Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Acharya, Pushpa Raj

Titel

The Nation-State of Nepal in Nepali and Anglophone Novels

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This thesis examines a travel account and a set of Nepali and Anglophone novels produced since the mid-nineteenth century to the contemporary times to explicate new perspectives on Nepal as a nation-state. It contends that the novel engages with the Nepali nation-state in two main ways. First, the novel discloses the connections between the people living in an imagined community and the practices of governance. Second, the novels are a key vehicle through which Nepalis produced and circulated knowledge, discourse, understanding, and practices regarding the state. The dissertation primarily investigates Jaṁgabahādurko Belāit Yātrā (Jang Bahadur in Europe), Lil Bahadur Chettri’s Basāim̐ (Mountains Painted with Turmeric), Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala’s Modiāin (The Wife of a Grocer) and Hiṭlar ra Yahudī (Hitler and the Jews), Manjushree Thapa’s The Tutor of History, Samrat Upadhyay’s The Guru of Love, and Narayan Wagle’s Palpasa Café. It asks questions such as what relationship existed between the British Empire, France, and the Nepali state, what the novels reveal about debt, migration, law, and, subjectively, how the novels expose the idea of sovereignty in the Hindu theological traditions, how they lay bare the interactions between desire, democracy, and liberal economy in a developing country, and how political violence exposes the inner workings of the state. My dissertation, by bringing together readings from critical and literary theory, law, political science, area studies, anthropology, sociology, history, and cultural studies, offers a critical methodology to analyze similar processes in other South Asian nation-states, while complementing the existing works in the field. This study contributes to the decolonization of scholarship on South Asian Studies, which is largely dominated by studies on India and Pakistan.