Michael Hutt's new biography is a heartbreaking and beautiful book. Heartbreaking because it holds up a mirror to Nepali society, and the image that it reflects back is tragic. Yet the book is beautiful because the image is also true.
The Life of Bhupi Sherchan: Poetry and politics in post-Rana Nepal; Oxford University Press, 2010
By Michael Hutt
So iconic a figure is the poet Bhupi Sherchan that, in Nepal, he is known by first name alone. Quoted liberally at times of national crisis, he is idolised by the left and admired by the right. People can recite stanzas from his classic collection, Ghumne mechmaathi andho manchhe (A blind man on a revolving chair), at will – whether to dismiss the latest unverifiable claims with 'This is a country of hearsay and rumour,' or to decry feebleness with 'I do not want to sleep today/wake me up, wake me up!' or to utter, in despair, 'The history of my country seems wrong to me.' Though Bhupi's best poems were written in and around the 1970s, they seem to capture the tortured spirit of contemporary Nepal.
And yet – so intellectually impoverished is Nepal – his oeuvre is not available in its entirety in Kathmandu's bookshops. Hutt, a London scholar who has worked for years on Nepali literature, points out that Bhupi's corpus is slim to begin with, consisting of one play, Parivartan (Transformation), and three poetry collections, along with a fourth published posthumously. Of these, Hutt can find two only in photocopy form. The secondary sources on Bhupi, too, are limited to two memorial volumes dedicated to him, two small books of literary analysis, a few published interviews, some essays and articles, and one Master's thesis on his work. To research this biography, then, Hutt was forced to rely on interviews with people who knew the poet personally, or with those who knew people who knew Bhupi. Out of their memories he has wrested the details of the poet's life.