Thapa 1 Tribhuvan University Forgetting the Other: Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café in the Light of Cultural Trauma A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science/ Department of English, Central College, Tribhuvan University/ in partial fulfillment of requirement for the Degree of Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) in English. By Prem Thapa Roll No 3 M. Phil. - III Semester Department of English/ Central College, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu July 2011 Thapa 2 Tribhuvan University The undersigned members of the dissertation committee have approved this dissertation, entitled Forgetting the Other: Forget Kathmandu and Palpasa Café in the Light of Cultural Trauma submitted by Prem Thapa to the Department of English, Central College, Tribhuvan University. Dr. Beerendra Pandey (Supervisor) Dr. Sanjiv Upreti (External Examiner) Dr. Amar Raj Joshi (Head of the Deparment) Department of English Central College, Kirtipur Kathmandu, Nepal Date: Thapa 3 Acknowledgement I would like to acknowledge the critical supervision and inputs of my supervisor Dr. Beerendra Pandey, who encouraged in choosing the topic and helped me with the recommendation of reference texts. There is, however, another person, my classmate and friends for long Mahabir Paudyal, who followed the first chapter and provided some insights during the research. I am grateful to my supervisor Dr. Pandey and Mahabir for their inputs and insights. I also wish to thank my friends Dominic Haffner, Gilles Gobbo and Sylvie Orange for sending me the reference texts when I most needed. Above all, I owe the encouraging moments during research to Mom, Dad and Brother Raj for asking me if I was ever going to finish the dissertation. Thapa 4 Table of Contents Acknowledgement Introduction: Books Born Out of War 1-13 Chapter 1. People’s War as Cultural Trauma 14-28 Chapter 2. Othering the Army: Forget Kathmandu 29-49 Chapter 3. Othering the Maoist: Palpasa Café 50-70 Conclusion: Forgetting the Other: Politics of Representation 71-78 Works Cited 79-84 Thapa 5 Introduction 1.1 Books Born Out of War Every dawn precedes a phase of darkness in natural world. Same thing can be said about a socio-political change, particularly, when people try to change existing system. A society may go through a period of chaos, destruction, and uncertainty. Nepal, too, has gone through a period of conflict before a couple of centuries old monarchy bowed down to the peoples‘ demands for a republic state. The nation went through an acute pain and suffering material, as well as, cultural loss. The result it brought is ‗New Nepal‘; the words often used referring to a political change in 2006. However, the nation has yet to promulgate the new constitution in order to institutionalize New Nepal. In the first part of this chapter, I discuss the conflict scenario and outline some widely read literary works that the period produced, and move on to the research problem I have undertaken in this dissertation. The period of conflict bore tremendous energy of creativity in Nepali writers writing in, both, Nepali and English languages. A high flow of books swept through the post-conflict Nepal in response to the suffering and the loss caused by the decade long political conflict with armed forces backing it. In the year 2004, ―Ramesh Parajuli prepared a bibliography on the Maoist movement listing over three hundred entries only in English. Numerous other works on the Civil War have been produced since then‖ (Adhkari and Gautam 3). In order to recap the motivating source of this huge literary output, I shall, briefly, answer the question: What was the scenario that bore such an immense creative energy? It is a well-accepted fact that Nepal have gone through an extreme situation since 1996, which has left the Nepali society shattered, socially and psychologically, that it may never come to terms with the loss. Between the year 1996 and 2006 ―about 15,000 people have lost their Thapa 6 lives‖ (Baral ―Maoist Insurgency‖ 207) and the number of disappearances and the injuries caused by the conflict has yet to be made public by the government. The rural countryside suffered the most where the insurgents had their bases. The poor villagers were caught in the cross-fire between the state security forces and the rebel forces. They were abducted and tortured in the name of supporting either warring forces. Left with no choices ―the villagers could no longer live in the villages and fled to safer areas within Nepal or went to India or abroad, seeking employment‖ (Thapa and Sijapati 170). The countryside witnessed barren villages as mass migration took place. The villages became empty of youths. There were, hardly, any able working hands left in the villages. The women were left with little kids and duty to feed and care them despite the destitution. Thus, women were forced to plough their fields, which until then, was a cultural taboo. As the internal war escalated, the people suffered a vicious conflict trap as double victims of the conflict. At first, they were direct victims of the state security forces as relatives (wife, father, and mother) of the rebel. And, secondly, they had to offer hiding shelter and food for the rebels at the cost of their own livelihood. Apart from human loss and suffering, the material loss was immense during the conflict. The nation‘s infrastructures, for example: bridge, government buildings, offices and industries, were hit to an irreparable state. Observing the damage caused by the People‘s War, Thapa and Sijapati, remark: ―The intensity of the violence has extracted a huge material loss for the country‖ (170). Physical destruction exceeded as the conflict progressed. The survey undertook by one of the national media houses reported that, by the year 2003 ―The cost of reconstruction of the development infrastructure that was destroyed by Maoists is estimated at NRs 200 billion‖ (qtd. in Adhikari 61). Thus the people‘s lives were affected individually as well as collectively. The countryside and its people lived through mayhem caused by the conflict, yet the turmoil Thapa 7 went almost unnoticed to elites of the center and the world outside Nepal. The report of the bloody war broke out now and then in newspapers that employed local journalists to report spicy story of hunger, famine and child-marriage from the faraway hills and tarai. The elites at the center read the exotic reports at their savory breakfast table. ―During this time, the Kathmandu establishment did not experience what was happening in the countryside, and those who did have first-hand experience had no voice in the establishment. Readers had to search hard to find any reference to the war […]‖ (Thapa ―Future of Nepali Literature‖ 8). Apart from some oblique news reports, the event remained in local geography and archives of warring forces –the rebels and the state. It was only after the Royal Massacre in 2001 that the national and international media came to learn about the deepening of conflict in faraway countryside of Nepal. Moreover, ―International attention on Nepal actually increased with the visit of Secretary of State Collin Powell in January 2002- the first visit in thirty years of such a high-ranking official of the U.S. government‖ (Riaz and Basu 154). The visit of the U.S. Secretary was followed by international institutes, conflict experts and writers. Thus Nepal turned into a site of conflict and trauma for national and international academics conducting researches. Adhikari and Gautam observe that ―International academia and INGOs working on conflict and development are drawn towards studying this movement‖ (2), ever since. It was only during and after the first negotiation period between warring forces that writers and journalists made their journey to the conflict affected zones. The story began to unfold at every tea table of literate class of Nepal. What the citizens outside the conflict zone witnessed was the grotesque images of bloody violence splashed across the TV channels and on the front page of the newspapers. The conflict continued, from bad to worse, and the texts on the conflict began to flow in the reading circles. Who wrote about the conflicts were professionals Thapa 8 and experts working in media house, human rights organization and academia. Some narrated the story as a news reporter, the other wrote on the insurgency as a part of their research project. Yet, because these projects are ―Frequently sponsored by donor communities, they have specific objectives, and are often guided by a pre-existing framework on what to observe, and where. Gaps thus remain in understanding Nepal‘s political and social problems‖ (Adhikari and Gautam 6). To understand Nepal‘s political and social problems during the conflict we should look into the independent works of writers, academics and artists living in the country during the period, who strongly responded to the conflict through their writing, research papers and works of art. However, I limit myself in outlining some of the widely discussed books and a play rather than covering up all the texts produced during and in the post-conflict period. Among the published works on the insurgency is an anthology of short story, Stories of Conflict and War (2007), translated and edited by Govinda Raj Bhattarai, which covers stories by old to young generation of Nepali writers that present the social milieu during conflict from observers‘ perspective and from sufferers‘ perspective. Written along the same line of style is Chhapamar ko Chhoro, a collection of short stories by Mahes Vikram Shah, which presents social realities including the plight and state of society and the people during the insurgency. Among the written texts Close Encounters (2010) stands apart as the collection prose on traumatic experience that the author went through during the conflict whilst working for the human rights issues.