Capuchin Capers

The lastest foray of Christian missionaries into South Asia began with the arrival of Vasco de Gama on the Indian coast some 500 years ago. As the Catholic missionaries worked their way northward, they heard that there were some lost Christian communities in Tibet. Considering the travel conditions of the time, they made daring probes into the high plateau. By 1626, the Jesuits had established the first Christian church in Tsapang, on the banks of Sutlej in the western Tibetan kingdom of Guge. In 1628, another church appeared in Sighaste, eastern Tibet. Jesuit priest John Carabal was the first non-Asian to set foot in Nepal that year, on his way from Sighaste to Bengal.

After the suppression of the Jesuits by Rome, the responsibility for Tibet was assigned to the Capuchin missionaries in 1703. At first, their attention was focused on Tibet, and it was only when strong Lamaistic opposition daunted the missionaries' will that they turned their attention to Nepal. Incidentally, the first Nepalis to be converted to Christianity were some Kathmandu merchants in Lhasa.

During the Malla period, the position of the Capuchin missionaries hung between strong support and patronage of the rulers to open hostility and suspicion from the society in general and. in particular, the Bahuns—the bête noire of the missionaries in the Subcontinent.

On the whole, the Capuchin gains were modest. By the time their mission was closed in 1769, they had been able to convert about 80 adults, apart from the numerous dying children they were able to baptize at the time of death. In 1760. the church of Our Lady's Assumption was built somewhere in the present Thamel area, and a second one in Bhaktapur.

Initially, Prithivi Narayan Shah, the unifier of Nepal, was well-disposed to the Capuchins. This amicable relationship ended abruptly when the Gorkhalis suspected the Italian monks of having played a role in inviting the English to intervene in favour of the Malla kings.

After he took the Valley, in 1769, Prithvi Narayan expelled the Capuchins along with 57 converts, who settled in Bettiah, Bihar. The expulsion of missionaries from Nepal seems thus to have been occasioned by politico-military considerations, but doubtless the Brahminic elements in Prithvi Narayan's durbar liked the idea. The interest of the political and religious elites converged to exclude missionaries from Nepal for the next century and half.

Only in the last decade of the 20th century would the missionaries and proselytisers have it as good as they did under the Mallas. No less an authority than Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala reassured a caller during a live BBC phone-in last February with the words, "If I want to change my religion, who is to stop me?"