Who Has Read Bhanubhakta?
Pratyoush Onta I don't know when I first heard the name of Bhanubhakta, but as a schoolboy I definitely read about him more than once during 1975. My fifth grade Nepali textbook, Mahendramala, contained not one but two chapters about Bhanubhakta. One, presented as a letter by a student to his father, described the celebration of Bhanu Jayanti in his school. The second was a cameo account of Bhanubhakta's life and work. Both of these lessons, of course, mentioned Bhanubhakta's rendering of the Ramayana in colloquial Nepali.
Sometime later I read about how Bhanubhakta's Ramayana, written in Nepali when all the big pundits wrote in Sanskrit, brought about the second unification of the country. The territorial Nepal unified by Prithvinarayan Shah, so that story went, was emotionally unified by Bhanubhakta's Ramayana written in simple Nepali, accessible to all. The same story mentioned that Motiram Bhatta first published Bhanubhakta's Ramayana in the 1880s and had highlighted Bhanubhakta's contribution to the cause of the Nepali language by writing his biography.
In retrospect I see that none of those textbook stories taught me a single thing about how Bhanubhakta's Ramayana had become available to the widely spread population. Nor did they tell me who had actually read it given that levels of literacy were close to zero among large parts of the population. Nor did they teach me how those who could read "read" the Ramayana, or how the experience of reading it has changed over time. In short, those stories taught me nothing about the dissemination or reception of Bhanubhakta's Ramayana, though their claims for its importance depend precisely on widespread dissemination and a homogenous experience of reading.
Twenty years later, after having done some research on the historical making of Bhanubhakta as a national icon (published in the premier issue of Studies in Nepali History and Society) I still do not know the answers to these questions. Reading of the relevant literature showed that Nepali literary historians have paid little attention to such questions. This is a glaring omission since many of them claim that the reading of Bhanubhakta's Ramayana produced the emotional unification of Nepal. Did this happen? There is much to suggest that it did not and that, in fact, trying to create a national sensibility based in language and literature by claiming that it already existed was part of their project of nationalizing Nepali literature.
Nationalizing Literature
In the course of promoting a national Nepali culture, Nepali language and its literature have been nationalized over much of the last century. Nepali language activists in British India first used literature to assert a separate identity for themselves early in this century. Within this project, Bhanubhakta and his Ramayana were rediscovered and made into the original literary icons of the Nepali jati. The influence of this language-based activism seeped into the Nepali literary world from the early 1930s and, through the work of Balkrishna Sama and others, Bhanubhakta was established as the adikavi of Nepali literature. So much effort has gone into the making of ?Bhanubhakta' as a national myth that we know comparatively little about the historical Bhanubhakta as a person.
Similarly much energy has been spent on proclaiming the significance of the reading of Ramayana as a "national" activity that fostered the spirit of the Nepali nation. From the early work of Surya Bikram Gyawali in the 1920s until today, this claim has simply been asserted, without evidence. Yet Ramayana as a carrier of national unity may not have existed outside the imagination of these high priests of Nepali nationalism.
Ramayana's Circulation
Bhanubhakta completed the writing of the satkanda-Ramayana in Nepali between 1841 and 1853. We do not know how and if his handwritten version was reproduced, but Naradev Sharma (biographer of Motiram) has claimed that Motiram first heard the verses of Bhanubhakta's Ramayana being sung in Kathmandu around 1880-81. Motiram then searched for the entire work but found only the Balkanda whose publication he facilitated in 1884 in Banaras. 2000 copies of the Balkanda were published and available accounts suggest that they sold out in a few years.
Before Motiram published Bhanubhakta's entire satkanda Ramayana in 1888 Damaruballav Pokharel and two others did exactly that in 1886. Their 2000-copy edition is largely forgotten today because, unlike Motiram's edition, it was not picked up for reprinting and dissemination. According to literary historian Kamal Dixit, in the preface Pokharel wrote that he was publishing Bhanubhakta's Ramayana in the belief that the text would assist all readers to maintain their dharma. He explained that Bhanubhakta had rendered Ramayana into Nepali so that his countryfolk could attain moksha in a state of knowledge. In Pokharel's reading, there is no hint of Ramayana being the carrier of Nepali national unity. Rather, the significance of the work is religious and Nepali is merely a medium to render it accessible.
Although some aspects of the Banaras-based Nepali language publishing industry in the late 19th century are known, we know very little about how Bhanubhakta's Ramayana was actually sold in Banaras and elsewhere, who the main agents or sellers were, and more importantly where in fact those copies landed up. In his memoirs Parasmani Pradhan recalls that his father, who had worked as an intern in a press in Banaras, actually sold a copy of Bhanubhakta's Ramayana to a Newar in Khurseong. But one Khurseong Newar's purchase hardly begins to illuminate the claimed rapid spread of the Ramayana. If we know so little about its sale and reading in British India, we know even less about its dissemination inside Nepal, a process on which the national unification story squarely rests.
Between the 1880s when this Ramayana was first published in Banaras and the early 1930s when the adoption of Bhanubhakata as a jati icon by Nepali language activists in Darjeeling was well under way how in fact did Nepalis who were literate read the Ramayana? And under what conditions did they, in turn, read the Ramayana to those who were not? What was the life of the Ramayana as a text in this era? We don't know.
A History of Books
I have used Bhanubhakta's Ramayana as an example. If we know so little about how this most famous of Nepali books was disseminated and read over the last century, it's no exaggeration to say we know very little about the history of Nepali books and of their reading. History of books involves, minimally, thinking about the multiple relationships that bind authors with publishers, publishers with printers and other supporting industries, these in turn with shippers and booksellers of all kinds and, finally, with diverse buyers and readers. These elements which describe the space of circulation of a book as a commodity are the basis for a history of books in any era. This is not to say that the relationships connecting these elements will be identical in different times and places. Instead, reasearching these elements will help us to discover the historical particularities of our specific case.
Nepali literary historians have taught us a little about some of these relationships with respect to Bhanubhakta's Ramayana, though much remains to be learned about its circulation. However, when it comes to the next step?elucidating the experience of reading Ramayana?they are silent. Their effort has been directed toward establishing the vamsavali of Nepali literature since the days of Bhanubhakta, not toward asking how either the common person or the pundit read the Ramayana and contemporary texts.
The emotional unification of the Nepali people, recognition of a common identity on the basis of a common experience of reading, is a large historical claim. It is a wonderful story, an inspiring foundation for a nation. But does it have any substance? A history of books and a history of reading that does not pay attention to the central activity that creates meaning?that is, the activity of reading itself?is a history that ignores the reader as agent of history, as the creater of the meaning in her universe. Thus literary historians teach us what they think the meaning of reading Ramayana has been (or should have been) for the Nepali public at large. But their analysis of it as a second unification of Nepal, given what we don't know about the history of reading as an activity, is clearly overstated and misleadng.
An impressive team of literary heavyweights led by Kamal Dixit have been convened to prepare a documentary film on Bhanubhakta. Shouldn't some of their energy be spent on asking how in fact their hero's work has been read over the last hundred years? Do they have any interest in the history of meaning creation (and hence of life) through the act of reading? Or will they simply visually reify the mythical story of the creation of a unified Nepali identity through the spread of Bhanubhakta's Ramayana? The latter, it seems to me, would be yet another instance of obscuring heterogeneous historical experiences in the interest of furthering a nationalist agenda, one that illuminates very little of the social history of the Nepali nation.
(Onta is a historian and an editor of Studies in Nepal History and Society. His dissertation was a history of Nepali nationalism).
