Middle class consciousness in Rabi Thapa’s Nothing to Declare
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Department of English
Abstract
With the application of Mark Lietchy’s Suitably Modern: Making Middle Class Culture in Kathmandu and Out Here in Kathmandu, this research study explores Middle Class Consciousness among youths in Kathmandu in Rabi Thapa’s fictional work Nothing to Declare. In Thapa’s collection of short stories, the characters immensely display the middle class consciousness. Delving in to the historicity and the context of the text that is the twentieth century, the researcher undertakes an examination of the characterization and the events in the present time. Characters like Ashok, Subodh, Dhiraj, Bikram and others are found in the line of modernity and their orientation towards consumption - consumption of foreign culture, goods and so on. For example, Ashok, a youth from the middle class family, is going through the thread ceremony to become a man while dreaming of a passage to America to become modern and upper class. Bearing such issues in mind, Thapa intermingles middle class youths and their modernity with consumerism. This constructive fiction helps us view the middle class youths from new perspective that reveals the true nature of the youths as such in Kathmandu.