Agam Singh Giri

The Himalayan Beacon

Agam Singh Giri, a poet of distinction, is regarded as one who best represented the Indian Nepalese (Gorkha) people

Agam Singh Giri

in Nepali literature. His five poetical collections are Yaad – Remembrance, Atama Vyathaa) – Anguish, mine, Aashu – Tears, Jivan Geet – Life’s songs, Youdha r Yoodhaa – War and Warrior, Jaleko Pratiwimba r Roeko Pratidhawni – A burning image and a weeping echo. The first collection was published in 1955 and the last one was published posthumously in 1978 and it was awarded the first Bhanu Puraskar in 1979 by the Nepali Academy of West Bengal.

Giri wrote of sadness felt incessantly by him and a rather over-burdensome sadness prevades his poems. No product of any personal trauma, yet this sadness was intrinsic to Giri’s own nature. The poet’s painful realisation of the sad plight of Gorkhas made it later more acute and the poet discursive. Nevertheless a majority of the best poems of Giri fall in the later category of his poems. In his first phase the poet alternated between inwardly cognizing his sadness as though in purity when poetry was for him ‘a painful expression of an accursed life’ and focusing it outward and bearing it in fusion with other feelings as an in-grown aspect of the existing social reality. The second choice or tendency perceptibly gained on the first.

Of the Indian Nepalis or Gorkhas, who, Giri felt, are today only a faint shadow of their former glorious self, he says: