Vol. 12 No. 9 · 10 May 1990
pages 10-12 | 3812 words
Alan Macfarlane writes about the crisis in Nepal
- Fatalism and Development: Nepal’s Struggle for Modernisation by Dor Bahadur Bista
Longman, Madras, ISBN 0 00 000097 3
The current political revolution in Nepal marks a further stage in the rapid integration of that country into the Western capitalist world. From a standing start in 1950, when the Ranas were overthrown and Nepal began to be transformed from a medieval oriental despotism into a modern nation-state, a great deal has been done. Between 1950 and 1980 the cumulative growth in various sectors has been estimated as follows: ‘70 times in power generation, 13 times in irrigation facility, 134 times in school enrolment, 12 times in number of hospital beds’. A literacy rate of 2 per cent in 1951 had been increased to over 40 per cent in the late Eighties. There are now more than a hundred and fifty university campuses. Epidemic disease has been almost eliminated. Infant mortality rates have been halved. Piped water has been brought to most villages. An international airline has been started. Nepal now exports goods worth more than twenty-five million dollars a year. A large tourist industry has been created, with over 300,000 tourists (other than Indians) a year. Kathmandu and other towns have grown remarkably and now have many facilities, including television, computers and many modern goods and services.
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Letters
Vol. 12 No. 15 · 16 August 1990
From David Seddon
I would like to comment on Alan Macfarlane’s recent piece on Nepal (LRB, 10 May). It is remarkable that, in referring to Dor Bahadur Bista’s study of Fatalism and Development in Nepal, Macfarlane so signally fails to consider the significance of the recent dramatic developments in Nepalese politics for Bista’s esis that Nepal’s lack of development is due largely to the pervasive influence of ‘Bahunism’, a cultural configuration combining caste and fatalism. During the last few months, the political pressures which have been clearly building up in Nepal for over a decade have finally burst through the carapace of the monolithic ‘partyless panchayat democracy’ to challenge the existing political order. But the democracy movement in Nepal is not, as Macfarlane appears to imply, simply a ‘miracle’ triggered by events in Eastern Europe or China; nor does the political transformation now taking place simply mark ‘a further stage in the rapid integration of Nepal into the Western capitalist world’. The changes are the outcome of dynamic and identifiable social forces within Nepal that require a more systematic analysis than is provided by Bista’s vision of fatalism as a kind of ‘curse’, or by Macfarlane’s image of the tribulations of a traditional society ‘with little experience of competitive, individualistic capitalism, suddenly thrown into such a capitalist world’.
The problem with essentially conservative theories of ‘stagnation’ is that they cannot account for change when it becomes undeniable – except as ‘miracles’ generated by external events. But the relationship between economics, politics and ideology (cultural configurations), in Nepal as elsewhere, is a dynamic one, and one full of potential for dramatic change.
What is striking about the democracy movement is that those active within it include, notably, members of those ‘high caste’ groups whose fatalistic ‘Bahunism’ Bista sees as so pervasive that it undermines Nepal’s prospects for ‘modernisation’. If ‘fatalism’ and ‘caste’ undeniably constitute important elements of the political ideology of the ruling classes in Nepal, it is now evident that they are unable to prevent other ideologies from gaining ground. But to understand precisely why the language of democracy and change has become increasingly powerful, and how the political transformations now taking place have become possible, it is necessary to consider the economic and social developments that have been taking place in Nepal over the last fifty years, for it is those developments that have created new contradictions and conflicts, and the potential for further change. It is precisely Nepal’s development (with all its problems and crises) that has given birth to those social forces which currently take the form of the democracy movement.
David Seddon
University of East Anglia
