This is about the Mahakabi Devkota Shatabdi Samman Mahotsav, the first chapter of which took place at the Sanchar Gram (Media Village) in Kathmandu under the joint aegis of Nai Prakashan and TriMurti Niketan with Dr Modnath Prashrit as chairman and Narendra Raj Prasai and Indira Prasai as executives of the steering committee, formed to celebrate the centenary of Laxmi Prasad Devkota by honoring Nepali writers born in and before 1942/43.
As one of the 100 short-listed recipients – culled from the original long list of 500 contenders – of the Samman, I entered the hall of the Village and saw most of the seniors already seated for the unique event. Some 80 were present, and the rest were absent, due to obvious reasons. My wife, Ranjana, remarked that Hiranya Bhojpure and I were perhaps the only two youngest honorees in the assemblage. Indeed, the average age of the gathered should stand roughly at 78 years, while my age of 66 years made me much younger than the rest of them.
When our names were called out alphabetically to receive the citation, I had the opportunity to look at, recognize, and wonder at each of the recipient who walked to the podium to be sayapatri-garlanded, given the framed bronze citation plaque, and the badge of honor embossed with the image of Devkota. Each one faced the panel of Ram Babu Prasai, Prashrit, Rashtra Kavi Madhav Prasad Ghimire and Bhadra Kumari Ghale while the Prasai duo of Narendra and Indira conducted the ceremony.
I knew only one-fourth of these older men and women, though having read the writing of most of them once upon a time in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Then a pall seems to have fallen with the arrival of the new millennium, thus rendering these writers as a creative force of the bygone 20th century Nepal. The past decade or two conspired to have them duly categorized as an unremembered tribe – isolated, scattered, introverted, cocooned and each having made personal peace and reckoning with him-/herself in the advancing years of their mostly lonesome lives.
The drastic transformations wreaked by the past decades were clearly discernible on these noble persons of Nepali letters and thoughts. Time had taken its toll on these grand personages of Nepali literature. Many have lost their partners and some spouses remain as infirm. Some are living with donated organs, while quite a few have had bypass surgeries. Dimming eyesight inconveniences some while rigid joints trouble some in walking. Getting up and stepping to the podium was laborious in their poor motor system.
Hypertension, arthritis and gout have enfeebled some while unsteady fingers upset others. Two gentlemen forgot where their seats were while coming back from the dais and had to be guided to their destination. The very few ladies were more conveniently seated in the front rows, so I couldn’t observe them closely; but they were nicely ensconced among themselves.
This cream de la crème grew up and throve in the middle of the 20th century. Beginning with, say, the great daylight earthquake of 1934 – “Trees were dancing and houses started falling,” according to Satya Mohan Joshi’s childhood reminiscences to Sagarmatha Radio – they saw the world from the wrong end of the telescope under the autocratic Ranas.
So these writers devised their own moral improvisations to pass censorship and avoid state pogroms, save their skin, and continue writing. They saw the Library Parba, the new avatar of the “Makaiko Kheti Kanda” and other anti-learning onslaughts of the rulers. There were also quislings and agent provocateurs among their own and exile and exodus of the victims were the results. Anti-intellectualism and fright on the part of the family rule eschewed eye-opening knowledge production and advancement of modern ideas and universal ideals. Nepal’s Dark Age continued and people grew restless; and this is where these elders and their seniors did their cleverest best to irrigate the drought of the mind and intellect.
The aged and aging gentlemen had enjoyed powers in their heydays, exercised authority all around and surveyed their provinces. But they wrote, too, which differentiated them from their fellow bureaucrats and associates who accumulated ill-gotten influences and riches through unethical means and unfair practices under the grand designs of institutionalized corruption. That these now-retired litterateurs also compromised and sang hosannas to the powers that be to protect their pens from state proscription and they did what they did according to the prevailing circumstances while they also strove to cleanse and purify themselves with their bleeding quills.
Demographically, most of the honorees belonged to the celebrated Bahun-Chhetri-Newar (BCN) trinity of Nepal – the most fortunate sons and daughters of the nation, patronized by the ruling cliques, pampered by succeeding systems, and favored by the dispositions of the administrations. But they also gave back to the nation; and this fact had them re-remembered and recalled to the short, simple and spontaneous occasion for the recognition of their literary contributions by way of celebrating Devkota’s centennial.
And they did come, happy as children, in their cool-calm-and-collected demeanor. They were suave, somber and contented in their advancing age. They had graduated to the stage of their individual “bhranti” and “leela” after their personal “kranti” and “karya” while they were younger and more productive. Now they had “kanti” on their countenances and enjoyed their own “shanti”.
They were all here this sunny wintry afternoon and without the air of pessimism, defeatism and nihilism that plague Nepal today. They had done their bits and that was that! Some had put on formal attires after a long time, most had their Dhaka topi on their temple, and they came without modern trapping: Not one of them displayed cell phones, for example. There was this Old Nepal in the hall which will pass away with the cast’s passage. The crook of his black-cloth umbrella handle on Ram Babu Prasai’s arm is that old-world “gham-chhaya” charm that won’t be seen in a few years. These senior ladies and gentlemen looked indeed beautiful, to say the least.
Therefore, the honor program was a timely action, coinciding with Devkota’s centenary. The scene painted a portrait of the previous-century Nepal. The gracefulness of the gathering echoed Devkota’s own hortatory lines from his poem, “Sundarijalki Maiprati”:
Bishwas disha hos
Bishwas nisha hos
Abinashiko yahi akash…
As to the media coverage of the first event in the Devkota centennial series, we at Republica did our best in objective journalism. It was the young generation in the newspaper who created the story and image of the happening. It was their tribute to their grandparental generation. Missing in Kathmandu’s subjective media were its middle-aged editors and reporters who almost stood as a fifth column in the void they did not fill up.
As for me, Friday, December 11, 2009 was the last day of my 66th year. I received my Mahakabi Devkota Shatabdi Samman on this day and it is the best birthday present I have ever had in my life.
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