After the 1950s, as Nepal ceased to be the Shangri-La for Western scholars, systematic study of Himalaya, in the light of social science perspective, came to be considered as their forte, akin to the larger canvas of growth of social science imagination in Nepal. Consequently, Himalayan Studies in Nepal have also been imagined as beginning with the scholarly engagement of Western social scientists alone. Given the historical condition of Nepal’s ‘non-coloniality’, to use Mary Des Chene, it might seem premature to raise the clarion call for decolonising Himalayan Studies in Nepal. But will it not be too surprising to uncritically accept that in relation to Himalaya there had been a complete void of scholarship ‘from within’ Nepal?

Perspective ‘from within’

Since the 1950s, works on the Himalaya emerging from within Nepal, where scholars raised pertinent questions, sketched out perspectives and provided analytical insights without provincialising the conceptual paradigms of their videshi colleagues, was not uncommon. Such contributions may appear valuable when pitched as ‘perspectives from within’—which can offer Himalayan Studies scholarship a distinctive Nepali flavour.

An engagement with works like Iman Singh Chemjong’s History and Culture of Kirat People (1948), Janak Lal Sharma’s Hamro Samaj: Ek Adhyayan (VS 2039), or numerous personal memoirs written in the context of Tibet like Mahasthavir Dharmaloka’s Mahachin Yatra (1950), Chittadhar Hridaya's Mimmanah Pau (1968), Nhuchhe Bahadur Bajrachaya’s The Story of My Life (1998) and such earlier attempts might endow Himalayan Studies scholarship in Nepal with a Nepali anchorage. Pondering the existing scholarship on Himalaya, one is likely to come across works from Nepali social scientists. These works hint at autonomous thinking, reflect upon the agentiality of researchers while doing Himalayan Studies, and pose serious methodological or conceptual questions while studying the Himalaya. However, these contributions have received less critical attention.

Dor Bahadur Bista

The illustrious Nepali anthropologist and close aide of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Dor Bahadur Bista, successfully attempted to Nepalize not only disciplinary imagination but also disciplinary practices for research and teaching anthropology in Nepal. Bista is famous for his People of Nepal (1967), published by the Department of Publicity, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and His Majesty’s Government, Nepal. Section three of the book features the highland people of Nepal, introducing “Nepal’s northern border with Tibet as high Himalayan country”.

Ethnographic accounts on 10 Himalayan communities are included, where borderland characteristics of the region are foregrounded, presumably for the first time by a Nepali anthropologist. In one of his best but least discussed articles titled, ‘The Political Innovators of Upper Kali Gandaki’, published in Man in 1971, Bista provides a glimpse of what may be understood as highland political culture. He describes how the Thakalis of upper Kali-Gandaki successfully secured political power and authority within their group and restructured their tribal hierarchy with other groups of the region which was, however, transformed over the years. This article is a robust critique of James Scott’s Zomianist thinking, which considered South East Asian and Himalayan highlands as state-evading zones that should garner no attention while discussing political structure or system.

Chaitanya Mishra

Much like Bista, Mishra did not write extensively on the Himalaya. However, in ‘Mountain Development: A Brief Theoretical Note’ (1988), he sketched a plausible design for the study of the relationship between ecosystem and development. Mishra argued that the large-scale changes in the Himalayan Mountain region are attributable partly to geomorphological forces, but mainly to human social activities continuing through the last 150 years. He pointed out that faster rates of change may be considered as the effect of the organisation of the capitalist production process.

More than three decades ago, Mishra hinted at the combined force of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene in bringing about changes in the mountain while also illustrating the causes of the mountain’s marginalisation through the interaction between human beings, state apparatus and the Himalaya.

Prayag Raj Sharma

Prayag Raj Sharma’s ‘Emergence of a hill-town: Urban development in Nepal’s rural backhills’ (1994) showed the possibility and necessity of rethinking urban development in the context of Nepal highlands. Of the total number of hill towns in Nepal, a significant majority originated in the aftermath of Gorkha political unification and not as an outgrowth of any urbanising tendencies within the local peasantry.

Nevertheless, those who helped establish it in the 19th century intended it to work as a servicing centre, in the building of which they necessarily incorporated some degree of planning. Such a place became known as a bajār, which means market or market place. Sharma’s intervention raises serious concerns regarding our uncritical compliance with concepts and processes generally used in social science research. However, no one considered these important while pursuing larger debates in Nepali academia, despite knowing that much of our social science concepts and categories are embedded within the valley-centric ontology.

Conclusion

An intimate chapter of agentiality in Nepali scholarship vis-à-vis Himalayan Studies emerged in the 1930s. It associates Itihas Shiromani Baburam Acharya and the need for a Nepali term of reference for Mount Everest. After noticing that the world’s highest peak, though located in Nepal, had no Nepali term in the first-ever scientific map of Nepal published by the Survey of India in 1932 and was identified as Jhyāmolongmā, its Tibetan derivation in 1934, Acharya wrote an exploratory essay Sagarmatha ya Jhyāmolongmā published in Sharda in 1939.

Realising that the presence of the Tibetan term might confuse the Nepalis, Acharya used the Nepali term Sagarmatha for Mt Everest. Although the contemporary Rana rulers did not find the absence of a Nepali term on the map objectionable, they charged Acharya with attempts to insult the British by giving a Nepali name to the peak, already named after ‘our friends’. He was immediately sacked from his job as an accountant in the Education Department.

Surprisingly, although the peak was only about 100 miles away from Kantipur, people were to identify its greatness only through the English term. Had Baburam Acharya shown complacency to the British, the necessity to use Sagarmatha to refer to the world’s highest peak would not have emerged in the late 1930s. Though the darwar accepted the term Sagarmatha in 1961, Mt Everest’s Nepali belongingness can solely be attributed to Acharya, who was not simply translating the English term.

Sagarmatha embodies Nepali popular imagination and situates the peak within the lived traditions of Kirati people and the nationalist texture of the Nepali nation while epitomising the rootedness of Acharya’s scholarship—becoming a view ‘from within’ that is both agential and decolonial. Provisioning Acharya’s vision in academics could have motivated Nepalizing Himalayan Studies in Nepal. Thus, Himalaya ‘from within’ might appear far more promising when articulated as a perspective that refers to culturally appropriated spatial imagination.

This article is an abridged version of a presentation delivered at Martin Chautari Annual Conference (27-29 November, 2024).