Thanks to the initiative of poet/artist/diplomat Abhay Kumar (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhay_Kumar) of the Indian Embassy at Kathmandu, the fifth anniversary edition og Goa Arts + Literature Festival (December 4-7 2014) will feature an unprecedented lineup of new writers and books from Nepal, who are being acclaimed for "rewriting" the country http://www.huffingtonpost.com/niranjan-kunwar/rewriting-nepal-2014-is-m_b_5776448.html
For the first time ever, Thomas Bell, Prashant Jha and Aditya Adhikari and others will present their books on the same platform. Adhikari's book will have its exclusive India release at GALF on 6th December. Bell's "Kathmandu' has been described as "an encompassing and engrossing portrait of a city, mixing ancient history with anthropology, political intrigue with personal anecdote" http://m.newindianexpress.com/books/368525 Jha and Adhikari's new books are discussed together in this superb long review essay in the latest issue of Caravan Magazine, linked and excerpted below. GALF is free and open to all from December 4-7. Register now http://www.goaartlitfest.com/registration.php ---- >From Caravan http://www.caravanmagazine.in/books/after-kingdom "Jha and Adhikari continue this project of rescuing Nepali history from the royalist pap that has long smothered it. The authors are both journalists, as well as friends and collaborators, who came of age during the 1990s and experienced the subsequent vicissitudes at first hand. That said, in Battles of the New Republic and The Bullet and the Ballot Box they take significantly different approaches to both material and methodology. Jha is bold: a single-volume history of a country’s transformation from a kingdom into a republic and all that this entails, especially in a land as diverse as Nepal, is prone to faults of omission. But his tale succeeds admirably in transmitting a sense of the magnitude and significance of recent events. He covers the Maoists, but also engages deeply with other key actors—most notably the old democratic parties, Madhesi activists and politicians, and organs of the Indian state. For its path-breaking coverage of these latter two especially, many prominent commentators on Nepali affairs have already declared Battles of the New Republic a landmark achievement. Jha builds his account using copious interviews—perhaps no other Nepali journalist boasts the same access to key activists, politicians, bureaucrats and intelligence officials—and weaves the voices of a plethora of characters together with personal memoir in the style of narrative journalism. That, combined with Jha’s complex outlook as a high-caste Madhesi with personal and linguistic ties both to Nepal and India, as well as to those exercising power in Kathmandu and those grappling for it in the Madhes, renders this as much a significant social history as a political one. While Jha works thematically, Adhikari’s narrative is more strictly chronological. In laying out, step by step, the birth, growth and evolution of the Maoist party and the armed rebellion, The Bullet and the Ballot Box is cogent and detailed. But its concern is mostly only with the Maoists, and it fails to engage deeply with several other dynamics that have played out since the 1990s, such as the rise of Madhesi politics. We learn much of what the Maoists did, but get less of a feel for how their choices reflected shifts in a far-reaching political web that tied them to the palace, multiple political parties and movements, and India—and this weakens the book’s account of the Maoist movement itself. For individual stories of the movement and the hopes and changes it has kindled, Adhikari relies less on interviews and more on fiction, poetry and memoir dealing with thorny social issues and the war, a profusion of which has emerged in recent years. His summaries of these texts—most available only in Nepali—form a remarkable literary and social history that is especially valuable to anyone curious about the wealth of new Nepali writing but unable to read the language. Sprinkled throughout the book, these sections are some of its highlights, and enliven what can, at times, seem a dry procession of facts."