Motiram Bhatta (मोतीराम भट्ट)मोतीराम भट्ट

The title, and the style

Though he lived a brief span of merely thirty years, Motiram Bhatta (Motīrāma Bhaṭṭa / मोतीराम भट्ट) transformed the landscape of Nepali letters more radically than perhaps any other single figure in the nineteenth century. Endowed by posterity with the title Yuvakavi (Yuvakavi / युवकवि, "The Youth Poet"), he stands as the architect of the Secondary Period (Mādhyamika Kāla) of modern Nepali literature—an era characterized by the emergence of print capitalism, literary journalism, dramatic verse, and analytical biography.

Born on the night of Kushe Aunsi in 1866 CE (1923 BS) in Bhosiko Tole, Kathmandu, Motiram received his early schooling in Banaras, where exposure to flourishing Urdu poetic salons and Hindi publishing houses ignited his determination to endow his native Nepali with a modern print heritage. Recognizing that an oral vernacular could only endure if supported by institutional infrastructure, he established the Motikrishna Dhirendra Press in Kathmandu, collaborated with the Bharat Jivan Press in Banaras, and founded the pioneering literary journal Gorkha Bharat Jivan in 1886. Through these channels, he broke the isolation of Nepali writers, inviting manuscripts from across the hills and creating a national reading public.

Motiram's crowning historic achievement was his rediscovery of Bhanubhakta Acharya. Traveling across Tanahun and Kathmandu to gather scattered oral fragments, he authored Kavi Bhanubhaktako Jivan Charitra in 1891, simultaneously composing the first modern biography and the foundational work of literary criticism in the Nepali language. By organizing the public printing of the complete Bhanubhakta Ramayana in Banaras, Motiram conferred upon the Nepali nation its foundational literary epic, while his own prolific pen introduced the evocative melodies of the Persian-style Ghazal and classical messenger-kavya through works such as Pikdūt.

The press at Thahiti

After about seven years in Banaras he came home in 1945 of the Nepali (नेपाली) calendar, 1888 or 1889. With his maternal uncles Naradev Pandey and Krishna Dev Pandey he opened the Motikrishna Dhirendra Company at Thahiti. A library opened with it, and people call that library the first in Nepal. The company later ran the Pashupat Press. He is credited with the first private printing press in the country, around 1888. Before that, a Nepali (नेपाली) book that wanted to be a book often had to be born in Banaras. He brought the machine closer to the readers.

He also started Mitra Mandali (मित्र मण्डली), a friends' circle on the model of the Banaras group, with Naradev Pandey, Laxmi Dutta Panta, Gopinath Lohani, Bhoj Raj Pandey, and others. The work of the circle was to make Nepali (नेपाली) poems and to pass them around. This is easy to skip, because it is not a famous title. It is how a literature actually grows when the state is a Rana (राणा) court and the language is still proving it can hold a modern book. A few people in a room, a press down the lane, a biography in the works.

He studied at Durbar High School. Among his school friends were Chandra Shumsher and Dev Shumsher, later rulers of the Rana (राणा) state. People say Dev Shumsher's more open temper owed something to this friendship. The claim is the kind a later century likes, and it should stay a "people say." What is solid is the odd picture: the young poet of a private press sitting in class with the boys who would inherit the court.

For a higher exam he went to Calcutta. In 1948 of the Nepali (नेपाली) calendar, 1891 or 1892, he passed the entrance of Calcutta University. He sat the next examination, the A.A.I.A., around 1893 or 1894, and did not pass. He came home. He went back to Calcutta in 1952, 1895 or 1896, fell ill, and came home again. He was in bed for seven months. He died on his lunar birthday, thirty years after the Kushe Aunsi (कुशे औंसी) on which he was born. The uncle who had told the story of the pierced nostril also wrote a life of him, Kavi Motiram Bhattako Sachitra Charitra Varnan (कवि मोतीराम भट्टको सचित्र चरित्र वर्णन). The biographer of Bhanubhakta got a biographer of his own. That is fair. He had shown the language how to do it.

The life of Bhanubhakta

The book that changed the shelf is Kavi Bhanubhaktako Jivan Charitra (कवि भानुभक्तको जीवनचरित्र), published in 1891, 1948 in the Nepali (नेपाली) calendar. It is a biography and a criticism together. Before it, Bhanubhakta was a voice at weddings and a manuscript in houses. After it, he was Adikavi (आदिकवि), the first poet, a man with a grandfather in Tanahun, a well, a shame, and a Rāmāyaṇa (रामायण). Motiram (मोतीराम) did not invent the poems. He invented the public poet. The poems on this shelf are the words. The reason a Nepali (नेपाली) child meets those words first is this thin book from a man who died at thirty.

Later readers have been rightly curious about the method. The life is written with love. It gathers stray verses and sets them down as proof that the poet was easy, gifted, and morally awake. Some of those verses float. A biography that wants its hero to shine will choose the shining pieces and tell the joining story in the biographer's own warmth. That warmth is the book's power and its limit. When you read the grass-cutter (घाँसी) poem, you are reading Bhanubhakta. When you read that the grass-cutter (घाँसी) shamed him into a Rāmāyaṇa (रामायण), you are also reading Motiram's (मोतीराम) shape of a life. Both are worth having. A literature needs the poem and the person who refused to let the poem stay in a wedding song.

The printing belongs with the biography. From Banaras he put the Balakanda out, and then the whole Rāmāyaṇa (रामायण). One national account puts the public printing of the Rāmāyaṇa (रामायण) in 1941 of the Nepali (नेपाली) calendar. The exact year moves a little from teller to teller. The event does not. A poem people could recite became a book people could keep. Motiram's (मोतीराम) prose and Motiram's (मोतीराम) press are one project.

Pikdut (पिकदूत)

Pikdut (पिकदूत) is the poem to read if you want his verse at full length. It is a dūtakāvya (दूतकाव्य), a messenger poem, printed around 1945 of the Nepali (नेपाली) calendar. The model is Kālidāsa's Meghadūta (मेघदूत), in which a yakṣa, separated from his wife, asks a cloud to carry his message to her in the Himalaya. Motiram (मोतीराम) changes the messenger. A woman in separation sends a cātaka (चातक), the pied cuckoo that poems say drinks only raindrops, and she asks the bird to carry her sorrow and her love to her husband without changing a word. In the end the husband comes back.

The pleasure is the errand. A classical poet shows he can do what Sanskrit did, and he does it with a Nepali (नेपाली) bird and a Nepali (नेपाली) wife. The cloud of Kālidāsa is a monsoon that already knows the map. The cuckoo of Motiram (मोतीराम) is a smaller, more anxious postman. She wants the message delivered as she spoke it. That small demand is very human. Lovers do not want a beautiful paraphrase. They want the sentence itself to arrive. The poem is śṛṅgāra (शृङ्गार) with a job to do, which is why it has lasted better than a loose book of compliments.

The thirty verses are on the Pikdūt (पिकदूत) page. Read it beside the ghazal (गजल), not instead of the life of Bhanubhakta. The biography is the public work. Pikdut (पिकदूत) is the private temperature of the style: separation, a faithful bird, a return. The young poet's title fits this poem. It is accomplished, and it is the work of a man who still has the old Sanskrit in his ear and the new language in his mouth.

The ghazal (गजल)

The ghazal (गजल) book people name is Sangeet Chandrodaya (सङ्गीत चन्द्रोदय), from about 1944 of the Nepali (नेपाली) calendar. A ghazal (गजल) is a run of couplets that share a mood and a turn of rhyme, and that can be sung. He had sung them in Urdu first. Putting them in Nepali (नेपाली) was the new thing. A famous turn, in the plain sense of the words, says that two eyebrows are already drawn sharp enough to be swords, so a sword is unnecessary, and that the beloved has become the master, so a government is unnecessary. The joke is the point. A lover's face is promoted until it replaces the state. That is śṛṅgāra (शृङ्गार) as a court compliment, and it is also a young man's pleasure in his own cleverness. Houses still pass the turn around. The two ghazals below are his. The spelling is the old printing.

Eyebrows (दुइ आँखिभौँ)दुइ आँखिभौँ

दुइ आँखिभौँ त तयार छन्, तरबार पो किन चाहियो,
तिमी आफु मालिक भैगयौ, सरकार पो किन चाहियो

पहरा कडा छ कटाक्षको, हरदम तयार मुहारमा,
घर भन्नु भारि महल न हो, दरबार पो किन चाहियो

कति चम्किलो छ हँसाइको हिसिमा किरन पनि दाँतको
मणि, मोती, नीर जुहार न हो, अरु हार पो किन चाहियो

Do not come (न आउनू)न आउनू

दिनको पचास त के हजार पटक कती समझाउनु ।
म गरीबका घरमा हरे तिमिले यसोरि न आउनू ।।

रिसमा थियौ कि खुशी थियौ मत केही जान्दिन के थियौ ।
कि यसो थियौ कि उसो थियौ मनमा कसोरि बुझाउनू ।।

न त आ भनुँ न त जा भनुँ म यसो भनूँ कि उसो भनूँ ।
तिनीको मिजाज म के भनु कतिसम्म विन्ति चढाउनू ।।

वय सोर्हजको मन साठ्ठीको छ र पो गजब जति प्यारिको ।
मुखको रबाबछ चन्द्रको ननिको छ मिस्सि लगाउनु ।।

मनसुव पुग्नु परै रहोस् दरसन पनि छ कठिनजहाँ ।
अब बाँचन्याछु मता कहाँ तिनीलाई यति सुनाउनु ।।

तिमिबिर्सिहाल त क्यै जनी म त सम्झदो छु अझै पनि ।
मुख भित्र पान चपाउनु अलि हाँसि हाँसि हँसाउनु ।।

मणि हो भनूँ त न झल्कने बिजुली भनूँ त न चम्कने ।
अइना भनूँ त न टल्कन् उपमा कसोरी जुराउनू ।।

तिमी पख भनी भनी कन जानु फेरी नआउनू ।
खपि सक्नु छैन मलाइ ता तिमीले यसोरि छकाउनु ।।

सुन है सबै हरिको हुकुम भनुकि भनूँ जुलम ।
अघि जो भयो उत भै गयो तर फेरी मोति नलाउनू ।।

He asks her not to come, in this way, to a poor man's house, not fifty times a day and not a thousand. He cannot tell whether she was angry or glad, and he will not say come, and he will not say go. She is sixteen, with an older mind, and her face is the moon's rabāb (रबाब). Let the wish stay far. Even a sight is hard. She may forget. He still remembers, and he asks for a little betel and a laugh. A jewel that does not flash, lightning that does not gleam, a mirror that does not shine: he cannot find the comparison. She says wait, and goes, and does not come back. The last turn signs Moti (मोति). What happened has gone. Do not apply the pearl again.

उहाँ भन्नुहुन्छ, गरिबको घरमा यसरी नआउनु, दिनको पचास पटक होइन, हजार पटक सम्झाए पनि। रिसाउनुभएको हो कि खुसी, उहाँले छुट्याउन सक्नुहुन्न। आउ भन्नुहुन्न, जा भन्नुहुन्न। उमेर सोह्र हो, मन साठीको, मुख चन्द्रको रबाब हो। मनसुबा पुग्नु परै रहोस्। दर्शन नै कठिन छ। उहाँले बिर्सन सक्नुहुन्छ। कविले अझै सम्झिरहनुभएको छ, र अलिकति पान र हाँसो माग्नुहुन्छ। नझल्किने मणि, नचम्किने बिजुली, नटल्किने ऐना। उपमा जुर्दैन। पर्ख भनेर जानुहुन्छ, फेरि आउनुहुन्न। अन्तिम शेरमा मोति छ। अघि जे भयो, गयो। फेरि मोति नलगाउनु।

The Urdu years are not a side note. About four hundred couplets in Banaras mean the ghazal (गजल) was a practice before it was a Nepali (नेपाली) invention. When people say he introduced the form, they mean he made it a Nepali (नेपाली) habit, with Nepali (नेपाली) beloveds and Nepali (नेपाली) wit. The sitar belongs in the same picture. A poem of his is often closer to a thing sung in a room than to a thing carved for a silent page. Lekhnath (लेखनाथ), on the next page, will take the carved page and perfect it. Motiram (मोतीराम) is still in the room where people answer each other.

The other books

Fifteen years filled a shelf. The names are the map, and a few of them open into stories a house already knows.

Gajendra Moksha (गजेन्द्रमोक्ष), around 1944, retells the elephant's release. In the old story an elephant is caught in the water by a creature that will not let go, and he prays, and Viṣṇu comes, and the elephant is freed. Motiram (मोतीराम) makes a Nepali (नेपाली) poem of that prayer and that release. The page stops at the freedom. The struggle in the water is the purāṇa's, and it does not need a second telling of the grip.

Prahlad Bhakti Katha (प्रह्लाद भक्तिकथा), a year or so earlier, is the boy who will not stop saying the name, in a court that wants him to stop. The devotion holds. The story is one a Dasain house already carries in another form, the victory of a devotion a tyrant cannot break. Motiram's (मोतीराम) poem is that story as a Nepali (नेपाली) epic of bhakti, beside the love poems. He was not only a poet of eyebrows.

Usha Charitra (उषाचरित्र) takes a mythic romance. Panchak Prapancha (पञ्चक प्रपञ्च) is named as a poem of entanglements. Manodweg Pravah (मनोद्वेग प्रवाह), a flow of the mind's urges, is an early collection, around 1942. Kashiraj Chandrasena (काशीराज चन्द्रसेन) is another narrative poem. Kaal Bhramar Sambad (कालभ्रमर संवाद) sets a conversation between time, or death, and a bee, in the old habit of making a small creature talk. These are the workshop. A reader does not need every plot on a first night. The reader needs to see that myth, mind, and the talking creature are all inside the same young style.

The plays are Shakuntal (शकुन्तल), around 1944, Priyadarsika (प्रियदर्शिका), around 1948, and Padmavati (पद्मावती), left unfinished around 1945. Shakuntal (शकुन्तल) is Kālidāsa's story put on a Nepali (नेपाली) stage: the king, the hermitage girl, the forgotten ring, the return of memory. Laxmi Prasad Devkota (लक्ष्मीप्रसाद देवकोटा) will later make a mahākāvya (महाकाव्य) of the same story, and Ghimire (घिमिरे) will make another epic of it. Motiram's (मोतीराम) is the early dramatic try, from a man who had seen how Banaras put Sanskrit plots into living languages. Priyadarsika (प्रियदर्शिका) is the play people put beside it when they list his stage. This page does not invent its scenes. The name says what he wanted the theatre to be: a sight (दर्शन) that pleases, a heroine worth watching.

Around the poems sit smaller books that show the range of the press. Shakunouti (शकुनौती) and Swapna Adhyaya (स्वप्नअध्याय) are studies of omens and of dreams. Gafastak (गफस्तक) is a handful of tales. Chanakya Niti (चाणक्य नीति) puts a book of conduct into Nepali (नेपाली). Gulsanovar (गुलसनोवर) is a fiction. Ukhanko Bakhan (उखानको बखान) is on the list under that name. Teej ko Katha (तीजको कथा) is a story for Tīj, the women's festival. Anupras Manjari (अनुप्रास मञ्जरी) is a garland of alliteration, a craftsman's exercise. An Urdu play, Husna Afroz Aaram Dil (हुस्न अफरोज आराम दिल), sits on the other side of his languages. He also wrote a poem of his own childhood, Bal Jivbarnan (बालजीवबर्णन). The list is almost too wide for thirty years of life. Kumar Pradhan, the critic, put the creative period from 1883 to the death, and said more was written than was printed. The printed list is already a life's work.

What a rasa (रस) is, in his hands

Sanskrit poetics names nine rasa (रस), nine flavors a work can bring to a boil in the person watching. Śṛṅgāra is the erotic-romantic flavor: union, or the ache of being apart, a face, a season that helps or hurts the lovers. Motiram (मोतीराम) chose it as his home flavor in a century when Nepali (नेपाली) verse was still proving it could do more than retell a scripture. The secondary period people assign him, roughly the 1880s into the first decades of the twentieth century, is often described as the śṛṅgāra (शृङ्गार) stream. That description is fair if it stays wide. He also wrote the elephant's prayer, the boy's devotion, a conduct book, and a life of another poet. The love poem is the temperature. It is not the whole house.

A ghazal (गजल), the form he carried over from Urdu, is a chain of couplets that can be sung. Each couplet can stand up by itself. A room can take one turn and pass it, the way his famous turn about eyebrows and a government still gets passed. The rhyme returns. The beloved is almost a convention, a you who is moon, court, and wound. What was new was the language. Urdu already had this room in Banaras. Nepali (नेपाली), in a Rana (राणा) city, mostly had manuscripts, hymns, and the wedding contest he heard at Khadga Dutta Pandey's house. He joined those nights to the ghazal (गजल). A literature changes when a tune people already love is allowed to sit down in the language they scold their children in.

The biography is the other rasa (रस), if a life can have one. Call it the flavor of recognition. He had heard Bhanubhakta without knowing the name, which is how a classic actually lives before anyone calls it a classic. Then he spent the years left to him making the name unavoidable. Print is the tool. A verse sung at a wedding dies with the voices, or it changes in the next mouth. A verse in a book can be argued with. The grass-cutter (घाँसी) poem on Bhanubhakta's page is eight lines about a well and a shame. Motiram's (मोतीराम) life of the poet is the story people tell around those lines: a road, a man still digging, a rich man's blush, and then a Rāmāyaṇa (रामायण). When you feel that story click, you are feeling Motiram's (मोतीराम) gift. He could hear a poem and see the person the country would need. Some of the joining is his warmth. The poems were already strong enough to bear it.

The story his Shakuntal (शकुन्तल) puts on a stage

Kālidāsa's Abhijñānaśākuntalam (अभिज्ञानशाकुन्तलम्) is a play the whole Sanskrit world knew, and Motiram's (मोतीराम) Shakuntal (शकुन्तल) is that story in a Nepali (नेपाली) dramatic shape. The telling, which is older than any of our poets, goes like this. King Duṣyanta is hunting and enters the hermitage of Kaṇva. Śakuntalā (शकुन्तला) is there, the daughter of the sage Viśvāmitra and the apsara Menakā, raised by Kaṇva because her parents' story was not a household story. The king and the girl marry in the gandharva way, a love-marriage without the long rite. He gives her a ring and returns to his city. She is absorbed in him and fails to greet the irascible sage Durvāsas, who curses the king to forget her. The curse is softened. Memory will return with the ring.

She goes to court. On the way the ring is lost in a river. The king does not know her. The humiliation is public. She is taken up, in the full telling, toward her mother's world, and a son, Bharata (भरत), is born, the boy the country's old name will remember. A fisherman later finds the ring inside a fish and brings it to court. Memory comes back. The king and Śakuntalā (शकुन्तला) and the boy are joined. Motiram (मोतीराम) stages this in Nepali (नेपाली) in the 1880s, decades before Devkota's (देवकोटा) epic and a century before Ghimire's (घिमिरे). The point for this shelf is the relay. One story passes through three centuries of Nepali (नेपाली) makers, and it passes through three styles. Motiram's (मोतीराम) is the early theatre, close to the Banaras habit of pouring Sanskrit plots into a living tongue. He does not yet have Lekhnath's (लेखनाथ) patience or Devkota's (देवकोटा) flood. He has the nerve to put the ring on a Kathmandu-facing stage at all.

Priyadarsika (प्रियदर्शिका) sits beside that play in the lists, a name that means the woman pleasant to see. Padmavati (पद्मावती) stayed unfinished. This page does not invent their scenes. What the three titles show is a man trying to build a Nepali (नेपाली) theatre while he was also building a press, a magazine that survives only as an advertisement, a biography, and a messenger poem. The unfinished play is honest. He ran out of years. The finished work is already more than a short life is supposed to leave.

What the press changed

Before the Pashupat Press and the Banaras printings, a Nepali (नेपाली) poem's natural home was a mouth or a notebook. Motiram's (मोतीराम) company at Thahiti, with the library people call the first, is a change of address. A book can sit on a shelf in the city where the language is spoken, and a reader can buy it without a trip to the Ganga (गङ्गा). The friends' circle, Mitra Mandali (मित्र मण्डली), is the human side of the same change. Poems need a room before they need a nation. He had learned that in Bharatendu's Banaras, where a good completion of a riddle could earn ten rupees and a reputation. He tried to make Kathmandu that kind of room, under a Rana (राणा) government that was not famous for liking independent rooms.

The school friendship with Chandra Shumsher and Dev Shumsher is the uneasy edge of the portrait. He was not an enemy of the court in the way Siddhicharan would later be an enemy of the court. He was a brilliant young man from a pandit's house who sat in class with the heirs and who is said to have warmed Dev Shumsher's more open ideas. Hold that as a say. What you can hold firmly is the double life of the 1880s. By day, Durbar High School and the road toward a Calcutta exam he would not quite pass. By night, and in the print shop, a project to give Nepali (नेपाली) a modern bookshelf. The illness took him at thirty, on the lunar day he was born, after seven months in bed. The bookshelf had already started. Bhanubhakta was on it. The ghazal (गजल) was on it. A bird had been sent with a message, and in the poem the husband comes home.

What to carry out of the room

Start with the life of Bhanubhakta, because it is the book that built this shelf's first page. Then read the grass-cutter (घाँसी) poem on that page and notice what Motiram (मोतीराम) added: a person around the eight lines. Then read Pikdut (पिकदूत), so the śṛṅgāra (शृङ्गार) is a story and not a rumor about pretty verse. Then one ghazal (गजल), sung if you can find a singer, so you hear why the form stuck. The plays and the purāṇa poems are the rest of the fifteen years. The press at Thahiti is the fact underneath all of them. A literature that cannot be printed is a wedding song, and he had already heard how good a wedding song can be. He wanted the song to survive the morning.

The title Yuvakavi (युवाकवि) is exact. He did not live to be the old master. Lekhnath (लेखनाथ) will be that, the crest-jewel, patient, classical, rewriting until the line is sweet. Motiram (मोतीराम) is the heat before the patience: Banaras, a press, a biography written with love, a bird sent into the rain with a message that must not be changed.

Where it sits

The page before this one is Rāmagītā (रामगीता). The page after it is Pikdūt (पिकदूत). The next writer is Shambhu Prasad Dhungel (शम्भुप्रसाद ढुङ्गेल). The poet he made public is Bhanubhakta. He was burned at Paśupati (पशुपति), and his day is Kushe Aunsi (कुशे औंसी).