Speaker: Christoph Emmrich

What is literature if we conceive of it as happening not on desks, in publishing houses, libraries, auditoriums, or private reading spaces, but in or as a bookshop? How is literature different, if one thinks about it from a very specific place and if that place is a bookshop? What does the convergence of displayed printed and bound copies of texts, the salesperson’s personality, financial transactions, poetics, and dust tell us about the literatures these places help to produce? How are the precariousness of the business, the volatility of its clients, the instability of the location, the fragility of the printed material, and the mortality of the shopkeeper part of a hitherto maybe too little thought-about transactional, evanescent, yet momentarily powerful aspect of literature? This talk explores a Himalayan literature’s location from the perspective of a multi-generational family bookshop, Natibajra’s “Saphūdhukū” for Newar language publications in downtown Kathmandu, run from within an old Buddhist monastic shrine, clandestinely under the Rana and Shah regimes, openly since the democratization of the country, serving as a meeting place for priests, poets, scholars, publishers, and activists, and promoting Marxism, Buddhism, avant-garde literature, and Newar language nationalism alike. The reminiscences of the shop’s late owner, Natibajra Bajracharya, who passed away in early 2019, reflections on life and business by members of his family, critical voices of prominent figures who owe their profile in Newar public life to their participation in Natibajra’s transactions, and, last but not least, the corpus of texts that have circulated through and emerged from this site shall help reflect on the literary event that is the bookshop.