Mahesh Paudyal

Of late, the diaspora fashion has caught Nepali literary discourse by its throat, but sadly, it is more of a misnomer than an apt signifier. Nepali diasporas do exist, but have largely remained mute. The self-proclaimed ones among the quote-unquote diasporas are those that can organise teleconferencing from New York or Brussels with people in Kathmandu. They are those who can fly all the way from John F Kennedy International Airport in the US, land at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, hire a cab, or afford a premeditated grand reception, and rush to the Hotel Soaltee Crowne Plaza.

The recent discourse about the Nepali diaspora has become entangled in itself for its inability to decipher the liminal space between a diaspora and an emigrant. Any emigrant who moves out of the country for a job, study or dollars, is not a diaspora. World literature borrows the term diaspora from Greek roots. Its etymological meaning is dispersal that came from diaspeirein, meaning disperse. 

In ancient times, during the rule of Alexander the Great, people, especially Jews from the Middle East, would move west, especially into Greece. They would become naturalised in the new lands, but would long for and love their fatherland (not necessarily motherland). Interestingly, two millennia before the inception of Israel, the Jewish diaspora was in existence. This attests to the fact that for someone to become a diaspora, it is necessary to have a fatherland that was left a long time back, and survives merely in the layers of frayed and fragmented memories.

People who move out of their motherland and live elsewhere are emigrants. All emigrants are not diasporas. William Safran, who has a globally attested scholarship on diaspora issues, has set certain conditions for a migrant to be a diaspora: dispersal from a centre to two or more peripheral or foreign regions; retention of collective memory, vision or myth; the belief that full acceptance by the host country is not possible with consequent alienation and insult; regard for the ancestral homeland as the true or ideal home and place of eventual return; commitment to the maintenance or restoration of the homeland to safety and prosperity; and personal or vicarious relation to the homeland in an ethno-communal consciousness. Added to Safran’s criteria are elements of memory and forgetting — faint memories of matters, rituals, languages and almost everything of the fatherland, and having no authorial claim on anything, owing to temporal and spatial remoteness from the roots.

This summarily dismisses the possibility of a diaspora flying back to the fatherland every now and then for birthday parties, wedding ceremonies, visiting a sick nephew or harvesting tea leaves. A true diaspora, as Salman Rushdie says, lives out there in a distant country, creates imaginary homelands and celebrates the anxiety of remembering and forgetting. To Safran’s claims, Frederic Barth in 1976 added that the dispersed diasporas live for generations by forming a separate, unorganised society. Rogers Brooker in 2005 added the diasporas in their new land always love to keep their distance from the mainstream. The magnitude of this distancing can be measured only with the second, third, fourth or subsequent generation of the original emigrants.

Based on this definitional foundation of the diaspora, any discourse on the literature of the Nepali diaspora becomes problematic. The history of emigration of Nepalis towards the west is not quite long; it is hardly half a century old. The earliest movers have written next to nothing. Those who write from abroad are fresh movers. The Nepali diaspora is, therefore, a fact; but its literature is not what people these days are claiming it to be; it is a different, unexplored story, still available for serious research. To release ourselves from a serious theoretical fallacy, we must, shun the habit of counting highly developed countries like the US, South Korea and the UK as seats of Nepali diasporas. In fact, these countries are good targets of job seekers and students. The Nepalis there are emigrants, not diasporas. Where do we find the real Nepali diasporas then?

The real diasporas are the Nepalis in Bhutan, Manipur and Assam in India, Burma, Hong Kong and the UK. Smouldered by the heat of history, crushed by the cruelty of autocratic or ethnic powers, displaced by natural calamities, pressed hard by poverty to migrate for good, most of these people entered Bhutan, northeast India and Burma and lost every possibility of return. Their progeny form the real diasporic Nepali population. In Hong Kong and the UK, the children of the former army men and their relatives make up the population. Singapore, if it holds any Nepali population with military roots, too might be counted. Elsewhere, Nepali diasporas do not exist. The literature of the Nepali diaspora, therefore, should mean literature by these people from such hitherto unexplored regions. 

Researchers, critics and the media must stop being dissuaded by high-five quasi and pseudo diasporic claims. Studies should focus on reading the epics of Bedanidhi Upadhyaya of Bhutan who chronicles the pain of Nepalis displaced from that country in the 1980s. Megharaj Adhikari, Shyam Rai and Lekhnath Pathak must be studied for their verses which bear the real odour of their new home, and the pain of being neither in nor out. Manipur’s Padam Bahadur Rai, Asharani Rai, Devi Prasad Thapa and Goma Devi Sharma must be taken more seriously. One needs to ask whether the people who claim to be brokers of the Nepali diaspora know anything about Alok Gautam or Hem Joshi. They need to take interviews of Bikram Bir Thapa, who is still healthy enough to tell the history of the Nepali diaspora in north-eastern India. A volley of names might prop up; befitting honour should go to Lil Bahadur Chhetry, Naba Sapkota, Durga Upadhyaya and Uttam Pradhan. A discourse on real Nepali diasporic literature should start, and the politics of profit in the name of the Nepali diaspora from wrong angles should stop for good.

Published on: 16 October 2012 | The Kathmandu Post