Limiting the analysis to the world of print, social scientific academic outputs are mainly put out as articles in journals or edited volumes and also in the form of monographs. Such outputs communicate the analyses of researchers to their peers and other members of the interested public. In this piece, my focus is on edited volumes, which have been an integral part of how scholarship has been developed by academics elsewhere. Having produced quite a few such volumes over the past 25 years and having commissioned some titles of this nature recently, I am convinced that edited volumes do advance branches of Nepal Studies. Hence they deserve close scrutiny that is often missing in our intellectual landscape.

Let us start with some basics. Edited volumes come in two primary modes. First is the case when all or most of the articles contained therein have been specially commissioned for it and processed through various stages of the pre-press editorial work. Second is when all or most of the articles have been previously published and they are later brought together in an edited volume known as a ‘Reader’ in the publication industry.

Irrespective of its type, the more useful edited volume is put together to attain thematic coherence among the selected articles. Such a volume usually contains a substantial introduction by the editors that locates the book in the proper academic contexts, provides summaries of the chapters contained and also delimits the scope of the collection. The introduction helps the readers to get a good overview of the relevant academic landscape of which the book is a part. It also helps to clarify the remit of the edited collection since no one book can cover all aspects of the theme in question. In a coherent volume, the editors also add references to other articles contained in it by indicating as much in the main text or the footnotes of the original chapters. This makes the chapters in the collection “talk” to each other. A user-friendly edited volume often comes with a decent index.

Volumes with new articles

With respect to edited books of academic writings, it was only in the 1970s that this genre really began to make a mark in the Nepali social science landscape. Some of the early such volumes were derived from papers presented at specific conferences. Among the books that have been important to me, I would mention Social Science in Nepal (1974) edited by historian Prayag Raj Sharma and published by the then Institute of Nepal and Asian Studies of Tribhuvan University. This volume contains a set of foundational reflections on the state of various social science disciplines in Nepal as presented in a seminar in 1973. It set a benchmark for later similar exercises.

Edited volumes derived from seminars took off in the 1990s when many university departments and academic NGOs found the seminar-to-book publication route relatively easy to travel. While seminar conveners urged paper presenters to revise their written texts based on the feedback received from participants, the authors of such papers rarely received written comments from their peers who had gone through their texts carefully. Hence, the articles in these edited volumes suffered from the lack of careful peer-reviews and rigorous re-writing and were generally of modest quality. However, there were some exceptions.

Edited volumes in which the chapters were critically reviewed by peer readers and the contributors managed to do several rounds of revisions of their texts have done well. For instance, Nepalko Sandarvhama Samajshastriya Chintan (2004) which I co-edited has sold more than 3000 copies. There are several other more recent examples of this type.

The readers

Readers are collections of mostly already published theme- or period-specific articles by different authors selected by the editors. In the literary field, readers are usually called anthologies. Such books are useful to introduce new students to the research landscape on the subject under consideration. They can also help to instigate new domains of research. Recently, I co-edited (with Lokranjan Parajuli and Mark Liechty) a reader, Nepal in the Long 1950s. In it we “aim to situate the events of that turbulent decade within larger frames both in terms of time—the complex historical processes that led to the transitions of the 1950s and continued thereafter—and space—the complex regional and global contexts in which events in Nepal took place.” It is for the readers to decide how successful the 10 articles (7 reprints, 3 new) in this volume are in terms of fulfilling that aim. We also hope that the volume will instigate younger historians of Nepal to move away decisively from narrowly conceived political histories of the 1950s.

When it comes to the readers, the biggest challenge is to get reprint rights for the articles selected by the editors. For articles that have appeared in journals published in Nepal or in Nepal-related area studies journals published from elsewhere, getting such permission is relatively easy. However, getting reprint rights for articles that appeared in disciplinary journals published by big commercial and academic publishers can be difficult. While seeking reprint rights for articles originally selected for two readers (focused on the ongoing federal transition) published by Martin Chautari in the past two years, one such publisher wanted to charge as much as $680 for a single article. That article and others for which we did not get permission were not included in the published readers. In some other cases, we never heard back from the original publishers after seeking reprinting permission following their online guidelines.

The missing volumes

Many edited volumes on a wide variety of subjects need to be brought into existence by those who study those themes. Take, for example, the case of long-distance labour. While the income remitted back to Nepal by such labourers is crucial to the country’s economy, it is surprising that there isn’t a single reader covering various aspects of this phenomenon. The best academic writings on Nepali mobilities remain scattered in the pages of various hard-to-access journals.

Talking about my discipline of history, Nepal’s historians have been particularly missing in publishing thematic edited volumes (a senior historian once dismissed such volumes saying “they don’t count”). Where is the edited volume on Nepal during the long 19th century? Where is the edited volume that covers the history of the changing gender dynamics in Nepali society during the 20th century? Our historians have been prolific in producing single-author monographs, but the absence of edited volumes explains in part why history as a discipline has been a loser when it comes to generating collective disciplinary outcomes and to being perceived as a “useless” discipline.

It is high time that my fellow historians and other academics put out new edited volumes and readers on the themes that concern them intellectually.