Mere shadows in the life of Jung Bahadur Kunwar Rana, the founder of the Rana dynasty that ruled Nepal for 104 years, Hidden Women tells us a story of women about whom we know nothing, or very little. Not much is written about these women in Jung Bahadur's life except that against his wishes they committed sati when he was cremated. Strong and independent, they enjoyed a prominent place in his life, and ironically the one he admired most, tried to kill him. Narrated through the eyes of Jung Bahadur's wet nurse, the story is a sensitive depiction of women. Thoroughly researched, Greta Rana builds together a realistic picture of how women lived and thought. hoped and died in a restrictive feudal society of Nepal.
Greta Rana MBE (awarded Order of the British Empire in 2005) was born in Yorkshire, UK and moved to Nepal with her husband Madhukar SJB Rana in 1971. She first ventured into literary fiction in the 1970s after two short genre novels, Nothing Greener and Distant Hills and a popular cliff-hanger written for a weekly newspaper titled Against the Winds of Tomorrow. Her work in mountain areas was to provide the themes for her novels as she observed a country left behind, finding transition difficult against the ethnic and cultural divides and the suffering caused by the desperation of poverty in one of the harshest terrains on earth. She has written novels and seven poetry collections; her last published novel was Hostage (2018). In 1991, her short story, 'The Hill' won The Arnsberger Internationale Kurzprosa. Greta Rana is also a founder member of PEN Nepal and a former Chair of International PEN Women Writers' Committee. Greta Rana has been living in Nepal for about five decades - and on 31 December 2004, she retired from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) where she helped establish a publishing and outreach division 24 years ago. Greta Rana's committed interest in children's education, especially children whose families cannot afford to send them to school, led to the founding of the 'New Shakespeare Wallahs, an amateur drama group working under the auspices of the Nepal-Britain Society to raise resources for children's education amongst the poorest communities. Brief periods of residence in Laos and Afghanistan in the late 1970s and early '80s, besides her time in Nepal, have given her a unique outlook on what the author refers to as 'the colonisation by development aid! Her upcoming novel 'Ghosts in the Bamboo' is broadly plotted around these locales. She is a full-time writer and lives with her children in Jawalakhel, Lalitpur, Kathmandu.
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