Positive Review for 'The Mulukī Ain of 1854: Nepal’s First Legal Code'
The book titled 'The Mulukī Ain of 1854: Nepal’s First Legal Code' written by NHDP team members Rajan Khatiwoda, Axel Michaels and associate of the project, Simon Cubelic was positively reviewed by renowned scholar of Nepali and Himalayan Studies, Prof. Michael Hutt (SOAS). He writes, " This extraordinary book not only makes the Ain readable for those who do not know Nepali, but also for bilinguals who find the archaic language and terminology of the original Nepali text forbidding. To describe the text as ‘readable’ in an aesthetic sense would be to flatter its authors: this is a legal text, and much of it is necessarily repetitive because it must spell out the sanctions and punishments for particular crimes as they apply to each of the prescribed caste categories by turn. As an online resource, it will no doubt be used largely as a work of reference. However, as one turns the pages of the print version and reads the articles of the Ain one after the other in sequence, one begins to sense what Michaels refers to in his Preface as 'the richness of life in Nepal in the mid-19th century - with all its social, religious and economic problems and conflicts', and understands something of what this extraordinary text, coming from a place and time so radically different from our own, was actually trying to do."
The review can be read here: http://journals.ed.ac.uk/himalaya/article/view/7186/9313
Citation: Hutt, M. (2022). Review of The Mulukī Ain of 1854: Nepal’s First Legal Code by Rajan Khatiwoda, Simon Cubelic, and Axel Michaels. HIMALAYA - The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 41(1), 137-139. https://doi.org/10.2218/himalaya.2022.7186