The 1977 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts

BIOGRAPHY of Mahesh Chandra Regmi

Born in Kathmandu, the capital of the near legendary Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, on December 28, 1929, MAHESH CHANDRA REGMI has spent his life researching the history of his country—particularly the systems of land tenure—and in attempting to understand and apply his findings to the problems of the present.

Nepal is divided into three geographic regions, the low-lying Terai which forms its border with India; the central mountainous belt, ranging in altitude from 1,000-8,000 feet; and the alpine zone which terminates on the upper slopes of the highest mountains in the world. The central valleys are heavily cultivated, planted to rice in the summer monsoon and wheat and vegetables in the dry months of winter. The Terai, which was jungle and swamp when REGMI was born, has now, under the pressure of a population explosion, been largely deforested and brought under tillage. Its main crops are rice and jute. The high mountains offer little land for agriculture and experience a brief growing season; only corn, millet and pulses survive the harsh climate. The problems associated with land tenure apply primarily to the central zone.

MAHESH REGMI was the third child (with an older brother and sister) of Krishna Chandra and Padma Priya Regmi. His mother died when he was only three but he grew up in a large family of seven half-brothers and sisters. He was not sent to school but was tutored at home by his father—who played and taught the sitar, the famed string instrument of north India—and his two uncles, one a Sanskrit scholar and the other a classical musician like his father. They prepared the boy to take the entrance examinations for the high school of Hindu University at Benares, India, at age 10. Although he passed English, civics, Sanskrit and history, he failed mathematics and Nepalese. (His English was particularly good as his father had started him in that language at six; by eight he was reading English children's books and by 12 such authors as Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Henry Fielding.)

Since he was not accepted at Hindu University REGMI continued to study at home. In 1944 he placed second in the private high school graduation exam and entered Trichandra College in Kathmandu. Trichandra was affiliated with the University of Patna, India, because at that time there was no university in Nepal. The government, which was encouraging Nepalese to seek higher education, gave REGMI financial assistance to travel to Patna and to engage private tutors prior to both his intermediate and his final exams. He placed second in each, receiving his Intermediate Degree in 1946 and his Bachelor of Arts with Honors in 1948 at the age of 19.

The early pressures put on him, by his family and by the government, to succeed scholastically, had kept REGMI a serious, studious young man, with little time for sports or outside companionship. Now, however, instead of pursuing his studies under an almost assured government grant, he took the advice of an uncle who was teaching music to a member of the Rana family (hereditary prime ministers of Nepal) who was in exile in Calcutta, India, to seek a job in one of that family's industrial firms. He arrived in Calcutta in July 1948, but the job failed to materialize. Nevertheless he remained in that city for two years, and tried to establish himself in business, but both of his ventures—a bookshop and a clothshop—failed.

Returning to Kathmandu in 1950 he stayed only five months before he left again for India, this time for Benares where he hoped to resume his studies—but financial considerations prevented him from so doing. In the meantime a revolution had broken out in Nepal which overthrew the authoritarian rule of the Ranas and put the Nepali Congress Party in power. The king, himself a democrat, returned from exile and supported the change. The newly established government advertised for candidates for training in the new Finance Ministry and REGMI applied. However, since he was assigned a lower position than he felt entitled to, he transferred to the Ministry of Industry and Commerce where he was appointed Deputy Director of the Department of Industry. Six months later he became Acting Director, the capacity in which he functioned until he was summarily dismissed in November 1955. During his years in the Department of Industry (1951-1955) he served concurrently as Acting Director of the Department of Cottage Industries (1952) and of the Department of Central Purchases (1953-54). His dismissal from his position in the ministry, for which no reason was ever given, put an end to his civil service career. He speculates, however, that if he had taken the lower position in the Ministry of Finance he would probably have remained in government service all his life, never faced with need or compulsion to work on his own.

REGMI was basically unemployed for the next 18 months, picking up odd jobs from time to time and seeking to determine what he wanted to do with his life. In July 1957 he came into contact with Leo E. Rose, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of California at Berkeley, who was in Kathmandu gathering materials for his dissertation. Discussions with this young American scholar confirmed REGMI’s contention that he, too, could write and do research. With this newfound confidence he determined never to take a salaried job again. On the basis of this decision, between 1957 and 1961, he turned down offers from both the British and the American embassies, and from the new government established by King Mahendra in 1960.

Linked with his desire to be independent in a business sense was a desire to be independent personally. In 1958, therefore, he made another major decision. He left the joint family in which he had grown up, and moved his wife, Mana Devi Gnyawali, whom he had married in 1947, and five children—four sons, Girish Chandra (1949), Sirish Chandra (1952), Suresh Chandra (1954) and Durgesh Chandra (1955); and a daughter Lila (1957)—into private quarters. He had found it increasingly difficult to live within the constraints of the traditional system where parents and siblings lived in a common compound and contributed jointly to family resources. In leaving he forfeited any claim to family loyalty and support; on the other hand the family lost his contribution to the unit's well being. He also specifically relinquished his claim to family properties. In so doing he not only sought to avoid any "pettiness or bitterness" which any claim to his share of the property would invoke, he also wanted to prove to himself that he could succeed by his own efforts, and prove to the world that in spite of his dismissal from high government position he was, as he put it, "not a worthless person."

His dismissal and his later refusal to accept normally highly sought-after salaried jobs, earned him criticism and hostility on the part of both friends and relatives, who objected to his taking an unconventional and "modern" position. Thus his lot and the lot of his wife and children has not been easy, faced as they have been by the jealousy and resentment of both their families and their peers.

In May 1957 REGMI had put his business ideas into practice and set up a research and translation service. He began by putting out the weekly Nepal Press Digest and in September 1957 followed with the daily (Monday through Friday) Nepal Press Report, a summary translation into English of news reports, editorial comments and articles on national development which appeared in the newspapers of Kathmandu and district towns. To do so he had to be fluent in three major languages of the country: Nepali, the lingua franca; Hindi and English.

In September the same year he instituted the Regmi Research Project which supplied, under contract, translation services to the United States Agency for International Development Mission in Kathmandu and the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi which handled U.S. Nepalese affairs. The latter contract was taken over in 1960 by the newly opened U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu.

In 1964 REGMI started the Nepal Recorder which was published irregularly. It offered a selected translation of laws, regulations, orders and notifications promulgated by the Nepalese government, with an annual index. It was complemented by the Nepalese Miscellaneous Series, started the same year, which published—also irregularly—English translation of the "consolidated texts of laws and regulations, periodically revised to incorporate amendments and additions."

The Regmi Research Series, a monthly, was begun in 1969, and presents a translation of the "historical aspects of Nepal's law, government, society, politics and economics." For example issue number 8 of the series, published in August 1977, included in the six items covered, "Ritual Purity Among Communal Groups," which summarized steps taken by the government to deal with the problem of ritual purity for the tribes and occupational groups who had not accepted the Hindu customs and taboos brought into Nepal by their Gurkha conquerors. The summarization was made from the materials REGMI had collected and collated in the volumes of the Regmi Research Collections, comprised of transcripts of historical materials from archival and other sources. All of the translation and summary services are available to subscribers in Nepal and abroad. Of the five services the Research Series has been of greatest import to scholars and government administrators. Fr. Dr. Ludwig F. Stiller, originally an American Jesuit who has now acquired Nepali citizenship and is an eminent scholar of Nepal, calls it the "most important single research periodical in the history of Nepal."

In 1969-70, in an attempt to improve the management of his services and "to simplify tax problems," REGMI separated the Regmi Research Project into two private limited companies: Regmi Research Ltd. and Nepal Press Digest Ltd. The Press Digest continued to offer the Nepal Press Digest and the Nepal Recorder. Regmi Research offers the Nepal Press Report, the Nepal Miscellaneous Series and the Regmi Research Series.

In addition to his translation of current papers and periodicals, and of items of general historical interest, REGMI has, since the late 1950s, been engaged in researching the laws and customs of land tenure as practiced in Nepal since the Gurkha conquest in 1768. He published his first book on the subject, Some Aspects of Land Reform in Nepal, in Kathmandu in 1960; it was reissued by the University of California at Berkeley in 1962. The Himalayan Border Countries Project of that institution supported him in the preparation and publication of his four-volume tour de force, Land Tenure and Taxation in Nepal, published by the university between 1963 and 1968. Land Tenure has become a standard reference work "of fundamental importance for the study of the history of Nepal," as one of his colleagues writes.

REGMI believes that historians—especially in a nation like his where 95 percent of the people are dependent upon one economic venture, agriculture—should examine the economic basis of society to understand its past and present. Previously, however, Nepalese historians had concentrated on dynastic chronology and political relationships. This is understandable REGMI admits, because throughout history the peasant has been largely illiterate and therefore inarticulate. The written word, on the other hand, has been the monopoly "of those segments of the society whose power and privilege are derived from the right, backed by the coercive apparatus of the state, to take away from the peasant a sizeable portion of the food he produces." It is his pleasure to adjust the balance and to declaim "the condition and problems of this inarticulate [peasant] class," he writes.

To understand the problems of the peasant, and therefore of the modern state seeking to alleviate his condition and to create a surplus capital for industrialization, it is essential, REGMI believes, to be familiar with the land policies and the structure of the past upon which the present state rests. The failure of the land reforms undertaken since 1950, he feels, is due to a lack of understanding of the underlying patterns of land tenure and taxation. To understand these it is necessary to take a brief look at modern Nepalese history which begins with the conquest of the various hill tribes living in the Himalayan valleys by the Gurkha, a people of northern India.

The Gurkhas claim descent from the Rajputs of Udaipur who were driven out of their land by the invading Muslims in the 12th and 13th centuries, and who settled in the Himalayan valleys, bringing their culture with them. In 1768 Prithvi Narayan Shah succeeded in subjugating the last of the tiny Nepalese kingdoms of the Kathmandu valley. This conquest accelerated the transition in Nepal from valley-centered petty states to nationhood. A war with China which ended in 1793, and the British-Gurkha War of 1814-16, resulted in the approximate present-day boundaries of the country.

Dissension and intrigue flourished at the Nepalese court during the next three decades until an able young soldier, Jung Bahadur, became prime minister in 1846. To stabilize the administration he banished the king and queen and set the minor heir on the throne, ruling in his behalf. In 1856, under his direction, but by royal order, the function of prime minister was limited to members of his family who had been socially upgraded in 1849 and given the name Rana. Jung Bahadur continued to govern Nepal until his death in 1877.

Under the titular kings the Rana family ruled Nepal for 100 years and the society evolved from that of "Gorkali [Gurkha] military feudalism" into the "authoritarian agrarian bureaucracy of the Ranas." Under the Gorkali the military had been given lands and allowed to collect taxes; this had led to weakening of the political and economic authority of the central government. The Ranas reversed the situation and created a highly centralized, aristocratic bureaucracy. Although the bureaucracy was paid in land, it was not a case of landowners acquiring political power as under the feudal system, but of political leaders acquiring land. And since they were attached to the central government, they were usually absentee landlords whose taxes were collected for them by village headmen. In essence, as REGMI writes in Landownership in Nepal (1976), Nepal's 19th and 20th century land system represented a "coalition between the aristocracy and the bureaucracy on the one hand and local overlords on the other to wring agriculture surpluses from the peasantry and share the proceeds." When the local taxcollectors, who eventually became landlords themselves, were no longer dependent on favors from the political overlords, there was a break between them which REGMI believes may have been a major reason for the revolution of 1950 and the overthrow of the Ranas.

Shortly after the successful 1950 revolt King Tribhuban returned from exile and accepted the role of constitutional monarch. Democracy was instituted, although there were, in fact, a succession of rather ineffective governments during the decade, and not enough political stability to permit calling an election until 1959. The election was handily won by the Nepali Congress Party and a new constitution came into effect. The new government, however, lasted only one year. In 1960 King Mahendra, who had succeeded to the throne on the death of his father in 1955, dissolved parliament and part of the constitution on the grounds that the government was both inefficient and corrupt. In 1961 he outlined proposals for the Panchayat (council) System and what he called "basic democracy," i.e. democracy at the lowest level of government, the village, and representational government at the higher levels. Basic democracy was to allow people to move into full democracy gradually.

The Panchayat System has four levels of government. The lowest unit, the Village Panchayat, is elected democratically by all men and women over 21. Councils at the next three levels are elected by representatives of the immediately lower bodies. In 1977 112 of the 135 members of the National Panchayat, the highest legislative body, were elected indirectly through village and district-level panchayats with provision for nomination of an additional 20 percent of the members by the king. The 1975 (Second) Amendment to the Constitution had abolished representation of class organizations. The lower panchayats function as executive bodies for their units, are responsible for implementing national plans and can levy certain taxes. In spite of the government's good intentions since 1950, and in particular since 1961 the position of the peasant, and especially the tenant, for the most part has not improved, and land policies have failed to create a capital surplus that could be used for industrialization. The reason, REGMI feel is a lack of understanding by government planners and law makers of the underlying economic structure.

In Volume I of Land Tenure and Taxation in Nepal, subtitle "The State As Landlord," REGMI examines the major form of traditional land ownership, raikar or state landlordism, i.e. land on which taxes are collected or appropriated by the state, either directly or indirectly. The second volume deals with birta tenure, land and the revenues from it which have been assigned to individuals conditionally by the state. The Rana family acquired a vast amount of birta land during their century of rule, each prime minister seeking to enrich himself, since in Nepal land is not passed from father to son by rights of primogeniture. Birta land has been the object of most land reform legislation since 1951. REGMI assesses the legislation and the reasons for the success or failure of its implementation.

In the third volume, jagir, rakam and kipat tenure systems analyzed. The first two are forms of land grants given individuals by the state in payment for military or administrative services—in lieu of other emoluments. Kipat is a form of communal ownership, formerly prevalent among a number of tribal groups but now found only among the Limbu in eastern Nepal.

The last volume deals with "Religious and Charitable Endowments: Guthi Tenure," i.e. land given in perpetuity to religious or charitable institutions, in some cases family organizations. Because of the religious aspects of the trusts, no attempt has been made by the government to change guthi tenure. Rakam, jagir and birta systems of tenure were abolished during the 1950s, however, and most land was brought under raikar, state landlordism.

One value of this detailed tabulation and analysis of the various traditional forms of land ownership is that it uncovered a vast array of ancient land tenure systems that go back to pre-Aryan times, to the Tibetan or Indo-Mongolian systems brought into the hill valleys by the first settlers. It shows the accretions of history—Hindu, Buddhist, Moghul and British influences that crept in from northern India. Nepal in some respects is still, as Rose writes in the Foreword to Volume I, a "museum of practices prevalent in ages past throughout a much wider area of Asia." These forms have been preserved in Nepal "because of its relative isolation and freedom from colonial domination." Nepal thus offers a fertile field to scholars of other Asian states who seek to understand the historic substructures of the societies they are studying.

Nevertheless, as Rose goes on to say: "The bewildering complexity of tenure systems in Nepal, which the author so graphically and carefully describes, obviously constitutes a major obstacle to modernization of the agrarian and revenue structures. . . .Proposals for their complete and immediate abolition must be carefully considered, and must be framed with due care to avoid the simultaneous abolition of certain positive functions that they do perform and which are essential to any effective land use program."

REGMI similarly notes in the Preface to Volume II, "Since development in democratic societies is essentially a process of evolutionary reconstruction, an adequate understanding of existing social and economic systems and institutions is the sine qua non for formulation and implementation of realistic policies." The need for research into the past is evident when he gives as an example the Legal Code (Muluki Ain) that governs Nepal's legal system, including its land policies. To understand the actual situation one has to be aware, he says, of the "orders, regulations and notifications applicable to particular government offices in specific areas or situations," since they override the Muluki Ain. The latter has long been available in published form, the former are being collected and collated by REGMI.

REGMI’s work is based almost wholly on primary sources, and on collections of laws and regulations not previously accessible or, at any rate, not previously studied. Many of the documents from which he worked earlier have already been destroyed or lost. For his four-volume treatise on land tenure, his best sources were the records kept in the archives of the Ministry of Law which go back to 1908, and in the Land Records Office of the Ministry of Finance which date to the Gurkha conquest in 1768; a few are earlier. He also utilized the Tibetan Affairs Section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In connection with his research into guthi tenure, he visited major temple-beneficiaries to clarify policies of law enforcement. The entire study took him seven years, August 1960 to March 1967, and the four volumes constitute some 1,000 pages. He credits his initial interest in studying Nepal's land tenure system to Dr. Frank Moore, a Ford Foundation Scholar affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley who visited Nepal in 1956-57, and his success in carrying these four volumes to completion to the support of the Himalayan Border Countries Project of the University of California at Berkeley, as well as to numerous other colleagues at home and abroad.

In 1971 REGMI published A Study in Nepali Economic History, 1768-1846, which Stiller calls "one of the most significant books yet to be produced on the history of Nepal." In this opus, Stiller wrote, REGMI not only gives the reader "clear pictures of Nepalese society at different stages in its development, but the added dimension of growth through those stages. The documentation is excellent." He adds that another of its values is that it shows modern government planners: "These are defense mechanisms the Nepalis have built into their society as a source of protection. These are the institutions that Nepalis have devised as a means of growth. This in short is what it means to be a Nepali." If planners are not guided by these insights, he says, it is "at their own peril."

In his succeeding works REGMI more and more seeks solutions to the problems that he so cogently reports. In his chapter "Land Tenure" in Nepal in Perspective, edited by Rana and Malle in 1973, he points out that tenancy—which has unintentionally been allowed to increase under the raikar system—constitutes a major threat to any meaningful reform. As he sees it, tenancy has increased for three reasons. One, at the beginning of the 20th century landlords sought to receive cash incomes rather than in-kind payments from land. In 1910 this pattern was institutionalized. Monetary tax rates were set, based upon the current value of 50 percent of the major crop. These rates remained virtually unchanged until recently, but the value of the crop gradually increased. Thus the cultivator was "able to meet his tax obligation with a smaller portion of the produce than before." This meant that he acquired a capital surplus and was able either to buy new land or rent part of his already acquired holdings to others.

Two, after the revolution of 1950 a ceiling was placed on the amount of land one person could hold; large estates were broken up but, since land has remained the single most desirable form of investment of surplus capital, the land fell principally into the hands of noncultivators, e.g. civil servants and the like. Third, the rapid increase in population has increased the demand for land by the peasant since there are few employment opportunities outside agriculture to absorb surplus labor. The amount of land that can still be opened for agriculture is minimal, and increasingly marginal; already deforestation has taken place at an alarming rate.

The result of the land reform policy since 1950, REGMI writes, has thus unfortunately "actually led to an expansion of the non-working landowning class." And it has "strengthened the position of landowners as rent-receivers without giving them commensurate obligations." He then applies to the Nepalese situation the words of David Thorner in The Agrarian Prospect in India: "If you do not totally reject the principle of non-working landlords. . . . you allow all the evils of concentration of power at the village level to come trotting back in. The whole world of organized subterfuge, with which so many villages are already replete, will continue unabated."

Land reform, REGMI goes on to say, must aim at reducing the social and economic gulf between landowners and tenants. Since the "entire social, economic, political and administrative framework of the nation is being remodeled on the panchayat pattern," he recommends that the panchayat system be extended to land tenure. He suggests that every village panchayat "should acquire the ownership of agricultural and pasture lands situated in the area under its jurisdiction."

He pursues his idea of panchayat tenure in his latest published work, Landownership in Nepal (1976). Pointing out that, although peasants have a recognized constitutional status and landlords do not, the rural upper class is nevertheless developing at the expense of the lower. Its members can afford, for example, to take advantage of modern agricultural technology. They thus prosper at the expense of the peasants who cannot afford the capital investment required by the new technology and whose segment of the economy therefore continually falls behind. Further, when adopting large scale and labor saving techniques, the landowner consolidates land and evicts tenants, he cuts both his economic and social obligations to the latter.

Increased peasant proprietorship is not the answer, REGMI continues, because it can easily degenerate into landlordism itself, as it did under the raikar system of the last century. The important thing, rather, is to decrease demand for land as an investment by the non-cultivating class.

The answer that REGMI proposes, the panchayat system, accommodates itself to the political pattern now in place. He suggests that the village panchayat acquire lands held in excess of the law or lands owned by absentee landlords, and gradually become the "state landlord" of the surrounding lands, turning them over to tenants to cultivate. He proposes that the tax (rent) on land be reduced from one-half of the value of the major crop, to one-fourth. The reduction in tax will enable the tenant to acquire a capital surplus which can be utilized for nonagricultural investments.

Although the panchayat system has yet to be adopted for land tenure, REGMI’s voice has not gone unheard during the last two decades. In 1961-62 he served his government briefly as Member-Secretary of the Royal Taxation Commission and the Royal Land Reform Commission. He resigned from the latter after three months because of the demands of his translation services. He was also engaged as a research economist, first by the Center for South Asia Studies of the Institute of International Studies of the University of California at Berkeley and then by the Himalayan Border Countries Project, headed by Rose, also at the University of California. In August 1967 REGMI was invited to participate in the 27th International Congress of Orientalists at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA; enroute he visited the United Kingdom.

Besides the earlier mentioned volumes, his Thatched Huts and Stucco Palaces: Peasants and Landlords in Nineteenth-Century Nepal, will shortly be printed in India, and he has almost completed The State and Economic Surplus: Production, Trade and Resource-Mobilization in Early 19th Century Nepal. Although he claims to dislike writing articles, he has written a number of monographs on land tenure, taxation and reform; and on the economic and industrial history and potential of his country. Several have been included in edited collections.

In spite of the problems he has faced as an historical researcher— in part due to a lack of interest on the part of government and academe, and in part to the lack of ready access to source materials—REGMI, through his Research Collection and his publications, has translated and made available to serious scholars—foreign and Nepalese—a vast amount of new material. As a colleague wrote recently, he has "carefully and systematically collected an enormous amount of relevant data contained in a variety of old government and private records," and in his publications has maintained not only "the highest standards of scholarship, intellectual honesty and objective research methodology, but he has provided a large amount of historical data never available before." He has also brought his fine mind to bear on his research materials, analyzing them and applying them to the societies of both past and present. Stiller refers to him as "one of the truly great scholars of Nepal today."

The humanitarian aspect of his work has been recognized by another colleague who writes: "despite his skeptical and objective approach to the problem of the Nepalese peasants, his feeling and compassion for them is best summed up in the dedication of his book, A Study in Nepali Economic History, 'To my fellow countrymen who have suffered much.' "

September 1977
Manila

REFERENCES:

Rana, Pashupati S.J.B. arid Kamal P. Malle, ed. Nepal in Perspective. Kathmandu: Centre for Economic Development and Administration. 1973.

*Press. 196 3-196 8.

Regmi, Mahesh Chandra. The Future Pattern of Landownership. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1976.

______. Land Tenure and Taxation in Nepal. Vol. I-IV. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1963-1968.

______. "Nepal's Land Reform." Presentation made to Group Discussion. Transcript. Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Manila. September 1, 1977. (Typewritten.)

______. "Preliminary Notes on the Nature of Rana Law and Government." Contributions to Nepalese Studies. Kathmandu: Institute of Nepal and Asian Studies, Tribhuban University. Vol. 2, no. 2, June 1975.

______. "Regmi Research Institute," list of publications of the Institute. (Mimeographed.)

______. Regrni Research Series. Kathmandu: Regmi Research Ltd. Year 9, no. 9, August 1, 1977. (Mimeographed.)

Stiller, Ludwig F., S.J. "Preface," The Rise of the House of Gorka. New Delhi: Manjusri Publishing House. 1973.

Letters from and interviews with those knowledgeable of the work of Mahesh Chandra Regmi.