I was sixteen during Nepal’s first democratic uprising under an alliance led by BP Koirala’s party; at the same time, Burma was holding a democratic election that endorsed Aung San Suu Kyi’s party with an overwhelming number of votes. Less than a decade later, I had a chance to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi’s husband, Michael Aris, in Oxford, not too long before he passed away. Sixteen years later, I am indeed touched by Aung San Suu Kyi’s optimistic comment on Nepal’s peaceful national transition and its drive for ethnic inclusion in the days ahead.

Tale of two Laureates

Suu Kyi is adorned with the official halo of the Nobel Peace Prize and is a courted figure in the corridors of power in the United Nations. But what connects her with a great mass of the common people like me is her unbelievably arduous fight against the dictatorial Burmese junta, which she pursued in an enviably dignified manner. Suu Kyi is indeed exceptional in being a rebel and a stateswoman at the same time. It is not surprising that many compare her with another Nobel Laureate of our generation, Nelson Mandela.

What Mandela and Suu Kyi have in common is the firm resolve of their determined souls to put up a David v Goliath kind of drama, which eventually tired out the giant machines of oppression. But what truly distinguishes the two Laureates from lesser mortals is that, upon victory, they greeted their oppressors with unparalleled compassion and forgiveness. Mandela famously said, “As I walked out of the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”

Invoking South Africa as her role model, Suu Kyi emphasised that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Burma must take a path that is ‘restorative, rather than retributive’. It is this spirit of forgiveness that separates the two Nobel Laureates from those who wage inhumane wars and those who cowardly press for revenge after the fight is over. In taking this stand, the two lone stars make use of Western hegemonic apparatus like the United Nations in handling issues of war and crime but rise above such systems to allow a more compassionate exploration of alternatives. Both Suu Kyi and Mandela have carved out their own trajectories, allowing us to believe that not all nations’ paths must always lead to Rome. Their efforts to explore possibilities of alternative resolutions cannot be delinked from their original visions about their nations.

The home and the world

I want to reflect on something rather profound that Suu Kyi shared when she addressed the Nobel Institute last year. Recalling what the Nobel prize meant to her in 1991, she said that the house arrest had taken away a sense of reality from her, and that the Nobel prize restored it, simply by wiping away the borders separating her ‘home’ where she lived from the ‘world’ out there. Her exact words were, “…there was a house that was mine, and there was the world of others…separate in an indifferent universe…What the Nobel prize did to me was that it drew me once again into the world of other human beings.” Suu Kyi’s reflection reminded me of a masterpiece that another Asian Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, had written just over a century ago—The Home and the World (Ghare Baire). Tagore’s poetic novel showed us the dilemma of a home-confined Indian woman of the anti-colonial era who eventually came out in the open to choose a set of values that would eventually define her nation.

My impressionistic ramblings on the poetry of national imagination came close to its meaning when I read Abhi Subedi’s restatement of Karen Swenson’s words on Suu Kyi, which has now gathered its own following in Nepali social media: “… a bird eats its cell, to crack its walls with wings.” A nation’s hatching is actually not much different. That was what our own national hero BP Koirala believed. BP’s fiction about the fact of a nation serves as a reminder that originality of imagination is what makes a nation original. We are, because we belong to our imaginations. His novel Tin Ghumti (The Three Turns), for example, centres around a woman, Indramaya, who calls on the political and social systems around her to make room for proto humanity. Indramaya appeals to the keeper of her home to see the honesty of her individual acts over the outer constructions of social do’s and don’ts, or lokacar. She fails, and so does her home. A nation that forces a woman into exile because her two feminine roles—a lover and a mother—cannot fit within its moral-legal paradigm, is a nation bound to fail. That was the essence of BP’s novel written during his prolonged imprisonment under the Panchayat.

Alternative value systems

BP’s Tin Ghumti was in some ways inspired by Tagore’s The Home and the World. India’s Bimala was almost Nepal’s Indramaya, even if one regretted her choice while the other rejoiced in it. This genre of writing speaks to the discourse on national semiotics in a Saussurean tradition. Analysing this, India’s ‘reason buster’, Ashis Nandy,

made a Freudian comment about the relationship between the individual and the state, that “the state forbids to the individual the practice of ‘wrong-doing’ not because of the desire to abolish it but of a desire to monopolise it.”

Was it mere accident then that writers like Tagore and BP have required female protagonists to put across their points about an individual’s role in nation-building? Perhaps. But the poetry of Suu Kyi takes this imaginative engendering even further. She makes it easier to understand why this mode of introspection so easily busts the misplaced Western legacy of executive modernity that blindly draws on the legalistic indicators of rights alone. Compassion was what was missing in the legalistic discourse, and Suu Kyi’s feminine being—as those of Tagore and BP’s novels—brings that in abundance.

Nations (and civilisations) evolve from the individual dilemma of choosing between alternative value systems. Which of the values do we permit into our private domains of ‘the home’ and which we hedge to keep out in ‘the world’ is essentially what defines what kind of nation we are and will be. Traditionally left in-charge of the domain of the home, women’s intuitions can profoundly shape such choices.

Shakya is an assistant professor of sociology at South Asian University, India