The Plight Witness: A Glimpse of the Bhutanese Cause

The Plight Witness: A Glimpse of the Bhutanese Cause has recently entered Nepali market with heart-rending tales of the Bhutanese Nepalis, who were compelled to compromise and were conditioned to lose. A realistic novel, Witness is the English translation of YN Chaulagain’s Nepali fiction Sakshi translated into English by Hem Guragain. The 200 page-long novel has been published by the Literature Council of Bhutan. Done beautifully in English, the novel features the crisis that befell a huge population of Nepali-speaking Bhutanese, who had to take refuge in Nepal and endure untold miseries. Told from the narrator’s first-personal perspective, the story is set in various Nepali refugee camps in the 1990’s. The linear story encompasses a period of about one year, while the novelist has used flashback to bring back the history of torture the Bhutanese rules subjected these poor citizens to, earlier. The novel questions the validity of such unwarranted eviction, India’s role in the rehabilitation of the refugees, Marriage Act 1980, and the Nationality Act 1985 that, in the long run, became the immediate cause of the conflict and the eviction thereof. The novel advocate for the rightful return of the refugees to their homes and life, but its possibility seems bleak, considering the global developments taking newer turns vis-à-vis the refugees’ life.  Though it is translator Guragai’s first book-size translation, the rendering is smooth and captivating and reads like an original piece of writing.