A general case will poignantly exemplify how we are suffering from intellectual inefficiency: There is no doubt that the Buddha was born in Lumbini of Nepal. No matter how hard Indian historians and intelligentsia try to prove his birthplace as either Bihar or Orissa, he was born here and we are proud of the fact. My question is: How much effort have we put on enlivening the philosophy of the Buddha? Can we truly boast that we have given considerable contribution to the intellectual heritage of Buddhism? Has our social and intellectual tradition not generally defined Buddhism as a religion of the people with Mongolian face and small eyes? The fact is that in Nepal, Buddhism is confined into a narrow definition and many understand it as the religion of the Tibetan refugees. The Indian philosophical tradition, on the contrary, has established the Buddhist philosophy as an important heritage of India’s civilization.
Literary pundits have defaced Nepali intellectual domain by submitting themselves to deconstruction, postmodernism and other –isms.
I do not subscribe to Sapkota’s criticism of Nepali intellectuals who, he says, imported Indian intellectual tradition from Benaras. It was not their fault to have gone to Benaras for studies. Since our country did not have a university until about 50 years back, it was the most viable destination for those who wanted to pursue higher studies. Apart from the fact that those first-generation university products did not come up with a “Nepali intellectual mind”, Benaras has long been serving as a space for growth as well as a refuge for Nepali political actors and revolutionary students.
In inventing Nepaliness, we cannot stand apart from the contemporary intellectual tradition, Western or Indian. Rather, we should critically examine how the Europeans dominated the world during the colonial era with their epistemology and discourse. They used consent generation as the chief method to ‘subjectivize’ a nation and her people and created the cultural race of “the other”. Just as the colonized subjects invented counter discourse as a tool to ‘desubjectivize’ and decolonize themselves, we can create our own intellectual tradition and ‘dehegemonize’ ourselves from the contemporary intellectual powers.
Recently, my former classmate from the department of English in Tribhuvan University inquired me about the courses that are offered in the English Department of my university. When I told her that my department offers courses like “Linguistic Philosophy of Bhartrhari’s Vakyapadiya” and “Texts, Rituals and Performance in Bhakti Movement in India”, she was taken by surprise and asked if I was really pursuing English studies. Bored as she was learning about my courses, I, on the contrary, was confident that the purely Indian courses lend a better space for intellectual growth of a student than the purely British courses offered as a tradition elsewhere. Here, the case is not exclusively an Indian one but an example of how we can find alternatives to the purely Western intellectual tradition that we are now blindly emulating. One can go for national ways of looking at things, which determines the formation of a national intellectual tradition.
The Nepali literary tradition has a pathetic facet. Our writers call each other the twin brothers of the great figures of Western literature. Laxmi Prasad Devkota is regarded as the William Wordsworth of Nepal; Bal Krishna Sama the William Shakespeare. Some are the Nepali Anton Chekhovs while others are the Harold Pinters. But, how long can we keep measuring Nepali literary merit in the Western lactometer? Even Sapkota himself has been using the same lactometer while critiquing purely Nepali texts. As is evident, some of the intellectual and literary pundits have defaced Nepali intellectual domain by wholeheartedly submitting themselves to deconstruction, postmodernism and other –isms.
Why Nepal has not gone through an “intellectual renaissance” has two evident reasons. One lies in the macro-level fact that Nepal has never been colonized or ruled by external forces. Although many assert that Nepal is a semi-colonial country, our culture and nationhood has not encountered the risk of external attack or domination. Apart from small-scale trade and territorial links with India and China, Nepal did not appear in the international arena until after the 1950s. Nepal has not gone through an industrial revolution and we experienced civil war relatively late. We have always been a non-aligned, passive nation. It is evident that in such countries, renaissance takes place late.
The second reason is internal. The holders of the state power have usually been able to rationalize their superiority to the people. Since the emergence of the concept of the state, the religious inscriptions introduced the king as the incarnation of god. It was then obvious for the religiously-inclined Nepali society to conform to what had been written. Over the centuries, people have been subjects without them ever being aware of their real identity as the major stakeholders of the society.
The Republic of Nepal has already started to experience a pan-Nepali cultural – hence civilizational – renaissance. Power is disseminated in the hands of the people. Gender, caste and ethnic issues are taken into consideration in the reformation. The minorities are getting reach of the key to knowledge, the key to power. Only when the key to power is disseminated to the ground level can a nation undergo civilizational change. “Substantive intellectual discourse” is a vague term. Creating “intellectuals” is again creating hollow icons. What is important is to identify the potential of the unique individuals.
Sapkota’s call for a “collective rationalization of the Nepali mind” is a tricky way which leads a civilization only towards regression. The identity of different castes, ethnic and linguistic groups should not be dissolved in a single, homogenizing soup bowl of multiculturalism but should be placed in a salad bowl where they have their separate identity yet bound by a collective idea called national civilization.
Related story
Maoist parties to hold discussion with civil leaders and intell...
