Over the weeks, I have participated in several discussions concerning the revival of interest in the 1960s and the changes in Nepali society during that time. There, I was asked to share my experiences about the developments I observed as a youth. Discussions on the changes propelled by the global movements from the mid-sixties to the seventies also intrigued me. These talks also covered Nepal's changes since the democratic transformation in the fifties.

One question that interests people is what attracted Western visitors to Nepal in the sixties and early seventies. Foreign journalists and researchers as well as scholars raise these questions. Interestingly, those who engage in discussions include students who see some semantic values in the very lexicon ‘sixties’. So, I asked them counter-questions: Why do you want to know about this, who were the ones who came to Nepal in the sixties, and why?

Some of those who respond to these questions have stunned me. They were born after the sixties, and for them, this was a unique period of global movements. The world witnessed significant events during the sixties and early seventies. One metaphor they bandy about for one of such orders is the hippie movement. What strikes me is their nomenclature for the mobility of youth during the sixties and the seventies. I like this metaphor coined by analysts, historians, media personnel and academics. For them, the youth activities of that period represented some programmes and a few commonly shared ideologies that guided the activities of a group of people, youths in this case.

It has almost become a cliché to say that Nepal opened up to the world after the fall of the autocratic Rana rule in 1950. The decade of change had some features that added to both confusion and uncertainties. Catching up with the changes happening within and outside of Nepal was challenging. Shifting from a deeply entrenched feudal culture to a free order of things was new to us.

Everything was in a state of transition. As a literature student, I see this shift from a literary perspective. Literary writers had chosen their modus operandi by bringing a literary magazine called Sharada in 1934 through the efforts of some writers who, according to the late literary critic Yadunath Khanal, made a tacit agreement with the then-ruling Prime Minister Juddha Shumsher Rana. The magazine was a forum created to express a consciousness of freedom and creativity through literary writings that were often quietly censored. As the Italian scholar Antonio Gramsci suggested, it was a silent agreement, a unique hegemony.

On the political front, unlike the literary process, the system was overt and open to challenges. The subtle process of the changes happening in politics during those years is recorded in documents and the interpretations of native and foreign writers. However, a unique diary entry from 1951 to 1956 of the first elected Prime Minister, Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala depicts a close picture of transformation in Nepali politics, his perception of the modes of change during that period and the aspirations of youth. BP Koirala Memorial Trust published the book BP Koirala’s Diary: Story of Courage and Freedom (2020). It records his visceral observation of the challenges and angst of the feudal society due to the changes in values entrenched for ages. This period marks the transformation of consciousness in Nepal.

The sixties saw the third period of change in consciousness—10 years after the democratic transformation in Nepal’s political structure. But, King Mahendra’s dissolution of the elected Parliament in 1960 hit the forces involved in the changes hard. A non-party political system called Panchayat was established in the early sixties. Yet, that period brought some unique changes, resulting from the interest in the outer world and its cultural and ecological features. Drawn by the desire to explore, young travellers arrived from the West. They were not tourists in the ordinary sense of the term, but initiated a unique order out of disorder. They were called hippies, and didn’t have any political motives.

Among the intriguing features of that new order was that these youths were allowed to smoke ganja or marijuana in Nepal freely. King Mahendra and his Panchayat regime did not restrict them. People from outside, especially from America and Europe, often ask me: How should we interpret this phenomenon? I tell them I do not know the exact answer to this question. But to make some sense, I evoke Gramsci, who has said that a strict ruler gives continuity to a state of hegemony as long as that does not threaten his rule. Art and literature, music and paintings may flourish in such situations.

Ganja was banned in Nepal after the American government doubled down on its demand for the same. American journalists offered various interpretations. In one interview available online, one journalist/interpreter says that after ganja was banned in Nepal following President Richard Nixon’s pressure, many Nepali youths became jobless and turned Maoists. However, in reality, these two events happened at different times. While the marijuana ban occurred in the early seventies as depicted in a poem by an American poet, the hippie Ira Cohen, who says that the Singha Durbar built by Rana Prime Minister Chandra Shumsher inspired by the style of the Versailles Palace of France was burned by Lord Shiva as a punishment for banning ganja, the Maoist movement began after two decades, in 1996. Nevertheless, these metaphors represent the romanticisation of the transformation of the sixties in Nepal.

The 1960s in Nepal thus represent changes in political order, evident from the examples of the establishment of a democratic system and its dissolution, as well as the flourishing hippie movement during the political restrictions. Studying modernist poetry, art and architecture from that time is also imperative to fully grasp this phenomenon.