Thousands of people recently took to the streets of Nepal to protest social-media restrictions and alleged corruption by government ministers and senior officials. Amid accusations of excessive force by law enforcement during the protests, Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli resigned on 09 September. Even after his resignation announcement, protesters entered and vandalized several government and private buildings, including Nepal’s parliament building and ministers’ residences, and there were reports of arson.
In that context, the claim circulated that: It’s enough to burn a nation’s libraries to set it back 1,000 years! Nepal’s royal library is burning, the Charyapada is burning!
See the Facebook posts circulated with that claim here (archive), here (archive), here (archive).
See the Instagram post circulated here (archive).
FACT-CHECK
The Rumor Scanner team’s investigation found that there was no incident in which Nepal’s royal library or its Charyapada manuscripts were burned during the recent protests and arson. In reality, an image of arson at Nepal’s main administrative building, Singha Durbar, was circulated with the misleading claim.
In this investigation, we located a photo on the stock photo website Getty Images that bears partial resemblance to the circulated image. In the circulated image the building appears to be on fire; the Getty Images photo, however, was taken at a normal (non-fire) moment.
Thanks to photojournalist Paul Popper, the caption of the published photo indicates it was taken in 1967 and shows an exterior view of Singha Durbar — the central palace in Kathmandu, also known as the Lion Palace.
Later, we also found a similar image in a post on Getty Images’ Instagram account: a photo.
The Instagram post’s caption refers to the image as depicting arson at Nepal’s main administrative building, Singha Durbar, during the recent protests.
In other words, the image being circulated shows Nepal’s government administrative building Singha Durbar.
Additionally, inquiring into claims that Nepal’s royal library and the ancient Bengali-language literary artifact Charyapada were burned, we found an updated article on the national daily Prothom Alo’s website dated 20 January 2017 titled ‘In Search of the Colorful Charyapada’.
In 1907, Mahamahopadhyay Haraprasad Shastri discovered a manuscript of the Charyapada in the Nepal royal court library. That article reports that what was once called the Nepal royal court library no longer exists in the same form: many government departments redistributed its holdings. The author suggests that Haraprasad Shastri likely saw the manuscript in Singha Durbar’s collections rather than at Bhaktapur Palace, because Bhaktapur Palace housed a museum (which he visited in 2014) where the Charyapada was not found.
The Charyapada is a collection of songs and teachings of early tantric-Buddhist practitioners that preserves social and cultural elements of early medieval eastern India. It was originally written on palm-leaf manuscripts, where Charyakars combined songs with commentaries. In 1907, Haraprasad Shastri discovered a copy of this manuscript in Nepal’s royal court library. The original manuscript is known as Munidatta’s commentary manuscript, and Shastri identified its language as Old Bengali. The original manuscript is no longer in Nepal; however, portions important to the preservation of the Charyapada’s cultural and scholarly value are held in Nepal’s National Archives.
Over time, scholars have translated and studied the Charyapada in several languages, including Hindi, Assamese, Odia, Maithili, English and French. Currently, some pages are kept in Nepal’s official archives, and some colored copies have been collected and photographed at high resolution.
Therefore, the claim that Nepal’s royal court library was set on fire during the recent protests and that the Charyapada manuscripts burned as a result is false.
SOURCES
- Getty Images – Singha Durbar Palace In Kathmandu, Nepal
- Getty Images – Instagram Post
- Prothom Alo – In Search of the Colorful Charyapada
