalistic eye for societal
structures, and great empathy for the weak and the poor. This shines through in All
of Us too, as Thapa’s four main characters negotiate alliances,
dependencies and jealousies that propel them to a point where they all meet. It
is a varied foursome. Ava, born in Nepal but adopted and raised in Canada,
moves to Nepal in the throes of an early mid-life crisis. Indira, an ambitious
development worker in Kathmandu, feels stifled by tradition and an unhappy
marriage. In the Gulf, Gyanu, a migrant worker, dreams of a future somewhere
with his lover, who is from the Philippines. Back in Nepal, Sapana, Gyanu’s
sister, joins a women’s group from her village on a tour to the other end of
the country, where she yearns to step across the border into India, “Just so we
can tell everyone at home that weíve been abroad.”
But in one thing all
four are united: they are Nepalis negotiating much wider worlds—geographically,
ideologically, socially, and in many other ways—than those they would have
faced had they been born just a generation earlier. The same could be said of
Thapa, who was born in Kathmandu, raised between Nepal and North America, and
in her adult life continues to split her time between the two. In this, the
writer and her characters are emblematic of Nepal itself, as the long isolated
country confronts the modern world. Since Thapa’s first book appeared, in the
early 1990s, Nepal has witnessed immense tumult: another experiment with
democracy snuffed out, a civil war, the fall of the monarchy and a return to
democracy again, a new constitution, and through it all a flood of young people
emigrating to escape chronic poverty, joblessness and misgovernment. Thapaís
writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, has tried to make sense of all of this.
It is a vital window onto the dreams and struggles of Nepalís new generations.
THAPA’S EARLY
UPBRINGING in Kathmandu
was one of “convent school propriety, birthday parties, music and art lessons,”
she wrote in Mustang Bhot in Fragments, her first book. Her father
is a former diplomat and royalist politician, and Thapa moved with her family
to the United States, where she attended high school and then college, studying
photography at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. She returned to
Nepal at the end of the 1980s, in the final years of the royal regime... Read more:
