To the Battlefield on an Elephant

"To the Battlefield is a sparkling tribute to democracy. Casual, gossipy, but bold and at times blatent and biting,

these columns of fire sketch the history of Democratic Movement in Nepal. Battlefield comes from the vibrant pen of an author who has become a household name in the Nepali speaking regions of the Himalayas; from Dr. Tara Nath Sharma, a legendary figure known for his innovative mould-ing of Nepali language and making it fresh and lively like a hillside brook, shorn of all evil influences, and known too for his fearless outpourings for which he was in 1966 arrested and sentenced for a brief imprisonment and more recently publically denounced by a faction of the Parliament for his editorial article, "A Word or Two, Mr. Speaker", which he wrote as the chief editor of Nepal's national daily, The Rising Nepal. Be it senseless pundits and yogis of Panchayat who advocate darkness and atrocity or conservationists who treat Nepalese as 'stupid anthropoids conserved in a prehistoric zoo for the satisfaction of affluent tourists whims and philistine recreation' or years of his past when he encoun-tered Mahakavi Devkota, Father Moreau, a colossal brain and an affectionate heart, or James Britto, a tyrant Christian missionary, or his own generalissimo who made him a true revolutionary by putting a slice of meat into his Brahmanic mouth, or an eccentric Keralite yogi who mysteriously carried pamphlets of democracy or commonplace popular issues of load-shedding, of Kosi, Karnali and Gandaki or a dull book on Nepali literature by a "mediocre scholar" from the London based School of Oriental and African Studies, Dr. Sharma writes with an intensity that can leave you stunned, and lead you 'to an unchartered and vast space, full of mysterious beauty that inspires both inquisitiveness and awe.' For what Dr. Sharma focuses on are the familiar but forgotten pages of his contemporary Nepal. Battlefield thus becomes a rare gift from the most discussed living Nepali author whose words have always rocked Nepal and remained instrumental in writing the corpus of Nepali language, literature and learning."