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The changing face of children’s literature in Nepal

From Panchayat-era moralism to donor-driven publishing, and today a rising crop of local initiatives, the shifts in Nepal’s children’s literature reflect the difficult history of the country itself

By Niranjan Kunwar
Two young schoolboys with backpacks stand at a bookstall, flipping through illustrated books, while other children and adults
Children at the Nepal International Book Fair in Kathmandu in 2015. Leadership in shaping children’s literature has frequently come not from the state but from literary civil society leaders, alongside foreign donors and development agencies.
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AT THE 31ST Congress of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), held in Copenhagen in 2008, the scholar Biswambhar Ghimire presented a paper outlining the history of children’s literature in Nepal. His research is dotted with important dates and details  reminding us that the Nepali general public was largely prohibited from attaining even basic literacy until the fall of the autocratic Rana regime and Nepal’s first, abortive experiment with democratic rule in the 1950s. This historical constraint is worth keeping in mind as we turn to the current state of children’s literature in Nepal, which can be understood as part of the broader landscape of elementary education in the country. 

The first book written in the Nepali language exclusively for children was Gorkha Paila by Gangadhar Shastri, published in 1892. Until then, Sanskrit was the primary language that formally appeared in print. Gradually, a handful of generous elite intellectuals and reform-minded rulers wrote books for children; among them was Jaya Prithvi Bahadur Singh, who published a few in 1901. 

While much of the population might have been illiterate, childhood in Nepal – as elsewhere in Southasia and beyond – was in good part shaped by oral traditions of improvised lullabies, folktales and stories. Nepali folk writers, school teachers and even nationally renowned intellectuals – like Laxmi Prasad Devkota and Lekhnath Paudyal – wrote stories for children. Some of these stories, along with translated excerpts from Aesop’s Fables and the ancient Indian fable Panchatantra, were included in school textbooks and taught to successive generations. 

Yet, rather than reflecting Nepal’s linguistic and ethnic diversity in print and visual culture, much of this work reinforced the hegemony of a single tongue and ethnic group: respectively, the Nepali language, and the Khas-Arya people of Nepal’s middle hills. The Panchayat period from 1961 to 1990, which followed the curtailment of democracy in the 1950s and put power in the hands of the Shah monarchy, enforced the primacy of the Nepali language and the Hindu religion. This ideological narrowing fostered a climate of censorship where language activists from marginalised communities were jailed and dissenting voices were systematically discouraged.