Tone Bleie

Professor UiT, Arctic University. Norway

A bold invitation: the sanctity of culture and scope of rational negotiation        

In an op-ed titled “Cultural Thrills of Progress” in The Rising Nepal 13.08 the political science scholar and policy analyst Dev Raj Dahal argues public education should promote an approach to “culture” which promotes nation-building and a sense of “Nepaliness.” Dahal’s vision is laudable, but how realizable?  Realization would depend on agreeing on national curricula development based on nonsectarian, non-fiction and fiction, production of supporting pedagogy and high-quality learning materials for teachers and students of formal and nonformal education.

  The public institutions responsible for national curricula plans, textbook production and distribution and teachers training constitute critical nodes. Although Dahal’s foremost concern is public education, one must ensure compatibility with private schools to prevent a cacophony of sectarian and nonsectarian values and narratives of Nepal’s history and current layered culture.

What is called for is social integration that reduces current polarizing social and cultural contradictions, promotes tolerance and unity, unleash innovation, and solidify positive peace. 

 Noted for combining abstract normative arguments about international and national affairs with candid characterization of Nepalese politics and policy advice, the op-ed’s author also poses conceptual challenges and solutions. There is a call for culture-driven innovation in education that fuels “progress” – originally a Latin term 19th-century enlightenment thinkers appropriated to define their notion of social evolution.  Dahal’s bold invitation seeks to debate a Middleway which acknowledges Nepal’s syncretic cults and stimulates multiple complementary loyalties.       

The issues at hand are challenging at the very least.  Basic tenets of religious culture are taken for granted in Nepal’s predominantly devotional society. However, incremental change does take place, often without much public afterthought.  Merely a few generations ago the repute of a married woman who dined in a public café would be questioned.  Subtle cultural change aside, several moral taboos and social customs remain overwhelmingly adhered to.

Powerful ancient temple institutions guard zealously against post-2007 attempts of state control rather than patronage.  Maoist leaders’ revolutionary zeal to transform Nepal’s institutions and social fabric has dampened noticeably.  Noting prominent cadres receiving tika on private and official visits and brilliant garlands one wonders: do they display neo-traditionalism due to tactical self-reserving reasons or genuine belief?  Other elected politicians and civil society actors operate as entrepreneurs that propagate agendas which draw on cultural politics of difference and human rights.  Others again seek to rehabilitate the Hindu monarchy.  

Rehabilitating or redefining values? 

Dahal knowingly puts his hand in a wasps’ hive.  The scope for rational thinking ought to be broadened. “Cultural Thrills of Culture” got published last weekend, coincidentally right after global news agencies reported the attack on Salman Rushdie in the State of New York.  It would be foolish not to see this dreadful news as disconnected from a debate about scope for rational debate on culture in Nepal.  The attack on Rushdie as a global free speech icon is not an isolated episode.  Its sinister background is rising revenge-based intolerance.  The attempt to silence Rushdie’s razor sharp, now bloodied pen, compares with recent brutal attacks and murders on several Indian and Bangladeshi authors and bloggers.  Most were articulate rationalists.  Some atheists, others nonorthodox, all were vocal critics of religious orthodoxy and right-wing cultural nationalism’s crude majoritarianism.  Public education as a means of culturalist social engineering cannot be divorced from considerations of current crude geopolitics, exclusionary nationalism, tolerance and glorification of hate killings, creeping autocratization and rise of the digital police state in the region and globally.          

The scope for rational debate about cultural innovations in Nepal is somewhat difficult to predict.  State and non-state actors may seek to manipulate the general public’s sense of insecurity and growing distrust in “so-called” democracy.  Idolization of the abolished Hindu state, wiped-up irrational fears of conversions, justified desire for stability and affirmation of own sacrosanct convictions – all may affect civic space negatively.  Beyond the organized Hindu Right, also former avid supporters of the federal republic are currently favoring a reinstated monarchy of sorts.  Some revisit the good and the bad of the Panchayat era of partyless guided democracy, a forerunner to the Asian values legacy, spearheaded in the 1990s by Mahathir Mohamad (Prime Minister of Malaysia, 1981–2003, 2018–present) and by Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, 1959–1990.          

An interesting mention of “Cultural Thrills…” is liberal critique of authoritarian streaks of Confucianism, the Asian values’ political ideology of the 1990s and Nepal’s own guided democracy in the 1961-1990 period. The author hints that some of these elements may fit into his educational vision of Nepal’s Middleway.         

At this point of brainstorming in an op-ed, it makes little sense to raise lofty ideological objections.  Instead, I begin debating which ideas of Nepal are realizable from the repository of currently competing ideas of the past and the future and their normative foundations.  Only a modest and rough attempt is possible here.  Let me try to characterize with broad pen certain normative cultural features of the state and Nepalese society.  I like to ask: are these traits of a transitory regime best analyzed as superstructure rather than structure? Or alternatively, is the “ancient” regime merely wings clipped – giving us analysts a deceptive veneer of expanding liberal secular modernity? These are troubling questions.      

I conclude by drawing up a list of values as an input to debating the educational Middleway vision in Dahal’s op-ed.        

Secular superstructure – on state bearing rites and popular religious culture

The 2015 Constitution with its guarantees as normative and legal structure contains Article 4 on secularism as religious and cultural freedom.  It also deals with the protection of religions and customs practiced from “ancient” times.  The formulations in Nepali are intricately ambiguous and a source of debate about which religions “ancient dharma” acknowledge. Suffice here to remark that the article is a nonrevolutionary compromise.  It expresses what I like to call a metaphysical uncertainty – an incoherent religious and social order that is felt as threatening.  Now, uncertainty about the fundamentals of our existence and values is a precondition for a scope of freedom for renewals and reformulations about the world at large and Nepal’s individual and collective societal order.  Conscious ontological and normative renewals may incorporate elements of indigenous philosophy and syncretistic folk cults, giving rise to multiple compatible senses of belonging, duties, and entitlements. Article 26 is more radical in its definition of the right of religion and practicing faith.  It does not repeat article 4 on collective and ancient religion but recognizes individual choice and the equality of all religions. That said, the ban on conversion remains in Mulukhi Ain of 2018. 

Now, the former royal state rituals, such as Kumari Jatra remain by and large performed as before, but a prime minister or president takes the disposed monarch’s seat and receives the Kumari’s blessings. First time this was done by Girija Prasad Koirala as PM and Head of State in 2007.

 What does this somewhat secularized ritual broadcast in a largely devotional society?  Rationally speaking, if the secularized ritual in terms of official practices produces auspicious effects as officiated by the Hindu monarch before the post-2007 substitution, the ritual ought to delegitimize the Hindu king’s efficacy as intermediary vessel.  But this will not happen any time soon without articulate secular messages.  In the minds of a largely religious public the royal meta-context endures.  The rituals rather invoke the nostalgia of a lost ancient order.  The appearance of the deposed King Gyanendra at a range of state appropriated ceremonials officially as a private devotee, instills a sense of loss and metaphysical insecurity in a reverent public.

There is much which cannot be debated in this brief article. Nepal’s ranked societal order pivots around an ingrained model of reverent worship and submission to powerful deities, produces a subtle cultural logic influencing interactions between elected politicians and voters.  No wonder politicians by choice or self-reserving instincts appear as “royals” that dispense patronage against loyalty.  In conclusion, the ambiguities in articles 4 and 26 of the 2015 Constitution, the noted modest secular accommodation of state rituals, apart from the Guthi Samsthan limited (partly failed) interventions into powerful religions institutions dating back to the ancient Malla-realm (1201 to 1779 CE) and the early Gorkhali state, suggest secularism should be understood as mainly superstructure.  Recent accommodative “revisionist” reforms have supplanted revolutionary republican zeal.

  A Middleway in public education: some basic proposals

Updating national obligatory curricula in social science and humanist subjects, risks becoming engulfed in controversy around the very idea of Nepal.  Low number of students in history and culture departments compared with anthropology and sociology in Tribhuvan University is an ominous symptom.  Classical chronological history of royals’ genealogies, courtiers, commanders, and prime ministers do attract a certain readership, but for the educational purpose we debate here, this historiography is completely inadequate.  Attempts of stimulating Nepaliness by cherry-picking of glorifying nationalist narratives of the early Gorkhali state and subsequent historical epochs of the Shahs and Ranas would fail.  Such a historiography would be comparable to China’s past Sinocentric civilization order that distinguished between insiders (civilized), outsiders as beastly and the intermediary barbarians, the latter to be civilized.  

The Middleway Dahal calls for could require an intercultural comparative historiography as a medium of identity formation, engaging young readers by understandable multilayered narratives of the rise of a state-centric hierarchy, chiefly and regional orders that includes the rise of syncretic temple institutions to mention few of themes.  Young readers should not merely understand the norms behind ranked orders of rulers and subjects and histories of resistance and compliance from below but be capacitated to think differently normatively speaking.  They should thrive in a respectful school environment that helps them overcome multiple exclusions through an inclusive and empowering historical self-understanding.  Teaching materials at primary, secondary and post-secondary levels must contain coherent compelling narratives informed by comparative intercultural historiography.  Tertiary-level curricula may introduce students to the country’s currently contested history, explaining different classical and contemporary theoretical stances and their implications for productions of specific historical narratives.                 

 At a fundamental level this is envisaged as a process of rejuvenating Nepaliness that does not aim to reclaim a Hindu-centric normative ranked civilizational order but an amalgamation of Buddhism and several others.    

An accommodative process ought to refrain from: 

• putting doctrines over reason, 
• certainty over wonder, 
• deliver commands and patronage, 
• denigrate deliberative civic work, 
• denigrate voices of youths and children 
• rank orthodox “high” religion over syncretistic practices, 
• rank religiosity over spirituality, 
• legitimate patriarchy including taboos of ritual im/purity
• legitimate caste hierarchy including notions of im/purity
• arrogance and a politics of contempt and hatred, 
• categorically elevate Western philosophy above indigenous philosophy and wisdom, 
• rank formal public education over non-formal including civic education
• allow religious schools to promote intolerance and hatred                                                                                                  

About the author: Tone Bleie is currently Professor of Public Policy and Cultural Understanding at UiT, Norway’s Arctic University.  Bleie worked as development executive, researcher, consultant in and on Nepal, the Greater Himalayas, and the Tibetan Plateau for over three decades.

  Her earliest engagement in Nepal was as Deputy Regional Rep. and Program Director of Norwegian Redd Barna (1993-1995).  Bleie can be reached at: tone.bleie@uit.no