Fewa, a nation thing

I was not surprised to see Jahnavi appa in Pokhara. She called me to meet her on the northern bank of Fewa. There is nothing like knowing an academician who is so very exceptionally beautiful. Moreover, she speaks many South Asian languages. Her Urdu is as good as her Bengali. She writes poems in Malayalam and is learning Nepali fast because of her profound knowledge of Hindi. We talked about the beauty of the city and later focused on nationalism and imagination because we both have recently read Gayatri Spivak’s book Nationalism and the imagination.

How does the love of Fewa become a nation thing? You ask something like this in your delineation of Spivak’s idea. I am contextualizing and rephrasing her notions on nation and nationalism. How does the love for this water, a fisherman’s song, a gaine’s music become a nation thing? How does singing dohari or eating gundruk change into the idea of a nation? How does love for a green rice field connect to a nation thing? I asked her.

Before meeting Jahnavi appa, I listened to a musical performance at Lake Side. The song, dance, and music for the tourists seemingly suggested Nepaliness. The same question can be repeated here. How does a song of a region relate to a nation thing?

Jahnavi appa’s critiquing of my borrowed questions (Spivak’s) convinced me because I would have argued in the similar line of thought. But let me put forward how Spivak takes such connections and changes. As long as there is comfort associated with such a song and/or a corner of a field which connect us to the nation, the nation thing conjures up. But, for her, such connections do not always lead to positivity. That means such connections are not consistent in the time of helplessness: When the comfort is taken away, nation thing does not remain positive.

Jahnavi appa said that Spivak’s discourse is relevant in Nepali nation thing too. The rise of federalism is, if not the weakening of a nation, resistance to the totalitarian notion of nationalism. When there is discomfort in people’s lives by the governing mechanism, the idea of a nation becomes less important in the presence of immediate surviving demands. And I add that unless the nation is threatened as a collective whole, the corner of a paddy field or a dohari keep changing easily into a nation thing.

Who cares for the nation when a young boy’s life is in precarious conditions? When the comfort is denied by the governance, the nation thing does not remain positive. The butler of the hotel, where Jahnavi appa stayed, used to be a good folk singer from the higher hills. He told her that he is moving to West Asia (Europe calls it the Middle East) where his old school friend from the Tarai has invited him to work in a five-star hotel. “I do not now feel the same enthusiasm when I sing songs about Begnas lake.”

Thus, the connections between nationalism and imagination can be fragile. Comfort determines imagining that a fisherman’s song in Fewa changes into nationalism. If comfort is denied, nationalism and imagination do not live up positively. A Nepali in a comfort zone, a person like me, a reader like you would not agree to such arguments, Spivak would think, because we do not have experience of the dire needs and their total denial.

After talking long with Jahnavi appa, after a day, drinking coffee with a student who is a teacher now in Pokhara, I put similar arguments without referring him to Spivak and Jahnavi appa. He retorted. Nationalism is a profound sentiment which lives inherently with us whether we are poor or rich. He can claim such connectivity because of many reasons. He may be right so for as the sentiment of nationalism works with him as a construction in his comfort zone.

Like me, he is fed with history, doctrines, songs and literatures, and he is not in a position to imagine severe forms of denial, and hence, thinks being an inherent nationalist. He thus is right from his ideological position, nor is the butler wrong from his position. I would not say that the idea of the teacher falsifies the idea of the butler.

Nation seems to me a fragile, floating, indeterminate and yet emphatic reality as Fewa is. The paradox of fact and fiction, comfort and denial, make strange sense of the contested category called nation.

I pondered over the matter multiple times in between my conversation with Jahnavi appa, the butler, the teacher, and this write-up. I do not judge nationalism as good or bad because it is beyond evaluative comprehension. From its predecessors, like religious communities to monarchical systems, nationalism has survived even the impacts of sub- and trans-nationalist hopes of globalization. Despite its long history of fragility, rigidity, and imagination, it is a category which has to be understood in its contestations. Finally, I would keep on reading Jahnavi appa and Spivak, two of my favorite ladies of immense intellect.

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