Remembering Nepal’s 5 best minds

Nepal was hermetically sealed for centuries before it finally opened to the outside world only 80 years ago. Prior to that, starting in the 1830s, only a handful of British Residents and a scientists had ever visited the country. 

Among those select few was J D Hooker who travelled through the Kanchenjunga region in 1849. A century later, Nepal’s doors were finally opened and saw a flood of mountaineers, academics and researchers.

Foreign academics, from both the physical and social sciences, were anxious to make their mark in the poorly studied, but unusually rich and diverse, cultural and environmental geographies of Nepal.

Many of Nepal’s own early scientists and conservationists in the 1950s began their careers as the young assistants of foreign researchers. Many went on to become internationally noted academics, field practitioners, and heads of government agencies. 

Sadly, this generation of Nepal’s scholars has now largely passed on, and many of their contributions to scientific research and conservation successes are in danger of being forgotten by present and future generations.

Here is a (by no means exhaustive) selection of five pioneer scholars from Nepal who contributed unusually meaningful research some 60 years ago that advanced Nepal’s development.

Today there are few scholars, conservationists, government officials, or writers in Nepal who were not influenced one way or the other by these five individuals. 

Likewise, scores of senior western scholars and practitioners continue to tell stories of their days in the field with Dor Bahadur Bista, Tirtha Bahadur Shrestha, Kazi Nepali, Upendra Man Malla, or Harka Gurung from Mustang, Dolpo, Kanchenjunga, to Chitwan. 

Their legacies are alive through contributions to Himalayan botany, social science, ornithology, and geography.

DOR BAHADUR BISTA (1926-1995)

Dor Bahadur Bista was a young headmaster of a girl’s high school when he was recruited in 1955 by the Austrian anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf to work as a research assistant in Khumbu for his study of the Sherpa people. Fürer-Haimendorf discouraged him from pursuing higher degrees, Bista went on to become one of Nepal’s best-known and influential anthropologists. His book People of Nepal (1967) was the first comprehensive survey of Nepal’s remarkably diverse ethnicities. In 1991, he published the controversial Fatalism and Development in Nepal which, in addition to fame, was to also earn him enemies from the Royal Palace to his own family and friends because of its strong criticism of the caste system.

Controversy seems to have been in his blood: Bista once told fellow anthropologist James F Fisher that he had written Fatalism to “shake things up”. He served three years as Nepal’s Consul General in Lhasa (1972-1975), was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Columbia University (1977), Chair of the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS) (1978), and was one of the founders and Chairs of Tribhuvan University’s newly-formed Department of Anthropology (1979). 

Always one to lead by example, in 1991 he established the Karnali Institute in Jumla with the goal of creating a caste-free, model village. This also led to criticism and even slander from powerful, high caste figures in Karnali. Bista vanished mysteriously in 1995, and his life and disappearance became the subject of Kesang Tsetsen’s 2015 documentary ‘Castaway Man’.

TIRTHA BAHADUR SHRESTHA (1937)

During a career spanning more than six decades, Tirtha Bahadur Shrestha traveled and worked extensively throughout Nepal with noted international botanists such as J D A Stainton (western Nepal, 1965-1966), L H J Williams of the British Museum (Arun and Tamor valleys Nepal,1969), J F Dobremez in Jumla and Saipal (1975), from Langtang to Gauri Shankar with Hirro Kanai, M L Banerjee, and Daniel Nicolson of the Smithsonian Institution (1970s). He also collaborated with The Mountain Institute in what was to become the Makalu-Barun National Park and Buffer Zone in 1992.

Shrestha received intensive field-based training in Himalayan botany from the British Museum of Natural History, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and Edinburgh, and with some of the best of the world’s botanists. 

Tirtha B Shrestha received a doctorate in botany from the University of Grenoble, France in 1977. Between 1961 and 1991, he worked for HMG’s Department of Plant Resources, then known as the Department of Medicinal Plants. His collections are now housed in the Kathmandu Herbarium at Godavari, the British Museum of Natural History, the University of Tokyo, University of Grenoble, and the National Herbarium at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. 

Among Shrestha’s many notable awards are the National Award on Botany (2011), World Wildlife Fund Nepal Abraham Conservation Award (2005), Balipara Foundation Lifetime Service Award (2016), and Jagadamba Sri Award (2006). In fact, he has received national awards and medals from four different heads of state of Nepal: King Mahendra (1969), King Birendra (1975 and 1986) President Ram Baran Yadav (2012), and President Bidya Devi Bhandari (2020).

Since 2000, Shrestha has devoted himself to the advancement of science, biodiversity, and conservation in Nepal through frequent publications in magazines and newspapers like this one.

He lives in Sanepa with his wife Timila Shrestha, a plant chemist who earned her doctorate from the University of London. 

HARI SHARAN NEPALI ‘KAZI’ (1934-2021)

Perhaps one of the most fondly remembered of Nepali’s early scientists was the self-trained ornithologist ‘Kazi’ Nepali. He spent his early years in the 1940s studying the birds of Shivapuri, Pulchoki, and within Kathmandu when the city still had trees, green space, and fields.

He started collecting and preserving bird specimens in 1952, and even organized a small exhibit for King Mahendra’s Coronation in 1955. Although the British resident to Nepal in 1833, Brian Houghton Hodgson, is reported to have collected nearly 10,000 bird specimens representing 672 different bird species during his time in Nepal, these were all sent back to the UK. 

Kazi had to start from scratch, collecting 750 of Nepal’s 875 bird species that are now housed in the Natural History Museum at Swayambhu. He identified 13 new bird species in Nepal, and helped establish Bird Conservation Nepal (BCN) and the Lumbini Crane Center. He worked with world-renowned ornithologists such as Robert Sr and Robert Jr Fleming, authors of Birds of Nepal,1964 to which Kazi made major contributions.

Bob Fleming Jr. remembers that in the early 1970s Kazi was the only other ornithologist that he and his father trusted to lead the annual Christmas bird count in Kathmandu with three groups at different elevations on the Valley rim.

A total of 186 different species were counted one year. Kazi was project ornithologist during the planning years of the Makalu-Barun National Park in the 1980s and 1990s, spending weeks collecting and identifying birds in the remote region.

Although Kazi never received an advanced degree, his awards and extensive publication record on ornithology were impressive. He had an unflagging interest in all things birds, and shared what he knew generously espercially with the younger generation of Nepali birders.

It is hard to forget the smile on Kazi’s face early in the morning, as he whispered the name of bird after bird calling from a distance.

UPENDRA MAN MALLA (1932-2021) 

One of Nepal’s foremost physical and cultural geographers known for a ‘multi-dimensional personality, Upendra Man Malla was a larger-than-life figure, both in physical appearance as well as in lifetime Having interviewed him in fall of 2019 where he seemed to have known and worked with nearly every notable personality, Nepali and foreign, in the past 70 years. 

Born in Wotu in Kathmandu in 1932, he received his MA in geography from Patna University in 1953 and was appointment to the early Ministry of Planning and Development in 1954, then to the Ministry of Commerce. He was awarded a British Council scholarship for a B Litt from Oxford University in 1957.

On return, he became professor of geography at Trichandra College and Tribhuvan University in 1957. He served in a royal committee that charted the political division of Nepal into 14 administrative zones, and 75 districts, working with Swiss geologist Toni Hagen. the first time that the country had been mapped and administered in such a way.

In 1973 he was appointed the first dean of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Tribhuvan University. Prof Malla was the founder of the Nepal Geographical Society in 1961, serving as chair for nearly three decades. He was also chair of the UN’s Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB) in the 1980s and this could have influenced Malla becoming the first in Nepal to advocate the integration of the social and environmental sciences into development planning.

From 1979-84 Malla served in the National Planning Commission where he looked after the social sectors. He taught at the Central Department of Geography until retirement in 1995, training a range of young Nepali students who went on to work in the academic, governmental, and non-profit sectors.

He heavily influenced the development of geography as an interdisciplinary field of study in Nepal and is fondly remembered for his warmth, personal interest in each of his students, and unparalleled contribution to Nepal’s academic and governmental institutions.

HARKA GURUNG (1939-2006) 

Nepal’s first mountain geographer, Harka Gurung is remembered as a chronicler of Himalayan peaks as well as of early mountaineering 1949-1960, and as a “genius geographer” by others. He travelled extensively across Nepal in the 1960s and 1970s and wrote Vignettes of Nepal (1980) based on his journey. Among his mentors and associates were the famous British climber and explorer, H W Tilman, Swiss German Gunter Dyhrenfurth, and Austrian mountaineer and cartographer Erwin Schneider.

Harka Gurung was born in Lamjung under the shadow of Manaslu (8,163m) and Himalchuli (7,893 m). He did his BS from Patna in 1959, and received a scholarship for postgraduate (1961) and PhD (1965) in geography at the University of Edinburgh. He was the first Nepali to receive a PhD from a European university and lectured widely at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Department of Geography at Tribhuvan University, and at the Population Institute of the East-West Center in Hawaii. 

He served with distinction in the National Planning Commission (1968-1975), as Minister of State for Tourism, Public Works, and Transport (1977-78), and as Director of the Asia and Pacific Development Centre in Malaysia (1993- 1998). 

He once said: “The landscape with Himalchuli on the horizon and the Marsyangdi River in the gorge below determined my choice of geography as a profession… and my political beliefs were shaped by the multicultural setting of the village.” 

Gurung was a prolific writer, publishing 15 books, 7 monographs and 675 articles and reports prior to his untimely death in the Ghunsa helicopter crash in 2006 along with many of Nepal’s most accomplished conservationists, including Chandra Gurung, Mingma Sherpa, Tirtha Man Maskey, and Narayan Poudel. He was a strong advocate of the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for development planning. As an astute politician, he was able to move things through government that would otherwise take months or years to be approved. 

Alton C Byers, PhD, is Faculty Research Scientist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) University of Colorado at Boulder in the United States and a frequent Nepali Times contributor. A longer version of this article appears in the November 2024 issue of ECS-Nepal.