Narrative and Symbolic Construction of Nation in BP Koirala’s Sumnima and Narendra Dai

Abstract

This project looks into BP Koirala’s novels Sumnima and Narendra Dai from the perspective of the narration of his vision of nation. Koirala’s concept of nation emphasizes on common spirit and joint effort of people that give rise to the feeling of unity. He foregrounds humanitarian values and backgrounds ethnic, religious supremacy. His notion is close to Benedict Anderson’s and Ernest Renan’s idea of nation since all of them focus on humanitarian ground, emotional connection achieved through either ‘shared history’ or ‘images’ and ‘symbols’, and a sense of collective effort or desire to live together. Koirala, aware of ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity of Nepal, focuses on compromise and new culture or narrative that can incorporate people of diverse background together to raise the sense of collective effort to knit them together in the fabric of nationhood. Homi K. Bhabha’s idea of narrating a nation combining both ‘pedagogical’ or historical and ‘performative’ or working together in present and future dimensions looks similar to Koirala’s view of creation of new unity with respect to historical background. Sumnima begins with ‘pedagogical’ conflict between the Aryan and the Kirat culture resembling cultural combination of Nepalese society. By shattering the Aryan’s sense of ethnic and religious supremacy, by making the voice of humanity, spoken through Sumnima, victorious and ending the novel happily with commitment between the two cultures to go ahead with collective effort, Koirala constructs nation with an attempt to awaken Nepalese people to the significance of coexistence, reconciliation and cultural harmony. Narendra Dai connects Narendra’s comeback from foreign to his wife with the idea of nation. His coming back to home or the ‘imagined community’ where he can share the ‘images’ ‘history’, his readiness to ‘split’ and live the life of ‘joint effort’ with his wife whom he hated reflect the features of nation. At the same time the use of symbols like Nepal, the Koshi river and Holi give the impression that the ‘interior life of the novel’ matches with ‘the exterior life of the reader’s life.’