This Book is a Compendium of Women Writers of Nepal (born between 1860-1960 AD), who contributed to literature in the Nepali language. It contains profiles and perspectives of mainly fifty-four leading writers of that time. In the appendix there is a record of another one hundred and fifteen women writers, born in Nepal; of eleven more creative writers born in India and seventeen more, whose works have been found, but are not published. All of these belong to the same period.
Nepali is a comparatively very young language of the SAARC sub-continent, spoken by approximately thirty million (three crore) people. Among these two thirds are residing and working in the country of their birth. One-third are outside their country, working, learning and repatriating to their home land. About fifty lacs of Nepali speaking people, who are of Nepali origin, have taken citizenship of other nations.
Literacy among Nepali speaking people is very low. Nepal, a small country situated in a distant region, in the lap of the Himalayan ranges, is one of the least economically developed countries of the world. During the hundred years, prior to 1950 the country was in sordid isolation under the autocratic rulers, who ruled the country between 1846-1950 AD. They were more concerned with saving their fiefdom from being eaten up by the British rulers, who had colonized the neighbouring sub-continent of India, than in working for the economic development and enlightenment of the people. In a traditionally feudal, and patriarchal society, women were under the absolute domination of men. Some enlightened fathers had started trying to defy the social pressure and had assisted their daughters to get some education. It was only after the great revolution, that is the second world war which ushered in refreshing winds of change throughout the world and specially in Asia and other countries, colonized by the imperial powers, that Nepal also came out of the century long isolation. The old autocratic rule of the Ranas was swept away and various cross currents of thoughts and ideas trickled into this remote state also. Even to prove oneself more liberal than their neighbour, men who had absolutely dominated society so far, started yielding to the rise of woman-power. Women started getting education in girls' schools and also in a few institutions where co-education was started. The influence of British India, where women were more free and had taken leading role in fighting for freedom from the clutches of the British imperialists entered into this neighbouring country. In the field of literature and culture, the people of Nepalese origin, inhabiting the adjacent area of Darjeeling, a district of the state of Bengal in British India, had a more congenial and intense influence on Nepalese society. The open border, the common language, the composite literature of this adjoining area, brought in more liberal ideas and added new and egalitarian trends in the field of literature as well. So by 1950, when the isolation of the country ended and the flood-gates of liberal and revolutionary ideas entered Nepal, the status of women as well as the trends of literary writings, went through a sea change. Out of the 54 women writers whose profiles are compiled in this book, three of them, namely Queen Lalita Tripura Sundari (1793-1831), the loquacious Yoga Maya (1858-1941) and Ambalika Devi, writer of chronicles of Rajput luminaries (1894-1936), wrote before the change that was ushered into Nepal in 1950. About ten of the litterateurs started writing before 1950 and continued to write even after that. The rest, about forty of those in our compendium, started writing only after a democratic form of government took over in Nepal. Many are still living and continuing to write, but their prime contributions span the twentieth century.
While writing on the life and work of the women litterateurs, I felt the need of adding the physical or socio-economic and historical perspectives to the narrative.
Otherwise, I felt, the mere profiling of the life and work of a writer would amount to undermining the psychosomatic structure which is a basic functional connector between the physical and the beyond. The complexity of physical nature, and particularly, the human mind, is so enormous that it is futile to follow a single method for comprehending all the aspects of the world in which we are situated. Therefore it is understandable that those writing on the works of appreciation of literature and aesthetics, approach their subject with certain discernible traits or emphatic assumptions of their work. Some writers are primarily interested in discovering the general rules or law that govern all literary or aesthetic works spread over different genres and categories. They tend to underplay what they call or think the noisy local events of the external world and peculiarities of different languages, genres, litterateurs and historical trends.
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