Yubaraj Bhandari is a Nepal-born poet, ghazal writer, songwriter, and essayist whose literary work now extends across Nepal and Canada. His writing moves through poetry, songs, ghazals, op-ed prose, and technical articles, and is marked by spiritual inquiry, emotional separation, memory, social critique, and a sustained responsiveness to place. A recurrent feature of his work is the movement between rural Nepal, urban experience, migration, and later encounters with Canadian landscape, especially Montreal and Niagara. He belongs to a body of Nepali diasporic writers who continue to write from within Nepali literary forms while also widening their imaginative geography through migration and transnational experience.

Bhandari was born in 1972 in Dumribesi, Tanahun, and was the youngest of seven siblings. He grew up in a rural farming family in the mid-hills of Nepal. His parents were Khemraj and Shovakanti. His father died when Bhandari was only six years old, after which his mother raised him and his siblings as a single parent. He completed his schooling at Shankar Secondary School. The emotional and material conditions of this childhood—rural life, farming, early loss, and the mother’s central presence—remain important to understanding his writing. They reappear later in the emotional register of separation, longing, endurance, and memory that marks much of his poetry and song. His passion for poetry emerged early, around the ages of twelve and thirteen. Among his first compositions were poems such as “Timile” (“You”), “Sathi” (“Friend”), and “Pahiro” (“Landslide”).  As a child already dreaming of publishing books, he would turn diaries into handmade book-like objects and fill notebooks with poems. These early poems seem to have moved more toward free verse than toward strict metrical verse.

Music was another crucial influence in his early life. While still in school, he became deeply fond of Nepali singer Narayan Gopal’s songs, listening to them on the Sony radio his family owned. These songs inspired him to write his own. His mother’s encouragement further strengthened his confidence. He would often recite songs to her without telling her that he himself had written them. If she praised one of them, he would submit it for publication. In this way, one of his songs was published for the first time in the literary supplement of Gorkhapatra. That first appearance in print marked a significant milestone in his literary journey, since publication in such a venue offered recognition and public legitimacy to a young writer from outside Kathmandu. He also sent songs to Madhuparka for publication. These early experiences show that his literary beginnings were not confined to poetry alone but included songwriting and publication in major Nepali literary outlets.

After moving to Kathmandu for university study, Bhandari encountered a broader literary world. He found particular inspiration in major Nepali writers such as Laxmi Prasad Devkota and Bhupi Sherchan. He was also energized by the works of Daulat Vikram Bista, Vijay Malla, and Madhav Ghimire, including texts such as “Ek Minute” and Gauri. These readings helped deepen his literary ambition and connect his early lyrical impulse to a more developed literary sensibility. During this period, he pursued studies at Trichandra Campus and Pulchowk Engineering Campus in Kathmandu, first in architecture and later in mechanical automobile engineering. His education then took him abroad to Leningrad and afterwards to Kharkov, Ladi, and Khadi in Ukraine. During these years outside Nepal, his literary interests widened further. He became immersed in Russian poetry, admired Alexander Pushkin, and even experimented with composing short pieces in Russian. The expansion of his literary world through technical study abroad is one of the striking features of his biography: engineering and poetry developed side by side rather than in isolation from one another.

He later returned to Nepal and, after his mother’s death, moved to Canada in 2009. He lived in Montreal until 2021 and then moved to the Greater Toronto Area. Migration did not interrupt his writing. Rather, it altered its thematic field and gave new resonance to questions of separation, belonging, memory, and place. And it relates to his experience of growing up. At one stage, after his mother moved away with one of his brothers, he lived independently for approximately eight to ten years. During that period, he turned to songs of biraha (“separation”) and expressed emotional pain in a melancholic register. That long emotional history, perhaps, helps explain why memory, loss, and maternal presence continue to recur in his poetry even when the surface subject seems different.

His literary production gained renewed momentum in 2016 and 2017 as he became more actively engaged with contemporary literature in Canada and began contributing more frequently to Sahityakosh through his friend Rishi Bastakoti. This connection seems to have revitalized his writing practice and made his output more regular. By 2018, his poetry had begun to move more deeply into spiritual and introspective terrain, as seen in poems such as “Ma Ko Hun?” (“Who Am I?”) and “Naman” (“Bowing Down”), which were later published in a collection.  This phase culminated in the publication of Arko Karnali: Kavira Sangraha  (Another Karnali: Poetry Collection) in 2023, a volume containing fifty-six poems. The collection represents a major stage in his poetic development, gathering poems that move among gratitude, identity, emotion, memory, landscape, social crisis, and spiritual questioning. The opening poem of the collection, “Naman” ,  is a poem of gratitude. The speaker reflects from the present moment on the different dimensions of life and offers thanks to everything that has made existence possible. Gratitude extends from the smallest entities—a grain of dust, air, sky, a drop of water—to the widest and most abstract: sea, cities, houses, teachers, parents, books, food, dreams, family members, the universe, and God. The poem’s movement is expansive, and its tone suggests a spiritual humility rooted in interdependence. Life here is not conceived as an isolated selfhood but as something made possible through relation, gift, and the accumulated presence of others and of the material world.

That gratitude is set against a more searching inwardness in “Ma Ko Hun?”. In this poem, the speaker asks what constitutes identity: name, address, lineage, fame, property, spouse, desire, habit, or emotion. The poem approaches the self as unstable and elusive. It does not merely ask for a label but presses toward a philosophical question about being itself. This movement toward self-inquiry is central to Bhandari’s later poetry, especially after 2018, when spiritual and transcendental concerns became more pronounced in his writing. “Ma Ko Hun?” therefore stands as one of the clearest expressions of his introspective turn.

“Bukhyancha” (“Scarecrow”) turns to error, regret, and moral awakening. The scarecrow becomes a powerful metaphor for the self confronted by its own limitations and mistakes. The speaker recognizes the pain he has caused both to himself and to others, and the scarecrow functions as a silent witness to missteps that cannot simply be undone. The poem is shaped by remorse, but it is also oriented toward empathy and growth. It urges forgiveness and self-care, suggesting that self-awareness begins in the acknowledgement of one’s own failures. Similarly, “Pagal Hanso” (“Crazy Laughter”) presents a figure moving through thought and memory in solitude, struggling with inner turmoil and laughing at the absurdity of emotional life. The laughter is “crazy” because it gathers joy, pain, madness, and estrangement into a single gesture. Both poems show Bhandari’s interest in emotional excess and internal conflict, but they also suggest that self-knowledge emerges through that very disarray.

In “Bhavanako Naksha” (“A Map of Emotions”), Bhandari links emotional experience to geography. The speaker travels through landscapes and memories, from the waves of Karnali to the Atlantic coast, and carries homeland and cultural memory across those spaces. Mountains, rivers, games of childhood, and communal scenes become part of an emotional cartography that cannot be literally mapped. The poem contemplates whether such a map can ever exist, yet it also finds solace in the beauty and variety of the natural world. Here, Bhandari’s poetry begins to connect geography, migration, and feeling in more explicit ways. The emotional life is not detached from terrain; it is lived through it.

Another poem, “Junkiriharu” (“Fireflies”), opens by reflecting on light and darkness as natural cycles, then shifts toward the crises of the present—virus, violence, and war. Against those forms of turmoil, the fireflies become figures of resilience and service. They symbolize frontline workers, from health workers in hospitals to soldiers in villages, whose labour sustains hope amid darkness. The poem moves from contemplation to collective ethics, suggesting that compassion and service can create brightness within uncertainty. This poem clearly extends the ethical and communal concerns already visible in Arko Karnali.

Bhandari’s poetry also engages Canadian places directly, and this is one of the strongest ways in which his writing enters a Canadian literary landscape. His poem “Niagara”  is explicitly about Niagara Falls rather than the wider town or region. The waterfall is figured as sacrifice, beauty, and renewal. It becomes almost sacred: a door to heaven where angels dance and deities flow. Its ceaseless cascade offers catharsis and healing, and even in winter, when frozen, it reveals another spiritual form. The poem is not simply descriptive; it turns the falls into a site of metaphysical reflection and emotional release. In a different register, “Montreal”  is an ode to the city where he lived for more than a decade. The poem celebrates Montreal’s beauty, bilingual culture, Saint Lawrence  River landscape, and distinctive atmosphere. The city is figured intimately, like a handkerchief woven by a beloved, yet also as a marvel of modern life. The speaker feels both closeness and distance, longing to return and to understand the city more deeply. He writes,

Wait Montreal!

To read your culture in your bilingual way

To write your beauty in the colours  of your gardens

I haven’t got it yet

These lines express not mastery but ongoing encounter.. Read together, these poems do more than mention Canadian locations. They show Bhandari translating Canadian landscape and city into Nepali poetic language and sensibility.

Alongside poetry and songs, Bhandari began writing ghazals while studying engineering in Ukraine. After returning to Nepal and later settling in Butwal for work, he gradually found platforms through which to share them. His ghazals appeared in newspapers and magazines, and radio programs devoted to ghazals amplified his literary presence. For him, ghazal is not limited to romantic convention. It is a form capable of carrying emotion, image, dialogue, politics, and social critique. He approaches the ghazal with careful attention to the makta, that is, the central theme, refining and repeating thought to give the composition impact. He values adherence to the traditional discipline of the form while also making room for personal reflection, humility, delicacy, and political meaning. His early ghazal “Paththar Bandachhau” (“You Turn into Stone”) published around 1990/1991 , drew inspiration from well-known Nepali ghazal writers such as Lalijan Rawal and Gyanuwakar. His songs too form an important part of this expressive world, including his collection Nariko Aawaj: Teejka Geet Sangraha (The Voices of Women: A Collection of Teej Songs) published in 1991.

In 2023, Bhandari published Bhavanako Tasvir (A Portrait of Emotions), a collection of 101 ghazals. This book gives a fuller picture of his work in the ghazal form. These ghazals range across philosophical meditation, social and political injustice, betrayal, deception, and love. “Ghazal-1” explores perception, hidden truth, fate, and the uncertainty of outcomes. It suggests that appearances deceive while truth remains concealed beneath surfaces. “Ghazal 45” turns toward social injustice, contrasting the imprisonment of an innocent person with the public glorification of a killer in the media. “Ghazal 73” deals with love’s complexity, showing how it can provoke tears and laughter, beauty and pain, and even become entangled with forms of hatred disguised as affection. Together, these examples show that his ghazals, like his poems, are not narrowly confined to one mood or theme; they move among love, political critique, and philosophical thought.

Bhandari also writes op-ed articles in both Nepali and English newspapers and magazines, and this prose work broadens his profile beyond lyric and ghazal writing. He has written on environmental issues, pollution, two-wheelers, and technical matters related to transport and fuel. Among the subjects he has addressed are alcohol as an alternative fuel, engine seizure caused by fuel mixing, and auto workshop management in Kathmandu, which was also the subject of his thesis work in Ukraine. His article “Sawari Pradooshan: Samasya ra Samadhan” (“Vehicle Pollution: Problem and Solution” 2001)  analyzes pollutants emitted by vehicles, their effects on the environment, human health, and urban climate, and calls for governmental and nongovernmental efforts in public education, improved maintenance, and alternative fuels. These writings show that his technical education and professional knowledge also enter his public prose, making him not only a literary writer but a commentator on environmental and technological questions.

Yubaraj Bhandari’s significance lies in the range and continuity of his writing across forms and geographies. He writes poetry, songs, ghazals, and public prose from within Nepali literary traditions, yet his work also absorbs migration, engineering knowledge, Russian literary exposure, and Canadian place. The emotional charge of maternal memory, separation, and solitude remains central, but his writing also opens onto spiritual inquiry, ethics, social injustice, political critique, and landscape. In the context of Canadian literary space, he occupies a meaningful place as a Nepali-language diasporic writer who has begun to write Canada—especially Montreal and Niagara Falls—into Nepali poetics rather than merely writing from Canada. That is an important contribution. It expands the imaginative territory of Nepali diasporic literature and shows how Canadian places can be reimagined  through the forms, tonalities, and metaphors of Nepali verse and ghazal. At the same time, his environmental and technical essays extend his role as a public intellectual. In this combination of lyric reflection, ghazal craft, song tradition, place-writing, and civic prose, Bhandari  stands as a significant figure in contemporary Nepali diasporic writing in Canada.

References

Atom, Netra. “Arko Karnaliko Gatha.” Arko Karnali: Kavita Sangraha. Kathmandu,  Bhundipuran, 2023, pp. 7–12.

Bhandar, Yubaraj. Arko Karnali: Kavita Sangraha. Kathmandu, Bhundipuran, 2023.

Bhandari, Yubaraj. “Baikalpik Indhanko Roopma Alcohol Prayog.” Hamro Auto Sansar, n.d.

Bhandari, Yubaraj. Bhavanako Tasvir. Kathmandu, Bhundipuran, 2023.

Bhandari, Yubaraj. “Engine Seize: Samasya ra Samadhan.” Hamro Auto Sansar, n.d.

Bhandari, Yubaraj. Nariko Aawaj: Teejka Geet Sangraha. Kathmandu, 1991 .

Bhandari, Yubaraj. “Sawari Pradooshan: Samasya ra Samadhan.” Kantipur, 23 Shravan 2058 B.S./7 Aug. 2001 C.E.

Bhandari, Yubaraj. “Two Wheeler Development and Ruling Vehicles.” Hamro Auto Sansar, n.d.

Pooja, Govardhan. Bhavanako Tasvir. Kathmandu, Bhundipuran, 2023, pp. 11–14.

Rana, Boond. “Ajhai Oj Aaos!” Bhavanako Tasvir. Kathmandu, Bhundipuran, 2023, pp. 7–9.