By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS
Kathmandu : As Nepal's royal family faces the sharpest public criticism ever with the government announcing an election to decide its fate and the prime minister asking the king and crown prince to abdicate, a former royal tutor says the dynasty's positive contributions will be recognised in future.
In 1967, 27-year-old American social scientist Francis G. Hutchins had just received his doctorate and was teaching at Harvard University when he was asked to tutor an unusual student.
The student, though he arrived in jeans like any other Harvard freshman, was Birendra Vir Vikram Shah Dev, the 22-year-old crown prince of Nepal.
Though neither the tutor nor the student foresaw it, Birendra would go down in history as the "democratising monarch" who gave up the absolute power exercised by his father, and later the victim of a shocking national tragedy in which he and his whole family were killed in a midnight massacre at the royal palace in Kathmandu.
With a sea change having overtaken Nepal since then, the sixth anniversary of the carnage, observed on June 2, went virtually unnoticed. The anniversary came in the wake of fresh anti-monarchy sentiments with Maoist protesters vandalising statues of old monarchs, including Birendra's, once regarded as a benevolent monarch.
At a time when Nepal's new government has pledged to hold an election to put the 238-year institution of monarchy to vote, Hutchins, now 67 and the author of two acclaimed books on India, has come out with a memoir of King Birendra.
In "Democratising Monarch", Hutchins has eulogised the slain king as "the last great Shah ruler and a pivotal figure in the history of Nepal" and his dynasty described as "imaginative, serious-minded and public spirited".
Hutchins visited Nepal in 1970 to attend King Birendra's wedding – along with high-profile guests like Indian president V.V. Giri, King Sisavang Vatthana of Laos and the crown prince of Bhutan – and again five years later, once more as a state guest, to attend Birendra's coronation ceremony.
Until the king's death in 2001, he remained in touch with his former student through mail and "mutual friends".
The news of the massacre, he says, was an even greater personal shock than the Sep 11, 2001 catastrophe in the US.
"I was more or less in mourning for a year, and then decided that writing about Birendra and Nepal would be therapeutic for me as well as possibly helpful for others," Hutchins told IANS.
The author realises that Nepal's Shah dynasty has lost its popularity after King Gyanendra's attempt to seize absolute power through an army-backed coup. However, he feels that in the future, the positive contributions of the dynasty will be recognised, even if the monarchy is abolished.
"France was unified by the French monarchy in the centuries before 1789,"`he says. "Then monarchy became hated and was abolished by the French Revolution. But France remained united as a nation and I think the traditions associated with the monarchy were in large part responsible for this.
"Similarly, Nepal exists as a nation today because Prithvinarayan (the founder of the Shah dynasty) declared himself an Emperor equal to the Manchu Emperor of China and the Mughal Emperor of India and made Nepal powerful enough to resist conquest by China or India."
Hutchins feels too much decentralisation could result in loss of national unity.
"Maybe a way can be found to preserve a ceremonial head of state whose job will be to emphasise and symbolise cultural unity," he says. "The head will have nothing to do with politics and would not have to be hereditary, or kept in the Shah family."
The former tutor accepts that the controversial dynasty had its failing.
"Our first president, George Washington, was a slave-owner," he says, drawing a comparison. "But today Americans can still manage to respect George Washington while condemning the fact that he was a slave-owner.
"Nepal survived imperialism because of the Shah Dynasty and I hope that in future the Nepalese will be proud of this historic accomplishment, even if the monarchy is abolished."
Hutchins says he would never have considered writing about Birendra during his lifetime.
"I thought of our relationship as confidential," he says. "But now Birendra is part of history, and my book is intended as a contribution to developing an accurate assessment of his place in history.
"I don't know how the Nepalese will react to what I have written, but I hope they will be interested."