Laxmi Prasad Devkota Biography, the Mahakabi or Poet the Great of Nepal


Laxmi Prasad Devkota was a Novelist, author, and Nepali artist. In Nepali literature, He was honored with the title of Mahakavi. He was considered the most famous literary figure in Nepal.

Muna Madan, Kundalini, Bhikhari, Sulochana, and Shakuntala are popular and best-selling. He is known as a poet with a golden heart. 

Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s early stage 

Laxmi Prasad Devkota was born in Dobidhara, Kathmandu, on 1909, 13 November, on the night of Lakshmi puja. His father’s name is Teel Madhav Devkota, and his mother’s is Lakshmi Devi Devkota.

He achieved his Basic education under the custodianship of his father. His father was a Sanskrit scholar. He started his formal education at Durbar High School, where he learned English and Sanskrit grammar.

At the age of 17, he finished his matriculation exams in Patna. He goes after a bachelor of arts and law at Tri-Chandra College. He graduated from Patna University. Due to the family’s financial condition, his desire for his master’s degree was incomplete.

Laxmi Prasad Devkota joined Nepal Bhasaanuwad Parishad ( publication Censor board); a decade after graduating as a lawyer, he met legendary playwright Balkrishna Sama.

At the same time, he also worked As a lecturer at Padma Kanya and Tri-Chandra College.

Laxmi Prasad Devkota Biography, the Mahakabi or Poet the Great of Nepal 1
Laxmi Prasad Devkota Biography

Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s learning and style

  Devkota began to write epic poems in Nepali literature, and he was the first writer in Nepal. He started a modern Nepali language movement by contributing to Nepali literature.

He was inspired by the Newar language ballad song Ji Waya Lachhi Madani. He wrote the narrative Poem Jhyaure Bhaka in folk tune, a famous poem, and in 1930 he wrote Muna Madan. The best-selling book in the history of Nepali literature is Muna Madan.

The documentary Muna Madan, Nepal’s real note for the foreign-language Movie at the 76th Foundation Grants, was based on this poem in 2003.

At the time of the Ranas- the country rulers, he received immediate recognition. Muna Madan’s poem describes the story of Madan, a traveling salesman who goes to Tibet to earn some money, leaving his wife, Muna.

The verse explains the thematic hardships of the journey: the agony of parting, the itching desire, and the misery of death.

The terrible song ballad Ji Waya la Lachhi Maduni is based on a New dealer, his wife, and his mother. The retailer leaves Kathmandu to work in Tibet.

The song begins with the wife pleading with her relative to stop him, assuming that it doesn’t have a month after she came to their house and he needs to go on.

Laxmi Prasad Devkota had learned this melody from locals singing it at a regional gathering. He was highly influenced by Melody and determined to re-write it in Nepali literature After the Rana leaders had limited literature, language, and New merchants.

He became the Main part of a New dealer as in the first melody to a Kshatriya (warrior class) number. However, Kshatriya spirits did not obey business for their existence during that time.

He came to represent it as such in sequence to attract the Rana leaders. He could make long poems and lyrics with learned philosophical density and complexity in quite a short time. Devkota wrote Shakuntala, which is the first narrative literature.

And including Mahakavya printing in the Nepali language in three months. Shakuntala is a large business in 24 cantos based on Kalidasa’s great Sanskrit musical Abhijnanasakuntalam, Written in 1945.

Devkota’s knowledge of Sanskrit music shows Shakuntala and style, which he regularly combined while working in Nepali.

According to David Rubin, the new learner and translator of Devkota,  Shakuntala is his most notable accomplishment. 

Laxmi Prasad Devkota Biography, the Mahakabi or Poet the Great of Nepal 2
Laxmi Prasad Devkota Biography

“It is, externally reservations, a staggering accomplishment, arranging numerous elements of a standing tradition with a new characteristic of the scheme, a reward of a remarkable personality, Kālidāsa’s poetic drama of natural love with a representative structure that guides to improvement in the coinciding of emotional and pure love.

Devkota also printed short lyrics arranged in various classical and non-traditional modes and rhythms. Most of his poem explains the significance of English Poetic poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth. The title poem in the group Bhikhari is nostalgic of Wordsworth’s “The Old Cumberland Beggar.”

Devkota had described the fellow performing his unfortunate debt and pain in this poem, removed of personal emotion and physical encouragement.

On the other hand, Fellowes is viewed as the cause of kindness arranged in the heart of pain and poverty. Devkota combines the fellow with the priest as the latest fount of opinion and insight.

His lyrics focus on mundane details of the natural world and the human. The titles of his songs, like Ban and Baadal, explains that he asked his romantic thought about the general and proximal appearances of the world. What resonates during most of his poems is his deep belief in sympathy.

For example, in the composition Ban, the lecturer runs a range of investigations, refusing solace and support that could be awarded individually to him as a person.

He includes his loyalty and attention to his personal life. The composition closes with the following quatrain highlighting the speaker’s humanistic desires.

Besides poems, Devkota also presented meaningful enrichment to the essay genre. He is considered the father of the current Nepali article.

He challenged the traditional method of themes and developed conventional ways of essay writing. He contained a more liquid and natural form that had more accuracy in meaning, expressive in words of a language, and significance in emotions.

His articles are frequently paradoxical and represented by their sharp humor and relentless analysis of the modernizing characters from the West in the Nepali community.

An article titled Bhaladmi examines a dying course in Nepali culture to recognize people based on their outside surfaces and outlay rather than their original personal personality and quality.

In a different article titled Ke Nepal Sano Cha? He states a genuinely nationalistic way of protesting the colonial troops of British India, which he thought were invading all characters of Nepali society.

His poems were published in an article book named Laxmi Nibandha.

Laxmi Prasad Devkota Biography, the Mahakabi or Poet the Great of Nepal 3
Laxmi Prasad Devkota Biography

Laxmi Prasad Devkota in politics

Laxmi Prasad Devkota was not working inside any well-established state party in his poetry, which harmoniously included an opinion of resistance against the autocratic Rana dynasty.

He initiated operating as a director of the Yugvani newspaper of the Nepali Congress. At the same time, his self-exile in Varanasi started confiscating all his assets in Nepal by the Rana Government.

After democracy through the revolution of 1951, Devkota was appointed to the ‘Nepal Advisory Committee’ in 1952 by King Tribhuvan and was elected member of the Nepal Salahkar Samiti. 

Under Kanwar Inderjit Singh’s premiership, he was elected as Autonomous Governance and Minister of Education in 1957.

Laxmi Prasad Devkota Biography, the Mahakabi or Poet the Great of Nepal 4
Laxmi Prasad Devkota Biography

Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s family members

Padma Devkota is the eldest son of Laxmi Prasad Devkota, a writer and author who worked for several years as a teacher at the English Department, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu.

Devkota suffered from Nervous breakdowns in 1930, apparently due to the death of his two-month-old daughter, father, and mother. He was admitted to the Mental Asylum of Ranchi, India, for five months in 1939.

He could not support the marriages and properties of his daughters due to economic conditions. He told his wife, “Let’s leave the children to the concern of youth and society and abandon this world at bedtime and take potassium cyanide or morphine. 

Laxmi Prasad Devkota Biography, the Mahakabi or Poet the Great of Nepal 5
Laxmi Prasad Devkota Biography

Death

Laxmi Prasad Devkota was a severe smoker during his life. Devkota died at Aryaghat Kathmandu on 14 September 1959 after a long struggle with cancer.

References