Mobility, Nostalgia and Self Transformation in Nepali Literature: Reading Narayan Wagle’s Palpasa Café as Travel Narrative

Abstract

“To travel is to make a journey, a movement through space. Possibly this journey is epic in scale […]and takes place within the limits of the traveller’s own country or region, or even just their immediate locality”. (Carl Thompson, Travel Writing, p9). The travel, whether it is long or short, necessitates the presence of space as its ulterior dependence. Narayan Wagle, the Nepali travel journalist, in his first experimentation of fiction, named Palpasa Café, brings in his travel encounters in the up skirts of Nepalaya. Fusing fiction with journalism, Wagle presents the blurring division between fact and fiction. In this manner, Wagle can be called as an “embroider”, what Bruce Chatwin coined instead of traveller, as Chatwin advocated the use of adventures with fictional embellishments. The postmodern idea of travel introduces tourism. “Tourism herald postmodernism, it is a product of the rise of consumerist culture, leisure and technological innovation” (Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel, p 27). Attributing the terms embroider, tourist and lifestyle-traveller would analyse the Nepaliness in Drishya or the “I’’ in the book in three different strategies. The first term induced Wagle to fictionalise the travel without losing its factual representation of Nepal. The second gives him confidence to see the places as a stranger to introduce alterity by drawing similarities and differences. The third transforms himself to check his identity in terms of a person who evaluates the life of the people of Nepalaya. This paper analyses how the novel portrays mobility, nostalgia and self-transformation in the form of a travel narrative.