In a famous essay first published in 1970 under the title “The Intellectual in Nepalese Society”, the scholar of literature and history, Kamal P Malla (1936-2018) wrote: “The post-1950 decade in Nepal is characterized…by an unprecedented expansion of intellectual and cultural opportunities. The decade can aptly be called a decade of extroversion. For it was a decade of explosion of all ideas, activities and organized efforts.” As Malla and many other commentators have noted, the political and civil freedoms that became available to Nepali citizens after the end of the Rana rule allowed for many experiments. As a result, during the 1950s, there was a noticeable growth of intermediate organisations, such as libraries, schools, colleges, political parties, women’s organisations, research collectives and many other entities.

While there has been some new research on the organisational forms and activities of the intermediate organisations that came into existence during the 1950s, historians have not paid sufficient attention to the life experiences of and influences that were at work on the individuals who founded such entities during that decade of frenetic activities. If done well, such research will help us understand the forms and ways in which the founders carried out their post-1951 public work.

Nepal Sanskritik Parishad

Let me share an example to concretise my suggestion. Nepal Sanskritik Parishad (NSP) was founded in late 1951 by a bunch of active writers and intellectuals. The NSP was an interesting experiment in organisational imagination at that time since it involved the actions of some newly “freed” citizens of Nepal and an erstwhile leading member of the Rana oligarchy, Kaiser SJB Rana (1892-1964), a son of Chandra Shamsher (r. 1901-1929). While the life experiences and visions of Bal Chandra Sharma (1919-1975) and Kedar Man Vyathit (1914-1998) were important when it came to the founding of the NSP, its functional life depended upon the managerial work of Isvar Baral (1923-1997) and the financial patronage of Rana.

The latter combination kept the organisation active between 1951 and 1964, the year Rana died. During its short existence, the NSP organised seminars, provided fellowships and published an academic journal and a few critically edited texts. But what of their pre-1951 life experiences might have come into play when its founders decided to create the NSP? Let us examine the case of Kedar Man Vyathit.

Although Vyathit wrote extensively, and also others have extensively written about his life and poetry, this corpus is mostly silent about his affiliation with the NSP and why he might have been involved in its founding. Hence, it would be worth an effort to try to put together a provisional narrative to this effect.

Vyathit the founder

Although Vyathit’s family was from Kathmandu, he was born in Sindhupalchowk in 1914. Later, he came to Kathmandu and apparently had very little opportunity for formal school education. Four sets of life experiences can be considered essential for Vyathit’s work with the NSP. First, in the late 1930s, he came into contact with Shukra Raj Shastri (1893-1941) and they and others jointly established the Nepali Nagarik Adhikar Samiti (NNAS, Nepali Citizens’ Rights Committee). In his 1992 book Political Awakening in Nepal, historian Prem R Uprety says the NNAS was founded in 1937 with Shastri as its president and Vyathit as its secretary responsible for looking after its organisational matters. Uprety says the NNAS worked on both the social welfare front (for example, by helping the pilgrims who came to celebrate the Shivaratri festival in Kathmandu in 1938 with food and shelter) and the social-political consciousness-raising front with public discourses based on religious scriptures tinged with political commentary.

In an interview he gave late in his life, Vyathit recalled that the NNAS’s “activities were intended to create an awareness among the public about the negative impact of the authoritarian familial regime on the life, culture and civilisation of sovereign Nepal.” These public events were held in the heart of Kathmandu—in Asan and Indrachowk—and led by a certain Pandit Muralidhar Sharma. Shastri was arrested after he gave a lecture on one such occasion. He was eventually executed by the Ranas in 1941. Although we do not know the exact details of Vyathit’s involvement in the NNAS, we have to speculate that it taught him about critical public action and organising, among other things.

Second, in the fall of 1940, many anti-Rana political activists associated with the Nepal Prajaparishad Party and various other political formations were arrested and put on trial. Vyathit was also arrested and was given an 18-year prison term. As several writers have noted previously, it was in jail that Vyathit got additional education in politics. He also learned to produce poetry under the tutelage of fellow inmates Siddhicharan Shrestha (1912-1992) and Chittadhar “Hridaya” (1906-1982). When Rana premier Juddha Shamsher retired in 1945, Vyathit was one of the prisoners released before their prison terms were up.

Third, during the reign of Padma Shamsher (r. 1945-1948), Nepal’s elites felt relatively more emboldened to organise. As Lokranajan Parajuli has discussed in a 2024 article published in the journal Samaj Adhyayan, the Nepali Sahitya Parishad was permitted to be formed in April 1947 with Vyathit as its chair. It organised a major three-day literary event in Kathmandu in late May 1947. Finally, some months later, Vyathit went to Banaras and joined the Nepali Rastriya Congress. After being oriented to engage in anti-Rana activism, he subsequently returned to Kathmandu to do underground political work. Having been sought by the Rana regime in connection with an incident that happened in September 1949 in the eastern Tarai, he was later arrested inside India and was imprisoned in jails in Motihari and Patna. He was still in an Indian prison when the Rana regime fell in February 1951.

These experiences would have enabled Vyathit to conceptualise and establish the NSP as an organisation to execute public action around cultural knowledge production for “national unity”, as he put it. In the first meeting of the NSP, he articulated that the production of literary art was the medium to build that unity. I suspect this literary imagination would have drawn Vyathit to the NSP enterprise more than its potential for historical knowledge production, as would have been the case for political and literary historians such as Baburam Acharya (1888-1972) and Isvar Baral.

I spent several years in my youth documenting the work of Nepali nationalists in British India during the early 20th century. These folks put together the narratives of Nepali bravery that became fundamental to the Nepali identity during the Panchayat era. But I now realise that we need to do much broader research on the early decades of the 20th century if we want to understand post-Rana Nepali society at large. A part of that research needs to focus on the life experiences of individuals growing up in the early decades of the 20th century, individuals who would later play important innings across many sectors in post-Rana Nepal.