Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilIssues64Book reviewsPratyoush Onta, Lokranjan Parajul...

Book reviews

Pratyoush Onta, Lokranjan Parajuli and Mark Liechty (eds), Nepal in the Long 1950s

Catherine Warner
Référence(s) :

Pratyoush Onta, Lokranjan Parajuli and Mark Liechty (eds), Nepal in the Long 1950s, Kathmandu: Martin Chautari, 2024, x+461pp

Texte intégral

1Considering the pivotal nature of the 1950s in Nepal’s modern history, it is surprising that nothing like this edited volume previously existed. It is a readable, lively, and academically engaging book that explores the democratic experiment from its own perspective, rather than simply as a fruitless interlude preceding the Panchayat era. The ten chapters are knit together in ‘recognition that Nepali history occurs beyond the national and the political – the two frames that dominate, and stifle, most of the existing historiography on Nepal in the 1950s’ (p7). By incorporating articles previously published in the journal Studies in Nepali History and Society, along with several new articles, editors Pratyoush Onta, Lokranjan Parajuli and Mark Liechty foreground historical scholarship that pays close attention to places and personalities at the intersection of national and global transformations. In the introduction, the editors state their purpose: to inspire ‘further research that situates Nepal’s history within larger temporal and spatial frames’ and to encourage the production of social and cultural histories along with a broadening of archival engagements (p18).

2The volume is populated by entertaining and relatable individuals whose stories bring to life the social and cultural experimentation of the 1950s. These complex figures redefined spaces in and (sometimes) outside Kathmandu, as they built sites and organisations for ‘knowledge projects’ (Onta p140) and other transformations. The old-guard Rana and reinvigorated royal elite mixed with a growing circle of educated professionals as the latter exercised their new freedom to infuse civil society organisations with their own aspirations and interests. This juxtaposition prompted entangled collaborations and conflicts, intensified by the evolving Cold War scenario. By moving beyond the political narratives already firmly established in works such as Rose and Joshi ([1966] 2004), Mihaly (1965) and Gupta (1964), the authors provide an expansive temporal framing; they trace the new sociality of cultural production and consumption to roots preceding Tribhuvan’s flight to India and the Delhi Accord of 1951, and look beyond Mahendra’s coup of 1960 to the lingering influence of this crucial decade.

3In chapter 1, Prawash Gautam presents brothers Bekha Narayan Dangol (Tilauri Maila) and Jog Narayan Dangol (Kancha Dai) who opened one of the first tea shops in the 1940s near Dharahara. Gautam contextualises the brother’s entrepreneurial success in terms of the relaxation of Rana restrictions, the introduction of a mass commodity (tea) and the formation of a class-based consumer society. Gautam also factors in the acumen of the Newar brothers who pushed back the boundaries of caste restrictions and commensality to an unprecedented yet limited degree. This is one of the few chapters that explicitly engages with the public sphere: Gautam carefully assesses the extent to which this framework fits in with the end of ‘feudalism’ (ie Rana rule) and the growth of a ‘class-based consumer culture’ (p59).

4Pratyoush Onta’s chapter draws a nuanced portrait of the founders of the Nepal Sanskritic Parishad (NSP), launched in 1951 within a few months of the collapse of Rana rule. Nepal’s first social science journal, the NSP Patrika, was founded by Bal Chandra Sharma and Kedar Man Vyathit, and saw its most successful years under Isvar Baral, with funding from Kaiser SJB Rana, son of former Prime Minister Chandra Shamsher. The first three had come of age in the 1930s and early 1940s: they had maintained intellectual and political engagements beyond Nepal’s borders and had drawn inspiration from anti-colonialism and the Indian independence movement. A generation older, Kaiser held prominent civil and military offices under his father’s regime and had already started his impressive private library. Onta suggests that while Kaiser’s motivations for supporting the NSP remain unclear, he may have wanted to ‘re-create a new public identity for himself in post-1951 Nepal’ (p172), unlike his expatriate siblings. Thus, a group of disparate individuals relied on a revised form of patronage to promote high-quality social science research – a novel conjuncture which Onta describes as a ‘utopian project of cultural revival’ (p153).

5The vivid portrayal of individuals attempting to define their relevance in the post-1951 period continues in Lokranjan Parajuli’s chapter 6, where the participation of both old and new visionaries in the creation of Tribhuvan University (TU) is depicted as being rather ineffectual. The queen mothers, Kanti Rajya Laxmi (RL) and Ishwari RL Shah, wives of the late Tribhuvan, co-opted the founding of Nepal’s first university. They bypassed the Government of Nepal’s formal channels of organising a higher-education system via the National Educational Planning Commission’s collaboration with the US development entity United States Operations Missions (USOM). This project included an exchange of Nepali university professors with the University of Oregon and the advisory services of a retired American university chancellor. The queen mothers, however, were not interested in using the existing plans or expertise, and instead relied on Indian experts and the Patna University model, as well as personal funds. The Cold War context, especially the evolving relationship between India and the United States, provided the queen mothers with an opening to pursue the project on their own terms, possibly to the detriment of TU’s ultimate success.

6As these examples show, shifting ‘class-based patterns of social organization’ (p7) were complicated by questions of how to fund and organise new institutions and whose vision(s) to pursue in the crosswinds of the Cold War. As many of the chapters in the volume suggest, the institutions and organisations associated with class formation were generally funded by ‘feudal’ or development money introduced within the context of the post-World War II international order. As the introduction explains, India and the United States competed for influence within Nepal until the mid-1950s; by the end of that decade, they found common ground in using Nepal to forestall Russian and Chinese influence in South Asia. The United States built up a client bureaucracy in Nepal to carry out its development agenda, which contributed to eroding the legitimacy of the nascent democratic state apparatus. Mahendra took advantage of competing Cold War patronage in the latter half of the 1950s, used foreign aid to bolster his domestic legitimacy and seized the government in 1960.

7Several articles analyse the formation of this ‘development agenda (p4) in Nepal, paying particular attention to the lingering aftermath of Rana rule, democratic aspirations and royal ambition. In chapter 2, Bandana Gyawali argues that the term ‘bikas’ became the preferred translation for ‘development’, edging out Rana- and communist-associated candidates such as ‘unnati’ and ‘pragati’. On the one hand, its semantic focus narrowed down to the economic aspects of the term in order to reflect American thinking of the early 1950s. On the other hand, the term succeeded in giving expression to the ‘politicization of Nepali citizens as they became increasingly aware’ (p69); and more people contributed to the use and circulation of political language compared with the Rana period. In chapter 4, Ghimire examines contests between political elites over who could best represent the people affected by the flood in 1954 and how to democratically administer ‘welfare’ to ‘the people’ via nascent political organisations (p222). The state’s institutional confusion and ineffective relief response put paid to the government’s legitimacy and ruptured the political alliance, Ghimire argues, ultimately providing Crown Prince Mahendra with an opportunity to seize power. Peter Gill (ch3) provides a political analysis of the land-reform movement, primarily encouraged by the political parties and their opposition, and encoded in a series of legislation culminating in the 1964 Lands Act. The parties, especially the Nepali Congress, used populist rhetoric to push for the abolition of birta (a privileged form of land tenure) in order to combat Rana ‘feudalism’ and to bolster their progressive credentials. By contrast, Mahendra was keen to abolish birta to increase tax revenues and to appropriate a form of legitimacy which – the political parties had already demonstrated – held popular appeal. These chapters underline the small size of civil society and the narrow scope of political transformation. Nevertheless, each chapter also contends that public and popular perception of and engagement with government action and policies – whether in the adoption of new concepts, the critique of disaster relief or the demand for land reform – were significant forces for change. The reader, however, is left to wonder if this explanatory device (ie the sway of popular opinion) obscures more than it resolves. In other words, if no public sphere as such existed, who was the audience for such rhetoric?

8The last section of the volume, ‘The World in Nepal’, focuses on the reach of foreign people, ideas and institutions. In doing so, it builds on the work of the first six chapters (‘Nepal in the World’) which firmly dispel lingering myths of Nepal’s isolation from global processes at the end of Rana rule. Susan Heydon examines medical encounters shaped by Christian missions, foreign visitors and international aid. Interestingly, some of the earliest sustained Western medical connections with Nepal came via foreign missionaries residing along the Indian border, with some cross-border service provision in Butwal and Tansen established in the 1920s and 1930s before the end of Rana rule. Given the geographically dispersed nature of missionary establishments and mountaineers with their first-aid kits, Heydon’s chapter depicts a form of cultural interaction and site of knowledge formation that distinctly avoided the centralising tug of the capital. Following on from this, both Thomas Robertson and Jeremy Rappleye draw fascinating portraits of key figures – Ambassador to India and Nepal Chester Bowles, and educational advisor Hugh Wood – in the establishment of the American development paradigm. In Robertson’s chapter, the ambassador’s attempt to refute Cold War perceptions of US racism by deploying the first African American technician to work on the Rapti River project offers a unique glimpse at new imperial politics of identity, which would bring together ordinary Americans and Nepalis in unequal exchanges informed by a historically contingent, global mode of racialisation. Rappleye analyses Wood’s life story and thought to explain how his voice became so dominant in Nepal’s early education plans, including in the Report of the Nepal National Education Planning Commission. Although the Nepali members of the committee preferred a plan to address inequalities by adopting a culturally informed curriculum and using redistributive funding, Wood insisted on a universal, modernising education system funded by local communities. The chapters in this section highlight the multiple forms of agency at work in the formation of the unequal development paradigm within the context of Britain’s imperial retreat, the advance of American Cold War imperialism and the ongoing clash between Rana, royal and civil society actors.

9The final chapter by Mark Liechty serves as a fitting bookend to the volume as it once more weaves together the stories of the old power structures and the development of a new professional class. The narrative follows an episode in the life of a retired Russian ballet dancer, Boris Lissanevitch, from his colonial perch at the height of Calcutta colonial club life to Kathmandu at the invitation of Tribhuvan in 1951. With his connections to the royal family and the Rana elite, as well as his ability to draw on a niche community of elderly American tourists flush with cash and Raj nostalgia, it would seem that Boris’s varied entrepreneurial ventures were destined for success. Business failures and two stints in jail suggest otherwise. In fact, Boris’s enterprises received financial backing from Prince Basundhara, Mahendra’s younger brother and relied on the employment of Ashok Sharma, a young English-speaking Nepali graduate of the Jesuit St Xavier’s School. Thus, old royal money was indirectly linked to the know-how and professional activities of a new type of urban, educated (male) individual – a forerunner of ‘a rising middle (professional/entrepreneurial/bureaucratic) class’ (p445) that would usher in Nepal’s first era of mass tourism in the 1960s.

10As the above discussion indicates, Nepal in the Long 1950s raises thought-provoking theoretical and methodological questions. Readers will certainly be assured that Nepal in the 1950s was made up of many dynamic and overlapping worlds full of new possibilities (for some), changing economic contours and global connections. However, in setting aside political history for social and cultural methodologies and in extending the archives to include oral histories and printed Nepali sources, new questions emerge regarding the political economy and social worlds of cultural production. Women occupy an unusual position in the volume: they are present, but generally portrayed as unwanted or tragic figures, such as the queen mothers who are associated with Indian influence and with the failure to build institutions (ch6), Boris’s long-suffering but beautiful wife (ch10), or Kaiser SJB Rana’s first wife, Lakshmi Rajya Lakshmi Devi, whom – according to a footnote (fn37 172) – he allegedly abused. In the volume, the endeavour to give the activities of professional male Nepalis a “fair” reading (Onta p153) is not extended to women. This omission may be partly interpreted as an unspoken assumption that the nascent professional class is depicted as forward-looking, democratic agents of change. However, from a gendered perspective, this class probably shaped social and cultural life in Nepal at a time when women were excluded, whether intentionally or not. Rana and royal women continued to play active roles beyond the domestic sphere and, although they are never mentioned, women of the working classes would have necessarily occupied key roles outside the home. Onta seems particularly aware of this shortcoming; he notes in the conclusion to his article that the new organisations were ‘to be sure mostly male-driven’ (p189). This is treated as a lamentable but understandable silence. However, as the footnote regarding the abuse of Lakshmi Rajya Lakshmi Devi suggests, the constitution of new intermediate organisations in society rested on norms of what should and should not be said in public about men’s private lives, possibly to the detriment of women’s freedom. Thus, it is worth exploring the degree to which the new freedom achieved through civil society organisations depended on a gendered public-private construction, which may not have represented a progressive opening for all members of society.

11Furthermore, just as ‘feudalism’ does not do justice to describe the Rana period, the ‘public sphere’ does not entirely correspond to the 1950s – and yet these terms are useful approximations of the extensive changes that took place. Onta’s chapter hints at the scope of the conceptual problem: he notes that these changes were dependent on Rana money in the early 1950s, yet allowed for the development of ‘people’s organizations…[which] introduced the possibility of re-structuring Nepali society with a layer of new types of intermediary organizations concerned with various interests and themes, including the knowledge enterprise, with members who were not related to each other’ (pp189–90). As this formulation suggests, historians still have much work to do to understand how the ‘variously imagined post-Rana “repair” work’ (Onta p190) reoriented social formations, knowledge production, public life, identities and governance by the middle of the century and beyond. Moreover, the shifting politics of patronage seem to have failed to fully match the ‘new forms of global capitalism’ that were being introduced (p2), thereby suggesting that the intersection of economic history and cultural production in the twentieth century is an avenue worth pursuing. The volume serves to revitalise discussions on twentieth-century Nepali history and its global connections, and it is likely – and indeed hoped – that some of the authors and editors, as well as emerging scholars in the field, will continue to push this work forward.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Catherine Warner, « Pratyoush Onta, Lokranjan Parajuli and Mark Liechty (eds), Nepal in the Long 1950s »European Bulletin of Himalayan Research [En ligne], 64 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 octobre 2025, consulté le 07 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/3462 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15auw

Haut de page

Auteur

Catherine Warner

Catherine Warner is an associate of the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University and an independent scholar. Her research focuses on social and cultural histories of migration and circulation in the Nepal-India borderland in the long nineteenth century. She has published in Studies in Nepali History and Society (SINHAS), Ateliers d’anthropologie, and HIMALAYA, and she is currently associate editor of SINHAS. 

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search