A bold and incisive analysis of Nepal’s society, and its attempts to development and respond to change, from someone who is both and insider and an outsider to Nepal. At an early age Dor Bahadur Bista travelled all over Nepal in the company of the leading anthropologist Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf which helped him acquire an insight that enables him to make an objective and frank comment on his country. The bulk of the author’s argument in this book is that Nepal’s strengths have always been in the indigenous qualities of its various ethnic groups. But it has been under the influence of other cultures which have suppressed its own strengths. He believes, that while Nepal should be open to other cultures, they should be scrutinized and their negative elements purged before they are adopted. Nepal’s future hope lies in its ethnic cultures whose simplicity provides a greater flexibility and thus a greater propensity to development and change, than the cumbersome and ossified structure of the urbane upper class, and caste, society of the Kathmandu Valley. It attempts to diagnose Nepal’s ills through the eyes of a sympathetic yet critical insider. It has something of the flavour of other such attempts: De Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime, Weber’s Protestant Ethic, Taine’s Notes England. It is worth considering at some length because of its insights and because Bista, as an insider, can say things which no outsider could say.
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