Manjushree Thapa Middle Ground: Nepal Literature Festival Keynote, anschließend Gespräch mit Rajeev Balasubramanyam
More recently, the collective political imagination has turned away from the difficult task of envisioning a just future, and has instead turned to the comforting promises of nostalgic, simplistic and even false narratives about the past.
Manjushree Thapa’s keynote address explores how the immense complexity of South Asia can inspire people from the region to resist this tendency to retreat and to once again cast a bold gaze towards the future.
South Asia has always been characterised by intellectual and material exchange, stretching from the Arabian Sea across the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean. Throughout this long history, South Asia has created and exchanged knowledge in hundreds of Indo-European, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic languages, both major and minor.
Thapa turns her attention to the present: a South Asia in which hopes for democracy are being severely tested by social inequality, economic insecurity, environmental crises and resurgent authoritarianism. Drawing on her long-standing engagement with the political upheavals in Nepal, she asks what kind of stories might help to counteract reactionary nostalgia.
The whole world stands to lose if such a cosmopolitan and educated region turns its back on the task of imagining the future. In her keynote speech, Manjushree explores the extent to which the climate crisis and economic uncertainty lend apparent appeal to nostalgic narratives about the past, and she proposes creative ways of imagining a just future.
In English with simultaneous translation into German
Additional information
Dates
October 2026
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