Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  And yet.

  A mile below lay the far-famed valley like a placid green lake, lapping at the bases of the mountains. Its twin holy rivers meandered through farmlands to converge in the center, where temples and pagodas rose high and stately from an upwelling clamor of redbrick tenements and serpentine bazaars. Atop a forested hill at the city’s edge, the all-seeing eyes of Buddha gazed out from the gilded spire surmounting the hemisphere of an enormous stupa, the source of John Garstin’s inspiration for the folly of the Golghar. At its base gleamed a monumental vajra, the thunderbolt that destroys all ignorance.

  And gleaming, too, rising with neo-Gothic grandeur out of geometric garden parks in every district of the city, were the palaces.

  Not two or three or five or ten, but dozens.

  At that distance, all that distinguished them from their models in the ancien régime were roofs of corrugated iron. With their French windows and white plastered facades, they might have been the châteaux of a lost tribe of Bourbons, as fertile as they were forgotten.

  There was even a replica Versailles.

  I looked for a long time. Then I noticed the waterlogged blossoms on the glossy boughs that framed the view.

  The forest of Chandragiri was a rhododendron forest.

  22

  * * *

  A Maharaja

  NIGEL’S FORAY INTO the Terai at the beginning of 1850 was the first of several, and he later wrote admiringly and enthusiastically about the jungle’s flora, its solitude, and the “singular, deliquescent light” beneath its canopy. No record survives, though, of his impressions of the road to Kathmandu on that early, fraught journey with S—— . From accounts by the few Europeans who preceded them, we learn mostly of the obstacles that the arduous track placed in their way. They portrayed the airy precipice and the dark defile in the resolute language of conquest, pushing and breaching and surmounting. The sole exception was the only woman among them, Honoria Lawrence. Enraptured by “the beautiful scenery and vegetation,” Henry’s wife scarcely mentioned the difficulties. Even those she described were presented in vignettes that made little of the passage but much of the forbidden land itself, in all its strange loveliness:

  This difficult path, a mere foot-track, over ascents and descents, and along the beds of torrents, is the one mode of access to Nepaul, the only Pass entering their country which the jealousy of the Nepaulese has hitherto allowed strangers to see; and this one road is rendered apparently as difficult as possible to deter travellers. “Where the tree falleth there it lieth.” In numberless places large trees had fallen across the path, and the path forthwith wound round them. Some had lain thus undisturbed till perfectly decayed, retaining the original form of the trunk, but transmuted into fine mould. Covered with sward they looked like gigantic graves.

  It was not the picturesque, however, that struck Mrs. Lawrence when she first gazed upon Kathmandu Valley from Chandragiri. “It was unlike anything I ever saw,” she wrote, “more like an artificial model than any actual scenery, and suggested a crowd of new and strange ideas.”

  How did they ever get there?

  How should they ever get away?

  How could that “emerald, set in the ring of the hills,” have been first discovered and inhabited?

  “And being known at all, how comes it to be so little known?”

  On that point, at least, she could turn to her husband for enlightenment. Save for the feudal theocracy of neighboring Tibet, no land in all the world was more xenophobic than Nepal. (Another eighty years would pass before the first white woman reached Lhasa, disguised as a Tibetan beggar.) Its rulers enforced its isolation the same way they wielded their power: with a vengeance. Nepal’s history as a kingdom was a short one, no longer than a human lifespan. But it was a history so besmirched by bloodshed that it was cause for reproach even by the standard of savagery then prevailing at the courts of Central Asia.

  The die was cast from the beginning. In 1768, Prithvi Narayan Shah set out from his tiny principality of Gorkha to conquer the city-states of the Nepal Valley, thirty-five miles to the east. No one expected him to succeed—least of all the Malla kings of Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur, each of whose domains was larger, richer, and more powerful than Gorkha. But the cities of the valley had long located their only conceivable enemies on the plain of India and the high plateau of Tibet. To keep them out, they relied on the formidable natural barriers of the Terai and the Great Himalaya Range. Their local defenses were virtually nonexistent, their people—artisans, merchants, and traders—no match for the cutlass-wielding hillmen under Prithvi Narayan Shah.

  “The conquest of Nepal by the Gurkha tribes was marked by revolting cruelty whenever opposition was encountered,” wrote the Edwardian historian Frederick P. Gibbon, and the more valiant the opposition, the more barbaric the consequences for those who survived. Upon the surrender of Kirtipur, whose defenders had inflicted two humiliating defeats on the invaders before laying down their arms, Prithvi Narayan ordered his troops to cut off the noses and lips of every male inhabitant. The weight of these grisly trophies, according to a Jesuit who was present when they were presented to the prince of Gorkha, amounted to no less than eighty pounds. When Nigel Halleck arrived in the kingdom in 1850, there were still men alive whose skull-like faces bore witness to the brutality of its founding father.

  At Kathmandu’s Hanuman Dhoka Palace, on September 26, 1768, Prithvi Narayan Shah declared himself an incarnation of Lord Vishnu and placed a jeweled crown adorned with the three-foot plume of a bird of paradise on his head. His absolute, unchallenged rule as sovereign lasted until his death in 1775. After that, wrote Gibbon, “the court of that country was perhaps the most intriguing and treacherous in Asia. The only hope of retaining power appeared to lie in the destruction of all possible rivals, and no other method of rising to, or retaining, office seemed ever to enter the minds of the ambitious.”

  Infant kings. Scheming regents. Abdications, restorations. And, time and again, massacres. The murder of the third Shah king by his stepbrother, in 1806, provided a pretext for his prime minister, Bhimsen Thapa, to round up ninety-three nobles and army officers on charges of conspiring in the killing. All were executed, after which the senior queen and fifteen reputed mistresses of the late king were burned alive on funeral pyres. Shortly afterwards, Thapa, acting in the name of the three-year-old king, Rajendra Bikram Shah, persuaded tribal chiefs to march on the fertile lowlands of the Gangetic Plain, promising each a share of the substantial tax revenue that would flow into the Nepalese treasury after usurping the British. Defeat, he assured them, was impossible: “Our hills and fastness are formed by the hand of God, and are impregnable.”

  Thapa overplayed his own hand, but only just. The military outcome of the border dispute remembered grandly as the Anglo-Nepalese War was a stalemate. It was a stalemate, however, between twelve thousand irregulars and a disciplined force of thirty thousand equipped with far more modern weapons, and Calcutta took note. The Gurkhas—who were actually drawn from several tribes in the Himalayan foothills, with disparate languages and traditions—clearly were a “martial race,” a distinction previously bestowed by the Company upon the Sikhs of the Punjab and the Pashtuns of the North-West Frontier.

  The British could hardly permit the Nepalese incursions to pass unchallenged, but they were far from sanguine about their ability to capture and hold the remote strongholds of Kathmandu Valley. Accordingly, they drafted a treaty that preserved Nepal as an independent buffer between India and China but forced the Nepalese to cede to British India a third of the kingdom’s territory—some of which proved so difficult to govern that it was returned to Nepal within months. They also negotiated the employment for mercenary service of five thousand Gurkha soldiers, and the acceptance of a British resident at Kathmandu.

  Bhimsen Thapa ruled Nepal as a despot for a generation, torturing and beheading opponents real and imagined and keeping Rajendra under house arrest. The king got his revenge in 1837 by di
smissing Bhimsen, who was charged with poisoning a young prince and imprisoned soon afterwards; he committed suicide behind bars two years later. His successor as prime minister launched a short-lived occupation of British territory and was sacked himself under pressure from Calcutta.

  By the time Henry Lawrence arrived in 1843 to take up his duties as resident, a pro-British nobleman named Fateh Jang Chautaria was in nominal charge as prime minister. But neither he nor the king was actually calling the shots. Rajendra, confronted after the death of his senior queen with the conflicting ambitions of his junior queen, Lakshmi Devi, and his son, Crown Prince Surendra, had issued a royal proclamation that assigned all his powers and prerogatives to Lakshmi Devi. Naturally enough, she wanted to depose Surendra and proclaim her own son the heir apparent. When Chautaria balked at changing the order of succession, she dismissed his government and nominated Mathabar Singh Thapa, brother of the late Bhimsen, as prime minister.

  Upon taking office, Mathabar commenced a reign of terror, torturing and executing courtiers and army officers he believed responsible for his brother’s imprisonment. Stealing a page from Prithvi Narayan Shah, he had one nobleman’s lips and nose cut off on charges of giving false evidence. The queen watched his ruthlessness with approval, confident he would obey her orders to depose the teenaged crown prince at a suitable time.

  Mathabar decided instead to serve his own ambitions. He wanted the king to abdicate so he might rule freely himself in the name of Crown Prince Surendra, just as Bhimsen had ruled in the name of Rajendra. From that point on, wrote Henry Lawrence, “The royal authority of Nepal . . . was shared by Mr. Nepal, Mrs. Nepal, and Master Nepal.”

  But it was Nephew Nepal who waited in the wings, intent on usurping them all. Jang Bahadur Kunwar was an army officer who had impressed the Lawrences with his solicitude for Honoria while leading the official party that escorted her to Kathmandu. He owed the assignment to his uncle Mathabar, and it was to Jang Bahadur that Mathabar turned again as the most trustworthy person he could think of after deciding to support the legitimate heir to the throne. Conscious that the average life expectancy of a Nepalese prince of the blood royal could be counted on the fingers of his hands, Mathabar appointed his nephew to serve as Surendra’s personal bodyguard. Then he secretly urged the crown prince to challenge his father to step aside in his favor.

  When the king refused, Surendra, with encouragement from Mathabar, announced his intention to go to Benares, smear his body with ashes, and live as a sadhu on the bank of the Ganges. Accompanied by three regiments of the army as an escort, he left Kathmandu for the Indian frontier.

  Crossing the border with such a heavy escort, Mathabar advised the king, was asking for trouble. The prince was sure to be detained by the British government. At Mathabar’s request, both the king and the queen set out to intervene. Mathabar followed with a regiment under his personal command. On November 25, 1844, encamped at the edge of the Terai, the king put his hand and seal to a document that revoked the transfer of his sovereign powers to the queen and assigned them instead to the crown prince. On Mathabar’s orders, eighteen army officers who advised the king against issuing the proclamation were executed on the spot.

  After a month of increasingly erratic and sadistic behavior by Surendra—he had a penchant for ordering young maidens thrown into wells—the king changed his mind and revoked the edict. Henceforth, he vowed, he would be the only ruler; no one would be placed in the position anymore of receiving conflicting orders from three different authorities. Lakshmi Devi, for her part, pressed the prime minister to fulfill his promise to declare Surendra’s stepbrother the crown prince. Mathabar put her off, inflaming her suspicions further by raising three new army battalions in a bid to consolidate his power.

  By this time Jang Bahadur had been transferred to the king’s bodyguard, where he realized that the real power of the state remained in the hands of the queen, whatever Rajendra said publicly. And he could not help noticing that even Lakshmi Devi’s lover, an army commander named Gagan Singh, exercised more authority than the prime minister.

  Jang Bahadur, no less ambitious than his uncle, proved himself even more ruthless. By one account, he arranged to make Gagan Singh’s acquaintance by first encouraging his brother in a romantic liaison with the commander’s daughter. Once the introduction was made, he embarked on a successful campaign to ingratiate himself with Gagan Singh, who in turn introduced him to the queen. No proof exists that the three of them proceeded to plot Mathabar’s assassination, which took place on May 17, 1845. But Nepalese historians agree that after the prime minister was summoned to the royal palace that evening, on the pretext that the queen had suddenly fallen ill, he was executed on her orders by a shot in the head from behind, fired at point-blank range by his nephew Jang Bahadur.

  The next morning, Rajendra announced that he himself had executed Mathabar as a traitor. (Two years later, in a deposition addressed to the Government of India, he admitted that Jang Bahadur was responsible.) Then, in a show of independence that probably stemmed more from a cuckold’s resentment than anything else, he defied the queen’s wishes and refused to make Gagan Singh prime minister. Instead, both Gagan Singh and Jang Bahadur were promoted to the rank of general.

  For the next year and a half, Jang Bahadur bided his time and plotted Gagan Singh’s assassination. Upon learning of her lover’s murder on the evening of September 14, 1847, the enraged Lakshmi Devi ordered the royal buglers to sound the call that summoned all civil officials and military officers to the palace courtyard. Once they had gathered, Jang Bahadur instigated their wholesale slaughter, on the pretext of protecting the queen and with the connivance of his brothers, assorted nephews, and trusted friends. As the queen looked on from a palace balcony, fifty-five unarmed nobles and army officers were slain so brutally that their blood flooded the gutters of the royal compound all night long, while bold packs of jackals howled beneath its walls.

  The following afternoon, Queen Lakshmi Devi appointed Jang Bahadur supreme commander and prime minister of Nepal. Even as vultures wheeled slowly over the royal palace, temple bells rang out across Kathmandu, and an artillery battery of nineteen guns fired a feu de joie in honor of the new prime minister. But in two weeks’ time the queen herself was plotting against Jang Bahadur. Like his uncle before him, he had promised to change the order of succession in favor of her son. Instead he posted a company of armed guards drawn from his own loyal regiments to protect the crown prince. After assuring Surendra’s safety, he informed the queen that he could not support the disinheritance of the eldest prince. It was, he wrote primly, a matter of conscience. She then met with a group of officers hostile to Jang Bahadur and ordered them to kill him immediately.

  That he learned of their plan to trap him in the palace garden was probably inevitable. Jang Bahadur, unbeknownst to the queen, had long enjoyed an ongoing affair with one of her maids, Putali Nani, who acted in concert with the palace priest to pass him urgent secret messages about what she saw and heard in the royal apartments. In the event, it was the conspirators who were trapped at the appointed hour in the garden, and twenty-three were executed there, in the second palace massacre in less than a month.

  Afterwards, at an extraordinary meeting of the state council called by Jang Bahadur, the queen was formally accused of plotting to kill the crown prince and the prime minister. The surviving leaders of the kingdom’s nobility, surrounded by heavily armed men charged with “protecting” them, convicted her of the charges. A proclamation issued in the name of King Rajendra stripped Lakshmi Devi of all royal powers, and on November 23 the royal couple departed for exile in Benares. In the absence of the king—who would spend the rest of his life under house arrest—Crown Prince Surendra became regent.

  Jang Bahadur was twenty-nine years old. In one of his first acts after attaining absolute power and proclaiming himself maharaja, he installed the royal chambermaid Putali Nani in his own palace at Thapathali, declared her his wife, and honored her with
the title of maharani. The son she bore him was ultimately made a general, and admitted to the roll of succession in the line of hereditary prime ministers who would rule Nepal for more than a hundred years, until the restoration of the Shah monarchy.

  It was, perhaps, a sentimental gesture. But only in part. As much as Henry Lawrence deplored Jang Bahadur’s lack of moral compass, he judged him “a man of exceptional intelligence,” one who read almost instantly the lay of the land when it came to his own self-interest. It was the same intelligence—and self-interest—that assured Nigel Halleck and his Afghan companion of a milder greeting than a rain of poisoned arrows when they reached the strategic fort of Sisaghari.

  We cannot be certain that Henry Lawrence was the author of the letter of introduction to Jang Bahadur that S—— presented to the commander there, though an aside in another letter written by Nigel suggests that he was. What is clear is that the two men were permitted to continue on their way, and that Jang Bahadur welcomed them with open arms. Just prior to their arrival, he had adopted the honorific surname Rana, which meant “brave with the sword of war.” He was already contemplating the building spree that would raise, in all their gleaming dozens, what came to be known as “Rana palaces.” And he shrewdly foresaw that the Englishman and the Afghan might both prove useful in making it come to pass.

  23

  * * *

  Kathmandu

  1975

  I SPENT MY FIRST six weeks in Kathmandu learning to speak Nepali. I lived in the neighboring city of Lalitpur with a Nepalese family and commuted by bicycle every day to join my college classmates for five hours of intensive language lessons. Coming and going, I rode past several of the palaces I had glimpsed from Chandragiri, including Singha Durbar, the replica Versailles. Up close, their dilapidation threatened to eclipse their grandeur. Most, I learned, remained in the hands of the Rana family, who no longer ran the country but continued to exert their influence at the highest levels. Queen Aishwarya herself was a Rana. But when I tried to find out if one of them might once have housed a Victorian gentleman by the name of Halleck, I received the same blank look wherever I asked—the British Council, the American Library, Tribhuvan University—followed by the same succinct suggestion: