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| Kathmandu, Sunday December 15, 2002 Mangshir 29, 2059. |
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Devkota’s self-defence
By PADMA DEVKOTA
My article "An Other Voice: A Cultural
Misrepresentation" (The Kathmandu Post November 9, 2002) has created waves and
ripples over the issue of a culturally detrimental remark made in the Preface to An Other
Voice: English Literature From Nepal. A lot of non-issues have now become issue for
debaters in this field. I have been accused of saying things I have not said in my
article, and I have been under personal attack too, which Dr. Dipak Pant, of the
Department of Physics, has rightly observed in his letter to The Kathmandu Post of
December 6, 2002.
All this has not changed my original
conviction that it is wrong for the editor-duo to make a negative comment on a poet of
Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s stature and to dismiss him without apparently even knowing
what Devkota has written in English. After all this debate in the dailies, their silence
has added strength to my conviction that any younger generation of writers must rise to
sublime heights not by denigrating their established predecessors but by accomplishing
artistic tasks on their own. Unfortunately, this is not the practice in Nepal even to this
day. In his light write-up "‘Clumsy’ clashes, Chautari Chum" (The
Himalayan December 9, 2002), Safal Sharma wonders why "The editor-duo of the book,
around which so much rabble is being raised, have kept mum like graveyard stones in the
face of such strange controversies raging around them—and that too, about their own
handiwork."
The only people who have spoken up are two
aspiring writers of the younger generation: Manjushree Thapa and Samrat Upadhyay. I will
not be surprised if Manjushree Thapa turns out to be the ghostwriter of the Preface. She
has been backed unblinkingly by Samrat Upadhyay despite her garrulous tone and her
intention to "lambaste," to which she confessed in the letter published in The
Kathmandu Post of Nov 28, 2002. As a result, I had to ignore her comments.
Samrat Upadhyay is someone I fail to
understand. When he won the American prize for his collection of short stories, I too was
happy. When he lambasted the Nepali scholars and participants who attended the LAN
Conference in his article titled "Let’s have a national consensus on
literature," (The Kathmandu Post March 31, 2002), he was unaware of how that article
boomeranged on his artistic rise. People then commented that he had received the American
pat and had become an Emperor of Vanity. When I look back upon such comments on an
uprising author, I think that Samrat Upadhyay should have been more careful in addressing
the scholars and participants of that conference. Giving up the yellow journalistic and
querulous style of writing will certainly help him and his students in the United States.
Of course, the same Samrat Upadhyay who, on
the basis of what was reported to him of the discussions at the LAN conference, was
vitriolic and indecent in his retort has today understood that even canons and classics
might be criticized. What he has yet to understand is that you don’t just make a
free-floating, dismissive remark about a canon or a classic and expect people to agree
with you. This may be a "writer’s" convention in America; but it certainly
is not the scholar’s convention in Nepal. This is exactly what the Preface does. I
think he should remain a bit more under Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s shadow and learn a few
more things that will help him gain respect as a writer in the future. I will quote only
the fourth paragraph of an essay written originally in English by "clumsy"
Devkota. The title of the essay is "Pulling Down the Higher Leg." The defenders
of the editor-duo of the Preface under criticism have every right to denounce this as old
and useless advice.
This is what Laxmi Prasad Devkota has to say
in his own defense: "Do Indian literary figures tend to pull down the higher leg?
That is a natural instinct among unhealthy spirits of competition. That unpleasant habit
is most pronounced in our Kathmandu atmosphere. The aspiring type tries, after his fourth
or fifth poem, to pull down the legs of the poet-laureate, Lekha Nath Paudyal. He plucks
the oldest surviving grey beard for jealousy, and for demonstration of personal merit in
progressiveness. A young writer in the dramatic field, who produces his second One Act
Play, begins to thunder defiance at the dramatic art and practice of the greatest
dramatist of the age, Bala Krishna Sum. A doggerel verse maker can be heard thundering his
scurrilities on the public square of Indrachoke or Yuddha Park against the escapism of the
Nature poetry of Siddhi Charan Shrestha. The mean prose piece producer of an oil paper
journal will direct his invectives against the merit of high literary essayists. It is
natural for the young to feel always cornered or left in the background by the grown up
giants of merit. But the unhealthy spirits of rebellion swallow up the merit in their
personal consciences and thunder against the enviable personality who overshadows them
into oblivion. The iconoclast is abroad. He seeks to pull down the legs of Kala Vairab
(The Terrible Death God) from below, insulted and frustrated by the gigantic symbol of
divine power, without understanding what a heavy weightage should descend to crush him
down, and what a number of heavy supports he would have to sweep away. It is like a
democratic candidate of mean callibre standing for the General Elections against a high
intellectual opponent against whom he has nothing to vent but false thunder, nor show
anything else but the demonstration of a muscular fist. That is the psychology of
frustration at its height. You do it because it pays you. You enjoy the hellish fees of
false rebellion."
This tradition of pulling down the higher leg is alive in the
Preface to An Other Voice: English Literature From Nepal. By defending the editor-duo,
Samrat Upadhyay has only proved the American saying: "You can take the boy out of the
country, but you cannot take the country out of the boy."
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