ITIHAS SHIROMANI BABURAM ACHARYA AWARD
​JOHN WHELPTON                                                                                        RASHTRIYA NACHGHAR, KATHMANDU 16 JULY 2025

​माननीय संस्कृति मन्त्रीज्यु, दाजु(भाई तथा दिदी(बहिनिहरु,
 
सबभन्द पहिले म संस्कृति मन्त्रालय र सम्बन्धित व्यक्तिहरु लाई हार्दिक धन्यवाद व्यक्त गर्न चाहनछु किनभन्ने वहाँहरuले नेपाली ईतिहासको क्षत्रमा मेरो धेरै सानो योगदानलाई यसरि सम्मान गर्दैहुनुहुन्छ। नेपालमा बस्ने धेरै साथीहरुप्रति पनि म अत्यन्तै कृतज्ञ छु जसको मित्रताले गर्दा मैले नेपालमा पहिले अंग्रेजी शिक्षक, पछि अनुसन्धाताको रुपमा खुशीसंग बस्न र काम गर्न पाएकोछु। खास गरि यहां अभि सुवेदी र उनको परिवार, जसले धेरै बर्षदेखि मलाई परिवारको सदस्य जस्तै स्विकार गरेक छन, त्रिरत्न मानन्धार, कृष्ण हछेथु, स्वर्गिय ऋषिकेष शाह र स्वर्गिय कृष्ण कान्त अधिकारीको नाम यहाँ उल्लेख गर्न  चाहन्छु। वहाँहरmअरm  र सबै अरु साथीहरुलाई मृरो धेरै, धेरै धन्यवाद।
 
आज जगदिश चन्द्र रेगमी, स्वर्गिय चित्तरञ्जन नेपालीलाई, र त्रिरत्न मानन्धार जस्ता विव्दानहरुलाई विर्सनु हुँदैन किनभने वहाँहरुले इतिहासको क्षेत्रमा गरेको अमूल्य कामको कारणले यो पुरुष्कार पाउनुभएको छ ।  २०३९ सालमा मैले स्नातकोेत्तर विद्यार्थीको रुपमा नेपाल आएर, वहाँहरुसंग खुशीसंग सल्लाह लिन पाएको थिएँ।
 
नेपाली भाषाको संदर्भमा हामी विदेशीहरुको वर्गिकरण, राणाहरुको जस्तै, तीनवटा श्रेणीमा गर्न सकिंछ – ए क्लास, बी क्लास  र सी क्लास ।   ए क्लासलाई नेपाली राम्ररी आउंछ, सी क्लास लाई “नमस्ते,” “धन्यवाद” र “कस्तो छ” बाहेक अर केहि पनि आउंदैन। बी क्लास लाई भाषा आउंछ तर तयो प्रचलित हुंदैन, उच्चारण बुझ्न गाह्रो। धेरै बर्षको प्रयत्न भए तापनि म बी क्लास मा पर्छु। त्यस कारणले यहाँ माफ मांग्दै, म अहिले अंग्रेजीमा बोल्ने अनुमति चाहन्छु।

​Baburam Acharya, in whose honour this award was named, died on 5 September1972,  three weeks after my own first arrival in Nepal, and so I never met him but did, of course, use his mammoth work on Prithvi Narayan Shah and also his Nepalko Samkshipta Brittanta in my dissertation research ten years later. I also have some impression of his personality and of his dedication to the study of Nepali history from  the 1966 interview he gave to Ruprekha editor Uttam Kunwar, which is still available in English translation on the Record website.  Alongside his dedication, he was blessed with a prodigious memory, particularly important after the loss of his eyesight.  This was perhaps part of the reason he seldom cited his sources, so the reader often simply has to take him on trust.
 
What is the subject to which Acharya brought so much devotion? The British historian Edward Gibbon defined history as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind" and this is a view seemingly supported by the title of  Acharya’s  Ab yasto kahilyai nahos!, translated by his grandson into English as The Blood-stained Throne, and also by the title  of Triratna Manandhar’s study of Ranoddip Singh’s reign, Nepal: the Years of Trouble. Most scholars today understand history more broadly than Gibbon, seeing it as akin to anthropology: the study of the past in all its aspects rather than as focussing solely on the often-violent competition for power. Nevertheless, power politics is an important aspect of society and getting the story right is an important enterprise, even whilst we recognise the need to look at long-term structural changes.  I do not think that Triratnaji wasted his time pouring over the details of the Shamsher coup of 1885 nor that I wasted mine comparing different accounts of Jang Bahadur’s seizure of power in 1846.
 
Historical scholarship involves both careful mining of primary source in the archives and also synthesising the material and looking for significant patterns. The first is  mainly a task undertaken by academics but Chittaranjan Nepali’s work on Bhimsen Thapa and Ran Bahadur Shah, which was mainly based on original documents, was done whilst he was serving as a senior civil servant. It is, of course, in synthesis and analysis that those who are not professional academics most often make an impact, Winston Churchill being one of the best-known internationally.  In Nepal the plan in King Birendra’s time to publish a comprehensive,  authoritative Nepali-language national history, with chapters commissioned from leading academics, never came to fruition and would in any case have been more controversial than authoritative. The standard account of  Nepal’s political history since Prithvi Narayan Shah was not produced within a university but by a politician and activist, Rishikesh Shah’s, whose Modern Nepal does incorporate some archival material but is mostly based on secondary sources. Similar in several respects are  the two recent volumes by Sagar Shumshere Rana, Singha Durbar and Kingdom Lost. The work of both these authors is greatly strengthened by the authors’ own family background  and personal memories of events at the end of the Rana period.
 
Detailed work in the Nepali archives and the mining of the Nepali press is obviously easier for those brought up in this country and that is one reason for the contrast pointed out some years ago by Pratyoush Onta between the history and anthropology of Nepal: the bulk of the output in the former discipline has been authored by Nepalis, in anthropology most of the standard works are by foreign scholars.  Foreign historians are dependent on our own slow reading of carefully selected Nepali sources, my own usual method, or on commissioned translations, the most famous example of the latter being the work under the US Defence Dept-funded Himalayan Border Countries Project directed by Leo Rose.
 
The foreigners’ usual handicap is lessened because so much relevant material is available in English. For the colonial period, there are the  extensive archives in London and in India. These records are subject to the limitations of British bias or misunderstanding but they do present the kind of analysis rarer in the Nepali documents which usually record the final  decision rather than the discussion and conflicts which led up to it. In the post-colonial era, an increasing amount has been published by Nepalis themselves in English, not just for the convenience of foreign embassies or aid organisations but as a language in which they themselves feel completely at home. Sagar Shamsher Rana in the introduction to Kingdom Lost gave as one of his aims  conveying the contents of important Nepal-language accounts to the many young Nepalis who are more comfortable reading English. For any historian of Nepal, some use of Nepali-language sources does indeed remain essential, whether accessed directly or via translations, and  Nepali texts were central to my own first book, Jang Bahadur in Europe, and to some of my other work, However, both in my doctoral dissertation on Jang’s rise to power and even more so in my History of Nepal, a work of synthesis rather than front-line research, I relied principally on English language sources.  The same is true of the early studies of Nepal-India relations by authors like Ramakant and Kanchanmoy Mojumdar, of Kumar L. Pradhan’s Brian Hodgson at the Kathmandu Residency and Thapa Politics and of Bernardo Michael’s State Making and Territory in South Asia, a detailed study of the boundary disputes that led to the 1814-16 war and of clashing concepts of what a boundary means,.
 
The linguistic disadvantages that most foreigners labour under are to some extent counter-balanced by two advantages. The first is, I must confess, a little unfair. Those of us who were educated in economically developed countries are better connected to the centre of the global academic industry so when Cambridge University Press in the UK wanted to commission a short history of Nepal I was in a strong position as the only British researcher on the country who was primarily a historian rather than an anthropologist or linguist. This advantage is lessening as more Nepalis become established within Western academia but remains real at the moment.
 
A second small advantage is perhaps that as foreigners, we may can contribute an additional perspective to the study of Nepali history, in particular through international comparisons. One of the themes  I have pursued in recent years has been the parallels between the emergence of national identity in Nepal since the 18th century and at  earlier date in the British Isles. When I first presented the idea in an academic forum, one UK-based Nepali researcher thought it was a valiant attempt to compare the incomparable, but I continue to feel the approach is a valid one. Despite the many differences between countries and period, the underlying challenge of producing harmony amidst diversity is common for all of us.
 
I offer one final comment not on the language of sources but on the language of publication. If you are seeking to reach an international audience – and even reach some of the English-orientated  in Nepal itself – or to establish an international reputation, then writing in English makes sense. It would, however, be worrying if people began to feel that serious work can only be published in English. Both Contributions to Nepalese Studies and Studies in Nepali History and Society rightly continue to carry articles in both languages. As in many other spheres, a balance has to be found between the global and the national
 
सबैलाई धेरै धन्यवाद
 
Suryabikram Gyewali, Itihas Shiromani Baburam Acharyako Smritima,
https://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/ancientnepal/pdf/ancient_nepal_21_07.pdf (accessed 15/
 
Uttam Kunwar interview with Baburam Acharya.
https://www.recordnepal.com/reason-incident-and-consequence;-these-are-the-primary-bases-of-history-baburam-acharya