This kind of evocation of brave history, which a Nepali historian Pratyoush Onta calls “nationalization of the past” to create “sensibility of shared history,” has come under vigorous attack from various quarters now. The discourse from the past has been put under serious scrutiny and is being critically revisited and rewritten by the scholars. This could be a good subject of a dissertation for the Master’s and MPhil students. But here, I would like to focus on the status of history in the Nepali education system and in popular memory. It is a republican truth that history is being ignored. For example, today’s SLC and +2 graduates do not know most of Nepal’s history. They can allude to Prithvi Narayan’s Unification campaign, Jung Bahadur and Kot Massacre but cannot detail them. Two factors account for this phenomenon; one, today’s students do not care what happened in the past, and two, Nepal’s present education policy allows students to do without studying history from schools to the university.
History has not always been unkind to history though. History was given due space in the Rana-era education. In Durbar School, it was a compulsory subject. With the rise of the Panchayat regime, history got further rooted into Nepali education. The New Education System Plan, known as the nationalistic education policy, recommended teaching history compulsorily in school level. History, then, was conceived and made use of as a tool to instilling nationalism in people. By having the subjects reminisce the bravery of Nepali soldiers during the Anglo-Nepal War (1814-1816), the regime was leading its people toward nostalgia and glory of its past and thus promoting Nepali nationalism.
Today’s students do not care what happened in the past, and Nepal’s present education policy allows students to do without studying history.
History began to suffer a serious setback in 2038 BS (1981) when Nepal’s school curriculum was revised. Henceforth, history was relegated to optional subject in the secondary level. In the lower secondary level, contents of history were subsumed in Samajaik Sikshya (Social Education). Government-issued textbooks urged the school children to feel a heated one-nation-under-a-Shah King pride. We were taught that because of Prithvi Narayan’s unification drive we were in the possession of our unique identities as Nepalis. Political change of 1990, and education policy that followed, continued the pattern of 1981 with regard to history curriculum. As a result, history began to disappear into the mists. School students of today do not read history because it is an optional subject in the curriculum of high school. And department of history at Tribhuvan University receives virtually no enrollment. This, clearly, is the sign of intellectual impoverishment.Ideally, everyone should know how his state developed, who ruled it, how and for how long. To know why things are as they are today one should know how they were in the past. History is key to understating growth of nationalism. Also it is guide to assess the rights and wrongs of the past. Nationalistic emotions can be implanted in people’s mind through teaching and learning history. Panchayat education had shrewdly capitalized on this fact.
Education system, history and nationalism form a triumvirate. Education policy of a state relies on and sometimes manipulates historical facts to imbibe (false) nationalism in its people. And nationalism thus implanted does not always serve right. Nepali history, for most part, has impressed on the people that we have always been betrayed and cheated by the southern neighbor since the 1816 Sugauli Treaty. I do not mean to deny the veracity of this public knowledge altogether but it has also contributed to the development of anti-Indian nationalism in Nepal. The incident of December 2000, in which Kathmandu saw the death of four persons including two school-going children over the issue of an Indian star’s, Hrithik Roshan’s, supposedly anti-Nepali remark in an interview with a television channel is a painful memory of expression of sentimental nationalism. The anti-Indian feeling which recurrently emerges in Nepali nationalistic discourse is also a part of the same sentimentality.
But the cure of such violent nationalism also lies in history. Teaching and learning of history can help to dismantle all the nationalistic clichés and stereotypes. It teaches that states and nations are contingent products of history. It teaches us to be proud of what we have achieved in our life with our efforts and wit. It is the knowledge of history that has enabled scholars to critic Panchayat nationalism. It is the curiosity of history that has propelled me to write this piece. But sadly it is receding, it is becoming history from the national curriculum, it is being blighted off from the popular memory of the new generation. It is this loss that, I think, we should lament over.
mbpoudyal@yahoo.com