It is obvious that a poet of Bhanubhakta’s repute receives a lot of praise and criticism. Having prevailed over about two centuries, Bhanubhakta’s fame also had to go through changed structures of feelings. As newer values appear in society, the older values get revisited, questioned, criticized, or even rejected. Presented herewith are some estimations made by various critics about Bhanubhakta.
The circumstances during his days not only received language, lessons of ethics, religious inspirations, and entertainment, it also received from his dedication a road towards welfare befitting that age. Granted that Bhanubhakta did not achieve this high significance through a contemplated thought, conscious effort, or elaborate planning. But it is true that such a personage is seldom born or works out of planning. He is such a seed that germinates in a fertile environment and gives a clarion call to the upcoming age. That such a development takes place, people start thinking what a great inspiring force it was in the construction of the upcoming time, not only in one but in almost all the dimensions of life. One isolated aspect of life cannot stand out alone; it stays in balance with all other aspects of equilibrium. In other words, the development of one aspect of life is not an outcome of its isolated development. Under the pressure of the whole, the part develops and in turn hones the whole. Similar was the reason behind Bhanubhata present the form of our language he did. So was its impact. In our national life, Bhanubhakta has similar, multi-dimensional significance.
Balchandra Sharma, “Bhanubhakta ra Unko Yug”, Sajha Samalochana. Ed. Krishna Chandra Pradhan, 2058.
Bhanubhakta’s version of the Ramayan has a great national importance. Realizing this fact, the rulers of this country recognizing Motiram Bhatta, the one who brought Bhanubhakta to limelight and got his works published as a national luminary. Yet, for want of its proper use, this fact appears unable to really safeguard the true Nepali nationalism. Our upcoming generation is being misguided to the extent that it will not feel any thrill even on hearing someone recite Bhanubhakta’s Ramayan in tune. The schools seldom encourage their students to sing out the Ramayan in proper tune. Instead, they are encouraged to sing English songs to the beats of musical instruments. It seems necessary to critically reexamine this reality and take proper decisions and actions.
Shivaraj Acharya Kaudinnayana, in “Preface” to Bhanubhaktakrit Ramayan he edited
these four hill flowers. Bhanubhakta’s is a name revered throughout the Nepali speaking world. He is generally regarded as an all time great in the field of Nepali poetry. Each and every Nepali poet born after him owes a great deal to him as a perennial source of inspiration. He fought under many odds to establish the primacy of Nepali as a medium of poetical expression. Sanskrit scholars derided his vernacular oriented poetry but he cared very little. Paras Mani Pradhan has emphasized this aspect in Bhanubhakta.
RK Sharma in Indian Literature, March-April 1981, Vol. 24, No. 2.
Besides the specialty of the subject matter, fluent idiom, humorous irony, descriptive and imaginative expression, artistic portrayal and aesthetic outlook had crowned him as the pioneer poet in Nepali—the honor that enjoyed by Geoffrey Chaucer in English, Rebeller in French, Cervantes in Spanish, Giovanni Boccaccio in Italy and Martin Luther in Germany. If individuality and self-inquisitiveness in the traditional environment are some of the signs of renaissance, Bhanubhakta had all these characteristics. And thus, he is regarded as the precursor of renaissance in Nepal and ‘Father of the Modern Nepali Literature.’
Kiran Shankar Maitra, “The First Poet of Nepali Literature” in Indian Literature, September-October 1982, Vol. 25, No. 1.
He was a giant among men and with him the Nepali poetry came of age. He is regarded as the Adikavi or Premier poet of the Nepali language. He received education in Banaras and his books of poems were printed
published in Banaras. His translation was based on Adhyatma Ramayana. But when we read it we feel as if it were an original composition with Nepalese touch and coloring.
Paras Mani Pradhan, in “Modern Nepali Literature in India”. Indian Literature, January-February 1977, Vol. 20, No. 1.
Bhanubhakta Acharya played a fundamental role in the development of Nepali as a literary language and is therefore honored as its “founder poet” (aadikvai). Obviously, he was by no means the first person ever to compose Nepali verse, but his rendering of the Ramayan epic into simple, idiomatic, rhyming Nepali was entirely without known precedent in the language. Until Bhanubhakta, few Nepali writers had been able to shake off the influence of the more sophisticated Indian literature. As a consequence, their literary language was heavily larded with Sanskrit philosophical terms, or else it borrowed extensively from the languages of adjacent regions of India that possessed more developed literatures. Hindi devotional verse was an obvious sources for such borrowings. Nowadays, Nepali writes come from various strata of society and strive to distance their language from Hindi, to which Nepali is quite closely related and with which it shares much of its word stock. These efforts are inspired partly by a nationalism that was largely invisible among the high-caste Nepali elites that monopolized the literary culture of Nepali in earlier centuries. Bhanubhakta’s Ramayan was the first example of a Hindu epic that had not merely been translated into the Nepali language but has been “Nepali-ised” in every other aspect as well. It is still among the most important and best-loved works of Nepali literature, and along with Bhanubhakta’s other works, it became a model for subsequent writers.
Michale James Hutt, in “Introduction” to Himalayan Voices: An Introduction to Modern Nepali Literature, 1991.
The revival of Bhanubhakta and the subsequent dissemination of his name and work by Darjeeling-based Nepali language activists and the Nepali Sahitya Sammelan was the first step toward making Bhanubhakta a national icon of the Nepali nation. In this rediscovery, the role played by Suryabikram Gyawali is very important and I shall have more to say about his efforts shortly. The use of the word “rediscovery” is intentional and suggests that Bhanubhakta had already been “discovered” at least once before. As the school textbooks in Nepal during the Panchayat era informed the students, this was in fact the case and Motiram Bhatta is said to have done exactly that in the 1880s. Hence I will discuss these two discoveries and argue that contra the claims made in nationalist history, Motiram did not discover in Bhanubhakta an icon of national history. Instead, what he found in Bhanubhakta’s writings was flowing poetry written in an easy to understand (i.e. non-Sanskritized) Nepali. For this Motiram praised Bhanubhakta a lot. But it was the later rediscovery of Bhanubhakta in Banaras and Darjeeling that converted him into a jati bir purus (brave man), a legacy which the post-1950 Nepali state found easy to borrow and disseminate as part of its reification of the national bir pantheon.
Pratyoush Onta in “Creating a Brave Nepali Nation in British India: The Rhetoric of Jati Improvement, Rediscovery of Bhanubhakta and the Writing of Bir History. Studies in Nepali History and Society 1(1): June 1996.
Bhanubhakta is the first poet with acclaimed repute in Nepali literature. He widened the narrow road of Nepali language by creating masterpieces like the Ramayan and Badhu Siksha in traditional rhyming forms and got his name stamped in the minds of the Nepali speaking people. His deep attachment to traditional values considering women in his certain works has attracted immense criticism, sometimes even quite mean and derogatory ones, and now it seems to be ever growing. As a writer and a reader, I have certain reservation for his opinions about women folk, but I still think such nasty criticism of him is bound to bring only negative attitude towards the first great bard of our language.
While reading him, we must not forget the fact that his writing was done nearly one hundred and fifty years back amid the surrounding of very traditional Hindu folks. I strongly believe that evaluation of Bhanubhakta without the historical and cultural background of his time is just waste of time and in fact, a kind of devaluation of our pioneering poet whom our great poet Devkota praised as “the most revered man in Nepali literature.”
Prava Baral, critic and story writer, in a conversation with The Gorkha Times
Before Bhanubhakta there was practically no Nepali literature worth the name. The Nepali language though endowed with a great power of expression and having a large and varied vocabulary had not assumed dominance till then and the contemporaries of Bhanubhakta were trying to find out an indigenous mode of literary expression.
Arjun Ranjit in “Literary Hero Bhanubhakta Acharya” [https://foreignaffairsnews.com/bhanu-jayanti-is-being-observed-today/]
Good artical