A Personal Reflection on King Mahendra
Nepal, Nov. 9 – When I was admitted to St Xavier’s School in Jawalakhel, which is now celebrating its 75th anniversary, in January 1972, I must have spent the cold months of that winter looking forward to attending a school with impressive football fields and large buildings. Classes for the year 1972 were scheduled to begin on February 1. However, on the early morning of January 31, King Mahendra passed away in Bharatpur. He had ascended the throne in March 1955. At that time in my life, I knew very little about Mahendra.
I would later read extensively about Mahendra during my school years. I did so not only in the Nepali textbook titled Mahendramala but also in almost all other subjects except science and math. Most of the writings in my textbooks were hagiographic. It was only much later, when I pursued academic training to become a historian, that I had the opportunity to read various works by different writers about the “real” King Mahendra.
Villain versus Hero
After several years of political experimentation, Mahendra promulgated a new constitution on February 12, 1959, establishing a bicameral parliament under a very strong monarchy. The long-awaited national elections were finally held between February and April 1959. The Nepali Congress won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, and its leader, BP Koirala, became the first elected prime minister of Nepal in late May 1959. As the Koirala government implemented progressive reforms, the ambitious monarch within Mahendra did not want to share political power or the spotlight with Koirala.
Instead, Mahendra sought absolute power. In December 1960, he disbanded the parliament and banned political parties. He arrested Koirala and many other political leaders, imprisoning them for many years. Mahendra accused them of using their power for personal and party interests. He also claimed they were responsible for the rise of corruption and an environment where national unity was threatened by anti-national elements. After the coup, Mahendra consolidated power and ensured his absolute control over Nepal. Hence, King Mahendra was seen as a villain who stifled the democratic experiment. This narrative, broadly speaking, is what writers not supporting absolute monarchy present. This version, of course, found no place in the Mahendramalas I read or in the textbooks studied by two generations of Nepali students.
There was, however, another narrative circulating about Mahendra. Two years after seizing absolute control, in December 1962, he officially promulgated a new constitution designed to implement his suitable-to-the-soil Partyless Panchayat System. He launched various development projects aimed at achieving, within 10-20 years, the level of progress attained by other nations in a century. The most famous of these projects was the East-West highway commissioned in 1962. He also rapidly expanded Nepal’s diplomatic connections to many countries during the Cold War. He planned cultural unification projects, including the programming of Radio Nepal and the nationalization of school curricula under the New Education System Plan (NESP) announced in 1971. Mahendra did not live long enough to see the effects of the NESP, which continues to influence much of Nepal’s political and public culture. For these reasons, many writers from the monarchist camp view him as a hero.
Debate as Pedagogy
On January 31, 1972, I did not know both of these perspectives on King Mahendra. As a child, I knew only that the all-powerful king of my country had died unexpectedly, and this had disrupted the plan for my first day of school at St Xavier’s. Almost 54 years after Mahendra’s death, these competing narratives remain active in the Nepali public sphere. If anything, both of these narratives have become even more robust in the post-Panchayat era.
In her excellent introductory book to history as an academic discipline, Thinking about History (2017; Nepal reprint edition 2021), the American historian Sarah Maza suggests that “in order for the past to serve its best purpose, we must not freeze it in place, we must argue about it.” In agreement with her, I believe that argument-focused history is the best way to teach history to both school and college students in Nepal. This kind of pedagogical re-imagining of history is not an original idea globally, but unfortunately, it has not received the attention it deserves in our country.
The centralized bureaucratic mechanism through which our public school and college curricula are determined is partly to blame for this situation. Market forces, which have wrongly rendered disciplines like history as “useless,” are also at fault. However, the largest responsibility lies with Nepali historians for failing to innovate in argument-focused history in the pedagogical aspects of our discipline. We have not invested our intellect and time into this matter, nor created appropriate age-relevant resources for our classrooms.
Apart from the competing narratives discussed above, there are many other examples that can be used in a teaching context. The middle-aged historian in me first thinks of printed books as the most necessary resources for use in our classrooms. For school-age students, such books should feature many images and minimal text. For college students, imaginatively edited thematic or era-specific volumes with articles presenting competing narratives as arguments would be helpful. However, unlike Nepali sociologists and anthropologists, Nepali historians have largely failed to produce such collections.
For digital-native students, other types of pedagogical resources will also be needed. These can include audiobooks, animated stories, visual podcasts, recorded interviews with historians, documentaries, and similar media. No matter what kind of resources are used, classrooms must be led by teachers open to competing narratives, not those who have drunk deeply from the monochromatic well of the NESP. Visual recordings of good and innovative teaching should be uploaded.
Students should develop the habit of exploring all sides of a debate, and college students should engage with relevant primary sources. Creating such teaching resources and fostering a conducive classroom environment for learning will require additional financial investments from the public, private, and non-governmental sectors.
But is anyone listening?
