A Nepali writer has come up with a different cause for the downfall of the Shah dynasty — the lack of breast-feeding by the Shah queens.
KATHMANDU: A Nepali writer has come up with a different cause for the downfall of Nepal’s King Gyanendra and the Shah dynasty that ruled the kingdom for over 200 years — the lack of breast-feeding by the Shah queens.
Peter J Karthak, author and columnist, attributes the disintegration of Nepal’s royals and their growing unpopularity to the royal babies’ never knowing “the comfy zones of their mothers’ bucket-seat laps and pillow-like soft bosoms”. Karthak, who was educated in North Point school in Darjeeling, where the current king and his two brothers also studied around the same time, wrote in the Kathmandu Post daily on Sunday that the lack of breast-feeding, symbolising the meagre role mothers played in royal childrens’ lives, caused the “male brats” to grow up as “drunkies (sic), junkies, spoilers, wastrels and mean murderers”.
Nepal’s aristocratic families considered breast-feeding to be a lowly custom and nursing mothers were hired as wet nurses for royal infants. With zero bonding between children and their mothers, Karthak says it was not surprising that in June 2001, the then Crown Prince Dipendra gunned down his own mother, Queen Aishwarya. The malaise affected the current king and his two brothers, the late King Birendra and Prince Dhirendra, even more because they grew up without their “biological mother hen”, he wrote.
Their mother, Queen Indra, died when they were young, and their father, King Mahendra, married their aunt Ratna. While the new queen’s “glacial beauty” qualified her to be the “royal consort”, her “surrogate motherhood” could not replace the “missing mater”, Karthak wrote.
“The missing mother meant that the royal family’s centre would never hold.” Being parentless, Karthak goes on to add, Birendra, Gyanendra and Dipendra developed into poor parents themselves and couldn’t control their own children, who became wayward.
The Nepali royals have rarely been photographed interacting with their grandchildren. Crown Prince Paras and his wife Himani have often gone on long unofficial foreign junkets, leaving their three children home.
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