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The Social Science Baha was set up in January 2002 to foster and facilitate the development of the study of the social sciences in Nepal. In keeping with its stated objective, the Baha has focused mainly in the following four activities:
Social Science Library
The Baha’s major priority is the development of a well-stocked and efficiently managed social science library. The library has so far collected 20,000 titles and also provides users with access to online resources.
Lectures, conferences, etc
The Baha hosts The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture once a year, inviting prominent academics to deliver a lecture in honour of the late historian. As part of the Social Science Baha Lecture Series, the Baha also provides a forum to academic personalities to interact with their colleagues in a standard lecture format. The Baha also organises conferences, roundtables and other interactions of an academic nature.
Publications
The Baha publishes books and occasional and working papers as a means to make available scholarly works that may not ordinarily be accessible to the general reader.
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| News & Announcements |
New publicationThe Gorkha Conquests
The process and consequences of the unification of Nepal,
with particular reference to Eastern Nepal
by Kumar Pradhan
with a new introduction by John Whelpton
Nepal was forged out of the conquests by the principality of Gorkha, and Nepalese historians often view this process as consisting of ‘national unification’. This work is a probe to see whether cohesive elements of nation-building were present in the past to warrant such a description. It examines some of the real motives behind Gorkha’s desire to expand over the neighbouring hills and plains and beyond, together with its consequences on the society and economy of the peoples of great diversity living in those areas.
Eastern Nepal, also called Kirat, was one of the last areas to be conquered by Gorkha, but has received somewhat scant attention from Nepalese historians. This book provides a region-specific coverage to allow for a deeper understanding of the process of Nepal’s political unification, and its impact.
The publication of Kumar Pradhan’s The Gorkha Conquests in India in 1991 marked an important milestone in Nepalese historiography because it was a direct challenge to a ‘nationalist’ orthodoxy presenting the military campaigns of King Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha and his immediate successors as an heroic venture on behalf of all the people of Nepal…The environment in which this book is now being republished is radically different from that in which it originally appeared since Nepal is now no longer a kingdom and an emphasis on ethnicity, regarded as almost taboo before 1990, has now moved to the centre of the Nepalese political arena...In these new circumstances, it is possible that a negative evaluation of Prithvi Narayan himself will become the new orthodoxy…The debate will in any case continue and The Gorkha Conquests will remain an early but very important contribution to it. —From the introduction by John Whelpton, author of A History of Nepal « Back
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The Social Science Baha was set up in January 2002 to foster and facilitate the development of the study of the social sciences in Nepal. 
