| Paschim |
Posted
on 01-Nov-01 01:45 PM
The latest edition of the Boston-based Samachar Bichar is coming out this week. For a free delivery of the issue, please send an email to the editor Bhupesh Karki at bhupeshk@aol.com with your mailing address. The upcoming issue has original articles by:
1. Devendra Raj Panday, former Minister of Finance.
2. Saubhagya Shah, graduate student at Harvard.
3. Sangita Shresthova, graduate student at MIT.
and there's more. For a flavor, read below. Secure your copy now!
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Excerpted from the article "Awry Aristocracies and Other Tales" by Paschim from the forthcoming issue of Samachar Bichar.
The Gwalior Tie
Bir Shumsher had banished his anglophile brother Khadga to Palpa in 1887, two years after jointly killing their uncle Ranodip and becoming Shree Teen. Khadga subsequently took his loot to Madhya Pradesh and built the Nepal Palace near Sagar. His daughter was the first Nepali woman to matriculate from high school, but had shown primitive judgment when it came to marital choice. She chose an Indian man after seeing his photograph, not to budge even after it became known that the gentleman was already married to somebody else. She mothered Lekha Devi, who later became the famous BJP figure, Vijayaraje Scindia, after marrying King Jivajirao of Gwalior. Their second daughter, Usharaje, later tied knots with the Sindhupalchowk MP, Pashupati Rana, while Vijayaraje’s famously estranged son, the late Madhavrao, went on to marry a Nepali. I don’t know if these intricate linkages were crafted at Oxford in the early Sixties when both Madhav and Pashupati attended New College (founded 1379 AD). In any case, Devyani is the second of Pashupati and Usharaje’s daughters who was to be wooed by Dipendra. These ties wouldn’t have mattered much if it didn’t mean that all these people are so related to each other. Not by essence of character but by accidents of birth. Most of Nepal’s aristocracy, especially those who pointlessly insist that they are of the right pedigree because their grandaunt’s distant nieces were senior wives, or because they spell Shumsher with the right alphabet, descended from Dhir, not his brother Jung whose sons had been swiftly crushed by Dhir’s. More recently, while Pashupati’s lineage originates in Chandra Shumsher, late queen Aishwarya’s ancestry is linked to Juddha. Chandra and Juddha were brothers.
Pardon this conjugal calculus, but the moral of the story is whether the late queen should, I wonder, have come up with more compelling reasons to obstruct Dipendra’s choice because her arguments about original purity seem inaccurate, ridiculous, and irrelevant. Jung Bahadur, for example, had set an immodest standard for his cousins by breeding 22 wives and maintaining a harem of over 200 concubines. Accidents in assigning allegiances to new births were very likely to have happened, for it must have been hard to keep track of where the drunken maharaja was sleeping any one night.
Further, women are biologically programmed to live longer than men. If men married women who were older than them, there is a theoretical proposition that they can improve the longevity of their togetherness at old age, as they will both die at around the same time. Did Dipendra have this in mind in courting a woman two years his senior? No. He was just single and bored when he started seeing Devyani, but it would have been nice to hear how the former queen would have received this scientific argument that their prolonged marital bliss was, after all, in the national interest. This is important because subjects now know what can happen when petty royals get upset, and flawed aristocracies shatter.
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| Paschim |
Posted
on 02-Nov-01 10:29 AM
SB has indeed been a worthwhile experiment with a very small group of people - two to three volunteers - struggling to produce a quality output with original contributions on a sustained basis. It has a dedicated readership of around 1000, and has been published regularly, with occasional hiccups, of course, for the last 10 years. Under the leadership of a long time Boston resident, Bhupesh Karki, a core team of around 2-3 people have been instrumental in assisting him solicit quality articles as well as design the much admired publication. But there is almost always a trade off between quality and time, and as full time employees or students, it is hard to cope with the demands of putting up a readable compendium every 3-4 months. So SB's production timeline is unpredictable, and they haven't been able to widen the readership by going online, for example.
So any volunteers in the Boston area who want to be involved in SB, please contact Bhupesh Karki, the editor at bhupeshk@aol.com to express your interest. Ideally we'd want people on the editorial board who are already published, or have a demonstrated record of engagement in these kind of ventures at the college level. But please do express your interest by stating what kind of role you'd best like to play - web/design/editorial/outreach. I'm sure the stretched SB team and its editor Mr. Karki would greatly welcome any kind of support from Bostonians. After all, SB is Boston's own home-grown and home-bred product with a brand of considerable value!
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