This summer, there have been three high-profile book launches in Kathmandu. The season kicked off with the release of Manjushree Thapa's Seasons of Flight, followed by Samrat Upadhyay's Buddha's Orphans and Sheeba Shah's Facing my Phantoms. All events were well attended and heavily publicised in the Kathmandu press. A quieter launch, that of 19-year-old Pradeep Swar's Beautiful People, capped off the literary season in mid-July. Readings and creative writing sessions in the English language, if restricted to a fairly small group, are now a feature of the capital's cultural circuit rather than the exclusively expatriate activity of the past. Furthermore, there are rumblings in the air of a literary festival in Kathmandu next year.
Are they long gone, those days when your uncle (hobby: writing) would sidle up to your father at a family gathering, and press on him two copies of his latest literary effort? When English-language literature was the Hardy Boys, then the latest pulp from Stephen King, and eventually Gabriel García Márquez? As the Salman Rushdies and the Vikram Seths burst onto the global scene, the Nepali reader could hardly claim ownership, and homegrown English-language prose fiction was limited to children's books and the aforementioned vanity ventures. The odd novel, such as D B Gurung's Echoes of the Himalayas and P J Karthak's EveryPlace: EveryPerson were anomalies at a time when Nepal was slowly but surely moving into the slipstream of globalisation, but had yet to find its voice on the international literary stage.
Then along came Samrat Upadhyay. With the 2001 publication of his first collection of short stories, Arresting God in Kathmandu, the Indiana-based creative writing professor became the first Nepali writer to be published in the West. Accolades flowed even as some Nepalis feigned horror at his earthy descriptions of small-town love and despair, and he soon became an overnight celebrity in the country he had left at the age of 21. Earlier that year, to a little less fanfare, Manjushree Thapa had published her first novel, The Tutor of History. Local compilations such as Crow and An Other Voice seemed to hint at the talent bubbling below the surface. For young aspiring writers in Nepal, it was as if the floodgates had opened.
The NWEs
It was something of a false dawn, despite the assertions of the increasingly assertive Nepali media and arts scene. Both Thapa and Upadhyay continued to publish, but their success was largely limited to the Subcontinent, Nepal and India in particular. In most of the decade that followed their breakthrough publications, very few other Nepalis writing in English (NWEs) emulated their success. International publishing houses remained fascinated by Indian and other Southasian sources more familiar with English due to their colonial past; Indian publishers were happy to release local editions of globally acclaimed Indian novelists and bestselling local phenomena such as Chetan Bhagat; and Nepali publishers mostly failed to materialise at all, with distributor-retailers such as Pilgrims Publishing dominating the market.