If you ask me to name a country where the most practised form of
verbal art is poetry, I would say Nepal. I say this with a penchant for
poetry, because I believe poetry has stayed with us as part of our
shared cultural and pragmatic consciousness longer than anything else.
Fond farewells
Bhanubhakta
Acharya (1814-1866) used poetry to win a release from jail and land
litigation. King Mahendra wrote a non-poem to bid farewell to then prime
minister BP Koirala who had gone to meet him in his sawari camp before
going on to his first prime ministerial visit to India after getting
elected in 1958. The poem is banal but meaningful. It goes like this in
my translation:
“BP, you’ll go now leaving us behind here/You’ll visit
big cities, in the foreign land/You’ll have fun/But we will languish/In
these very rivers, valleys,/the banyan-shaded platforms/And miss
you/Don’t forget us/And we can never forget you either/Tired, when we
will wipe sweats sitting on Chautari/At that moment/I will remember
you.”
Mahendra never met Koirala again as predicted in the poem.
Though Koirala’s party lingers in power with a coalition partner, that
poetic episode leaves an important dent even today when parties
visualise the future of this land on a chequered screen.