Indians of my background — middle-class, from professional families, and English-speaking — generally look Westwards when seeking information or understanding of countries other than one’s own. The United States of America and England are natural poles of attraction, but so also countries such as France and Italy.
As a young boy, I learnt about these countries, but fortunately the circumstances of my upbringing also fostered a curiosity in lands closer to me, and which Indians of my class are usually rather indifferent to. A country whose culture and history I was aware of from an early age was Nepal. Along with the rest of Uttarakhand, my hometown, Dehradun, had come under the rule of the Gurkha kingdom of Nepal in the late 18th century. The British, who succeeded the Gurkhas, located several army regiments in Dehradun which carried the word, ‘Gurkha’, in their name, since many of their soldiers had come originally from Nepal.
The Nepali influence on my boyhood was quite marked. The school I studied in was established by Rana aristocrats who had fled their homeland in the 1950s. The route from my home to school ran through a sprawling, Nepali-speaking settlement named Gadhi. My first sporting hero was the legendary East Bengal footballer of Nepali origin, Ram Bahadur Chettri, who, in the off-season, returned from Calcutta to run a cricket club with my uncle in our hometown. These connections have persisted; I have made several trips to Nepal as an adult, and one of my closest friends is a Nepali editor based in Kathmandu.
It was therefore with some interest that I read a recent book of essays on that nation, Nepal in the Long 1950s, edited by Pratyoush Onta, Lokranjan Parajuli, and Mark Liechty, and published by Martin Chautari in Kathmandu. The book is set in the years that followed the fall of the Rana nobility. The Ranas, who had dominated Nepali politics in the previous century, had kept a tight grip on independent thinking and cultural creativity, and Nepal in the Long 1950s documents the efflorescence of popular expression that resulted from their departure.
The first essay in the book, by Prawash Gautam, is on a tea ship called Tilauri Mailako Pasal. Tea drinking was never part of traditional Nepali culture; it emerged as a result of British influence. Nepali soldiers, serving in the two World Wars, acquired the habit abroad and brought it back home. This particular tea shop was frequented by democratic rights activists as well as by footballers and their fans. For the former, the café “served as a meeting point to share information, snippets of conversation, and discussions about political developments and planning…” As for the latter, as one footballer recalled, “we would meet there [at Tilauri Mailako Pasal] before our games for snacks and then again after matches… We would sit there and talk mainly about our games — who won, how to improve skills and matches and strategies about games. We also talked about movies” (the first cinema theatres had just opened in Kathmandu).
Notably, unlike other eating places in the Kathmandu Valley, Tilauri Mailako Pasal “was open for customers from all castes”. The brothers who ran the shop recognised that being ecumenical in these matters was good for business. Nonetheless, social prejudice persisted in subtle ways, with lower castes usually eating or drinking tea outside the shop while upper castes did so inside.
Another interesting essay, by Bandana Gyawali, is on how, in the 1950s, with the push for economic growth, the idea of ‘bikas’ or development took hold in the Nepali imagination. As an American technical expert wrote, “Nepal is just now freed of the noose of isolation which has been strangling her development for more than 100 years.” Like neighbouring India — indeed, like all emerging nations in Asia and Africa—Nepal was said to need more roads, more factories, more power plants, more and bigger cities, in order to become truly ‘developed’. The vision was common to pro-capitalist as well as pro-socialist intellectuals; except that in the former case market and foreign aid would deliver development, while in the latter case it was the State and the vanguard party that would do so.
(Although Gyawali doesn’t mention this, it is worth noting that in the decades of the 1950s and beyond, Bikas, or its Sanskritised version, Vikas, became common first names for male children in Nepal as well as India.)
In his essay, Pratyoush Onta looks at the emergence of new forms of intellectual and literary production after the fall of the Ranas. He focuses on one organisation, the Nepal Sanskritik Parishad, which published a journal featuring articles on Nepali history and culture, partly with a view to providing a useable past for emerging notions of nationhood.
An early issue of the Parishad’s journal carried an editorial which (in English translation) stated its purpose as follows: “Without being cognizant of the accumulated old knowledge of the country, there can be no pride over the nation. Nepal’s new era is just starting… To promote the dignity of the nation and the feeling of nationalism, it is necessary to know the history of the country from ancient to contemporary times, the achievements of the ancestors, and the overlapping meetings and coming together of various jatis.”
Onta remarks on the vigour and creativity of the intellectuals who ran the Parishad, while not failing to note that they were all men, and almost all upper caste as well. In their work, cultural renewal was seen as a prelude to economic progress; the artistic and literary projects they undertook were “closely tied to future materialistic progress of the country”. In this manner, sanskriti was pressed in the service of bikas.
In his contribution, Lokranjan Parajuli writes on the founding of Nepal’s first modern university, named after King Tribhuvan. From its inception, “for both the Indians and the Americans, the university was the playground in which they exercised their power/influence”. Some promoters wanted Patna University to be the template for the Tribhuvan University, leading a prescient Nepali educationist to warn: “I am rather inclined to believe that even Indian educationists will not be happy if Nepal, in these late years of the 20th century, established a University in slavish imitation of Indian universities which came into being in circumstances so different from our own… The growing concern … among Indian educational leadership over the inadequacies of Indian universities is evidence of the fact that all is not well with those universities.”
Other articles in the book deal with land reforms, US aid assistance, and a flamboyant Russian entrepreneur who ran a Kathmandu hotel that catered to foreign tourists. The essays use a wide range of primary sources; newspapers, archives, and government documents, as well as interviews. They are rigorously researched as well as accessibly written.
Reading this new book, I learnt a great deal about the emergence of modern Nepal. And it also got me thinking of how a similar volume (or even series of volumes) could be crafted on what was happening in India in the 1950s. In that, the first decade after Independence, cafés and coffee houses in Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore emerged as key theatres of cultural exchange. A study of one or more of these cafés would be a worthwhile exercise. Likewise, Onta’s work on Nepali scholarly journals made me think that a history of that pioneering Bombay journal, Economic Weekly (later reborn as the Economic and Political Weekly), would shed much light on the emergence of intellectual thought in post-Independence India. Reading the essay on the establishment of Tribhuvan University made me wonder why do we not yet have a well-researched book on the emergence of the IITs and their shaping of economic life in India and beyond. Likewise, the essay on the Russian who ran Kathmandu’s Royal Hotel could inspire scholarly studies of the emergence of now iconic Indian hotel chains, such as Taj and Oberoi.
In a column published a year ago (“Big Brother”, The Telegraph, August 24, 2024), I argued that our ruling politicians need to shed their arrogance and condescension towards countries such as Nepal and Bangladesh. Reading Nepal in the Long 1950s makes me offer an addendum to that argument; namely, that learning more about our neighbours will benefit India and Indians regardless of any economic or foreign policy gains that might accrue.
ramachandraguha@yahoo.in