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PERSONALITIES in Nepalese Literature

Greta Rana
in conversation with Para Limbu, Chairperson, Spiny Babbler


Creations


Greta Rana’s reputation intimidates first-time visitors. She represents the woman of the sixties – fiercely independent, vocal, and professional – she voices strong views distinctly, fearlessly, and powerfully. She is a writer who is socially conscious of other people’s sufferings and advocates for human rights through her own work.

Her passion for literature is inherent. By the time she was seven, she had already seen and was familiar with some of Shakespeare’s plays and fell in love as a child with the greatest dramatist the world has ever known. For her, no pre-twentieth century author has evoked as much appreciation in her as Shakespeare has.

Through Greta Rana, literature gains a broader meaning and perspective. It becomes the very essence of our existence without which we would have no history. Through her, literature is seen in its most dramatic form. It is alive, expanding, bringing forth ideas through our most prized possession – the mind. Literature has been and will be for Greta Rana and us, a medium through which we gain a continuous insight into the human psyche and its development.

She begins: “I was born during the middle of the Second War World in West Yorkshire, England. My mother, a schoolteacher, had to teach during the war so, when I was two years old, I was sent to the school where she taught. I remember being in a classroom with children two to three years older than me. I was given a book of Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes. Not knowing what to do with it I scribbled on it and the teacher got annoyed. My mother decided to teach me how to read as quickly as possible.”

Greta’s mother used to read out Shakespeare plays to the four children and they would stay until two or three o’ clock in the morning listening to their father’s stories. “My favorite books of that time were Winne the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, and the Song of Hiawatha. When I am daydreaming sometimes, I can still hear my father saying, ‘by the shores of Gichigumi, by the big sea shining water.’ The thing that always impressed me was the phrase ‘daughter of the moon’, which was the name of Hiawatha’s grandmother, Nokomis. I always wanted to be a daughter of the moon.

“I also enjoyed reading Elizabeth Goudge, who wrote what today would probably be called science fantasy. And I loved Billy Bunter, I thought he was hilarious. Whenever I came across a word I didn’t understand I would ask my mother, ‘Mum, what does this word mean?’ She used to say, ‘You have a dictionary, look it up.’ The only time she intervened was when we couldn’t understand the dictionary! Quite early on, I started reading authors like George Eliot, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Tennyson. Today I see old copies of my books when I go home – Ivanhoe, The Mill On the Floss – among others."

Greta’s strong love of literature reflects a childhood upbringing well grounded in the arts. Her parents often involved their four children in literary and artistic pursuits. “I remember very distinctly my parents leading us like ducks. We would follow them, going around endless numbers of museums, art galleries, and historical places in Britain. We were young and felt left out to see other children running around and enjoying popular music and all kinds of other things. When I was small, people still had to buy food with ration coupons. We didn’t have fancy clothes and used to think why we couldn’t have the fancy cheap clothes that first came in. My mother always believed it best to have one good thing than a lot of low quality things. Afterwards when we became older and my mother died, I came to Nepal about this time, I remember sitting and thinking what a gift my parents had given us. They had, when times were hard and money was scarce in postwar Britain, saved up to take us to see all those wonderful things.

“Under the main street of my town, there are some of the most complete Viking remains in the whole of England. It’s just that the town corporation never had the money to reconstruct them. There’s a huge Roman bath just down one of the streets. When my father was a county councilor, he took me to Wakefield and showed me what they had recovered of the Viking remains. There were bins and bins of Viking jewelry – the most amazing treasure haul you have ever seen in your life. All these legends of the Vikings and Romans and everything we grew up with – these are all the things I suppose that influence you as a writer.

“Throughout my schooling, my teachers were encouraging. I remember a composition I wrote when I was in class four. The teacher announced, ‘I’m going to read out the best story written.’ She started reading and it was my story. She said, ‘I’m not going to give you the name of this person, but all I have to say is that this person should write and go on writing. In high school, I had an English teacher who had been a Cambridge Don. He really believed in my work. Until he died five years ago, I always sent him special poems – things I thought were not bad – he would write back to me and say, ‘keep going, you’re getting there. I know you’ll get there.’

“I was offered a scholarship when I was seventeen years old to study drama at RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) and my mother said, ‘Oh that’s ridiculous, you have to be good looking to be an actress.’ I remember the look of disbelief on my headmaster’s face. In retrospect, I realized that she was really frightened for me because she felt that, although as kids we were intellectually driven, we were naïve in many ways. She felt that drama school would be unlike university – much freer and that I would go adrift. She feared for me and thought I was a little bit too soft. She used to say, ‘You’re such a fool. If you’re not careful you’ll let people walk all over you.’ Afterwards I did not accept the scholarship. But acting was and is still a very intense passion of mine. When I see people who can act and act well, it gives me a big lift. I think that person has something and can make the writer’s work come alive.

"I went to the University of Manchester, read English language and literature at the Bachelor’s level and did a post graduate in criminology/social psychology. I worked with juvenile delinquents as a protection worker in Canada for five years and, in 1970, I became the director of Social Services at St. Joseph’s Hospital. I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. All this time, I was still writing poetry. Then I and my husband, Madukar Shumshere, came to Nepal in 1971. His mother became ill and she wanted him back. Before coming to Nepal, he said, ‘All you have to do in Nepal is just sit down and write. But that didn’t happen.’

“All I knew about Nepal was Mt. Everest and the Gurkhas. There weren’t a lot of publications about Nepal in those days. It was a tremendous leap of faith I think to come to Nepal. You have to understand that there was a lot of adjusting. I went to work for Gorkha Travels and got the cultural shock of my life – a salary of Rs. 300! The first thing about Nepal, which I found very strange, was this one-party democratic system. That struck me as a little odd because in a one-party system where can your checks and balances come from? I also found this absolute deception, this avoidance of telling the truth to the powers hard to take. Basically, I suppose, when you come from a monarchical tradition, and I’m not talking about the monarchies of this day in Britain, you wonder how heads of state know what is going on unless people tell the truth. One of my favorite historical characters is Queen Elizabeth the First. In 1558, she couldn’t get a housekeeping budget unless the Commons of the British government of the day voted for it. Occasionally she’d put them in the tower for a couple of weeks if she couldn’t get the decision through. She was a person who had to have the love and approval of the people that she ruled.

“I continued writing poetry then I got interested in prose. In 1973, Bharat Koirala of The Rising Nepal asked me to write a feature page, which I did for 14 years until they finally discontinued it. There was supposed to be no censorship, but everyone knew there was. Your article would come out and one paragraph would go on to another paragraph that wasn’t leading on logically, so you had to write in a kind of code, which was not hard to do in English because people were not really too converse with the more obscure words.

“In 1982, I became the features editor of a weekly newspaper called Valley News and Views. Keshab Shumshere, the editor, was my husband’s first cousin. His sister asked me to help him establish the newspaper. I wrote features under different pen names. I was Sanya, the Wanderer, and used to write about culture and tourism. Then I was Brutus and used to write about political things.

“The license of Valley News and Views was confiscated in 1986. Keshab Shumshere was arrested for printing an article on the nefarious dealings of people in government and involvement with the Gurkha National Liberation Front. I don’t know what he wrote exactly, I was in England, but I knew he had been working on it for a long time. He told me he had his four independent objective sources and was ready for publication; however, he would not reveal them. I suggested to him that when I returned, we’d go through it together and see how it could be written so that it would not be so inflammatory. But I think he was very determined and published it. The newspaper was closed down and the publisher took off to Germany. Eventually we didn’t get the license back, but it was a good paper. I’d dearly love to have the license back. There’s a lot that needs changing in journalism. I think a lot of young people can bring about changes, but they can’t if they don’t have a newspaper.”

Greta’s interest in writing a book on the Ranas developed only after she became involved in the translation of Wake of the White Tiger. “My father-in-law died in 1982. Before passing away, Diamond Shumshere Rana, a prominent novelist in Nepal, came to see him and asked him if I would translate Seto Bagh. He was a cousin of my father-in-law.

“It took me two years to translate the book. In those days I used to study Nepali two hours a day – reading and writing, so my Nepali was much better than it is today. I offered Diamond Shumshere an interpretation and a word for word translation. He selected the interpretation.

“I think Seto Bagh did very well, 7,000 to 10,000 copies were published, which at that time, I thought, was very optimistic because if you look at the best selling list of English books of people like Salman Rushdie, apart from the Satanic Verses which sold an awful lot simply because of the fatwa, if you look at say The Moor’s Last Sigh selected from the bestsellers’ list, probably 2,000 hard copies were sold. It’s only if you ever get into a paperback that you get a million copies sold. Because once you’re in the mass market, you’re sold in the supermarkets, the airports sell it, and people will buy anything in supermarkets and airports.

“Nepal is not a paperback world. So if you sold 10, 000 copies over a period of sixteen years, I think you’ve done very well. You also have to accept that the media makes people and personalities, which is one of the problems being in Nepal if you are an English writer. You miss out on all that the media can do for yourself and your community of writers.

“It was only after I translated Seto Bagh that I realized that if I didn’t bring my focus back to my own language – my mother tongue and my own writing – I would never be able to add something of value to the literature of the English speaking people. It is my lifelong dream. I realized that if I concentrated on another language, even if it is French, which is my second language, I would never achieve that ever.

“The one thing that intrigued me about Seto Bagh is the character of Jung Bahadur. Nobody knew much about his personality. You read about all the Ranas and there are very few clues about what they were like as people. They were what we’d call in English, two dimensional. There’s the legend, there’s the person, there’s the things that they did – historical facts or fiction. Jung Bahadur Rana had 104 years influence on this country and novelists make him sound as if he was ‘Mr. Flapjack’.


“The interesting thing about Jung, if you read the historical archives, is that he seems to have had a lot of women. Women probably knew more about him than men. You have a couple of occasions in which there were plots against him and it was women who helped him all the time. He abolished sati and yet so many of his wives committed sati. Did they think they’d be massacred after his death? Did Jung murder that one, did he murder this one? If he did then what were his motives? What was he thinking? Napoleon believed that it was his destiny to become what he was. ‘Moi, je suis le destin (I, I am destiny),’ he said. Is that how Jung felt? Nobody knows, nobody cares. Lots of parts are missing, like the missing parts of a jigsaw puzzle.

“When you write about anyone, you have to have a sense of personality. It is this trait that distinguishes Shakespeare from all other playwrights of his era and makes him brilliant. He invented, if you like, human psychology – centuries before Sigmund Freud. The idea that the human being has a continuous conversation with itself, maybe it is a little bit eccentric to think of yourself as it, there’s me as I’m talking to you and I’m consciously talking to you, and there’s me as I talk to myself and what’s inside me, and the awareness of that and the awareness of the conflict between the outside and the rationalization of the human psyche and the effects it has on the personality, and how you react to others or the reactions of others to you. If you look at Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, or Macbeth, you begin to see what he was doing. He must have been a great observer of the human personality.”

With over four decades of writing experience, Greta, today, is not satisfied. At first, she never thought of herself as anything other than a poet or a short story writer. However, one of the things she hadn’t foreseen about her poetry was her audience. She says, “My poetry is difficult for people who haven’t grown up in the English language, whereas people who have would say, ‘Hi! I see that’, it falls flat on others.”

Greta wrote her first novel in Nepal. She feels that the first two she wrote were rubbish. One was called Nothing Greener, the other Distant Hills. She felt that if she looked at them in terms of literary merit, they were just yarns. But she wrote a third one in a month based on a dream she had had. It was called Right As It Is and she remembers, when she finished it thinking that that’s where she had to go in terms of novel writing. She felt she could write prose and not only poetry.

“In 1980, I started working on a book called A Place Beneath the Pipal Tree. It’s been accepted for publication twice. The first time, however, the company was taken over by a text book firm. Eventually my agent who is an agent for Mary Wellesley, one of Britain’s biggest selling authors, read the book and sent me an astounding letter that I’ve kept. The book was put on auction and Harper and Collins bid for it. Later on, one of their editors thought that, because it didn’t have an English heroine, it might not sell, which is a strange idea. It has two chapters about Tibet and one of my characters is a Tibetan. I think Harper and Collins might have backed out because, at that time, Rupert Murdoch was going into critical business negotiations with China. I didn’t see it then until all the books about Hong Kong came up and they sent them back too. Who knows? Whoever knows with publishers? What happened in the mean time is that a German publisher asked for the first foreign language publishing rights. So I had to decide whether I would let my book be published first in another language, which is German. I did and it should come out some time this year.

“I’ve got another book called Ghosts in the Bamboo, which is a satire. It’s about a menopausal woman who thinks she hears voices in the bamboo, the voices of her grandmother and mother. It’s a sort of a story within a story. You have to decide in the end whether she murdered her husband or not. It’s almost serious fiction, but funny. It’s literally full of women and the conversations they have with their psyches and each other. I’ll have to try and find a publisher for it.”

Although Greta has found enjoyment in prose, she feels her first love will always be poetry. She says, “Poetry is what I call the highest excellence. Sometimes I publish it in volumes, sometimes in other periodicals in America and Britain.” She feels there is a marked difference between poetry and prose. She explains: “In prose you feel that you can learn a formula, but with poetry I don’t think so. I know in America you have poetry workshops and things like that, they’re probably useful. However, I don’t believe that the poet is particularly the progenitor (if you like) of the poem. I think the inspiration has to come through you. There are lots of theories about it. Maybe it is some kind of chemical problem that poets have and others don’t have, maybe some kind of process in the brain. I don’t think you can write poetry alone, its more like earthing through the electricity cable – it has to come to you. You don’t go to it. With prose, you can spin your own fantasy, create your own story. You can observe human behavior and write. You can look at the trees and describe them. This is a proactive process your brain is going through. But as far as poetry is concerned you are the vehicle. You have to feel that at least. Emily Dickinson asked her mentor, ‘Does my poetry live?’ That’s what I’m talking about.” And that is why Greta gets more satisfaction from poetry. Once her poetry comes out, it’s like a rush of relief.

She has considered writing plays but feels she needs somebody to write them with her. Someone who actively acts all the time and who can understand the logistics of acting and what it takes. Someone who knows what is possible in drama and what isn’t. She says, “I’ve read a lot of plays by people just trying to write a play and it doesn’t come off. The thing which is missing is the actor, the dramatist personality, something which Shakespeare had.”

Greta’s involvement in PEN Nepal started from 1986 when she and a group of writers tried to establish a branch. She was the secretary and as they come in contact with more and more writers in PEN, the organization asked them to be on the Writers in Prison Committee. In 1990, the new Prime Minister, Mr. K.P. Bhattarai, registered PEN Nepal. From 1994 to 1996, she became the chair of the International Women Writers’ Committee. Last year, she was requested to stand as a member on the new international executive committee of International PEN. She received a nomination but withdrew because she decided she wanted to concentrate on PEN Nepal.

“Organizations like PEN help to fight censorship. I feel that if you censor, you invite rebellion. The thing is if you try and repress those parts of freedom you find distasteful, you remove from people their most coveted right as human beings – security. You can’t ever do that, because censorship means insecurity, it means you’re not safe, you can’t have access to the information that you need to keep yourself, your family, and everybody safe. And that is the importance of literature. Literature gives you a clue about that conversation humanity has with its internal spirit and externally with others. It gives you a perspective of the times in which we live. It becomes an important part of human history. Without literature you lose ideas and without ideas there’s no point in being human beings.”



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