By Pradyumna P. Karan. University of Kentucky Press, 1960.
My thoughts…
This book is a treasure. Particularly intriguing is where it sits in history. As the author points out, the year before this volume was published, King Mahendra proclaimed a new constitution for Nepal and the country had its first election. It was also around this time that His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama fled Tibet. Only a decade earlier, Nepal’s border were largely closed to Westerners. This book was the country’s first published geography.
Also interesting is that only months later, King Mahendra revoked the constitution, dismissed the government, imprisoned its leaders and banned political parties.
But anyway, back to the book…
Armed with an amateur 35 mm camera, author Karan traversed the country in a light plane to collect data for his maps. These he supplemented with his own field studies. Dozens of his earthbound photos enhance his collection of hand-drawn, black-and-white maps: of landforms, topography, tectonics, drainage, agricultural zones, disease zones (malaria and leprosy in the low and middle elevations and cholera in the high lands), transportation routes, minerals, land use, religious population… He’s got a cool chapter on rural house types by region, again illustrated with his own photos and line drawings.
It’s particularly interesting to compare this book with its beautiful, high-tech, 21st-century counterpart.
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