The Making of the Nepali Anthropologist

Before the field workers came the foreign travellers and writers. Among the latter were British administrators and travellers cum -writers, such as William Kirkpatrick. Francis Buchanan Hamilton, Brian Hodgson and Edwin T. Atkinson. While Kirkpatrick and Buchanan Hamilton have left impressive accounts of what they saw and heard during their brief sojourns in Nepal, Atkinson's is an omnibus account of the Kumaun-Garhwal areas, Hodgson was associated with the Office of the British Residency in Kathmandu, established in 1816, for more than two decades, starting from the early 1820s. Besides being central to the resurgence of Buddhist studies in the subcontinent, Hodgson pioneered research on the languages, peoples, flora and fauna of the Himalaya. His work, and that of other Residency officials, constitute the initial contributions to the knowledge-mapping of the region. Then, in early part of this century, Sylvain Levi and Percival Landon were given rare opportunities by the Rana rulers to visit Kathmandu to pen their important volumes.

Levi and Landon notwithstanding, however, Nepal remained off-limits to Field work-based anthropology until the end of the Rana rule in 1951. What Sir Richard Temple wrote in his Journals in 1887 —"the exclusion of the Nepali dominion from the gaze of science is religiously maintained" — remained true until the middle of this century. The Kathmandu rulers kept tight control on access to Nepal's lands and her peoples.