write an essay on postmodernism in nepal

Postmodernism, Nepali Literature and the Question of Theoretical Consonance

• June 10, 2023

Mahesh Paudyal

Without being burdened by the imperatives of defining categories—as those related with ‘postmodernism’ are terms overwrought by discussions across the academia all the world over and are conceptually indefinable—this paper claims that there is very little detection of symptoms that are conspicuous and identifiable as symptoms of postmodernism in Nepali literature, though in painting, music, films and fashion, one could probably make a tally of things, both structurally and thematically, and make a table of the postmodern. Postmodern is not something that conforms to strict bracketable traits; rather, it encompasses many things at once, and therefore, is plural. There are many postmodernisms, and different authorities of the theoretical conundrum position themselves on different ends of the same thing, sometimes even to the degree that they contradict one another, and nullify the whole attempt to define. In fact, postmodernism sprang from the debates about finalities, and sought to jeopardize any attempt towards finalizing, normalizing, stabilizing, defining, fixing, coding, symbolizing, classifying and universalizing a concept or a code. Still, for a purpose Spivak might call ‘strategic essentialism’, we might tacitly agree upon a few trends that have been recognized as postmodern, as cited in several occasions by critics of high acclaim like Govinda Raj Bhattarai and Krishna Gautam. Thus, we can see if Nepali literature—whose one facet has been claimed as strictly postmodern qualifies to that rank.

One important irritant persistently creeping into any theoretical discussion about modernism or postmodernism is  history . The discipline is so pervasively and so intricately connected with politics that it cannot be done away with, when literature is discussed, both in relation to modernism or postmodernism. Besides this, history is an indefinite repository of meta-narratives and grand-narratives, and hence its inevitable relation with modernism and postmodernism is quite self-evident. Modernism was  necessarily  about criticizing history and seeking a break from it—a move away from history’s totalizing and centralizing impact towards individual self-awareness, and therefore, away from institutional identities towards individual identities. History—along with religion at its core—as modernism depicts, was an eclipse that cast a heavy shadow of pessimism, fragmentation, hopelessness, spiritual banality, and loss of faith in politics, religion, and God, resulting into a conditional continuation of faith in science and reason. For postmodernism, history is an epoch of the past to be objectively alluded to— neither to criticize nor to eulogize—but to present it in a form different from the one presented by the traditional, nationalistic historiography and to lay bare paradoxes and contradictions within itself, so that it looks altogether different and multiple. Krishna Dharabasi’s  Radha  which deconstructs the traditional Radha-Krishna binary could be a case in point, but it alone doesn’t make up an example of postmodernism in Nepali fiction simply because of its feministic bias, which creates another set of binaries. Nabaraj Lamsal’s  Karna , which topples the meta-narrative of the  Mahabharata  in relation with its depiction of  Karna  as villain is interesting and calls for a confused attention whether it is a postmodern experiment, but the author’s  bias—which the postmodernists would never show—is very apparent, and hence, the epic, both in form and content, is still modern. Jagdish Ghimire’s  Sakas  is apparently too critical of history and deals more with its psychological impacts than the structure of history itself, and therefore, continues to be an example of a modern text.

It will be a beneficial idea to continue the discussion by considering the very term ‘postmodernism’ as a tripartite: post-modern-ism, as Eva T.H. Brann suggests. ‘Ism’ as she claims, is “running in droves” and for this, we must locate a whole group of writers—not critics who foist incompatible categories—who make such an ‘ism’ a trait of a group. In case of Nepali literature—be it in poetry, novel, story or any other genre—the claim is repulsive, because there is no such group. Some critics claim, the practitioners of  Leela Lekhan , a type of writing that sees life as a game with various facets, like the life of Lord Krishna, are postmodernists.  Leela Prastav  of Indra Bahadur Rai and his followers, does, to a great extent, identify its proposal with postmodernist practice, but writings coming out of the pen of most of these writers do not rigorously foreground postmodern ethos. The  Prastav  is Derridian to a great extent—as it allows no finality to any interpretations and leaves everything to a lidless end—and it will be a lame mistake to claim everything Derridian—which is a linguistic, and strictly speaking semantic idea—with postmodernism, which is a cultural category.  Leela Lekhan , as it has a definite manifesto, summarily defies the quality of being postmodern, because it defines itself, sets rules for itself, and claims definite patterns for itself, and this is something postmodernism never, never does. A postmodern work, as Leotard contends, is not composed in accordance with any previous universal rules, or meta-narratives. This is to say that a postmodern tendency doesn’t rest on a set manifesto; its traits evolve out of itself, and need not—and does not—conform to any proposal.

There is (was) a group of poets in the east that incepted in the 90’s as Rangavadi, and their practice, to a large extent, defiled most set rules, and sought to identify for itself a unique identity as poets. They even took up concrete poetic trends, and defiled classical rules and norms for poetry.  Rangavad attempted to see life as a spectrum of colors, and its different combinations. But by the very name and definition, it has a structuralist inclination. Moreover, thematically, the group chose issues of identity, race and recognition, and picked characters from the lower strata of life, especially from the ethnic minorities in the Eastern hills of Nepal, thereby making their positions more akin to structuralist Marxists, and not sustainably postmodern. There is no other group identifiable in Nepali literature which has practiced a sustained exercise of literary endeavor that qualifies to the rank of ‘ism’, and is still identifiably postmodern. A few authors tried something called ‘mixism’—a name neither theoretically accepted, nor established as an experiment. It was an attempt to mix generic forms of poetry—ghazal and lyrics—but unlike collage and pastiche that settled down as identified postmodern experiments—owning mainly because of the fact that its pioneers could produce their own practitioners and successors—mixism failed to gain currency, and did not evolve as an ‘ism’. It was aborted before late.

Another test-case is in relation with the prefix ‘-post’ in postmodernism. Modernism in Nepali literature doesn’t coincide with modernism in the West. Modernism in the West overlapped with the rise of industrialization and the maxima that marked the limits of colonial expansion. It also took along settled polity, established political systems, expanse of the market, rise of education, and pervasion of market economy. These parameters are repulsive in Nepal. The latest political questions in our case is not one of experimentation as is true for it the West. It is more a question of finding ways to replace the erstwhile feudal set up—represented by the vestiges of monarchy and landed nobility—by a more egalitarian society. These are questions America tackled in the 1770s, France also in the 1770s, England in the second half of the nineteenth century, Russia in the 1920s and China in the 1950s. This political modernism prepared grounds for their literary modernism, and now when the modernisms in these countries have matured, it is obvious that they seek an escape from their own tedious continuity, and so, postmodernism became inevitable.

But the same is not true for Nepal. The collapse of Ranarchy in 1950 marked the first most remarkable manifestation of a consciousness for modernizing. It intended to end and did end a centralizing, closed, dictatorial, conservative and coercive rule of the Ranas, to be replace by a better, humane and democratic system. But, since the 1950s, our politics has not been moving forward; it has just been oscillating between a mean position, the back-tracking being more apparent than forward swinging of the pendulum. The most important question the nation was facing back in in 1950 was as to what kind of polity should replace the Rana oligarchy. The same question loomed over in 1960, 1971, 1979, 1991, 2005-06, and continues to pose today in 2020: what kind of polity should replace the past system, and by the same token, the Rana legacy of dictatorship, feudalism, inequality, and willfulness?  Ever since the question was settled in 1947, for once and (seemingly) forever, India has moved ahead. We have oscillated, more backtracking than swinging forward. We have, therefore, failed to cash the most important political event that was apparently modernist in the sense that it was a show-cashing of the highest degree of consciousness, something like what Kant called a freedom from ‘self-incurred tutelage’ for enlightenment. All political movements in Nepal since 1950 are nothing but newer versions of the same thing; just a revised echo of the 1950 revolution. Even by claiming that we have accepted the idea of federal system doesn’t confer upon us a title of the postmodern. This was a question most Asian and African nations dealt with, long before the onset of modernism, or almost during the time we have identified as modern. This is, at least, a step towards modernizing ourselves.

If modernism in literature is to be seen in connection with the ground reality of the country and not just as a disjoint category called consciousness—this the Marxist might refute as  impossible —Nepal is still struggling to achieve a good shape of modernism. Accepting literature as realistic depiction of the fact supplies us the reason that ‘fact’ in today’s Nepal is pre-modern. I am aware, that in urban spaces like Kathmandu and Pokhara, due largely to the expanse of media and the Internet and direct interaction with the Western culture, symptoms of change are traceable, but literature—if it has to be Nepali literature in strict sense of the word—cannot behave as an island by neglecting the voice of the 70 percent of the nation’s population, which, as facts claim with authority, is living in a pre-modern situation. We are still seeking to define our political system. The fundamental question, still, is to replace the economically stratified society strewn with untellable inequality by an egalitarian equation, to ensure the minimum rights of women and children, to allow roads to every village, to manage an uninterrupted supply of power to every household, to manage rice in remote districts of Mugu, Humla and Kalikot, to supply pills to the victims of diarrhea in Jajarkot, to manage text books for school-going children etc. Even the minimum that makes a country modern has remained a far cry in our country. How then comes the questions of the postmodern, unless it is willfully foisted upon an incompatible cultural space by ambitious critics and reviewers at an incompatible time?

What is plain, therefore, is that like the nation itself, our literature is struggling more to register its departure between pre-modern and modern. Since there was no strictly identifiable literary phenomenon that spark-plugged modernism in Nepali literature, its bracketing within the limits of time is a question without answer. Critics have identified 1937—the year first prose poem “Kaviko Gaan” was published by Gopal Prasad Rimal and “Prati” was written by Laxmi Prasad Devkota—as the point of departure, but I am of the opinion that a generic form can never set in motion a new movement in literature. It has to be an epoch-making political event, or a ground-breaking, edge-cutting, content-determined work of art—like Joyce’s  Ulysses  for example—that should mark the limit. Seen this way, real and visible modernism started in Nepal, politically, only around 1950 with the of collapse, or attempts to topple the Ranarchy, and the exercises to replace it with a more democratic system has  not  been achieved even today. Time, therefore, is not politically ripe, to think of postmodernism in our case. If literature can divorce with politics and can carve for itself a new trajectory of development, I am unsure what actually inspires and propels literature. The same is true for postmodernism, and I agree with Linda Hutcheon: “What I want to call postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political” (4). If it is merely ‘imagination’ that matters, we are simultaneously in all ages: pre-modern, modern, postmodern, and to contain all these at once, we are in a  romantic  era, which will last forever, because imagination will last forever.

There are critics who cite the case of increasingly dominant body of writings that echo the voice of the identity groups and the subalterns to bolster their claims that such writing is postmodern. In the first place, much of such ideas are inspired by the Marxist dialectic of have-verses-have-nots, and are bent on giving the have-nots a voice. There’s nothing new and strictly postmodernists in that. The whole premise, if explained as postmodernist, has the fear of being self-defeating, because in order to refer to and identify a group, the writer has again and again got to pull into discussion the existence of another group—allegedly a dominating one, a bourgeois one—and once again, the structuralists’ favorite binaries figure out. Postmodern text should, instead, try to dismantle the very premise that enables such binaries to stand, and theoretically argue that nothing that defines groups as haves or have-nots, or oppressed or dominant, ever existed. Postmodernism is never prescriptive; it is merely demonstrative.

As for the subalterns’ claims, nothing save the denouncement of nationalistic historiography is postmodern, and the whole project—led initially by Ranajit Guha in India—was pointed out to be neo-nationalistic in the sense that all that led the project were elites, and the subjectivity of the subaltern was, in the long run, their invention. The project was, therefore, plagued by the fact that it contrarily confirmed Spivak’s concern that a subaltern lacks the infrastructure that allows it a real voice. The same is true for all writings about the subaltern in Nepal. It has neither questioned the foundations of binaries, nor developed a methodology markedly different from nationalistic historiography. A few novels in this line like Taralal Shrestha’s  Sapanako Samadhi , Yug Pathak’s  Mangena  and Rajan Mukarung’s  Damini Bheer  have dealt with history and juxtaposed the subaltern vis-à-vis the bourgeois history, but structurally, they reproduce the traditional novel, and thematically, there is nothing like the  nouveau roman —like Alain Robbie-Grillet’s  The Erasers , for example—that questions the very praxis of the binaries that enable the visibility of the subaltern in comparison with the elites and the aristocrats.  The project, therefore, is not postmodern.

The last point this essay tackles in relation with the confused idea of postmodernism relates with the literature of Nepali Diaspora. In the first place, the theoretical premise in which Diaspora is being confused with emigrants is pathetically wrong. There is no doubt that a huge chunk of Nepali population is abroad—most of them for work, and a few naturalized in the past two decades—but most of them are emigrants and not Diaspora, because they still have homes and families here and are likely to return any day. Those naturalized abroad have an extremely short history out of home, and therefore, they do not possess the qualities necessary for defining a population as diasporic—namely a faint memory of the homeland, an ambivalence of conformity, a situation of cultural hybridity, a difficulty that impedes coming home, an organized effort to create an imaginary homeland, and an inability to mix with the host culture, etc. Their children can be diasporic, but they have not become writers yet. The real Nepali Diaspora are people living from centuries in North-East India, Bhutan, Burma and some settled ex-army men’s families in Hong Kong, UK and Brunei. But they either have contributed little to the corpus of Nepali literature, or, their writing doesn’t show postmodernist trait in an extent that it inspires a different theoretical classification.

What then is all this fuss about postmodernism in Nepali literature? Much of it is a confusion, coming out from critics who are not, in fact, attempting to show postmodernity in any work of art, but are trying to explain and interpret western postmodernism to their eastern students. Secondly, there is an anxiety associated with our critics to cash in hand any fashionable western theory and use it outright, without considering whether the soil and air here is prepared for that. Third, the confusion of postmodernism and postmodernist is rampant. Fourth, the tendency to lump every post-structural experiment as postmodern too is there in our case. All these points—one to four—are at once prone to questioning by the single fact that postmodernism tries to locate that the owners of information in the news age have now changed from institutions to individuals, but in case of Nepal, almost all the information and knowledge is still controlled or regulated by institutions—either directly by the state, or private institutions that control the information technology—and therefore, the postmodern condition is not yet traceable. Yes, the question that our literature reflects a neo-natal category called postmodernism—at least on our case—can be accepted at least.

The best idea, therefore, is to see how Nepal can streamline and nurture its own alternative modernity—as projected by Sanjeev Upreti. We need to see if we can combine our nascent modernity with some of the strengths of the western postmodernity—like its apologies for pluralism and liberal humanism—and carve a more defined and matured modernity. We have to wait and see if more of experimental fictions like those of Kumar Nagarkoti—gradually moving out of Joycian hangover, though—and poems like those of Manprasad Subba come and enrich our literature till a formidable body of work that is postmodern in the real sense becomes traceable. We must wait and see if the likes of the film  A Clockwork Orange Time Bandit  or  Blade Runner,  or novels like  1984  and novels of Thomas Pynchon become visible in Nepali literature. Since the possibility is a far cry as postmodernism is fast dying out and becoming anachronistic, it too will be a good idea that literature can still do well by foregoing or dispensing with postmodernism. It is not necessary that we must always subscribe to any idea that is Western. How about making genuine and committed efforts to identify and define our own type of unique modernism, and free ourselves from the anxiety of postmodernism? Harold Bloom’s children-of-mind better remain silent; anxiety of influence is not always a good idea!

A note of caution before I end! There are two groups of people, who have made postmodernism a buzzword, of late, in Nepal. In the first group are vehement critics of the phenomenon—most of them being Marxists—who are inspired by Frederic Jameson’s explanation that postmodernism is the “cultural logic of late capitalism”, and therefore quite coercive. Second group consists of the enthusiasts of critical theory—most of whom are democrats—who champion the postmodern claim for multiplicity, and therefore, argue that it can give voice to the hitherto silenced communities. Both the stands have their strengths, but are pathetically plagued by sheer limitations. The first group oversees the idea that postmodernism has vaporized before settling down—even for a brief spell of time— in Nepal, especially in literature and therefore, their fear is about a non-existent Sandman. The second group makes up a contingent of neo-normativists, who want to replace one state of affairs—namely, a society characterized by one group’s hegemony—by another, but they oversee the fact that by siding with another prescriptive or idea, they become positivist, and put the very notion of postmodernism into question by being prescriptive. I am, therefore, arguing for a third polemic: postmodernism only sparingly influenced Nepali literature in apparent fashions, and therefore, it will be the best idea to explain it away as something that came in the western metropolis, and died out there itself. Its aftershocks did reach our thresholds, but subsided without leaving any traceable change or damage. We are already in an era of planetarity and a borderless globe. What we need to embellish, at the present, is the idea that our modernity needs maturity, and we must work in that line for a few more decades, and give a final shape to our alternative modernity.

[Paudyal (b. 1982) is a faculty at the Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University, and a critic. Author of books in various genres including fiction, poetry and plays, he is also a translator of high acclaim. He has represented Nepal in several academic conferences abroad. He is the Chief Editor of The Gorkha Times. He can be reached at [email protected]]

• Ratna Book, 2005. 
• United Publications, 2011. 
•  Jagdish Ghimire Foundation, 2012. 
•  “What is Postmodernism?”  Harvard Philosophy 1992. 4.7. 
•  Rai, Indra Bahadur, with people like Krishna Dharabasi and Ratna Mani Nepal 
•  “What is Postmodernism?” The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 81.  
•  Gautam, Laxman. “Modernism and Modern Nepali Poetry.” Dancing Soul of Mount Everest. Ed. Momila. Trans. Mahesh Paudyal. Kathmandu: Nepali Art and Literature Dot Com Foundation, 2011. xxxviii.
•  Hutcheon, Linda. A  Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2004.  
•  Upreti, Sanjeev. Siddhantaka Kura. Kathmandu: Akshar Prakashan, 2011. 
•  Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Verso, 1991.

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• Reflections
• School Zone

Primary Survey of Postmodern Traits in Nepali Stories

Govinda Raj Bhattarai

‘Postmodernism in Nepali stories’ is an issue quite intricate to explain, but the urgency of the present time doesn’t allow us to escape from the responsibility on the pretexts of its conceptual complexity. It’s high time we launched discussions, deliberations and discourses on this issue. We are already too late.

As soon as a discussion is launched on this issue, several assumptions of the postmodern thought and its pervasion come to the forefront. Should we examine it from the grounds of philosophy, economics or literature? Or, from postmodern music or culture? Since every aspect and dimension of life, from philosophy to folk experiences, show pervasion of the postmodern and its practice, it will be difficult to address each of those aspects. In this write-up, one genre of Nepali literature—the short story—has been taken up to examine the entry of postmodernism and its use, and a short discussion has been undertaken to suggest how the same can be explained.

It Informs about Shift of Paradigm

              The direction of creative artefacts in Nepali literature has changed. Accordingly, it’s high time we changed the paradigms of literature and evaluation. This is not an abrupt outcome. Incidentally, it was after the political change of 1989 that Nepali literature started exhibiting a shift in its overall direction. More than the changes inside Nepal, it was global development that induced a rapid shift towards the evolution of an open, liberal society. Its impacts have started appearing in Nepal as well, especially in its literature and culture. It was at such a time when articles on postmodernism started appearing. Even books started burgeoning in the decade of the 2050’s BS. When we look back from today, we can notice that the number of books written in support or opposition of postmodernism has crossed one and a half dozen. This is not a trivial number. There are adequate grounds to enter those works and plan a PhD dissertation. This is a matter of joy.

              The books published so far on postmodernism are listed below in chronological order of their publication:

1. Marxvad ra Uttar Aadhuniktavad (Marxism and Postmodernism; Rishi Raj Baral, 2052)

2. Nepali Sahitya Itihasko Rooprekha : Uttar Aadhunik Prastuti (An Outline of Nepali Literary History: A Postmodern Presentation; Shanti Raj Sharma, 2056)

3. Aakhyanko Uttar Adhunik Paryawalokan (The Postmodern Inquiry of Fiction; Govinda Raj Bhattarai, 2061)

4. Uttaradhunikta: Bhram ra Wastavikta (Postmodernism: Illusion and Reality; Ninu Chapagain, 2061)

5. Uttaradhunik Aina (The Postmodern Reflections; Govinda Raj Bhattarai, 2062).

6. Uttaradhuniktavad ra Samalakeen Yathartha (Postmodernism and Contemporary Reality; Rishi Raj Baral, 2063)

7. Uttaradhunik Jigyasa (Postmodern Curiosity; Krishna Gautam, 2064)

8. Uttaradhunik Bimarsha (Postmodern Discourse; Govinda Raj Bhattarai, 2064) 

These are central works dealing with postmodernism. Eight/ten other books of peripheral importance have been published, which have their bearing on postmodern background, and signal that our creations, reading culture and analysis are fast changing. For example, we can refer to Govinda Raj Bhattarai’s Paschimi Baleshika Chhitaharu (The Spray of the Western Drip-Edge, 2061), Pemba Tamang’s Aakhyandekhi  Parakhyansamma (From Fiction to Para-fiction, 2005) etc. Besides them, the works of Abhi Subedi, Mukesh Malla, Mohan Raj Sharma, Laxman Prasad Gautam and others have crossed the watermark of two dozens, which, albeit through scattered pieces of writing, have explained the postmodern idea, and are constantly registering their presence in the entire discourse. As a result, three students have registered themselves for PhD programme on this subject. The number of MA and MPhil dissertations submitted to various universities in Nepal has crossed three dozens. A detailed description of these works has been presented in the essay “The Entry and Practice of Postmodern Ethos in Nepali Criticism” in Uttaradhunik Bimarsha (Postmodern Discourses, 2064) by Govinda Raj Bhattarai.

              The grounds of shift in paradigms have become clear both in creation and criticism of Nepali literature. The objective of this write-up, however, is limited to the presentation of an introduction to postmodernism in Nepali short stories, though these references have been made to prepare a background for the same. Not only short stories, but other genres of literature too are in need of newer perspectives for their study and analysis. This is applicable to issues other than literature as well. There are three grounds pertinent to this claim:

a. Philosophical grounds

b. Structural grounds

c. Stylistic grounds

This short write-up, however, cannot address all these grounds in detail. I shall try to explain certain things in brief. Viewed from philosophical grounds, we should understand reality or truth as an entity relative to one’s perspective. We should believe in its instability, which needs constant amendment. We must believe that the grand-narratives have either died out, or they deserve an end. Accordingly, the inversion and absence of the older values should lead to an inquiry for newer truth, and following it, we should be ready to embrace a new, pluralistic path. Such endeavours will foreground those thoughts, ideas, individuals and cultures which were hitherto back-grounded and lead to the evolution of newer centres. Establishment of multiple centres is one of its aims. Resistance and deconstruction of a singular centre is its objective.

              Some newer structures can come up: generic disruption, inter-generic collage, indeterminacy of the limits of characterization and plot, and the presence of novelty and unconventionality; but all these are not imminent necessities, because novelty has been invited merely for breaking away from the dictates of classicality and fixity. We must be careful lest this becomes yet another instance of conservatism. Removal of one dictator should not be followed by the enthronement of another. Since it is a search for freedom from older constraints, postmodernism offers a room for exploring uncertain forms and processes. Postmodernism is in itself a new paradigm that can be constituted by many newer structures. The belief that no structure is, in itself, the ultimate will give birth to newer structures. Let newer values replace older structures (truths/illusions). All these manoeuvres undertaken to attain such a goal can be term ‘deconstruction’.

              This does not have many pre-determined stylistic grounds. An artist is always in an open-ended atmosphere. Let him/her play the role of an inventor. Since he/he is an individual breaking open from all types of structural bondages, there are ample examples of such rupture, but there are not many limiting rules. Many things depend on individual invention.  Pun, tone, trace and images appear. Opposition and satire can come forth. Fantastic imagination can occupy the central position. Many things are subjected to inversion. For this to happen, it is not necessary for any of the erstwhile ideologies to get erased. Be it any thought for that matter—realism, existentialism, Marxism, psychoanalysis or any other—its use in a postmodern context invites liquidity and novelty. After this, what follows next, in terms of its content, is a fourth issue for exploration. The content is the same; all that is new is the perspective to look at it, and that is always a different one. That is free of any finality.

Current Situation itself is Today’s Reality

Time has changed. Our socio-cultural conditions have changed. So have our educational, political and international scenarios. This change itself is the reality of our time. We write this change. Our new stories are about diasporic conditions. We have stories that envision our space in the cyber culture. There are stories that are committed to writing the issues of superhuman world, while there are stories on war and intercultural realities too. Ethnographic stories about various cultural groups have asserted for themselves a generic claim. Translated literature, transcreation, and deconstructive writings have several processes. Especially the marginalized characters, situations and conditions are getting into the body of contemporary writing. All these are new scenarios that invite newness. Accordingly, Nepali literature is taking newer turns and adopting newer styles.

The stories we are writing today are gradually moving away from modernist prescriptions. A group of writers has started adopting postmodern trends. The stories of the past could be analysed on grounds of their structure and system, but the present day stories demand post-structural analysis. They can be explained only through deconstructive and postmodernist approaches. The works in the past used to be more individualistic; but now, newer and darker forces bent on swallowing the individual have appeared, and so, our writing has turned towards the safety of the human kind, and the safety of the mass. Authors committed to ethnographic and cultural writing, gender awareness, and equality turn towards such issues. Their stories are the stories with postmodern consciousness.

Postmodern Study of Nepali Stories: A Background

Not much time has passed since Nepali stories started getting analysed from postmodern perspectives. Govinda Bhattarai’s article on deconstructive criticism and Nepali literature, published for the first time on 43 rd issue of Kavita in 2049 presented the theoretical aspect of such study. The stories of Indra Bahadur Rai, Dhruva Madhikarmi and Ramesh Raj Panta, and the poems of Udaya Niraula discussed in the article have been taken as instances to explain the deconstructive process. In reality, deconstruction is the pivot of the very philosophy of postmodernism.

A few years later, Bhattarai’s yet another essay “Nepali Kathama Nawaprayog: Drishti ra Ghanaghor Jungle ” (Drishti ra Ghanaghor Jungle: New Experimentations in Nepali Stories) was published in Garima , issue 249, 2060. This essay claims: “Dhruva Madhikarmi’s story collection Dhristi ra Ghanaghor Jungle collects fifteen short stories. Of them, four stories have become milestones of Nepali short stories. These four stories are: i) Arko Sudamako Katha (The Story of Another Sudama), ii) Sudama Number Dui (Sudama Number Two), iii) Dristi ra Ghanaghor Jungle (Drishti and the Dense Forest) and iv) Euta Dantyakathako Punarokti (The Retelling of a Fairy Tale). Of them, the last named story was published in the year 2039. This clearly indicates that Dhruva Madhikarmi was a pioneer in writing new stories. That time can be regarded as a point of departure.

Another important work in this line is “Uttaradhuniktavadko Sandarbhama Nepali Akhyan”, i.e., Nepali Fiction in the Context of Postmodernism. Though he article mentions ‘fiction’, it is basically an analysis and discussion of Nepali short stories. The work was published in Samakaleen Sahitya 45, 2060. This long write-up, in the beginning, presents the points to differentiate postmodernism from modernism. These points suggested by Ihab Hassan are considered valid even today.  For example, if viewed from modernist or structuralist perspective, our creation appears bound, while in the new, it is free. Similarly, a creation used to be considered a ‘product’ earlier, which is now considered a process. That used to demand reading; this demands de-reading. That used to be considered certain; this uncertain. That used to be considered timeless; this one is instantaneous. Besides these, this article, for the first time mentions the differences between narrative and anti-narrative, between reader-centric and author-centric discourses.

That essay, on the basis of the standards discussed above, makes an analysis of the stories included in the story-special edition of Samakaleen Sahitya . Samakaleen Sahitya had, in its 25 nd and 26 th issues, published 32 and 34 stories respectively, making the number of stories 66. All these stories were those written in the 50’s of Bikram Sambat. The essay under discussion has analysed those stories. While doing so, attempts were made to foreground the novelty seen in their style, plot, characterization, theme, incident, etc. The collections contained stories by Kavitaram Shrestha, Kumar Gyawali, Govinda Bahadur Malla, Dhuswa Saymi, Dhruva Chandra Gautam, Parashu Pradhan, Manju Kanchuli, Meera Rem Pradhan, Manu Brajaki, Madhav Lal Karmacharya, Ramesh Vikal, Bishwambhar Chanchal, Shailendra Sakar, Lil Bahadur Chhetri, Amod Bhattarai, Avinash Shrestha, Gopal Parajuli, Ismali, Santa Regmi, Khagendra Sangraula, Tej Prakash Shrestha, Rishi Raj Baral, Nayan Raj Pandey, Narayan Dhakal, BB Lakandi, Rajab, Basu Baral, Vijay Chalise, Sarubhakta, Gopal Ashk, Dhoomketu and others, which have, in one way or another, transgressed the limits of traditional short stories. The new stories have replaced the erstwhile central idea and structure.

A Model of New Analysis

              This write-up discusses how, at that time, postmodernist reading of the stories could be done. I remember a couple of contexts here. “Hari Sharan Ramko Punaragaman”, or “The Return of Hari Sharan Ram” by Ismali tells us that members of many communities that had been kept subjugated and oppressed for centuries are of the feeling that they should wipe out or peel off their own caste (surname). They feel that if they can do so, they can stay hidden or live without any identity, and by that token, get freed from servitude and stay free from inferiority complex. In the story, Hari Sharan replaced his real surname ‘Mochi’ by ‘Ram’. This is the consciousness of the oppressed class in the contexts of Madhes. The story depicts the Jhas and the Mishras, people of high and cultured social classes, as antagonists. Similar is the story “Sangram Bahadur Karki” by Khagendra Sangraula. Basu Baral’s “Nalu Arthat Nalika Deshar” too is a similar story.

              In Dhruva Madhikarmi’s “Krishna ra Sudhama -2”, Krishna and Sudama are depicted as businessmen, hard-pressed by the oddity of the present time. Sudama is no longer a poor man, and there is a different mystery underlying his love for Krishna. His wife is in a different role. This is a deconstructive story. Another example of deconstruction appears in Avinash Shrestha’s “Dantya Kathabhitrako Dantya Katha” — ‘A Fairytale inside a Fairytale’. This story presents Prince Dikpal in a different role. The story is a collage of poetry, play and fiction. By that token, the story transgresses generic limits by mixing them. This is a new possibility discerned in other literatures as well. Use of fantasy, which is one of the predominant features of postmodern stories, is found dominantly in the stories of Morash. Sarubhakta’s “Nani Dhangre ra Meri Najanmeki Chhori” is an example of nature writing, in which, characters have been picked from non-human world. This way, the writing that attempts to analyze novelty in 56 Nepali short stories has hinted the need to develop newer perspectives to look at Nepali short stories.

Some New Story Collections 

Since then, the stories have continued this newness and have registered a huge gallop in this direction. In the meantime, about fifty new storywriters have come up, some with collections and others in scattered writings. Many more are coming. Women writers are equally active; many writers are emerging from marginal groups. The number of translated stories too is on the rise.

              In all these works, novelty and shift of paradigm is clearly discernible. I hereby list a few works of this period in order of their year of publication:

Sunyawat (2058) by Hiranya Kumari Pathak

Uttarardha (2058) and Sitaharu (2060) by Parashu Pradhan

Baikhari (2059) by Mohan Raj Sharma

Chaubatoko Charaitira (2059) by Hiranya Bhojpure

Samaya Bimba (2059) and Sandheko Dain (2062) by Biwash Pokharel

Manasthiti (2060) by Badri Palikhe

Nepali Youn Katha (Nepali Sex Stories, Part I, 2060), edited by Pramod Pradhan

Mann Manai ta Ho (2060), Ani…(2062) and Nishabda Prashnaharu (2063) by Ilya Bhattarai

Sipahiki Swasni (2059), African Amigo (2060), Chhapamarko Chhoro (2064) by Mahesh Bikram Shah

Timi Gayeki Bhaye (2060) by Radhika Ray

Purush Gandh (2060) by Pradeep Menyangbo

Saathi Barshama Hridayaghat (2060) by Dhruva Chandra Gautam

Santrasta Aankhaharu (2061) by Matrika Pokharel

Pratinidhi Katha (2061) by Sanat Regmi

Tusharapat (2061) by Tita Tamrakar

Chhatima Taap Rakhera (2061) by Aamod Bhattarai

Baluwama Arko Nepal (2061) by Rakshya Rai

Bisancho (2061) by Ratna Prajapati

Andhakar (2061) by Dhruva Sapkota

Kajol Khatun (2061) by Phulman Bal

Maun Bidroha (2061) by Jaleshwari Shrestha

Dobhan (2061) by Bhagawan Chandra Gyawali

Sanghuro Dharatal (2062) by Chandra Kala Newar

Orchestra (2062) by Durga Binaya

Atmahanta (2062) by Narayan Dhakal

Swapnayatra (2062) by Narendra Raj Paudel

Hawan (2062) and Kagajma Dastakhat (2064) by Neelam Karki Niharika

Jadoma Bhok (2062) by Rajendra Parjuli

Dosro Prahar (2062) by Baba Neupane

Swapnabhanga (2062) by Shyam Krishna Shrestha

Upama (2062) by Sita Aryal

Ananta Pahiraharu (2062) by Sijana Sharma

Jhola (2062) by Krishna Dharabasi

Dosro Vishwayuddha (2062) by Roshan Thapa Nirab,

Nepali Youn Katha (Nepali Sex Stories – Part II, 2062), edited by Laxman Prasad Gautam

Dwandwa ra Yuddhaka Katha (Stories of Conflict and War, 2063), edited by Govinda Raj Bhattarai and Bishnu Bibhu Ghimire

Samakalin Nepali Dwandwa Katha (Contemporary Nepali Stories of Conflict, 2063), edited by Laxman Prasad Gautam

Tanya , Indrakamal ra Adhakar (2063) by Avinash Shrestha

Tirsana (2063) by Laxmi Upreti

Aama Januhos (2063) by Maya Thakuri

Bhoomigat (2063) by Bhagirathi Shrestha

Rajendra Bimalka Katha (2063) by Rajendra Bimal

Chiriyeko Mutu (2063) by Homnath Subedi

Bighatan (2063) by Harihar Khanal

Nepali Youn Katha (Nepali Sex Stories – Part II, 2064) edited by Bimal Bhaukaji

Aafanta Dushman (2064) by Basu Jammarkattel

Leela Dharana ra Kathaharu (2064) Ratna Mani Nepal

In a similar way, Stories from Nepal (2003), published from Sajha Prakashan, Selected Stories from Nepal (2005) published from Nepal Academy and Beyond the Frontiers published from Gunjan are works that include stories by 75 authors in English translation.

              More or less the same authors appear in English and Nepali versions. Those contemporary names have appeared in the works mentioned above. Of them, the majority had tilted towards postmodern writing. Time has made them turn towards postmodernism.

Newer Avenues of Creation and Nepali Stories

Postmodernism promotes diversity and plurality. It moves exploring newer avenues of creation. It seems alternatives to the centre-seeking tendency of the erstwhile practices. Accordingly, it develops newer parameters of criticism.

              Of the many avenues of creativity that have appeared today, cyber culture is one. The world has been pervaded by cyber practices today. Globalization has made the world culture singular. Such a world is quite mechanized. One strand of Nepali short stories reflects the influence of cyber culture. Our writers have started writing cyber stories. This issue has been discussed at length in my book Uttaradhunik Bimarsha — the Postmodern Discourses.

              Another avenue of creation is war. War literature occupies a formidable space in world literature. In case of Nepali literature, the preceding decade has bequeathed a huge body of war literature. Many storywriters have come forth with war as their themes. At the present time, war stories are making a huge gallop. The number of collections with war stories has crossed a dozen, and the number of storywriters is around a hundred. This is a big diversion. At the moment, unless we refer to the following collections, we will hardly know anything about war stories:

Dwandwa ra Yuddhaka Katha (Stories of Conflict and War) edited by Govinda Raj Bhattarai and Bishnu Bibhu Ghimire

Samakalin Dwanda Katha (Contempary War Stories) edited by Laxman Prasad Gautam

Chhamako Chhoro by Mahesh Bikram Thapa

Dwandwa ra Dhuwa by Punya Kharel

Aatmahant a by Narayan Dhakal

Aarambha arthat Suruwatka Kehi Katha by Dhir Kumar Shrestha

Jadoma Bhokka Kehi Katha by Rajendra Parajuli

Some stories in Beyond the Frontiers, edited by Padmavati Singh and Govinda Raj Bhattarai

Some stories from Andhakar by Dhruva Sapkota

Some stories from Maun Bidroha Jaleshwar Shrestha

Some stories in Kajol Khutun by Phulman Bal

Some stories from the collections of Rajendra Bimal

Some stories from Sitaharu by Parasu Pradhan

Some stories from Swapnayatra by Narendra Raj Paudel

For analysing war literature (also stories), one need to use the theory of trauma. Though they are yet to appear in collections, many writers are, at the moment, writing war stories. Their study holds different significance.

              There is yet another dimension of postmodern writing, namely disporic and emigrant writing. This poses a different scenario. Of those writing from abroad, the important ones are Hom Nath Subedi ( Chiriyeko Mutu , 2064), Rajab, Kamala Saroop, Govinda Giri Prerana, Nagendra Neupane, Mira Rem Pradhan, Rakshya Rai and others, while those from inside Nepali writing on such themes include Ilya Bhattarai, Padmavati Singh, Mahesh Bikram Shah, Manju Kachuli, Raju Babu Shrestha and many others, who have penned stories depicting hybridity and difference resulting from an intercultural encounter upon reaching foreign countries.

              Postmodernism also lends freedom to translation. At the moment, those who have been translating stories from world literature and enriching Nepali literary corpus include Khagendra Sangraula, Bhuvan Dhungana, Narayan Dhakal, Kumud Adhikari, Ram Chandra KC, Byakul Pathak and many others. This is a novel avenue. This has ushered Nepali story into a new realm of diversity and novelty.

              There is yet another new avenue of creation: environmental writing. This aspect is yet to enter Nepali story. However, its presence can be felt in poetry, essay and novels.

              Finally, another very important salient feature of postmodernism is deconstruction, rewriting and reinterpretation. This aspect has become apparently discernible in Nepali short story. There are several instances where inter-generic collage can be noticed in the structure of a story, exemplified by some of the stories of Sarubhakta, Avinash Shrestha, Dhruva Chandra Gautam, Roshan Thapa, Narayan Dhakal and others.  Of the many types of experimentation, we can notice newness in stories by “Sylvia” by Kumar Nagarkoti. Morash too is an extremely successful experimental storywriter. We can also notice such experimental nuance in Parasu Pradhan’s Sitaharu in the way he mixes characteristics of stories and novels in his fictions. The stories of Rajab too are equally experimental.

              Nepali short story is moving towards a new direction. It is assuming a very different style and technique. Characters, setting and incidents are myriad. From the ethnic world, not many works have poured in. Yet, writers like Phulman Bal, Nabin Bibhas, Indrish Sayal, Prakash Angdembe, Raj Kumar Dikpal, Indira Chongbang, Dhan Hang Subba, Dr. Bishnu Rai, Apsara Lawati, Bhadragol Kirati, Krishna Dev Chaudhary etc. have written stories that deserve a significant attention.

              A Nepali short story is fast assuming a global dimension. It is breaking away from traditionalism. They have, at the moment, started echoing the voices of the margin. These are the postmodern models of Nepali short story. It’s high time we had a separate collection of such stories. This is evolving.

Soles, Robert. Elements of Fiction: An Anthology . New York: Oxford, 1981.

Bhattarai, Govinda Raj. Paschimi Balesika Bachhita . Kathmandu: Nepal Academy, 2061.

—. Uttaradhunik Bimarsh. Kathmandu: Modern Books, 2064.

[Translation of Bhattarai’s “Nepali Kathama Uttaradhuniktako Prarambhik Sarvekshyan” by Mahesh Paudyal. Source: Rupantaran, 2076]

[Prof Govinda Raj Bhattarai, PhD (b. 1953) is a poet, novelist and critic of high repute. Professor of English at Tribhuvan University, he retired from his job a few years ago, and has since then devoted himself fully to literary works. He made his debut in writing quite early. His seminar works of repute include novels  Muglan ,  Socrates Footsteps  and Socrate’s Diary, theoretical non-fictions like   Kavyik Andolanko Parichaya  (Introduction to Poetic Revolutions),  Aakhyanako Uttaradhunik Paryawalokan  (Postmodern Study of Fiction),  Paschimi Balesika Bachhita  (Drops of Western Eaves ),   Uttaradhunik Aina  (Postmodern Mirror),  Uttaradhunik Bimarsha  (Postmodern Discourses) and  Samayabodh ra Uttaradhunikta  (Time Consciousness and Postmodernism). He is also among Nepal’s pioneering translators and essayists.  He can be reached at  [email protected] ]

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Leela Writing, Postmodernism, Eastern Spiritualism and History

In this essay first of all I discuss various forms and features of postmodern writing to show how there are distinct affinities between postmodern texts and the texts of leela. Next, I argue that leela writing has its own distinct flavor due to its roots in eastern spiritualism including its mythological, ethical and metaphysical registers; a fact which distinguishes its overall tonality and affect from western postmodern textuality. Then I discuss the relationship between practices of leela and the issues of contemporary history and politics; a dimension that is often overlooked in the theorizations of leela if not in its practice. Next, I point to some of the problems faced by the practitioners of leela and conclude by making some tentative suggestions concerning the directions that they might take

Leela Writing and Postmodernism People writing about such concepts as “postmodernism” and “postmodernity” sometimes tend to use these two terms interchangeably, as if they meant the same thing. What must be remembered, however, is that while postmodernity – like its predecessor modernity – signifies a wide range of technological, cultural and economic transformations that happened in the latter half of the twentieth century; postmodernism, by contrast, refers to specific movements in the field of literature, painting, architecture and other art forms since 1960s. Even as a movement in the field of arts and letters, western postmodernism has hardly been a homogeneous experience, and there have been at least three different forms of postmodernism since its arrival in the American scenario: the avant garde postmodernism of 1960s, the aesthetic, often a-historical postmodernism of the 70s and early 80s, and finally the political postmodernism of the 90s. The effects produced by the mixture of these three different forms of postmodernism(s) continue up to our contemporary present.

These distinctions between postmodernity and postmodernism – as also those between different forms of postmodernism – make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to come to a definite set of conclusions while talking about postmodernism, especially when we talk about postmodernism in the context of a non-western locale like Nepal. If we speak of postmodernism as an aesthetic or literary style then the historical disjunction between western postmodernism(s) and the postmodern practices of Nepal becomes evident; especially when we consider that while the late 50s and early 60s saw the genesis of postmodern literary and aesthetic styles in the west, the same period saw the blossoming of Nepali modernism rather than postmodernism. Examples of literary postmodernism(s) in Nepal should mainly to be sought in recent practices, especially in the texts that were written in the last decade and half.

In this context it can be said that Indra Bahadur Rai’s passage from “Teshro Ayam” (Third Dimensional writing) to “Leela writing” be read as a gradual shift from the aesthetics of modernism to postmodernism. This is not to say that Teshro Ayam was the only primary impulse behind Nepali modernism or that Leela writing is the only type of writing that inaugurates postmodern tendencies in Nepali literature.  What I am arguing, however, is that while the influence of modernism and postmodernism can be traced in many Nepali texts, the passage from Teshro Ayam to Leela writing presents one of the shifts from the formal logic of modernism to postmodernism in the context of Nepali literature 

Teshro Ayam, both as a theory and a practice was inaugurated in 1963 with combined efforts of Indra Bahadur Rai, Bairagi Kahinla and Ishwor Ballabh with the publication of a literary magazine called “Teshro Ayam” from Darjeeling. At the center of this movement was the concept of vastuta , or objective reality. While five people, for example, might perceive a chair from five different angles, the chair-in-itself has an objective reality or vastuta that remains outside the subjective perception of the perceivers. The practitioners of Teshro Ayam tried to represent that objective reality – which Indra Bahadur Rai has compared with the Kantian thing-in-itself – through the use of concrete hard images and experimental play with language. Such an epistemological perspective and linguistic experimentation bears resemblance to both imagism in western literature (Ezra Pound and T.S Eliot are well known as two of its most famous practitioners) and cubism (Picasso and Braque can be taken as examples) in western art. Since both imagism and cubism are rooted in the aesthetics of western modernism it is easy to see the relationship between the theory/ practice of Teshro Ayam and the formal and epistemological roots of Anglo-American modernism.

Similarly, there are plenty of similarities between Leela writing and postmodern texts such as Barthes’s “Lost in the funhouse,” and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s children . Informed by post-structural theory, especially Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, these texts challenge the fixity of the meaning of text to celebrate the way meaning slides and slips in the stories, language and in culture. In other words there the stability of meaning is dissolved in its perpetual flux or “play” or “leela.” Indra Bahadur Rai has written that he became aware of the limitations of Teshro Ayam when he realized that it is impossible to penetrate into the heart of objective reality or vastuta. The thing-in-itself, as Kant realized in the nineteenth century is unknowable and un-representable. What are available are the only the multiple subjective, historical and socio-political positions from which we perceive and interpret. And since those perspectives are illusory and changing the meaning keeps on sliding and shifting. In other words leela keeps on happening perpetually.

Such an effect of a playful instability of meaning is achieved through a use of a variety of devices or techniques: a) A mixture of various literary genres including fiction, poetry, drama and criticism in the same text; b) Use of the technique of meta-fiction by which the author deliberately undercuts his or her own position as the center of original meaning; and c) a deliberate evocation of the presence or traces of earlier texts. All of these devices, working together or separately, contribute to the play of the meaning in the text. Indra Bahadur Rai’s story “Kathaputali Ko Man,” for example, mixes all three of these devices to celebrate the slipping and sliding of meaning in the text. The story is a rewriting of Guru Prasad Mainali’s “Paral Ko Ago” which about the marital discord of Chame and Gaunthali, the two main characters of the text. Gaunthali leaves her house for her parental home after Chame beats and abuses her verbally. Though he is terribly angry with her he begins to miss her after a few days, and following the advice of Juthe and his wife – whose life is full of marital bliss unlike that of Chame – goes to his father in law’s home to persuade her to come back with him. After initial reluctance Gaunthali agrees to accompany Chame back to their home and the story ends with a happy note with Juthe’s wife commenting that the quarrels between husbands and wives are like a temporary fire in dried straw.

The realist tale of Mainali, however, is markedly transformed in Rai’s rewriting of it. A number of other tales of marital discord - or other “traces” and textual presences - intervene and mix into the story of Chame and Gaunthali in “Kathaputali ko Man” including the story of Ratna, Sharada and her husband; the story of Renu, her husband, and his boss who is making preparations for the marriage of his own daughter; Dina, her husband and her father; and the tragic story of an unnamed husband whose wife commits suicide rather than agreeing to come back with him. All these multiple stories of marriage, marital friction, and reconciliation or separation are organized around a modernist reconstruction of Chame and Gaunthali’s story in the form of a drama. These multiple traces or texts merge into each other to recreate a free flow of textuality within which meanings from various texts keep on sliding into each other. Meaning, instead of being located within the borders of one story keeps on transforming itself as borders or the frames of individual stories dissolve in an ongoing leela or play of meaning.

The meta-fictional note is sounded at the beginning of the tale as the narrator casts doubts about the “truth” or the factual value of the tale he is going to tell: “Never believe in a story. I speak only one truth in the stories, a singular though an illusory truth. Despite of my invitation to them to come and sit around, other truths keep on standing and claim. For leela and involvement in the drama of lights and more lights.”  Such a meta-fictional chord is reasserted in the central dramatic rewriting of the tale as three journalists come and interrogate Chame about his actions, feelings and expectations. The journalists interpret Chame’s actions in the light of their own modern sensibilities and analyze his story from psychoanalytic, Marxist and other socio-political perspectives. Such interpretations create pieces of literary criticism within a narrative that critiques the tale that it is itself presenting. In other words, not only does Rai’s retelling of Mainali story destabilize the meaning embedded in the earlier text through his use of meta-fiction – a device that he uses together with his evocation of other textual presences or traces - but he achieves the same purpose by mixing various literary genres including story telling, drama and literary criticism within the frame of the singular text of “Kathaputali Ko Man.”

Similarly, Krishna Dharawasi’s novel Sharandarthi (Refugees) and Krishna Baral’s recently published novel Avataran foreground the play of meaning by using similar techniques. Using a metafictional style that is often deployed by a number of postmodern writers, Dharawasi recreates the passages of various waves of Nepali refugees who have arrived at Jhapa and other eastern parts of Nepal from Burma, from Assam and more recently, from Bhutan. Dharawasi traces the fortunes of these homeless exiles who, deprived of their homes in foreign lands, now return to the homeland of their ancestors only to find that they are still without homes or nations that they can call their own. Fiction and fact mix into each other in Dharawasi’s novel as various real as well as fictional characters from other texts including Lil Bahadur Chetri’s Basain , Parijat’s Shirish to Phool , Govind Raj Bhattarai’s Muglan , and Shiva Kumar Rai’s Dak Bunglow among others enter the textual web of Sharandarthi , creating a labyrinth like structure that the lovers of postmodern fiction are more used to finding in the novels of John Barthes, Thomas Pynchon or Salman Rushdie. Similarly Baral’s Avataran includes the presences or traces of earlier texts including B.P. Koirala’s story “Hod,” Guruprasad Mainali’s “Naso,” and Dharawasi’s Sharandarthi itself. Such earlier traces destabilize the meanings of Dharawasi’s and Baral’s text from within. Meaning, instead of being contained within the structure of the “present” texts itself, exceeds the borders of those texts and slips into a play of textuality that includes multiple texts.

The technique of metafiction destabilizes the position of the authorial center of intended meaning in both of these texts. Dharawasi’s characters in Sharandarthi question its author’s intention, and the author himself appears as one of the characters of the novel; and the same device is used by Baral in his novel. Thus, Baral’s novel Avataran consists of eight stories that all come together in the final chapter of the novel which is presented in the form of a play. In this last dramatic scene the major characters of the eight stories story gather together to discuss whether they have any kind of control over their fate, or whether it is their perpetual destiny to be the playthings of their authors. In other words the chapter suggests that author is not the original center of meaning in the text. With the author dead or absent the characters are free to write their own stories, to shape their own lives and destinations. Meaning, outside the control of the god like Author/ creator slides and slips and perpetually transforms itself.

One of the Baral’s eight stories in the novel titled “chiyakheko sikka” is a rewriting of B.P. Koirala’s earlier story titled “hod” (contest). Koirala’s story is about the contest between a newly wed married couple Padam and Padma. Padam tells his wife that he can seduce any woman. Padma tells him to prove his point by seducing the beautiful widow of Harikrishna within fifteen days. The story ends with Padma accepting defeat as Padam about to seduce the widow. With Padma’s acceptance of her defeat the poor widow is left in a lurch, the sexual vulnerability of the females is established as a fact, and the patriarchal ideology is reasserted.

Krishna Baral’s rewriting of the story brings in an element of “un-decidability” by displaying the perspective of the widow which was left unexamined in Koirala’s earlier work. The story ends with the following words: “The writer stopped his pen. But no one thought what would happen to the widow of Harikrishna … the writer was unable to reach any conclusion. It is the readers that have to decide now. Let us forget these old stories of contest.” By foregrounding the problems and confusions of the writer Krishna Baral challenges the position of the author as the original ground of intended meaning. Meaning is liberated from the tyranny of the author(s) and the readers are allowed to create their individual, often contradictory meanings. In other words a new contest or “hod” begins; a contest between various readers – as also the characters of the novel – to appropriate the meaning of the text.

Ratna Mani Nepal’s collection of short stories titled Kathaindredi has also been presented as an example of leela writing. Rai, in his introduction to the book, has written that the stories – including Nadekhnu , Kotha Bhari Biralo and Chandragadi Tira among others – are saturated with leelabodh or leela awareness. These stories, in simple yet powerful language, present the central fact that truths are multiple, and that meaning is destabilized through a play of perception. While Nepal’s stories make use of the technique of meta-fiction his stories, unlike some other texts like “Kathaputali Ko Man” and Avataran that announce themselves as leela texts in an overt manner – at least at the level of technical experimentation – present the world view leela in a more subtle fashion. This shows that leela writing is not only a matter of technical or linguistic experimentation but also a matter of awareness or a particular way of looking at the world.

Leela Writing and Eastern Spiritualism At the level of style and technique there does not seem to be any major difference between the traditions of postmodern textuality and leela writing. Both reject author as the center of meaning; both use other texts and traces and give new twists to older narratives; and both mix traditional genres like novel, play, poetry and criticism to create a free flowing textuality that is not tied to specific literary genres. What then is the difference between Leela writing and the postmodern “play” it is supposed to have imitated? Krishna Dharawasi has argued that in mixing the literary forms and in evoking traces of earlier texts, the leela writers are adopting the techniques used in Puranas and in epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata. In other words the techniques of Leela writing are adaptations of eastern traditions of writing rather than a copy of contemporary postmodern experimentation. However, is it the only point of difference between Leela writing and contemporary postmodern productions?  Are there other ways in which eastern spiritualism has influenced leela writers?

It seems to me that the influence of eastern spiritualism upon leela writing can be seen in three interrelated, though distinct registers: a) The register of mythological stories both at the level of content and form; b) The register of ethical philosophy; and c) The register of eastern metaphysical world view.

Dharawasi’s argument is that leela writers use eastern mythological characters and the techniques used in eastern myths and epics without subscribing to the mystical or spiritual perspective that underlies those narratives. If this argument is right then leela writing is closer to the postmodern world view – which is closer to the atheistic post-modern temperament – rather than the eastern spiritual world view. However, it appears to me that in addition to the uses of eastern mythologies, leela writing – especially its theoretical aspect as written in Indra Bahadur Rai’s pronouncements – is influenced by both eastern ethical philosophy and eastern metaphysical world view. Commenting upon his story “Kathaputali ko Man,” for example, Indra Bahadur Rai has expressed his view that all human being are like “puppets” that are perpetually “driven by social, economic, political, religious, psychological and theoretical forces.”  What should be the moral and ethical attitudes of such “puppets?” What should human beings while making ethical decisions? How should they live? Rai answers that like the puppets they should be without desire. The unblinking eyes of puppets reflect the desire-less neutrality of a Zen Buddha, argues Rai, a mental state that provides a model for human behavior. The object in itself is unknowable; and human truths are unstable and subject to the changes of perspectives and historical location. But despite it all human beings can acquire partial freedom by remaining neutral, by disavowing attachment and desire and by “playing the game of life for the sake of playing.” “Khelaun Khelne Khel:” lets live/play the puppet play/ leela of life, thus conclude Chame and Juthe, now grown old and without their wives, towards the end of Kathaputali Ko Man.  This is the ethical dimension that is influenced by not only Hindu scriptures but by other eastern philosophies such as Tao and Zen

Finally there is the register of eastern metaphysical world view. In one of his interviews Rai has pointed to the affinities between the concept of leela and the world views of Aravindo and Shankaracharya, the famous eastern philosophers: “Arabindo has talked about a world consciousness; a consciousness that is manifests in various and multiple forms in the world. Such a multiple manifold manifestation itself is leela. Shankaracharya described this world as mithya. Leela writing is similar … to Aravindo’s concept of leela and has even closer affinities with Shankaracharya’s description of it.”  Both Aravindo and Shankaracharya, in their different ways of course, talk about a non-dual consciousness that traces the universe, a consciousness that transcends rational attempts to comprehend it. For this reason any attempt to describe it must necessarily speak the language of paradox. Fritzof Capra’s influential book of the 1980s titled Tao of Physics – which might have influenced Rai – speaks of a similar non dual world consciousness which is being indicated by the latest discoveries in particle physics. In the same interview Rai also evokes the Geoffrey Chew’s “bootstrap theory,” Werner Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty principle,” and David Bohn’s “hollow movement” theory; scientific theories that are also discussed by Capra in his book to point out the points of affinities between eastern spiritual metaphysics and western modern science. According to such a “common perception” both western physics and eastern metaphysics are pointing towards an awareness of a non-dual global consciousness of which the world - with its manifold objects and individual consciousnesses – is a mere manifestation. A simultaneous awareness of the flux of the objects and individual consciousness (which happens in a world of duality and division) at the one hand an awareness of the non-dual world consciousness on the other leads one to the heart what might be termed as “leela consciousness.” 

These three registers – that of mythical narratives, ethical philosophy and Leela Writing and History, and metaphysics – of course are related to each other. Eastern philosophizing, as the text of Bhagwatgita amply demonstrates, often assumes the shapes of mythical narratives that propound ethical propositions and metaphysical world views. At the same time, it seems to me, it is necessary to separate them for the purpose of analysis in order to understand how eastern spiritualism has shaped the formulations of leela, more so in Indra Bahadur Rai’s own works than in its other practitioners such as Krishna Dharawasi. Such a spiritual dimension distinguishes leela writing from postmodern world view which to a great extent is determined by the atheistic world view that dominated western intellectual scene in the later half of the twentieth century. This might be most important contribution of Rai.

Leela Writing, History and Politics In 2055 BS Krishna Dharawasi wrote an article in Purvanchal Dainik arguing that since the moods, feelings and meanings are perpetually changing everything, including the entire scope of life falls within the scope of leela. This article made a scathing attack on the writers and critics on the left side of the political mainstream to suggest that even progressive Marxist writers, since they were human beings, were not outside the province of leela. Leftist writers like Punya Prasad Kharel and Vijaya Kharel hit back quickly through their articles in Swadhin Samvad Saptahik and Purvanchal Dainik respectively to argue that if one were to believe in the arguments of Dharawasi then everything, all historical events – from Maoist killings to the violence of the state, from poverty to corruption in the high places – were just various manifestations of leela. Such a view, according to Punya and Vijaya Kharel, merely leads to the reaffirmation of capitalist ideology since it reduces historical and political realities to mere “play” of meanings; a charge that is sometimes brought against the postmodern writers and critics – and especially against the practitioners of “aesthetic” postmodernism that flourished in the 1970s - of the west by their more historically and politically counterparts.

To some extent the charges of the progressive critics appear justified, especially if we consider Dharawasi’s article in Purvanchal Dainik as a representative text of leela writing as far as its political dimension is concerned. To call everything leela without adequate theoretical analysis is a gross act of interpretive irresponsibility. And if any term – be it Leela or Vilayan or Chakravyuhan Samchetana – is magnified to mean everything under the sun than the term becomes porous and vague and ends up by meaning nothing. At the same time, however, we should realize that Dharawasi’s article should not be considered as some kind of major political statement of leela writing. In matter of fact an adequate theorization of the political and historical dimension of leela writing still remains to be written; this remains a gaping hole, an obvious theoretical drawback as far as Leela thinking is concerned.

This is a pity because leela writing – or the texts that are presented as embodying the technique of leela writing by their authors like Dharawasi’s Sharandarthi and Baral’s Avataran – obviously has a political and historical dimension. Despite all the formal experimentation that goes on in Sharandarthi , for example, Dharawasi’s novel is not exactly a “funhouse” a la Barthes style. As the novel amply shows through a vivid reconstruction of the alienated, excluded lives of the refugees, the other side of postmodern play and pleasure is pain. While John and Roland Barthes can afford to celebrate the pleasure of the text and the fun of being lost in a postmodern textual labyrinth, Dharawasi cannot help but write of pain and terror that transform the postmodern laughter of his narrative. Dharawasi’s postmodern laughter is ruptured at its edges, showing lines of tension that point to the disjunctions inherent in current global situation in which some nations and people are more postmodern than others. Sharandarthi gives ample reasons for believing that third world postmodernisms are not free from the burden of history, unlike the often a-historical forms of western postmodernisms, especially the ones produced during its aesthetic phase in the 1970s and early 1980s. Third world postmodernism(s) of Gautam, Rai and Dharawasi - as that of Rushdie or Okri, for example - are insistently political even as their formal, aesthetic structure seems to suggest at the first glance some kind of a-historical impulse.

Recent memories show that massacres can happen inside the royal palace, and peoples debilitated and killed in streets, schools and private homes as pre-modern forms of violence irrupt within modern civil spaces. Some people can afford postmodern laughter as meanings slide and slip in a play of difference and in a relativity of perspectives. For the rest of us who have to live with the terrible tragedies that keep on interrupting our lives, however, the other side of postmodern play is often historical horror. As ghostly terror and killings break into our present the postmodern laughter changes too; echoing in the wasteland of our history it sounds more like a mournful wail.

It appears to me that the concept of “individual and local” truth(s) that Dharawasi has discussed in the opening pages of his book Leela Lekhan provides an interesting direction that can be further developed to theorize the political and historical impulse of leela writing. Dharawasi has given the example of Bhisma, one of the central characters of Mahabharata to argue that truths are multiple, individual and local. While Bhisma, as a loving grandfather of Pandavas, was ready to tell them way by which they might kill him in the battlefield and hence win the war, in the battlefield he was first and foremost the leader of Kaurava army that sought to defeat the Pandavas. These two different personalities of Bhisma – as a Kaurava general and as a favorite great grandfather of the Pandavas – point to two different “truths” of the same person. Truth is not only individual but the same person can “live” multiple truths through his depending upon the local situations he or she is in. While this is an important statement, I think that there is a need to politicize and historicize it further. Michael Foucault – one of the three important impulses behind post-structuralism in addition to Derrida and Lacan – has argued convincingly in books like Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality and Madness and Civilization that truths – including the “truths” of such concepts as sexuality, madness, sanity and criminality – are not only individual and local but also historically, politically and institutionally constructed. There is no transcendental Truth with a capital T, but only multiple and plural truth(s). Such truths are local, functional and are subject to historical and political changes. Foucault’s this insight can function, it seems to me, as an important theoretical tool in developing the theoretical dimension of leela thinking.

One of the strength of deconstruction comes from the fact that it is able to “deconstruct” the binary oppositions such as High/ Low, Male/Female, Sky/ Earth, Rational/ Emotional, Occident/ Orient, Whiteness/ Blackness in the texts. Once such binary oppositions are deconstructed textual and cultural meaning, which is supported and made possible by the presence and persistence of these very binary oppositions, is de-stabilized and de-centered. Thus begins the free play of meaning which is often celebrated in the postmodern writing influenced by deconstruction and other post-structural theories such as Lacanian psychoanalysis and Foucaultian studies of power. By deconstructing multiple binary oppositions that work at the heart of languages, cultures and texts, such writing challenges the received ideologies of Eurocentric patriarchal cultures. This is the major political value of deconstruction which was understood well by its practitioners of the 1960s, a decade that – like the ones in 1980s and 1990s – saw the practices of politically informed postmodernism as opposed to the “aesthetic” postmodernism of 1970s. The main question that the writers of leela face is this: Will it develop in a politically and historically informed manner as did the postmodernism(s) of the 1960s and 1980 and onwards? Or will it only remain tied to the formal textual/ aesthetic experimentation that characterized the postmodern writing of 1970s?

Krishna Baral’s novel Avataran deconstructs earlier meaning embodied in B.P Koirala’s story “Hod” by representing the perspective of the widow that was absent in the Koirala’s text. By doing so, it creates the possibilities of other meanings, of other narratives. This opens up the political dimension of the text. However, while Baral’s rewriting of “Hod” – like his re-conceptualizations of Mainali’s “Naso” and Dharawasi’s Sharandarthi - creates a textual slippage to illuminate the “blindness” that characterized the earlier text it does not really transform it in a radical manner. The widow remains weak, submissive and vulnerable to the temptations of the flesh as opposed to the male hero Padam who seems rationally calculating, and in a total control over his sexual desires. Shyamlal and Trilochan, two of the major characters of Baral’s novel, end up with two wives thus fulfilling a male fantasy; and the moral universe of the two other narratives is disrupted because the female characters – Manamati and Sahinli Mukhini – stray from the path of righteousness and proper sexual conduct. One of the weaknesses of the text, it seems to me, is that the “leela” of Krishna Baral does not proceed to its logical limits. The play of meaning stops after a while and the meaning – which is earlier presented as perpetually slipping and changing -  is re-centered around the ideologies of a patriarchal society; ideologies that were supposed to be disrupted by the play or leela.  This is the challenge that Leela writing faces: if it intends to live up to its name, it needs to take its “play” seriously and to make sure that it does not re-center the meanings that it has deconstructed itself. There must be an ongoing performance of leela; a performance that keeps on “erasing” or questioning the meanings that it has generated through its perpetual play. 

Conclusion Certain questions have come to the fore: Is Leela a mode of creative writing or a method of literary criticism? Or is it a philosophical or theoretical school with well defined methods and tools of analysis? Novels and short stories of Rai, Dharawasi, Baral and Nepal have shown that it can be a mode of creative writing. It has the potentiality of developing as a mode of literary criticism, though substantial work needs to be done before it can establish itself as a full fledged method of literary criticism. Above all, its practitioners need to apply leela criticism to study not only those texts that announce themselves as expressions of leela writing but other texts as well. Are there leela elements or effects in the texts of Devkota, Dhruva Chandra Gautam or Parijat? Can leela criticism be applied to the texts not written under the sign of leela writing? Leela thinking can become a method of literary criticism only if can answer in affirmative to these questions.

This leads to a second, though related issue. Is leela a philosophical/ theoretical school with determinate methods and tools of analysis? If yes, then it is merely another “ism” or another “vaad” just as, for example, post-structuralism is. This is a trap that it must seek to avoid as its practitioners such as Rai and Dharawasi seem well aware of. The strength of leela comes from its perpetual openness to new influences and ideas, from its willingness to incorporate new perspectives, tools and methods of perception. From this perspective, it appears to me, the term leela thinking or leela awareness – or what Rai has described as Leela bodh – is a term that is more accurately appropriate in describing the entire gamut of novels and stories, theoretical essays and pieces of literary criticism that have been written under the sign of leela. Leela is a world view; an awareness, or a bodh that expresses itself in various kinds of texts including fiction, drama, criticism and philosophy. It is an awareness that can be seen not only in obviously experimental leela texts like “Kathaputali Ko Man” but also in Ratna Mani Nepal’s stories in Kathaindredini , and Baral’s “Katti Thok Haru” in his collection of short stories titled Katha Chiyatiyeka . If such is the case then leela writing or leela criticism (or leela Lekhan and leela samalochana) can only be a subset of what might be described as leela bodh or leela awareness, an awareness that perceives perpetual instability and play of meaning in various kinds of cultural texts through a combination of western post-structural and eastern spiritual perspectives.

It is this combination of western post-structural methodologies and eastern spiritualism - including its mythological, ethical and metaphysical registers - that distinguishes leela from postmodernism; the same characteristic that makes it a bodh or awareness rather than simply a mode of writing or criticism. It seems to me that the practitioners of leela can distinguish their work from that of western post-structuralists and post-modernists (including Derrida’s deconstruction and postmodern practices of John Barthes and John Fowles among others) only by reformulating their central concern from “leela writing” to “leela bodh .” As far as leela is only a form of writing, then it is hardly distinguishable from the practice of deconstruction and other postmodern – often metafictional - practices of “rewriting.” In their desire to describe leela as something authentically eastern the practitioners of leela, including Rai and Dharawasi, seem to have minimized the effect of post-structural theory and postmodern practice upon their writing, even though Rai accepts deconstruction and reader response theory as two of the major influences upon him in addition to those emanating from post-structural Marxism, Buddhism, Jainism, Gestalt psychology, modern physics and so on. A careful study of texts presented as the examples of leela writing – including the texts of Baral, Nepal and Dharawasi in addition to those of Rai – however, shows that though their texts might show an uneven manifestation of these “other” sources, what have really shaped their writings/ rewritings, however, are the textual strategies associated with deconstruction, reader response theory and other post-structural/ post-modern practices. In other words Buddhism, Jainism, Gestalt psychology, theory of deconstruction and the postmodern technique of metafiction do not influence leela in an equal manner, especially at the level of practice. For example where is the overt influence of Buddhism or Jainism in Baral’s Avataran or in Dharawasi’s Sharandarthi ; the two texts that make a liberal use of the technique of metafictional rewriting that is associated with deconstructive practices? It seems to me that the practitioners of leela can respond in a more critical – and more responsible manner – only by fully accepting the western postmodern/ post-structural influences upon their work rather then trying to deny or minimize such influences. At the same time, they should work towards developing the seeds of eastern thought – at its mythological, metaphysical and ethical registers – that are already present in their theorizations though not well developed in their actual practices including novels and short stories. Such a double acknowledgement and practice of both western post-structural theory and triple registers of eastern philosophies would turn leela into an authentic cultural practice by turning it into a bodh , an awareness or a perspective from which to both write and analyze various kinds of texts including novels, short stories, cultural criticism and even autobiography.

As far as future directions and possibilities are concerned I feel that leela should simultaneously explore both its spiritual and political dimensions, and at the level of both theory and practice. Unlike Rai, Dharawasi has focused only upon the mythological and ethical dimension of eastern spiritualism which, to my mind, leads to a limitation of some sorts. Similarly, while leela writing has produced creative texts such as Sharandarthi that have overtly political themes it has not been able to theorize itself politically. This leads to another kind of limitation. The willingness of its practitioners to keep the play of leela open and their willingness to keep on revising their perspectives, however, gives hope that these limitations will be overcome in future.  

See Govinda Raj Bhattarai, Garima, Jestha, 2062 Indra B. Rai, Kathaputali Ko Man (Deepak Press, Varanasi, 1989) 60. Rajendra Bhandari and Vatsagopal, ed, Lila Lekhan: Varta Ra Antarvarta (Janapaksha Prakashan, Sikkim, 1997) 6. Rai 76. Bhandari 43. For a reading of lila writing from the perspective of eastern spiritual philosophy also see Vishnu Kumar Bhattarai’s Bhakti Dekhi Lila Samma (Niyatra Prakashan: Jhapa, BS 2057). Dharawasi’s article in Purvanchal Dainik and the counter replies from the progressive writers are included in Ratna Mani Nepal’s Lila Drishti (Ganesh Prasad Nepal: Jhapa, BS 2056). References Baral, Krishna. Lila, Varta Ra Sharandarthi: Lila Smalochana . Niyatra Prakashan, Jhapa, BS 2056 Baral, Krishna. Avataran . Niyatra Prakashan: Jhapa,  BS 2061 Baral, Krishna. Katha Chiyatiyeka . Niyatra Prakashan: Jhapa, BS 2060. Bhandari, Rajendra and Vatsagopal. Ed. Lila Lekhan: Varta Ra Antarvarta . Janapaksha Prakashan: Sikkim, 1997 Bhattarai, Govinda Raj. “Uttar Adhunik Jangal Ko Euta Bhrantibriksha.” Garima , Jestha, BS 2062 Bhattarai, Vishnu Kumar. Bhakti Dekhi Lila Samma . Niyatra Prakashan: Jhapa, BS 2057 Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Practice . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982 Dharawasi, Krishna. Lila Lekhan . Dubasu: Kathmandu, 1996 Dharawasi, Krishna. Sharandarthi . Niyatra Prakashan: Jhapa, BS 2056 Eagleton, Terry. “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism.” New Left Review 152 (1985): 60-73. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization : A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Pantheon, 1965 Foucault, Michel. Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92. Kamuf, Peggy. Ed. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds . New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction . London and New York: Metheun, 1987. Nepal, Ratna Mani. Lila Drishti. Ganesh Prasad Nepal: Jhapa, BS 2056 Nepal, Ratna Mani. Kathaindreni. Niyatra Prakashan: Jhapa, BS 2058 Rai, Indra B. Kathaputali Ko Man . Deepak Press: Varanasi, 1989. Rai, Indra B. “Sapekshata: Ayamik Ra Lila Lekhan.” Garima , Mangsir, 2061 Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1982 Shrestha, Dayaram. Ed. Nepali Katha: Bhag Char. Sajha Prakashan: Kathmandu, BS 2057

ELT CHOUTARI

Nepal’s first digital elt magazine, post modern paradigm in nepalese elt.

A Great Paradigm is Knocking at the Door:That is Postmodernism

Dr. Govinda Raj Bhattarai

Professor of English

Department of English Education

Tribhuvan University

Every teacher needs to be familiar with the issues that I am going to address in this essay: every teacher, educator, and every institution from primary to university levels of education and academic centers of all sorts.

The central motive for writing this paper is to draw from ‘postmodern’ philosophy and seek its application to English language teaching in the context of Nepal. It is high time we incorporated new values in our curriculums, especially in those of English Language teaching, ELT.  English language, and so literature, is soaked in ‘contemporary world values’. We need to experience and feel the pace of these contemporary values and walk in consonance with them because time has changed dramatically and cyberspace has ‘flattened’ the world, to quote Friedman’s term, and global values have seeped into local cultures all over the world. Porous culture of the present day has permeated everywhere to horizons earlier unknown. All these phenomena are the characteristics of the postmodern period that has followed the post II war period of some five decades ago.

I am not going to quote definitions of postmodernism from “Grammatology”, or from “The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge” or from “The Postmodern Reader” or from “The  Encyclopedia of Postmodernism” itself. In a brief article like this there is no room for pedantic ramblings on a subject that has already built a tremendous archive; it is so wide and diverse that sometimes it sounds unfathomable. Despite this, those of us concerned with ELT and more broadly, language teaching, should no longer remain ignorant of this all pervading paradigm shift, should look into the new values and find out if any aspects of postmodernism are applicable to our field, out of this all sweeping dimensions, and try to improve our career and profession by including these aspects. With this in mind, I would like to put my pen into paper by just referring to some major features and achievements of postmodernism that are relevant to teaching (which may apply to all teaching activities irrespective of subjects).

Before this let me relate my topic to the origin of this ‘philosophy’, to fields it has permeated and some distinctive marks that help us define the term. It was Jacques Derrida ( 1930 ­– 2004)  whose seminal article  “Structure, Sign  and Play:  In the Discourse of the Human Sciences”  (1967) attracted scholars’ attention towards a deep gap lying unnoticed between the structuralist tradition established by Saussurean school and the post II war situation that saw many changes in the existing values. This inspired and encouraged scholars to revisit the common philosophy of academics based on structuralism. This came to be known as postmodern move which challenged modernism, modernist principles and beliefs, which eventually gave way against the force of postmodern onslaught. Gradually scholars and thinkers of late twentieth century shifted their attention towards a new philosophy, a new paradigm in their respective fields. There are different angles of interpretation, standpoints or conditions of postmodern trend or. For instance, Jacques Derrida takes a philosophical standpoint. There are others, like Michel  Brown, Jean Baudrillard, Rolland Barthes, Thomas Kuhn, Charles Jenks to name a few among hundreds of forerunners, who discuss psychoanalysis, political philosophy, literary theory, philosophy of science, and  architecture, respectively. There are other great names people remember for their vigor and enthusiasm in interpreting music and dance, art and culture, anthropology, history and geography from postmodern perspectives. Ihab Hasan rightly thinks that this has formed a new movement, paradigm, or school: postmodernism.

I would like to refer to Hasan’s The Postmodern Turn (1987) to provide the readers a feel of how it has become all pervasive.  Postmodernism attacked deep foundations of meaning, truth, its finality, classifications of objects and concepts and showed that a continuum of enigmatic existence may go on till the last moment, so one always fails to claim finality, all perfection. One should keep on experimenting with what exists and look for novelty and innovation. Such points may have deep impact on an innovative teacher.  Not without good reasons have some claimed ‘death’ of many things and ideas such as history including the death of discourse (see, Collins and Skover). The term death has been used everywhere only to show a kind of departure and a sudden rupture felt in the existing practice and thought.  It is not in the literal sense they say so, it is to indicate the suddenness of a great shift towards a new present almost disconnected to its rootedness or the past.  So it was introduced as an anti foundational movement that has given a message that every foundation, even that of science, ever requires some kind of restructuring, remaking, rebuilding, and rethinking from age to age, and more so in a world controlled by machines like ours  today. The inventions and innovations that occur today are beyond our imagination, and will continue to be so. Philosophical principles too are always reinventing and reshaping themselves, like the inventions in science. Values are changing fastest of all. Peoples’ interests, demands, aspirations and lifestyle have changed accordingly.

Naturally, Derridean philosophy stands against stagnant ideas and dogmatic principles. However I am not going to sound obscure by referring to Jacques Derrida the mastermind himself, nor great thinkers like Michael Foucault, Gilles Deleuz, Frederic Jameson, Luce Irigary, Zygmunt Bauman, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivack or more such philosophers who have helped in defining the scope of this new philosophy with zeal and fervor until the dawn of the 21 st century.  However “No jargons please” my heart speaks, and mind says no to a maze of debates. Those who are dead against pluralistic values and multiple perspectives on objects and truths and things are very adamant and even wish to denounce it as a new fangled thing that destroys the old values and leads us to nowhere.  They don’t know that old things decay soon of their own accord, and progress demands a rapid pace for everything: reshaping and rebuilding, by deconstructing the old ones. ‘Deconstruction’ has therefore been considered as a central point that brings change in our perspectives.

Postmodernism has stood on the principle of journey to infinite, incompleteness and this is the stand it has taken for more than three decades. But I am going to put my pen into paper also to recount my experience of being with it and in it for the last two decades. However, mine has remained a different world of literature. I noticed the concept enter into Nepali literature in the last twenty-five years, though vaguely and hazily in the beginning. At present though, there are more than two dozen books published on theory and practice of it and many more are in making, some to defend it and others to denounce. Denouncing it is equated with an act of challenging time that does not go back nor does it remain stagnant. That is why, as Derrida thought, if you cannot get the final meaning, if it ever gets deferred and is different every moment, what is the point of sticking to a particular time or value that is claimed to be final and universal and will save humanity? We believe in transitory nature and transience, we believe in the new and ever changing experience and experiment, fragmentary nature of truth, we believe in relativity of truth, because no absolute truth does exist, it is in the eyes of the beholders that truth takes shape whether it be in the field of philosophy or chemistry or astronomy or child care, adult education or teaching and learning, or the production of learning materials from everyday and common matters to universal matters.

It is difficult to define the concept of postmodern, as it encompasses everything– from art to culture, and from feminism to curriculum. Different fields of knowledge and areas of study such as history, geography, literature, sports and music have postmodern features which are distinct from those with modernist perspectives. It is change in perspectives, a change of perspectives. The whole of perspectives of looking at truth and the world has changed today. It may sound sometimes too intricate to drive this point home, but I would like to show how our total perspectives need to be revised. I would like to refer to Hasan again from whose work I quoted above. He shows how what ‘modern’ world  thought of as distance needs to be perceived as participation , purpose as play , signified as signifier , genre as text .  Each of these moves requires serious discussion, interpretation and exemplification. When one goes deep into such abstract philosophical niceties, one is most likely to get lost. Therefore I like to suggest the readers to start at the beginning, go on building their knowledge, contemplate and try to find application accordingly.

The seminal ideas of postmodernism entered the mainstream with Jacques Derrida’s principles of deconstruction which got associated with post-structuralism and gradually to postmodernism in the field of philosophy. Likewise, in literature, John Barth proposed that the conventional modes of literary representation had been “used up,” which means  everything has been exhausted before so he expounded these ideas in a seminal essay called  “The Literature of Exhaustion” and in it Barth opined that Modern values had an ultimate goal and a final point, but postmodern stretches beyond confinement. Old rules, symbols, figures, devices have completely been exhausted so we need newer images, combinations, symbols, tools, perspectives and everything.  In the field of architecture, ‘Jenkins’s architectural design’ is considered postmodern. If we look at music or painting or film or other sectors such as health, we can find pioneers who introduce postmodernism into these fields. It gives a sense of eternity, plurality or pluralism of objects ideas, and things, which is at the core of its principle. It rejects structural school of thought and language and classification. So looking at the world with postmodern perspective means looking at it as a centre less embodiment of multiplicity.  The multiplicity exists, whether or not one accepts it, so in the words of Foucault, it is an all pervading condition of the world .

Postmodernism stands for pluralism– many ideas and opinions, many practices and tolerance among them. It naturally has many centers. How it forms knowledge is still in suspense and doubt. Postmodernism asks you not to trust the practices that you are following. Some truth may be lying hidden so the concept of absence is more important than presence. All inventions were absent until they were discovered to the state of presence. Postmodernism calls for a change in concept and behavior. It is a philosophy of alternatives from no choice. From binary classification, it has reached a state of multiple options.

How can we make use of postmodernist theory in an ELT class? Firstly, it says all knowledge is constructed not just given; all knowledge is invented or “constructed” in the minds of people, they say. This belief requires student centered teaching, student autonomy and more freedom.

It promotes and nurtures multiplicity so it applies for multicultural setting of the learner and equal respect and attention to all.

It explores new centers and therefore every student has equal opportunity to be honored– the handicapped, disable, deprived, backward and marginal and excluded. The teacher treats them equally on grounds of humanity. Students that form diverse picture in the class are assets to him or her.

Cyber culture is part of our life so technology will create virtual worlds and learning modes are changed abruptly and totally. Teacher education is incomplete without resorting to the use of technology (radio, Edusat, mobiles, ICT) etc. The electronic media has erased the geographical distance and historic time so the modes of teaching and ways of learning are tat tally different from what they used to be before. An English Language Teacher, like any other should be equipped with this Knowledge.

01 Nov 2010

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7 thoughts on “ post modern paradigm in nepalese elt ”.

This is a very interesting post. I liked the way Bhattarai sir made a connection between most-modern interpretation of epistemology and ontology and how language teachers can benefit from this. It is always useful to think that knowledge is plural, changing and dynamic and locally constructed. Rather than making our students falsely believe there is fixed reality and truth or answers to particular questions, it is necessary to respect students’ opinions and voices and teach them that they can be critical of authoritative knowledge that comes from teacher and textbooks.

Great piece! I enjoyed reading this article. Yet, it does not bring the concept of post-modernism in real ESL or ELT classroom. I was expecting more examples and realistic picture of what post modernism could be for our ESL learners.

Krishna is right-there is yet a lot to be done to show how post modern ELT functions in Nepalese context. This article, however, is a big endeavor to orient ELT professionals of Nepal towards the emerging paradigm. Once they know what is post modernism and what is its fruit, we should take Nepalese ELT towards diversity and interdisciplinary. Monolithic approach in Nepalese ELT has not fetched much is all obvious. This is the high time we pondered over this new trend and deconstruct our practice and shape it in accordance with the local socio-educational values.

I liked Bhattarai Sir’s effort to present the concept of postmodernism but I found little about POSTMODERN ELT

Wonderful attempt! In terms of epistimology, anxiology, ontology of postmodernism! Here’s challenge of cosmology!

Very good article basically focusing on the overall history, theory and trend on Post Modernism. Would have been better (but everyone is well known that a single article can’t address all the issues) if some practical examples from the field of EFL had been included….

I should like to express my deepest gratitude to Prof. Dr. Govinda Raj Bhattarai for casting light on one of the most perplexing, most complex and elusive issues of our times, that is postmodernism and for showcashing its implications in ELT classrooms. His article on postmodernism has really enlightened me, so to speak – though postmodernism stands firmly against any kind of enlightenment of knowledge – and has set me into thinking, critically, about postmodern philosophy that has emerged in various domains.

We all are heading towards an endless journey along the railroads of postmodernism, believing and half-believing, testing and trying, challenging and at times accepting, constructing and deconstructing truth or knowledge in an attempt to reach the ideal realm of truth. But this ideal truth, or the so-called absolute truth, is never reachable; for there is no absolute truth or final knowledge in postmodernism’s mind. In this sense, postmodernism, in its true essence, refuter all sorts of sudden spiritual enlightenment that brought archetypal knowledge, the absolute knowledge, in the minds of ‘sadhakas’ (spiritual thinkers that practiced rigorous ‘sadhana’) of past times including Buddha, Aristotle, Plato, and Swami Vivekananda. Postmodernism has an inherent suspicion towards metanarratives or grand narratives which are nothing but the narratives that record enlightened knowledge. In the critical eyes of postmodernism such enlightened knowledge becomes a dogma if its absolute authority is claimed. For no knowledge is absolute, no meaning is final. It is up to the readers to construct the meaning text by the process named deconstruction by Derrida. In the process of deconstruction the original or literal meaning of the text is annihilated and new meaning is constructed. Thus deconstruction may be viewed as a combination of two processes: destruction+construction, or probably decomposition+construction. Thus the meaning moves away from its centre – the writer. This is where the notion of decentering comes into light. And this notion of decentering or decentralisation emerges not only in interpreting texts but also in various other domains such as politics, state and power, etc. Nepal has become New Nepal and is preparing to emerge into federal republic system of government which hopefully should it happen will be a nice example of decentering or decentralisation. Thus the ongoing transformation of Nepal carries the spirit of postmodernism. But I fear, dare I say as a side note, if such type of decentering in Nepal will take much longer time than we have expected.

As Dr. Bhattarai has already hinted that postmodern philosophy is such a vast and elusive issue that no single treatise is sufficient to capture its one single aspect, I have no guts to go further alone but on whatever have I deciphered about postmodernism I sense some self- contradiction in postmodern philosophy. The self contradiction is that if postmodernism does not believe in metanarratives, why is it producing its own metanarratives which suspect the reality of every knowledge? If postmodernists suspect their own knowledge, why need they go sermoning? Do I make any sense in these questions? Being in postmodern era I suspect my own knowledge. Trying and testing of my knowledge is required? But how?

These are the questions that have been puzzling me. If you construct anything of them or if you have already constructed, please kindly share with me.

Awaiting your comments, Indra Ter

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Postmodernism

Postmodernism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 31, 2016 • ( 22 )

Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s, and is probably still continuing. Postmodernism can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanization of the post- Second World War  era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism.

The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism . Modernism was an earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the Modernist stance.

Postmodernism shares many of the features of Modernism. Both schools reject the rigid boundaries between high and low art. Postmodernism even goes a step further and deliberately mixes low art with high art, the past with the future, or one genre with another. Such mixing of different, incongruous elements illustrates Postmodernism’s use of lighthearted parody, which was also used by Modernism. Both these schools also employed pastiche , which is the imitation of another’s style. Parody and pastiche serve to highlight the self-reflexivity of Modernist and Postmodernist works, which means that parody and pastiche serve to remind the reader that the work is not “real” but fictional, constructed. Modernist and Postmodernist works are also fragmented and do not easily, directly convey a solid meaning. That is, these works are consciously ambiguous and give way to multiple interpretations. The individual or subject depicted in these works is often decentred, without a central meaning or goal in life, and dehumanized, often losing individual characteristics and becoming merely the representative of an age or civilization, like Tiresias in The Waste Land .

In short, Modernism and Postmodernism give voice to the insecurities, disorientation and fragmentation of the 20th century western world. The western world, in the 20th century, began to experience this deep sense of security because it progressively lost its colonies in the Third World, worn apart by two major World Wars and found its intellectual and social foundations shaking under the impact of new social theories an developments such as Marxism and Postcolonial global migrations, new technologies and the power shift from Europe to the United States. Though both Modernism and Postmodernism employ fragmentation, discontinuity and decentredness in theme and technique, the basic dissimilarity between the two schools is hidden in this very aspect.

Modernism projects the fragmentation and decentredness of contemporary world as tragic. It laments the loss of the unity and centre of life and suggests that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, continuity and meaning that is lost in modern life. Thus Eliot laments that the modern world is an infertile wasteland, and the fragmentation, incoherence, of this world is effected in the structure of the poem. However, The Waste Land  tries to recapture the lost meaning and organic unity by turning to Eastern cultures, and in the use of Tiresias as protagonist

In Postmodernism, fragmentation and disorientation is no longer tragic. Postmodernism on the other hand celebrates fragmentation. It considers fragmentation and decentredness as the only possible way of existence, and does not try to escape from these conditions.

This is where Postmodernism meets Poststructuralism —both Postmodernism and Poststructuralism recognize and accept that it is not possible to have a coherent centre . In Derridean terms, the centre is constantly moving towards the periphery and the periphery constantly moving towards the centre. In other words, the centre, which is the seat of power, is never entirely powerful. It is continually becoming powerless, while the powerless periphery continually tries to acquire power. As a result, it can be argued that there is never a centre, or that there are always multiple centres. This postponement of the centre acquiring power or retaining its position is what Derrida called differance . In Postmodernism’s celebration of fragmentation, there is thus an underlying belief in differance , a belief that unity, meaning, coherence is continually postponed.

The Postmodernist disbelief in coherence and unity points to another basic distinction between Modernism and Postmodernism. Modernism believes that coherence and unity is possible, thus emphasizing the importance of rationality and order. The basic assumption of Modernism seems to be that more rationality leads to more order, which leads a society to function better. To establish the primacy of Order, Modernism constantly creates the concept of Disorder in its depiction of the Other—which includes the non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-adult, non-rational and so on. In other words, to establish the superiority of Order, Modernism creates the impression- that all marginal, peripheral, communities such as the non-white, non-male etc. are contaminated by Disorder. Postmodernism, however, goes to the other extreme. It does not say that some parts of the society illustrate Order, and that other parts illustrate Disorder. Postmodernism, in its criticism of the binary opposition, cynically even suggests that everything is Disorder.

Jean Francois Lyotard

The Modernist belief in order, stability and unity is what the Postmodernist thinker Lyotard calls a metanarrative . Modernism works through metanarratives or grand narratives, while Postmodernism questions and deconstructs metanarratives. A metanarrative is a story a culture tells itself about its beliefs and practices.

Postmodernism understands that grand narratives hide, silence and negate contradictions, instabilities and differences inherent in any social system. Postmodernism favours “mini-narratives,” stories that explain small practices and local events, without pretending universality and finality. Postmodernism realizes that history, politics and culture are grand narratives of the power-wielders, which comprise falsehoods and incomplete truths.

Having deconstructed the possibility of a stable, permanent reality, Postmodernism has revolutionized the concept of language. Modernism considered language a rational, transparent tool to represent reality and the activities of the rational mind. In the Modernist view, language is representative of thoughts and things. Here, signifiers always point to signifieds. In Postmodernism, however, there are only surfaces, no depths. A signifier has no signified here, because there is no reality to signify.

Jean Baudrillard

The French philosopher Baudrillard has conceptualized the Postmodern surface culture as a simulacrum. A simulacrum is a virtual or fake reality simulated or induced by the media or other ideological apparatuses. A simulacrum is not merely an imitation or duplication—it is the substitution of the original by a simulated, fake image. Contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has been thus replaced by false images. This would mean, for instance, that the Gulf war that we know from newspapers and television reports has no connection whatsoever to what can be called the “real” Iraq war. The simulated image of Gulf war has become so much more popular and real than the real war, that Baudrillard argues that the Gulf War did not take place. In other words, in the Postmodern world, there are no originals, only copies; no territories, only maps; no reality, only simulations. Here Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that the postmodern world is artificial; he is also implying that we have lost the capacity to discriminate between the real and the artificial.

Fredric Jameson

Just as we have lost touch with the reality of our life, we have also moved away from the reality of the goods we consume. If the media form one driving force of the Postmodern condition, multinational capitalism and globalization is another. Fredric Jameson has related Modernism and Postmodernism to the second and third phases of capitalism. The first phase of capitalism of the 18th -19th centuries, called Market Capitalism, witnessed the early technological development such as that of the steam-driven motor, and corresponded to the Realist phase. The early 20th century, with the development of electrical and internal combustion motors, witnessed the onset of Monopoly Capitalism and Modernism. The Postmodern era corresponds to the age of nuclear and electronic technologies and Consumer Capitalism, where the emphasis is on marketing, selling and consumption rather than production. The dehumanized, globalized world, wipes out individual and national identities, in favour of multinational marketing.

It is thus clear from this exposition that there are at least three different directions taken by Postmodernim, relating to the theories of Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson. Postmodernism also has its roots in the theories Habermas and Foucault . Furthermore, Postmodernism can be examined from Feminist and Post-colonial angles. Therefore, one cannot pinpoint the principles of Postmodernism with finality, because there is a plurality in the very constitution of this theory.

Postmodernism, in its denial of an objective truth or reality, forcefully advocates the theory of constructivism—the anti-essentialist argument that everything is ideologically constructed. Postmodernism finds the media to be a great deal responsible for “constructing” our identities and everyday realiites. Indeed, Postmodernism developed as a response to the contemporary boom in electronics and communications technologies and its revolutionizing of our old world order.

Constructivism invariably leads to relativism. Our identities are constructed and transformed every moment in relation to our social environment. Therefore there is scope for multiple and diverse identities, multiple truths, moral codes and views of reality.

The understanding that an objective truth does not exist has invariably led the accent of Postmodernism to fall on subjectivity. Subjectivity itself is of course plural and provisional. A stress on subjectivity will naturally lead to a renewed interest in the local and specific experiences, rather than the and universal and abstract; that is on mini-narratives rather than grand narratives.

Finally, all versions of Postmodernism rely on the method of Deconstruction to analyze socio-cultural situations. Postmodernism has often been vehemently criticized. The fundamental characteristic of Postmodernism is disbelief, which negates social and personal realities and experiences. It is easy to claim that the Gulf War or Iraq War does not exist; but then how does one account for the deaths, the loss and pain of millions of people victimized by these wars? Also, Postmodernism fosters a deep cynicism about the one sustaining force of social life—culture. By entirely washing away the ground beneath our feet, the ideological presumptions upon which human civilization is built, Postmodernism generates a feeling of lack and insecurity in contemporary societies, which is essential for the sustenance of a capitalistic world order. Finally, when the Third World began to assert itself over Euro-centric hegemonic power, Postmodernism had rushed in with the warning, that the empowerment of the periphery is but transient and temporary; and that just as Europe could not retain its imperialistic power for long, the new-found power of the erstwhile colonies is also under erasure.

In literature, postmodernism (relying heavily on fragmentation, deconstruction, playfulness, questionable narrators etc.) reacted against the Enlightenment  ideas implicit in modernist literature – informed by Lyotard’s concept of the “metanarrative”, Derrida’s concept of “play”, and Budrillard’s “simulacra.” Deviating from the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern. writers eschew, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this. quest. Marked by a distrust of totalizing mechanisms and self-awareness, postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the author’s “univocation”. The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. Postmodern literature can be considered as an umbrella term for the post-war developments in literature such as Theatre of the Absurd , Beat Generation and Magical Realism .

Postmodern literature, as expressed in the writings of Beckett, Robbe Grillet , Borges , Marquez , Naguib Mahfouz and Angela Carter rests on a recognition of the complex nature of reality and experience, the role of time and memory in human perception, of the self and the world as historical constructions, and the problematic nature of language.

Postmodern literature reached its peak in the ’60s and ’70s with the publication of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Lost in the Funhouse and Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth , Gravity’s Rainbow, V., and Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon , “factions” like Armies in the Night and In Cold Blood by Norman Mailer and Truman Capote , postmodern science fiction novels like Neoromancer by William Gibson , Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and many others. Some declared the death of postmodernism in the ’80’s with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver . Tom Wolfe in his 1989 article Stalking the Billion-Footed Beas t called for a new emphasis on realism in fiction to replace postmodernism. With this new emphasis on realism in mind, some declared White Noise in (1985) or The Satanic Verses (1988) to be the last great novels of the postmodern era.

Postmodern film describes the articulation of ideas of postmodernism trough the cinematic medium – by upsetting the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization and destroying (or playing with) the audience’s “suspension of disbelief,” to create a work that express through less-recognizable internal logic. Two such examples are Jane Campion ‘s Two Friends, in which the story of two school girls is shown in episodic segments arranged in reverse order; and Karel Reisz ‘s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which the story being played out on the screen is mirrored in the private lives of the actors playing it, which the audience also sees. However, Baudrillard dubbed Sergio Leone ‘s epic 1968 spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West as the first postmodern film. Other examples include Michael Winterbottom ‘s 24 Hour Party People, Federico Fellini ‘s Satyricon and Amarcord, David Lynch ‘ s Mulholland Drive, Quentin Tarantino ‘s Pulp Fiction.

In spite of the rather stretched, cynical arguments of Postmodernism, the theory has exerted a fundamental influence on late 20th century thought. It has indeed revolutionized all realms of intellectual inquiry in varying degrees.

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Categories: Literature

Tags: Amarcord , Angela Carter , Armies in the Night , Baudrillard , Beat Generation , Catch-22 , Crying of Lot 49 , Federico Fellini , Fredric Jameson , Gabriel Garcia Marquez , Gravity's Rainbow , Habermas , Jane Campion , Jorge Luis Borges , Joseph Heller , Karel Reisz , Kurt Vonnegut , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Lost in the Funhouse , Lyotard , Magical Realism , Marxism , metanarrative , Michael Winterbottom , Michel Foucault , Modernism , Naguib Mahfouz , Neoromancer , Norman Mailer , Once Upon a Time in the Wes , Postmodern film , Postmodernism , Raymond Carver , Robbe Grillet , Salman Rushdie , Sergio Leone , simulacrum , Sot-Weed Factor , Stalking the Billion-Footed Beas , The Satanic Verses , The Waste Land , Truman Capote , White Noise , William Gibson

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If modernism was an aesthetic movement how come postmodernism becomes bad for society? I think modernism caused more struggle and stress for ordinary people and they found relief in postmodernism. Contemporary people always found reasons not to be part of any movements and they did nothing good or bad, it’s very strange that small groups of people make big movements in literature, movies, architecture and the rest majority are forced to read, watch and entertain. In my view, marketing play a big role here considering the fact that human races have tendency to follow and react what they see and what they hear. Reality is not just about the sufferings and losses. A moving window in a computer screen is a virtual reality. Watching and enjoying that window movement while a war is going on in some other countries is very much better than going there and being participating in it. No-one wants to think the war doesn’t exist. They know war does exist and they don’t want to make it more worse. So whenever you talk about postmodernism, make sure you are not completely against this.

So informative, expressed in limpid way

Hello Can you please add up more to your excerpts With more original, important translated articles by the theorists with examples and analysis please

Hi Kindly find this category https://literariness.org/category/postmodernism/ if you are in search of Postmodernism related articles. You could also find articles on the key theorists by just browsing through http://www.literariness.org . Thank You. Share the site with your friends

Nasrullah Mambrol

HI! how can i give references to your articles?

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Social Science Baha

• Lecture Series

Ethnography, History, Culture Enduring Oppositions and Creative Dynamism in Nepal

The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture 2017

11 December 2017, Kumari Hall, Hotel Annapurna, Durbarmarg, Kathmandu

Ethnography, History, Culture: Enduring Oppositions and Creative Dynamism in Nepal by  David Holmberg

This lecture recapitulates key transformations in western Tamang social and cultural life over the last 50 years. It approaches the question of ‘culture’ and the place of culture in anthropological theorising in the frame of social activism, and views new cultural activism as a direct consequence of the productive capacity of the Tamang in new socio-political contexts. Tamang, historically at the peripheries, are now a dynamic presence in an emerging new configuration of interethnic relations in Nepal. The impossible hope of the Panchayat era to produce, through deculturation, a monolingual, homogenous Nepali culture and society has antithetically produced an as-yet-unresolved counter demand for state recognition of cultural difference by Adivasi Janajati communities in Nepal. While older Tamang villagers lament the demise of the forms of culture they inherited from their past, young people, in an entirely new experiential and communicative environment, are creating new ontologies and producing new forms of cultural distinctiveness that reflect existential realities in contemporary Nepal. Cultural oppositions endure in a world of new political possibilities and new forms of communication, all within an expanding and levelling consumerist economy.

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Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Cornell University in New York,  David Holmberg  has been synonymous with anthropological research with the Tamangs in Nepal since the mid-1970s. In an illustrious academic career spanning decades, several generations of Nepal-focused scholars were privileged to be trained by him. He maintains close ties with academic institutions in Nepal, the most significant being the Cornell Nepal Study Program (CNSP) in collaboration with Tribhuvan University, Nepal, initiated in 1993. He also chaired the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University from 1990 to 1997, then again from 2001 to 2008.

Professor Holmberg’s areas of interest include ritual syncretism or hybridity: the relations among Buddhist, shamanic, and sacrificial practices, conceptions of power, state system of forced labor, and history of anthropology of the Himalayas to name a few. His major publications include (with Kathryn S. March, Surya Man Tamang and Bhim Bahadur Tamang)  Mutual Regards: America and Nepal Seen through Each Other’s Eyes  (Kathmandu: Jeevan Support Printing Press, 1994) and  Order in Paradox: Myth, Ritual and Exchange among Nepal’s Tamang  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). He is currently in the midst of writing a book,  Extractive Labor/Productive Ritual  based on reconstructing the nature of a state system of forced labour through the memories of villagers and through archival evidence. His most recent appointment was to the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University as the Fulbright adviser.

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Essay on My Country Nepal For Students

If there is a country’s flag that stands out among all other countries it is the flag of Nepal . Our flag is very unique and cannot be compared to other countries’ flags due to its shape. It also has a hidden meaning behind it which represents the country’s peace-loving and friendly nature, bravery, and immortal history.

My country Nepal is situated between two countries, India and China. Although it is sandwiched between international powers, conflicts have not happened between any, and peace remains. Nepal is a country of various castes and cultures. In other words, it is like a beautiful garden of flowers with people of different ethnicities and backgrounds.

My country Nepal is not only unique for its flag but also its geographical terrain, the variety of castes and cultures you can find, and the rich history of it. It is the land of various great places and important figures that people know far and wide. The temperature here spans from cool to hot and is a heaven for residing in.

There are about 126 castes in Nepal each with its own rich history and culture which makes Nepal a rich place for culture. Some dating back to the millenniums. Not only that, our country is very rich in its geographical terrain. From the lowest point of just 70 Meters from sea level to the world’s highest peak Mt. Everest (8848.86 meters) , we have temperature scales that vary from place to place. It is divided into three regions, Terai, Hilly, and Himalayas each according to their altitude and geographical differences.

Himalayan regions have high and mighty Himalayas that are breathtaking to look at. Out of the world’s top 10 highest peaks, 8 of them fall in my country. It is already a great pride to have come from such a country. The diverse flora and fauna, beautiful landscapes, lush and green jungles, historical and religious places in Nepal are enough to gather the attention of foreigners and locals too. People from all over the world pay thousands of dollars just to see our country’s snow-capped mountains, rivers, cliffs, waterfalls, other beautiful landscapes, the rich flora and fauna, and sites of great religious and historical importance. It just doesn’t end there.

📌 Read –   Essay on the Importance of English Language

Our country ranks in the top 5 for the richest in water resources. With just a small country with an area of 1,47,181 sq kilometers, it has the potential to fuel hydropower worth 2% of the entire world. It may look small in number but taking our country’s small area in context, it is a potential incomparable to all. The Terai region holds fertile land and smooth flowing waters that are excellent for farming and cultivating.

Nepal is also known as an agricultural country where 60% of the people here follow agriculture as their work. Our country also has huge historical importance. Gautama Buddha the founder and preacher of Buddhism which is practiced worldwide was also born in Nepal. Buddhism is known to preach peace and non-violence and to love everyone. King Janak is also an important figure who holds great importance to communities in Nepal.

Other personalities include Bhrikuti, Araniko, etc. Our country is also known for its bravery. Our country never has to celebrate Independence day as we were never under the rule of any other. We stood and fought against the Britans and other Mongol countries. Brave Gorkhalis were united after a long struggle and fought their way to preserve their country. The courage and bravery of Nepali people are also know world wide. Many brave Gorkhalis went to fight under countries in world wars and won various colors and medals. This brought our country so much respect that we even enjoy it for granted to date.

Although our country’s history, culture, terrains, and achievements make anyone feel proud, the power struggle for the politicians, previous kings, and presidents have made the country weak and fall in the developing country category. Our rich natural resources have not been utilized and we have fallen way behind. Corruption is widely prevalent in our country and the loans we have taken from other countries are in a large number. The amount of food and other materialistic consumption has made Nepal import more and export less.

Our country is poor but the people here are rich. This is because of the corruption and the illegal working/trading that has been done. The government has not made significant progress and the people aren’t responsible. Although I feel proud to be A Nepali, the condition of my country makes me feel bad. People should feel responsible and carry out their duties and not just complain about the government.

The government too should implement proper policies and rules and enforce them accordingly. Utilization of our natural resources should be done in an effective way and social evils such as discrimination according to castes and genders, other superstitions should be slowly removed. Centralized development should stop and we should control the people moving out to other countries with their skills that are wasted abroad. This way we can slowly develop our country.

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28 thoughts on “ essay on my country nepal for students ”.

Thank you so much sir for helpful essay.

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Is Nepali politics postmodernist?

Abhi Subedi

The fluidity we have noticed in Nepali politics today may give the impression of a postmodern condition. Postmodernism has developed a special semantic and philosophical shape in Nepali parlance known famously as uttaradhunik . This topic is debated more among literary writers than politicians. However, I have heard a few theorists half-heartedly use this in Nepali political conversations as well. An economist and leftist political thinker Hari Roka used to organise meaningful discussions known as mimamsa at the Nepal Academy hall some years ago. He would invite people holding different views to participate in the minuscule but rare colloquiums. On one occasion, I had conversations with some politicians about Nepali political postmodernism if any. Other than such scanty usages I know, Nepali politicians do not discuss the postmodern condition in Nepali politics. Mimamsas such as those are few and far between.

But literary writers have continued to use this term more than others. They are divided into two camps. One camp holds that postmodernism is a bourgeois and capitalist theoretical creation. But there are others who consider postmodernism as a very progressive concept. Their argument is that postmodernism opens plurality in literary discussions. The fixity of meaning is an illusion. We discuss topics related to postmodernism with students in the English Department. I think this should also have happened in political science and other departments. I do not want to enter into a debate in this short column. But one thing should be mentioned about the appeal of postmodernism to both literary writers and political activists. Debates about postmodernism in these areas are held productively among rebellious social groups and Marxists as well as those who believe in the instability of meaning and multiple experiments in literature and art.

Convergence of subjects

There are, however, fewer instances of any serious literatist or culturalist venturing into discussions about bringing about convergence of literary and political subjects. In this context, I want to mention the efforts of one very important literary Nepali writer who used postmodernism as a productive mode in the interpretation of both politics and literature. It was critic and poet Jagadish Shumsher Rana who tried to find a common idiom for politics and literature in postmodernist discourses. I have some very strong recollections about my association and interactions with him. I should especially mention one event and a book about postmodernism that he wrote. Rana had invited me to “speak” at the launch of his book Uttaradhunikbad Bahulya Bisfot , or Postmodernism: An Explosion of Pluralism , on February 16, 2013. In this book published by Ranga Nepal, Rana has made some very bold and thought-provoking observations that strike me after a decade as worth repeating, especially in the present context of Nepali debate in the realm of theoretical interpretations of political karmas and thinking patterns. Rana and I were the only two on the dais, speaking about the book and its content.

What struck me was the audience composition for the postmodernist debate that foregrounded political ideas, including appreciation of the Maoists in some areas of Nepali politics. But the curious matter was Rana’s emphasis on the importance of postmodernism in that context. The audience was a mix of members of Rana’s family circle, who spoke by using high honorifics and saluted family seniors by covering their noses with the cupped palm. But there were also Maoists, leftists in general and some anarchist youths. That strange mix, that postmodernist composition of the audience, reflected the persona and vision of Jagadish Shumsher Rana. His ideas in the book indicate the need to re-evaluate the history of Nepal and redefine certain fundamentalist concepts.

Rana clearly admires the Maoists and the changes they introduced in society. But these ideas are controversial. Jagadish Rana shows that the mix of ideas and the conglomeration of different groups of people mark a shift in social and political studies. He writes that Nepali history follows a certain pattern that should be assessed openly. About the genesis of Ranacracy and modern Nepali history, Rana makes the following assessment, which I translate here: “The people who felt exhausted by the continuous fighting, pushing and pulling by the power elite at Nasal Chok (Hanuman Dhoka) had no option but to accept the autocratic family rule. That period was dominated by autocracy and feudalism. The question comes, what direction and course of support will the people take in today’s time of postmodernist plural explosion if people get exhausted in the same way?” (296).

The analogy that Rana draws between the state of the “exhausted” people of feudal times with the possible state of exasperation among the people if similar conditions as those experienced by the “exhausted” people occur in postmodernist times today is worth evoking here. The present state of Nepali politics is moving towards some kind of uncertainty. An erstwhile republican Maoist leader is the prime minister who is facing government partners from the monarchist stream of politics. This is, however, the result of democratic election practices as given by the republican constitution. The people have elected people from different age groups and social classes. People are openly discussing political, economic, diplomatic and ethical subjects. The judiciary has not been functioning in a properly organised manner as legal experts have been saying. Politics and governance, while compromising with the forces that have established themselves in different areas, including economics, trade and commerce, have to shun some of their established ruling practices. I see an alarming situation in the field of education management. A little mistake at this stage when political parties are uncannily focusing on sharing or grabbing power will destroy the education system. That will create a terrible situation.

Explosion of pluralities

The political parties who still evoke theories as their guiding principles know they cannot entirely live up to them. Creative persons holding posts in old municipalities more than others realise that they have to carefully combine their radical ideas with those who function with deep-rooted practices. The most visible clashes appear to be occurring in the architectonic areas, in the acts of demolition, reconstruction and preservation.

Postmodernism, as scholars have been saying, is a condition that calls for a change of the monolithic order into that of pluralities. In Nepal, the current political state indicates what Jagadish Rana calls an explosion of pluralities. The lure of an all-encompassing theory or some traditional institutions has to pass the test of time. I believe that the current state of plurality in politics and the great opening of the convergences of ideas is a great strength of Nepali politics. It calls for honesty, sincerity and openness to the culture of plurality and democratic commitments.  

Abhi Subedi Abhi Subedi is a poet, playwright and a columnist.

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