One thinks of him as a dictator, a tyrant, a killer, a naïve and power-hungry potentate devoid of reason and vision.
He is conceived of as a mastermind and chief actor of the bloody Kot Massacre of 1846.[break]
This projection, hailed as a truth of Nepali history, has eclipsed others aspects of his life and deeds for which Nepali people should remember him.
Quite a good deal of the country’s legal, educational, and administrative systems bear his legacy.
The nation relies, for its legal system, on the foundation of Muluki Ain (1854) that he laid down.
His and his descendants’ private palaces serve as the modern-day Nepali regimes to house their administrative offices.
Nepal’s education system has its genesis in his time. And for keen onlookers, his and his descendents’ portraits reverentially hang on the walls and corners of most of the star hotels and resorts of the country.
His statue, with energetic ferocity in his countenance, stands at the corner of the Bhadrakali military parade grounds where he seems to be about to gallop off to Singha Durbar.
Considering these remnants, I sometimes fall to the illusion that he is still a ruler of this country.
But he has been dead since February 25, 1877 (Falgun13, 1933 BS). On the occasion of his 135th death anniversary, I attempt to unearth some less applauded facets of his life.
Jung Bahadur Rana arrests my imagination for more reasons than one.
This chief protagonist of nineteenth century Nepali history is not just a tyrant.
He is a metaphor of power, bravery, courage, valor, nationalism and oriental mysticism whose life, deeds, and antics sound like fairytales to modern readers.
When he went on a visit to colonial Britain, he first globalized this tiny nation. He amazed and awed westerners with his oriental image.
To subscribe to John Whelpton’s Janga Bahadur in Europe, he struck every European’s fancy with his “strange and gorgeous sight,” generated curiosity in his onlookers who started doubting as to “Arabian Nights being a work of fiction.
” “What if,” the Britishers wondered about him and his party “they have tent packed up in turban big enough to cover a regiment! What if they have arrived here flying through the air on a magic carpet?
” The Britishers considered him to be an “incarnation from the Arabian Nights... attended by the fiery Pari Banou... journeying with passports covered with hieroglyphics and stars.
” The Englishmen and their memsahibs saw in him “aspirations of a great emperor” and found him “not subservient like an Indian.”
Numerous incredible facts envelop Jung Bahadur’s biography. I am thinking of Padma Jung Bahadur Rana’s Life of Maharaj Sir Jung Bahadur (1980) which records such facts, some of them really astonishing.
When he was eight, he clambered upon the horse which galloped off before he could hold the bridle. The horse took flight but he was left uninjured. About the same age, he caught the head of the serpent in his father’s garden in Thapathali.
His father screamed in terror at this sight but the serpent made its way without harming him.
At ten, he jumped into the river Bagmati, then in flood, and not being able to swim was carried away by the current long way off before he was rescued.
While in Chitwan, a king cobra is said to have been standing half erect and spreading its hood over his head as a protective umbrella when he was lying asleep on a village ground adjoining the forest.
He fought with a wild buffalo at the royal palace of Basantpur and tamed a leopard.
In 1841, he leaped on horseback into the Trishuli River. Other stories concern his seizure of a wild elephant single-handedly, his leap off from the Dharahara, and his jump into a well, and so on.
Not all of such anecdotes are concocted myths. John Whelpton believes that there is a “core of truths to the anecdotes” and historian Rishikesh Shaha has confirmed some of them. Diamond Shumsher Rana in his novels Seto Bagh and Grihaprabesh makes recurrent references to these “anecdotes” as real happenings.
Life was hardly easy for Jung Bahadur. Since his childhood to adolescence and to old age, he underwent several life and death situations and lived a life fraught with ambushes, risks and danger.
After Premier Bhimsen Thapa’s fall in 1837, Jung’s property had been expropriated by the state and he was left in Kathmandu with virtually nothing of his own.
He took to gambling in this frustrating period of time.
And then when he was in utter debt, he left Kathmandu to make some fortune in the Terai and tried his luck in Varanasi.
Failed, he lived with Tharus in Chitwan. He comes past a lot of such hardships before he reappears in the Nepali court.
Jung Bahadur is a metonymy of Nepali nationalism. He was, arguably, more of a nationalist than any of his successors from Rana Udip to Madhav Kumar Nepal.
A fascinating account of Jung Bahadur’s commitment to nationalism was carried out by Surendra Paudel in Nagarik daily two years ago. Paudel’s argument in the essay is that history has portrayed Jung Bahadur as a devotee of Britain.
He is projected as an ally of imperialism and expansionism but he was a true nationalist. Actually, “he was never a devotee of Britishers as has been portrayed by history.
His history should be rewritten.” (Nagarik, May 2, 2009) Indeed, he had “Junge” pillars built along the major borders which are being displaced now. And he retained land ceded to British by the earlier regime.
In Nepali history, only three prime ministers, as dictators or statesmen, have been able to rule for three decades: Bhimsen Thapa, Jung Bahadur Rana and Chandra Shumsher.
The rest of Nepali history is one of instability, formation and fall of governments, intrigues, and foreign dominance in internal affairs.
For example, in twenty one years of democratic exercise since 1990, Nepal has had about eighteen governments.
Hardly any government has lasted more than three years. (We have hardly had Jhalanath Khanal as new prime minister and talks of toppling him down have already begun).
And in the two decades of democratic era, we had more border encroachments than ever, our nationalism became just rhetoric, and our foreign policies went weaker.
It is in awareness of these realities that I consider Jung Bahadur Rana worth commemorating today.
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