Memory is the Mother of all Wisdom said Aeschylus long ago. Truly, human civilization is nothing more than what we cherish as the best we have recollected in the form of version especially as an intangible existence. Tangible actions and events are complimentary. In this paper, I would like to discuss memory, not individual or personal one, but as a social phenomenon, which is termed as collective memory. People inherit, treasure and transmit memories recorded in their practices without conscious effort. To put it in Halbwachs’s words, “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories”(1992: 46). He believes that human memory functions within a collective memory which is the result of shared remembrances. History also treasures memories but Halbwachs says history is dead and collective memories are living, both are publicly available facts however. Truly, these unrecorded memories bind people together so long as they live in a particular society. What happens if people disperse and societies disintegrate or fragment and they are away (virtually they are nowhere ) from their ancient seat of learning, acquisition and transfer of knowledge through social memory? They suffer memory loss (a case more dangerous than Alzheimers because a whole society goes amnesic and the loss becomes irretrievable), as a result they are most alarmed, feel insecure, shocked and dismissed. They are traumatized more for their children than themselves, as they know the succeeding generation(s) will be truncated or devoid of the past that looms since antiquity. I have seen parents trying to teach literacy and numeracy in their mother tongue to their children (in foreign lands) so that they could be connected with their homeland in future but it fails because there is no oral tradition existent to show the totality of ‘native’ social life that helps one ‘inherit’ language and culture automatically. With travels and migrations, memory landscapes change over a period of time and the culture of that race changes its color adapting to the local one. I have seen desperate parents planning to return to their homeland (to die) leaving their grown up children behind. I have seen this during my travels to many Nepali diasporas distributed from the USA to Hong Kong.
In this paper I will substantiate instances of people gripped by fear of gradual “memory loss” not of a person but the “collective memory” of a whole generation, whole community. This can be equated with “culture death” which results from the loss of “cultural memory” which will leave people devoid of their identity. I will draw on my personal experience and cases of literary works created by authors distributed along various Nepali diasporas.