Of Journeys and Worldviews: Formation of Early Modern Consciousness in Nepal
Nepali society develops the early traces of modern consciousness in the 1930s. As we approach Nepal from literary writings, reading the contexts and texts to understand the socio-political worldview, we see walking has shaped the perceptions of people before the introduction of modern highways. People walked to see the world, understand themselves, and pay homage to their gods and ancestors. They brought home the memories, news, and new ideas from their travels. They were never tired of walking: they took rest and continued walking. This panel comprises of three papers on journeys in the novels, short stories, and plays. Dr Komal Phuyal presents the relationship between formation of political self and journey in the early modern fictions in Nepali literature, while Mahesh Paudyal reads pre-modern short stories to analyse formation of worldviews vis-à-vis place in the 1930s and 1940s. Dr Shiva Rijal’s paper contextually reads Nepali plays of the 1930s and 1940s to see the relationship between formation of self and journey.
Panellists:
Dr Komal Phuyal
Mahesh Paudyal
Dr Shiva Rijal
Chair/Convener: Dr Komal Phuyal, Lecturer in English, Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur, Kathmandu, Nepal
Discussant: (TBC)
Paper 2.1:
Author: Mahesh Paudyal
Affiliation: Lecturer, Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur, Kathmandu
Paper Title: Place, Consciousness and the Formation of Worldviews as Reflected in Pre-Modern Nepali Short Stories
This paper examines seven representative Nepali short stories written in pre-modern period, specifically before the 1940’s, or at least set before it, when road transport had not become accessible to the common people yet. The characters in the stories under consideration travel on foot or commute by means other than modern vehicles. This paper exhibits how the sense of place and its limited connectivity determine the characters’ worldview and shape their psychology. The study, by making use of the insights of place attachment theory, reveals that the Nepalese worldview, before the country’s launch into modernity and exposure to the wider world abroad, was shaped by values that are either strictly local or are acquired from immediate neighborhood within the range of on-foot accessibility and shared through non-automobile travel. Such values, groomed by the palace or the society defined by limited mobility and negligible exposure define the patterns of pre-modern Nepali worldview, and reflect people’s faith in the unquestioned bountifulness of the land they inhabited, their organic bonding with their neighborhood, their unshakable faith in nationalism, their strong commitment to the family institution, their rural ambience etc. Thus the study demonstrates how Nepal’s worldview before the 1940’s was conditioned by the exigencies of a place.
Paper 2.2:
Author: Komal Phuyal
Affiliation: Lecturer in English, Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur, Kathmandu, Nepal
Paper Title: Journeying on Foot: Formation of Political Self in Modern Nepali Fictions
This paper reads the early modern and modern Nepali novels to see how the characters view the formation of the political self in the backdrop of the journey. Prior to the era of highways in Nepal, the modes of journey happened in the form of walking, horse riding, or being carried by humans on their backs or in a palanquin. The first highway in Nepal, Tribhuvan Rajpath was opened in 1956: it changed the mode of travel for the people. The experience of travel holds prime historical significance now, for it reveals the worldview of the people before the inception of highways in Nepal. This study attempts to bring together the experience of the characters from the selected novels from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to see the formation of the political self in the time of the intellectual and political awakening of the country. Girish Ballav Joshi’s Bir Charitra (1903), Rudra Raj Pande’s Rupmati (1934), Dharma Ratna Yami’s Samajko Euta Jhalak (1938), Lil Bahadur Chhetri’s Basain (1957), and Lain Sing Bandel’s Muluk Bahira (1948) picture of the society as witnessed through the eyes of the characters who travel far and wide, and observe the intellectual and political incongruent aspects of life. The new historicist reading of the fictional narratives helps examine the formation of the political self of the society as the society was preparing itself for change in the time proposed for the study.
Paper 2.3:
Author: Shiva Rijal
Affiliation: Lecturer in English, Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur, Kathmandu, Nepal
Paper Title: Theatre of Walking: Reading Pre/Modern Nepal through Plays
This paper explores how the act of travelling on foot before the highway era in Nepal has been represented and preserved in Nepali plays written in the 1930s and 1940s. Given the geographical and economic conditions of the nation, Nepalis had no option other than walking to reach their destinations and moving from one place to another. Playwrights had to accept the conditionality under which the characters had to walk to reach the places they needed to go. Characters walk for their masters, they walk for their personal reasons, they meet on the road, they exchange information as well as the ethos of the patriarchal Hindu society and so on. Talking about their business of walking is helpful to understand the flesh and blood of the society. Unlike the archives constituted by photographs and official documents, listening to such characters walking down the trail is helpful to understand the stories of the then society.