4 research outputs found
Deconstructing the Criminal Justice System in Nepal: Toward a Victim-Centered Justice Paradigm within the Shadows of a Hybrid Legal System
No full textNepal’s criminal justice system, despite undergoing legislative reforms, remains entangled in a historical legacy rooted in hierarchical social structures and patriarchal values. This legal system, marked by minimal implementation of justice principles, has yet to realize a truly participatory and victim-centered model of justice. This study aims to evaluate the extent to which legal reforms in Nepal have ensured more equitable and victim-oriented justice, and how legal transformation within the criminal justice system can be actualized. Through a critical examination of Nepal’s legal history, constitutional texts, and legislative reform initiatives, this article assesses the dissonance between progressive legal theories and practical implementation. Employing a normative-juridical approach with an emphasis on critical legal analysis and a comparative-historical perspective, the study reveals that, despite legislative efforts to reduce inequality and discrimination, law enforcement practices continue to reflect structural disparities that neglect the needs of victims and reinforce state dominance in criminal proceedings. Accordingly, current reforms remain insufficient to achieve substantive change and necessitate an ideological transformation toward a legal paradigm that is more responsive and sensitive to victims’ rights
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Experiments with a National Language: A Study of Hindi Modernism
No full textAgainst the background of immense socio-political upheaval in the wake of Indian independence in 1947 and the Partition of India and Pakistan, mid-twentieth century Hindi literature grappled with two main problems: Hindi’s supposed supremacy over other languages and its centrality to the nation on the one hand, and the generation of a literary form that was commensurate to the instability of a new nation on the other. In the same moment, nationalist and official discourses were structured by a belief in a fully formed nation and its heteronormative, patriarchal, and patriotic citizen-subjects, which were to be framed in Hindi. Thus, discourses around the Hindi language postulated the shaping of such a citizen-subject through Hindi, which would in turn evolve into a modern language through its ability to articulate the modern nation.This dissertation argues that while Hindi modernist fiction held an evasive attitude towards nation building, its emergence in a historical moment that was informed by the Partition, developmentalism, and language debates meant that the history that these texts refrained from directly engaging came to reside in their experiments with form. In the post-independence moment, language channeled the violence of nation-making, language conflict, and caste and gender oppression into narrative. I study Krishna Sobti’s (1925-2019), Nirmal Verma’s (1929-2005), and Krishna Baldev Vaid’s (1927-2020) use of a modernist Hindi to explore the instabilities and incoherencies in the nation form at the level of literary and narrative form. Sobti’s preoccupation with female desire, Verma’s attention to the silences within language, and Vaid’s existentialist despair reveal the difficulty of evading the nation when using a language that was often central to imaginaries of the nation. The inhering of nation-as-history in narrative form, I argue, is a consequence not only of the historical moment in which these texts were written, but also of the language in which they were conceived, which remains deeply entangled with the nation.Examining the opening of subjectivities, narrative trajectories, and relationalities to the queer and non-normative, I argue that in the context of attempts to nationalize Hindi in the pre- and post-independence periods in India, the use of modernist form invests Hindi with possibilities, drives, and vocabularies that its nationalized form must repress. The intense preoccupation with gender, language, and narrative form found in Hindi modernist fiction is seen as transmuting the violence of nation making and the despair of postcolonial nationhood into experiments with form and style that lead to a change in the texture of the nationalized language.Chapter 1 looks at Krishna Sobti’s constitution of a feminist Hindi in her novellas Mitro Marjani and Surajmukhi Andhere ke. Reading these novellas in relation to the female body’s instrumentalization as a site for the inscription of national and communal identity during the Partition, I argue that Sobti’s Hindi ruptures the connections between the female body, an official language, and a dominant nationhood that are situated within normative Hindi. Chapter 2 reads Nirmal Verma’s novella Ve Din (Those Days, 1968) and travelogue Cheedon par Chandni (Moonlight on Pine Trees, 1964), both of which were written during his travels in Europe. I argue that Verma’s ‘creative oeuvre’—here Ve Din and Cheedon par Chandni—sublimates the grand narrative of history into a modernist aesthetic that illuminates intimate experiences. Further, by using Hindi as a language of travel and translation in these texts, Verma creates a new idiom that is infused with an ahistorical cosmopolitanism. In Chapter 3, I analyze Krishna Baldev Vaid’s existentialist novel Bimal urf Jaayein to Jaayein Kahan as a Brechtian experiment that registers histories of the nation, masculinity, and literature at the level of form to generate a language that coagulates as it fails to move forward, even as it simultaneously injects non-reproductive pleasure into the text through the use of pornographic obscenity. Hindi thus becomes a language that is placed in the hands of a failed masculine author and that fails to write the nation as well as the masculine protagonist.Modernist experimentation, with its incumbent defamiliarization of language, draws our attention keenly to the traumas and violences already embedded in a language that can never be ‘whole’ in the ways that it is assumed to be in its standard, nationalized register. The work of mid-twentieth century modernist writers replaces Hindi as the language of Hinduism, conservatism, and nationalism with Hindi as the language of feminine autonomy, translation, empathy, cosmopolitanism, hesitancy, and pleasure. It is through the complex literary textures that these writers introduce into the “national language” that their texts begin to conjure alternative imaginaries of the nation
Prometopidia joshimathensis subsp. yazakii Dey & Uniyal & Hausmann & Stüning 2021, ssp. n.
No full textPrometopidia joshimathensis yazakii ssp. n. Figs 2l–o; 3e; 4b, c, e, f, k; 5f; 6e Prometopidia conisaria: Yazaki, 1995: 18 (specimens from Nepal only), text fig. 575 (female genitalia and 7th abdominal sternite), pl. 100, fig. 11 (♂ moth; Yazaki, pers. comm.) (nec Hampson, 1902). Type-material examined. Holotype ♂, Nepal, Ganesh Himal, 1 km E of Gadrang, 2520 m, 9.iii.1996, 85°16’E 28°09’N, leg. László Bódi & György Makranczy; genitalia slide no. 2367-DS, Barcode No.: BC ZFMK Lep 00595. Coll. ZFMK. Paratypes: 1♂, Nepal, Dhumre, Bimal Nagar, 500m, 29.–30.iii.1995, 84°26’E 27°55’N, leg. László Bódi & György Makranczy; genitalia slide No. 2368-DS, Barcode No.: BC ZFMK Lep 00597; 1♂, Nepal, Ganesh Himal, 1 km SW of Gadrang, 2900 m, 10.iii.1996, leg. László Bódi & György Makranczy; genitalia slide No. 2399-DS, Barcode No.: BC ZFMK Lep 00596; 1♀, Nepal, Dhaulagiri Himal, 2,5 km SE of Lebang, 2450 m, 24.iii.1996, leg. László Bódi & György Makranczy; genitalia slide No. 2400-DS, Barcode No.: BC ZFMK Lep 00594; Coll. ZFMK. 1♂, Nepal, Prov. Nr. 2 East, Jiri, 5.IV.1964, leg. W. Dierl; genitalia slide No. ZSM G 424; 1♀, same data, genitalia slide No. ZSM G 20364 (Pritha Dey fec.), coll. ZSM; 1 ♀, Nepal, Kathmandu valley, 5km SW of Kathmandu, Dhankinkali, 25.I.1996, leg. Chenga Sherpa; coll. CMS. Nepal, Kathmandu valley, Godavari, 1600 m: 1♂, 10.i.1992; 1♂, 27.ii.1992; 2♂, 2.iii.1992; 1♀, 16.iii.1992; Godavari, Mt. Phulchouki, 2075–2275 m: 1♂, 2.iii.1992; 1♂, 17.iii.1992; 1♂, 19.iii.1992. Coll. K. Yazaki, Tokyo. Description and diagnosis. Wingspan in males 29–31 mm, female 28 mm. Type-material from Joshimath of the same size as specimens of yazakii ssp.n. from E. Nepal. Pattern and coloration almost the same in both subspecies. There are lighter grey specimens which only have the area outside of the postmedial line darker grey, and completely darker grey specimens.Ante- and postmedial lines are punctate, with the dots on the veins. Females with very indistinct fasciae rarely occur.About half of the specimens of the subspecies yazakii, however, have continuous transverse fasciae (see fig. 2m): two of four in coll. ZFMK, four of eight in coll. Yazaki; the relation may change in larger samples. In both collections the single females have punctate fasciae. Among the nominotypical subspecies from Joshimath (n=7) and paratypes from Punjab (n=3) specimens with continuous fasciae do not occur. The hindwing bases in males of ssp. yazakii are swollen and distinctly modified like a rectangular pouch, with a small, round, membranous section, similar to a tympanum, near the base of the frenulum. The basal part of vein Rs (upper vein of the hindwing cell) is also strongly angled, running adjacent to the distal border of the pouch. The function of this unusual structure is unknown and it should be paid more attention to it in future. Further differences are seen in the shape of the distal process of the 7 th sternite in females: a rather narrow, transverse, almost rectangular process in P. joshimathensis joshimathensis (Fig. 4h), a broader, distally double-curved process in ssp. yazakii (Fig. 3e). The male genitalia of both subspecies are without distinctive differences, but the female genitalia are slightly larger in subsp. yazakii, with the anterior part of corpus bursae larger in relation to the posterior part and a larger signum with wider opening, broader sclerotized ring with more numerous and longer spines. Morphologically, all these differences are considered to be of subspecific value, though the genetic distance is rather high. Distribution. Central and eastern Nepal (Fig. 1 (a)) Etymology. Dedicated to Katsumi Yazaki, Tokyo, one of the best-known experts of East Asian Geometridae, who as the first revising author studied specimens of Prometopidia intensively, designating and figuring also the lectotype of the type-species in the collection of the NHMUK. Moreover, he first recorded specimens of Prometopidia from Nepal. Genetic data. BIN not yet assigned, data based on three sequences with fragment lengths of 407 bp, all from eastern Nepal. Maximum intraspecific variation 1.0%. Genetic distance to nominotypical subspecies 3.3%, requiring confirmation by additional specimens. Genetic distance to P. conisaria 6.7%.Published as part of Dey, Pritha, Uniyal, Virendra Prasad, Hausmann, Axel & Stüning, Dieter, 2021, Revision of the genus Prometopidia Hampson, 1902, with description of the new species P. joshimathensis sp. nov. from West-Himalaya and its subspecies P. j yazakii ssp. nov. from Nepal (Lepidoptera: Geometridae, Ennominae), pp. 28-44 in Zootaxa 4980 (1) on pages 40-42, DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.4980.1.2, http://zenodo.org/record/488290
