At least two generations of historians who have done research on Nepal of the early 20th century have primarily relied on state archives in Nepal, India and the UK to produce their work. However, after the end of World War II and the beginning of the re-structuring of world politics—the end of the British colonial era in South Asia, the rise of the US as a superpower and the end of the Rana regime in Nepal in 1951—we saw the beginning of a new era of engagements for Nepal and Nepalis with new states, in particular the US, and with other foreign institutions and nationals. Various unpublished records of these new types of engagements have ended up across different archives worldwide. Here, I would like to point to three different types of new archival collections that we need to pay attention to if we want to write good histories of the Nepali-videshi encounters of the 1950s.

First, as Nepal’s engagements with the US increased in the post-WWII era, collections of official documents of these engagements have ended up in the state archives of Nepal and the US. This means that US-based publicly-supported archives now hold many documents that have a direct bearing on the histories of Nepal during the long 1950s (which started before 1950 and ended after 1960). For instance, there are many US State Department documents at the US National Archives in College Park, Maryland (NARA II).

Historian Daniel W Edwards consulted these documents some time ago. He has done researchers a favour by publishing America Meets Nepal 1944-1952: Problems, Personalities & Political Change (2022), which contains various extracts from the “most interesting parts” of the relevant documents of the early Nepal-US encounters. Similarly, in producing several articles on US involvement in Nepal during the Cold War, environmental historian Thomas Robertson has relied not only on the documents in NARA II but also those held at the USAID Library in Washington, D. and the Harry S Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. Some Nepal-related documents are now available in the online USAID archives.

Second, the involvement of specific foreign institutions in Nepal during the long 1950s gave birth to specific holdings in institutional archives. The University of Oregon and several of its faculty members, including Hugh B Wood, were involved in planning and implementing educational programmes in Nepal during the 1950s. In fact, Wood was the primary advisor to the first National Education Planning Commission, which produced its report in 1955. Hence, it is no surprise that an American academic who researches the history of education in Nepal, Jeremy Rappleye, has consulted the University of Oregon archives in Oregon, US, to write an interesting article on the work of Wood in Nepal. That article was published in the June 2019 issue of the journal Studies in Nepali History and Society (SINHAS). Rappleye reports that there are many more Nepal-related materials at the University of Oregon archives, including films, for other researchers.

Such archives also exist for other foreign institutions that became involved in Nepal in the 1950s. For example, New Zealand-based historian Susan Heydon relied on the archives of what came to be known as the International Nepal Fellowship and the United Mission to Nepal (UMN) to write an article on foreign-Nepali medical encounters during the 1950s. These archives are now held at the Divinity School Library of Yale University in Connecticut, US. I suspect similar archives exist for other US-based institutions (e.g., Ford Foundation) and similar entities in the UK, India and elsewhere that were involved in bikas work in Nepal then.

Third, the involvement and action of specific individuals, both Nepalis and videshis, in Nepal during the 1950s can be researched through a reading of their private papers, including photographic images they might have taken or gathered. While I suspect that a majority of such papers have either been destroyed or are still held in private family collections, some have ended up in archives run by universities, and think tanks. For instance, the bulk of Robertson’s sources in an article he published in the same issue of SINHAS, came from the private papers of Chester Bowles, US Ambassador to India and Nepal during the early 1950s and a graduate of Yale. These papers are now held at the Yale University Library. Similarly, Rappleye’s article relies heavily on the personal papers of Hugh B Wood, now held at the Hoover Institutional Library & Archives located at Stanford University in California, US. The Wood papers, available in 42 boxes, have not yet been catalogued. These papers have also been consulted by Lokranjan Parajuli and are referred to in his forthcoming chapter on the politics of the founding of Tribhuvan University.

Such unpublished personal papers and photographs are also available in archives in Nepal. For example, about 500 photographs taken by Harold Lyle Dusenberry (1907-91) are available in the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (MPP) in Patan Dhoka. Dusenberry, an American, did two stints in Nepal (1952-54, 1956-58). He advised agricultural programmes and trained rural development workers (see his 1958 report available online, Six Years of Village Development in Nepal).

Among the 500 photographs organised in five albums held in MPP, there are many that document the Nepali-videshi encounter of that era in interesting ways. Once, Dusenberry and his team members visited Pokhara. While it is not clear exactly when this visit took place, these photographs document the team’s temporary camp in Bindabasini chaur in Pokhara and various encounters in that city. In the photo above, you can see several US team members taking a bath in the open and many dozen Nepalis observing the act. There are also several photos of training sessions and technical demonstrations held in Kathmandu.

I have given examples of three types of unpublished archival records in state archives, institutional archives and personal paper holdings that came into existence due to the new Nepali-videshi encounters after WWII. Since some of these archives exist in Nepal, our university faculty members should encourage their students to explore them for their dissertation research. Those who hold other records of such encounters should be encouraged to deposit them at our public institutions so that younger researchers can access them.

With respect to the archives located in the US and elsewhere, Nepal-based researchers should seek travel fellowships to visit those archives. One such fellowship allowed Parajuli to visit Stanford in 2017 to study the Wood Papers. In the long run, we can also hope that these archives will put their holdings online to facilitate the work of researchers who are unable to travel for on-site consultations of those records.

There are yet other ways to facilitate the reading of such collections by researchers. What is stopping the history department at Yale University from offering a dissertation fellowship to a deserving PhD student—of any nationality—who wants to work on the above-mentioned archival collections related to Nepal that are now physically located there? Also, what is stopping the various Nepali NRN groups from supporting the doctoral research of a Nepali (from Nepal or the Nepali diaspora) on collections mentioned above at NARA II, Yale or Stanford?