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.

In the decades following 1951, Nepal opened up to overseas research but the rest of the Himalayan region of India, Tibet and Bhutan remained off-limits. Therefore, with some notable exceptions (Gerald Berreman and Ramachandra Guha in the Uttar Pradesh hills, Jonathan Parry in Himachal Pradesh, T.N. Madan in Kashmir and Chie Nakane in Sikkim), academic attention to the Himalaya focussed overwhelmingly on the places and peoples of Nepal's northern territories. As the other Shang), Las of the region remained forbidden, scholars "discovered" the Nepal Himalaya as the home of people who were, as anthropologist Ulf Banner/ pointed out in a related context, "most other" to the metropolitan centres of anthropological learning.

For at least two decades after Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf did his first extended field work among the Sherpas of Khumbu in the mid 1950s, the anthropology of Nepal remained exclusively in the domain of Western researchers. They arrived to conduct the first-time study of the Sherpas, the Thakalis, the Gurungs. the Magars, the Rais. the Limbus, the Tamangs and the Newars. And. in some instances, high-caste Hindus and lesser known groups within Nepal. Anthropological scholarship by Nepalis remained minuscule until the landmark publication in 1967 of Dor Bahadur Bista's People of Nepal, the first Western-style anthropological monograph to be written by a Nepali.

Change came in the early 1980s. In 1981, Tribhuvan University began Masters-level courses in sociology and anthropology. The classes have been popular and enrolment this year exceeded 400. The past decade thus saw a significant jump in the number of trained Nepali anthropologists. This group has already published a sizable body of anthropological literature.

At least three major international conferences on Himalayan anthropology have been organised in the West and conferences in Europe and North America routinely include the anthropology of the Himalayas and/or Nepal. The difference in the two recent gatherings in Kathmandu was that for the first time they allowed Nepali and overseas anthropologists to participate simultaneously in large numbers. The participation of so many Nepali anthropologists at the Kathmandu conferences could be said to indicate that Nepali anthropology has arrived.

Cristoph von Furer-Haimendorf (1909-1992)passed away recently. Born in Austria in 1909, he studied anthropology at the Universities of Vienna and London. Furer-Haimendorf first went to India in 1936 to conduct fieldwork among the Konyak Nagas. In 1944-45, he worked in the North East Frontier Agency for the Government of India. From 1945 to 1949, he was Advisor to the Hyderabad State Government for "tribes and backward classes". He was also professor of Anthropology at Osmania University, subsequent to which, from 1949 to 1976, he held the Chair in Asian Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. After almost two decades of research among the tribal populations of India, Furer-Haimendorf first came to Nepal in 1953 and pioneered anthropological studies on the Sherpas. He also wrote early important essays on the Tamangs, Chhetris, Newars and Thakalis.