Book Excerpt
Heir to a Silent Song : Two Rebel Women of Nepal

By Barbara Nimri Aziz

In 1940, the ascetic, poet and political agitator Yogmaya threatened to immolate herself if the maharaja of the time, Juddha Sumshere Jung Bahadur Rana, did not give in to her demand for dharma raj, or Arya Samaj-inspired ‘divine rule’ free from the misuse of state-backed Sanaatan dharma. Arrested for this rebellion, she was imprisoned, along with her followers, many of them women. On their release, Yogmaya led 69 of her followers into the rapids of the Arun river, drowning themselves in protest against child marriage, caste discrimination and bans on widow remarriage.

What follows is an excerpt of Heir to a Silent Song: Two Rebel Women of Nepal, a book written by anthropologist Barbara Nimri Aziz on her 1980’s visits to Yogmaya’s hermitage in Manakamana, east Nepal. The book mixes personal accounts and reflections, Yogmaya’s poems (or hazurbani) and biographical findings on this remarkable Nepali rebel:

In 1981, when I first heard these poems, they were sung and I would not understand the political implications of such creations. I was after all, illiterate in Nepali language and quite unaware of their simple but metaphorical message, being also ignorant of the political history of the region. I was a mere transient, intending to stop only for a night at the hermitage in Manakamana which initially appeared to be a sleepy retreat inhabited by feeble women who had come here to escape their personal problems or the ailments of their society and government, and pray together.

Any child knows an inflated bond.
So our Lord is witness to fraud.
Some play blind to greed and injustice
But never, our Lord.

Enchanted, then smitten, then compelled to pursue what lay behind verses I heard that first night, I stayed on, and then returned to work with those women. Manamaya would be assigned as my teacher by Damodara or Mata, the head of this hermitage. She welcomed Jangbu and me the first time, when we walked out of the hot afternoon sun into the shade of the prayer hall. We bathed in the icy river, then ate, and rested in the prayer hall. That night, my companion slept in shelter of the open prayer hall where male visitors were bedded. I was taken to the hut of one of the women. Before I slept, I heard her singing the verses. I was stirred by their force. These were not the normal praises to the divine, either Hindu or Buddhist, I had heard living among Tibetan nuns and monks and visiting Hindu ashrams in the course of my travels through India and Nepal. They were unlike the jolly folk songs of the Nepalese hill people. These verses possessed an elegance and a rhythm completely unfamiliar to me. I also felt they carried a special message because the woman who sang them seated in the dark next to me, uttered the words with an energy that seemed to life her from her piety and old age. I sat up and listened as she continued, and I could not sleep for a long time, as they repeated in my mind. Outside the jungle air throbbed with the calls of night insects and the Arun River flowed with a rumbling chalung, chalung sound.

An evil man’s rule cannot last.
His army is certain to crumble.
Powerless though I am, I’ll say
Your reign will end.

Early next morning I went directly to Mata and asked what were these songs I heard in the night, and she replied quietly, "These are the teachings of our guru." She leaned her head back against the trestle fence. "Hazur is our leader," she sighed. I did not know Mata but when she said this, she seemed to be unburdening herself of a long held secret.

Mata had already decided that my arrival here was divine provenance. My attraction to and curiosity in the hazurbani now convinced her of this, and she received me as if it was her duty to help me. In the coming days, and on my subsequent visits, she saw to it that I had every assistance from her companions at the hermitage, who proved to be the only reliable source on Yogmaya, and the only people willing to risk teaching me.

Mata, like the other inhabitants at Manakamana, spoke about Yogamaya as if she was still among them. I saw no outward sign of Hazur Yogamaya, no photograph on the wall below an image of Lord Vishnu or next to the color poster of the monarch or alongside the portrait of a local notable. There was no distinguished dwelling, no sign of a monument. "Where is your guru now?" I asked.

"Hazur went to heaven. In the year Vikram Sal 1997 (1940 AD)." I said nothing, and Mata added: "The gates of heaven were opened for her."

This guru was not a man but a woman, they also called Shakti Yogamaya. Being a revered woman yogi poet still did not explain the aura of mystery that surrounded this woman. "And the hazurbani?" I asked.

"These words are the teachings of our master." She did not call them prayers. "Before you came, no visitor asked about the hazurbani," she said with a warm smile. "We are glad you are here and we will help you." Then she asked a puzzling question: "Are you not afraid?"

All this greed makes more injustice.
Oh Master, you promised us hope.
God, we watch the helpless die.
Oh Master, what is it you do?

(Reprinted with the permission of CNAS).

Privileging Partition

By Ajit Baral

After the partition of 1947, communal violence, rape, riots, arson, and brutal killings broke out in newly birthed India and Pakistan. This mass insanity left one million people dead and ten million displaced. Those who survived the violence were left grappling with the pain and suffering that the partition brought with the birth of two countries. Translating Partition makes readers relive the horror of partition.

Translating Partition is an anthology of short stories, criticism and essays. The fiction section contains seven stories, all but one translations: two by Sa’dat Hasan Manto, and one each by Kamleshwar, Bhisham Sahni, Surendra Prakash Attia Hosain and Joginder Paul. This section also contains a piece by Manto which isn’t a story per se. It’s unfathomable why three writings by Manto should be given the pride of place in the book; perhaps this is the editor’ way of titling Manto The Master of Partition Literature, without expressing it outright or getting mired in the controversy of who is who of partition literature.

Both of Manto’s renowned stories—’The Dog of Tetwal’ and ‘Toba Tek Singh’— deal with identity politics. The former is about the frivolity of foisting an identity on a dog, an activity done with the color of a fun sport; but the dog gets shot in the sport. In a seething indictment, Manto thus shows the partition to be nothing but a sport. ‘Toba Tek Singh,’ probably the best of partition stories, begins with the Indian-and-Pakistani decision to exchange lunatics interred in asylums in India and Pakistan. The protagonist, who has not slept a wink during fifteen years of incarceration, asks inmates where his home Toba Tek Singh is. No one knows for sure. Even officials in charge of the exchange do not know where it is. Indians think it is in Pakistan. Pakistanis think it is in India, and they push him to the other side. But the protagonist, in defiance and resoluteness, stands on a bit of land between the Indian and Pakistani fences and cries, ‘Toba Tek Singh is here.’ He dies refusing to acknowledge the division.

There is a similar overtone in Joginder Paul’s ‘Thirst of Rivers’ in which an old woman, Bebe, undermines reality, partition reality, by holding onto the memory of the haveli where she used to live with her family. Kameleshwar, in ‘How Many Pakistans?’ uses Pakistan as a metaphor for evils within, for hatred and communalism. The narrator cries, ‘God knows how many Pakistans were made!’ And it is Pakistan that keeps coming, in one form or another, between him and his lover time and again, separating them. There is no escaping from his Pakistan. At the end of the story, after seeing his lover naked in a whorehouse, he utters in despair, ‘Where can I run to escape from Pakistan? Is there any place where there is no Pakistan? Where I can become whole…’ In ‘Pali,’ Bhisham Sahni recreates the scene of trainloads of people migrating to the other side of the border, and the separation of Pali from his family. Having established a stage of his liking, Sahni then moves on to picture the politics of religion played on a small child.

Attia Hosain’s ‘Phoenix Fled’ and Surendra Prakash’s ‘Dream Images’ make subtle allusions and are difficult to comprehend. This difficulty notwithstanding, ‘Dream Images’ is very interesting: surrealistic in tone, the story progresses with a logic one can comprehend only in dreams. M. Asaduddin, the story’s translator, has to my relief written a critique of the story, helping me gain a fuller grasp of it. His reading of the story is excellent. The other critiques by translators are also excellent: their criticisms go beyond the reading of their texts and contain, inter alia, notes on translation.

The book’s essay section has five essays. Naiyer Masud provides a short historiography of Urdu literature and reflects on the influence of the partition in Urdu literature. Bodh Praskash examines the role of the woman protagonist in his essay. In ‘Partition Narratives: Some Observation,’ Arjun Mahey echoes what Gyanendra Pandey has written in ‘The Prose of Otherness’ when he talks about the inadequacy of historical narratives in representing the partition. This inadequacy finds resonance in other essays as well.

In ‘Strategies of Oblivion and Ways of Remembering,’ Ravikant argues that by explaining the partition as a great tragedy or as a mere transfer of power, the history of historians has helped consign the partition to oblivion. The writing of history has been made difficult by the socio-politics that have kept the conflict between Hindus and Muslims, India and Pakistan alive, and the state’s tendency to view as taboo the discussion of certain subjects ‘in the name of ever lurking fear of a possible riot.’ The state’s selective use of memory, and its tendency to homogenize the races to normalize situations, have skewed the discourse on the partition. But there are other ways of remembering. Literature, which does not necessarily echo the state’s voice and is ‘the preserve of popular memory,’ is one way of privileging marginal voices.

In ‘Vartaman and the Daily Reality of Partition,’ Saumya Gupta rejects newspapers as being ‘a direct pointer to popular memory’ and ‘a historical agent in the formation of discursive structure that map historical events.’ Suggesting that newspapers should be put into historical scrutiny, she takes the task of scrutinizing Vartaman, a popular newspaper in Kanpur, India, in the 1940’s. And then she goes on to show how Vartaman machinated the popular discourse on partition to suit its changed agendas and heroes.

Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. The current outburst of communal violence in India shows how easily people forget history. Translating Partition, which privileges the memory of partition and the undercurrent of ‘localized truths’ that were ‘evaded and minimized by the dominant discourse on the partition,’ stands like a bulwark against the tendency to forget.

(A. Baral is a reviewer and the co-host of a radio program on books, Radioma Pustak).

Who's Reading What

Ever wondered what Kathmanduites are reading? To find out, the Review of Books bugged a few avid readers into telling us about the books that are currently lying around their tables, sofas, sunny balconies and beds. Our hope is that their recommendations will guide readers to books of interest.

In between saving the world, environmentalist Dr. Chandra P. Gurung, head of World Wildlife Fund Nepal, is reading One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arab under the British Mandate by Tom Segev. Says Dr. Gurung: ‘This is one of the most interesting books that describes the tumultuous period under the British mandate before the creation of the State of Israel. The book discusses how Britain promised both the Jews and the Arabs that they would inherit the land, a promise that they could not fulfill, which led to the beginning of the conflict in the middle east today.’

Editor at Himal Books Deepak Thapa is also reading about historical conflicts in Beloved by Toni Morrison, and A History of Warfare by John Keegan. He says that it took him some time to get into Beloved. Of the second book, he says: ‘It has fascinating descriptions of the origins of warfare from the earliest humans, and gives accounts of how war evolved and how technological advancement brought about changes. The most interesting bit so far is the origin of the modern army from a European feudal past, which is still the basis for armies all over today.’

Also reading up on war is human rights lawyer Gopal Sivakoti Chintan, whose bedtime reading consists of Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations by Michael Walzer. Sivakoti Chintan quotes a poem by Randall Jarrell, ‘A Modest View of War’ to give us a light glimpse into a heavy book:

Profits and death grow marginal:
Only the mourning and mourned recall
The wars we lose, the wars we win;
And the world is—what it has been.

At Kantipur, news editor Narayan Wagle is reading My War is Gone, I Miss it So by Anthony Loyd. The author is a journalist, a correspondent at the Times covering the Balkan war. Says Wagle: ‘This book sounds like a reporter’s diary, but it has a different nature. It beautifully depicts the ethnic civil war, and the trauma and the time.’ The book’s power comes, he says, from its skill in story telling; but ever the journalist, Wagle says: ‘What interests me more is that it is full of a reporter’s point of view.’

‘I’m so depressed by the situation in the country that I have trouble reading,’ admits columnist Barbara Adams. The book that she’s nevertheless trying to read is: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington. ‘It is a weighty analysis of global issues especially pertinent at this time of religious extremism and military confrontation,’ says Adams. ‘In addition it raises many important questions about Western influence on other civilizations.’ The book is ‘heavy going but well worth the struggle!’

Thankfully, war is not the only thing we are reading about. Conservation architect Sudarshan Raj Tiwari is busy amassing knowledge about the place we call home. ‘Two books are on the table at present,’ he says: Dr. Jibraj Pokharel’s Patanko Krishna Mandir, and Dr. Prayag Raj Sharma’s Kul, Bhumi ra Rajya. Says Tiwari, ‘Dr. Pokharel’s book is a literary book on architecture history. It contains enjoyable rhymes but is not always agreeable as to matters of architectural history of Nepal’s temples. Dr. Sharma’s book is a heavy research-based anthropological study of Kathmandu’s early medieval society—it’s an old book, but worth slow reading and ingestion.’

Coincidentally, Tiwari’s Tiered Temples of Nepal is one of the books currently being read by poet, essayist, critic, professor and playwright Dr. Abhi Subedi. Dr. Subedi confesses to reading many books at a time, ‘a bad habit’ that comes from having ‘many divided interests.’ He is reading a second architectural book, Nature and Architecture by Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi, translated by Erika Young. This book, he says, ‘shows that every architectural construct is a human interpretation of natural shapes: an amazing theory.’ The third book that Dr. Subedi is reading is Lok Sahityako Ablokan by Jivandev Giri, which he describes as ‘an interpretation of Nepali folk literature, small but cogently prepared.’ He is also reading Maya Angelou’s collection of poems: ‘A book that is full of energy, humanity, rebellion, kindness and love…. Wonderful to keep company with her at a time when I need it most!’

Meanwhile, journalist Daniel Lak, who lives in all our television sets, is reading The House of Blue Mangoes by David Davidar. Says Lak: ‘It’s a wonderful, lush south Indian family saga of the sort I usually avoid, but his writing and locations are wonderful. It takes the chill out of winter in Kathmandu and makes me long for Kerala—another of my favourite places.’ He adds, ‘And unlike journalists in India, I don’t care how much of an advance he got from a western publisher.’

And what are writers themselves reading? Novelist Peter J Karthak, day-jobbing at The Himalayan Times, is reading Manjushree Thapa’s novel The Tutor of History, as well as Manoa’s special issue on Nepali literature, Secret Places: New Writing from Nepal, edited by Samrat Upadhyay and Manjushree Thapa. Karthak himself is one of the contributors to Secret Places, along with Nepali writers and poets Manju Kanchuli, Maya Thakuri, Shailendra Sakar, Narayan Dhakal, Dhruba Sapkota, Mohan Koirala, Sanat Regmi, Shyamal, Kesang Tseten and Purna Bahadur Vaidya.

Samrat Upadhyay himself, author of the graceful stories of Arresting God in Kathmandu, is reading The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. Says Upadhyay, ‘Barks’ translation pays a fine homage to the poetic genius of this 13th century Sufi mystic. Rumi’s images are brilliant, and often the teachings are designed to cut through the crap so you can reach your true nature, even if you have to, as Rumi says, "Wash yourself of yourself."’

Now there’s a thought for those reading less pithy books on war.

Finally, the fact remains that not all of us have time to read books. Ace legal and management expert working on energy issues at Winrock International Ratna Sansar Shrestha confesses, ‘These days I read a lot (and write a lot too) but most of what I read consist of emails, many of them, and a huge number of attachments. In my spare time, I read domestic bills and invoices and steal moments to read dailies, weeklies (mostly locally published, except for Newsweek and India Today) and press clipping on energy-related news reports provided by the Press Council.’

(So that’s what we should be reading if we want to rule the world).