Introduction of John Whelpton

Introduction of John Whelpton before he delivered the Mahesh C. Regmi lecture (“Revisiting the Yam and the Rocks: Nepal between India and China”) organized by Social Science Baha in Kathmandu on September 11, 2024

When my colleague Deepak Thapa asked me to introduce John Whelpton before his lecture today, as a historian, I took the liberty to “locate” him and his work for people who have never met John, never heard him speak and never read a word written by him. The poster announcing today’s talk distributed by Social Science Baha identifies John as both a historian and a linguist. However, I do not know John’s linguistic work and hence, I will only introduce him as a historian of modern Nepal. John has published several books and dozens of articles on Nepali history. But before I get to them, let me first introduce John the person and his connection to Nepal.

As historians, we know that what happens in our lives and in the lives of folks we study are not pre-determined. As such, it is highly possible that John might have not become a historian of Nepal. After growing up in Nottingham in the East Midlands, UK, John went to study classics at a college in Oxford in 1968. After he got his BA in 1972, he joined the British Volunteer Service Oversees (VSO) and wanted to go to either India or Pakistan. As he told me in the interview published in my 2004 book Nepal Studies in the UK, “those countries did not want British volunteers for ordinary school or college teaching of English” (Onta 2004: 63). So they sent him to Nepal. Hence, in 1972, John began his long association with Nepal as a VSO English teacher.

In the next two years, he taught English first at Thakur Ram Campus in Birgunj and then at Amrit Science College in Kathmandu. During the time he was in Nepal, he does not remember reading much of Nepali history apart from one or two books and a few articles. He returned to the UK and for the next six years, he worked as a civil servant of the UK Ministry of Defence. In that capacity, his job had no link with Nepal. Around the end of 1978, upon the suggestion of his old friend Abhi Subedi, the literary writer and critic, John started translating Jang Bahadurko Belait Yatra which had been published in Nepali many years earlier (Dixit 2014 v.s.). This translated work was eventually published in 1983 as Jang Bahadur in Europe: The First Nepalese Mission to the West by Sahayogi Press. While doing the background research in relation to this translation, he got both tired with his day job and interested in studying the history of Nepal. Hence, he resigned from his job in 1981 and started graduate studies in history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS, University of London. In contrast to what it has become today, SOAS was in pretty good shape regarding research related to Nepal at that time. Although SOAS did not have any historians who had done research related to Nepal, anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf was still active there. Lionel Caplan was teaching in its anthropology department and Michael Hutt was a fellow doctoral student.

John’s PhD research focused on the political history of Nepal between the years 1830 and 1857. The early 1830s were the end years of Bhimsen Thapa’s dominance in Kathmandu’s politics and the mid-1840s and thereafter saw the rise of Jang Bahadur Rana as the national dada. This focus in his doctoral research was directly related to John’s work on Jang Bahadur’s Beliat visit. In addition, I would imagine that he was also following the footsteps of Fr Ludwig F. Stiller who had published his book The Silent Cry: The People of Nepal 1816-1839 in 1976, just five years before John started his PhD studies. He tells me that he had not read this book in 1981 but he had certainly done so by 1983 since it is listed under the references of his Jang Bahadur in Europe book.

During his PhD research, John did his primary archival research in the India Office Archives in London, the National Archives in Kathmandu, and the National Archives of India in New Delhi. He was supervised by the historian of India Dr Kenneth Ballhatchet. John submitted his PhD in late 1986 and was awarded the degree in 1987. That work was eventually published as Kings, Soldiers, and Priests: Nepalese Politics and the Rise of Jang Bahadur Rana, 1830-1857 (Whelpton 1991). This was a very detailed study of Nepali political history. As he told me in that 2004 interview, it is very likely that that is the reason why the likes of Oxford University Press did not want to publish it, confirming that Nepali history then was not a good business idea for their publication list.

Even before he finished his PhD, John obtained a Diploma in the Teaching of English Overseas by taking the relevant training at Manchester University between October 1985 and June 1986. This he did as an “insurance policy” since he had already figured out that getting a regular job as an academic teaching South Asian history was going to be difficult for a modern Nepal specialist. After applying unsuccessfully to academic jobs, John moved to Hong Kong in 1987 and started to work as an English teacher during the day and Nepal researcher in the evenings and nights. In 1990, he published Nepal (in the World Bibliographical Series of Clio Press), a useful annotated reference book for the late pre-internet era. This was a project that he had inherited from Richard Burghart, that brilliant historical anthropologist who died way too soon. In the following year, John’s dissertation was published as mentioned earlier.

After the tragic death of Martin Hoftun in an airplane accident in Nepal in July 1992, Martin’s father the late Odd Hoftun asked John to complete Martin’s research on the history of democracy in Nepal. John agreed to do so in the autumn of 1992, thinking that he would get the writing done by 1993. However, this joint work took several years to get done and was only published in 1999 by Mandala Book Point as People, Politics & Ideology: Democracy and Social Change in Nepal. In the meantime, he co-edited Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom: The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Nepal with David Gellner and Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, both of whom have given this lecture in the past (Gellner, Pfaff-Czarnecka and Whelpton 1997). Subsequently John published A History of Nepal in 2005 from Cambridge University Press. This book contained many factual errors and was also inadequately referenced. John tried to rectify the former by providing a list of corrections to at least one primary bookseller in our city, the legendary and much lamented Shiva Shrestha of Himalaya Book Centre.

As someone based in Hong Kong with a day job that involved teaching English and in the more recent past Latin, John did not get a chance to do intensive archival research for a long time. That changed slightly after he retired from his English teaching job and Mike Hutt got a major grant to do research on the aftermath of the 2015 earthquakes that devastated our country. As a member of what was called the “After the Earth’s Violent Sway” project team, John did archival work both in London and New Delhi and produced two papers, one of which, with the title “Juddha Shamsher and the 1934 Earthquake” was published in the journal Studies in Nepali History and Society in 2021.

In the 1990s and later, when he was not able to do archival research, John shifted his attention to doing work on contemporary history. He has published several articles on the post-1990 elections and other subjects. He does field research for such articles during his annual two to three-week long visits to Kathmandu. While the likes of Krishna Hachhethu have been very useful informants for this kind of work by John, he does stop by and see folks like me who know very little about contemporary politics of our country. I often wonder why Krishna and John have not collaborated to write a very detailed account of post-1990 Nepal.

I could go on but will stop here (since you came to hear John and not me) with one final observation related to the specific theme of his talk today. I don’t know any piece by John in which he has talked about Nepal’s relationships with India and China in a major way. But I assume that the year he spent in Birgunj in the early 1970s allowed him to have a view of India from a Nepali border town. And as a resident of Hong Kong who has been living there before it reverted back to China in 1997, he knows a whole lot about China. Now let us hear from him directly.

References

Dixit, Kamal, ed. 2014 v.s. Jang Bahadurko Belait Yatra. Lalitpur: Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya.

Gellner, David, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka and John Whelpton, eds. 1997. Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom: The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Nepal. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Hoftun, Martin, William Raeper and John Whelpton. 1999. People, Politics & Ideology: Democracy and Social Change in Nepal. Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point.

Onta, Pratyoush. 2004. Nepal Studies in the UK: Conversations with Practitioners. Kathmandu: Martin Chautari.

Stiller, Ludwig F. 1976. The Silent Cry: The People of Nepal 1816–1839. Kathmandu: Sahayogi Press.

Whelpton, John. 1983. Jang Bahadur in Europe: The First Nepalese Mission to the West. Kathamandu: Sahayogi Press.

Whelpton, John, comp. 1990. Nepal (volume 38 in the World Bibliographical Series). Oxford: Clio Press.

Whelpton, John. 1991. Kings, Soldiers, and Priests: Nepalese Politics and the Rise of Jang Bahadur Rana, 1830–1857. New Delhi: Manohar.

Whelpton, John. 2005. A History of Nepal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Whelpton, John. 2021. Juddha Shamsher and the 1934 Earthquake. Studies in Nepali History and Society 26(1): 3–33.