Culture Key To Spurring National Integration

Of all the elements, culture is the most powerful one to hold society and state together.  It links the people to the past, conserves its valuable properties and enables them to defend what is pertinent for the future.  A vaunted theme in Nepal’s national integration is that it did not pursue a metaphor of cultural homogenisation. Variety of people of Tibeto-Mongolian, Indo-Aryan and Austro-Asiatic lived side by side and enriched Nepali culture. Long geographical seclusion produced varied sub-cultural identities spurring its national resilience. The immigration of a diverse population in Nepal with different races, dialects, customs and manners added a multi-colour into its montage. 

Nepali rulers had accepted the pluralistic idea of the state and tolerated the attitude of people to preserve their cultural norms, mores and beliefs that make for order and integration. Now it is a mosaic of 125 distinct ethnic and caste clusters, 123 linguistic groups and spiritual homes of over 150 cults coexisting in a sane harmony. Each is embedded in complex psychological and material contexts.  This unity in diversity adorned by heroes and builders, poets, historians, singers and sages is the pulse of national integration.

Psychological deterrence

The very array of its diversity provides a certain level of psychological deterrence against civilian strife and a conscious rational response to cultural diffusion. Many sub-cultural folk dances and songs have derived sustenance from the Nepali language. Folk songs are rhymed in the flute, murchunga and binayo in the classic musical tone of malashree.  The transmission of lore, art, music, song, festivals, dance and language became the carriers of collective awareness and emotional satisfaction. These are the cultural commons by which Nepalis define their relationship, deal with each other decently and engage in a larger public action. This has eased the process of Nepalisation and learning about modern life with zeal. 

 Nepali language, which is derived from Sanskrit and countless local dialects including Maithili, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Newari, Gurung, Magar, Rais and Limbus, etc. has contributed to the communication, education and development needs of all Nepalis long before the nation was unified by King Prithvi Narayan Shah. The fusion of national communication and political space helped the edifice of the nation to seek statehood. The philosophical writings of Hinduism and Buddhism and other cults kept their distinctive styles and memories. In Nepal, it reflects co-evolution, social faith and an intricate way of life.  Nepali Hindus, Buddhists and several cultic groups visit the monastery of Swayambhu to worship Goddess Saraswoti and Buddha at the same time.

There are many temples and monasteries where the idol of Ganesh is placed besides Buddha forming the core of Nepali consciousness while the cult of Chandan Nath is adored by both Hindus and Muslims. Priests for temples come from diverse caste groups to satisfy the spiritual needs of cross-section of devotees while regular spiritual discourses have emotionalised the voluntary spirit of Nepalis to donate for social progress without political overtones.  Shared norms have built a duty-based society. Cultural logic does not bar the choices of people while exercising their rights. For example, both Hinduism and Buddhism, consolidating in the civil society transmitted wisdom from the past, made the culture intellectually alive and enriched public life.

Nepal’s long seclusion from the great traditions, especially of the Gangetic belt and the Sinic, eased internal interaction and coherence. The acculturation of many subcultures into great tradition and national morals has widened the knowledge boundaries. Inter-caste marriages, social mobility and exposure to modernisation now have made culture adaptable to changing times.  Nepali culture evolved out of this process as an abstraction of many sub-cultures and, in the process, harboured tolerance for national integration. Nepali society embodies many autonomous institutions -- cultural, economic and religious and intellectual — tied in the web of family, clan, community, polity and even the state and governed by the social virtues of a common citizenship.  

Noted geographer Harka Gurung says, "Nepali society is a typical mosaic of four vital cultural patterns: the autochthonous culture incorporates disjunctive, tribal societies speaking diverse languages and dialects. The Lamaistic culture refers to the Bhotia societies coterminous to Tibet from where it drew its sustenance. The Brahmanistic culture conforms to the tropical Hindu realm that includes both native converts and immigrants from India. The fourth culture, of the educated moderns, is distinguished by modernisation ideals of a contemporary society.” The modern elites of many social origins have more in common now than fifty years ago but they have yet to infuse positive multipliers of national integration of multi-cultural nation. 

Nepali language, its calendar Bikram Sambat and history of fight against invaders defined Nepal’s nerve distinct from both the neighbours. The Nepali society stratified into - Bahun, Chhetri, Baisya and Sudra in vertical order had created means for organising the production of material, intellectual and spiritual life. Social stratification, however, defines unequal position of individuals in society but gives every individual a place within the hierarchy making each relevant to complex societal needs. It also spurs superior hierarchy and privilege infecting with polarising effect and faces deconstruction. Social relations which emerged in Nepal were thus totally pyramidal, a part of cultural heritage shared between Nepal and Bharat. 

Waves of migration of people to Nepal from India turned Nepali rulers and people to look to the south and internalize exogenous features into the heritage of Nepali literature, music, religion, culture, art, law and institutions without diluting the experience of their separate nationhood. Cultural synthesis interacted among Hindu, Buddhist and indigenous societies to shape a syncretic frame.  The dominant tradition has pervaded many cultural factors of peripheral society and evolved national culture within the bounded space, forming a world-view and pulling people to a road of national integration.

The position of a person inherited from the family adhering to group value, not individual talent, faces deconstruction with the spate of migration, modernity and mobility. Still, it serves social and economic welfare and trust for socialisation with peer groups, schools, media, political parties, etc. and their innocent deference to authority whether a father or a leader. This authority springs from the status, custom and law. Membership in the basic group, such as family and community is based on kinship bond while in the secondary groups, such as schools, interest groups and political parties individual interests, laws and social contract acquire greater salience and solidarity. 

The unreflective style of teaching in Nepal has enforced an element of authoritarianism. The binary mode of education has created emotional distance between two classes of Nepalis while political education fostered only conformity to borrowed existence. Both do not socialise the adults with the notion of being critical, trustful and respectful to others required in democracy. The outcome is intellectual alienation from one’s own conscience, culture and duty to society thus creating barriers to national integration. “Culture is the foundation of patriotism,” says Baburam Acharya, “its attrition marks the extinction of the state.” 

Politics in Nepal operates through informal networks in competition for access to decision-making, not through constitutional or normative codes. Its contact to the partisan media gives spiteful expression of allies and enemies, not the feeling of co-equal citizens. The business too is afflicted with this disease and has not been able to make economic integration through production, exchange and distribution of goods. It could not expand the economic organisation beyond families to capture the economies of scale for trade and transactions. Formal market, like civil society, is segmented. Both have outreach in relatively better off parts of the nation leaving the periphery lurch in backwater. 

The artisan classes, the technical personnel, who had for long specialised in different manufacturing occupations lack modern tools now to create the competitive advantages of their products and compete in the national economic integration.  Business-friendly milieu requires natives’ access to the national laws and resources.  Outsiders’ investments need to compliment, not substitute, the nation’s race in the global sphere. The caste ethics reviles the worth of menial labour in which feudal tenure system props up share tenancy at the expense of peasants and workers to unleash entrepreneurial spirit. The structural blindness of power elites has made their inclusion in the political economy highly skewed and their human rights struggle unfinished. 

Until the advent of democracy, the Nepali polity defined social relations and laws according to caste position in which underclasses found the trajectory of their life distressing. Social prejudice is unlawful now and caste, ethnic and regional solidarity is asserting greater articulation. The modern elites acculturated with alien ideologies have, however, naively absorbed the cultural experience of the advanced nations and justified them regardless of their utility for social and national integration. Unlike the native elite there is a break of their sentimental and cultural links with the masses. The democratic veneer has yet to set up the law of social equality.

The relationship among different Nepalis mirrors a complex hegemony of ideas, power and leadership, not the functional specialisation of roles. The cultural meanings are derived from the language of power. Only social modernisation allows the lower caste people to think in terms of citizenship equality, confront the archaic ideas and challenge the political engineering of the masses. This may enlarge the radius of trust beyond kinship and party structure to capture the politics of scale and foster social and system integration. Nepali heartland elites assign a secondary importance to political and public institutions which are prized in the developed nations. The affno manchhe syndrome cuts the meritocratic recruitment of citizens in the public institutions with better career rewards and evolves an order based on performance. The system of pande pajani has outlived the Rana regime cheering the feudal Nepali tradition of subservience. 

Centrifugal narratives

A tradition that encourages the deviation of public servants from the routine affairs of the state daunts the capacity of governance to fulfil the necessities of life and, thus, weakens its power to overcome centrifugal narratives. The existence of the hereditary elements in political leadership manifests a chronic tendency to flirt with the seductive charm to power. As a result, many revolutionary leaders far from helping to improve their democratic standing and standards of living of people have degenerated into patrimonial elites, bungling the economy, wrecking democratic niceties and breeding political anomie.  The nation's mass culture segmented into region, religion, race, language, ethnicity and caste categories is the reason that has defied an acculturation towards shared national feeling of citizenship. 

Today, globalisation of Nepali society has led some scholars to search for common roots, ethnic solidarity and detachment from national sentiments thus affecting the fires of civic nationalism which is essential for interaction between the state and local cultures and spur national integration. Nepalis abroad, no matter how racially, socially and geographically diverse they are, form a common identity. Culture, the soul of nation, can flourish by nourishing its cohesive elements and regenerating the merits of its democratic civility at multi-spheres for national integration.

(Former Reader at the Department of Political Science, TU, Dahal writes on political and social issues.)