The special reference of this write-up is the powerful writings of young writers like Buddhi Sagar Chapain, Khagendra Lamichhane and Yangesh*, who have been constructing their personal narratives into stories in a forceful way. What is striking about these writers is their use of public spaces of writing for personal stories of people relatively unknown so far. When the Indian author Nirad Chaudhary- famous later, wrote his first book about himself, he had entitled it “Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.” This was so because autobiographies, like personal stories of childhood, of an unknown villager far from Kathmandu for instance, are supposed to be sold when they belong to someone who is already well established. Barack Obama too told his personal story through his autobiography “Dreams from my Father” before he became well-known for other achievements but cases like these are exceptions.
Chapain, Lamichhane and Yangesh* are representative characters only. Their stories, whether based on their native lands of Kailali in the far-west or the rustic setting of Syangja in the near-west, defy the traditional hierarchy of a Kathmandu-accepted idiom in their expressions. Lamichhane’s play “Paani Photo” being staged at Gurukul currently, not only brings to the fore the silence of tragedy of a family whose son has disappeared during the insurgency but also a local accent of the Nepali language that Kathmandu has never learnt to appreciate. Even now, there are many people who believe in abandoning their local accent of Nepali and imitating the so called “sophisticated” Kathmandu accent. The stories of the three writers mentioned above have deconstructed the traditionally established notion of sophistication (Kathmandu) versus crudeness (elsewhere/the other) as far as the form of expression is concerned.
The emergence of the young writers thus is significant also in the sense that there is still a group of people in the Kathmandu-educated club, with a solid hold (even control) over media spaces, that thinks that whatever sphere of knowledge they have less access to, the whole sphere is less significant. Against this background of elitist clubs with an intellectual constipation and exclusionary interpretations of what is good and bad coming from such clubs, the emergence of the young writers bears a particular significance. This emergence establishes that every individual matters and so does his/her story.
Our society has rarely appreciated the underlying impact of “ideas” in the gradual transformation of society.
Human history across cultures around the world is full of stories written about gods and goddesses. With the change in time, renaissance and modernity, human stories came to the center stage as opposed to the ones about gods and goddesses. But still, there were the big stories versus the small, big people versus the small and us versus the other. It was through the era of postmodernism and deconstruction with its irresistible impact on understanding of the nature of human knowledge from the early 1970s in the West that the dichotomy of grand narratives versus ordinary was assaulted. Whether people liked it or not, deconstruction became a new consciousness in the world defined as postmodern. My argument is that it has had its share of impact in the Nepali intellectual psyche too and this has been amply evidenced by the use of the term deconstruction in the Nepali public discourses and writings. And I am not talking about literary writings alone here.
What is popular in the present day world as the subaltern voices is this very thing. The assertion of personal identity of an individual belonging to a marginalized group (subaltern or the other) can happen by narrating the personal stories by the concerned individuals themselves. Feminist movement saw women write their own little personal stories that were otherwise ignored by the dominant male society. The African-American assertion for equality in America also came through the telling of personal stories to establish that these stories too matter and deserve to be told. These examples to compare young emerging Nepali writers by putting them in the category of the subaltern may sound a bit farfetched, however, this is exactly the idea of the subaltern.
It sometimes sounds abstract to criticize something as Kathmandu-centric because most of the politicians and other important people of national life have come from the other parts of the country. But Kathmandu in this sense does not mean a group of individuals only who have a claim of conventional ownership over this geographic territory. It (Kathmandu) implies an exclusionary attitude. And this attitude is sometimes more strongly represented by people who do not necessarily belong to the place called Kathmandu originally. It is against such attitude that the voices from the corners, stories from ordinary lives and narratives from unrecognized places bear a special significance. These stories deconstruct Kathmandu’s elite narratives, and for a better aesthetic taste.
*(Corrected)
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