Almost always, we are taught to analyse Nepal’s history in isolation, detached from broader regional and global transformation. In ‘Sandhikal’, historical sociologist Lokranjan Parajuli challenges this perspective. He presents Nepal as a site of movement and collision of ideas, power, rebellion and historical contingencies.
What makes ‘Sandhikal’ gripping, despite its academic grounding, is how it treats the reader. Rather than offering fixed conclusions or social theories, Parajuli synthesises diverse writings and rich empirical materials, giving readers the agency to interpret the evidence themselves. He consequently redefines how to take in the epistemic diversity.
Narrative and analysis are accompanied by dense in-text citations, historical dates, minutes and references. Through five interconnected domains, including politics, society, education, radio, and cinema, he examines the year 1950 as the pivotal transition for modern Nepal. Each section has its own distinct historical focus, but they collectively map out a society on the brink of transformation.
He zooms out to look at the year as a massive regional crossroads rather than merely ‘the Rana’s fall’. Nepal was sitting on a fault line of shifting world orders. World War II had just ended, and the British had pulled out of India. Ideas about democracy, anti-colonialism, and sovereignty were swirling across borders. And inevitably, Nepal wasn’t insulated from this wave.
The chapter ‘Politics’ charts this friction through Padma Sumsher’s tenure, a uniquely liberal Rana Prime Minister who paradoxically believed that the survival of his family’s regime depended entirely on the goodwill of its citizens.
Seeking to modernise society, he emphasised literature and coeducation, and in 1947 (2004), introduced Nepal’s first constitution. The chapter meticulously details how this framework was gradually constructed, including the first parliamentary meeting held in Singha Durbar by Mohan Sumsher. The gathering, Parajuli notes, appeared rushed or particularly ‘staged’. Almost a month later, the Rana regime was overthrown.
Simultaneously, the book tracks the rise of anti-Rana groups, including the Praja Parisadh and Nepali Congress, to dismantle the century-old autocracy.
Parajuli brings the era to life with the visual glimpses of national and international newspapers from the time, including Bishweshwar Prasad Koiral’s stirring appeal, published in Bihar’s newspaper, ‘The Searchlight’, to gather and rise for development and transformation on October 4, 1946.
“There is no liberty of any kind,” Koirala wrote. “The rules are above the law, and the people are steeped in ignorance and squalor.”
Nepali citizens’ revolutionary thoughts were also provoked by the geopolitical reality, as India seemed bound to achieve independence from the British Empire. This British departure proved to Nepali freedom fighters that even the most deeply entrenched autocracies could be dismantled through collective resistance.
By reading these historical moments as deep cultural shifts, Parajuli highlights the critical importance of restructuring specific knowledge, wisdom, language, perhaps through decolonisation or indigenisation, bringing to the surface the ‘Chyand Bhangur’ (momentary) nature of the historical political construction.
His choice to examine this transformation through media and culture, such as radio and cinema, as well as communication and politics, is fascinating. Power changes in how people talk and what they listen to.
Parajuli initially presents a paradox. A contrast between popular historical understanding and the archival evidence he assembles.
The rise of radio in the 19th and early 20th centuries in Italy, used for both entertainment and propaganda, provides a broader global context to Nepal’s own gradual exposure to the medium. Given the crucial role of All India Radio, the section traces the emergence of Nepali-language broadcasting programmes, expanding the reach of radio across linguistic and cultural borders.
The chapter, ‘Radio’, also includes photographs of Sushri Lila and Shree Devenraraj Upadhyay, two Nepalis working at All India Radio in Delhi, which document early instances of Nepali participation in transnational media spaces during the Rana period, particularly under Padma Sumsher’s reformist rule.
India’s early exposure to cinema and its circulation within the region rippled across Nepal during the leadership of Dev Sumsher, when cinema was actively publicised. The first screening was announced in Gorkhapatra, marking an early moment of encounter with cinema in the public sphere, with Padma Sumsher further extending its exposure to children and ordinary citizens.
To broaden the historical lens, Parajuli evidently scrutinised multiple historical texts and archival materials in constructing this narrative. Intertextuality, in this sense, sits at the core of the book’s method, seemingly allowing different sources, voices, and temporalities to speak to one another.
Power, as ‘Sandhikal’ demonstrates, does not just change hands in palaces; it changes when ordinary people begin to imagine themselves differently. Lokranjan Parajuli pulls Nepal’s history out of isolation and drops it squarely into the global current.
What makes it an indispensable breakthrough is also Parajulis’s presentation of raw archival blueprints rather than pre-packaged social theories. Therefore, ‘Sandhikal’ succeeds as an invitation to rethink how Nepal’s modernity is narrated.
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Sandhikal
Author: Lokranjan Parajuli
Publisher: Publication Nepalaya
Year: 2026
