Dambar Prasad Ostee, who writes literary works as Dee Pee Ostee,  is a Bhutanese poet of Nepali descent living in Canada. Residing in Brantford, Ontario, he writes poetry, prose, and ghazals shaped by displacement, linguistic suppression, refugee life, labour, and cultural memory. His literary work and organizational involvement have remained closely tied to the preservation and promotion of Nepali language and literary culture among Bhutanese communities dispersed across Nepal and the wider diaspora.

Born in 1974 in Bagana District, Bhutan, Ostee is the son of Balabhadra and Yashoda Ostee. He studied up to class seven in Bhutan. His early life and schooling were shaped by the political turmoil and cultural repression directed at Nepali-speaking Bhutanese. Before forced displacement, he encountered Nepali literature in school through writers such as Parasamani Pradhan, Lekhnath Paudyal, and Dharanidhar Koirala. When the Bhutanese government removed Nepali from the curriculum in grade five, Ostee found it a formative moment. He recalls witnessing Nepali books being confiscated and burned in front of schoolchildren. That experience remained central to his later commitment to writing in Nepali and sustaining the language through literary practice.

In 1992, Ostee and his family fled Bhutan for Nepal amid state oppression of the Nepali-speaking population and suppression of the democratic movement. After arriving in Nepal, he married in 1993 and had a child the following year. He resumed formal study in 1997, completed a bachelor’s degree in English, and in 2006 earned an MA in Nepali. His MA thesis, Bhutani Nepali Bhashi Srasta ra Sirjana (Bhutanese Nepali Writers and Their Works, 2006),  introduced and analyzed twenty-five Bhutanese writers of Nepali ethnicity. He pursued his studies through distance-learning programs in Mal Bazar and Jalpaiguri in India and continued literary study through the Nepali Sahitya Parishad in Siliguri. After completing his MA, he undertook a year-long primary teacher training course offered by the Nepal government. He then worked in a range of educational settings, including schools, adult education, and programs for school dropouts. He also served as assistant in charge at the Bhutanese Community Development Centre and taught Nepali, English, and social studies through Caritas and UN-related educational work. From 2004 to 2010, he worked in Sarlahi district as middle school principal at Adarsha Saraswati Boarding School. In August 2010, Ostee and his family were resettled in Saint John, New Brunswick, under the Canadian resettlement program. They remained there until December 2014, when they moved to Ontario.

Ostee’s writing emerges from refugee experience and from a sustained attachment to Nepali language. The suppression of Nepali in Bhutan remained one of the earliest impulses behind his literary work. He read widely in Nepali literature and developed a strong affinity for Krishna Dharabasi. Among the poets and writers, he admired were Laxmi Prasad Devkota, Bhupi Sherchan, Siddhicharan Shrestha, Lekhnath Paudyal, Indra Bahadur Rai, and Lil Bahadur Chhetri. He also read plays by Balkrishna Sama and novels by B. P. Koirala. His poetic practice moved from traditional metrical verse (chanda) toward prose poetry, a form he found more suitable for the expression of his ideas and experience.

In 1998, Ostee began publishing articles and poems in magazines such as Bhutan Jagaran and Saptahik Sandesh. His work in Bhutan Jagaran, which focused on refugee issues and current affairs, led him into journalism, especially political reporting. The Bhutan Press Union later recognized his journalistic work with an award. After leaving the refugee camp, he continued to write on social and political questions, gathered in his prose writings and literary compositions. With the support of fellow writers Narad Kharel and Dambar Kharel, he published Tribeni in  Birtamod in 2001, a collaborative poetry volume containing seven poems each by the three poets. This publication marked an important stage in his literary development. What began as a drive to defend and conserve Nepali language in the face of its suppression in Bhutan expanded into a wider engagement with social life, memory, deprivation, oppression, love, and refugee experience. His work extends across poetry, ghazals, and prose, and he has also contributed to a Bhutanese ghazal collection.

In “Yasari Banayiyo Mero Pariwarlai Sharanarthi” (“This Is How My Family Was Made Refugees”),  Ostee recounts the circumstances under which his family was displaced from Bhutan. He traces the crisis to 1988, when King Jigme Singye Wangchuck introduced the “one nation, one people” policy directed against Nepali-speaking citizens in southern Bhutan. He describes the imposition of new cultural practices, the protests organized by the Bhutan People’s Party in 1990, and the military response that followed, including violence, arrests, and school closures. In Ostee’s account, his family fled at night, leaving behind their home, belongings, and livestock. They crossed rivers, passed through difficult terrain, and travelled under fear of capture by the Bhutanese army and police. After reaching India, they stayed for a time in Atrighat under precarious conditions and later travelled by bus to Kakarbhitta, Nepal. There they registered with the UNHCR—the UN’s Refugee Agency—and were placed in the Beldangi refugee camp in Jhapa in eastern Nepal, where they joined other displaced families and began rebuilding their lives. This narrative provides the historical and emotional background to much of Ostee’s later writing on exile, statelessness, and continuity across displacement.

In the article, Ostee reflects on the loss of homeland and on the demands of refugee life. He understands this experience as a continuous journey, extending from his ancestors’ migration to Bhutan to his family’s forced departure and their later resettlement in Nepal. His family’s experience is placed within the wider history of the refugee crisis that displaced large numbers of Nepali-speaking Bhutanese from their homes. Ostee likens his own life to a rolling stone descending from the mountains, moving from the hills of Nepal to Muglan, India, and Bhutan, then back to Nepal and onward once more into foreign land.

The idea of life as an unbroken journey appears with particular force in Aviral Yatra (Continuous Journey), a poetry collection of forty-two poems first published in 2016 and reprinted in Hamilton, Ontario, in 2018. In the title poem, Ostee reflects on life’s movement through struggle, hope, suffering, and mortality. He compares life to the uninterrupted flow of the Indravati River. The collection brings together themes that recur across his writing: displacement, identity, endurance, and the unsettled condition of the Bhutanese Nepali diaspora.

Several of his poems in the collection illustrate the thematic range of his work. His poem “Mero Bhasha” (“My Language”) pays homage to the Nepali language. The poem underscores the language’s cultural and literary significance, invoking works such as Muna-Madan and the Ramayana while drawing on images from the natural world to convey its strength, beauty, and sustaining presence. In the poem, language becomes a source of home, continuity, and community across displacement. Another poem, “Naya Varsha” (“New Year”), expresses disillusionment with the arrival of the new year. The poet questions what the new year actually brings when the calendar changes but old problems, social stagnation, and suffering remain in place. The poem critiques the superficiality of new year celebrations and the hollow promises attached to them. Ostee contrasts the exchange of hopeful greetings with harsh realities such as disease, natural disaster, and violence, and in doing so registers frustration with the absence of meaningful change. In “Sapana Bhitrako Euta Pida” (“A Pain in a Dream”), Ostee turns to the question of homeland and to the elemental relation between human life and the earth. The poem moves through a series of dream situations, from blindness and the receiving of kindness to the freedom of flying in the sky, before arriving at the realization that survival finally depends upon the earth itself:

After all, the basis of survival is the earth itself.

Finally . . .

I also realized

I am also an earthling!

The poem ends with the pain of living without a country, giving poetic form to the loss and displacement at the centre of the refugee experience.

Another poem, “Pasina, Ragat ra Dalar” (“Sweat, Blood and Dollars”), addresses the harsh realities of labour and the pursuit of economic survival. Through the metaphor of exchanging sweat and blood for dollars, Ostee represents the physical and emotional cost of work, particularly under difficult and exploitative conditions. Framed through a personal narrative voice, the poem extends beyond an individual story and raises larger questions about the price of earning a livelihood and the value assigned to human effort and life in a capitalist world.

Ostee has also played an active role in literary organization. In the Khudunabari refugee camp, he helped found the Sahityik Sadhana Alankar Guthi,  which recognized writers for their work. He organized Godhooli Sahitya Chautari,  a weekly live reading forum for short plays, stories, ghazals, and poetry. He has also been involved with Sahitya Parishad Bhutan,  an organization extending across the countries where Bhutanese Nepalis have resettled. These activities place his literary contribution within a larger collective project of sustaining reading, writing, criticism, and cultural continuity across scattered communities.

Throughout his writing, Dee Pee Ostee returns to Nepali identity, language, and culture as lived forms shaped by political persecution, migration, and resettlement. His work records the historical experience of Bhutanese displacement while also tracing the emotional and intellectual worlds that emerged from it. He occupies an important place in Bhutanese Nepali diasporic writing because his poetry and prose connect linguistic preservation with refugee memory, literary activism, and the wider social life of resettled communities. His career brings together writer, teacher, organizer, and cultural worker within a single literary trajectory.

References

“Dambar Ostisanga Shivalal Dahal.” Bhutanese Literature Dot Com, 7 Nov. 2010, https://bhutaneseliterature.com/डम्बर-ओस्तीसंग-शिवलाल-दा/.

Ostee, Dee Pee. Aviral Yatra. 2016. Hamilton, 2018.

Ostee, Dee Pee. “Avyakta Premko Parinam.” Bhutanese Literature Dot Com, 1 Jan. 2012, https://bhutaneseliterature.com/अव्यक्त-प्रेमको-परिणाम/.

Ostee, Dee Pee. “Bato ra Ma.” Bhutanese Literature Dot Com, 24 June 2011, https://bhutaneseliterature.com/बाटो-र-म/.

Ostee, Dee Pee. “Ma Euta Patrakar.” Bhutanese Literature Dot Com, 26 Dec. 2010, https://bhutaneseliterature.com/म-एउटा-पत्रकार/.

Ostee, Dee Pee. “Mero Bhasha.” Bhutanese Literature Dot Com, 30 Jan. 2011, https://bhutaneseliterature.com/मेरो-भाषा/.

Ostee, Dee Pee. “Nartangini.” Bhutanese Literature Dot Com, 13 Mar. 2011, https://bhutaneseliterature.com/नर्तांगिनी/.

Ostee, Dee Pee. “Naya Varsha.” Bhutanese Literature Dot Com, 17 Apr. 2011, https://bhutaneseliterature.com/नयाँ-वर्ष/.

Ostee, Dee Pee. “Phool.” Bhutanese Literature Dot Com, 4 Dec. 2011, https://bhutaneseliterature.com/फूल/.

Ostee, Dee Pee. “Prem!” Bhutanese Literature Dot Com, 11 Sept. 2011, https://bhutaneseliterature.com/प्रेम-2/.

Ostee, Dee Pee. “Sapana Bhitrako Euta Pida.” Bhutanese Literature Dot Com, 20 Mar. 2011, https://bhutaneseliterature.com/सपना-भित्रको-एउटा-पीडा/.

Ostee, Dee Pee. “Yasari Banayiyo Mero Pariwarlai Sharanarthi.”