Contents of this Issue

• The literary B. P. and The Grocer's Wife (Jayaraj Acharya and Swarnim Wagle)

Reviews

• Raj: A History of British India (Lawrence James)
• Form and Function: A Study of Nutrition, Adaptation and Social Inequality in Three Gurung Villages of Nepal Himalaya (S.S. Strickland and V.R. Tuffrey)
• In The Name of Development: A Reflection on Nepal (Nanda R. Shrestha)

Jayaraj Acharya and Swarnim Wagle

"I am an anarchist in literature through which I try to fulfil my rebellious impulse, but as a democratic socialist in politics I am in search of an agreeable political order. As I am one man in politics and a completely different one in literature, there is no smell of politics in my writings."

While B.P. Koirala (1914 - 1982 AD) said this of himself, the then regime saw things differently. The three decades from the early fifties to the late seventies were that era of Nepali politics when the nation's psyche was bifurcated into either supporting BP or opposing him. Politics revolved around one man who either commanded intense loyalty from people willing to follow his orders, go to prison and die, or detestation of the extreme from those who publicly demanded his execution. BP's writings thus remained neglected as long as he lived for purely political reasons, albeit part of the problem has always been his literature itself. In his quest for a better Nepal, he not only put forward a new political vision but simultaneously ushered in fresh and hitherto untested style in writing Nepali literature. As a dissenting intellectual, he surely had second opinions about the way politics was handled but he also differed vehemently with the traditionally accepted versions of ethics, society, religion, philosophy and of course literature.

BP's claim of his distinctly different existence in literature and politics is only partly true, for his writings clearly indicate a revolutionary persona that characterised his political life both in power and out of it. He was an example of a person who when disagreeing with the societal practices at large found himself in a position jostling against its often prized acceptances. At a time when the country was tied to conservative morality and antiquated values, BP championed a genre in literature that was the last candidate for popular appeal.

His debut short story in Nepali, Chandrabadan, published in 1935 not only portrayed the agony of a widow and her frustrations with living but also began a wave of bold experiments in story telling. There is a visible influence of Sigmund Freud and international writing in his early short stories but it was characteristic of the man to be Nepal-specific and pin down any airy thoughts to earth. In The Colonel's Horse, for example, the psychological workings of a sexually discontent woman is no doubt sensuously captured but by depicting the then accepted custom of unmatched nuptials between men and women of big age differences, BP questions an uneasy tradition. Similarly, the famous Faulty Glasses is a brilliant exposition of a hapless sycophant in Rana Nepal.

These three stories are typical of BP's style of writing that reflect accurately the sense and direction of all his short stories which is, perhaps, what has led to a charge seemingly hard to refute. Did he not squander his literary genius by spending a disproportionate amount of time exploring the inner urges of women and men? It really depends on how one reads his writings, but Jail Journal, published belatedly for the first time four weeks ago, would be a powerful ammunition for those who disagree with this charge. As a diary kept in the sixties during BP's early years in jail, he offers a highly personal and intimate account of his interpretations of national and international affairs, readings of literature and philosophy, interactions with people who mattered to him and above all, a joyous look at the little things in life.

He took to novels only later when he was imprisoned for eight years after being the first elected Prime Minister in the country's history. The first novel written, Three Turns, records marked influence of existentialists like Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, but this influence decreases in the subsequently written Sumnima - The Story of the First Kirata Woman, Narendra Dai and Modiain - The Grocer's Wife.

The latter is a major departure from his alleged obsession with Freudian psychoanalysis. Written in the Sundarijal Military Detention Camp over three cold days in January 1964, it is the smallest of BP's novels that poses perhaps the biggest of questions. Taking an almost heretic swipe at the Hindu epic Gita, The Grocer's Wife looks at Mahabharata from the eyes of a young widow who lost her husband to the war. BP finds the war unjustifiable, and his bitterness is fed through a grocer's wife in the novel who tells a nine year old boy:

"Don't be great like the heroes of Mahabharata. Their greatness brought the holocaust. If you aspire to be great - to be God - you bring ruin. So, just be good. A good man."

The Grocer's Wife starts like any contemporary novel with a boy and a family friend taking a trip on the Indian railways to the Bihari town of Darbhanga. They meet Modiain, and the novel is slowly steered back to history to tell the boy the story of Nari living in the age of the Mahabharata.

This novel's simple message, "Be good, not great", may well have been BP's own guiding philosophy in life. As a politician who did indeed preach and practice armed revolution, the pacifist plea of the novel may be hard to reconcile with his real life; but as the London Times wrote in BP's obituary, he was a Fabian who resorted to violence only when every peaceful option was exhausted. The thrust of the novel, however, is broader with a look at forms of duty. The Gita assumes that the world is an illusion that makes life and death a meaningless phenomenon. Because humans are mere instruments of god, their role is just to perform duty with no desire of an outcome and with no passion involved. BP disagreed with this approach. In Journal, he bluntly writes, "This philosophy propagated by Gita smacks of emptiness to me". If a duty is worth performing, it is worth performing well. Use of brain then becomes an imperative. But why should one be dissociated with the end result of the duty so well performed? BP's question is, why should duties performed rationally be superior to those driven by passion?

In the war, Krishna convinces Arjuna that because life and death are beyond their control, humans need not worry about who gets born and who gets killed. As pawns of God they merely have to accomplish their duty. Thus as a ksetriya, Arjuna's duty was to fight and fight alone. From such a high flying logic, Mahabharata is taken for granted and ignored for its inhumanity. The reason BP is palpably agitated in The Grocers Wife is that he is a humanist trying to conjure up an image of two million women just widowed by the great oriental holocaust.

BP's position was that the issue is not so much between duty driven by passion and desire, or without. Essentially, the distinction that drew his attention was really between good and evil. Gita does not deal with this. All it says is, again, as godly tools, it is not upon men to tell what is good and evil. This is best left to the creator. With a teaching like this, BP is prompted to go a step further and say that the Hindu philosophy is basically an unworldly, god-oriented philosophy. Its focus is not on life and living, but on salvation. There exist sets of duality in this philosophy; body versus soul, worldly versus unworldly and life versus salvation. In these conflicts, emphasis is always on the second -- soul, unworldly and salvation. Because good and evil is not considered to be a social issue, relevant to our everyday living, BP says that the Hindu philosophy has no concern with the moral norms set by the societies we function in. He says this religion is thus "amoral". With the Supremacy of Salvation persistently highlighted as being the essence, Hindu philosophy is a philosophy of death, and a line from Jail Journal sums up BP's opposition succinctly ("We need philosophy to live, not to die"). One of the reasons why The Grocer's Wife is so outstanding is that it helps us see this in perspective, without compromising the beauty of a romantic novel.

(Professor of English at TU, J. Acharya is a former Fellow at Harvard; S. Wagle is a student of philosophy and economics, currently working for the UN.)