The Lunatic

      
                                                                        Laxmi Prasad Devkota, Nepal (1909 – 1959)
Summary in English

"The Lunatic" by Devkota is an autobiographical poem. The poet appears at the center of modern society wearing the mask of a Lunatic speaker and attack the modern corrupted world. This is the translated version of the Nepali poem "Pagal" by the poet himself. Each stanza brings out a different aspect of the speaker's character: confidence, abnormality, imagination, sensitivity, anger and awful majesty. The poet exposes the evils, corruptions, ugliness, injustices, prejudices and discrimination that are prevalent in the modern Nepalese society.
In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker is mad. It means he is a Lunatic person and attacks so-called sane world and its evils. Sane people are overconfident, oversensitive and extremely proud hollowly intellectual achievements. They always feel but do not think. In fact, emotional aspect of human soul is focused by the poet. In the second stanza, the speaker has pointed out the facts that prove a man insane. The world of the so-called insane people is the world of average understanding.
The speaker as a lunatic claims that he sees the sound and hears the sights. He tastes the fragrance and smells the taste. Similarly, he sees the flowers and beauty in the stones. He also touches the things thinner than air and believes the things of existence of which the sane world denies. He also communicates with the birds and animals. However, in the lunatic's world, everything is seen positively, but in the world of sane people, everything is viewed negatively. The lunatic speaker argues that he has even the sixth sense. He dances in the nature with the songs of cuckoo. Therefore, he says that he is mad at this condition.
The speaker compares and contrasts the world of sane with the world of insane. In the world of ordinary beings, the interpretation made with the sixth senses is not only illegible and incomplete but also nonsense, the corrupted person enjoys the time with wine and prostitutes, has no sense of humanity and judges everything from monetary point of view. If the person who dares to speak of their irrationality is to be mad, the speaker accepts that he is mad. The lunatic speaker says that he is emotional and works with heart. He melts and flows. He is like poetry. On the other hand, sane people are like prose (essay). They work with mind. The heaven of the sane is his hell. Their religion is his sin, and king is a beggar for him, their gold and diamond are valueless for him. Sane people think that they have five senses, they like progression, nature is unremarkable, they believe things is unremarkable, they believe things have limited meaning. In contrast, insane people are in miserable condition and say that they have six senses. They claim that their heart works over mind and the things have limitless meaning. For them, heaven is hell and progression as regression but nature is remarkable and enlightened one.