(The following is adapted from Professor Kamal Prakash Malla's article "The Intellectual in Nepalese Society", originally carried by Vasudha magazine in March 1970, and subsequently included in Malla's collection The Road to Nowhere (Sajha Prakashan 1979). The essay is included here, with permission, both for its continuing relevance to the Nepali society, and to remind that the best Nepali writings in English appeared in the journals and magazines of the 1960s and early 1970s. Editors.)
This is an essay on the poverty of intellect in Nepal. Such an enquiry has become somewhat urgent, because ´intellectual´ is one of the most over-worked words in recent Nepali writing. Before putting the vogue word under the microscope, I, however, feel tempted to make a few commonplace observations about the Nepali society of which contemporary intelligentsia are art offspring and in which they were brought up.
For the emergence of intelligentsia as a class nothing is more important than the growth of cities and a pre-existing literate population sharing a culture of accessible language. It is only in the Valley of Kathmandu, with its unbroken historical continuity, where one can see a microcosm of the culture-formula, though already in a fossilised state. It is only the Valley which seems to have a cultural continuity with the present, consistently based on a broader literate population than elsewhere in the kingdom. In the culture of the Valley, more important than either the settlement pattern or the linguistic diversity is the stranglehold of religions and of their priesthood. Under the caste structure the Sanskritised Hindu or Buddhist priesthood constituted a class of intelligentsia in their own right. This class has been in existence around the Nepali courts at least as early as the Licchavis.
Though understandably and consistently tolerant towards the co-religions of Buddhism, Bonpo or Shamanism, the power-elite in Nepal has been zealously Hinduist. No wonder that in Nepal only those sections of the population who have assimilated the Sanskrit language (eg. the Nepali-speaking Brahmins, the Newari-speaking Brahmins, the Joshis, Maithili or Bhojpuri-speaking Brahmins—so powerful as court-ideologues in the Malla courts) constituted the traditional intelligentsia.