12 January 2026
The historical, political, economic and legal reasons for Nepal’s Dalit population remaining uneducated, unrepresented, and largely unheard until about twenty years ago are well known and do not need reiteration. Similarly, the post-1990 political and societal changes that have increased the level of Dalit representation in key institutions and enabled the emergence of a tiny Dalit middle class in Nepal are also quite well established.
One of the lesser-known consequences of the emergence of this class of Dalits, however, is a recent, quite sudden blossoming of Dalit-authored writing in Nepali. I have to date identified some 70 living Nepali Dalit writers who have published poetry, and (to a lesser extent) literature in other genres, including short fiction. At least 21 living Nepali Dalit writers, plus three who have died, have also published books.
Nearly all of these individuals come from Pahadi [Hill] Dalit communities. The fact that so little literature of this nature has yet emanated from Nepal’s Madhesi Dalit communities attests to their continued marginalisation. The change of consciousness that leads to people beginning to write is plainly a consequence of the rapid spread of at least school-level educational achievement in communities where, for generations, illiteracy has been the norm. But I have struggled to find any studies of other cases of oppressed minorities acquiring, within the course of just one or two generations, the levels of literacy and education that have hitherto been the exclusive preserve of a dominant caste/class.
This essay is an attempt to describe how individuals born into Nepali Dalit families were inspired and enabled to write and publish literature. It draws upon ongoing conversations with six contemporary Nepali Dalit writers—Dhana Kumari Sunar, Pancha Kumari Pariyar, Nabin Abhilashi, Krishna Bishwakarma ‘Satisaal’, Asmita Badi, and Kisan Premi, hailing from Hetauda, Khotang, Dang, Narayangarh, Surkhet, and Chitwan, respectively—and insights from conversations with a large number of other Dalit writers over the past three years.
Personal trajectories
The post-Panchayat watershed comes dramatically into view when one sits down with a contemporary Nepali Dalit writer and asks them to share their memories. However, the abolition of the Panchayat regime in 1990/1 did not begin to bring Dalits into the mainstream immediately. In fact, once multi-party democracy was re-instated in 1991, Nepali voters rejected Dalit candidates in election after election. It could be argued, therefore, that the emergence of a Nepali-language Dalit Literature in the 1990s was triggered partially by ongoing oppression and caste-based discrimination, which continued despite democratisation.
While a handful of the Nepali Dalit writers with whom I have spoken grew up in families where literate practices already had some status, most are the offspring of illiterate parents who still worked to feed their families in the same way as generations of Dalits had before them. ‘There was no one in my home who could read or write’, Asmita Badi told me, ‘My parents had never even seen a school.’ When she was in year 10 at school, she taught her parents to write and recognise their own names. Dhana Kumari Sunar has a similar story to tell: her father was not educated, and it was Dhana Kumari who taught her mother how to write her own name.
Every Dalit writer has experiences to relate of caste-based discrimination at school. These have varied in their level of severity, but the experience of eating and drinking separately from the other children, using separate water sources, not being asked to perform services such as bringing water for the teacher, and not being allowed to enter the homes of non-Dalit schoolmates, even those who were intimate friends, was common to all. Famously, Pancha Kumari Pariyar was the only Dalit girl at her school, and for her first three years there she studied standing up or squatting on the classroom floor because she was not permitted to sit on a bench alongside the non-Dalit children. Speaking of his own very similar experiences, Nabin Abhilashi told me: ‘There weren’t benches in every room, and where there were benches there were not enough for everyone. And for whom were there not enough? For the Dalits, of course. [Khagendra] Sangraula’s [story] “Sangram Bahadur Sarki” is like my story.’
It was also a struggle for Dalit students to continue beyond primary school level. Nabin, the only Dalit to pass the School Leaving Certificate in his village at that time, told me that during his schooldays, Dalit children would generally study up to Class 6 or 7, then go to India in search of work, or work as tractor drivers, labourers, mechanics or some such. Dhana Kumari Sunar had to interrupt her studies after Year 6 due to her family’s inability to afford to pay the 75 rupees annual admission fee that was then charged by government schools. All of her siblings also had similar breaks in their schooling, for the same reason. Her mother tried hard to raise the funds for her schooling, even submitting a written plea to the local Panchayat chief, but was unsuccessful. Krishna Bishwakarma ‘Satisaal’ excelled in his studies in Narayangarh, but when he had completed primary school his father told him, ‘Now we cannot educate you further, son, you will have to study dukkha [sorrow, suffering] from now on.’ So, he went back to cutting firewood in the jungle, assuming that he had not gained admission at the local middle school.
In their much-cited 1963 article, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, Jack Goody and Ian Watt quote anthropologist Margaret Mead to argue that modern education creates discontinuities between the illiterate and their children. In many cases, this discontinuity was actively sought by Nepali Dalit parents who identified a lack of education as one of the root causes of their families’ continued immiseration. The roles played by mothers in securing education for their children is a theme that recurs regularly in Dalit writers’ life journeys. In 1999, Purna Nepali addressed the next generation in a poem entitled ‘Ma Thanne Chu’ [I will Consider]:
If you quit your crying and roar out a challenge instead,
If you quit your games and resist instead,
If you seize your right, without begging for it,
To live as a human, because you are human,
I will consider my story concluded,
The dark pit of centuries filled in.
(My translation.)
Their families’ poverty was another factor that threatened to hold these writers back in their early years. Unable to buy books, Krishna Bishwakarma Satisaal went to friends’ houses, copied out words from their English dictionaries, took them home, and learned them by heart. Nabin Abhilashi’s mother went out to work, crushing rocks for gravel or gathering firewood in the forest, after his father, a police officer, had to retire early due to a gunshot injury. From Class 8 onwards, Nabin himself would rise at 4 am every day, and travel 25 km on a tractor to a river shore where he would dig sand for a building contractor before starting his day at school.
Many of the Dalit writers I have interviewed claim to have excelled during their early education, despite suffering a range of discriminatory treatments. Winning a prize for a poem is remembered as a key event by many of them. Pancha Kumari Pariyar, who recently became the first female Dalit member of Nepal’s apex state cultural institution, the Nepal Academy, wrote poems from an early age, for which she won prizes in local school competitions. In an interview published in Nepali Times in 2019, she told Muna Gurung: ‘I started writing in 4th grade and I would come first in class or in competitions within the school. But by 5th grade, I was competing at local and district levels. I wrote about the hurt I carried in my younger years, but more than the poems, my focus was always about being 1st, 2nd or 3rd. I didn’t want to be any less.’
Dhana Kumari Sunar was greatly encouraged when the first poem she ever wrote won first prize in a campus poetry competition in the mid-1990s, when she was about 23. She began to write more regularly, publishing poems and essays in political and literary journals and newspapers. Krishna Bishwakarma Satisaal won first prize in his school’s annual poetry competition when he was in Year 8, realised that writing could bring prizes, and applied himself to it with renewed energy.
Particular Nepali authors wielded huge influence over these fledgling writers. Modanath Prashrit was one: Krishna Bishwakarma Satisaal told me that Prashrit’s Devasur Sangram (published in 1973) gave him a ‘very deep consciousness of delusions about religion and the injustices done to us’. He could not afford to buy books, and didn’t even know the titles of the books he needed to read, but then Nepali literary magazines such as Yuva Manch and Madhuparka began to appear in the local marketplace. He would borrow copies from friends or spend many hours at the bookshop reading them, ‘sitting there reading until the shopkeeper shouted at me’.
This new political awareness also led Dalits into a much greater involvement with national-level politics than previous generations. After she was obliged to quit school, Dhana Kumari Sunar worked at a factory in Hetauda for nine years, where members of the underground Maalé party convinced her that their party would liberate the whole proletariat (sarvahara), including the Dalits. They set up a night school, and Dhana Kumari was among its first intake of students. During the latter phases of the ‘People’s War’ in Nepal, Pancha Kumari Pariyar joined the CPN (Maoist) and worked as the Bhaktapur district convenor for a Maoist-aligned Dalit organisation. Krishna Bishwakarma Satisaal became a Maoist activist in the late 1990s; both he and Asmita Badi are now Central Committee members of the Scientific Socialist Communist Party, Nepal.
Kisan Premi provided me with an interesting insight into how a Dalit writer might decide when and how to share their work. He worked at the district level as a civil servant from the later years of the Panchayat regime onward, retiring in 2020. He wrote poetry, often on the topic of Dalit oppression, but did not publish any of it until 1995/6, when he published a poem entitled ‘Janatako Bilauna’ [The People’s Lament] in the journal Saahas, to the consternation of his friends, who feared it might still be unsafe for a government official to publish such material. In 2002, he completed an episodic poem [khandakavya] entitled Chetana [Consciousness], which he described as ‘written for the Dalit popular awakening (jan-jaagaran)’. He handed out printed copies to those who could read, and for those who could not, he made cassette recordings. One reaction he got from his readers and listeners was that if he wrote only about Dalits he would not be taken seriously as a writer. So, another ten years passed before the conditions seemed to be right, and Chetana was finally published in 2013.
The conditions of writership
The British literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, argues that the production of ‘culture’ depends on an economy evolving to the point where it produces an economic surplus: ‘Only then can some people be released from the business of keeping the tribe alive.’ The phrase ‘keeping the tribe alive’ has a certain resonance here. For generations, Dalits performed roles in communities all across India and Nepal without which no society, no ‘tribe’, can function, but they were categorically excluded from all avenues of personal advancement and educational development. After the advent of multi-party democracy in Nepal in 1990, Nepalis, Dalits included, enjoyed new freedoms of speech and expression. A new generation of Dalits, particularly in the hills, not only acquired literacy but also completed their schooling and began to develop the kind of historical sensibility provided by the development and transmission of writing. They also experienced the dramatic rise in ethnic and caste consciousness which was both a cause and an outcome of the Maoist rebellion against the Nepali state. In these circumstances, it was perhaps inevitable that they would begin to stake their claim to a place in Nepal’s literary sphere, of which many had only recently become aware.
These political and social changes have begun to provide a small number of Nepali Dalits with access to the ‘condition’ of creative writership. This is a condition that would often be associated with middle-class status in societal contexts where creative writing is widely perceived primarily as an activity engaged in during a time characterised as ‘leisure’. But I find it difficult to construct individuals such as these as members of a middle class indulging in writing as a leisure activity, because their identities as writers were forged in contexts of hardship and struggle, and their writings express a strongly felt political need. Many of the Nepali Dalit writers’ motivations mirror those of Indian Dalit writers, whose work is described by Sharankumar Limbale as ‘purposive’ and written ‘from a predetermined certitude’. ‘How many love poems are there in Dalit literature?’ Limbale asks, and answers, ‘Almost none. Why has this happened? It has happened precisely because young people, angry young people, have written Dalit literature. Don’t they feel sexual attraction? Do they not have feelings of love? Of course they do. But compared to sexual attraction and love, they found their rights, their status and their respect to be more important.’
Like their Indian counterparts, Nepali Dalit writers see the literature they produce as a corrective to that produced by generations of other, non-Dalit, writers, which either ignored or misrepresented them. In a conversation I had with him in 2022, Krishna Bishwakarma Satisaal articulated the Dalit literary impulse in the most stirring terms: ‘[During my youth] we did not have any ability to object and the laws [against untouchability] had not been applied. There was no access to the state, so no one to give a hearing to our pain (pidaa). So, a rebellious emotion grew within me, but where to give this expression? The most beautiful aspect (paato), the easiest place, was literature…People wouldn’t take any notice if you just went about shouting your mouth off [literally, “doing gaali”]. To articulate the resentment in my mind I had to learn some art, develop an agenda (mudda), some philosophy (darshan). Then maybe it would have some effect.’
Historically, the writing of poetry, fiction and other literary genres in any given society has been a highbrow practice, linked to and dependent upon educational status and levels of socio-economic privilege, and ultimately to membership of a particular economic class: one that buys and reads books. It was, therefore, an activity that was long beyond the reach of Nepal’s Dalits—initially because of their illiteracy and material poverty (most books of Nepali literature are self-published, requiring a substantial subvention from the author). Even after those conditions began to be ameliorated, Nepali writership remained the exclusive preserve of dominant-caste writers. Beginning with the political changes of the 1990s, and increasingly after the end of the 1996–2006 civil war, some educated Nepali hill Dalits identified Nepali literature as a bastion of dominant-caste privilege that had to be stormed. So far, through the largely uncoordinated efforts of individual writers, they have succeeded in carving out a space within it for themselves. To borrow the words of the British writer, George Orwell (‘Why I Write’, 1946), the literature they have produced ‘pushes the world in a certain direction’, and helps us to see Nepali history and society ‘more clearly as they are’.
