Jail Journal

Jail Diary of BP Koirala

• January 12, 1967:

  I re-read Sarat Babu's Shrikant. I had read it once when I was in school and had liked it then. I was in those days profoundly affected by his novels. But when I re-read Shrikant lately, I found that the novel has clearly dated. The things that struck me are his middle class values, which have become so outdated now that to take them seriously and sentimentally is only to provoke ridicule or at least disinterestedness. Love for a prostitute is not now such a problem because she is no more considered to be a fallen woman unredeemable woman. Sarat Babu inspite of his clear sympathy for prostitutes and fallen women, seems to suffer from a sense of prejudice for them or the society. Sexual or marital fidelity is another value which has lost its luster in the present social context but to which Sarat Babu seems to be deeply attached. Sexual conservatism is not necessarily a virtue, nor sexual liberation a vice by itself. The glories of Sarat Babu's projected womanhood emanate from this conservatism. Sarat Babu does not seem to conceive that sexually free woman can also be conservative. May be, when he wrote the novel, its sentiments were appropriate for the time - but the drawback of this novel is exactly this topicality.



• January 13, 1967:

  After having written all my letters for this month, I feel vacant today. This happens at the end of every Nepali month, when I have to send out my letters for delivery. It seems I become too much involved emotionally as I write my letter - because too full in mind of my dear ones - that no sooner I am done with writing I become overwhelmed with loneliness. Like disappearance of a powerful dream which though a temporary experience acquires vividness - it generates loneliness as if colours and light have disappeared from the scene, as if all the trees and streams, the hills and valleys, the blueness of the sky and its stars, the sun of the heaven - all have vanished from the scene, leaving a vast emptiness in the centre of which I stand. I feel like weeping out of sheer loneliness. I also suffer from a sense of worklessness. There is nothing that I can lay my hands on, there is nothing that I can create. In the vast loneliness, it is not only the material world that loses its variety and colour, the world of the mind too loses the capacity of extolment and the ideas become gray - mind and the world merge in the general grey here in my lonely hours. Worklessness - an attitude of mind which has lost its capacity for excitement - loneliness dulls the mind.



• January 14, 1967:

  Confusing reports on the happenings in china. What is this Red Guards movement? What does the conflict between Mao faction and Lin faction signify? Is army homogenous? If not, will not its participation in the conflict presage a civil war - a tradition and a recurring phenomenon of the Chinese history? Internationally, from the propaganda of Russia, it appears Russia is pro-Lin and anti-Mao; the rest of the world appears to be watching the situation with breathless expectation. The tone of Indian reporting reveals its anti-Mao lines. It appears only Russia is keenly interested in the outcome of the conflict - which means from the point of view of Russian national interest the victory of Mao would auger ill for Russia. Does it mean that Mao's policy is opposed to Lin's in the fact that Mao would like to escalate Chinese confrontation with Russia with implication that she would de-escalate its hostile policy towards India and USA? If so, the outcome of the struggle is of tremendous consequence to the world. India does not seem to have grasped this implication. The implication is that Mao's victory would introduce a period of easement in the relationship between China and India. USA will be a gainer against USSR, at present the latter is gainer against USA as China confronts the latter.



• January 16, 1967:

  All the problems of man spring from this tentative character of man - his middle position. That is why nothing explains him wholly; why all the contrary assertions about him in philosophy are valid; why there is both madness and method in him; why a normal man is sub-human; why there is this tension of existence in him; why he is most unsatisfied with life but is most reluctant to leave it - the current existential thought, the new philosophy (or the current vogue of this old philosophy) is due to the awareness of this middle position of man. Science treats him as an animal (or oven as particles of matter), Idealism treats him as a God, and hence the peculiar philosophy of modern man, that is Existentialism.

  Man's modernism, his selfishness, his egoism, his cruelty, his rapacity, his vanity, all his vices are human attributes. His "negative" qualities. But his selflessness, his charity, his generosity, his kindness, his nobility, his fellow feeling - all his virtues are also human attributes. His "positive" qualities. Negative qualities are historical, reactionary and retrospective; positive qualities are creative, preferential and prospective. If man had only negative qualities, he would have remained an animal; if only positive, he would have already becomes God. He is neither - hence his puzzlement.

  Man is not wholly an animal nor is he wholly a transcendental being. Man is the two beings - animal and God. He is composed of a part animal and a part God, unseparately fused. There is no God in man; nor is there animal in him. He is a vanishing point between an achieved but now receding reality (the disappearing animality, that is, animal) and an unrealized but clearly glimpsed possibility (the approaching Godhood, that is unformed God).



• January 19, 1967:

  Gyaneshwari Gita, about which both Kishunji (Krishna Prasad Bhattarai) and Ram Narayan (Ram Narayan Misra) have very high opinion. Gyaneshwari once made a buffalo recite the slokas of the Vedas. GM (Ganesh Man Singh) thinks that both RN (Ram Narayan Misra) and KP (Krishna Prasad Bhattarai) believe in this story as true and terms them superstitious. GM himself believes in ghosts which he sees so often at night in the camp and believes that dreams are clues to future happenings. GM is not prepared to believe that any harm can come to him despite all the reports of cancer with which he is fatally down. I think this is superstition. But am I free from superstition? Is not trust in science some kind of superstition? Because life is infinitely vaster than the explanation of it provided by science. One should accept the verdicts of science with some skepticism, because they themselves are tentative, fragmentary, elementary and are relevant to a tiny area of human existence. To give more to science than is due is superstition in the reverse.