How do we discover new countries? In 1950, after two centuries when the kingdom of Nepal kept tight rein on who could and mostly could not cross its border, the doors opened a crack and the world rushed in. Geographers, explorers, aid workers, anthropologists, filmmakers, mountaineers, hippies and art dealers rummaged through the valleys and up the mountainsides as though some vast emporium of the exotic had just announced a fire sale. Toni Hagen was among them, arriving 1950 as part of a sustained Swiss development aid project; he walked the length of the country, filming the people he met and wrestling Nepal’s complex geography into some kind of order. A blank on the map was rapidly filled in.
The opportunity to get to grips with the greatest mountains on earth was equally irresistible. In the following decade all the mountains of Nepal over eight thousand metres were climbed. In the same year as Toni Hagen arrived, the wry and self-deprecating Bill Tilman, whose writing features in this book, joined a team of Americans to become the first Westerners to visit Khumbu and the southern base of Everest. Within three years the mountain was climbed. Nepal became one of the most desirable destinations for the world’s adventurers, a country apparently lost in time, full of arcane spiritual wisdom, near-continuous religious festivals and a people who seemed endlessly hospitable and wholly lacking, it seemed, the cynicism and materialism of the modern world. It was a similar impulse that sent me to Nepal for the first time more than twenty years ago, following on the coat-trains of earlier generations of climbers and explorers.
That rush of discovery was invigorating and transformative but it didn’t come close to unravelling the dense and complex tapestry of Nepali culture and society – or finding out where decades of political oppression and cultural stagnation had left ordinary people. For this kind of work, poets make better explorers. In 1959, the Bombay-born poet Dom Moraes arrived in Kathmandu, still only twenty but already a published poet and the winner of the Hawthornden Prize. He later wrote a book about it, Gone Away. Moraes, drunk half the time and excited by the louche sensuality of the recently deposed Ranas, was not complimentary of the poetry he heard, but on his last day in Kathmandu he took the chance to sit with Nepal’s great poet Lakshmi Prasad Devkota, who was dying of cancer, aged only forty-nine, near his own funeral pyre at the temple of Pashupatinath. I came across Moraes’ book by chance and left it with a desire to read Devkota and much more – and so a fascination with Nepali literature began. Overshadowed by its colossal neighbours, Nepal’s voice often struggles to be heard, but it is a voice that is distinct, often playful, long-suffering, proud, resigned but undoubtedly of its own making.
Devkota was a great liberalising force in Nepali literature, which had previously cleaved between the formal, highly metrical Sanskritised poetry of the elite and that of the oral, folk tradition. Despite his disdain for the colonialising weight of the British Raj, Devkoṭā was an admirer of English Romantic poetry, translating Wordsworth and Coleridge into Nepali and drawing on their guiding spirit for his most popular poem, Muna Madan, written not in an arcane, highly stylised form, but in the jhaure metre and more colloquial lexicon of the Nepali folk tradition. It is a story of separation and loss, of true love and human worth beyond caste or ethnicity, and consequently popular – and still is – with a wider public despite Nepal’s woeful literacy rate in the 1930s. For myself, his later work, Pagal, about his experience of mental illness, is even better and certainly more experimental and challenging.
My discovery of Moraes led to Devkota, Devkota to the work of the English academic Michael Hutt and his book Modern Literary Nepali, which included many of the best Nepali writers from the late twentieth century, particularly Gopal Prasad Rimal and Bhupi Sherchan. The sardonic sense of fun in Sherchan’s work, blended with the tragic, seems to me essentially Nepali. ‘This is a land of uproar and rumour / Where deaf men who must wear hearing-aids / Are judges at musical contests,’ he wrote in the 1960s, ‘and those whose souls are full of stones / are connoisseurs of poetry.’ It’s easy to see why, given Nepal’s protracted political and social agonies, his poetry still resonates today.
Modern readers are doubly blessed, with access not just to translations of famous Nepali works but also to new generations of Nepalis writing in English. Manjushree Thapa’s novel The Tutor of History is a moving exploration of thwarted lives and cynical exploitation of democratic ideals. She is also a formidable journalist and traveller and her non-fiction works are also an essential part of modern literary Nepal. In the last couple of years I’ve been introduced to new Nepali writers, particularly Rabi Thapa and Prawin Adhikari, who have published vital and revealing collections of short stories. They capture seismic social upheavals that were only reinforced by the actual seismic upheavals that captured headlines around the world in April 2015.
It is rewarding also to know that while the literature of exploration and adventure that drew me to Nepal may not have penetrated deeply into the fabric of Nepali culture, the awareness and appreciation of Nepal’s complexity and richness among foreign writers is also there, particularly Thomas Bell’s exploration of his adopted city Kathmandu. I haven’t read anything by an outsider that captures this most exceptional of cities better.
Ultimately, ironically, and I think Bhupi Sherchan would appreciate the joke, discovering another country, one that starts off seeming foreign and exotic to a European sensibility but ends up, in the Nepali phrase, as manpareko jhutta – a favourite pair of shoes, reveals only how little we know of our own country, or else how unfamiliar it can become when we shift perspective a little and look afresh. Dom Moraes, like Devkota, died prematurely, having lost his way after an electrifying start, but finding it again, to some extent, towards the end. One of his later projects was a biography of the Elizabethan traveller Thomas Caryate, who walked to India and whose first-hand knowledge of Indian customs had a deep impact in his native England. Caryate lived in the Somerset village of Odcombe, and it was there that Moraes requested that some of the soil from his grave be sent, the East mulching the west. In the churchyard, carved on a block of Rajasthani stone, is a small memorial – the end of all our exploring.