EXPLORING BORDERLANDS IN SOUTH ASIA
Reading Parijat and B P Koirala
Belonging and Borders in 20th Century Nepali Novels
Mallika Shakya
This article suggests a feminist reading of borders and
nation in investigating the poetics of transborder
humanism scattered in the popular genre of Nepali
fiction and poetry. While border-crossing is
predominantly associated with suffering and despair as
well as hope and relief, it may also allude to opportunism
and betrayal. My argument is that borders are not only
corporeal and political, but also introspective and
personal. I reflect on the works of Parijat and B P Koirala
whose lives criss-crossed the NepalIndia border on
more than one level. I argue that the conundrum of their
political and personal engagements might have
triggered a new poetic discourse on an individuals
relationship with society, state and the world. This genre
of writing speaks to an earlier South Asian discourse
dating back to Tagore but more recently, revisited in its
psychoanalytic interpretations by Ashis Nandy which
interpret borders and nationalism more flexibly to offer
an alternative that is different from its more mainstream,
Westphalian theorisations.
The author would like to thank several colleagues and friends for their
generous feedback on earlier drafts of this article, including Smadar
Lavie for introducing her to the anthropological movement among the
women of colour, Michael Hutt for feedback on her reading of Nepali
literature, and two anonymous reviewers of this journal for detailed
comments and meaningful suggestions. Part of the work for this article
was funded by the South Asian Universitys Institute of South Asian
Studies through a research grant on The Poetic Imagining(s) of
South Asia.
Mallika Shakya (mallika@sau.ac.in) teaches at the Department of
Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW APRIL 15, 2017 vol liI no 15
B
orders may be political constructs representing frontiers
of contiguous territorial power but they also often become
vehicles for cultural homogenisation projects key to
modern nationalisms (Gellner 1983). Nationalist imagination
often has its borders sealed by either means of mythological
memories or the executive cartography of violence. Although
territories (and societies) bounded by state borders may appear
unbroken, in reality borders permit both discontinuous and
overlapping spaces which allow corporeal and subjective
crossings. The contact and transcendence of such crossings
may lead to more deliberate and self-conscious forms of public
and personal imaginations, which span a vast range from gen-
dered concerns for intimacy (Baldassar and Gabaccia 2011),
selfother dichotomy (Macey 2012), or universal humanism
(Hart 2015).
In this article, I try to understand borders and their national
manifestations through a critical reading of popular literature
from Nepal. In expanding social science categories by embrac-
ing literary imaginations, I take the viewas Shiv Visvanathan
(2003) didthat the vocabulary of the social sciences in its
current form is inadequate to understand the pain, evil and
suffering that are attendant on the fixity of national boundaries.
The uncompromising versions of nationalism and national
borders, in Ashis Nandys (2013) view, spread around the
world by piggybacking on colonialism, and then anti-colonial
struggle. It can further be added that the social science litera-
ture on nationalism continues to romanticise nations as public
imaginational projects without acknowledging the coercive
elements within them (Anderson 1991). One outcome of such
focus on the fixity of the nation and its borders is what Willem
van Schendel (2007) called the Wagah Syndrome, after the
daily choreographed display of aggressive masculinity at the
border between India and Pakistan at Wagah; he suggests that
this generates a psyche that influences the behaviour of the
state in other less densely militarised borders such as the one
between India and Bangladesh. I bring to this discussion a
feminist interpretation of borders which invokes the possibilities
of cross-border flow of ideas and imaginations (Saldivar-Hull
2000; Talpade Mohanty 2003).
I begin with a broad overview of Nepali poetry and fiction,
but my corpus for investigating the notions of belonging and
borders specifically consists of the novels penned by two leg-
endary Nepali writersParijat and B P Koiralawhose trans-
border lives offered Nepal a cosmopolitan vision of the nation.
I choose their works specifically for the deep concerns they
53
EXPLORING BORDERLANDS IN SOUTH ASIA
show for the incompatibility of nation state borders with con-
cerns of universal humanity at one level, and structures of inti-
macy on the other. Is rigid nationalism the Ulyssean one-eyed
Cyclop that needs slaying for humanism and reason to prevail
(Hyslop 2008)? Can an ultrarationalist interpretation of the
nation muffle the emotionality of belonging (Abu-Lughod 2000)?
A cursory review of literature shows that most frameworks
theorising transborder humanism in Africa, Asia and elsewhere
have originated from poetics of one kind or the other (Mbembe
2001), and at times, feminine agencies are invoked to express
the problems of belonging amidst coercive bureaucracies rooted
in masculine pursuits of muscle power and social dominance
(Spivak 1990). My paper explores ways of engaging with popu-
lar fiction and poetry to look for alternative views on nations
and borders. My aim in proposing a critical reading of a literary
corpus of this kind is to question the exclusionary corporeality
of borders and to explore alternative views on the self and the
world. In doing so, I join a conversation between Visvanathan
(2003) and Nandy (2013) that draws attention to the violence
that is inherent in the very idea of the nation state as we have
come to understand it in its Westphalian avatar following the
experiences of (anti)-colonialism.
My writing approach is not to ethnographise B P Koirala or
his work into its sociopolitical contexts as several anthropolo-
gists of poetics have done (Ali 2012; Langah 2012; Gupta 2014). I
acknowledge that literature and build on it, but I proceed further
to ask a related question: can fiction generate its own anthro-
pology, allowing us to problematise the politics of knowledge
in theorising nationalism? This is where I differentiate the
second section of my paper from the succeeding sections. The
former reads the sociopolitical contexts of the fictional plot,
while the latter sections read the fictive power of imagination
of two selected novels to decode their anthropological merits
in a way that expresses their concerns for universal humanism.
My engagement with the concept of universal humanism inter-
prets anthropology in a Kantian sense rather than to mean
ethnography per se. For Kant, humanity had to find the orders
of morality allowing us new ways of living together. He was
particularly concerned with how everyday particulars can be
reordered to allow us to develop new human associations that
are most inclusive. In referring to anthropology to mean
human teleology in this sensea concept I borrow from
Hart (2015)I build on the tradition founded by anthropolo-
gists such as Faye Harrison (1995) and Smadar Lavie (1995) in
their feminist responses to an earlier anthropological classic,
Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986).
This particular genre of writing which inserted women into
the project of writing culture, built on an earlier movement
among the women of colour as articulated in literary volumes
such as This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldua
1983), insisting on coalitions of diverse kinds in looking for ways
to meaningfully reshape the politics of knowledge in ant-
hropological meditations (Behar and Gordon 1995). These two
anthropological movementsa Kantian understanding of ant-
hropology as a discipline with concern for universal humanity,
and the Bridge projects insistence that poetics be the platform
54
for equalising knowledgeare central to my own reading of
the poetics of belonging and border.1
Border Crossing in Nepali Literature
There is a rich body of Nepali literature on border crossing,
ranging from minstrel (gin) songs and personal love letters
which circulate in and around remote villages at one end, to
published fiction and poetry penned by intellectual writers
which circulate in urban literary circles at the other. Collec-
tively, as Michael Hutt (2012) points out in his comprehensive
review of Nepali fiction and poetry on emigration, they speak
of both the pride and woes of lhurs (mercenary soldiers) and
muglns (economic migrants), often criticising the poverty,
political instability and exploitative social organisation at home,
but also of the grudges of those who remained home towards
their compatriots who chose to enlist in foreign armies or take
jobs outside the homeland.
Hutt (2012) has attributed Nepali poets and fiction writers
laments about their compatriots border crossing, to their
Marxist inclinations. He also pointed to the class, ethnic and
other heuristic conditions of Nepali writers, making way for a
kind of literary nationalism that considered emigration unpat-
riotic. On mercenary service, a renowned Marxist poet from
Kathmandu, Bhupi Sherchan, compares Nepali lhurs with
sacrificial buffaloes and puns Gorkhli (the warrior status of
Nepali soldiers) with goru khli (mere oxen).2 The military
awards and decorations earned are tainted:
It is lovely as it adorns your breast,
This decoration, this Victoria Cross,
But does it not emit sometimes
The rising stench of the corpse of your kin?
Sherchan 1984 [1969]: 63; translation by Hutt (2012: 21).
Stench and taint constitute a regularly invoked trope of pol-
lution when depicting lhurs. Mohan Himanshu Thapa (1973)
says a returning mercenary soldier is carrying a speck of poison
in the food [he] is bringing, some noxious gas in the cool breaths
[he] breathes.3 Another poet from Darjeeling in India, Agam
Singh Giri, too urges the lhurs to shed their memories of
war before entering homes, for they are bloody and polluted.4
Although this may reflect a pacifist belief that war is in itself
polluting, or that a war fought for someone elses cause is tainted,
the idea of pollution may hark back to the rituals of cleansing
imposed by the Nepali state on migrants returning home from
alien lands. Upon unification (or conquest) of the Nepali kingdom,
for example, King Prithvi Narayan Shah imposed such stringent
conditions of cleansing on the Newars of Kathmandu Valley
that the traders returning from Tibet, almost all of them
Buddhist, had to spend months with a Hindu priest undergoing
pti (cleansing) of theirallegedconsumption of yak meat
(the yak was held to be of sufficiently close kinship with the
Hindu-revered cows that purification rituals were considered
necessary) (Shakya 2013: 61).5
Literary narratives on migrants lives before leaving muluk
(home) to seek opportunities mugaln (abroad) speak of deso-
lation and despair, and have given rise to a left-leaning literary
genre of socialist realism,6 which is replete with imageries of
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dukha (suffering) and bs metinu (homes wiped out) within the
homeland. It is not that the grass is greener on the other side of the
border, where narratives of bijog (despair) and dhokh (trickery)
continue to mark Nepalis lives abroad. The centrality of this
theme may derive from a classic epic Mun-Madan7 penned by the
great poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1936) and often considered the
greatest literary epic in Nepali literature. The feelings of despair
among those economically forced to abandon homes and
emigrate echo in a large body of contemporary fiction and poetry,
including Tana Sharmas Mero Kath (1966; My Story), Sharad
Poudels Simn Wripri (2004; On the Two Sides of the Border),
Bakhat Bahadur Thapas Paradesh (2007; Foreign Nation),
Krishna Dharavasis Sharanrthi (1999; The Refugee), etc.
On the other hand, Nepali writers on the other side of the
border it shares with India did not deny the treachery of migrant
or diasporic life even as they saw hope in their existence out-
side Nepal. Even if life was not ideal in their newly assumed
homes in pravs (foreign lands), they depicted that people held
on to the memories of deeper suffering back home. Lil Bahadur
Chettri is a renowned Nepali novelist hailing from the diasporic
community in North East India. Dhan, the protagonist of
Kshetris well-known novel Basi (1955; Residence), is a hard-
working young man from the Nepali hills who has his house
and cattle usurped by a duping moneylender, while his sister
Jhuma is impregnated and then abandoned in a state of emo-
tional and social limbo by her foreign lover. The two siblings,
ostracised by societyone cheated in wealth, the other in
chastitythus, have no other option but to leave home and cross
the border. The grass on the other side is not much greener.
Govinda Raj Bhattarais (1988) novel Mugaln, for instance,
speaks of the humiliation hill migrants face in the lowlands for
not possessing modern city skills such as navigating intercity
rail systems. The trope of suffering comes full circle with Indra
Bahadur Rais (1972) short story Hmi Jastai Mainki m
(Mainas Mother Is Just Like Us) which concludes with a scene
where a Nepali hill woman grabs her meagre belongings and
reorders her tiny vegetable stall for the next days business, after
being disrupted by the chaos of an uprising calling for a recog-
nition of Nepali identity in the Indian territory Darjeeling. A wise
head among the diaspora Nepali writers Rai speaks of the
home and the world as the mountains and the rivers in much
the same way as Ravina Aggarwal (2001) differentiates yul
(home and origin) from thang (plain land and residence), con-
trasting those who remain with those who leave, but also stress-
ing that a connection lingers between the two, that mountains
are always washed along by rivers (Rai 1993: 63).
Amid these ethnographically situated literary portrayals of
everyday suffering, a select few works in Nepali literature
stand out for their bolder and deeper exploration of the intro-
spective meanings of border crossing for individual psyches.
For example, Lainsingh Bangdels novel Muluk Bhira (2008;
Outside the Country) begins with a Nepali emigrant in Darjeeling
recalling how he had entered mugaln in torn clothes with
nothing but a khukuri (Nepali sword) in his waistband and a
ghm (bamboo mat to keep off the rain) on his head, and how
he now has enough to feed him and his family even though
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EXPLORING BORDERLANDS IN SOUTH ASIA
there is no kipat (ancestral land) in mugaln. The story then
proceeds to show a certain psychotic disability in his character
which overpowers him from time to timesomething that can
only hark back to the violence and self-harm involved in the very
act of emigration and border crossing.8 The story culminates
by exposing the unfathomable darkness inside his hearthe
runs away and eventually commits suicide in remorse after he
murders his beloved wife in a fit of momentary rage.
This last story about the fatally destructive psyche imping-
ing on migratory experience points us to consider borders as
multilayered constructions of human psychology in addition
to their corporeal and spatial manifestations. This is where I
propose that the notion of poetics may offer the tropes neces-
sary to understand the human psyche, in the making of borders
rather than merely offering an ethnographic context. We are
to be reminded that borders are often drawn as contiguous
lines demarcating the separation of political and geographic
entities, but borders may also represent boundaries of personal
hope and despair just as they may represent boundaries of
national identities and constructions. The real and perceived
sufferings of mugaln have offered Nepali writers literary
tropes of despair and withdrawal, while giving rise to a cross-
border imagination verging on ethnographic realism. Alongside
the border of materiality is the border of emotions, addressing
a lived space of inner doubts and convictions being reworked
into a complex self as a result of having crossed political and
social boundaries. What emerges is a multilocal way of life
that may construct a subjective site that absorbs sensibilities
that are deeply transnational in their syncretic viewpoints. It
is to clarify this latter point that I discuss the life and work of
Parijat, arguably the most important left-leaning Nepali writer,
who lived a life that may well be called binational and who
nurtured transborder humanism, while leaving behind a rich
literary legacy that dealt with profound questions about our
subjective selves. Her literary contribution derives from Freudian
visangativd (absurdism) which Parijat introduced to Nepali
literature, which boldly confronted aspects of shunyat (void)
and nissrt (nothingness) of life.
Border between the Self and Others: Parijat
Parijat was born on the Lingiya tea estate of Darjeeling in April
1937, the daughter of the estates medical doctor who later quit his
job after his relationship with the British colonial owners soured.
He introduced his young children to the philosophies of Marx,
Engels and Gandhia privilege sometimes lacking in those
brought up in self-isolated Nepal under the Rana regime which
exercised an iron fist to suppress both political and intellectual
consciousness. While preaching liberalism, her father main-
tained an elitist way of life which distanced the children from
their working class surroundings. Parijat lost her mother at an
early age and suffered from a chronic illness for most of her life.
She then migrated to Kathmandu as a teenager although she
returned to India several times, initially to campaign for a revolu-
tionary leftist cultural movement Rlph and later, for medical
treatment. Although it is common for Darjeeling Nepalis to
visit, work and even live in Nepal, Parijats transborder living
55
EXPLORING BORDERLANDS IN SOUTH ASIA
seems to have given rise to a unique kind of transborder sensi-
bility as is reflected in her literary writings and political activism,
which, ironically needs to be juxtaposed against the deep
demarcation of the border she draws between herself and her
surroundings. I elaborate this paradox in the following way.
Rlph was a radical creative movement of the 1960s and
1970s that sought to generate a political consciousness expressed
through popular culture. A group of young singers, musicians and
poets, they travelled throughout the Himalayan foothills, criss-
crossing its political borders between Nepal and India. They sang,
wrote, and debated social inequality invoking neo-Marxist views,
at times travelling with no financial support other than spontane-
ous sponsorship of bus tickets, meals and beds (Manjul 1988a).
For a self-styled Marxist group, Rlph embraced the rhetoric of
individualistic anarchism. It is on this point that Rlph needs
to be differentiated from several other leftist cultural movements
that Nepal saw during the Maoist movement several decades
later. Even if some Rlphlis such as Ninu emphasised a Marxist
rationality of political resistance on class (Chapagain 2010),
others, including Manjul and Parijat, were inspired by a certain
creative energy rebelling against the social norms of sexuality,
rationality and morality. Especially for Parijat, it may even be
said that her borders were more about emotive self-ostracisation
than about Marxist class, let alone the borders of nationality.
She thought she stood out from everybody else because:
I demand more freedom, and I despair The philosophy that my life is
mine alone and nobody elses shall claim any rights in it is something
that has taken very, very deep roots in my heart.
quoted in Bhandari (1994: 3334)
Parijats masterpiece Shirishko Phl (1965; The Blue Mimosa)
is an absurdist expression9 of deep anguish, expressed in
terms of an unconquerable border demarcating self from the
surroundings. The plot of this novel revolves around a retired
mercenary soldier traumatised by his violent experiences in
World War II, who develops an attraction for a young but
unfemininely strong-minded woman. The trauma of war has
turned Suyog Bir Singhs life into a meaningless void that dis-
tances him from society, while Sakambari has a chronic illness
and she lives a life fiercely guarded against everything and
everyone. One fateful evening, Suyogbir impulsively kisses
Sakambari just once on the mouth while she is enjoying the blue
mimosas on the threshold of her home. The kiss shocks her and
she walks away. They never meet again. In the following days,
weeks and months, Suyogbir hears first that Sakambari is sick;
then that she is worse, and eventually, that she has died. The
novel ends with a wasting Suyogbir lamenting over Sakambari:
Within the glass I see two deep dark eyes. I see a shorn head. I drink and
I quench my thirst. My own fingers have become yellow with nicotine.
I often look at them and I console myself. (Sakam)Bari does not exist and
I recall that here, love does not exist either. I am living in an absurd
world and, I always acknowledge, I am living in a great void. (p 66)
Suyogbir suffers inconsolably. He cannot overcome the
boundary he has set for himself, as if the void he has inherited
from the far away war zone is a contagious one which he cannot
help but transmit. This void is not about hatred but apathy.
Hatred stirs action and may eventually lead to an outlet while
56
apathy keeps one immune to the consequences of inaction
(Stovling 1994). It is the lack of love and ones inability to con-
fess love that finally kills everyone, including the killer. In
Parijats universe, borders are deeply subjective, populated not
with pragmatic concernslet alone considerations of political,
cultural or geographic constructsbut with the core of the self.
The threshold of a home is possibly the only material repre-
sentation of border allowed in Parijats depiction of self and
othersa boundary that sets apart the lives of its characters
but connects their materiality with inner souls. Sakambaris
house is a homey one, populated by three unmarried sisters
and a seemingly spouseless maid. The house is full of feminine
manifestations of different kinds: the youngest who seeks the
pleasures of love and elopes, and the eldest whose renuncia-
tion of sexual pleasures has turned her into a soft-hearted,
conventional woman of contemporary Nepali society. It is the
middle one, Sakambari, who defies all female stereotypes, who is
sharp-mouthed, smokes endlessly and, using the imagery of
mimosa and bees, demands protectionself-destructive as it
may befrom all external influences. She says,
One buds for oneself, blossoms for oneself. If one must fall, why jostle
with a bee? If one must fall, why tolerate the assault of a bee? One falls
within, with ones own will. (p 12)
It is in the company of these four women that their bachelor
brother basks in love, to the extent that Suyogbir the homeless,
loveless old soldier confesses, I am jealous of a man for the first
time in my life (p 31). Suyogbirs fateful kiss on the threshold
under the mimosa blossom is one fleeting moment when the
border between Sakambaris self and the world collapses. The
intensity of the transcendent moment does not last, and the
magic vanishes (p 51). As Suyogbir later reflects, his intense
attraction to Sakambari had triggered memories of his violent
wartime past when he raped a woman in the jungles of Assam
and betrayed another. These brutalities he inflected on others
have their roots in the brutalities he suffered himself as a
mercenary soldier fighting someone elses imperial war. The
irony is starkest when he recalls telling the woman he was about
to rape, why construct this wall of ideology with the dying lot like
us? Come, let me rob you, you rob me too (p 39). Caught in this
vicious cycle of violence, what separates Sakambaris threshold
from Suyogbirs world, thus, is not the street adjacent, nor the
village nor nation; instead the demarcation is between a
Tagorean home and the world, love and wastea concept I
elaborate further in the following sections of this paper. After
an intense saga of introspection, Suyogbir does approach
Sakambaris threshold one more time, gathering all his courage
to confess his love for her. But it is too late and death has built
its own border and asserted its power to transcend all other
borders as Aggarwal (2001) shows us in her ethnography of a
faraway border village on the IndoPak border in the Himalayas.
Transcending Borders: Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala
While Parijats writing and being shows how national, political,
and social borders seep into personal psyche that ultimately
separates the self from the world, Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala
transcends the hard-edged definitions of democratic, national,
APRIL 15, 2017 vol liI no 15 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

and social propriety when dealing with the ironies of individual
life. In common with Parijat, his fiction avoids local colour and
weaves plots that could easily be universally enacted. The pre-
dicaments of human conditions for him are not about the pains
of political or social borders; rather, they represent negotiations
with liminal spaces that are intensely personal. It is not sur-
prising that the literary positions B P Koirala took in his fiction
at times offended the political pieties of the national bourgeo-
isie that looked up to him as a political leader representing
their nation. I will discuss some such instances later in this arti-
cle. Here I look at some aspects of B P Koiralas life and ideology
in an attempt to clarify his universalist stance on humanism.
B P Koirala was a leading politician and literary writer from
Nepal whose dealings with India were both political and personal.
He was born in Banaras (Varanasi) in 1914, after his father
opposed the Rana regime and was forced to seek political asylum
in India. What politically connected Nepal with India at the time
was a shared context of (crypto)-colonialism. B P Koirala was
active in the Indian independence struggle from an early age:
at the age of eight, he individually boycotted his school in res-
ponse to Gandhis public appeal. Later, he joined and organ-
ised civil protests in Banaras, Patna and Calcutta, for which
he was arrested several times and jailed for four years in 1942.
When he was released from Indias Hazaribagh jail in 1946, it
was clear that national independence was not far off for India.
Realising this, B P Koirala called on the Nepali diaspora in India
to form a political party for Nepal (Koirala 1946). This led to
the founding of the National Congress, which later merged with
two other political parties to become a formidable political force
in 1950the Nepali Congress. This party led a popular movement
in Nepal ousting the Rana regime in 1951. Following a tripartite
agreement signed in Delhi between King Tribhuvan Shah, Prime
Minister Mohan Shumsher Jang Bahadur Rana and the Nepali
Congress, B P Koirala joined the coalition cabinet as Minister of
Home Affairs. After winning the first ever democratic election
held in Nepal in 1959, B P Koirala became Prime Minister. Within
less than two years, however, the new King Mahendra dissolved
Parliament, and had B P Koirala publicly arrested at a mass meet-
ing he was addressing. His health suffered in jail, and after eight
years of imprisonment, he was released and exiled to India.
B P Koirala spoke candidly about the 1970s being a decade of
uncertainty and turmoil for all of South Asia. He believed that
the American departure from Vietnam had turned South Asia
into a new frontier of the Cold War. He called on the political
analysts in Nepal and South Asia to acknowledge the growing
Westphalian aggression throughout the region rooted in seem-
ingly random incidents, such as Indias annexation of Sikkim,
Sheikh Mujibs assassination and the coup in Bangladesh,
emergency rule in India, and the growing distrust between
Nepali King Mahendra and the Indian establishment. B P Koirala
considered the South Asia region at threat under pressure
from the charged nationalisms brewing in the region, and on
this ground, he chose to repatriate and reconcile with King
Mahendra. He flew to Kathmandu on 31 December 1976, but
was arrested at the airport and once again imprisoned. Upon
his release five years later, he addressed the public only once, to
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EXPLORING BORDERLANDS IN SOUTH ASIA
reiterate his call for national and regional reconciliations. His
health further deteriorated and he died the year after, in Nepal.
B P Koirala was consistent in his liberal vision of democracy,
nation and region, even though that put him in an awkward posi-
tion at times with the activists of his own party. For example, he
argued ardently in the late 1940s, when anti-Rana sentiment
was at its height among the opposition camp, that Nepals
democracy could coexist with dignity with a king, or two kings
from the Rana and Shah families, if needed, as he put it. His view
remained more or less the same when he chose to return to
Nepal in 1976, arguing that politics in Nepal demanded more
than an electioneering strategy but a vision of nation that
respected the complexity, depth and idiosyncrasy of human
lifea process he claimed that was initiated in the subcontinent
a century ago and elsewhere even earlier (Giri 2066/2009).
It cannot be sheer serendipity that B P Koirala left behind no
grand political documents but chose to pen seven extraordi-
nary novels during his long incarceration in jail. In fact, he saw
his novels as his legacy, as he clearly stated in one of the last
interviews he gave before his death. Although B P Koirala
maintained that his novels were altogether different from his
political career, it is hard to overlook the fact that B P Koiralas
fiction seemed to resonate his political conversations. His liter-
ary characters, like B P Koirala himself, resist hard-edged defi-
nitions of nation, society and self. They insist that boundaries
are neither objective nor cast in stone. They adamantly call for
an existentialist space that would redesign alternative codes
on national and social propriety in such a way as to do justice
to inner souls rather than outer structures (Pandey 2005).
B P Koiralas Teen Ghumt (Three Turns)
Here I read one of his novels, Teen Ghumt (1968; Three Turns),
to engage with the poetics of feminist nationhood that Koirala
offered Nepal, one possibly influenced by what Tagore had
envisioned about anti-colonial India and arguably, even one
comparable with what Mahashweta Devi lamented about
postcolonial India (Nandy 2013; Spivak 1990). The story of Teen
Ghumt is told as a flashback of a middle-aged woman. Not only
its layout but also the common content about a protagonist
womans views on different episodes of the national political
struggle she underwent, make Teen Ghumt a literary cousin of
Rabindranath Tagores Ghare-Bire (1919 and 2003; The Home
and the World). However, there are also significant differences.
Unlike Tagores Bimal, B P Koiralas Indramy is not repent-
ant about her past: [Indramy] does not feel bitter, only soft,
but the memory of a slight touch of sadness makes her heart
compassionate (pp 12). BP writes about Indramy as being
in a situation, when a woman probably feels that she has
reached her destination, from where she need not travel any
further, as if life sheds its loads and gains the peace of rest (p 2).
In this flashback, Indramy is honest about her feelings as a
fiercely independent young woman brought up in a well-to-do
family, politically aligned with the monarchy. She is fond of a
classmate, Ptmbar, but not yet aware that this would cause her
so dramatic a turn that would eventually make her into a drop of
water in a faraway ocean (p 8). It is only when marriage
57
EXPLORING BORDERLANDS IN SOUTH ASIA
proposals begin to arrive, and her mother rejects her casual
hint about Ptmbar being a potential suitor, that she becomes
aware of the depth of her love for him. Subsequently, she de-
serts her maternal home and knocks on Ptmbars door with-
out ever having consulted Ptmbar earlier. This was done in a
solitary state of mind that B P Koirala calls not under illusion;
just that her inner conscience was too clear for her outer reali-
ty (p 8). When she finally sees Ptmbar, the tension between
her inner and outer realities vanishes, as if to come together
in their common focus on Ptmbar. She then easily morphs
into her new role as Ptmbars wife (p 8).
Ptmbar is a member of a political party fighting for a national
regime change. His friends discuss armed resistance, which
Indramy does not approve of. But as the only woman, almost
like queen bee Bimala in Tagores Ghare-Bire, Indramy is
popular in this male circle where she is treated as a sister, daughter
and friend. This results in some tension between the couple,
which becomes worse as Indramy pines for a child at a time
when Ptmbar is preoccupied with the world outside their
home. One ominous night when Ptmbar goes to bed even as
Indramy stays awake sexually and emotionally snubbed, the
military raids the house. Ptmbar is arrested and sent to jail.
Ptmbars best friend Ramesh, who is also Indramys
favourite, is released from jail early while the rest of their
political circle is still behind bars. Ramesh is attracted to
Indramy and eventually they develop a relationship, which
is contrasted with her marriage:
it was Indramy who had taken the first step to enter Ptmbars
world. It was her who had reached out to Ptmbar, so if that was a
mistake she was the first to be blamed, Ptmbar only second. Maybe this
was the reason why she was the first owner of the joy, happiness, glory,
dignity of that relationship; Ptmbar only had the second share in it.
In relationship with Ramesh, however, it felt to Indramy, that the
situation was just the opposite. She did not take the first step there, she
only let herself be found. But isnt waiting to be reached audacious in
itself? If yes, Indramy considered herself a culprit of that much. (p 25)
The novel states almost factually that Indramy never
stopped loving Ptmbar. The day she slept with Ramesh, she
renewed her faith in religion and began her worship of the
national deity Pashupatinath in Ptmbars name. The day she
felt her pregnancy was also the day she regained her hope for
Ptmbars release from jail, and the day she broke up with
Ramesh. While many other Nepali women, both fictional and
real, like Indramy in the early pages of Teen Ghumt, have left
maternal homes to join lovers of their choice, this new avatar
of Indramy who takes a new man with pride and dignity is
not a Nepali Indramy at all. Her character pushes cultural
borders even further as she feels her love renewed for Ptmbar
while pregnant with another mans child.
Ptmbar is released from jail the day that Indramy goes
into labour. Against her uncultural hopes that this might be
the beginning of a happy family life for all three of them,
Ptmbar fulfils all cultural duties of matrimony and father-
hood but shuts himself off emotionally. He does not explain his
actions, assuming that cultural norms are so well established
that these should be obvious to Indramy. Indramy is any-
thing but a cultural creatureneither in her sexual affair with
58
Ramesh nor in her emotional expectations of Ptmbar. What
Ptmbar calls his kartabya (cultural duty) towards a wife and
child, Indramy calls lokcr (pretense). When Ptmbar accuses
Indramy of disloyalty, she replies,
I might not have kept up with what society would call my duty towards
you, but by nourishing the fundamentals of life, I have kept my internal
dignity and matrimonial loyalty intact. As soon as I conceived, I did not
let myself be touched by regrets; I waited for your return more ardently
than ever before. That is why I could never be touched by feelings of im-
purity (apavitrat), shame (lajj) or inferiority within me (kunth). (p 61)
As differences between the two intensify, Ptmbar urges
Indramy to send the child to an orphanage. An outraged
Indramy leaves Ptmbars home instead. Later, we hear
brief snippets of how everybodys lives develop thereafter
Ptmbar soon married a political comrade and went on to
become an established political leader of the new nation; Ramesh,
a parliamentarian and a householder. Only Indramy was
pushed out of the political and social boundaries of that na-
tion, for her two essential feminine rolesthat of a lover and a
mothercould not be accommodated there. She continues to
love Ptmbar as she always did even as she mumbles to her-
self towards the end of the novel with a resigned sense of
equanimity, this is what life is (p 73). The novel ends with a
scene where Indramys child has grown into a lively young
woman who brings her boyfriend home to meet her mother.
Indramy eagerly greets the young man, and says to herself,
he is extrovert in nature, just like Ramesh (p 74).
Localised, Subjective and Transcendent Borders
Borders demarcate lived geographies but also an intimate self.
As the sociopolitical contexts of fiction and poetry emerging
from Nepal that speak about Nepal illustrate, borders can con-
trast a neighbourly mugaln where the poor and the down-
trodden take refuge when flushed out of their native land, against
a nationalistic love for pristine pahd (hills) that need protection
from the worldly pollutions of warmongering. When poetics
copulates with the ethnography of contextualisation, the out-
come may be what Michael Hutt called socialist realism which
resists the evils of global capitalism. Put another way, the shifting
dynamics of the poetic imagination about borders and home-
lands, which is lodged in the dialectic of suffering here and hope
elsewhere, or vice versa, constructs a sociopolitical geography
of identity and belonging. This sociopolitical agenda of border
literature is the taxonomy of the collective, often verging on
an essentialised ethics of equity, justice and subversion.
Hutt (2012) is right to point out that the lhur- and
mugaln-bashing voices of socialist realism sit somewhat un-
easily with the unproletariat lives and work of Nepali poets
and fiction writers who never left home. Living this paradox
has generated its own tropes which Shamsher (1998) called
kavitm nr (slogans in poetry) and nrvdi kavit (poetic
sloganism), dating as far back to the legendary poet Laxmi
Prasad Devkota (Sangraula 1970; Vikal 1983). Through this
stream emerged Rlph, discussed earlier in this paper, a
movement that championed sociopolitical consciousness
through individual anarchism. Manjul, one of the Rlphlis,
APRIL 15, 2017 vol liI no 15 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
 EXPLORING BORDERLANDS IN SOUTH ASIA

went on to turn the consciousness-aesthetics paradox on its head Semiotic Borders

by writing anarchic poetry about a sloganist poet, Siddhicharan
Shrestha. Siddhicharan becomes Siddhicharans, and takes out a
procession (p 53), and the weight of this anomaly tires him so
much that, [he] eventually picks up both his legs and rests them
on his shoulders even as he keeps walking (Manjul 1998b: 25).
Manjuls contemporary Parijat, who lived a paradox of class
and borders, once clarified, just as she entered what is known
as the third (and final) phase of her writing, that I have now
made the jump ... I will from now on write as a Marxist (p 11).
She wrote two collections of short stories, some memoirs, essays
and poems during this phase. But this is not the phase that
eventually defined her. It remained overshadowed by her earlier,
introspective and absurdist writings, including Shirisko Phl
which I discussed at length in this paper.
The novels eponymous blue mimosas blossom on the thresh-
old of Sakambaris house, the location of the kissa momen-
tary violence collapsing the boundary between her home and
its surroundings but also connecting the anguish of the past with
hope for the future. Borders are not localised herethey do not
demarcate one culture or imagination from the other, let alone
nations. They speak of self and others, by taking up the metaphors
of the home and the world. Sakambari combines a lived psyche
with the public imagination of cross-border trajectory. This com-
bined genre also defines B P Koiralas work, even though his
borders are not divisive or protective like Parijats literary charac-
ters but transcendental. His own life was spent equally on the two
sides of the NepalIndia border involving arduous political strug-
gles for both Indian and Nepali nationalisms. His vision for a hu-
man nation found more ardent expression in his fiction than in
his political prose. Teen Ghumts protagonist Indramy is almost
B P Koiralas inner self, calling on the political and social systems
around her to make room for proto humanity. Her love for the two
men and her daughter who consecutively enter her life tran-
scends the boundaries of social and political structures. With an
ease uncharacteristic of a contemporary Nepali woman, she calls
on her husband to see the superiority of her honest acts over
outer constructions and borders of lokcr. She is not under-
stood. Hence, she detaches herself from his borders. She is not
bitter about the way her life unfolded. She is above all borders
created by others but at ease with herself. In their death and
departure, Indramy and Sakambari embody Mahasweta Devis
Douloti the Bountiful, she is defeated by a masculine practice
of nationhood but on death her corpse overfills the map of India
such that men are effectively barred from delivering a sermon
about nationalism on an Indian independence day (Spivak 1990).
My reading of Nepali literature is informed by Rabindranath
Tagore who sets the pattern for the diagnostic use of poetry
and fiction while critiquing the boundaries set on nation, local
and selfa trajectory that has since appealed to numerous
literary writers within and around South Asia.10 This genre of
writing speaks to the discourse on semiotics in the Saussurean
tradition in thinking about borders. Physical lines may demar-
cate localities and communities but the semiotic borders also
highlight emotional relationships between self and the other
(the other being community, society and state), just as they
establish proximal zones or transcend them. This is not alto-
gether different from the Freudian (191415) comment about
the relationship between the individual and the state, that
the state had forbidden to the individual the practice of
wrong-doing not because of a desire to abolish it but of a de-
sire to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco (p 279). This mode
of introspection calls for renewed interest from those studying
borders and the national psyches that are, at times, strategi-
cally bolstered through shows of aggressive territoriality and
the misplaced Westphalian legacy of executive cartography
which trample proto-humanity.
I invoke B P Koirala and Parijat along with other novelists
and poets writing on borders to bring back the focus on indi-
vidual concerns of belonging and freedom. I join Shiv Vis-
vanathan in suggesting that the social science of the nation
must seek to escape its current obsession with bureaucratic
order to capture the violence inherent in construction of bor-
ders. Poetry and novels have consistently shown borders and
nation as a genre of violence, at all levels, localised and sub-
jective. The second subversive possibility here has to do with
gender: Women are the primary victims of border-aggression
(like Sakambari) and border-policing (like Indramy). Pari-
jat has sometimes been called a genderless revolutionary
while B P Koirala is almost an honorary female in writing his
literary characters. It is in the engendering of the subversion
of border-related violence that these novels offer new ways of
looking at bordered nations and their relationships with the
world beyond the border. Suyogbir rejected by Sakambari
comes closest to empathising with the victims of his
violent aggression in the imperial battlefields. Indramy
rejected by national patriarchy carves out a space where
her daughter can freely live as she chooses. The challenge
now is to see if we can apply these categories of pain and gain
within the social science typologies on borders, belonging
and nation.

Notes
1 Within South Asia, Nosheen Ali (2016) has dis-
cussed the notion of mannkahat among the
Punjabis in Pakistan to mean the epistemic
place poetics holds in the Seraiki landscape.
2 See Titara, Battai ra Bhakkuko Ragoka Dantan-
haruprati (To the Offspring of Partridges, Quails
and Sacrificial Buffaloes) by Bhupi Sherchan
(1984/1969).
3 English translation by Hutt (2012: 20) of Mohan
Himanshu Thapas (1973: 28) Khukurimthi Ek
Chokt Bdal (A Chunk of Cloud above a
Khukuri [Nepali Sword]).
4 See discussion by Subedi (1978) on Agam Singh
Giris poem Yuddha ra Yoddh (War and the
Warrior), p 39.
5 The ritual was even stricter earlier for Newar trad-
ers who returned from southern districts under the
Mughal realms, who supposedly had to undergo
purifications by bathing for 40 days in cows urine,
drinking it, and eating cow dung occasionally, ac-
cording to records kept by Father Ippolito Desideri
in the early 18th century (Burghart 1984: 104).
6 The narratives of exploitation and alienation
under smjik/samjvdi yathrthavd (socialist
realism) include Ramesh Vikals Aviral Bagda-
chha Indrvati (Indravati Flows Undisrupted,
1983), Jagadish Ghimires Llm (The Auction,
1970), etc. A step further left is Marxist realism
which includes Khagendra Sangraulas
Chetanko Pahilo Dk (First Call of Conscience,
1970), Parijats Toribri, Bt Ra Sapanharu
(Mustard Fields, Paths and Dreams, 1976) and
Anindo Pahdsangai (With the Insomniac Hills,
1982).

Economic & Political Weekly EPW APRIL 15, 2017 vol liI no 15 59
EXPLORING BORDERLANDS IN SOUTH ASIA
7 In this classic Nepali khanda kvya (short epic),
the protagonist Madan leaves home to travel to
Tibet for work despite his wifes protestations
that loving company is more important than
wealth. Madan is successful in Tibet but on his
way home he falls ill. A Tibetan eventually takes
pity on him and nurses him back to health.
However, upon his return home with his bags
of hard-earned gold, he finds that his wife has
committed suicide and his mother has died of a
broken heart.
8 See the autobiographical documentary film
My Mother India directed by Safina Uberoi
(2001) in which her mother, Patricia, a leading
sociologist, talks about the trauma brought on
by her surrendering of her Australian passport
to take Indian citizenship for which she was
forced to seek professional counselling.
9 See Luintels (2012) argument that while Indra
Bahadur Rai introduced absurdism in Nepali
literature through his novel ja Ramit Chha
(There Is a Spectacle Today, 1964) but Parijat
perfected it in her novel Shirisko Phul (The
Blue Mimosa, 1965).
10 See the corpus of poetry written by Faiz Ahmed
Faiz on the anguish and disillusionment caused
by newly created borders between India and
Pakistan and then, between East and West
Pakistan.
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