Ganga Bahadur’s books: landmark proletarian novels and the Nepali communist movement

Abstract

ABSTRACTBased on literary research and interviews conducted in Kathmandu, this article takes as its starting point the contents of a bookcase belonging to an ex-Maoist combatant now living in retirement in Kathmandu and the “syllabus” promulgated by the then Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) for the ideological training of its cadres. It goes on to chronicle the process by which a number of “landmark ‘proletarian novels’” (Denning 2007, 706) came to be translated into Nepali from Russian and Chinese, and the ways in which Maoist cadres were inspired and influenced by these works during the course of the “People’s War” in Nepal between 1996 and 2006. Finally, the discussion moves to a consideration of the relationship between the impact of these translated texts in the Nepali context and broader conceptualizations of “world literature.”