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Posted
on 26-Jul-01 11:24 PM
CNAS Under Panchayat
An essay by Pratyoush Onta
The Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS), one of the four
research centres of Tribhuvan University (TU), recently completed its 29th year.
But that is not why CNAS has been in the news in recent weeks. After Kumar Khadga Bikram Shah, who was the executive director of CNAS in the second half of the 1980s, was murdered in the Narayanhiti Palace on 1 June, all of the obituaries have mentioned that during his tenure CNAS attained its heights as a research institution. This essay has been prompted by these
mentions.
CNAS was started on 16 July 1972 as the Institute of Nepal and Asian Studies (INAS). An Institute of Nepal Studies (INS) had existed in TU since 1969 in a small scale and it was replaced by INAS in accordance with the directives for higher education in the New Education System Plan of 1971.
Dr Prayag Raj Sharma, who had trained in ancient history and
archaeology, was the founder Dean of INAS. In the beginning, INAS had four faculty members, and it could grant degrees (MA and PhD) by dissertation. Due to lack of resources, INAS initially gave priority to only Nepal studies in anthropology and sociology, history and linguistics, the research in each being guided by a subject committee consisting of scholars from INAS, departments of TU and outside.
Sharma provided foundational leadership to INAS. Under him, it
started a documentation centre and a seminar series. It organized a major seminar on the social sciences in Nepal in 1973. In December 1973, INAS published the first issue of the bi-annual journal Contributions to Nepalese
Studies.
This journal is still around and it has published some of the seminal articles written by Nepali and non-Nepali scholars. In the mid-1970s, Sharma recruited new faculty members and students and INAS soon began to serve as the contact point for all kinds of social science researchers.
Perhaps because there were, relatively speaking, more faculty members trained in history, some of the early research publications brought by INAS were historical documents and analyses. The most well known of them is of course the book of late Dhanavajra Vajracharya, Licchavikalka Abhilekh.
Dhanavarja was also involved in the research and publication of several other works,including the controversial Panchali Shasan-Padatiko Etihasik Bivechana (coauthored with Tek B Shrestha) which tried to provide historical depth to the "suited to the soil" theory of the Panchayat system. By 1980, INAS had
also published works on migration, linguistics, and folklore
in additional to several bibliographies and indexes.
In the meantime, due to changes in TU's academic structure, INAS was converted into CNAS in September 1977 and it lost its degree-granting status. Dean Sharma became the executive director and when he stepped down from the post in 1978, anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista was named his successor. Bista had worked under anthropologist C. von Furer- Haimendorf and written People of Nepal but formally he only had a BA degree and a diploma in ethnography. His elevation to the rank of a professor of
anthropology and the CNAS job came as a grant from King Birendra.
By 1980, several of the students had finished their MA by dissertation and had found employment in CNAS. The faculty number had also increased due to further recruitment. Bista served only one three-year term as the executive director and after he stepped down in 1981, several people held the office for
short tenures until Kumar Khadga B Shah took over in 1984. During this unstablephase of the institution, the National History Project was initiated whereby several historians were asked to write on different aspects of Nepal's
history.
Most historians submitted their manuscripts by the late
1980s but they were only gradually published after 1995.
Under Khadga B Shah, the Asian studies part of CNAS picked up in
several ways. He brought a remarkable group of political scientists (with sympathies toward various power centres) to CNAS and asked them to focus their attention to studying other countries in South Asia, China and Japan.
He started regular interactions amongst these researchers, and published the journal, Strategic Studies Series, where Nepali social scientists analyzed regional politics, South Asian cooperation, Cold War themes and related issues. In 1986, the CNAS Year Review, containing several country-wise annual surveys for SAARC countries and a few additional countries was started. Other publications, both as monographs and articles, were
brought out.
Under this scheme scholars like Dhruba Kumar and Govinda Bhatta published work on China, and Sridhar Khatri wrote on the US and also about regional cooperation in South Asia. Similarly Lok Raj Baral and geographer Vidya B S Kansakar wrote about demographic politics and regional cooperation. Pramod Kantha wrote on Pakistan, Dev Raj Dahal on Japan, and Krishna Khanal on India's foreign relations. Shah purchased subscriptions to various journals for the CNAS library from his personal resources.
If under Prayag Raj Sharma, CNAS had made a name for itself largely based on works on Nepali history, under Khadga B Shah, CNAS enhanced its status as a centre for the study of contemporary politics in the South Asian region. As part of the celebrations of the Silver Jubilee of Panchayat, Shah organized
a seminar in Kathmandu in December 1986 on "Political Development and Social Change in Nepal" where papers that contained scathing criticism of the values on which that system was based were also presented. One such paper, "Values in the doldrums: does the West meet the East in Nepal?" by Prayag Raj Sharma (later published in Archives Europeennes De Sociologie, vol 30 no 1, 1989) was vehemently opposed by Panchayati 'philosopher' Dr Tara
Nath Sharma who demanded that the former CNAS chief be hanged for his views.
It is to the credit of Khadga B Shah that he tried to stretch the
relatively more democratic space available in post-Referendum Nepal to appraise the prevailing anti-democratic political system by organizing a seminar with money earmarked for Panchayati celebrations! For this he was hounded by conservative forces in the Royal Palace.
Shah stayed on the job after his first term ended in 1987 but he
didn't seem to have the same level of energy any more. As the Indo-Nepal trade and transit impasse happened, he tried to re-invigorate the group of political scientists and urged them to write about the subject. But differences between him and some scholars as well as between scholars who took up ultra-nationalist positions and those who were seen to be 'soft' on
India grew large. When some articles by Nepali scholars did appear in international publications, Shah again had to face the wrath of the Palace conservatives for whom the democratic aspirations expressed in those same articles were not palatable. He called an impromptu meeting and returned several of the political scientists he had brought to CNAS to their
respective home institutions.
He then absented himself from CNAS, making anthropologist Dilli Ram Dahal the acting executive director. With Shah's departure, the CNAS Year Review and the Strategic Studies Series ceased
publication. This happened because Shah, despite taking many personal initiatives, had failed to invest on building the institutional infrastructure within CNAS that would support these initiatives when he was gone.
While definitely conceptualized within the larger educational
blue-print of the Panchayat regime, CNAS under Prayag Raj Sharma and Khadga B Shah also showed that even authoritarian political regimes can not totally determine the entirety of intellectual engagements that academics pursue. CNAS under the post-1990 democratic regimes has not been able to thrive as an
institution and this is a subject that will be taken up some other time.
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