I spent the last two years as a Fulbright Scholar in the Creative Writing program at San Jose State, California. I was the only brown person in the first two semesters of the fiction workshop. My thesis novel was based on the Nepali Civil War. When I submitted the first chapter for the workshop, most of my classmates — otherwise very well-read people — admitted that they did not know anything about the war or Nepal, for that matter. But that was understandable. Nepal had never been colonized by white people; they were not obligated to remember us. When I learnt the fact, as the only non-colonized brown person in the Postcolonialism class, I joked that it would have been better if we were colonized; having a powerful enemy to blame on is half the therapy.
Jokes aside, the Post Colonialism class was a wonderful introduction to the contextual study of literature from India, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Sri Lanka, China, and Korea, among other colonized nations. The works of writers like Arundhati Roy, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Tsitsi Dangarembga have won critical acclaim on their own, but being braided to the larger narratives of Postcolonialism has given them exposure into college textbooks worldwide and granted longevity that prizes alone cannot. The classroom discussion made me wonder why Nepali literature has yet to receive the global attention all our neighbouring countries are receiving and what can be done to bridge the gap.
About four years ago, I had chanced upon an article by Ajit Baral pondering over the dystopian future of Nepali publishing. At that time, I was working as a Publishing Editor in Publications Nepalaya. Every week, I dove into the slush pile retrieving a few manuscripts I thought were worthy of global readership. And yet, Ajit was right, we did not have an international market and the once robust domestic market was shrinking dramatically.
Ajit’s article introduced me to JN Aton, who published the first book in Nepal, ‘Grammar of the Nepali Language’, in 1820.That year marked the sixty-third year of the East India Company’s arrival and eventual colonization of India, the seventh-largest country in the world by land area. It was a miracle that Nepal, which is about 22 times smaller the size of India, resisted full colonization. This isolation, however, had its consequences. For one, when imperialism gave way to the political awakening of South Asia in the 1940s, India and China already had pervasive rail and road connections that covered significant national and international destinations.
On the other hand, Nepal, a land-locked nation, had a mere 356 km of national road connectivity in the 1950s, with no proper transportation channels to connect with its neighbors. However, this disconnection is more expansive than rails or roads; Nepal has also been equally disconnected from the global literary scenario. For example, it is telling that the DSC prize for South Asian literature, in its ten years of history, has never had a single Nepali author in its shortlists.
Until 1951, Nepal was closed to the world, forbidding foreigners from entering the kingdom. In the age of roving empires, Nepal managed to escape colonization entirely, fermenting a robust, oracular literary ecosystem. Nepal had encapsulated itself during the deforming era of colonial conquest. But this isolation has also deprived our art and culture from travelling beyond our physical borders. Consequently, Nepal has become a distant romantic dream which needs to be humanized more in the global literary scene to arouse interest in its literature.
The way forward is definitely to translate Nepali literature and share it with the world. But before we do that, building the larger contextual narrative on which these works can find firm footing is important. In the Postcolonialism class, I realized that although the East India Company had never physically colonized Nepal, we functioned as the colonial masters’ satellite office. We pandered to their proclamations of “civilization” as any physically colonized state did. But so far, postcolonial studies haven’t focused heavily on these phantom colonies yet.
This is a wonderful opportunity for Nepali academia to conceptualize the notion and relocate Nepali political history on the world map. As a phantom colony, we can offer a new lens to understand the optics and operatives of Southeast Asian colonial history through our folksongs, folk literature, and political movements, which today is poorer for not understanding the complete machinery of imperialism.
Bhushita Vasistha is a writer, Fulbright scholar, poetry researcher and performer with over hundred thousand hours of viewership on YouTube. She is also the first woman editor to lead one of the major publishing houses in Nepal, curating and editing over twenty books. Currently, she is an MFA candidate at San Jose State University and a Reader for the Steinbeck Fellowship.
