Hari Raj Bhattarai

Yangsila Hari Raj Bhattarai

Yangsila: Love across the Himalayas is a fiction that picks up a historical event from a medieval setting and renders it new, tuning it up with contemporary socio-cultural issues in Nepal. The protagonist Panchashar is modeled after medieval Nepali sculptor Arniko, who had been invited by the Chinese Emperor Kublai Khan to build pagodas and stupas in his kingdom. The novel beautifully depicts socio-cultural, including marital relations, dependency and migration among people of eastern Nepali hills with people in China, basically Tibet. It also makes a passing note on the gradual loss of unity and cultural sovereignty of the Kirats living in the eastern hills of Nepal, and the possible danger of external cultural intervention thereof. By giving the novel a positive resolution, the author suggests an amicable solution to the cultural crisis through familial understanding and closer interactions, despite cultural and geographical differences among the people on the two sides of the Himalayas. The novel also gives an allegorical rendering to the latest crisis and uncertainty in the history of Nepal, and its symbolic negation by creative people through an escape into a mythical, imaginary and bucolic setting.