The annual Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture was instituted by Social Science Baha to honour the seminal contributions of the late historian Mahesh Chandra Regmi to Nepali scholarship.
The Baha envisages the lecture series to be a platform for allowing scholars and researchers in the social sciences to present their ideas and seminal works to the Nepalese intelligentsia and society. In keeping with this vision, every year, the Baha invites a scholar who has made an important contribution to social sciences scholarship in Nepal or on Nepali society, to present her or his work in front of an audience of invitees and the public.
Harka Gurung delivered the inaugural Mahesh Chandra Regmi lecture in April 2003 at the opening of the Baha-organized conference “The Agenda of Transformation: Inclusion in Nepali Democracy”. Gurung’s lecture entitled Trident and Thunderbolt: Cultural Dynamics in Nepali Politics was given in the presence of the late Mahesh Chandra Regmi himself who was the chief guest on the occasion. Unfortunately for Nepali scholarship, that proved to be Regmi’s last public appearance.
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The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture 2003
24 April, Birendra International Convention Centre
Trident and Thunderbolt: Culture Dynamics in Nepalese Politics
by Harka Gurung
In ‘Trident and Thunderbolt: Cultural Dynamics in Nepali Politics’, Gurung takes a historical sweep of the development of the modern Nepali state making references to various points in history when caste and ethnic hierarchy and inequality were reinforced by the rulers using legal instruments.
Studying the contestation between and among the dominant lingual group and the other ethnic/ caste groups for socio-political and cultural space, Dr. Gurung argues that ethnic challenges arising in nation building cannot be ignored. Whenever the socio-political context becomes favourable, they resurface and challenge the monolithic state. He calls for a ‘polycentric nationalism that fosters a feeling of belonging among all sections of society which in turn will promote national integration.’
Harka Gurung was born in Lamjung, Central Nepal, and went to military school in India. He earned a BA (hons) from Patna College, Patna, and a post-graduate diploma (1961) and PhD (1965) from the University of Edinburgh.
Gurung served at different times as member and vice-chairman of the National Planning Commission (1968-75), minister of state for education (1975-78), and minister of state for tourism, industry and commerce, public works and transport. He also worked in academia as demonstrator at the University of Edinburgh, a research fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, lecturer at Tribhuvan University, and visiting fellow at the Population Institute/East-West Center.
Gurung authored numerous books including: Pokhara Valley: A Geographical Survey; Vignettes of Nepal and Annapurna to Dhaulagiri; A Decade of Mountaineering in Nepal Himalaya, 1950-1960; Janajati Serophero; From Exclusion to Inclusion: Socio-Political Agenda for Nepal; Faces of Nepal; Nature and Culture: Random Reflections; and Nepali Nationalism.
The Mahesh Chandra Lecture 2004
18 August, Russian Cultural Centre, Kamalpokhari
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In ' bfhL{lnªdf g]kfnL hftLotf / jt{dfg s]xL hghftLo c8fgx¿' ('Nepali Ethnicity in Darjeeling and Some Current Ethnic Stances'), Pradhan follows the historical trajectory of the Nepali migration into Darjeeling. Travellers’ accounts and local annals from the 19th and early 20th centuries attest to centuries-old migrations into the area by today’s Nepali ethnic groups. Pradhan notes that the majority of the Nepali settlers there belonged to the proletariat.
The majority of these migrants belonged to the numerous matwalis groups, and despite their ethnic differences, these settlers forged a common Nepali ethnic identity. Pradhan explains how the process of Nepali identity creation in Darjeeling differed fundamentally from that in proper. In Nepal, the process was state-imposed and ideologically driven to create a monolingual unity at the expense of the ethnic cultures. In contrast, the process in Darjeeling occurred at the grass-roots. In this historical context, one would assume the Nepali identity in Darjeeling to be more resilient than that in Nepal.
However the post-1990 ethnic revivalism in Darjeeling, following a similar resurgence in Nepal, has put an end to such a notion. Numerous ethnic organisations have sprung up, but Pradhan concludes the lecture with reasons to suggest such a dissolution may not in fact take place. According to him, the Nepali language and the common historical destiny of the Nepali people there are the pivotal binding forces for the continued existence of a collective Nepali identity.
Kumar Pradhan received his PhD in history from Calcutta University and served on the Department of History, Darjeeling Government College, from 1966 to 1984 when he took over as the principal of Kurseong College, Kurseong. He is the author of The Gorkha Conquests: The Process and Consequences of the Unification of Nepal with Particular Reference to Eastern Nepal.
Pradhan is also an eminent writer and critic who has edited a number of literary journals and anthologies and published learned articles in Nepali. He is the author of A History of Nepali Literature (1984), published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in the Sahitya Akademi Histories of Literature Series. His work, Pahilo Pahar (1982), was awarded the Bhanubhakta Puraskar for 1983 by the Nepali Academy instituted by the Government of West Bengal. He received the Nepali Sahitya Sammelan Puraskar awarded by the Nepali Sahitya Sammelan in 2002, and the Aam Smriti Puraskar, an award given every three years for contributions to the Nepali language and literature, instituted by Nepali Sahitya Parishad of in 2003.
After retiring from teaching in 1993, he started publishing and editing the Nepali-language daily Sunchari Samachar.
The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture 2005
23 September, Russian Cultural Centre, Kamalpokhari
From Kin to Caste: The Role of Guthis in Newar Society and Cultureby Gérard Toffin
Guthi associations played a considerable role in the development of the civilisation of the Nepal Valley and still play a pivotal role in Newar society. Of particular importance are the associations devoted to the cult of divinities and the death societies. Anthropologically speaking, guthis cover a wide range of social groupings, from caste to kin, giving a preponderant position to territory. Though guthis are a distinctive feature of the Newars in Nepal, such type of associations are widespread all over the world. Gerard Toffin points to some parallels in the Himalayan belt, and mediaeval Europe. They are in most cases adapted to complex urban societies, but they are sometime the descendants of old farmer’s organizations linked with the local religion.
Gérard Toffin is Director of Research at CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris), and Professor of Nepali Civilization in the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilisations, Paris. He is also a member of the Scientific Committee for the French Research Centres in Asia under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of France. Toffin is an outstanding anthropologist, with over 35 years of excellent research on , and a good friend and well-wisher of the country. He has been doing research in since 1970 when he first came to to work as Cultural Attaché at the French Embassy. Since then, in addition to his own research on the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley and the Tamangs of west , he has directed, edited and participated in various anthropological research and publishing projects in his country. Toffin’s important works include Pyangaon, une communauté néwar de la vallée de Katmandou (Paris, 1977), Societé et religion chez les Néwars de la vallée de Katmandou (Paris, 1984), Le Palais et le Temple: La fonction royale dans l’ancienne vallée du Népal (Paris, 1993) and the edited volume, Nepal: Past and Present (Delhi, 1993). This year he published La quete de l’Autre: L’ethnologie d’hier à aujourd’hui (Solar, 2005) in which he puts into perspective the development and changes in Western anthropology over the last few decades. Toffin has lectured at Harvard, Oxford and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), of the University of London, among other institutions. In 2000 he delivered the Radhakrishnan Memorial Lecture, at All Souls College, Oxford University, where he spoke on the topic ‘From city to village: Society and religion among the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley’.
The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture 2006
16 December, Russian Cultural Centre, Kamalpokhari
Close-Up and Wide-Angle: On Comparative Ethnography in the Himalaya and Beyond
by Michael Oppitz
Anthropologists who conducted research in the Nepal Himalaya usually chose a single, often remote locality and stayed with this place until the end of their days. ‘Their village’ became the centre of the world and thanks to the rugged topography of the country, there was ample space for many researchers to select and defend their own local universe. This is why many of the Himalayan ethnographies have an atomistic appearance, which, for our knowledge of local cultures, is elementary. But no place is so remote as not to entertain relations with neighbouring local cultures. And so, they influence one another. Such influences can be detected in material products such as implements, artefacts and religious paraphernalia, as well as in the immaterial heritage such as ideas, concepts and myths. Cultural similarities beyond the local universe may be explained by common linguistic roots, trade relations or migration movements. But they also exist where such explanations fail. The lecture aims to present some examples of such unexplained similarities covering astounding distances in the Himalaya and beyond while suggesting a way of dealing with them through comparative ethnography.
Michael Oppitz studied at the Universities of Berkeley, Bonn and Cologne. He did his first fieldwork in Solu Khumbu, where he found some old documents on the history of the Sherpa. He showed these to Mahesh Chandra Regmi (in 1965), who helped him with other source materials and encouraged him to publish his findings, making him an author at the age of 23. After finishing his studies, he went to the Northern Magar to study their local shamanic religion. The outcome was a four-hour-long documentary, Shamans of the Blind Country. The other major result of his study of the Magar is Uncle’s Daughter No One Else. He has taught in Paris (the Sorbonne); Berlin (The Institute of Advanced Study) and the (the University of Texas and New York University).
The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture 2007
13 December, Russian Cultural Centre, Kamalpokhari
The Return of the Sacred: The Language of Religion and the Fear of Democracy in a Post-Secular World
by Ashis Nandy
The nineteenth-century European dream of continuous, irreversible decline of religion in the twentieth century did not prepare modern political and social theories, particularly contemporary theories of democracy, for a world in which religion has re-emerged as a post-modern phenomenon seeking to fill a void in private and public life. Important sections of the citizens have begun to see in religion ways of fighting the hazards of extreme individualism, loneliness, economism and consumerism. They have made new demands on the modern state system that have disoriented the ruling elites in many democracies who seek to contain the demands by setting up garrison states.
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Ashis Nandy is a political psychologist and sociologist of science. He is a former Director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and is presently an Indian Council of Social Science Research Fellow there. Nandy has had a long and prolific career illuminating an extraordinary number of subjects, including political psychology, mass violence, cultures and politics of knowledge, and utopias and visions. He has also written on the history of science and technology, the nature of the post-colonial state, alternatives to ‘development’, alternate politics, the role of religion in society and the game of cricket in India. He has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Wilson Center, Washington DC; a Charles Wallace Fellow at the University of Hull; and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh. He also held the first UNESCO Chair at the Center for European Studies, University of Trier, in 1994.
He is the author of, among others, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (1995), The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (1994), At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (1990), and The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983). His most recent book is A Very Popular Exile (2007).
The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture 2008
12 August, Russian Cultural Centre, Kamalpokhari
Where Is the Revolution? Towards a Post-National Politics of Social Justice
by David Ludden
How should we think about today’s political transition in Nepal? To address this critical question, we need a conceptual framework, and our most popular choice would be to think inside national history, thus to consider the nation from a perspective anchored in the capital. I want to describe another perspective: it is a post-national framework for thinking about the politics of social justice. National thinking appears in rather different light when we step outside, and my work has for some years now focused on mapping analytical spaces that include the nation without being defined by national territorialism. Nepal’s transition is unfolding inside (1) South Asian regionalism, (2) a growing collection of modern states transformed by rustic revolutions, and (3) contemporary globalization. These three contexts highlight the role of urban-rural and inter-regional inequity in generating radical politics. Struggles for social justice that originate in deprived places can successfully transmit their energies to the capital—which they do in various ways – but distances remain profound which separate ‘the nation’ defined in the capital from ‘the local’ defined in rustic towns, villages, slums, swamps, mountains, and forests. Local struggles for social justice remain local even when they provide a political basis for radical change in national state regimes. This defines the basic challenge for urbane politicians.
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David Ludden is Professor of Political Economy and Globalisation, New York University. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 and was Professor of History there from 1999-2008. His areas of interest are economic development, agrarian conditions, health environments, empire, inequality, social conflict. His monographs are India and South Asia: A Short History (2002), An Agrarian History of South Asia (1999), and Peasant History in South India (1985). His major edited volumes are Capitalism in Asia: Readings from the Journal of Asian Studies (2004) and Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical Histories, Contested Meanings, and the Globalisation of South Asia (2002). He has served as President of the Association for Asian Studies and has received research awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2003), American Council of Learned Societies (2002), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1990).
The Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture 2009
14 October, Russian Cultural Centre, Kamalpokhari
The Vamshavali from Chamba: Reflections of a Historical Tradition
by Romila Thapar
It is commonly said that Indian civilisation lacks a sense of history. Why this idea was given currency needs to be considered and countered. This is the context of the lecture. Using the example of the Vamshavali from the hill state of Chamba (in the present-day Indian state of Himachal Pradesh), it is argued that this category of texts constitutes one form of the many historical traditions of the sub-continent. The historical background to the emergence to this kind of text might explain why it was so widespread as a genre. The contents of this Vamshavali and its form reflects the process of its composition both in drawing from earlier traditions and in making a statement about later events. Download lecture in audio format
Among the world’s foremost experts on ancient Indian history, Romila Thapar earned her doctorate under A.L. Basham at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in 1958. She is Professor Emerita of Ancient Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Prof Thapar’s major works include Asoka and the Decline of the Maurya; Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations; Recent Perspectives of Early Indian History (editor); A History of India Volume One; and Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300.
Prof Thapar has been a visiting professor at Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the College de France in Paris. She was elected General President of the Indian History Congress in 1983 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy British Academy. She is an Honorary Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
She has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Chicago, the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, the University of Oxford, the University of Calcutta, and, most recently, the University of Hyderabad. In 2004, the US Library of Congress appointed her as the first holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South.
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