Contemporary Nepali Poetry: Writing for the Others
Arun Gupto
... among all these national contextualization when a few lines of a poet envisions that vast cultural space called South Asia even in a small room of yours or mine, readings create at least some sense of togetherness. A room in the poem becomes a metaphor to cross national boundaries.
The images of South Asia are not very frequent in Nepali literature of the contemporary times. It seems that our own cultural and artistic issues are too much with us to think about the others. A little of Tagore, some lines of Shamsur Rahman, and a few references to a Pakistani poet are just the contents of the literary conferences and cultural discourse. We have cross-cultural interactions among the South Asian nations: SAARC is always there, embassies are active, cultural institutions interact, but the sense of South Asia is just about political gatherings for treatises and tensions.
Regarding the influence of foreign writers and cultures, their impact on the Nepali writers are obvious, but when it comes to picturing the subject matters of the South Asian interest, Nepali poetry does not have many such allusions. I am not making a judgement over such absences; I am merely stating some contemporary facts. That is why among all these national contextualization when a few lines of a poet envisions that vast cultural space called South Asia even in a small room of yours or mine, readings create at least some sense of togetherness. A room in the poem becomes a metaphor to cross national boundaries. You just need some verses for this sense of belonging, and you realize a kind of thinking in terms of togetherness. Here are the first few lines of a reputed contemporary Nepali poet critic. The title of the poem is "South Asia."
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