[Arun Gupto, PhD, is a professor of English, who taught for decades at the Central Department of English Tribhuvan University before taking a break, and has continued to teach at the Institute of Advanced Communication, Education and Research, an institute of post-graduate studies in English, affiliated to Pokhara University. A learned scholar of literary theory and cultural practices, Prof. Gupto has authored several books, the most acclaimed ones being Understanding Literary Theory, Discourses on Literature and Culture, Goddesses of Kathmandu Valley: Grace, Rage, Knowledge, and Recent Writings from South Asia: Theory and Criticism among others. A highly acclaimed scholar and a passionate teacher, Prof. Gupto has written prolifically on post-colonial theory and literature, South Asian cultural experiences, myth and visual culture. Presented herewith is the edited excerpt of a conversation Uday Adhikari of The Gorkha Times had with Prof. Gupto recently.]
Your carefree nature reminds me of Prof. Durga Bhandari, who often got lost in childhood memory and told the stories of his childhood from the western hills of Nepal. He once wrote, “Those days, I was catching the butterflies and Hitler was killing the Jews.” I witnessed you becoming emotional when you talked about your early days in the village of Bahadurganj. How was your childhood in this bordering city?
There was a Fakir who used to walk down the lanes of my village in Kapilabastu. He would be all dressed in black with black scarf wrapped on his head, with a garland of beads, a bag or, I am trying to recall, perhaps a pot of hollowed dry gourd, and bare feet. He would walk and recite in Awadhi language, “Jo bane so banailo, andherawa me kaa karbo” (Cook, prepare whatever you have! What would you do in the darkness?) I was to wonder how India across the border were, a land of mysterious wanderers, vast, sublime, a country of my migrant grand father who had come to Kathmandu from Bengal as a physician during the Rana period and later had moved to the Terai. But now the Fakir is lost, and as I critically compare the past, the country across the border is not the same with mysterious and saintly communion but with a politics of a bullying big brother, panting and puffing on our necks, not with any lyrics but with its linear policies. The wandering Fakir from India has not totally disappeared though, because I listen to Tagore songs, watch Shahrookh Khan movies, and recall my college days in India and the long lost friends like Altaf, Nawab Ali Warsi, Dhruba, Nandalal, Jasmin, and Unes. But the fakir is lost when the Muharram and my childhood mentor, Rahmat’s Tajias – the replica of the tomb Hasan and Husain, the grand sons of prophet Mohammad – are now not bought by Hindu devotees; the fakir is lost when there is no Rahmat’s father who would sing “Hare more Ram aaye etni juniya!” (O, my Ram came at this late hour!).
There was a bullying big brother at my school, a year senior to me. He bullied us during soccer matches; playing bare feet, his kicks on the ball were directed towards us than to the goal post, it would hit us hard at times, then he would come and caress us with a wry smile, demeaning us though Mustakim, Dharmaraj, my brother Tapas and Amit (not Amit, he came late in football field), and I were good dribblers. The Fakir is replaced by the Bully in the border world. This is the very transformation I have gone through. My memory is looped by my critical recalling the past. The past always comes with the presence of looking back. Fakir is lost with my maternal grandmother who had exalted influence on me who would narrate Pearl S Buck’s Good Earth and Tagore’s poem “Upagupta.” She would read everything from a parchment to an epic and inspire both me and my mother to read. She used to visit us in Kapilabastu from Bengal. Parents piled up books and magazines around us. The village postmaster Gopal Shrestha added to our learning. He was a dramatist and a lover of books who opened up a library and named it Gyanodya Pustakalaya (suggestively Library of Knowledge). Some of us read novels with unprecedented pace. Who would finish and the issued book and get another book from the library! I remember I had competition with Dinesh Shrestha, a year senior to me. By grade eight, I had started making a list of how many I had read but then could not continue cataloging. That is why perhaps, my village friends would later claim that I have read a truck load of books. My favorite comic books were Phantom and Mandrake the Magician series of Lee Falk. School geography was my favorite and I could make maps of continents and countries with ease.
Once you jokingly said that you grew up reading multilingual texts in a government school. You had Indian and Nepali teachers, and read Hindi, Nepali and English textbooks. Would you like to revisit your early schooling days, Sir?
The days of ‘near’ stolen kisses, multi-language atmosphere, English days and sports were unforgettable. We grew up speaking and learning many languages. Awadhi, Nepali, Hindi, Bengali (my mother tongue), English, and passively Sanskrit. English courses, or Subjects, as we called them, were very profound in SLC. Five books were prescribed, a Prose anthology, a Poetry anthology, Letters from a Father to his Daughter (the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s letter to Indira Gandhi who later herself became Indian Prime Minister), John Nesfield’s grammar book, and Wonder Tales. In addition, we had to read many other books from our school library, especially books provided by American Center via Peace Corps volunteers who taught us English and sciences. I remember Mr. Peter Sanderson Whitehead from Buffalo who helped us communicate in English. There were Indian English teachers too who were task masters on grammar and translation. We had nothing but to plunge in English language and literature. We had been offered Special Elementary Hindi as an optional course. The headmaster, Mr. Ram Yatan Gupta was a respected teacher who could speak English with confidence with American accent. Our Nepali teacher was Guru ji who was expert in both Nepali and Sanskrit. Suklaji (Kamala Prasad Sukla) was brilliant in Mathematics and Munalal sir (Srivastava) was our hero who taught Biology and took us to the marshes and groves to teach us sciences. Tulsi Ram sir taught us Agriculture.
We played Volleyball, Hockey, Cricket, Soccer, Badminton, Table Tennis, Kabaddi, and Gulli Danda. Athletics was the most significant part of our sports because we had to participate in the District level tournaments. Dube sir taught us wrestling. An Indian Scout teacher kept us on the toes. Sports and academics were so much part of our lives that the High School in the village Bahadurganj was a fantasy place for the neighborhood. The villagers would come to see the sports festivals and inform their peers that they had gone to see the Olympics. All may sound exaggerated descriptions but these were normal life styles for us. Those were my boyhood golden days which shaped our formative years. And who can forget Theatre, which was part of our activities with singing and dancing. The village Post Master Gopal Shrestha composed plays and we played with intensities. I was a handsome boy so I got the roles of the hero (aside: students still consider me handsome.)! I wish Shiva Rijal were there who would have taken the role of “side-hero,” a term popular from Hindi movies. But on a serious note, Shiva is a wonderful drama-critic.
There were two sisters from the hills, the elder was called Badi madam and I had romantic attraction toward her sister who was called Choti madam. They were beautiful and inspirational. My first crush was the younger teacher and she too had some remote affection for me. We had beautiful senior girls and our class mates whom I cannot name because they are now honored grand mothers in some parts of Nepal. I don’t recall but who knows we may have had stolen kisses. I wish I could identify them now because they come out of the memory lanes like friends like fragrances.
Since I was a gentleman, my club was named Saraswati Club. My brother Tapas had a different club named strangely fancifully. My brother was always the antagonist with his naughty and aggressive friends: Dinesh Shrestha, Dipak Shrestha, Amit Gupta (my younger brother) Bhuwan Gorkhali, Jeevan Baniya were the bad (oops!), the bold ones and mine had kinder-hearted Radheshyam Maurya, Mustakeem, Ram Kishor Baniya, Bishal Gupta, and other innocent souls from the tiny villages around. Moulabee shahab, the head of the village Mosque, joined late and could run very fast with folded lungi. Nishar was a gentle boy then (now a retired Mathematics teacher from Tri Chandra College). Kausal was brilliant in Badminton only if he had accepted the invitation to go to Kathmandu; he could smash the shuttle cock so hard that he used to damage the feathers in the initial scores of the game; we had hard time in buying the new ones. I have archived my school days in my memoir Cracks in the Wind which I am trying to publish.
It was a multilingual, multicultural atmosphere from the school to family gatherings. We attended dinner invitations of any religious and caste fold.
You told somewhere that you were nature-boy from the beginning. You enjoyed outside the school more. What drew you towards nature?
My mother who is with me and my mentor Rahmat who has already passed away were the most sublime souls who taught me the impulses from the vernal woods, misty mornings, muddy roads, and blazing summers and their idiosyncratic beauties. Something like what Wordsworth accepts in The Prelude:
‘Twere long to tell
What spring and autumn, what the winter snows,
And what the summer shade, what day and night,
Evening and morning, sleep and waking thought,
From sources inexhaustible, poured forth
To feed the spirit of religious love
In which I walked with Nature.
For me not “to feed the spirit of religious love” if religious love is godly devotion, but for me “to feed” what Rahmat would narrate while walking. Nature and Rahmat fed me with immediate stories and my mother calmly interpreted them. “Bahini does not like to pluck away even a leaf of a tiny plant. When I uproot the wild plants in the garden to plant vegetables, my heart pounds with something like augury of what will happen to these greeneries when I am old.” Mother told me the day after, I remember, it was raining, “Rahmat is childless and he thinks he is all that is around here in the garden and in the vicinity of the village.” He perceives himself as a Peepal tree. One day he told me, “how beautiful it is to let a leaf rest an insect on her bed. Only if I was that leaf. I am the tree.”
I asked him when once Durga Puja and Moharram merged in the calendar, “Are you a Tree?” He looked at me, “I wish I am a tree. I cannot be a Tree even if I try in my dreams. That Peepal has bigger heart to withstand winter blast but I lit fire during the winters. Once a thick branch from the shaded crown snapped out of its trunk, I held my arms which generally reels under pain by a slight injury but I felt no pain. Still I cannot be that Peepal. But Onu, I grow beard because it gives me a bushy look. I walk barefoot. I know all the constellations of the summer sky, Kalapurusha – you Baba told me the name – is my favorite. I fell flat on the road while walking and watching Sitaron ka Jhumka.” (perhaps he meant the constellation called Orion).
Rahmat, as he grew old, gave me flashes of all the natural objects. I saw him a rock while tilting the ground with his spade, I found him a leaf when he rescued a drowning spider, a thunderstorm while raging against domestic violence. I never imagined that how wonderfully representative of human and nature Wordsworth is in his poem, “Resolution and Independence.”
When I gradually learnt that to approach nature is impossible; nature does not exist without human intervention and if it exists we do not know about it. When I gradually learnt that human intervention of physical kinds and mental perspectival modes construct nature, I perhaps did not understand nature because I merely conceptualized it. Rahmat had other visions, not nature as Shelleyan “everlasting universe of things,” but as everyday little narratives. No moral lessons from the woods and rivers like that of Wordsworth, but delight which constantly appears and disappears, nothing eternal but ephemeral which he termed as Shiltenpajaya in his own seemingly nonsense word from no any spoken language I have heard of. For him, nature was not even theological sacred but a gift from an unknown power, from an invisible hand behind all the beauties and ugliness. The gift he always transformed into stories.
When I grew up as a teacher at the universities, I realized that he took spirituality as his personal commitment to god, be alert and respectful to achieve god’s ways to human kind. The walk to the Mecca is important for him to get spiritual attainment by prayer. His spirituality was to promote righteousness through the acts in everyday life. He loved to listen to the Sufi songs. I later understood that it was a significant form of Islamic spirituality.
Rahmat was a vision-seeking being who expressed and tried to comprehend life around beyond physical and material means, through metaphors like meeting the spirits, meeting the melting deity in the pond on the tenth day of Durga puja when the image is immersed into the waters, and digging the graveyards to take the ornaments from the skeleton, all with full respect to the supernatural. I understood from him that the goal of life and how to achieve it is not necessarily driven by biologically instrumentality. I understood from him that spirituality is not always religiously driven. But Rahmat lived under the influence of god; that there is an entity, an energy called the Allah or Shiva for different faiths which is the final goal of human existence. He always believed that one has to live under the influence of God.
But when I talk about spirituality, I have both god and godlessness in mind. Spirituality is not the determinant of religion. Spirituality is the quest for meaning in life either beyond the bodily means or with bodily processes. I had differences with him I previously thought but later I realized that my differences of opinion is growth achieved from his ideas.
He was called a Fakir, a vagabond in spirit, his stories were never more than two minutes. They were sudden expressions of his emotions felt. If Rahmat narrated, my mother acted on what she believed in. Never to kill even an ant, cut a branch, never not to feed a crow, and stop my father to hunt in the foothills of Chure range. In my novelistic memoir, I tell a story of how a hunted doe by my father and his friend was sent back to the jungle.
If nature had something to teach during the upbringing of the three brothers, me, Tapas, and Amit, it did nothing, I believe. If the East wind blows your cheek when you are flying kites and playing gulli-danda, it does nothing but plays with you. If it does, it does only when we reminisce the past and evaluate how our formative years were spent in the countryside. Nature was never a guide but was with us always, not like a teacher instructing us but growing with us with summer mean-nesses and winter hardships, with the dangerous rice fields probably with hidden wolves, the nakedness of rain drops on the village children, Sitaphal or the custard apple to make us work to eat during the summer heat, and the evening windless silence, and the refreshing morning breeze while going to schools.
It seems your family gave much more emphasis on your education. Was the good education a kind of tradition in your family or your parents got inspiration from somewhere? What was your family background?
During the 60s we were far in a distant land in global terms: the great European decades of Sartre and Beauvoir, the troubling times of American involvement in South East Asia, the space race between USA and USSR, the strengthening of the third world countries, the outpouring of the Hippies in South Asia, artistic phenomena like Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, V. S. Naipaul’s A House of Mr. Bishwas, Warhole’s paintings, actors Henry Fonda’s dominance, and also Vaijantimala and Dilip Kumar in our part of the world. My countryside world was not distanced from the globe around. We knew the fights of Mohammand Ali, then Cassius Clay, heard live commentary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, heard running commentaries of our tennis heroes Rod Lever and Virginia Wade. We read Lee Falk’s Phantom comics, and Tarzan stories, Harold Robbins’ Where Love Has Gone and Mills and Boons classics folded in Atlases to hide from parents.
Why such surge in reading and information? My maternal grandmother and mother’s reading and recitation of Tagore and Kazi Nazrool Islam’s poems, the grandmother’s introducing me to Pearl’s S Buck Good Earth, my father’s narratives of history and Jim Corbet’s hunting tales, Gopal Shrestha’s play performances and our acting and many other performances, and reading of Hindi spy novels by Ibne Safi, Om Prakash Sharma, and Colonel Ranjeet. Oh, I remember reading Chandrakanta. We were able to get books of James Hadley Chase and I still have his Double Shuffle. My parents subscribing The Rising Nepal and LIFE magazine of brilliant photographs and U. S. embassy magazine SPAN, and regularly buying Hindustan Times, The Illustrated Weekly of India, Reader’s Digest, and Hindi magazine like Dinman and Sarita. Reading was not just a pastime but part of our daily lives.
I sometimes think about Franz Fanon’s impressions of reading western books, comics and going through the self-humiliating blackness, black as savages, brutes, shivering poor, evil and the whites as heroes and saviors! His Black Skin, White Masks makes you guilty of what you have read from the west, not all that you read, but the dominant whiteness and submissive consumption of what is superior to us. But we had a lot of South Asian materials, the vernacular and had the consuming reading culture of South Asian ideas and facts. I was not a helpless reader of dominant white cultural texts.
I always recall and bask in the time of good teachers like Bishambhar sir of English and also Rudra Naryana Sukla whom we called Angrezi master, Kamala Sukla sir of mathematics, Munnalal Srivastava sir of Biology, and the domineering Head Master of stylish English. There used to be a few teachers from the hills except those teaching Nepali and Sanskrit. One very impressive Nepali sir from the hills. His name what I remember is “Nepali master” (very unfortunate for not recalling his name).
It is the teachers who shape who you become and then the parents who support what the teachers have said and taught, you become an ideal part of cultural beginning. In the triangular relation of you, teacher and parents, school survives. The triangle is the foundation of our culture though the triangle is not everything but outside the triangle there are the details of how the triangle influences the particulars of life. I cherish my time because we were the part of the triangle, the Equilateral triangle, not Acute and Obtuse, but where the sides and vertexs are in perfect harmony, the arrangement of parts which pleases the senses, your mind and heart and your being. I am not talking about the geometric validities of angles but about the harmony in triangularity.
The day when my brother Tapas escaped from the school to go for swimming in the nearby brook, Munnalal sir with two senior students carried him horizontally holding his arms and legs to my mother while he shouting in all directions to showcase the atrocities inflicted by the two sides of the triangle. While carrying him the vertex was shrinking and expanding, a strange visual I still remember. Instead of scolding and punishing my mother gave all of them sweats in our tiny drawing rook. Tapas was surprised by getting the share: the triangle was turning to harmony, the vertexes angulating to 60 degrees. Baba, my father, coming out of the clinic, Tapas realizing something he never told me, Munnalal for being both a teacher and a brother, the senior students healing themselves with the new found modes of punishment to the ill-disciplined, and then mother taking Tapas to task in the evening by asking him to study one hour more while me and my brother Amit hitting the sack early, teasing him. This is what a triangle is for me of the schooling years.
You went to Gorakhpur, the city for higher education after doing SLC. You seem to have spent about two years but the city couldn’t impress you intellectually and you left as soon as you finished Intermediate in Arts (IA) from there for Calcutta. You were very young when you went to Gorakhpur. I wonder what made you feel that the college education was not taking you anywhere? Were you so serious about the goal of education then or the overall environment of the city depressed you? You often say your life got drastically changed when you reached Calcutta for higher education under the guardianship of your grand maternal uncle Prof. Sukumar Sen. It seems you got there what you had been harboring to achieve for long. How was your time in Calcutta? Was that a kind of turning point of your life? What this capital city of Empire of yesteryears changed in you?
You remember these details. I am honored, Uday. When I look back, my days in Gorakhpur were not at all bad, particularly, my graduation at St. Andrews college. I still remember Prof. Khan who taught us Macbeth; he would recite Shakespearean lines like an actor. I was keen in culturally educating myself, not an A performer. I was young and paid more attention to sports like Softball, badminton, and cricket. Before joining St. Andrews, I studied at Mahatma Gandhi Inter college (MG) which was just a place to engage myself to a city from a village in Nepal. St. Andrews was a fashionable intellectual space and MG had political bullies, the student leaders who did not interest me much and hence I liked St. Andrews, my friends like Nawab, Ujjwal, Altaf, Sarfaraj, Yashmin who were wonderful people but just disappeared as I did from them. The second part of my college days from MG to St. Andrews were different.
I was not very serious about education because I loved sports. I played Baseball and Badminton a lot. Calcutta or Kolkata now, was the turning point in my academic career in the mid and late 70s. I met Prof. Sukumar Sen, my father’s maternal uncle, a professor of history. He used to tell me everything about Buddhist history and its ideas. He knew every detail of Tilaurakot to Lumbini. He would narrate about Gandhara and Mathura Buddhas, about those famous 16 large states, the Mahajanapadas, Yogachara and Madhyamik schools. Soon joining French at Calcutta University and Alliance Française opened up the entire literary and intellectual French tradition. I started reading novelists like Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, poets like Alfred de Vigny, observing French impressionist paintings along with the learning French. French took me out into English literary world too. I would read novels as fast as short distance athletes. Gradually I lost the linguistic capacity of French.
Reading was all for me, novel reading was all, and mustard fish curry, especially the Hilsa fish of divine taste, and the sweats like somrasa, celestial ambrosia. Everyone listened to Tagore songs and read Bankim and Sharad. I started reading Bengali novels. I would go to the theatres and jatras. My cousin Leena would never leave me and I think I suggested her not to join the movie world as she was offered roles for being beautiful. Swapanda another cousin, would accompany us from time to time. But either cricket or Roman Roland would be our topic with all our friends. My friends and relative would praise me, “Nepali youths are really very cultured. You manifest yourself differently in a cultured city like Calcutta!” I would be extremely proud for being recognized from a Himalayan country.
Your capturing of minor incident in detail impresses me a lot. Your style of telling stories always gives me a reader’s joy. Now your novel is ready for publication. When did you feel you wanted to be a writer? Was there any inspiration at home or around?
I love to write and one day it came to me that I should write about the people who were inspirational in my childhood. I wrote a diary in poems when I studied in India and had a romantic friendship which ended in remoteness. After my graduation in India, I stayed in my village for a year and played soccer to its utmost sportsmanship. I was returning, walking nine kilometers up to South for Bahadurganj by closing my college life in Gorakhpur. You would take a train to come to Barhni, the Indian railway station opposite Krishnanagar, the Nepali border town. There is a Surahi river almost between Krishnanagar and my village which is almost nine kilometers of walk.
I do not know what came to my mind. I took out my cherished diary and tore the pages and drifted them in the river. Pages after pages floated and disappeared. My daughter Pallabi still feels sad and complains why I did that. I don’t know why but I too regret. I also used to write emotionally charged English and Hindi love letters for my friends; some letters worked and then I gradually thought why to be a ghost writer for ghost readers. The idea of creative writing may have evolved from those love letters and the floating pages in those riverine reflections mirroring my thoughts. I regret the river-mirror reflecting the pages of my youthful mind and hence after that I have not even lost a page of my writings, initially in hard copies and now in my laptop, they are as permanent as the flow of the river. The plastic covered brown diary is lost, the cover is still with me.
I think I can capture the minor incidents in some detail. In the winter afternoon I crossed the river. My black pant was wet up to the knees. I put the leather sandal on the sand and put my bag on the ground. I looked around. No one was there. All was silent except the murmuring of the water. I opened the bag! Very heavy because there were books filled in it! Two of my favorites: George H. Sabine’s A History of Political Theory and A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy were intact and ready to be re-read in my village. The diary was just below those two books. I don’t have Bradley’s now.
I bent on my knees and bent my body close to the water, cold and reflecting. I saw a three to four feet log floating by and I thought I should float the diary in the wake but the log floated away quickly and got stuck in a raised bushy heap of sand, some ten feet away. The log kept on struggling, as if trying to free itself from the bush. The struggle among the heap, the log and the flow made eddy for some ten minutes till the log was stuck. I had forgotten what I was bending for. Hope I had forgotten! I later am famed for my forgetfulness but on that confounded serenity, I didn’t forget to tear the pages and throw them into the waters! Abhi sir (Prof. Abhi Subedi) will understand why that was the germination of our performance called River Stage in the late 90s in Kathmandu.
I performed my memory, very young memory to float, the creations of infatuated narratives, neither cherished not regretted, just the poetic youthfulness. I looked the reflection of my face on the water, pleasant, spectacled, and smiling as if free from the joy of love and loss and going to meet my parents and brothers for a university life soon coming head, a life which among many wonderful gifts will give me love of thousands of students to write voluminous diaries never to be floated away into the waters.
You came to Kathmandu for doing your M.A. I wonder what drew you towards Kathmandu as you were enjoying your best at the university in Calcutta. What sort of differences did you find between universities in Calcutta and Kathmandu?
My grandfather Suresh Chandra Gupta was a physician who came to Kathmandu from Bengal during the time of Mohan Shamsher who was the Prime Minister of the country. I don’t know much about the history but from my father whom once my grandfather told that he didn’t like witnessing the hanging the prisoners as a physician witness to sign death certificate; hence left Kathmandu for the Terai. After my graduation in India, I came to Kathmandu where my brother Tapas was teaching at Saraswati Campus. I joined a Travel agency and impressed the western tourists by my knowledge of Nepali art and history. My friend, more a younger brother, Sunil Shrestha worked in Hotel de l’Annapoorna who would come to me at Continental Travels and persuade me to join M.A. English. When I completed the degree, Tapas told Prof. C. P. Sharma about me who was the assistant campus chief of Saraswati Campus. He referred me to the Principal of Amrit Science Campus Mr. Swambhu Thapa and my teaching career began. I joined Kanya Campus, Lainchaur too and was very popular teacher among the girls.
I had got admission at Central Department of English (CDE) by sheer luck. The then Head of CDE did not accept me for I was late. I was walking back dejected and met Prof. Mohan Lohani in the gallery.
“Yes young man, what’s up?”
I immediately replied, “Wanted to get admission but it is late, it seems!”
“Are you an English graduate?”
“English and French too.”
“French too?” he was pleased, I remember.
He took me to the head and just suggested to take me in. I was admitted and the romance of English days began.
I was rejected, I suppose, because I had French as specialization and English graduate minor. I knew it why I was almost disallowed and later as a faculty retorted the incident aesthetically by writing a play on John Keats trying to get admission at CDE. I also wrote a play in which a God joins CDE studies while Satan obstructs and tempts the man and woman at whose apartment the God stays.
Falling in love was as natural as walking in the evening in Kirtipur chilly winters. How can’t you fall in love when “And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes;”.
Kirtipur had a different dimension than Kolkata. The colonial city with Anglophonic atmosphere in the university was different because Kolkata just had the 70s with Naxal enthusiasm and independence of Bangladesh, and rule of communist party in Bengal but Kirtipur was heralding, gradually though: the advent of lurking mutability. The students from the countryside were never happy with the monarchy which they expressed in poems and tea chats. Leftist conceptualization was not aggressive but pervasive in the minds of the young. The heroes were, to some of my friends, from Boishevik-spirited fictions.
When you joined TU as a lecturer it was the time of theories as theory courses had been recently endorsed and the scarcity of manpower was a kind of challenge and you love saying you had a romance with theories. Would you like to explain how you, Sanjeev Uprety and others shouldered the responsibility of teaching new course faithfully, as entrusted by senior professors who were your gurus and wanted to see the responsibility carefully handled?
I am always fascinated in ideas, the history of ideas. Literary Theory fulfilled my desire. It was early 90s when theory was introduced at CDE. Sanjeev and Sajag were already there when I joined the department. Sajag took interest in Drama, Sanjeev and I were into theory. Birendra (Pandey) soon joined with his interest also in theory.
Professors Shreedhar Lohani and Abhi Subedi entrusted the responsibility of teaching theory. We still remember that they would eavesdrop to know how we taught by standing hiding them outside of the class but we could see them who were not good in hiding their arms just outside the door. We loved how they built their trust in us. We had theory and non-theory badminton matches at Sanjeev’s place. I remember theory group overpowered the non-theorists both in the court and outside. Not arrogance but the victory through poetics so to say.
I used to be enraged if someone talked against Derrida. One day Prof. Shreedhar Lohani gave me a long essay by Noam Chomsky who had critiqued deconstruction. He gave me the copy of the essay. I promised to read it at home. He asked me to read then only and locked me inside a room and told me to read and come out after half an hour. This is how I was theorized to the bones. Once I wrote a paper deconstructing Emerson’s “Nature.” Prof. C. P. Sharma was never convinced as he never is with sweet mischievous smiles on his face. He would just ask questions relentlessly. I was young and I remember that I faltered by his persistent logic.
But we had massive theoretical impact on the students which undid some of the teachers who were not interested in theory, specially some of my friends. A surge in theory literacy engulfed scholarship from Pokhara, Dharan, to Biratnagar. With humility, I accept that we were good teachers. Soon theory team followed, our students, Puspa Damai, Nagendra Bhattarai, Anirudra Thapa, Ishwari Pandey, Navarj Chaulagain, Bishnu Sapkota, and much later Pushpa Acharya, and yet later Bhushan Aryal, Bibhushana Paudel, Ujjwal Prasai, Tara Adhikari, and Suman Mandal. They are exceptionally good scholars and most of them are in the U.S. now. My daughter Pallabi is outside the Nepali English fold but she is of the same lot. Sangita Rayamajhi never was into theory but she took Gender and Sexuality as her academic domain. My colleagues like Gita Khadka, Amar Raj Joshi, Anand Sharma, and Anita Dhungel remained wonderful teachers of literary studies.
Theory or not theory, it was the wonderful phase in both CDE and IACER. In the nineties, J Hillis Miller, Fredric Jameson, and Richard Rorty visited CDE. And at IACER, our interaction with Gayatri Spivak was tensed and energetic, unforgettable: she visited as almost for three to four years.
I never moved out of theory. If I were not a theorist, I would never have written Goddesses of Kathmandu Valley: Grace, Rage, Knowledge. I am not at all a religious person in terms with devotion. My interest in myth, art and religion is theoretical and aesthetic. Some of my students and acquaintances wish me by sending messenger and WhatsApp images of gods and goddesses on festive occasions but I never engage in such communications. Religion is institutionally dogmatic to me. I take religious as an idea which needs to be critiqued and constantly questioned. It is as good a discourse as it has ills in it, like many grand narratives.
I am a university person and it is due to my theoretical understanding I think university discourse see god in devil and devil in god. I see concepts in double binds, always antithetical, a mode of thinking grew in me by reading thinkers like Plato, Foucault, Derrida, Spivak and Bhabha. Theory makes you hesitate in making claims.
Theory has given me another gift, the gift of understanding the myriad nuances of culture. I later took to documentaries. My visual experts like Salil Subedi and Renuka Khatiwada know my conceptualizing visuality and they help me by their understanding to capture moving and still images. Nagendra Bhattarai once told me years ago, “Why do they come to university if they do not have theory.” He is somewhere there in America but I could never trace him, even Dhurba Karki could not trace him, Nagendra’s buddy and my most dear student, now professor. One day playing Table Tennis at IACER, a student told my student Renuka that he is not a feminist. Renuka instantly retorted, “if you are a good human being, you don’t have to claim against feminism.” These are the little details of what theory is. Komal Phuyal once told me in Chitwan that theoretical awareness makes him a better teacher to develop perspectives. No teaching if there are no perspectives.
Now what about my extrasensory perspective! Perspectives are sensory though. Read it lightly!
I am famed for forgetfulness but after starting learning the violin, I have lost my gift of forgetfulness. I have forgotten canonically and stamped my identity of forgetfulness. I once called Shreedhar sir to pick him up for Kirtipur from Maitidevi. I kicked my motorbike from IACER old Baneshwor and rushed out to pick him up. The time to reach to Maitidevi is around 5 to 7 minutes. It was enough for me act as I am known for in English academic community. I went past him who was waiting for me at Maitidevi footpath. I just forgot that I had called him to give him a ride. He waved his hand to stop me, I waved someone back, imagining that one of my fan-students had waved me Namaste. He came two hours late to CDE taking a public bus because he had already missed the CEDA bus for professors and teachers. He looked at me seriously and just scolded me, “Phataha!” Phataha meaning something like unreliable, liar. You dare not forget Shreedhar sir, it is morally and academically a crime. But I dared and hence the canonization of my forgetfulness.
You have been in search of rich cultural history of Kathmandu valley for long and your book The Goddess of Kathmandu Valley: Grace, Rage, Knowledge confirms it. Long back, I read your small book on Parijat’s novel Siris ko Phool; it was a book of literary criticism. Recently you edited a book Recent Writings from South Asia: Theory and Criticism published by Routledge and now a novel is ready and two more books on theories are in the pipe line. So many varieties and sometime I can’t guess what will be the next. Please tell us about your writerly life. What is the energy that drives you so obsessively?
Cultural history of my village Bahadurganj, Kapilabastu is as dear to me as Kathmandu. I have written about the characters I lived with in the village, and Kathmandu has inspired me as a culture with thousands of years of tradition of thought and praxis. Ancient cities are loaded with thoughts, specially their epistemic tradition. The art of the valley is the epitome of South Asian culture at large. The city is rich in culture is an understatement. Richness is a vague term and is a cliché. All cultures have their varieties of richness. What is epistemic is what interests me. I have captured the tradition of thought in my forthcoming book The Seasons of the Divine which is an illustrated book with Renuka’s photographs. It is soon to be published. ‘Divine’ not in a devotional sense but in terms with how conceptualizing divinities in rituals and art is connecting nature, supernatural and human together. The similar critical and creative tradition is captured by our research team who are engaged in working on an anthology Art of the Lake: Spatiality, Textuality, and Sexuality. The team is exceptionally intelligently hardworking. I feel that writing is a multimedia collaboration which is what this book is about.
Before writing books, most of the time, I make documentary with my team and then write the book or compile anthology. My research team has made two documentaries with me, Art of the Lake, Art and Culture on Kathmandu. We walk a lot and observe the valley and the strength to write comes out of walking. Renuka and I are making Anger and the Mahatma nowadays which we wish to complete before she leaves for her doctoral studies. Salil will be working with me I suppose though he is very busy in the performing arts. Once I told Abhi sir how I understand this boy, in terms with what myth for Joseph Campbell is, the inner reaches of outer reality. The capacity to let the external worldly harmonies affect you for becoming a beautiful human being. I have seen these connectivities in these people. Pushpa Acharya is similar in spirit with whom I always seek to work together and cannot because his busy academic life in Canada. We are working out to finalize another documentary.
Documentary making is an aesthetic venture and you constantly learn and then you are encouraged to write. Writing comes out of a wide variety of experiences like being with your students, walking and spending time with them, exploring more of the city, then reading books. Such statements look simple, walking with your students and reading and sharing! My life is essentially my time in the class and outside. This is very important for me. I have been fortunate to find wonderful students who walk and share ideas with me. My writing is the product of the class and the walks outside the class. They are the muses.
The family is important who share ideas with you. Like my wife and daughter, the wonderful parents and also grand parents. I read out my writing to my wife Soma and daughter Pallabi. They are my sharpest critics and never stop short of commenting my weaknesses. My daughter tells how ready I am to listen to them. My wife has a literary background despite being a science graduate (I mean a post-graduate) as her academic background.
And then two of my teachers, Prof. Shreedhar Lohani and Prof. Abhi Subedi. They are the two souls of wonderful thought. They have been my constant companions. Abhi sir comes to me almost every Saturdays for tea made exceptionally well by Soma, he praises. Just recently we read Shelly and his vegetarian anarchism, on Tagore and his eternally hope for humanity, Sir’s collection, Chasing Dreams and our staging the poem in a river, Kaiser Haq’s conceit in his poems, Manzoorul Islam’s scholarly thoughts (both are academics from Bangladesh). We also talk about cricket and postcolonialism, and sir’s half-Hippie life.
Once a colleague of my, senior to me complained Shreedhar sir that he talked about philosophy and art only with me. Why not with him and others? Sir responded smilingly, Arun prepares background by short queries and comments and I get excited to respond to him. How can I talk philosophy to you without any muse-mizing (not his word though but his implications). Prof. Gayatri Spivak wrote to me once after returning from Kathmandu, from Heathrow airport, Shreedhar is like my teacher from Presidency College who spoke brilliantly, Arun, never leave him. Sir once told to his students and all the students are loving to him because they love and care but Arun is the one (there may be many) whom I remember in my dreams and when I think about art and philosophy, I remember him. Abhi sir says that I am a devotes of Theory-devi. Arun folds his hands in space and ideas come to him.
How can you not write when you have such culture around you! When you have students, the family, and teachers. And for sure, some wonderful friends whom I should not list but should mention, like Sajag Rana, Sanjeev Upreti, and Sangita Rayamajhi.
Once you told me how you were spellbound listening to Shreedhar Sir’s explanation about the wooden images of deities inside the shrine in Puri. Could you please elaborate?
I have been spellbound listening to him many a times. From Richard Rorty, Fredric Jameson, Gayatri Spivak to Manzoorul Islam, all have immense respect about his scholarship. Rorty passed away in 2007. When he was visiting Nepal, I had interviewed him about postmodernism and pragmatics. During a short break, he told me, “Talk to Shreedhar too so that you can be clear about ideas.”
You must be very lucky to find such a teacher. Something like old mountains, silent and source of “unaging intellect,” (Yeats uses the phrase for art) something like whom Shelley praises, the Mont Blanc, the poem of similar name.
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings . . .
The source of such profundity is gloomy at times, difficult to deal with. Sir is never satisfied because any mediocrity is rejected.
I once tried to document his ideas by making a conversational documentary with him. “No camera,” he threatened. “I speak with you but not with gadgets.” Then this comments on sir: “There are few dialogists in South Asia. There may be two or three brilliant minds you may find in the ghats of Banaras sitting in front of fire. One is fortunately there in Kathmandu who hangs out with you all. He rarely writes but speaks brilliantly,” Manzoor-da (Prof Sayed Manzoorul Islam from Bangladesh) once told in Pokhara. Plato writes something like this in his Seventh Letter, “anyone who is seriously studying high matters will be the last to write about them and thus expose his thought to the envy and criticism of men.” Still for me writing is not a degraded form of expression but I know speaking is a higher form of deliberation, speaking of Spivakian kind, of Shreedhar sir’s interpretative brilliance, of Manzoor-da’s and Abhi sir’s conceits. Writing can steal such brilliance unless you are very careful, really careful. Sir has certainly written, we all know, but that was necessary for academics. I am not talking about necessity but about the essence of serious subject matters with the immediacy of thought, speaking as the living presence of thought as Socrates says.
I once complained, “Sir, Sai baba calls himself a god.” “What is your problem?” He asked. You teach the mechanics of making hypothesis. Scientific methods begin with assumptions. Let us assume that A is equal to B, or let us assume that the stone equals to Shiva. Seeking god in you is an assumption. What is your problem?”.
Once Shreedhar sir was talking to Prof. Steven Jervis and I was sitting with them over some cups of coffee in Kathmandu. The topic was ‘value’. Value is something good, Jervis proposed. Sir retorted, “Value is neither good nor bad.” Prof Jervis had his strong arguments. The conversation was long and it was years ago, decades ago. I still remember while dropping Sir on my motorbike, “How can value be neither good nor bad?” “Padha na” (just study, read). Years later, I recall his argument when Socrates asks, “Is justice just?” The dialectics follows in Plato’s Republic.
Let me quote that I wrote in the “Preface” of my book Goddesses of Kathmandu Valley: Grace, Rage, Knowledge:
Prof. Lohani and I were visiting Bengal and Orissa in 2000. We went to Puri from Kolkata. In Puri I was not keen to go inside Jagannath temple because of the crowd and the compelling puja inside. He convinced me to go. I did not have a comfortable time inside, but ‘sir’ (as we all call our teachers ‘sir’ in South Asian schools and colleges) was patient enough to follow all the rituals the devotee generally performs. We returned to the hotel and in the very early morning, next day, at around 6 a.m. (which I call an unearthly hour), he called me. He was willing to visit the shrine again. I said it was just impossible for me to go there yet again. He forced me to go. I was ignorantly unwilling. The temple surrounding was calmer and the shrine was less crowded.We could see the wooden images of Jagannath, Balbhadra and Subhadra sculptured as puppets. He took me to the right corner of the shrine and told me how the artist has transformed the supreme puppeteer into puppets. He spoke brilliantly for almost half an hour, which I do not remember much except the essence of the conversation. I remember he asked me: who is great, the supreme or the artist who dares to change the gods into puppets? I gave him two answers, one to him and said the artist evidently; and the other to me silently, and said the interpreter.I too am a good conceited conversationalist and humorist. Not like Abhi sir though! He is brilliant. Decades ago during a workshop in Pokhara all the English teachers were in attendance. There was a young teacher asked me during the lunch break, why is it that Shreedhar sir does not smoke? (Sir used to smoke and had left). I puffed the smoke out and told him casually that I do not know why. Sir was at some distance talking to his students. He again asked the next day. It is good that he has left, I explained. He again asked the third day with utter surprise, as usual. I was a bit irritated by his questions. I finally told him, “Mero agadi khanu hunna (He does not smoke in front of me!)” He never asked me again.
Sir never liked my plantation in my bike, nor my wife Soma did. Sanjeev had plans to pet a donkey but Archana (Sanjeev is her husband) had vehemently disallowed him. Sanjeev even wanted to give him the title Uprety. It was too much for the dear wives. I had put some flowers by discarding the upper cap of the side box. But by the time it reached Kirtipur from Gangabu (we lived at Abhi sir’s residence, in the ground floor) the flowers were blown away as I used to ride with my youthful velocity. Sangita (Rayamajhi who had a Maruti Gypsy) once told me that I passed by her like a hero in the Ring Road. But the flowers used to be gone leaving the hero alone. Salil (Abhi sir’s elder son) fixed the problem. He made it a functional mobile garden. He put fertile soil and asked me to let the soil settle by not riding my bike for a couple of days. He also left some earthworms. He is an ecologist up to his bones. Then he suggested to plant wild tea plants. We did. Abhi sir once had a flat tire in his bike and he had to go to the Japanese Embassy to pick his visa. He was pressed with time and came down and looked at my plantation-bike. He hesitatingly bravely borrowed my bike. When he returned, he was overjoyed, “Ma mukta bhayen! (I am just liberated Arun!”
Sir never liked such craziness except Abhi sir and Sanjeev. May God give them more strength when they are old! Pallabi was small and was always amused. Soma had left being my companion on the bike and had conspiratorial plans. Sajag (Rana) wanted to write a piece in the Kathmandu Post. He never did. May have been the part of conspiracy by changing side. It then so happened that Shreedhar sir came to our place in Gangabu. “Abhi, not good, this is not good. These guys are respected teachers in the English academia. People will think them crazy.” He then took out the precious soil and stones from the box and started dispersing them in the garden. Soma helped him; she was encouraged and overjoyed with confidence. I was sad like as a summer rose burnt in the hot sun. Abhi sir was looking helplessly toward me. The creation was gone. How could I teach theory now? Sanjeev heard it and smiled sadly. Bindu didi (Abhi sir is her husband) smiled, “Natak jastai cha, ghar dekhi stage samma. Tyasai le ta Angrezi padhne bhid hunchha. Department Heads ra unka bidyarthi haru sabi natak ka patra! Ramrai kura ho!” (It all looks like a play, from home to the stage. That is why English department is crowded. Department Heads and their students are the part of play! Good for all!)
I still wonder why Sajag was in the enemy camp. I can understand Archana’s joy. May God forgive them for their follies!
My plantation bike was cheered by a cow once. I had gone to New Road and had parked the machine-garden in front of Bishal Nagar. Soma had asked me to buy some samosa and sweets from the famously known Tiptop sweet shop. When I was returning, I saw a cow was almost ready to chew the plants, I shouted and forbade the holy mother, “It will not fill even the tiny part of your stomach. Go away dear!” She looked at me with confusion and walked away toward Indrachowk.
Fast riders would overtake me in the Kathmandu streets and then slow their bike and look at the greenery in mobility and laugh and ride away. My dating with the bike went on for around three months before Sir and Soma’s assault on my ecological sanity.
We may end this conversation with you experiences in the US.
Prof. Marilyn Callander was one of the academics who exposed me to wonderful American experience. Drew University in New Jersey where I completed one more masters matured me while I was self contained and happy till I was here. Leaving Soma and Pallabi in Kathmandu was painful despite my parent’s supporting presence around her, in Bahadurganj. During the semester break I was invited to Chicago by Soma’s maternal aunt. I stayed there for a week. She gave me some wonderful collection of Rabindrosangeet and I remember Cat Stevens’ song I used to listen every night before going to sleep.
I sit beside the dark
Beneath the mire
Cold gray dusty day
The mornin' lake
Drinks up the sky
Katmandu, I'll soon be seein' you
And your strange bewilderin' time
Will hold me downTagore’s was to be too saddening in the winter nights of freezing cold outside: “When world snatches away the heart/And when the songs do not sprout . . .” It was very sad initial months and suddenly one day I was taking lunch in the cafeteria, alone. A colleague came to me and asked whether I would like to join their group. It was Heather Stuart from my class sitting with her friends, Susan, Alison, Liana, Joy at a distance. The friendship began; Marilyn once told me that I got into the very core of American life. I returned to Nepal during a long break and when I went back to Drew, Heather told me, “A wonderful person has joined the department.” She introduced me to Philip Chase. A brief but short narrative of immense friendship continued till I returned after the completion of the degree. Philip came to CDE as an exchange scholar. He fell in love with Rama Lohani who was my student at the department. They now are settled in the US and my friendship with them is permanent. They have two beautiful daughters, Rohana and Reshma.
My Drew days were as intense academically as it was culturally. I was exposed to western classical music by Heather and Philip. I still listen to Tagore or Western classicals whenever I am writing, particularly in the nights. Heather tried to instruct me with notations which I could never understand till I started learning the violin first instructed by Pallabi and then in the recent years by my wonderful teacher Yogesh Dogria.
My interest in Nepali and South Asian art turned into writing something substantial and making documentaries too. One of my friends at Drew from Singapore asked me how can we worship so many gods and goddesses. I argued if there is one why not more than one deity, hundreds and thousands. My further proposition was something which gave me ideas to write my goddess book. I told him something like this: “Imagine about those ancient people identifying myriads of characteristics in nature and around and giving them names and venerating them. Andrew, could you walk outside in the lawn and characterize some element and provide them some representative names to identify them? Just three or five names.” My friends were silent. “Just two name or even one.” Silence because my proposition was symbolically strong. “We name streets, human beings, eras, houses and what is our problem when we have the mytho-poetic imagination to name millions of features of nature.” Andrew met me after some days and told me that he is trying to be a devotee of Kali too. Not un-Christianizing himself but just respecting other remote cultures of the past. He was trying to be a pastor which he did I suppose.
I did not like the documentary on Nepal which one of my seniors from Drew showed our group out of respect for the Himalayan culture. The documentary was on Nepali art and culture and it began with a bizarre scene: a dog trying to follow a farmer carrying a load of meat in his kharpan and then the camera angling the lens and zooming in on the pinnacle of Maitidevi temple. It was the very museumization I talk to my students, a form of colonizaing ideology. Showing art and foregrounding poverty! I don’t mind if you are comparing poverty and art as contrasting cultural features of a country. That was not at all the intension of the director. The film was on Nepali art but scattered more with utter unartistic scenes. I was not happy sitting with my friends. I felt a kind of embarrassment. I later told Shreedhar sir about making documentaries on Nepali art focusing solely on the magnificence of epistemology and performances, pauva paintings and sculptures, music and dance. Two of my works as I have mentioned before are Art of the Lake (the first in the series) and Art of the Lake II: Art and City (the second) aim to capture the art and the episteme behind.
The U. S. university taught me a lot. Experiences are teachers. I was returning and my friends and I were in the most sorrowful mood. They had come to bid me farewell at LaGuardia, NY airport. One of my friends hugged me and told, she was crying, “Arun, you are a good person, a wonderful soul but the unfortunate thing is that we will not meet in the same heaven.” I smiled at her thinking about the loss but Philip retorted, “The heaven will be a boring place with all the Christian around.” I would not like a Hindu heaven if there is one. There are none for me. Heaven and hell are constructs of our critical and creative minds and nothing more. They are beautiful, they are threatening, they are imaginations and very creative, and nothing more in terms with facts.
In William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” an angel comes to the poet and takes him to a tour of hell:
By degrees we beheld the infinite abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolved vast spiders, crawling after their prey, which flew, or rather swum, in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption; and the air was full of them, and seemed composed of them. These are devils, and are called powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was mym eternal lot. He said: “Between the black and white spiders.”It is an abyss, has deep dark caverns, “a cataract of blood mixed with fire,” and the place is of unimaginable proportions. The poet continues:
My friend the Angel climbed up from his station into the mill. I remained alone, and then this appearance was no more, but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight, hearing a harper who sung to the harp; and his theme was: “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”The angel appeared again:But I arose, and sought for the mill, and there I found my Angel, who, surprised, asked me how I escaped. I answered: “All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics; for when you ran away, I found myself on a bank by moonlight, hearing a harper. But now we have seen my eternal lot, shall I show you yours?”“Owing to your metaphysics . . .” The construct, the knowledge which can weave heaven and hell. This is what university is for me and my friends and art, my teachers and family, my students. Our metaphysics is our construct. The best place to discourse such things is university.