योगमाया न्यौपाने (सन् १८६७–१९४१) राणा शासनविरुद्ध आवाज उठाउने कवयित्री, धार्मिक नेतृ र समाजसुधारक थिइन्। उनका कविता अनुयायीहरूले सङ्कलन गरेको सर्वार्थ योगवाणीमा छन्। यो लेख योगमायाको परिचय, जीवनी र उनका कविता कसरी हामीसम्म आइपुगे भन्नेबारे हो।
Yogmaya Neupane is remembered as a reformer, a religious leader and an early woman poet, usually in that order. I want to start with the third, because her poetry raises a question every other poet on this site lets us avoid: what is a poem when its author never wrote it down?
The facts
She was born in 1867 (1924 BS) at Nepaledanda, Majhuwabesi, in Bhojpur, eastern Nepal, and she died on 5 July 1941 (22 Asar 1998 BS). Popular tradition gives a later July date.
She led a religious community and spoke publicly against the Rana government and the injustices she saw around her. Sources describe her as a religious leader, a campaigner for women's rights and a poet.
Her verse survives in one published book, Sarvartha Yogbani (सर्वार्थ योगवाणी). Accounts say she could not read or write. Her followers took down her verses, and the book holds only part of what she composed.
Her work is out of copyright.
A poet without a manuscript
We are used to a simple chain: a poet writes a poem, and we read what she wrote. With Yogmaya the chain has another link in it. She composed aloud; others listened, remembered and wrote; later still, editors chose what to print.
That makes her poetry closer to the way most Nepali poetry lived for most of its history than to the way we read poems now. Bhanubhakta's Ramayana also travelled by voice before it was printed. Folk song still does. A poem built to be spoken and remembered is not a lesser poem. It is a different technology, and I have written about what that technology demands in why modern Nepali poetry stopped rhyming.
It also means every printed line of hers has passed through other people's hands and memories. Reading her honestly means holding that in mind, without either dismissing the text or treating it as untouched.
Poetry as public speech
Her verse was not private. It was addressed to a community and to power, at a time when speaking against the Rana state was dangerous. It belongs with the long line of Nepali writing that treats the poem as a way of saying something in public that cannot be said plainly. Bhupi Sherchan, decades later and in a very different form, is part of the same line.
How she died, and how carefully to tell it
In July 1941 she and 67 of her followers ended their lives in the Arun River, in Bhojpur, most of them on the same day. It is usually described as jal samadhi, a religious death by water, and as an act of protest against the government.
That event now dominates her story, and it should be told plainly and without romance. The scholar Michael Hutt has pointed out that it is missing from published histories of Nepal, and that activists and scholars have each reshaped her story for their own purposes since. Both things can be true: what she did was real, and the meaning attached to it has been built afterwards.
For a reader, the useful discipline is to keep the poet in view. She was a woman composing verse that criticised power, in a society that gave women very little public voice. That is the achievement, and it does not depend on how her life ended.
What a working poet takes from her
Authorship is not the same as handwriting. A poem can be wholly someone's even when another hand set it down. I think about this a great deal; the novel I am writing, The Ghostwriter, is about exactly that question.
Spoken poetry has its own standards. A line that has to survive in memory must be shaped differently from one that will sit on a page. Writing for the ear is a craft, not a simplification.
Tell real lives carefully. When a poet's death is more famous than her poems, the first duty is to the poems.
Where to go next
Bhanubhakta Acharya is the other poet here whose work lived by voice first. Parijat, a century later, is the next woman on this site to change what Nepali writing could be about. The full list is on the Nepali poets page.