(Re-)Writing Thamel: National Identity and the City-Setting in Contemporary Nepali Literature

Abstract

In recent decades, Nepalis have been forced to reconsider questions of national identity, politics, cultural authenticity, and history in a rapidly changing urban landscape. Building on scholarship within geocriticism, literary geography, and postcolonial studies, this article analyzes two works of modern Nepali literature that deal with the Kathmandu neighborhood of Thamel. By setting dramas and stories in Thamel, Nepali authors lay claim to a space that no longer coincides with its prevailing discursive-literary representations as merely a “foreign” place. They do so by destabilizing dominant touristic narratives about the neighborhood and rendering it as a Nepali space, albeit one that is deeply ambivalent. To re-write Thamel in this way expands the acceptable expressions of Nepalipan (“Nepaliness”) itself. Thamel, as both material urban space and literary setting, becomes the terrain upon which, over which, and through which these fraught cultural politics are waged to validate identities that are simultaneously conflicted, cosmopolitan, and Nepali.