Nepalese King Went to Harvard

With the mass murder of the King of Nepal and nine other relatives last Friday apparently at the hands of a member of the family, Harvard lost two of its most illustrious alumni.

The Nepalese king, Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, was a Quincy House resident and member of the Fox during a one-year stay at the College in 1967. His son-in-law, Khagda “K.B.” Shah, who was also killed, lived in Kirkland House on a Nieman fellowship in 1979.

Harvard provided a space for the two men to receive Western educations before they returned to an impoverished country on the way to modernization.

“[Crown prince Birendra] really had very little freedom, but they wanted him to have as much of a normal life at Harvard as possible,” says Katalin M. Kovago ’70, a good friend. “He was a nice, good-humored young man with a lot of responsibility on his shoulders.”

Shah Dev, as he liked to be called, spent all his time at Harvard accompanied by a bodyguard and tutor, Narayan Shrestha.

Both were generally well-liked, although Shrestha is described as the more outgoing of the two.

“Narayan was very voluble, very charming. Not that Shah Dev wasn’t, he was just more reserved and cautious,” says Boaz Shatton ’69, a friend from the Fox.

Despite his popularity, Shrestha’s role as Dev’s protector was apparent.

“Narayan was short in stature, and yet I remember one time we were in the cafeteria. He was in line in front of me carrying one of those thick plastic trays. He got three glasses of water. And then I noticed that he was holding all that weight just between his thumb and forefinger,” says Whitney Beales ’68, a fellow member of the Fox.

“It was then that I realized how highly trained Narayan was, and how important it was that the prince be protected.”

Besides the popular scholar-warrior at his side, Dev’s most recognizable trademark was his Jaguar, “a wonderful black XKE,” Kovago recalls.

The car seems to have been the only sign of Dev’s wealth and prestige. He was known for his modesty and studiousness, but never as a playboy.

Friends say the importance of his position weighed heavily upon him.

“Some of our conversations were very poignant,” Kavogo says. “About how different our lives were—he knew exactly what was going to happen to him, who he was going to marry, that he would be king. He was thankful for his long royal heritage, but I think he envied us Westerners our freedom.”

The Nepalese press gave a summary of every day the crown prince spent at Harvard, according to Nan Vogt, who served as co-master of Kirkland House, but spent 1967 in Nepal on sabbatical.

Details of the killings remain limited, as Nepalese tradition and the nation’s constitution place the royal family above official reproach. Government officials have privately identified Dev’s son, Crown Prince Dipendra, as the perpetrator. Dipendra also took his own life in the killing.

Rumors swirled in the Nepalese population, many of whom did not believe any explanations given by the Nepalese government. Many denied that Dipendra was in fact the murderer and suspected that the murders were an effort for another branch of the family to reach the throne.

Trust in the government’s explanation was particularly low after one leading government official Sunday blamed the 10 deaths on “accidental” machine gun fire.

The killings have led to public riots in the country and a government-imposed curfew.

The tragic end of Dev’s life came as a shock to all who knew him at Harvard, many of whom were invited to his coronation in 1975.

“I’m completely shocked,” Kavogo says. “I’m extremely sorry for him.”

Shah, Dev’s son-in-law, also seemed to view Harvard as a reprieve from the weighty duties of state facing him in Nepal.

“I think he was happy to be away from the whole royal thing in Nepal,” says David P. Kubiak, head of Kirkland’s senior common room in 1979.

Shah received the chance to study at Harvard through a Nieman fellowship, awarded because of his successful career in Nepalese journalism.

Shah, like Dev, used his time at Harvard to reflect on how best to serve his country.

“We had many conversations about Asia,” says Elizabeth Young, a friend who was writing a dissertation on economic development in Bali. “He was keenly concerned with how to be democratic, how to be modern, without being Western.”

“He personally straddled those [two] worlds very nicely,” Young adds.

—The Associated Press contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Eugenia B. Schraa can be reached at schraa@fas.harvard.edu.