Elision of Victimhood: A Critical Study of Human Rights in Forget Kathmandu, Rato Aakash and Palpasa Café

Abstract

The three narratives-Palpasa Café, Forget Kathmandu, and Rato Aakash- expose the issues of human rights violations. These texts make an attempt towards accusing either the Maoist or the State as the violator of human rights. Because the narrators of each text spend much time in collecting the evidences that support their claim, they are less concerned with true victimhood. Thus the victimhood, understood as the situation of speakability of the victim, is his/her very unspeakability, is denied, misrepresented and elided. Ghanashyam Dhakal’s Rato Aakash presents the State security forces as the evil forces, so does Manjushree Thapa’s Forget Kathmandu. On the contrary, Narayan Wagle’s Palpasa Café others the Maoists. The language of otherness has such overtones which bury under their force the sense of victimhood. Elision of victimhood comes to the fore because narrators of three narratives simply visit the war-affected zones. They unfold the stories recollected on the way, tea table, meetings based on mediated, represented truth. The narratives have been the narratives of accusations and demonizations rather than the narratives of victimhood.