Kathmandu:

When Nepal descended into chaos a few years ago, Sanjeev Uprety, professor at the Central Department of English (Tribhuvan University), felt that he must do something. Perhaps it was due to individual sensitivity that he felt deeply affected by the political turmoil. “I felt that I must do something to shore up my self,” he said recently, explaining his motivation to write a novel in Nepali. So in early 2006 he went back to his home in Jhapa and quickly penned down a narrative that attempted to connect individual well-being to that of the nation.

This theme emerges strongly in the book, Ghanchakkar, published by Nepa~laya in 2007. Laid out from the first person point of view, the novel describes the convolutions of a university professor as he embarks on a quest to understand and cure the roots of his mental affliction.

The novel draws heavily from autobiographical elements, a fact that has made the readers awake to present day reality, even as it has distracted some of them into seeking the connections between details in the novel and the real life of Dr Sanjeev Uprety. Perhaps this is the strength of the novel, because by transforming reality into an imaginary world of an unreliable narrator, the author has been able to show things that otherwise would have remained imperceptible.

There is also meaning to madness. The spirit of democracy appears as a universal field of energy that transcends individuals even as it ties them up into one larger whole. There is therefore a conflict in the novel between fragmentation and unification. Like the narrator, many other insane (read democratic), characters are aware of the larger field of force, and are able to develop a sense of common destiny even as they resist domination.

It is interesting to note that as soon as the book was published, the Nepali literary world embarked on an endless quest to understand and define the novel in terms of whether it is modern or post-modern. The book, with its unique use of point-of-view and content, resists classification. After all, the novel seeks to acquire the indomitable spirit of freedom and individuality, although freedom unfolds from within a field of unified spiritual whole.