Madhav Prasad Ghimire (माधवप्रसाद घिमिरे)माधवप्रसाद घिमिरे

The title, and the style

Revered throughout the nation as Rashtrakavi (Rāṣṭrakavi / राष्ट्रकवि, "The National Poet of Nepal"), Madhav Prasad Ghimire (Mādhavaprasāda Ghimire / माधवप्रसाद घिमिरे) embodied the golden melodic stream of modern Nepali romanticism. Spanning a monumental centenarian life from 1919 to 2020 CE, Ghimire's poetic career bridged the classical metrical rigor of the pre-modern era with the accessible, heart-stirring lyricism of the contemporary age, capturing the majestic topography of the Himalayas and the intimate joys and sorrows of rural domestic life.

Born in 1919 CE (1976 BS) in the idyllic hillside hamlet of Pustun, Lamjung, beneath the towering ramparts of the Annapurna range, Ghimire lost his mother in early childhood—a profound bereavement that echoed throughout his lifelong artistic sensitivity. Educated in classical Sanskrit in Ranipokhari and Banaras, he honed an exquisite ear for classical meters while retaining the earthy songcraft of the mid-hills. In 1948, following the tragic death of his beloved twenty-four-year-old wife Gauri, he authored the timeless mourning elegy Gauri (Gaurī / गौरी). Composed in the stately nineteen-syllable Śārdūlavikrīḍita meter, Gauri remains the most tender, emotionally devastating, and cathartic masterpiece of marital bereavement in the Nepali language.

Beyond personal elegy, Ghimire gave Nepal its most beloved patriotic anthems and musical verse dramas. His 1985 lyrical play Malati Mangale dramatized the humanity and liberation of bonded domestic serfs, while works such as Himalpari Himalwari and Kinnar-Kinnari celebrated the cultural harmony of Nepal's mountains, rivers, and peoples. In 2003, the government of Nepal officially bestowed upon him the permanent title of Rashtrakavi, honoring a lifetime of unparalleled lyrical devotion to the nation.

Putsun, a dead mother, Banaras, the paper

His mother died when he was three. His father, Gauri (गौरी) Shankar Ghimire (घिमिरे), and his grandmother raised him. He could read at six. At eight or nine a man called Fulebaba taught him the panchanga (पञ्चाङ्ग), the almanac a house uses for festivals and farming. At eleven he left for Duradanda to study Sanskrit. Later he came to Kathmandu, to the Sanskrit Pradhan Pathshala and the Tindhara Sanskrit Pathshala, and then to Banaras. The road is the old one. A clever hill boy studies Sanskrit, then he studies in the capital, and then he studies in the holy city. What he did with that road was a long life of poems ordinary people can sing.

His first printed piece came out in Gorkhapatra (गोरखापत्र) when he was fourteen. Accounts disagree on the title. One calls it Gyanpuspa (ज्ञानपुष्प). Another calls it Bairagya Pushpa (वैराग्य पुष्प). This page will not pick a winner. The fact that holds is a boy in his early teens already in the national paper. After Banaras he worked as a writer at the Nepal Bhashanuvad Parishad, the same translation council where Devkota (देवकोटा) worked, and in 1944 he was a co-editor of Gorkhapatra (गोरखापत्र). In 1946 he became its editor. He also wrote for Sharada (शारदा) and Udaya (उदय). In 1951, the year the Ranas (राणा) fell, he went back to the village and taught for a short time. The capital kept calling him back. From 1979 to 1988 he was vice-chancellor of the Royal Nepal Academy, and from 1988 to 1990 he was its chancellor. The army gave him the rank of honorary brigadier. The hundredth birthday, in September 2018, was celebrated across the country. The last months needed oxygen. He died of a respiratory illness.

The prizes match the title. They include the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu, the Tribhuvan Pragya Puraskar, the Sajha Award, the Bhanubhakta Award, and the Padmashree Sadhana Samman. People note that the Madan Puraskar, the prize Parijat (पारिजात) won for Shirishko Phool (शिरीषको फूल), did not come to him, though he wrote several epics. The national title came anyway, from the state, in 2003. A reader does not need the prize list to hear him. A reader needs Gauri (गौरी), Malati Mangale (मालतीमङ्गले), and one song in a voice that is not reading.

Gauri (गौरी)

Around 1933 or 1934, when he was about fourteen, he married Gauri (गौरी) Pokharel, who was about ten. They had two daughters. She died while he was still a young man. One account puts the poem's occasion in 1947. Another counts the marriage as about eleven years, another as longer. The dates move. The blow does not. He wrote Gauri (गौरी) for her. Bhanubhakta Pokharel, looking at the making of the poem, thought most of it was done by about 2005 in the Nepali (नेपाली) calendar, the late 1940s. The book people hold was printed around 2015, 1958 or 1959, from Sajha in later editions. He named it among his own favorites. Readers name it as the one that will outlast the title of national poet.

It is an elegy the length of an epic, set, the editions say, in Kathmandu, and fed by the hills he came from. The wife's name is also a name of the goddess. The grief therefore sits inside a sacred word. A husband saying Gauri (गौरी) is saying the woman and, whether he presses the point or not, the name the hymns use. The poem does not need a plot of battles. Its event is a death, and then the long walk of memory around that death. Subedi said he was shattered, and that the elegy is full of pathos, and that this is what people will remember. That is a just summary from a translator. This page will not invent the cantos. A reader who opens the book should find the wife still ahead of the commentary.

The afterlife of the poem shows how far it walked. Music Nepal brought out an album. Ram Krishna Dhakal, Sudesh Sharma, Sangeeta Pradhan Rana (राणा), Rambhakta Jojiju, Sapana Shree, and the poet himself sang. A Korean translation appeared in 2018, while he was still alive to be a hundred. An elegy written in the 1940s was still being carried into other languages in the century's second decade. That is a practical test of a national poet. The country did not only give him a title. It kept singing the grief.

He married again, Mahakali, when he was about twenty-nine. With her he had two sons and four daughters. The two marriages gave him eight children in all. The second household is the long life. Gauri (गौरी) remains the early wound, written before the academies and the brigadier's rank. If a reader wants the man before the honors, the poem is the door.

Malati Mangale (मालतीमङ्गले)

The other work a crowd knows is Malati Mangale (मालतीमङ्गले), a musical play written in 2039 of the Nepali (नेपाली) calendar, 1982 or 1983, and printed by Sajha. It takes a true story from Fujel village in Gorkha, in the Shah (शाह) years, when a house could still own people. Malati and Mangale are servants of the same master, a kamari and a kamara. They come of age and they love each other. The master wants Malati for himself. He sells Mangale away. The two of them weep. Mangale leaves her a flower and a promise of the simplest kind: while that flower holds, the two of them hold.

The road of the story then turns on two gold earrings, the Gorkhali (गोर्खाली) queen's own. With the earring of the right ear she buys Mangale. She sends the earring of the left ear to buy Malati. She means to join them and to free them. The two earrings put mercy and a sense of justice into one gesture. The timing fails. The people who arrive with the left earring find Malati already past saving. She has given up her life in that house, under the master who had fixed his eye on her. The play ends in the grief. Freedom was on the way. It did not arrive in time.

This page does not describe the master's harm beyond that want and that sale. The play's point is already clear. Love between two unfree people is treated as a thing a master can break by a bill of sale. A queen can spend gold to undo the bill. The body that suffered does not wait for the gold. Ghimire's (घिमिरे) patriotism is often a song of mountains and belonging. Here the country is a village that kept slaves, and the national poet tells the story against the village's owner. The sweetness of his line is put to a bitter history. That combination is why the play is essential, and why a shelf that stopped at Gauri (गौरी) would make him only a widower.

The stage life is its own tale, and it is worth the minutes. The play was performed at the Academy, first around 2042 and again around 2044. A recording came in 2044, 1987 or 1988. He wanted Amber Gurung's music and Narayan Gopal's voice for Mangale. The two men were not speaking. Ghimire (घिमिरे) went to Narayan Gopal's house in Maharajgunj and asked as a poet, and said so: he had not come as vice-chancellor. Narayan Gopal came to the Academy a few days later. Ghimire (घिमिरे) sent quietly for Amber Gurung. They met over tea, and the freeze broke in an embrace. Tara Devi was harder. She and Narayan Gopal would not look at each other. The duet was recorded with a heavy curtain between them on the Academy stage. Kiran Pradhan, Deepak, and others were in the company of singers. The play became famous in that friction as much as in the verse. A national poet who can get a sulking genius to sing has a practical gift the elegy does not show.

Songs, the mountain, the other epics

A great many Nepalis (नेपाली) meet him first as a song. The titles are already the gist, and the tunes are public in the way a radio is public. This page does not print the words.

Gaunchha Geet Nepali (गाउँछ गीत नेपाली) is the patriotic song, the one that says a Nepali (नेपाली) song gets sung. Schools and programs know it. It is the Rashtrakavi (राष्ट्रकवि) title in a melody: the country as a thing that sings itself. Nepali Hami Rahaula Kaha (नेपाली हामी रहौंला कहाँ) asks where we Nepalis (नेपाली) will remain. Belonging, said as a question, which is more interesting than belonging said as a shout. Phool ko Thunga Bagera Gayo (फूलको थुङ्गा बगेर गयो) is a bunch of flowers that has gone with the water. The image is departure. Something lovely was in the hand, or on the stream, and it went. People sing it at the edge of loss. Aajai Rati Ke Dekhe Sapana (आजै राति के देखेँ सपना) is a night song: what dream was that, again, tonight. Baisakh (वैशाख) is the month, the first month, the door of the year. Together these songs are a style of their own. The counted line became a thing a person who never opens an epic can still carry.

The mountain books keep the other half of the childhood. Himal Pari Himal Wari (हिमालपारि हिमालवारि) is the range as two sides, the far side and this side. A Lamjung poet does not have to invent a reason to look up. The snow is the north wall of the district. The title makes that wall a subject large enough for a long poem: what is on our side of it, what is beyond, and the life that has to be lived on one side while imagining the other. This page does not invent the cantos. The title is already a map.

Shakuntala (शकुन्तला) is his epic on Kālidāsa's story, in the line that runs from Motiram's (मोतीराम) play through Devkota's (देवकोटा) mahākāvya (महाकाव्य). The king, the hermitage, the ring, the forgetting, the return. Ghimire's (घिमिरे) version is the national poet trying the oldest romantic plot in the counted line he trusted. Kinnar-Kinnari (किन्नर-किन्नरी) is a lyrical book of the mythical beings of the high places, half song. Rastra Nirmata (राष्ट्रनिर्माता) names the builders of the nation. Indrakumari (इन्द्रकुमारी), Rajeshwari (राजेश्वरी), and Aswathama (अश्वत्थामा) are further long poems. Aswathama (अश्वत्थामा) is the Mahābhārata's figure who does not meet an ordinary death, the same name a Dasain blessing asks for length of life. What Ghimire (घिमिरे) does with that undying man stays in his book. Manjari (मञ्जरी) is another of the titles a list always includes. Charu Charcha (चारु चर्चा) is the essay book, a beautiful discussion, the prose beside the meter. Aafno Bansuri Aafnai Geet (आफ्नो बाँसुरी आफ्नै गीत), one's own flute and one's own song, says the late confidence in the plainest words. The flute is his. The song is his.

Ritambhara (ऋतम्भरा), unfinished at his death, is the right last title to mention. Ritambhara (ऋतम्भरा), in the old vocabulary, is a truth-bearing mind, a consciousness that carries what is real. He died still writing toward that. A hundred years, and the desk was not clear. The national poet was a working poet on the last day.

The counted line, after the free one

If you come to Ghimire (घिमिरे) from Bhupi, the meter can feel like a step backward. Bhupi broke the line where the breath breaks, and let irony do a rhyme's old job. Ghimire (घिमिरे) keeps counting. A line has a set number of beats, and it ends where the count ends. That is chhanda (छन्द). Lekhnath (लेखनाथ) had made that count sweet and philosophical. Ghimire (घिमिरे) makes it singable, and he lets a private grief and a village injustice into it. The count is not a refusal of feeling. It is the bowl the feeling is willing to sit in. People who still write this way say the discipline is the art. Anyone can cry in free verse. To cry inside a fixed music, and keep the music, is a different labor. He did that labor from the age of fourteen, in Gorkhapatra (गोरखापत्र), until the year he died.

The Academy years show the other half of a national poet, the half that sits in a chair. From 1979 to 1988 he was vice-chancellor of the Royal Nepal Academy. From 1988 to 1990 he was chancellor. Those are the last years of the Panchayat, the party-less system, and the year the system fell. He did not write Bhupi's blind man. He administered a royal academy while the street was changing, and he still wrote Malati Mangale (मालतीमङ्गले) in that same stretch, a play about people who were owned. The chair and the play should be held together. A title from the state in 2003, Rashtrakavi (राष्ट्रकवि), names the chair's man. The play names the poet who could look at a master's bill of sale. Both are him. The honorary brigadier general's rank is the state's affection for a gentle famous man. Gauri (गौरी) is the affection he gave a dead girl who had been his wife.

Two children, a flower, a pair of earrings

The marriage to Gauri (गौरी) Pokharel needs a plain sentence before the elegy can be heard. He was about fourteen. She was about ten. That was a hill marriage of the 1930s, common enough to be ordinary, and still a fact a modern reader should not sand down. They grew up into the marriage. Two daughters were born. Then she died, and the poem began. Whatever the count of years, eleven or fourteen, the book is a young husband's long walk around an absence. The editions place that walk in Kathmandu. The feeling keeps Lamjung in it, because he had no other childhood to grieve with. The name does extra work. Gauri (गौरी) is the woman. Gauri (गौरी) is also the goddess. A hymn-name wrapped around a wife means the mourning is allowed to be large without becoming a speech about the nation. He was not yet the national poet. He was a man whose first wife was dead.

Malati Mangale (मालतीमङ्गले) is the later conscience, and it is concrete enough to tell slowly. The story is set in Fujel, in Gorkha, in the Shah (शाह) years. A house owns a young man and a young woman. They work. They come of age. They love. The master, who wants the woman, sells the man. Selling a person is the ordinary violence of that order, and the play's horror is that it can be done on paper. Mangale leaves a flower. The promise attached to it is almost childlike, which is why it hurts. While the flower holds, we hold. Then the plot turns on jewelry, which is the right object, because jewelry is how that world measures a life. Two gold earrings of the Gorkhali (गोर्खाली) queen turn up on a road. One earring buys the man back. The other is sent to buy the woman. A queen spending her own ornaments to cancel a master's sale is mercy with a price tag, and the play lets the mercy be real. It also lets the mercy be late. The people who arrive find Malati past saving. She has already given up the body that the master had claimed. The flower's promise and the queen's gold reach a death. That is the ending. It does not comfort, and a poet famous for sweet songs wrote it anyway.

The recording is the comic stanza the tragedy earned. Amber Gurung had the tune. Narayan Gopal had the voice for Mangale. They were not speaking. Ghimire (घिमिरे) went to Maharajgunj and asked as a poet, refusing the shield of vice-chancellor. Tea at the Academy, a quiet message, an embrace, and the freeze between the two men ended. Tara Devi remained on the far side of a curtain. The duet was sung with cloth between them, on the Academy's own stage, because the singers would not look at each other. Out of that absurdity came the performance people still mean when they say the title. A national poet, in this story, is also a man who can walk into a sulk and come out with a song. The servants in the play never get that luck. The artists, barely, do.

What to carry out of the room

Read Gauri (गौरी) first, slowly, as a widower's book and as a hill poet's book. Then see or hear Malati Mangale (मालतीमङ्गले), because the servants correct the idea that he only praised the country. Then one song, out loud, so the meter is a body and not a lesson. Himal Pari Himal Wari (हिमालपारि हिमालवारि) and Shakuntala (शकुन्तला) are the epics for a second week. The essays in Charu Charcha (चारु चर्चा) are the talk around the poems. Ritambhara (ऋतम्भरा) is the door he did not finish closing.

His title is the state's. His style is the counted line with a song inside it. Set him beside Lekhnath (लेखनाथ) and the count is a tradition. Set him beside Devkota (देवकोटा) and the feeling is a friendship. Set him beside Bhupi and you hear the argument the century had with itself: a blind man on a chair, in free verse, and a national poet still willing to number every syllable. Both are Nepali (नेपाली). The garland goes down the river. The hills stay.

Where it sits

The page before this one is Siddhicharan, the poet of the era, who paid for a plainer sentence. Lekhnath (लेखनाथ) is the crest-jewel of the counted line he kept. The page after it is Guru Prasad Mainali (गुरुप्रसाद मैनाली). Laxmi Prasad Devkota (लक्ष्मीप्रसाद देवकोटा) is the friend in the 1946 photograph. The burning ground is Paśupati (पशुपति).