युवकवि मोतीराम भट्ट (सन् १८६६–१८९६) ले नेपालीमा गजल भित्र्याए, भानुभक्तको रामायण छापे र भानुभक्तको जीवनचरित्र लेखे, जसलाई नेपालीको पहिलो जीवनी मानिन्छ। यो लेख मोतीरामको परिचय, जीवनी र नेपाली साहित्य निर्माणमा उनको योगदानबारे हो।
Motiram Bhatta died at about thirty, and in that time he did something rarer than writing good poems. He built the things a literature needs before anyone can call it one: a printed text, a first great poet, a life story of that poet, and a form that ordinary people would want to write in.
Most poets inherit those. He had to make them.
The facts
He was born in Kathmandu in 1866 (25 Bhadra 1923 BS) and died in 1896. Nepali readers know him as Yuvakavi, the young poet, and he is counted among Nepal's national heroes.
In Banaras he published the Balakanda of Bhanubhakta's Ramayana in 1941 BS, and the complete Ramayana in 1944 BS.
His own books include the poetry collection Manodwega Pravaha (मनोद्वेग प्रवाह), the narrative poem Prahlad Bhakti Katha (प्रह्लाद भक्तिकथा), plays including Shakuntala and Priyadarshika, and, in 1891, Kavi Bhanubhaktako Jivancharitra (कवि भानुभक्तको जीवनचरित्र), the life of Bhanubhakta. That book is often called the first biography written in Nepali, and it makes him the language's first critic as well.
He made Bhanubhakta
This sounds like an exaggeration. It is closer to a description.
Bhanubhakta's Ramayana was not printed in his lifetime. It travelled by recitation. When Motiram set out to print it, a text that existed in many mouths had to become one text on a page: someone had to gather it and fix it in print.
Then he wrote the life. A biography does more than record a person. It argues that this person is worth recording. By writing one about Bhanubhakta, and by writing it as the first of its kind, Motiram was proposing a canon with Bhanubhakta at the top. The title Aadikavi carries that argument still.
Every literature has someone like this, whose name readers know less well than the writer they championed. In Nepali, it was a young man in Banaras with a manuscript and a conviction.
The form he brought home
His other lasting gift is the ghazal. Sources agree that he introduced it into Nepali and made it popular. It came to him through Hindi, which had it from Urdu, which had it from Persian.
What he brought was a set of rules, not a mood: couplets that stand alone, a refrain (radif) repeated at the end of every qualifying line, and a moving rhyme (qafiya) just before it. I have written separately about what the Nepali ghazal actually requires and which rule Nepali loosened.
Why did it take? Partly because a form with fixed rules is teachable. You can show someone the pattern in one couplet, and they can try one of their own that evening. For a literature trying to grow its writers quickly, that is worth more than any single masterpiece.
What a working poet takes from him
Infrastructure is creative work. Printing a text, settling a version, writing the first account of a poet's life: none of this is glamorous, and all of it decided what Nepali readers would read for the next century.
A form can be a gift to other writers. He did not only write ghazals. He made it possible for thousands of people after him to write them, which is a different and larger achievement.
Criticism is part of the art. Saying clearly why a poet matters is a contribution to literature, not a footnote to it. He did it first, and he did it before he was thirty.
Where to go next
Bhanubhakta Acharya is the poet he championed. The ghazal essay picks up the form he brought, and the Nepali poets page has everyone else.