Alma mater of kings recounts ‘royal’ days

Darjeeling, May 29: One of them has been voted out of kingship, the other has wilfully given it up for democracy.
The kings of the two Himalayan countries, Nepal and Bhutan, may be diametrically opposite in handling their national affairs, but they share a common alma mater: both have walked the corridors of St Joseph’s School (Darjeeling) or North Point during their formative years.
Old North Pointers who are still associated with the institution remember the “good times” that King Gyanendra of Nepal had during his school years. The 60-year-old has from today ceased to be the king of Nepal. Yesterday, political parties in the Himalayan nation had voted at a special assembly to abolish the 239-year-old monarchy and declare the country a republic.
“Every one passes through good and bad phases. I would like to remember only the good times associated with King Gyanendra,” said M. Coutinho, who had taught English and elocution to the king. Many royal family members from Nepal, including Gyanendra, were in North Point for the decade starting 1960.
A family photograph of the king, taken at North Point in 1969, hangs on the school corridor. “Among all of them, King Gyanendra was the most polite and well behaved. He was extremely down to earth as well,” said Coutinho, who has now retired.
North Point remembers Gyanendra as a student who excelled in elocution and was a very good hockey player, making it to the school team. “There were hardly any speakers who could match Gyanendra in those days. He not only won the inter-school elocution competitions with ease but was also the inter-Jesuit elocution contest in the entire Northeast,” said Coutinho.
According to him, even crown prince Paras, who would have been the king had it not been for the people’s uprising, had studied for a brief period at North Point.
Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the fourth king of Bhutan, was also a quiet student. “He was here for only a year. In 1962 when the Indo-Chinese war broke out he was taken out of school for security reasons,” said Fr Kinley Tshering, the rector of the school and a former North Pointer.
Wangchuk’s decision to usher in parliamentary democracy in Bhutan has earned him accolades from the international community.
Under him, the tiny Himalayan kingdom underwent many changes, a significant one in 1981 when the king introduced 20 elected district committees. The latest change and probably the most dramatic was the general elections held this year to bring in democracy in a country where people measure their success by the intangible yardstick of Gross National Happiness.
The GNH is a political philosophy that seeks to balance material growth with spiritual well-being. (The Telegraph)

NEWSMAKER-The decline and fall of Nepal's last king

KATHMANDU – Not long ago he was revered as a Hindu god, waited upon by thousands of royal palace retainers. His face crowned banknotes and the national anthem hailed him.
Now Nepal's King Gyanendra is vilified, set to lose his crown and even pay his own tax and electricity bills.

A special assembly will convene on Wednesday with the abolition of Nepal's monarchy top of its agenda, bringing to an end the 239-year-old Shah dynasty and leaving Gyanendra to go down in history as the last king of Nepal.
The 60-year-old businessman-turned-monarch has only himself to blame, many Nepalis say, after an ill-judged power grab in 2005 when he dismissed the government, jailed politicians and declared a state of emergency.
Gyanendra was apparently fed up with Nepal's corrupt and squabbling politicians and decided only he could rescue the country from a deadly Maoist insurgency.
The attempt backfired, and he was forced to back down the following year after weeks of street protests that ultimately sealed his and the monarchy's fate.
'He believed that he had the best intention,' said Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times weekly. 'But it was his autocratic streak that did him in.'
As a three-year-old boy Gyanendra was thrust on the throne in 1950 when his grandfather briefly fled to India, in the midst of a power struggle with the country's hereditary prime ministers, the Ranas.
When King Tribhuvan returned a few months later, Gyanendra retreated once more into the background, building a fortune in tea, tobacco and hotels and getting involved in environmental conservation.
Then, nearly seven years ago, his popular brother King Birendra and eight other members of the royal family were shot and killed by the crown prince, who then turned his gun on himself.
Gyanendra was back on the throne, and like many of his predecessors, he was brought up to believe he knew better than his subjects what was best for Nepal.
The massacre had broken the mystique of a monarchy once revered as incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu, while Gyanendra's seizure of power unleashed the wrath of the people.
'I think he is getting what he deserved,' said 48-year-old laborer Suntali Khatri, breast-feeding her two-year-old daughter next to a building site. 'He could not ask for more.'
Maoist rebels, whose main demand had been the abolition of the 'feudal monarchy', have gone on to become Nepal's largest party after a 2006 peace deal and elections in April.
They say Gyanendra can stay in the country as a commoner and businessman, provided he respects the assembly's decision.
The king himself has been reported as saying he had no intention of leaving Nepal.
Instead he is likely to drive from the pink pagoda-roofed Narayanhity Palace to his own, luxurious and well-guarded private residence in Kathmandu.
OVER-AMBITIOUS?
Gyanendra went to school in Darjeeling, a hill station in eastern India, and graduated from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu.
Mohan Prasad Lohani, who taught him English in university, said he was an irregular student – more interested in politics than studies. 'He had his own notion of how things should change. He was very ambitious,' he said.
That ambition could have been his downfall, analysts say. And it has been a dramatic fall from grace.
In the last two years, the government has seized thousands of acres of royal lands, nationalised more than a dozen of his palaces and sacked his priest in a purge of palace employees.
Virtually confined to his palace, the king has had his annual allowance cut, been hit with tax demands and requests for unpaid electricity bills. He has seen his face replaced by an image of Mount Everest on the country's banknotes and praise of him purged from the national anthem.
Yet royalists who have met him say he has taken it all calmly.
They argue that a hasty abolition of the monarchy could backfire and leave the country without the anchor that it needs in times of change. But royalist parties won just four seats in the 601-member assembly.
While many Nepalis like the idea of a constitutional monarchy, few like the idea of being ruled by Gyanendra or his unpopular son Paras, who has a reputation as a playboy and a reckless driver.
'I think this is the end of the road for the monarchy,' Dixit said. 'Most Nepalis think it just not worth the trouble to keep any more.' (Writing by Gopal Sharma and Simon Denyer; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani) (signonsandiego.com)

Nepali author demolishes king’s blue blood claim

By Sudeshna SarkarKathmandu, May 27 (IANS) On the verge of being stripped of his crown and evicted from the royal palace, Nepal’s distressed King Gyanendra now faces another blow - the demolition of the “myth” that his dynasty is descended from India’s Rajputs, a dynasty of warrior kings known for their valour and blue blood. Nepali author and researcher Subodh Kumar Singh contends that the Shah kings of Nepal, once revered as the incarnation of Hindu god Vishnu, are actually the descendants of the Magars, a Mongoloid people who inhabited western Nepal and occupied a low position in social hierarchy. They were dismissively described as ‘matwalis’ - a people known for their drinking prowess.
Singh, a political specialist at the American Embassy in Kathmandu, has been researching for over a decade the history of various communities who enjoyed a position of power in the past but then lost their glory and plummetted to the bottom of the social ladder.
In his new book, “The return of the Mauryas”, Singh says the Shah kings began creating the fiction that they were descended from the Rajput kings of India in order to hide their origin and commend greater reverence from their subjects.
However, several pieces of evidence belie the claim.
“During his last days, Prithvi Narayan Shah, the founder of the Shah dynasty, gathered all his relatives, courtiers and officers around him and advised them on how to conduct their work and themselves,” Singh told IANS.
“The last advice was recorded and still exists as Divya Upadesh (divine advice).”
“On his death bed, the king told the people around him, I am a Magar king. When you face death, you dispense with pretence and speak the truth. The king’s dying declaration is an indication that the Shah kings were not of blue blood.”
The advice was collected and published by a Catholic missionary who had come to Nepal in the 1960s, after the mystic land was gradually opened to foreigners.
Father L.F. Stiller’s book, “Prithvi Narayan Shah in the light of divya upadesh”, had to be published from India’s Bihar state in 1968 as, Singh says wryly, it would have been impossible to publish it in Nepal.
Even Singh’s book had to await the fall of King Gyanendra’s absolute regime and the restoration of democracy.
Singh points out a tradition that still remains in western Nepal as further proof.
“The Shah kings’ family deities - Goddess Manokamana and Gorkha Kali - have Magar priests,” he says. “If you are a Rajput, you would not have a Magar priest.”
Matrimonial alliances also indicate the dynasty’s humble stocks.
“The Magar kings had the tradition of marrying the daughters of Tharu kings. Prithvi Narayan Shah himself married a Tharu princess called Kaushalyavati.”
Though the Tharus are the kinsmen of the Buddha, who came from a royal family, the tides of fate turned them into slaves who are now regarded as untouchables in Nepal.
Later, the class-conscious Shah kings departed from the tradition and sought to marry Rajputs from India or the aristocracy in Nepal.
When Nepal holds the historic first meeting of its constituent assembly Wednesday and formally proclaims the kingdom to be a republic, King Gyanendra, overnight reduced to a commoner, would have his forefathers’ vanity to blame as much as his own overriding ambition.
“The Shah kings completely forgot their roots,” says Singh. “If they had remained true to their origin and kept themselves allied to the Magars, Tharus and Kirants, who form the majority, they would not have come to this pass,” Singh said.
“But they created fictitious genealogy and DNA and so, in the end, they had to face the dire consequences.” (Thaindian news)