Writers and Readers in Transitional Nepal Michael Hutt (SOAS, London)
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Writers and Readers in Transitional Nepal Michael Hutt (SOAS, London) 1. Introduction The past decade has seen significant changes in the world of Nepali publishing, marketing and reading.1 Ever since literary publishing began in earnest during the 1930s, Nepali literary works have normally been published in editions of no more than 1000 cheaply produced paperbook copies, which often take several years to sell. The vast majority of book sales have been of a small number of classic works such as Lakshmi Prasad Devkota’s narrative poem Muna-Madan (or indeed Parijat’s novel Shirishko Phul, which has sold more than 100,000 copies since its first publication in 1965 (Aryal 2011: 49)). While such works continue to sell, in recent years the Nepali public’s book-buying capacity has increased dramatically, so that the list of books that have sold in excess of 1000 copies is now quite long, and sales of over 10,000 are no longer uncommon. Current best-sellers include Nepali-language novels; books about the Maoist People’s War; books about the Narayanhiti palace massacre; and English language fiction by Nepali authors (notably, Manjushree Thapa and Samrat Upadhyay). Before 2002, probably more than half of the Nepali fiction and poetry in print2 was published by Sajha Prakashan,3 with the rest coming out of the Nepal Academy (Pragya Pratisthan), and a number of small private publishers. Ratna Pustak Bhandar is Nepal’s oldest private publisher and probably the classic example4 but the number of private publishers has grown considerably. For instance, a publisher such as Vivek Srijanshil Prakashan produces ‘progressive’ writings by Nepali and foreign authors in large quantity and at a very low unit price. Nepali translations of books by authors such as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gorki, Mao, Lu Sun and even Hitler5 are displayed every day on pavement bookstalls around major transport hubs, whose proprietors have a very keen sense of what will sell and what will not. Indeed, the appearance of a book quite literally ‘on the street’ marks its arrival as a mass seller (see Gautam 2010). In addition to this, the state’s censorious tendencies have been curbed and there is much greater freedom to publish than there 1 My thanks to Ramakanta Tiwari and Ramesh Rai for their invaluable assistance during my research for this paper. Also to John Whelpton for his comments on an earlier draft. 2 The most comprehensive collection of Nepali books and publications is housed in the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, which lists some 27,000 titles on its website. Deepak Aryal records that some 15,000 titles were published in Nepali before 1990, and a roughly equal quantity since 1990. Between 1990 and 2010, an average of 133 titles in English and 737 titles in Nepali were published in Nepal each year (Aryal 2011: 48). 3 Sajha Prakashan was established in 1964 under the Sahakari Ain 2016 (1959) as a successor/replacement of the Nepali Bhasa Prakashini Samiti founded in 1913, from which it inherited over 200,000 books. Since 1971 it has been Nepal’s main distributor for school textbooks. It is now the largest publisher of Nepali literary works, with more than 1200 titles published by 2005. As a quasi-governmental organisation, Sajha has an extensive network of shops and distribution centres all across Nepal, but suffers from all of the ills of a Nepali civil service department. 4 In the early decades of the 20th century a Bhaktapur Newar named Ramdas Shrestha ran a sweet shop in Makhan Tol, Kathmandu which sold religious pictures and books as a sideline. His son Ratnaprasad helped out in the shop and in 1939 he established ‘Ramdas and Sons’ as a separate venture selling religious books imported from India. Ramdas and Sons became Ratna Pustak Bhandar in 1946 and began to venture into publishing the following year. By 1970 it had published 535 titles (Shilpakar 2010). 5 Aryal claims that at least five different unauthorised Nepali translations of Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist have been seen on the streets of Kathmandu (2011: 48). 1 has ever been. During the first thirteen years of the Panchayat period (1962-75) two copies of any new book had to be presented to the Zonal Administration, and the distribution and sale of a new work was not permitted until approval had been received. These restrictions are now a thing of the past. In his seminal book Literature, Popular Culture and Society, Leo Lowenthal argues that studies of the representation of society, state or economy in the literature of a particular country or time contribute to our knowledge of ‘the kind of perception which a specific social group—writers—has of specific social phenomena’ and therefore to our knowledge of the ‘history and sociology of shared consciousness’ (1961: 143). This paper is a discussion of the way in which a number of Nepali books published since 2005 have reflected or sought to influence public understandings of recent and contemporary Nepali realities. The works considered here belong to three different genres: modern novels, books presenting conspiracy theories about the Narayanhiti palace massacre of June 2001, and memoirs authored by individuals who participated on the Maoist side in the ‘People’s War’ of 1996-2006. My approach to these texts is to attempt to provide a sociological interpretation of them, i.e. to relate them to the sociopolitical context in which they were created and assess their reception in, and impact (actual or intended) upon, the Nepali public sphere. The three genres could be described as ‘art literature’, ‘popular literature’ and ‘Maoist literature’. Because the insights provided by ‘art literature’ are intended for an elite audience, one immediate objection to a sociological approach to it might be that it has a limited readership and can therefore have only limited impact. This is of course true of works by all of the great writers of the past, regardless of the society from which they emerged. However, the fact that a novel is not read by the majority in a society does not mean that it holds no meaning for them. As Lowenthal points out, …the most telling truths about society and the individual are contained in a literature that is not read by the broadest strata; the realization of the ideal—an entire society aware of the profoundest truths about itself—lies still in the future’ (Lowenthal 1961: xiii-xiv). In contrast to this, popular culture and literature are usually viewed as providing entertainment for a mass audience, and offering little by way of insight. However, Lowenthal challenges those whose study of literature is confined to ‘literature as art’: The academic disciplines which have been traditionally charged with the history and analysis of literature have been caught unaware by the impact of mass literature, the best seller, the popular magazine, the comics and the like, and they have maintained an attitude of haughty indifference to the lower depths of imagination in print. A field and a challenge have thus been left open and the sociologist will have to do something about it (Lowenthal 1961: 141). Finally, Maoist literature, which is now produced in copious quantities in Nepali, has both artistic and populist aspirations. Its guiding principles were set out by Mao Zedong in his speech to the famous Yan’an conference of 1942: In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, or art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine (quoted in Xin Ning 2010: 122). 2 For Nepali Maoist intellectuals, the primary criteria against which a literary work must be assessed are the political motivation of its author and the political objectives of his or her text.6 As we shall see, Maoist and non-Maoist evaluations of the quality of a literary work can often collide. The novels, conspiracy theory books and Maoist memoirs I will discuss here were selected mainly because they have been comparatively widely read in Nepal and could therefore be seen as possessing sociological as well as purely literary significance. The present paper draws upon much longer discussions of each genre that are currently in preparation. 2. Literature as art: the booming Nepali novel 2.1 Marketing the Nepali novel: two examples Until quite recently, the novel (upanyas) was the least developed genre of Nepali literature. Only a handful of novels, by writers such as BP Koirala, Parijat and Diamond Shamsher, had reached anything more than a tiny readership. This was mainly because of low levels of literacy and education but also partly because the majority of Nepali writers saw themselves primarily as poets. If they authored fiction at all, this was usually produced in the form of short stories, and the most noticeable characteristic of most Nepali novels was their brevity. However, since 2005 a number of Nepali novels have achieved a level of commercial success that was barely imaginable before that date. Palpasa Café was the first of these. Written by Narayan Wagle, who was at the time the editor of Kantipur, Nepal’s best selling daily newspaper, Palpasa Café was published in July 2005. Its main characters are Drishya, a male Bahun from a hill village who works as an artist in Kathmandu, and Palpasa, a young woman who has returned to Nepal after her higher education in the USA.