Neelam's "Yogamaya": A Revisionary Rejoinder to Flawed History

Mahesh Paudyal

Neelam Karki Niharika's novel Yogamaya wins Madan Puraskar for the year 2074.  The book was published by Sangri-la Books. Congratulations!  What is Yogamaya all about?

Yogamaya has its heavy bearing on history. History is slowly slipping off the hands of the official historians, and is fast passing into the hands of the new historicists, who are better adept with historicization of fiction and fictionalisation of history. This bottom-up approach to history is bringing newer facts to limelight, and is subverting the erstwhile power-driven political allegory under the camouflage of history. This new approach to history has been instrumental in empowering two categories of people: the women, and the ethnic subalterns.

Neelam Karki Niharika’s latest fictional work Yogmaya is one of such feats that takes conventional history headlong. The work follows the author’s overwhelmingly successful feministic feats Arki Aaimai and Chiraharan. Unlike conventional Nepali feministic fictions, she does not take gender relations with stereotyped structural binarism. Instead, she untwines those discursive ideas that eventually lead to the unequal development of gender privileges. Hers, therefore, are academic and systemic arguments, not mere whims. This is because she relies on exploration and research and argues with facts and findings. She either de-reads the scriptures, or revisits facts percolated into our episteme as final truths thoguth the pages of official history, and digs up the graveyards of fossilised history to expose unthought-of of facts. The latest testimony is her fiction Yogmaya.

Yogmaya, though first fictional work on the legendary rebel, should be viewed in relation with several other non-fictional works on the subject produced earlier by Barbara Nimri Aziz, Govinda Man Singh Karki, Gyan Mani Nepal, Uttam Panthi, Matrika Timsina, Pawan Aalok, and others to see where the narrative departs, and where Neelam’s novelty lies.

There are three avenues in which the novelty of Neelam’s version of Yogmaya can be explored: facts, structure and style. Fact-wise, the fiction questions several ‘established’ facts that had unfortunately passed as reality into our history, and all other documents on Yogmaya. Against the most disturbing illusions about Yogmaya, Neelam claims that the rebel was not a child widow, whereas all other writings portray her as a child widow, who had lost her husband when she was seven. This, to this reviewer, is a crucial departure, because all the myth-making about Yogmaya hinged on this assumption. The very moment she is proven not to be a child widow, the pivot of the entire narrative changes its course, from sympathy to a critical scrutiny; from innocence to experience. The traditional understanding that her husband’s family meted such torture upon her that she was obliged to sow roots of rebellion since quite early in her life gets nullified instantly. Neelam quotes husband family sources and jolts there grudge that almost all writings on Yogmaya before this demonized their family, and made a lopsided interpretation of the facts. This mere hermeneutic game is no longer valid now, and sources of Yogmaya’s rebellion are now more social and systemic than personal and familial. Neelam’s fiction does deconstructive feat.

The novel assumes an unusually thick dimension because the author has taken the pain to foreground all other 68 people, who jumped into the surging waves of Arun together with Yogmaya in the year 2017. For the first time in the history of Nepali fiction of history, the voices of those 68 footnoted characters have become over-ground, backed by the voices of their families, acquaintances and friends, some of which are still alive, and have been portrayed as characters in this grand-narrative. The novel in detail underscores how they all—men, women and children—came under Yogmaya’s influence, developed into a spiritual cult of rebellion, and how finally followed their leader into death. This overwhelmingly spiritual impressionism, which forms a gateway into the social rebellion, finds an extremely powerful portrayal in Neelam’s fictionalisation of history.   

One of the characteristics of Neelam's version is the redrawing of generic boundaries between facts and fictions. At the very outset of the novel, she features Barbara Aziz Nimri, the first White woman to research about and write a book on Yogmaya. Neelam's narrative opens with a scene in Kathmandu, where Aziz visits novelist Parijat—who was well-versed in English—to translate her notes and type them clean. Parijat, who at the time is running quite sick, is apprehensive of her ability to do so. However, in presence of her sister Sukanya, Aziz entrusts Parijat with the task, and takes leave of her. The work, since then, has stayed incomplete, though Parijat is believed to have done a part of it. Neelam's fiction seem to the complementing that unfinished endeavour.

The main chunk of the novel Yogmaya consists of Yogmaya’s history, her troubled childhood, self-exile from home, advent into India and gradual attraction into spiritual sermon. The main trigger that fuels her interest in spiritual issues is the social provisions for absolving personal sins, including petty sexual offenses, whose charge Yogmaya bore in the depth of her heart. It was one of her inquiries to see if the scriptures really promised salvation for those stigmatized someone for an unwarranted offense. Her discovery, through many years of her spiritual inquiry and practice is that, scriptures are bunches of ideological fabrications, hegemonising documents, constructed discourses and lies that benefit the rulers and hypnotize the ruled.  On discovering this dark face of fabricated truths camouflaged in religious scriptures, Yogamaya turns a permanent rebel, and plunges into social and spiritual reforms. Her spiritual efforts back home in Bhojpur, her headlong collision with the Ranas, and her ultimate Samadhi in Arun, together with 69 of her disciples is the climax of this discovery. She was trying to set the message that fabricated history, dotted by vested ideological interests and coercive designs deserve subversion, even at the cost of death! This makes Yogmaya a revolutionary.

The fiction has very well articulated this message. Yet, there are some limitations which could have been averted. In her bid to lend voice even to the minor character, the fiction has assumed a very huge volume, too big for busy readers to finish reading soon. Secondly, the narrative tenses switch on and off, spoiling the smoothness of the narration. The readers are left with enough rooms to ask if the first chapter featuring Barbara and Parijat organically fits into the narrative scheme! It doesn’t, however, thwart the narrative coherence.