Narrative and Symbolic Construction of Nation in BP Koirala’s Sumnima and Narendra Dai
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Central Department of English
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.’