Bairagi Kainla (b. 1939)

In May 1963, an unusual literary journal appeared on the Darjeeling bookstalls. The publication of a new Nepali periodical was not a remarkable event in itself because short-lived magazines and papers had proliferated since the 1950s. This slim periodical, entitled Tesro Ayam (Third Dimension), was of greater significance than most, however, because it represented the first effort by a group of Nepali writers to formulate a coherent theory regarding the nature and function of the literature they produced. Indeed, one might even go so far as to describe this new movement, of which Tesro Ayam was the principal organ, as the first articulation of self-conscious modernism in Nepali literature. Although most Nepali writers aimed to produce literature that conformed with their own conceptions of modernity, none had yet begun to propound a philosophy that would define the attitudes and values of modern Nepali literature.

Tesro Ayam was published and edited by three young writers with common ideals: Bairagi Kainla, Ìshwar Ballabh, and Indra Bahadur Rai. Their contention, set forth in Kainla's editorials and Rai's essays, was that conventional Nepali literature was "two-dimensional," or "flat," and that it had to acquire a "third dimension" if it was to approach life as an indivisible whole to be apprehended objectively. In the editorial statement of the second edition of Tesro Ayam , Kainla criticized the old style of Nepali literature:

The bland sentimentalism (of earlier writers) is not simply drivel; it is also an escape from a sense of responsibility and therefore an escape from the realities of life. In dimensional terms, this kind of writing is "flat" because it lacks a third dimension (depth, and thought or vision) and has no faith in life. Such literature cannot satisfy the needs of the modern intellect. (Quoted in Tanasarma [1977] 1979, 201)

The distinctive features of dimensionalist (ayameli ) literature are most clearly apparent in its poetry. Most of the clichéd allegories, metaphors, and vocabulary of the "old school" were discarded, as was the use of meter. Poets began to borrow heavily from psychological theory and world mythology. Kainla and Rai urged writers to adopt a moral dimension of their own and to embark upon a fresh exploration of their language. This led to genuine originality and innovation, but also on occasions to "literary obscurantism at its worst" (Subedi 1970, 67). Opinions vary with regard to the value of the movement and to the validity of its arguments. Yadu Nath Khanal, for instance, writes that the dimensionalist school "has not gone much further than to suggest that modern sensibility must find a more complex form than traditionally available to express itself fully" and argues that Mohan Koirala has been more successful in this endeavor (Khanal 1977, 245). The overtly intellectual tone of much dimensionalist poetry, exemplified by the eclecticism of its references to obscure myths and its use of abstruse symbolism, means that some works cannot be comprehended fully without extensive recourse to the few commentaries that have been produced (see, for instance, Subedi 1981, 178-188). Several poems have come to be regarded as minor classics, however, and the finest of these were the work of the poet Bairagi Kainla.

Kainla, whose real name is Tilvikram Nembang, is a Limbu who was born in the Panchthar district of eastern Nepal in 1940 and educated across the Indian border in Darjeeling. Very little information is available regarding Kainla's life prior to 1960, and he has published nothing since returning to his home in 1966 after a period of residence in Kathmandu. His appearance on the Nepali literary scene was therefore brief, but his contribution has had a lasting effect. The following comments are restricted to an examination of the three poems presented here in translation.

"The Corpse of a Dream" (Sapnako Las ) appears to have been written some time before the philosophy of third dimensionalism was first formulated, when Kainla's first poems appeared in a collection entitled Flower, Leaf, and Autumn (Phul-Pat-Patjhar ), edited by Ìshwar Ballabh and published around 1960. This is a poem about unrequited love; references to "that love I gave up for mother and father" and to the "ritual of living" that "requires the sacrifice of a life" suggest that the love affair that the poem describes was aborted because of a difference in caste between the lovers. Thus, the poem concludes,

Man must walk on feet of convention
over the corpse of a dream,
trampling life's every morning.

The resentment of social and moral conventions implicit in this early poem is expressed more overtly in "A Drunk Man's Speech to the Street After Midnight" (Mateko Mancheko Bhashan: Madhyaratpachiko Sadaksita ) and "People Shopping at a Weekly Market" (Hat Bharne Manis ), the two most famous poems of the dimensionalist movement. The first of these is an obvious summons to rebel against accepted values and practices. Tanasarma explains that "the drunk man ... is a symbol of the modern progressive intellectual: the freedom he craves is the freedom to build a new life and to establish a new set of values" ([1977] 1979, 201). The narrowing streets clearly represent the constraints and strictures of social (and perhaps political) convention, but although the drunkard cries out against the "cramped and crumbling houses," the "self-defeated men, / tangled together like worms," and even against the history of Nepal and life itself, he does not evince a lack of faith in the future. Thus, the poem ends on a note of optimism:

... look with me for the first time:
as far as we can see, all around,
there is a battleground for victory
and a radiant light for life.

"People Shopping at a Weekly Market" is altogether more abstruse. Kainla often took months to complete a poem, and the unspontaneous and painstaking manner in which he composed, piling up layer upon layer of symbols and meanings, often made his works inaccessible. The central theme of "People Shopping at a Weekly Market" is reasonably clear, however: it concerns the imbecility and materialism of modern humanity, whose members sell "blood at the bloodbank nearby / to pay for rotting potatoes" but remain oblivious to the presence and proximity of death. The response of the poem's speaker is an angry one, a desire to smash through the emptiness of those around him, but he also admits his own collusion in the situation against which he rages. At various points, however, the poem seems to wander off on strange tangents, and its message becomes unclear. The poem's penultimate verse, in which the line "Oh death went empty-handed from the market today" is repeated three times, is surely imitative of Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper).

There is indeed clear evidence in Kainla's poems of the influence of the earlier phenomenon of English modernism, a movement that was also regarded as revolutionary in its time. The main fault of both dimensionalist and modernist poetry is its introversion and density: unlike Bhupi Sherchan, the greatest single influence upon young poets in recent years, Kainla made little effort to speak with simplicity or clarity to his times. The significance of Kainla, and of contemporaries such as

Ìshwar Ballabh, who continues to write today, is that they orchestrated the most overt rejection of previous tradition that Nepali literature has ever experienced.

Most of Bairagi Kainla's poems are collected in Bairagi Kainlaka Kavitaharu (The Poems of Bairagi Kainla, 1974).

The Corpse of a Dream (Sapnako Las)

My love,
a dream should last the whole night long.^[1] My breast is where I sleep at nights,
covered by vest and blouse,
like an old man's cave inside a village
where only the jackal and the fox
call out their evil omens.
Ruthlessly it is beaten
by bundles of office files
which must be revealed to others,
by crises of convention,
the absence of choice.

When he looks at his face,
primordial, unwashed,
in a mirror on a table,
a man has to say to himself—

a dream should last the whole night long,
as long as sleep goes undisturbed.
As soon as you wake from dark oblivion,
at dawn in the temple of the sun,
with flowers offered up by maidens:
these you must pluck yourself.
(Just like today, when I buried
the love I said I had for you
over there in the bank of the field;
that love I gave up for mother and father
I hear has sprung up, a jasmine tree;
so often these days 1 dream
of yellow flowers.)

This life must be lived
less for yourself, more for others.
In history, this great ritual of living
requires the sacrifice of a life.

[1] The speaker in this poem is a woman, who addresses her lover as mero hajur , "my lord." It is not especially unusual for a male Nepali poet to write a female persona poem: see, for instance, Rimal's "A Mother's Dream" and "A Mother's Pain."

Our unfulfilled souls
will frighten us all our lives,
all through each night in our beds,
in the mornings they will weep
tears of blood onto arum leaves:
young doves sacrificed
by soft, soft dreams.

But life is a ritual,
we must be honest with life,
we must live with fists unclenched.
Emptying ash from pillows and quilts,
we find the remains of scattered dreams,
some burned right up, some broken:
the wings of moths
which flocked all night round the lamp.

Watching in silence, compelled,
from a half-veiled window,
as the sun lifts its head,
belching and dipping its hands in blood,
over there, beyond the mountain.

Man must walk on feet of convention
over the corpse of a dream,
trampling life's every morning,
each man a solitary mourner,
each must mourn the corpse of his dream.

When the dream tumbles down,
like a bee's lifeless body into a lake,
cruel darkness of love and compulsion,
as soon as life rises, rubbing its eyes,
Man must bear sorrow on earth.

Man must walk on feet of convention
over the corpse of a dream,
trampling life's every morning.

My love,
a dream should last the whole night long.
(c. 1960; from Kainla 1974)

A Drunk Man's Speech to the Street After Midnight (Mateko Mancheko Bhashan: Madhyaratpachiko Sadaksita)

When I emerge from the wine shop,
long after midnight has passed,
cockerels crow their welcome
from every coop and perch,

flapping their wings in rebellion.
My very breath, drenched in alcohol fumes,
is a great storm in this atmosphere,
this lifelessness, this system.
Grand mansions line the street,
weakness hides in their foundations:
now now now—they will soon collapse!

All my steps are earthquakes today,
volcanoes erupt in each sensation;
how have I lived to such an age
in these cramped and crumbling houses,
too small for a single stride?
I am saddened:
even now they sleep, self-defeated men,
tangled together like worms
in the pestilent houses of the earth,
and do they sleep so late?

Today I am more immense than the world,
my breath is shut in by the ground of this street,
I stamp all over the road.
People say I am drunk—"Keep left"—
people say we should keep to the verge,
but people should walk all over this street,
as many as it can contain,
the police pick up all who keep to the verge,
saying, "This one's drunk, and that one, too!"^[2]

At the head of each bed in the rooms
of sky-kissing mansion and tower,
all through each night they burn:
blue, blue bulbs, the eyes of owls.
Here the owls' eyes watch through the night:
who are they waiting for, who will be ambushed?

Faceless men drag by
on legs of darkness,
all night long they walk this street,
their heads hanging low from their shoulders,
their heads full of letters and papers,
their hearts full of the office clock's hands,
their lives machine parts, soon obsolete.

And so the street is shrunken today:
who steals its corners and verges?

[2] Under the Ranas, Nepali society was rigidly stratified along lines of caste to the extent that a person's caste dictated which side of a city street he or she could walk on. This rule was enforced by police officers in Kathmandu.

Who tears life in chunks from its sides?
Why is the street more narrow each night?
"Tear up this road and widen it!..."
The witless policeman stands on the curb,
prepared to arrest me for these words,
for I am drunk!
But when the wine pervades my heart,
I feel I am full of such vastness,
the street is too narrow for me.

May the engineers hear me,
the leaders, the teachers, the poets,
may each second of history attend
to my speech, broadcast from the pavement
beside the main post office:
Streets!
A man walks upon you,
he is too great for you, he commands you:
crack and split and widen yourselves,
rupture and tear down those buildings
which encroach upon your borders,
further, further with each historic moment,
rend and crack the pavements:
they are like history's naked pages,
inscribed with flattering lineages
of the Kotparva's victors and the ruling family;^[3] split them from head to heart.
We should be allowed to stand here
on the feet of Columbus,
a revolution should walk here,
its head held high.
So I order you: Streets!
Crack and tear yourselves apart,
if potholes appear, I will fill them
with goodwill soaked in wine,
I will cover them with my immensity.
For otherwise I will not fit in,
otherwise, at nine 'o'clock, when it's time for school,
how will the little boy's mother and I
send him to school from this place
if the road cannot hold the sole of one foot?

Oh life, already flat on your back,
constantly trampled by hundreds of boots,
continually tortured by the wheels of cars,

[3] The Kotparva was the massacre of 1846 that is now considered to mark the beginning of Rana rule in Nepal.

oh streets, confined by the mists of inertia,
bounded by signboards and poles,
fragmented and fractured by turnings and bends
—a thousand splinters of the valor
of the universal emperor.

Oh sixty thousand cursed sons of Sagar,^[4] advancing to conquer the world,
driving a horse to sacrifice,
I pour the heavenly Ganga's waters
from the firmament of a bottle,
down over you with the faith of Bhagirath,^[5] onto your foreheads, eyes and chests.
Drink this wine which I pour on the street,
bottle by bottle, drop after drop,
revive and arise, my fathers,
you sixty thousand cursed sons of Sagar!

And now wipe the mist with a Himalayan fist,
from the horizon's gummy eyes,
and look with me for the first time:
as far as we can see, all around,
there is a battleground for victory
and a radiant light for life.
(c. 1963; from Kainla 1974; also included in Sajha Kavita 1967, Adhunik Nepali Kavita 1971, and Nepali Kavita Sangraha [1973] 1988, vol. 2)

People Shopping at a Weekly Market (Hat Bharne Manis)

Naked hills are licked clean
by a locust swarm which hides the sky,
Mikjiri flowers borne by the hills
wilt on the century's breast,
crawled upon, half-burned.
Clumsily flowing, overturning,
in laces and buttonholes,
in the market's bounds,
in a crowd of countless shadows,

[4] According to Hindu mythology, Sagar once ruled over the celebrated kingdom of Ayodhya. One of his two wives bore him 60,000 sons, who outraged the gods by their impious behavior. Sagar therefore engaged in the sacrifice of a horse to assuage the anger of the gods, but the horse escaped and was pursued to the infernal regions by Sagar's sons. Dowson [1879] 1968, 271-272.

[5] Bhagirath was the sage whose devotions brought the celestial Ganga River down from heaven in order to cleanse Sagar's accursed sons. Dowson [1879] 1968, 272.

in mist, the gunsmoke of a great war,
in a storm, their eyes are wheeling.

A void, the beginning
to which life has returned in pieces,
each eye has its own void,
a great lake of emptiness
filling their eyes.

I feel impelled
to smash the lake asunder
at Chobhar, with Manjushri's sword's sharp fingers,^[6] to make flourishing harvests of each fleeing moment,
drenching life with the Bagmati's waters,
raising humanity, wounded and torn,
from its grave (on the third day),
with the land which revives with the sun
... but it is only an impulse.

History drags along
until shirts are torn in its pages,
a map is etched onto bare, bloodied bodies,
signs declaring the fall of Hiroshima,
this drop of blood,
a moment in my hand,
a rock at this bend of Time
by the riverside.

Upon my brow I bear the blood
of the chicken the shaman killed^[7] to ward off the future:
two or three drops from a martyr
(yes, death is an honor indeed).

This is an oasis with one sapling green,
it grew with the sands, and drank
only reflected light,
but it is kicked out without an heir,
free and aimless in Time's dry desert.

Cobwebs strung up to fill window frames,
blown out from their own horizons,
reaching the lintel over the door;
how sadly, sadly they live,

[6] Kathmandu Valley was once filled by a lake. According to the Buddhist Svayambhu Purana, the valley was made habitable by the Bodhisattva Manjushri, who cleaved its rim of hills at Chobhar, to the south of the city, in order to release the Bagmati River.

[7] The word translated here as "shaman" is phaidangba , a tribal priest of the Limbu people of eastern Nepal.

even deliverance is insipid and sad,
this aimless freedom, this lonely freedom,
imprisoned in the pointlessness
of a struggle for derelict hopes,
ah, even deliverance is insipid and sad.

These eyes are raised up to the sky,
they collide with wall after wall,
in disappointment and ignominy
they fail to find the sky,
exhausted they fall to a dark pit of void,
another century of indecision.
And yes I must tear out my heart
with the hand of Prometheus,
a vulture on my shoulder,
deprived of the natural feeling of pain.
Within me in folds of wrinkled skin
there lies interned
a rebellion already suppressed
a rebellion already suppressed
a rebellion already suppressed.

Although I send myself to war
in inner conflict, mere inner conflict,
I make Vesuvius and Bali erupt;
to leaping floods of flame I offer
the parallel lines of harrowing evil
from the maps of life
which cause the fever and giddiness,
the angering dullness of impotence,
in the eyes of these people filling the market,
the brown sea of their eyes.
With a touch of ice they dry up the Nile
in the palm of the hand,
they accumulate time in a clod of being.

This ocean of countless cursed eyes,
I feel impelled to smash it to ripples,
to set fire to flame with fragments of waves,
fire and conflagration!
To offer up life at life's demand,
then once more, to life, to life.

But the guilty are mired in damp shadows
in this small yard, feet bound by compromise,
their eyes poured out into footprints,
their lives emptied out down both sides of New Road,
empty pots lie still here and there,
the market of people held tight in their eyes,

picking a fight, the blows of the Gita,
Arjun's star lit in every eye,
halting the sun for an instant,
on the canvas reversed, at Kurukshetra, in life.^[8]

Attack every valley, uproot from all eyes
the border posts of apathy which exile me,
I lack the courage, I erase the blade
with a layer of rust, I kill the senses,
I grow the mosses of death,
oh such an ordinary death!

The serpent cannot find
the bullets in Gandhi's breast,
the khari tree on the Tundikhel,^[9] the nails in the lanes of Jerusalem,
again it wanders in suicide,
thin at each end, checkered and damp,
disclosing a plot, the death of the ear.

Dodging the eyes of the guardians of faith,
who move to and fro by the main gate with music,
kindling a smile round the closed sight of Buddha,
on the face of a Japanese shrine,
hastening past necks beyond number,
I walk flat out ...

With the black car that almost touched me,
the car that is already far away,
death passed by close to life today,
this life which cannot be bought
with the small change of accident:
death left the market empty-handed today.

These people filling the marketplace,
selling blood at the blood bank nearby
to pay for rotting potatoes,
gathering up pieces of their will to live,
packing their being into a bag of shrouds,
they are quite unaware that death left today,
knowing the price of life.

Oh death went empty-handed from the market today
oh death went empty-handed from the market today
oh death went empty-handed from the market today.

[8] These are references to the famous battle recounted in the Mahabharata. The Bhagavad Gita, one part of the epic, records a sermon given by Lord Krishna to the warrior Arjun on the battlefield at Kurukshetra regarding the nature of dharma, or "duty."

[9] The khari tree marks the site in Kathmandu of the notorious political executions, referred to in many other poems, that took place in 1941.

With the black car that almost touched me,
the car that is already far away,
death passed by close to life today.
(c. 1964; from Kainla 1974; also included in Sajha Kavita 1967 and Adhunik Nepali Kavita 1971)