The Kingdom of Nepal: An Analysis of Hindu Culture

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This remarkable book, based on research carried out in Nepal between 1972 and 1979, when Nepal was still a Hindu kingdom ruled by a divine monarch, covers everything from its unique political system to the intricacies of the caste system, the land-tenurial system, all forms of social inequality and both Hindu rituals and metaphysical ideas. It is a truly monumental work in every sense of the term, though most especially for the originality of the author's interpretive ideas. Unlike most of her predecessors in the field of South Asian studies, who predominantly employed western social science ideas, Vivienne accorded priority to Hindu theory and metaphysics. This enabled her to mount convincing criticisms not only of Louis Dumont's highly influential structural understanding of both the caste hierarchy and Hindu kingship in India, but also the contributions made by the numerous exponents of both American cultural and Marxist anthropology.

Vivienne Kondos obtained her doctorate at the University of Sydney in 1981 where she taught in the Department of Anthropology until she retired in 2001. She published numerous papers on Nepalese culture, society and politics based on extensive fieldwork between 1972 and 1990 with the Parbate people in Kathmandu valley. She published two important books with Mandala Book Point, the first, On the Ethos of Hindu Women: Issues, Taboos and forms of Expression in 2004 and the second, Kali, in 2013. She also edited two Special Issues of The Anthropological Journal of Australia (TAJA), the first, on The Politics of Ritual in 1992 and a second, on Mabo and Australia, co-edited with G. Cowlishaw in 1995. Vivienne sadly died after a long illness on 24 March, 2016.

Because the circumstances leading to the publication of this book are somewhat unusual I will here briefly outline both what they were and their for the appreciation of the very long time span between its original formulation in 1981 as a PhD thesis and its eventual publication as a book in 2019. Indeed, the time span is even greater because the fieldwork on which this book was based was carried out between 1972 and 1979.

Despite its daunting length her three prestigious examiners were all highly eulogistic and strongly recommended publication. John Hitchcock, the then doyen of American anthropologists who had done research in Nepal, wrote that her thesis "... is most impressive. I am confident that its ideas will be welcomed as a fresh and brilliant contribution to the field of South Asian Studies." Roger Keesing, the then Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University, praised the thesis as "... an impressive piece of sustained scholarship that contributes importantly to questions of social theory, to the understanding of Hindu culture, and to the empirical understanding of Nepalese history, social structure and polity". The third examiner, Sir Ernest Gellner, then Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics wrote, "... the enterprise is of importance for the light that it throws on the of religion to politics in general, in Asian rural societies in particular and more specifically still, in what is after all the only state now existing in which Hinduism is an established religion".

Not surprisingly, despite such glowing comments from her exalted examiners, academic presses were not then prepared to publish such a vast and learned tome. Though Vivienne made a few attempts to reduce its length on each occasion she abandoned the task because she felt, I think quite rightly, that to remove any part of it would destroy the flow of her sustained argument. Instead, she preferred to devote her intellectual energies to new creative tasks. The result is that when Vivienne died in 2016 after a long illness her unpublished PhD thesis remained exactly as she wrote it 1981.

When Vivienne Kondos enrolled in 1971 as a PhD student in social anthropology at Sydney University with a desire to carry out research in Nepal I was, to my delight, appointed as her supervisor. I was not, however, quite so delighted when she firmly announced that her research topic was to be titled The Kingdom of Nepal: An Analysis of Hindu Culture. Initially. this seemed to me an excessively ambitious topic for a novice in both anthropology and in all things Nepalese to attempt. Indeed, I found it hard to grasp how any single researcher could possibly master such a wide range of data, no matter how extensive their prior research experience in Nepal might have been, and Vivienne's was then precisely nil. But I soon calmed down when I recollected just how impressed I had been by the thesis which she had recently submitted for her fourth-year honours examination, once again seemingly far too ambitious, but in fact quite brilliantly executed after a mere few months of library research and writing. This marked for me the beginning of a forty-five year engagement with every phase of Vivienne's continuing research in Nepal, including long periods during her PhD candidature when both of us were carrying out fieldwork in Kathmandu at the same time. On a number of occasions we would both wind up attending the same ritual and I still treasure the detailed fieldwork notes that she most generously gave to me after attending a Newar domestic ritual in 1974. It resulted in what I regard as one of my better publications.

When Vivienne began her research in Kathmandu in August 1972 it was still firmly established anthropological practice to not only study culture in a specifically social context, most typically by locating the research in a supposedly well-defined community, such as a village, clan or perhaps tribe, but also to seek to provide what might be termed social or sociological understandings of the cultural stuff whether it be rites, myths, stories, beliefs, values, art works or whatever. Without doubt such a research methodology bore bounteous fruit, but by the 1970s a kind of ennui was developing through the lack of any significantly new insights emerging. Furthermore, as more and more research was being carried out in large scale and socially very complex settings, such as nation states, the local paradigm employed began to wear distinctly thin. But to abandon the notion of a circumscribed sociality as both a fieldwork locus and an. explanatory resource was for many of us a daunting thought. However, that is exactly what Vivienne did when she arrived in Kathmandu. She lived in the centre of a substantial city and embarked on a research methodology which we both rather whimsically referred to as "taxi anthropology". That is to say, she travelled extensively, more often than not in taxis, not only in Kathmandu but also in the neighbouring city of Patan and elsewhere in the valley, both to attend rites and other events that interested her and to seek out informants, some learned scholars, others participants, to impart their understanding of whatever it was that she was currently focusing on. In other words, right from the beginning she saw as her primary interest the Hindu cultural stuff, at times made manifest in some local action, such as a ritual or a political protest, but above all embodied in the vast world of Hindu knowledge found in part in written texts but also in the minds of Nepalese Hindu citizens, wherever they were, whatever they were doing.. There was indeed, nothing that Vivienne more enjoyed about fieldwork in Nepal than her numerous lengthy sessions with the local scholars. She was determined that whatever kind of anthropological understanding she might eventually arrive at it must make sense not only to the actors or participants but also to the local pandits. It was precisely this achievement that enabled her to mount convincing critiques of those western scholars who resorted to western theories to explain things Hindu, most notably Dumont's reliance on continental structuralism and numerous others who sought inspiration either in the University of Chicago's cult of the cultural or in Marx's more material formulations.

When it was time for Vivienne to cease fieldwork and instead begin the even more difficult task of writing a thesis, it was the same story. Instead of pursuing the knowledge of pandits she was now equally determined to incorporate in her understanding of her research material everything that western scholars who had concerned themselves with Hindu culture and society had ever written. Inevitably the years passed and the thesis grew alarmingly until finally she submitted her massive tome of 541 pages in August 1981. It literally covered everything from the unique political system of the world's then only surviving divine monarchy to the intricacies of the caste system, the land-tenurial system, to gender relations and most especially Hindu metaphysics and ritual.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages