Why would anyone choose poetry, often considered the most delicate of all art forms, as a means of resistance and reclaiming identity? Understanding this would mean understanding the nature of the Nepali state. When the state responds to repeated appeals with only delays, denials, and withholding, anger ceases to remain only an emotion and becomes an instrument. And, for creative poetic minds, poetry becomes the last available resort to remonstrate with the state.
As years pass after Nepal declared itself a republic in 2008, a distinct poetic trend has surfaced where violence and aggression function as rhetorical and symbolic retaliation—a means for marginalised voices to reclaim their agency and assert rights long denied. Such poems have mostly come from literary figures at the societal, cultural, economic, and political margins, mainly from Dalit and Janajati backgrounds, condemning the state for failing to deliver on its promises and for perpetuating the cultural, political, and economic marginalisation of the already marginalised. This failure has given rise to a literature of resistance—a verse that no longer requests politely for a seat, but calls out the outright betrayal from the state.
Srijansil araajakata
These literary figures refuse to conform to canonical Nepali literary norms; instead, they produce poetry that differs in style and language. Through the increasing practice of writing poetry in native languages, celebrating local and indigenous cultures and rituals, foregrounding native characters as poetic subjects, and often using abrasive language, these poets sought to dislodge canonical literary practices. Their work was rooted in the poetic movement known as srijansil araajakata (creative anarchy).
Srijansil araajakata is a counter-canonical literary movement that came to prominence around the 2006 People’s movement in Nepal. Led by literary figures such as Upendra Subba, Rajan Mukarung, and Hangyug Agyat, it is an organised literary movement that challenges literary canons, norms, linguistic discipline, and the dominant aesthetic sense in Nepali literature, sparking debate in favour of plurality, locality, identity, and, most importantly, offering alternative literary expressions. Srijansil araajakata, in that sense, is larger than a literary slogan—an ideological intervention against established modes of literary structures and expressions, linguistic centrality, and cultural dominance. Many writers who identify with this movement felt that the characters, settings, language, and aesthetic sense in Nepal’s canonical literature did not represent the country’s diversity and thus needed an alternative form of poetic expression.
The major contribution of creative anarchists is evident in their use of language. For a long time, standard Nepali was accepted as the only literary language. Against the canonical trend, creative anarchists brought local words, mother-tongue expressions, everyday dialects, local myths, indigenous consciousness, and cultural symbols to the fore through their literature—a major intervention in favour of linguistic democracy. Although this has increasingly become a trend, literary works from these marginal spaces have often been met with as much disparagement as appreciation, with Nepali critics arguing that they trade in provocation rather than art—that their unflinching depictions of caste-based violence, cultural and linguistic discrimination, raw language, and refusal to soften upper-caste or state complicity amount to propaganda designed to inflame rather than illuminate.
For the purpose of this essay, from among the new generation of contemporary poets of Nepal, I pick Muktan Theba as an archetypal figure whose body of work has been at the receiving end of these criticisms. Such criticisms about poets speak less about their poetry than about the critics’ praise for canonical Nepali literature, its literary figures, and their modes of literary expression and language use. Moreover, these criticisms misunderstand not only how literature works as an art form but also who it is written for and what it is meant to do.
Theba’s poetry has emerged directly from sites of protest—his work has been recited at demonstrations against the state’s treatment of marginalised communities, contesting historical injustices. For a poet writing from within these conditions, poetry becomes less a reflective or aesthetic exercise than an extension of the protest itself. This erasure of a visible distinction between the poem and the confrontation leads critics to read violence, in subject, tone, and rhetorical mode, as central to Theba’s poetic voice.
About Muktan Theba
Muktan Theba is a contemporary poet who writes primarily in Nepali, but as a member of the Tamang indigenous community, his work can be fitted broadly into Nepal’s Janajati literary movement, set against the caste-based, Bahun-Chhetri-dominated Hindu state ideology that historically marginalised not just Tamangs but also other indigenous groups and Dalits, mainly by dispossessing them, denying them benefits of resources, and even criminalising them through accusations tied to Hindu religious rituals.
Through his poetry, Theba gives voice to the voiceless. For example, in one of his poems, Anaagarik (Non-Citizen), he shows this most clearly through a homeless, stateless speaker who rests on a pillow made of bundles of dreams and sleeps without worry. Theba takes the abstract, bureaucratic category of ‘non-citizen’ and grounds it in a body sleeping on the earth, forcing the reader to feel statelessness as a physical condition rather than a legal abstraction. The poem’s irony is that this freedom is not chosen but imposed by the state. By naming this rest a stateless sleep, Theba turns a legal and political category—people without citizenship or belonging—into an intensely lived condition. Theba exemplifies a strand of contemporary Nepali literature that recovers indigenous and subaltern voices previously excluded from the official record, using poetry as a tool of ethnic and social resistance.
The problem with civility as a critical standard
The criticism directed at a poet for being too violent stems from the reader’s comfort rather than the writer’s lived experiences. Only the realisation that Theba writes from a particular ethnic and class position, one shaped by inequality and discrimination, makes clear how his poetry carries the psychic and corporeal weight of historical injustice, exclusion, and structural violence borne by the marginalised groups in Nepal. His works contain striking phrases like ‘khorko maau taanna aaune baaghko gardan chhapkaune’ (slit the throat of the tiger that comes to yank the mother from the pen), ‘Mangalbaare haatbaata lyayeki Bhojpure sirupaate takiyamuni lukayeki chhu’ (I have hidden under my pillow the Bhojpur-made sirupaate khukuri I bought at the Tuesday market), and ‘timro aalo ragat piyera pyaas metaaune kaanda hun ma kaanda’ (I am the thorn that quenches its thirst by drinking your fresh blood). These lines give voice to speakers from communities that have long been silenced and the plight of women who have been the victims of heinous crimes such as rape and those burned alive over dowry disputes.
When critics call such poetry ‘too violent’, they often fail to interrogate or intentionally do not acknowledge what the violence in question is responding to. They extract the poem from its historical context and judge it against a standard of literary gentility that was always the yardstick of those who could afford it. For them, the state’s violence was a distant abstraction rather than a daily experience.
One should thus distinguish between violence as an offensive measure and violence as a mode of retaliation. Violence in art, when it arises as a resistance to oppression and structural violence, is not aesthetic excess. It is accuracy. It is the poet finding a form adequate to what has been experienced. To demand that a poet from a historically marginalised group describe their reality in softer language is to ask them to make the oppressor comfortable with the description of their own crime. Poetry that refuses this demand is not irresponsible. It is honest, and honesty of this type takes considerable artistic courage.
There is a long and serious literary tradition behind such a position. The poetry emerging from the Harlem Renaissance, the 20th-century Afro-American cultural and artistic movement that originated in the United States as a response to a culture that denied Black humanity, creativity, and self-determination, did not soften its rage for white readerships. Although the movement was not instantly accepted as part of mainstream American culture, it led to the awakening of African American culture and creativity. Harlem Renaissance Poets such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Georgia Douglas Johnson experimented with both the joy and hardship within Black experience in their poetry, while working to explain their identity and community on their own terms, outside the mainstream of white stereotypes.
The 1971 Nobel laureate in literature, Pablo Neruda did not moderate his fury against fascism, imperialism and class domination. Through poetry, he gave voice to the working class, peasants, factory workers, and ordinary people. As a Marxist, Neruda deliberately wrote in the language of everyday life, for he believed that through such measures the practices of exploitation and domination could be objectified.
In South Asia, Dalit and Adivasi literature from India has always insisted on language that does not cushion the reader from the reality being described. The violence in such writing is not ornamental or gratuitous. It is structural and inherent to the historical oppression experienced by the Dalit and Adivasi communities. To avoid using such language would be to remove the experience itself.
The question a critic ought to ask is not whether a poem is violent, but whether the violence is doing meaningful work. In Theba’s case, I would submit, it is. The rawness of his expression is not a failure of craft but a conscious choice—a refusal to aestheticise suffering. It should be read as a serious artistic and ethical choice rather than a failure of the poet, and it deserves serious engagement, not dismissal dressed up as taste.
The critic’s role
The criticism applies standards drawn from mainstream, status quo literary taste to poetry that is doing something fundamentally different, both in its experimentation with structure and its use of language. Violence is measured against an ideal of poetic restraint. In this case, the standard is presented as a neutral aesthetic criterion when it is, in fact, a value-laden position that tends to protect the canon from challenges to its authority.
This is not to say that criticism of Theba is inherently illegitimate. Good criticism is always possible, and no poet should be exempt from it. But good criticism begins by understanding what a work is trying to do before measuring how well it succeeds. Criticism that fails to do that simply ends up imposing a pre-given standard from outside and tells readers less about the poems than about the assumptions of the critic.
Theba represents a Nepali poetry that is expanding its sense of what poetry can be, what it can say, and how it can say it. That is precisely what living literature requires. The appropriate critical response is not anxiety about violence but sustained, good-faith engagement with what the poet is doing and why. Theba’s uncompromising anger is not a distortion of the poetry as a literary genre, but an intervention that requires the tradition to make room and, in doing so, become something larger than it was before. Isn’t that something that literature should do?
The critics who call Theba’s violence excessive are, knowingly or not, calling for a smaller literature. That is not a position anyone seriously interested in Nepali poetry should subscribe to. Literature that cannot accommodate the full range of what its poets have lived through, felt and thought is not a literature at its best. It is a literature protecting itself from its own most vital voices.
