BP Koirala (विश्वेश्वरप्रसाद कोइराला)विश्वेश्वरप्रसाद कोइराला

The man and the books

Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala (Viśveśvaraprasāda Koirālā / विश्वेश्वरप्रसाद कोइराला), universally known by the initials BP, was a towering intellect of South Asian modernity. While world history remembers him as the charismatic champion of democratic socialism who founded the Nepali Congress and served as Nepal's first democratically elected Prime Minister in 1959, the annals of literature revere him as the undisputed master of psychological realism in the Nepali novel and short story.

Born in 1914 CE (1971 BS) in political exile in Banaras, India, BP was schooled in both the radical anti-colonial movements of British India and the avant-garde European literature of Freud, Lawrence, and Gide. Unlike many contemporaries who weaponized literature for programmatic political propaganda, BP fiercely guarded the sovereignty of his artistic interior, famously declaring: "In politics I am a socialist; in literature I am an anarchist." Literature, for BP, was not a servant of state policy, but a fearless probe into the hidden undercurrents of the human psyche—its repressed libido, existential dread, moral contradictions, and spiritual hunger.

In his 1949 story collection Doshi Chashma ("The Faulty Glasses"), BP created a psychological masterpiece dissecting how political sycophancy and fear under the Rana regime warp an administrator's perception of reality. Later, during eight harrowing years of political imprisonment inside Sundarijal Military Jail following King Mahendra's 1960 royal coup, BP authored a succession of extraordinary novels. His 1969 masterpiece Sumnima staged a profound somatic and philosophical clash between an austere Aryan Vedic youth and a Kirat tribal maiden, examining the tension between spiritual asceticism and the irrepressible claims of physical life.

A life that keeps walking into the books

His father was Krishna Prasad Koirala (कोइराला), a man who followed Gandhi, and the boy grew up in Banaras rather than in a house in Nepal. Until he was fourteen he went to a school his father had set up. After that he went to Harishchandra School in the city. He started writing in the ninth grade. In 1930 the British charged him and his brother Matrika with ties to people they called terrorists. The brothers were held for three months and then let go. His father sent him to Scottish Church College in Calcutta. He left. He came back to Banaras. In 1932 he finished the intermediate exams. His father sent him to Calcutta again. He left again. In 1934 he took a bachelor's degree in economics and politics from Banaras Hindu University. In 1937 he took a law degree from the University of Calcutta and practiced for some years in Darjeeling.

While he was still a student he joined the Indian National Congress, in 1934. During the Second World War the British interned him at Dhanbad for two years, 1942 to 1944. When he came out, Indian independence was close, and he turned the same energy toward Nepal. In 1947 he founded the socialist Nepali (नेपाली) National Congress in India. In 1950 that party became the Nepali (नेपाली) Congress. On 9 March 1947 he crossed into Nepal to help his brother Girija start the strike at the jute mill in Biratnagar. He was arrested with Girija and four other leaders. The prisoners were walked to Kathmandu. The walk took twenty-one days, and it was slow on purpose. Villages along the road saw them. That walk did as much teaching as a speech. In Kathmandu they were held in a bungalow. A hunger strike of twenty-seven days, protests, and a request from Gandhi brought their release in August 1947.

He went back to India and looked for a way to bring the Rana (राणा) government down. He led the revolution of 1951. That ended a Rana (राणा) rule of about a hundred and four years. For nine months he was home minister in a cabinet shared by Ranas (राणा) and Congress. The cabinet broke. The last Rana (राणा) prime minister was dismissed in October 1951. King Mahendra then allowed a constitution and a free election. The election was in 1959. Many people expected a broken parliament. Congress took more than two-thirds of the seats in the lower house. BP's (बीपी) own seat was Biratnagar West in Morang. Mahendra hesitated for weeks, and then asked him to form a government. He took office on 27 May 1959. He was also minister of defence for the whole of that time, and minister of foreign affairs for about a month at the start.

The eighteen months were not quiet. He took Nepal's case to the United Nations. He visited China and India while those two were already quarreling over land. At home, a land reform, and especially a change in the tenancy laws, passed parliament easily and offended the landed families who had long dominated the army. On 15 December 1960 Mahendra suspended the constitution, dissolved parliament, dismissed the cabinet, took direct rule, and jailed BP (बीपी) and the colleagues closest to him. Many of them were out in a few months. BP (बीपी) was not. He had cancer of the throat. He was kept in prison without a trial until 1968. A great part of the fiction was written in those years, in Sundarijal jail.

In 1968 Surya Bahadur Thapa, then prime minister, had a hand in the release, and also in keeping BP (बीपी) out of the country. BP (बीपी) lived in exile in Banaras until December 1976. King Birendra had followed Mahendra in 1972. BP (बीपी) came home in the winter of 1976 on a policy he called national reconciliation, a meeting of king and democrats. He was taken from the airport to Sundarijal again. The date people give is 16 Poush 2033. He was charged with the capital offence of trying an armed revolution. In March 1978 he was cleared of treason and sedition. In 1981 he was allowed to go to the United States for treatment. The government paid part of the cost. Family and friends arranged the rest.

During the student demonstrations of 1979 he was under house arrest. He welcomed Birendra's call for a referendum on the political system. The announced result kept the Panchayat, the party-less system the king ran. BP (बीपी) was the first leader to accept that announced result, and he said the vote had been fair. He then asked people to boycott the 1981 election, because membership in a class organization had been made compulsory, and he would not call that a free contest. His health was failing. In January 1982 he still drew a very large meeting at Ratna Park in Kathmandu. He died on 21 July 1982. A great crowd came to the funeral. His brothers Matrika and Girija were prime ministers too, at other times. His wife was Sushila Koirala (कोइराला), whom he married in 1936. She was a classical dancer, a theatre director, and a worker for public causes. They had four children.

Two tempers in one man

In politics he was a socialist democrat. He wanted more than one party, and he wanted bread to be part of freedom. A poor country, he held, is not free just because it can vote. He differed from communists by saying a person needs more than bread. He differed from a market with no brake by saying that using up the world, and using up people, is a short sight (दर्शन). Socialism, for him, was the way that kept a vote and a fair chance at a living in the same hand.

In the books he let a wilder temper out. He said the fiction was where his revolt against the old order went. The politics was where he looked for an order a citizen could bear. Readers call the novels psychological, and they call Tin Ghumti (तीन घुम्ती) existential, a book about a person who has to choose inside a life that does not cooperate. He had read widely, in Nepali (नेपाली), Hindi, Bengali, and English, and in French, German, and Russian books as well. Freud's way of reading a hidden wish is in the early stories. It is not a costume he wears in every book. Even a story that is not Freudian still felt new in Nepali (नेपाली), because the person on the page wanted something the household rules had no room for.

He wrote the long novels fast, in jail, and they were printed slowly, years later. Modiāin (मोदिआइन) was written in three days at the end of January 1964. Tin Ghumti (तीन घुम्ती) was written in that same January. Sumnimā (सुम्निमा) was written in eight days in June 1964, from the 21st to the 28th. A reader who buys them meets another order. Tin Ghumti (तीन घुम्ती) came out in 1968, Sumnimā (सुम्निमा) in 1969, Narendra Dāi (नरेन्द्र दाइ) in 1970, Modiāin (मोदिआइन) in 1980. The jail was the workshop. The press caught up when it could. For a long time the writings were banned. Young people went to jail for having them in the house. That fact sits on the books like a second cover.

Doshi Chashma (दोषी चश्मा)

The story book is Doshi Chashma (दोषी चश्मा), Faulty Glasses, sixteen stories, published in 1949. Before that, his first stories had come out in Hindi in Hans (हंस), the magazine Premchand edited in Banaras. His first Nepali (नेपाली) story, Chandrabadan (चन्द्रबदन), came out in the magazine Sharada (शारदा) in 1935. Four more stories were in Katha Kusum (कथा कुसुम), an anthology printed in Darjeeling in 1938. By then a reader who followed the magazines already knew the kind of mind he was writing. The 1949 book gathered that work and gave it a name. The name is a pair of glasses that do not see straight. The fault is rarely in the glass alone.

The title story is about Keshav Raj, an ordinary man of the lower middle of society. His glasses blur the world. One day he fails to greet a Rana (राणा) general. He comes home and turns on the glasses first, as if the lenses had committed the discourtesy. A meal that is a little late becomes part of the same night. He cannot sleep. He knows what a missed greeting can cost under that government. The story stays inside the night of his fear. It does not need a speech about the Ranas (राणा). The fear is the speech. A man who believes the ruler's glance is the difference between safety and ruin will prosecute himself harder than a court would. The glasses are called guilty so that the reader can see who is actually on trial. It is the order that taught him to shake.

Karnelko Ghoda (कर्णेलको घोडा), The Colonel's Horse, moves the same pressure up into the ruling house. The colonel is about forty-five. His bride is about nineteen. He wants to be loved, and he wants to look like a man who can carry a marriage. He asks her a question she will not answer. She lets her weight rest on him. He cannot hold her, and he falls. She looks at him with hate. From that day the feeling she might have had is gone. A forty-five-year-old groom cannot read a nineteen-year-old silence, and the story does not ask her to explain herself for his comfort. Later he kills the horse. The killing is not a hunting scene. It is the colonel defeating himself. The aristocracy in the story can command a wedding and a stable, and still be empty when a living creature leans on it.

Madheshtira (मधेशतिर), Toward the Madhesh, follows a young widow. She wants a settled life, and she believes a husband is the way to it, which is the code she was given. She also decides to marry again, which breaks the code a widow was told to keep. She walks toward the Tarai with both of those facts in her. Conformity and revolt are not two women in this story. They are one woman, and neither choice gives her the happiness she walked for. BP's (बीपी) women are often like that. They are not rewards for a hero. They are the minds in which the book's real argument happens.

Those three are the stories a later critic can document in the open. The book holds thirteen more. This page does not invent them. The pattern of the three is already the pattern of the novels. A person tries to obey. The obedience hurts. A person tries to refuse. The refusal does not hand over a happy ending. The Rana (राणा) world, in these stories, is not a backdrop painted in for color. It is the reason a clerk cannot sleep, the reason a colonel is hollow, and the reason a widow's second chance is also a scandal.

Tin Ghumti (तीन घुम्ती)

Tin Ghumti (तीन घुम्ती), Three Turns, was published in 1968 by Sajha. It is the novel he wrote in Sundarijal in January 1964, and it is the one readers call his existential book. The setting is the Panchayat years, the party-less rule that began with the coup. Indramaya is a Newar girl. Pitamber is a Brahmin. They love each other. A marriage across that line was a taboo, a rule with teeth. They marry anyway. That is one turn, and it is already enough plot for an older kind of Nepali (नेपाली) novel, the kind that would stop at the brave wedding.

BP (बीपी) does not stop. Pitamber's political work gets him jailed by the Panchayat government. While he is inside, Indramaya falls in love with his friend Ramesh, and she becomes pregnant. That is the second turn, and it ruins the simple story of a loyal wife waiting at the door. The third turn is not a moral pasted on at the end. It is the inside of Indramaya's mind while those facts are all true at once. She is the wife of a man in a political jail. She is the lover of his friend. She is pregnant. The novel's courage is that it will not tidy her into a lesson about either patriotism or sin. It stays with the person who has to live in the mess.

The title's three turns are the title's promise. This page does not pin each turn to a chapter number, because that map is the book's own. What a reader can carry away is the shape. A marriage crosses caste, a jail breaks that marriage, and a desire arrives while the husband cannot come home. Around those facts, a woman's mind does not match the slogan on either side of the door. He wrote this in the same jail his hero is sent to. That rhyme is hard to miss, and it is still not an autobiography. Pitamber is not a portrait of the prime minister. Indramaya is the subject.

Sumnima (सुम्निमा)

Sumnimā (सुम्निमा) was published in 1969, also from Sajha. He wrote it in eight days in the jail, 21 to 28 June 1964. It is a short book, under a hundred pages, and it is the novel many houses name when they name him as a writer of fiction. The two people are Somdutta and Sumnima (सुम्निमा). He is a Brahmin boy raised on ritual and on the gods. Sex, in the teaching he has swallowed, is a way to produce a child, and celibacy is the ladder toward austerity and release. She is a Kirati girl, practical, at home in a natural life. They spend a long time by the Koshi river. A deep liking grows between them. Then they are separated.

After the separation he finds that she has taken root in him. Wanting her follows him to the end of his life. The ladder he was given, the one that was supposed to lead up and out of the body, has kept him from living in the body he actually has. That is the psychological story, and BP (बीपी) tells it without mocking the gods as a joke. Somdutta's devotion is real. It is also a wall. Sumnima (सुम्निमा) is not a symbol wheeled in to scold Brahmins and then dismissed. She is the person who knows how to be in the world he has been taught to step over. The hurt of the book is that he understands this too late to have the life.

There is a second story running under the love story, and it is about two peoples in one place. A Brahmin household and a Kirati household share a riverside and do not share a world. The novel lets that difference be felt through the two young people, rather than through a speech about ethnicity. Minority, cultural difference, and the consciousness of one's own people are in the book because they are in the friendship. A reader in a later decade can hear a politics of identity here. The 1964 pages are already doing that work, quietly, by refusing to let Somdutta's ritual be the only grown-up way to live. The desire that will not leave him is the novel's way of saying the other life was real.

It is worth saying what the book is not. It is not a folklore of "the first Kirati woman," though some lists subtitle it that way. Sumnima (सुम्निमा) is one woman, with a name, in a novel. It is not a sermon that the Kirati way is pure and the Brahmin way is false. Somdutta's loss is the loss of a man who cannot use what he was taught, and cannot live the life he was not taught. Both of those failures are his. She goes on being herself. The book belongs to the jail year, beside Tin Ghumti (तीन घुम्ती), and it is the one of the two that a general reader is most likely to have actually finished.

Narendra Dai (नरेन्द्र दाइ)

Narendra Dāi (नरेन्द्र दाइ), Brother Narendra, came out in 1970. A boy tells it, and he grows up during the telling. The household is rich enough to have a name in the village. Narendra is the man of that house. He is married to Gauri (गौरी). He does not want Gauri (गौरी). He wants Munaria, a poor girl who works in the house and lives with her father. Gauri (गौरी) wants Narendra. The family tries to make the marriage into a marriage. It does not take. The boy who is telling the story is sorry for Gauri (गौरी) and dislikes Munaria. That dislike is part of what the book will later ask him to outgrow.

The turn comes through Kaptanni Aama, an older woman of the house who keeps the caste line. Munaria gives water to a man of the Sarki caste, a caste the village treats as low, the caste associated with leather. Kaptanni Aama sees it and abuses her. Narendra's anger is immediate. He says he will leave the village, and no one can talk him down. The next day Munaria leaves with him. A social novel of an older kind might end on that exit, the rebel couple walking out of a cruel house. BP (बीपी) is not finished.

The narrator grows up and goes to Banaras to study. One day he sees Munaria in the city. Narendra has gone back to the village. He has tuberculosis, and he is not coming back to her. She is living with a friend of his who betrayed him, and the living is on her body. The narrator, who disliked her when he was a boy in the house, begins to see a girl in a bad place rather than a villain in a love story. That change in the teller is as much the novel as the love triangle. Meanwhile Narendra, home again, comes to love Gauri (गौरी). Then he dies of the illness. Gauri (गौरी) has had the love at the end, and she keeps the marks of a married woman, the red in the parting of the hair and the pote (पोते), the beads, which a widow was expected to put away. She lives in that choice.

Years later the narrator hears that Gauri (गौरी) has died in the great earthquake, the one Nepali (नेपाली) mouths date to 1990 in the Bikram Sambat calendar, which is 1934 in the common calendar. The house fell on her. She lived nine days with the injury and could not get out. A book published in 1970 is looking backward at that disaster, and at a whole village story that seemed, while it was happening, to be about love and caste and pride. The earthquake does not care which of those the village thought was the subject. Gauri's (गौरी) death is not a symbol BP (बीपी) announces. It is the last fact. The people who spent years arranging a correct marriage, a correct exit, a correct widowhood, are still living in houses that can fall down.

Modiaain (मोदिआइन)

Modiāin (मोदिआइन), The Grocer's Wife, is probably his shortest novel. He wrote it in three days, 28 to 30 January 1964, in the same jail, and Sajha published it in 1980, sixteen years later. The frame is modest. A boy is traveling from Nepal toward India with a man called Misirji. The boy wants to see Darbhanga. They stay in the house of the grocer's wife. They bathe in Hadaha Pokhari, the lake by the house, and they eat. By day the boy walks the city. At night he wants to go back to the water. She stops him. The lake, she says, has been there since the time of the Mahabharata. Then she tells him that war.

She tells it as a woman who lost her husband in it. The epic is full of kings, heroes, and a battlefield that later books treat as a lesson. She is none of those speakers. There were a great many women in her position. The novel's bet is that a grocer's wife is a better witness to a war than a catalogue of heroes, because the war arrives in her house as an absence, a man who does not come home. From inside the telling, BP (बीपी) runs a long list of human weather. Love, sex, beauty, longing, anger, honesty, fear, courage, deceit, the wish to renounce, emptiness, and a want that will not die. The prose, readers say, stays smooth while the feelings do not.

He is also arguing with a reading of the Bhagvad Gītā. In that reading the world is an illusion, death is not the final thing it seems to a widow, and doing one's own duty outranks the mess the duty leaves behind. The Gītā on this shelf is the poem itself, in the Bhīṣma section of the Mahābhārata. Modiāin (मोदिआइन) is one novelist's quarrel with the use of that poem as a comfort for war. He does not rewrite the battle. He asks what the battle is worth to the woman who has to keep a shop and a life after it. A Nepali (नेपाली) reader who had been taught to accept fate, and to accept a husband's death as the fruit of a duty, is the reader he wanted to unsettle. The boy by the lake is the stand-in for that reader. He wanted a sight (दर्शन) of the city. He gets a story that will not let the lake be only a lake.

Babu, Ama ra Chora (बाबु, आमा र छोरा)

Bābu, Āmā ra Chorā (बाबु, आमा र छोरा), Father, Mother and Son, was published in 1989, after his death. It is the last of the six novels, and it is the strangest household he built. The places are few, and they are Kathmandu, Calcutta, and Banaras. The people are a small high family. The first wife dies young, after giving birth to one son. The father, a man the telling calls Vidur, is left with the boy. The boy grows up and goes to Banaras to study. There he loves Uma, a girl at the college.

They have a night which the boy takes as a wedding they chose for themselves. The next day he leaves for Calcutta to buy clothes and goods for his father's wedding. He does not know that the bride is Uma. Her brother comes from Kathmandu the same day to fetch her. Within four or five days she is married to the father. She is pregnant, and the child is the son's. The father does not know that his new wife was his son's lover. He never finds out. At the time of the shopping and the wedding, the son does not know that the bride he is buying for is Uma. The knot is fate's, in the novel's own argument. If the father had known, he would not have married her. If Uma had been free to refuse and had held the refusal, the wedding would have failed. The book does not give her that freedom. It says a person walks a path that was already there.

After the wedding the house looks like one family and contains two. One side of the house holds the father, the elder son, and Uma. The other side holds Uma, the son she loved, and the child. What does the father call that child, a son or a grandson. What does the elder son call him, a brother or a son. The questions are cruel because the names of a family are the only names the house has, and none of them fit. Uma did not marry for love of the husband. What she gives him, in the early days, is closer to pity and to the role of a wife than to desire. He is around forty or forty-five, anxious, aware that his body is not a young man's, and unable to feel that this second marriage has saved him from being alone. He picks at small things. The novel lets that anxiety be ordinary and humiliating, not grand.

Later the telling turns again. Uma's own mother dies. The child grows. A liking between Uma and the husband begins where there was none. The book calls that turn fate as well. A reader who loved the earlier novels for their rebellious women can feel betrayed here. Those women decide, and pay. Uma is not allowed to decide. BP (बीपी), who had spent decades arguing for a citizen's freedom, binds this one character so that the sermon about fate can be complete. That is a fair complaint against the book, and it is also why the book is unforgettable. It is the novel in which he stops trusting the free person he had been defending, and tests what a household becomes when nobody in it is guilty and everybody is misplaced. He does not tell the husband the truth at the end. The secret stays a secret. Fate, in this book, includes not knowing.

The books around the novels

Six novels are the set people count. Tin Ghumti (तीन घुम्ती), Sumnimā (सुम्निमा), Narendra Dāi (नरेन्द्र दाइ), Modiāin (मोदिआइन), Bābu, Āmā ra Chorā (बाबु, आमा र छोरा), and one more that he did not finish. Hitler ra Yahudi (हिटलर र यहूदी), Hitler and the Jews, is an unfinished novel in the form of a travelogue, from the 1950s, when politics ate the decade. This page does not retell it. An unfinished travel book about that subject is easy to fake, and faking it would be a lie. The title is enough to show the range he wanted. Europe's disaster was on his desk, beside village caste and a grocer's wife.

Two story collections carry the short work. Doshi Chashma (दोषी चश्मा) is the 1949 book. Shwet Bhairavi (श्वेत भैरवी), The White Bhairavi, came out in 1983, the year after he died. Bhairavi is a fierce form of the goddess. The title puts terror and a holy name in the same mouth. This page does not invent the stories inside it. A later editor, Hariprasad Sharma, gathered stories and poems under the title Bishweshwar Prasad Koiralaka Katha ra Kavita (विश्वेश्वरप्रसाद कोइरालाका कथा र कविता). He did write poems. They are not the road a house walks to reach him. The stories are.

The life in his own late telling is Atmabrittanta (आत्मवृत्तान्त). It grew out of conversations with the senior advocate Ganesh Raj Sharma, and it was published as a book of recollections. An unfinished Mero Katha (मेरो कथा), My Story, is dated to 1983 in lists of the work. Jail Journal (जेल जर्नल) is the daily record of Sundarijal. Pheri Sundarijal (फेरि सुन्दरीजल), Sundarijal Again, is the return, the airport, and the second imprisonment. These are not novels. They are the political man writing down the days the novels were born next to. A reader who has just finished Indramaya, or Somdutta, or the grocer's wife, can open the jail book and see the room. The room does not explain the fiction away. It shows the price of the paper.

He also wrote political essays, and the titles are already arguments. One essay sets monarchy beside democracy. Another says that the pressed-down people have woken. Another takes up nationalism in Nepal's own case, and another treats revolution as something he called necessary. He argues that the Panchayat system is not democracy, he sets democracy beside socialism, and he calls for national unity and reconciliation. Those essays belong to the public fight, from 1960 to 1980. This page does not summarize each one as if a paragraph could stand in for a pamphlet. The titles tell you which door each fight used. The fiction tells you what the fights cost inside a house.

What to carry out of the room

If a reader has one evening, the path through him is this. Start with the faulty glasses, so the fear has a face before it has a theory. Then Sumnimā (सुम्निमा), because it is the novel a house already half knows, and the half it knows is usually only the romance. Then Tin Ghumti (तीन घुम्ती), because Indramaya will not let the romance, or the politics, win cleanly. Then the grocer's wife, if the reader wants his argument with war and with an easy reading of duty. Narendra Dāi (नरेन्द्र दाइ) and Bābu, Āmā ra Chorā (बाबु, आमा र छोरा) are the long look at how a family misnames the people inside it. The memoir and the jail books are the life, and they make more sense after the fiction than before it. Read as a politician's hobbies, the novels look like a great man's side work. Read in the order above, the prime ministry looks like one chapter in a mind that was already, in 1935, more interested in a frightened clerk than in a hero.

Where it sits

The page before this one is Gopal Prasad Rimal (गोपालप्रसाद रिमाल). The page after it is Parijat (पारिजात). The war the grocer's wife tells is the Mahābhārata, and the teaching BP (बीपी) argues with is a use of the Bhagvad Gītā. The Gītā on this shelf is the poem. The novel is one man's quarrel with a comfort drawn out of it.