HB Bhandari Prabhat

Greek literature was, in one hand, successful in depicting the permanent passion of the humankind. On the other hand, it also incorporated social values. In the same way, Gopal Parajuli is one of those experimentalist Nepali poets who have accepted some social values as universal. Like Matthew Arnold, a British poet of the Victorian Era, poet Parajuli takes moral and spiritual consciousness as the completeness of Hellenic consciousness. He stresses on the need of high seriousness in poetry, and gets himself entrapped in the ecstasy of a cyclone, bringing together moral and aesthetic consciousness in his creations. Poet Parajuli, who endorses morality, social consciousness and universal humanism, tries to uphold mass civilization through his latest epic. His epics show that staying away from moral and spiritual contemplation is staying away from life and away from labyrinth-conscience. The present epic does have a mirror of life no doubt; more than that, the consciousness of morality and universal love has been projected. In the same way, exploring the potentials present inside him, poet Parajuli stresses on the fact that one should become his own sovereign ruler, and each self (God) should engage in self-introspection to objectively observe and uproot from the face of the world the distaste and rift engendered by time.  For such reasons, Samayako Prasthan (The Departure of Time) is a path to salvation that shows the possibilities of emancipation of the present-day world beset by the crisis of existence and identity even in the physical world we live in.  In the light of these observations, Gopal Parajuli is an influential Nepali poet with labyrinth conscience capable of depicting the trinity—father, son and the holy ghost—as emblematic of time, human and God, together with his neo-Platonic beliefs.  A patron of the belief that literature is for consciousness of life and a perspective and not merely for literature alone, poet Parajuli, in his Samayko Prasthan concludes that the passage of time has led to human demise, and to restore the same, there is  need for a forage right up to divine consciousness.

The poet is unconnected with the society but not altogether disintegrated from it. It's an outcome of the present time that has made him appear romantic. He shows wounds and invents the remedy himself. For this reason, Samayko Prasthan is a challenge to those poets who are habituated to meekly observing and writing their poetry. Poet Parajuli assumes a distinct identity in his caliber to show his readers the path of salvation from inside an ecstatic entrapment.

In short, Parajuli's epic Samayko Prasthan, laden with labyrinth conscience, is a mirror to the present time. The poet, who has identified universal crisis in fine details, and who is unable to endure the death of humanity, poses himself as source of inspiration to the international community for restoring peace, brotherhood, humanity and universal compassion, by reinventing God. For that, he is unwilling to subscribe to the tendency of relegating literature to mere purgation of grudge, or to mere vacuity.  The epic, thus, disqualifies the tendency of viewing everything cursorily and in lumps-sum.

HB Bhandari Prabhat, Critic

Garima, March-April, 2003