Prithwinarayan Shah in the Light of Dibya Upadesh

Preface WRITING a book of this sort on the Father of Nepal is indeed a bold move for a foreigner in Nepal. The pages of the history of Nepal already bear the mark of too many foreign misunderstandings and over-simplifications. While a graduate student at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, I was confronted at every turn with the perplexities caused by well-intentioned but, at times, erring foreign writers of our history. It should be understood, then, from the very outset of this effort that I am most willing to be corrected where I err and that my aim in this work is simply to search for the historical truth, I say this at the very beginning of this book, because I think it is inevitable that the reader will find things in these few pages that will depart from accepted ideas and even traditions. This is not meant as an effort at achieving notoriety or a seeking of novelty. It is, I think, the natural result of the fact that I bring to this work a different background and different attitudes than those of many who are engaged in the work of research into the history of Nepal here in Kathmandu.

This difference in background and attitudes could lead to some useful insights, it seems to me, but at the same time this very difference is apt to be misleading. The idiom of Nepali his tory is not only the language of Nepal, it is the total fabric of custom and tradition that have evolved through the years. My twelve years and more of residence in Nepal have not per suaded me into thinking that I have acquired more than a few threads of that fabric.

Where I err, I hope my readers will be kind enough to attri bute that error to my own inadequacy, rather than to any negligence on the part of those scholars with whom I have had the pleasure of working. Where at times I strike closer to the truth, I freely acknowledge-and gladly so-my indebtedness to the History Department of Tribhuvan University, where the material contained in this book was first accepted as a thesis. I have elected to confine my study of Prithwinarayan Shah to the policies enunciated in his Dibya Upadesh, a document too little known and too little appreciated. I have based my study on the edition of Dibya Upadesh edited by Yogi Narharinath, published in 2016 B.S. I propose to divide my study into three parts. The first will try to situate Prithwi narayan Shah historically. The second part will present my own translation of the document itself, with such notes as may be required to understand the general meaning of the text.

**Contents and Sample Pages**