The Mahakavi at Kavidanda: The Hill of Poets

Arjun Poudel

On the trunk of the giant banyan tree that stood at the three-way intersection right in front of my house, I saw one morning a newly-hung wooden name-plate with the words ‘Devkota Marga’ painted in white. The smell of the paint was still lingering all around the tree. I was probably a fourth-grader at the time, and a large part of my everyday life got spent on or around that banyan tree, which was so tall that it was not just visible from miles away, but would crash right on top of my house if it had somehow fallen in that direction. 

Nearly every day, I hopped from one to another of the tree’s sprawling branches during a tagging game with my childhood buddies. If I were not thus hopping like a monkey over its branches, then I would certainly be found playing carom board, marble, dandi-biyo, two-person volleyball, or some such things in its dense shadow. The sudden appearance of the two words on that banyan’s trunk posed a great puzzle to my yet-to-be-formed mind that morning. I kept staring at those words until my neck got so tired that my head leaned to a side. Presently, there arrived my next-door neighbor in a lungi chewing at the end of a nearly two-meter long sugar-cane.

“Hi Arjun, I see that you have been scanning the board for quite some time! You didn’t like it?” he asked me, standing on the other side of the dirt road under a slender simal tree that rose even higher than the banyan tree. I had no doubt in my mind that he and the second of his three younger brothers had put up the sign board. So, I responded, “Of course, I do. But why did you paint the last name of your just-married younger sister there, instead of your own family name?” 

Although I had read and heard a good deal about the Mahakavi (literally, Grand Poet) in school and outside, it didn’t cross my mind at the time that it was his memory that had been enshrined on the tree-trunk. And most sign-boards I had come across at that raw age had been those appearing on house fronts, e.g. “Sapkota Niwas,” “Malla Sadan,” “Kshetriya Kunja” etc. My neighbor, who is also a distant cousin of mine, gave out a loud laugh and said, “You got it wrong, Arjun! It is the Mahakavi whose last name appears there on the sign-board and that Geeta’s new family has the same last name is merely an accident. I and Harihar (the second brother) have been reading the Mahakavi over the last several months. Having learnt so much from him, we two brothers felt obliged to make this offering on the occasion of the approaching Laxmi Pooja.”

***

I narrate this event from my childhood and the exchange with my cousin with such detailed elaboration because both have been etched in my mind as marking the unprecedented efflorescence of creative and consciousness-raising activities in my part of Chitwan that has come to be known as Kavidanda (literally, the hill of poets) today. The two cousins of mine, Khum Narayan Poudel and Harihar Poudel, have respectively become a highly-accomplished poet and a brilliant storyteller now. In the years subsequent to that incident, these two brothers ganged up with other enthusiastic teenagers of the neighborhood and started a vibrant, though short-lived, library under the auspices of an equally short-lived club named Social-Service Youth Club (SSYC). 

Purna Kanta Koirala, Surya Bhakta Adhikari, Yubraj Bhusal, Amrit Dhungana, Dilli Ram Sapkota, Shiva Prasad Poudel, Lal Prasad Sapkota, Bhuwani Sapkota, Uday Adhikari and others remained the sturdy pillars of SSYC in its early years. These youths did everything from laboring at road- and canal-construction sites to organizing deusi and bhailo activities for fund-raising. They even travelled to plant nurseries located as far as Hetauda, Amlekhgunj and Pathlaiya to bring young plants, which were then sold all over Western Chitwan among farmers and homesteaders. 

The money thus raised was used to buy mostly books from Sajha Prakashan and Ratna Pustak Bhandar. Some Hindi books like those of Prem Chand and SC Chattopadhyaya had also been purchased. However, most of the books that furnished the stock of the SSYC library were of Russian literature in translation that came mostly free of cost from the underground bookstores in Patan and Bhaktapur during the waning years of the Panchayat regime. Part of the money raised from the paltry fee charged for membership was also spent on newspapers like The Gorkhapatra daily and The Rising Nepal, as well as on sporting goods like soccer, volleyball, jump ropes, chess, carom boards etc. SSYC even had an in-house volleyball team that was mentored by Tek Bahadur Kshetri, who led it through many award-winning tournaments held in Chitwan and elsewhere.

During the most vibrant days of SSYC, a veteran social worker in the area Mr. Padam Raj Sapkota offered it room for both its office and library right next to his grocery store in Gulaph Bagh (literally, Rose Garden). As many as 30 members gathered daily in the library premises and engaged themselves in readers’ club, muktak recitation, chanting of the slokas of the Ramayana, chess, carom board, volleyball and other activities. A seventh-grader from a public school started spending hours and days with fictional characters like Tolstoy’s Vronski, and Chekhov’s uncle Vanya as a coming-of-age rite.

On the other side of the street from the grocery store, next to another giant banyan tree, was a raised foundation, with about a foot-tall wall that was topped with RCC (rod, cement and concrete). The foundation was meant for a Durga temple, which was eventually built somewhere else. It was on this foundation that the present author sat down with Mahakavi’s prose collection, Prasiddha Nibandha Sangraha (literally, a collection of famous essays). The book is, indeed, a collection of some world-famous essays from the West, translated by Mahakavi, the most notable to my mind being Charles Lamb’s “Dissertation Upon a Roast Pig,” which Mahakavi translated as “Poleko Pathako Upar Prabandha”.

In the essay, Lamb lampoons academicism, a movement dominant in his time in the areas of scholarship as well as art. It was very common all over Europe for academies, mostly royal academies, to invite and sponsor contributions seeking to explain the ‘origin’ of one or another aspect of human life. The Academy Francais was ahead of all others in sponsoring research works into the origin of language, a topic that it later came to ban in the 1900s because nearly all ‘scholars’ seemed to be working on it alone. Rousseau’s essay on the origin of inequality and Condillac’s essay on the origin of knowledge are two better-known, and still widely read, examples of such undertakings. 

In the “Dissertation Upon a Roast Pig,” Lamb’s persona claims to have got his hands on a Chinese manuscript that apparently explains how roasting of animals like pig and sheep originated in ancient China. The manuscript tells the story of a son and a father, namely Bo-bo and Hoti. The son, Bo-bo, has the habit of playing with fire and one day when the father is away in search of fodder for his pigs, the former sets the cottage on fire that perishes the entire stock of their animals. Out of curiosity as to what might have happened to the piglets, Bo-bo touches one of the piglets’ scorched dead bodies, only to immediately withdraw his burnt hand and insert the fingers into his mouth. Along with his fingers, a chunk of the roast meat that stuck to them also enters his mouth and he gets transfixed by the taste of it. The fierce blows that his father Hoti, who has just arrived and is now mad with anger at what he sees, rains at him appear to him like flies to be swept aside by his other hand. 

Bo-bo, nonetheless, manages to mumble the words “O father, the pig, the pig! do come and taste how nice the burnt pig eats.” On tasting the roasted piglets, the father undergoes a similarly captivating experience, and then starts a sequence of houses being built and put on fire every day. One day a neighbor spies on these father and son and learns about their discovery. He also begins to build houses only to set fire on them every day. Soon the practice becomes widespread all over the region.

***

Barely had I started reading the essay that day, when my friend Dr. Dhakaram Sapkota joined me, Lamb and the Mahakavi. We then took turns to read Lamb’s paragraphs and dialogues coming down the pen of Mahakavi Devkota, who adds so much spice into the diction that the reader can hardly stop the sustained laughter triggered in her for the entire duration of the essay. With each exhilarating remark or paragraph that we read to each other, we also gave a friendly pat on each other’s back, as if we were congratulating ourselves on being able to feast on morsels far more nourishing than those Bo-bo and Hoti had got. 

After I finished this collection, I read Laxmi Nibandha Sangraha (literally, Laxmi’s anthology of essays). Because everybody else seemed to be reading the Russian writers in those days, I then ventured into Fyodor Dostoevsky in translation. Navigating the pages of Crime and Punishment, Idiot, and Brothers Karamazov, translated into Hindi as Aparadh aur Danda, Baudam and Karmazov Bandhu respectively often felt like an unmitigated nightmare that one struggles to escape, only to realize how vain the struggle is.

 The aforementioned SSYC squad, apart from distributing young plants in the community, also itself planted countless trees on the bank of the then newly-built lift-irrigation canal, on the roadside as well as elsewhere. The statement I just made holds true at both literal and metaphorical level, because as those trees have come-of-age and matured – a fact that one can see pretty much everywhere in the region- and yet another generation of trees has emerged with even greater creative energy and output. This new generation includes Arjun Astafal, Sangeet Ayam, Ganesh Sherman, Surendra Astfal, Sirjan Abiral and many others have carried this creative flame further ahead. Mr. LB Chettri, in his latest avatar, hopped the boat that he stood on as a lecturer on Shakespeare until not that long ago to join and lead this new community of creative artists.

If you ever happen to embark on a first visit to the Kavidanda and head West on the Bharatpur-Rampur road, you’ll reach Kalyanpur in no time.  Then you’ll ask the locals for the way to your destination. You will have to ask them even if you have a map or some other navigational device with you, because it has long remained a ritual for first-time visitors to do so. The ritual has been instituted to commemorate the fact that the name Kavidanda itself was brought into use by the people of the low-lying areas like Kalyanpur and Anandapur. 

You’ll then be pointed to the South, where you will see the canal that I mentioned above, with the green trees rising on its banks. Further up is the ascendant Kavidanda, the Hill of the Poets, whose rise I have traced back to the powerful awakening of the SSYC squad.  

[Previously a lecturer at TU and Apex College, Arjun Poudel currently lives and works in Boston, USA.]