Khagendra Lamichhane

The Right to Action

-Prawin Adhikari

In a generation there is a handful of artists that shapes a community's experiences of the arts. Rarely is there a figure who spans across genres and disciplines and, quietly, patiently, over a significant span of their own youth, create a body of work that immediately becomes treasured. If one is to take the past fifteen years of the theater in Nepal, one name shines bright: Khagendra Lamichhane.

As disclosure, I must boast here that I call him a friend. I have known him for about five years now, in different capacities. We have collaborated, sometimes successfully and sometimes with nothing to show for it - but always amicably, and with each hour spent in his company, my esteem for his humility, his talent and his ambition has grown. A goat-farm obligation drew him away from Kathmandu when our interview was scheduled, so I am relying upon myself to report on him, drawing on the many conversations we've had over the years, over heaps of boiled mutton and a bottle of whiskey, or riding on his scooter to reach a studio in time to finish something, or when we spent days and nights frenetically working through a screenplay.

Lamichhane was born in Syangja to a family of farmers. He grew up in the village, with the usual village boyhood experience of playing truant occasionally and falling in love secretly, reading whatever he could get his hands on, and fancying himself a poet and a writer. His parents are hardworking farmers, and had raised him within the vicissitudes of a hill farmer's life in a village where all forms of inequalities existed. Flavors of that childhood are recorded in quite a few memoirs published in Kantipur weekend supplement Koseli and its Nagarik equivalent, Akshar. One, available at , speaks about his first novel, published and perished in short order, and gives a good insight into the man himself.

Khagendra Lamichhane moved to Pokhara after passing the SLC exams and enrolled at the I. Ed. course at Prithwi Narayan Campus, only to fail both Compulsory Nepali and Compulsory English. It was then that he realized he wasn't the studying kind at all - he had read enough novels to write one for himself. Lamichhane set out to do just that - write a novel so beautiful it would win the Madan Puraskar. Had it typed out at a Cybercafe, sold a gold chain to get it printed. Burned it when the cattle at home needed kudo. The final two sentences of the memoir read - 'There was no smoke at all. But the corners of my eyes were wet.' (Translation mine)

In this story is the seed of - or, a mirror to - most of the characters Lamichhane has created for the stage and the screen: a character with a tender worldview and an endearing naïveté, but also someone given to the extremes of desperate romanticism. In his stories characters the least and the most awesome conflate in the smallest moment: think of Tulke in Talakjung vs Tulke, blowing on hot potatoes picked out of the hearth while bragging about his revolutionary credentials. Or, in Peeda Geet, his one-man play, going from the helpless plea of, 'Include me in your team, young men, so that I can get work and feed myself,' to shouting at the young and strong for making fun of him, to accepting a doughnut and hot tea and eating with gusto. His characters for the stage, especially the men, seem to swing between tenderness and egotism, between bracing themselves to the enormity of the universe's inherent cruelty and complaining with a childish insistence upon being heard.

In Pokhara, Lamichhane met two people who would shape his future: the actor and director Anup Baral - who is, in his own right, a fine painter of water colors; and with the poet, novelist and playwright Sarubhakta, who now heads the Academy. Lamichhane moved to Kathmandu to begin his career as a writer and actor, and immediately sank into the despairing life of a young man displaced in the city, living in want, but pursuing his heart's desire.

He started writing plays for the stage while he was training under Anup Baral to be an actor. Not many people know, but, apart from the first novel that went up in smoke, Khagendra Lamichhane has written enough plays to be published under two titles by Gurukul: Pani Photo and Katha Natak. He has been among the most prolific writers of original plays in the past decade - his contribution not limited to the stage alone. But, plays like Jaar (adapted from IB Rai's short story by the same name), Talakjung vs Tulke (adapted from Lu Xun’s story The true story of Ah Q ), Paani Photo, Peeda Geet, Khuma (adapted from Mahesh Bikram Shah's short story), and Atal Bahadur ko Aatanka are familiar names to lovers of the Nepali theater scene. He has taken his plays to numerous festivals around the world, including the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe Festival and festivals across India, and to Japan and Thailand. Remember - these plays didn't travel as most Nepali artists travel, to cater to a Nepali diaspora desperate to dance to a few songs after drowning themselves in the liquor of nostalgia, or as a billionaire poet's readings of his own poems. They traveled on their artistic merit alone.

He is also an award winning producer of radio plays. Lamichhane was an integral member of the team behind BBC Media Action's series Katha Mitho Sarangi Ko, for which he wrote a number of radio plays and also directed them, although he was also involved as a producer of the series. Katha Mitho Sarangi Ko was at one time the most popular radio play series in Nepal. A wandering minstrel singer - played by the very talented Dilu Gandarbha, who was also the musician for the series - traveled through Nepal, finding stories about our society, the good and the bad, and narrating them to a wider audience. One story could stretch to four or five episodes, each 'shot' in location: the actors and locally cast non-actors went through lengthy rehearsals to get everything right and, tracked by a group of sound engineers, performed until every nuance of sound was captured. The series was so successful that it became emulated by the BBC in other parts of the world. It succeeded in capturing the vast diversity of languages and dialects that is the essential characteristic of a nation like ours. More than that, it brought together a scattered network of actors from across the country. Go to any theater performance in the city and talk to the people behind the production, and you'll likely hear that they have each worked with Lamichhane's BBC Media Action production, and enjoyed the experience, too.

After a long absence from the traditional stage and  a successful stint as a writer, producer and director of radio plays, Lamichhane was approached to act on the silver screen. In Badhshala, he plays a captured Maoist, tortured and blindfolded through the length of the movie, except at the very end where the audience briefly sees his bearded face. I happened to meet him and the actor Dayahang Rai a few days after that, and saw the camaraderie that had developed from their days of acting at the Gurukul stage. After a brief agreement to dedicate themselves to making the acting appear as realistic as possible, Lamichhane realized that he had got the short end of the stick: Rai was playing an Royal Nepal Army man, in charge of beating the shit out of Lamichhane's character, and he didn't hold back his kicks and punches. Lamichhane had bruises all over his body from that experience.

Soon after that, Bhaskar Dhungana approached Lamichhane for a role in Suntali. Concurrently, Lamichhane was also working on polishing up the screenplay draft for a third-degree adaptation of Talakjung vs Tulke. I had the honor, along with Lamichhane's longtime friend and colleague Shivani Singh Tharu, of going on a three-day retreat to Nagarkot. There, we dedicated ourselves to the task of polishing the draft, starting around noon and finishing late into the morning, warming ourselves with an excellent home-brew at a tea shop down the road, cordially arguing, conceding, accepting, challenging, correcting, until, exhausted, we couldn't think anymore. I saw his dedication to the craft and purity of intention, and he won my respect.

Therefore, when Suntali was about to go on the floor, we asked him to help polish the dialogues. I had written it for the region, but the patina of lived, lively sounds that Lamichhane brings to his dialogues, and the subtle inflection that adds to his characters was far superior to anything I could write. When Suntali came out, and people liked or hated it, uniformly the dialogues resonated with the people. But a lot of that effect was created by Lamichhane, again over a few nights at his place, with platters of fruit (he was trying to lose weight for the role in Suntali, and also for Talakjung vs Tulke, which was slated to commence within days after the Suntali schedule), and of course, that bottle of whiskey - which we barely touched out of excitement for what was happening on the page. Suntali had already been acted out, for every role and every line, by Bhaskar Dhungana. Now, Lamichhane and I acted out each line, weighing it, testing it for the tongue. So much of the comedy was in the sounds.

Talakjung vs Tulke finally brought him to the larger Nepali audience. (My mother hasn't seen the movie, but she saw and recognized him in a television promo. His line 'manmaa lageko kura bhanna ni ke ko sharam laaunchha ni!' bowled her over. She is a fan.) After a very long time - and quite generously, I believe not since Madan Krishna and Hari Bansha's earlier works - had a comedy been so full of such rounded, complicated characters. To the thoughtful viewer, Tulke's place in the world was a metaphor for a lot of the change that our nation has seen in the recent decades. 'Karantikari bhaye ni munchhe marna chahin nahuni,' Tulke says at one point. That is the ethos of the common Nepali person: even the most oppressed in our society - the women, dalits in the hills and the Terai, the landless tillers - they seem too reluctant to be brought over to the side of total violence required for a total revolution. It is not that Nepalis are given to quietly enduring, although fatalism does inculcate that habit in most: it is that the lull of the land, the neighborly empathy makes people averse to quick and cathartic violence. Talakjung vs Tulke fully captures this disrupt, through diction and humor of a sort that is becoming more and more familiar as it hews closer to our soil (and farther from external influences), and by bringing back the empathy and pathos characteristic of our societies.

I envy this man. Apart from running a fully organic orange orchard and vegetable farm in Syangja, he is toiling away on his novel. The last time we talked, we was well past the half-way mark, while I have been deleting the first few pages of mine. His production company is preparing for the second venture - Pashupati Prasad - which promises a radical new story set in an unusual and challenging setting. He recently staged Peeda Geet, his one-man play, and filmed it in its entirety, so that he can slowly, over the years, make all of his work available online for free. Talakjung vs Tulke will soon come out on DVD, with English subtitles - and this will only help bring his talent and dedication to a greater audience. And, as a farmer and the son of farmers, he knows intimately that efforts take a long time to take root, longer to gain the nutrient of experience and hardship, and even longer to day take to enrich themselves with the light that comes from practiced patience before they can bear fruits.

And he lives without the burden of anxiety or regret: he will readily commit to the fire of a new beginning anything perceived failure from the past, and barely flinch. Nepal needs a few more of Khagedra Lamichhanes - for its arts to attain greater refinement; for the voice of a region to be represented before the entire nation, for the slow labor of love to bear bright fruits. Until we have more, we will have to be content with just the one Khagendra Lamichhane among us, and take pride in him.