A very interesting topic found space at a pre-conference symposium entitled "Celebrating the Work of Professor Michael J Hutt" at the annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya on July 25. The topic for the roundtable was "Is there a discipline called Nepal Studies?" This pre-conference symposium did not necessarily focus on the works of Mike Hutt.

One of the moderators, Stefanie Lotter of SOAS University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies), asked me how I would see the discipline of Nepal Studies from a literary perspective. That was a familiar subject to me because I have been working for a long time in this area as a teacher, writer, research supervisor and participant in various academic and literary colloquiums. I realised I did not have any fixed structure to put in the allotted time at the symposium. However, I put some arguments to show that literature can be heuristically as well as pragmatically an important component of Nepal Studies. Some words about the subject Nepal Studies are in order.

Important point

Pratyoush Onta, research director of Martin Chautari; Kanak Mani Dixit, writer and creator of Himal Media and South Asian discourses; and Mallika Shakya of South Asian University based in Delhi put forward their arguments about the ontology of Nepal Studies from academic and research perspectives. Other speakers, Bhaskar Gautam, Bidhya Chapagain and Kumud Rana presented their ideas based on their academic and media experiences. To the question, "Is there a discipline called Nepal Studies?" I would say, yes, there is a discipline called Nepal Studies. But the important point is how you would answer this very important question.

I would call it an academic subject because all the components and accoutrements of Nepal Studies have an academic character. Research studies about Nepali themes and the dissemination of the findings constitute one modality of Nepal Studies. People outside academia, too, have done significant work in this area. Researchers who were also historians like Baburam Acharya and Sanskrit scholar Yogi Narahari Nath had Nepal Studies as the focus of their research. But in later times, the historical studies entered a new phase of research as in the works of Mahesh Chandra Regmi, Triratna Manandhar, Pratyoush Onta and Rajesh Gautam, to take just a few examples. There are other people who have done important research work. The cultural studies as introduced by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, but not as a hardcore study of culture, have made important headway in Nepal. But the departments of culture and history are facing a crisis for a shortage of students.

Nepal Studies, which could also be seen as a mode of area or regional studies, has not received much attention at the university. Nepal Studies under the name Nepal Parichaya became a favourite cliché during the Panchayat regime. It became an important component of Nepali propaganda-savvy academic programmes. But Nepal Studies continued to dominate the minds of both native and non-native scholars. The lure of Nepal or the desire to discover this land became a dominant subject among foreign writers. Naming them is beyond the scope of this short article. Brian Hodgson, who worked in Nepal from 1820-43, appeared to have a great desire to create a system of Nepal Studies by systematically arranging materials about Nepal. Charles Allen calls Hodgson The Prisoner of Kathmandu (2015) in his book. But the Western writer and the Japanese visitor-writer Ekai Kawaguchi, about whom I have written a book, became not prisoners but lovers of Nepal.

One dominant method used by foreign scholars is the study of Nepal with a unique sense of free engagement. Some have used colonial perspectives. But mission and passion are the two terms that I would like to use to characterise their works. They have created an important body of works from texts to paintings like Oldfield's oeuvre and Desmond Doig's My Kind of Kathmandu: An Artist's Impression of the Emerald Valley (1994), architectonic works like Carl Pruscha's Kathmandu Valley (1975, 2015) and Neil Gutschow's Newar Architecture (2011) in three volumes. In later times, scholars like historian John Whelpton, anthropologists like David Gellner and Mark Liechty, and literary scholar like Michael Hutt, to name a few, have been closely working with Nepali scholars. They are friends and we understand their passion with which they want to contribute to Nepal Studies. They have been listening to the suggestions and even critiques of Nepali scholars like Pratyoush Onta, Krishna Khanal and Krishna Hachhethu, and writers like Kanak Mani Dixit.

Language and literature

I have closely seen how a foreign scholar works to build up a system of Nepal Studies in the efforts of Mike Hutt at SOAS. He started with modest works and built up a system of Nepal Studies based on language and literature at London University. He created the unit of the literature and language-based Nepal Studies by arduously working on the texts and translating them into English. Himalayan Voices (1991) is the major output of that endeavour. Mike also wrote books about the background and context of such studies. I admire Mike's efforts to create a literature-based system of Nepal Studies at SOAS. I find ''Celebrating the Work of Professor Michael J Hutt", therefore, as an appropriate theme of the symposium.

The “10th director” of the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS), Nirmal Man Tuladhar, circulated an important historical note to show the historicity of Tribhuvan University (TU) working to create a centre or model of Nepal Studies. It says TU conceived a plan to establish an institute of Nepalology in 1966, which came into being in 1969. The original Nepal Studies was named Institute of Nepal and Asian Studies (INAS) in 1972. INAS was converted into the current CNAS. Nepal Studies is projected in various forms both in the curricula and the institutes. But Nepal Studies has been in operation for a long time by using literature as the base. The late Kamal Mani Dixit had initiated such a base by establishing Madan Pustakalaya. But today, Nepal Studies has become broad-based; it covers native and foreign works and university and individual efforts. My answer to Stefanie Lotter's question is that Nepal Studies also works by using literature, which has always been my modus operandi.