Saturday, December 21, 2013

Dr. Kumar Pradhan passes away

GANGTOK, 20 Dec: Former editor of Sunchari, respected historian and academic, Dr. Kumar Pradhan, passed away following a brief illness in New Delhi today.
Dr. Pradhan received his PhD in history from Calcutta University. He served on the Department of History, Darjeeling Government College, from 1966 to 1984, when he took over as the principal of Kurseong College, Kurseong.
He was an eminent writer and critic who has edited a number of literary journals and anthologies and published learned articles in Nepali. He is the author of A History of Nepali Literature (1984), published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in the Sahitya Akademi Histories of Literature Series.
His work Pahilo Pahar (1982) was awarded the Bhanubhakta Puraskar in 1983 by the Nepali Academy instituted by the Government of West Bengal. In 2002, he received the Nepali Sahitya Sammelan Puraskar awarded by the Nepali Sahitya Sammelan, and in 2003, the Agam Smriti Puraskar, an award given every three years for contributions to the Nepali language and literature by the Sikkim Sahitya Parishad.
His most substantial academic work is “The Gorkha Conquests: The process and consequences of the unification of Nepal, with particular reference to Eastern Nepal”, published in 1991 and heralded as an important milestone in Nepalese historiography because it was a direct challenge to a ‘nationalist’ orthodoxy presenting the military campaigns of King Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha and his immediate successors as an heroic venture on behalf of all the people of Nepal.

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