Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  Prithvi was born in 1723 in the hilltop village of Gorkha, around a hundred kilometres north-west of Kathmandu, in a quietly grand Newari-style house perched on a ridge whose backdrop is Manaslu, eighth highest mountain in the world, some fifty-five kilometres to the north. It feels a remote spot for a man who forged a nation. He was the tenth king in his line, ruler of Gorkha, a small mountain state among a clutch of small mountain states known as the Chaubisi rajya, the ‘twenty-four’ kingdoms: a loose confederation often squabbling with itself. Further west, towards the western border of modern Nepal was another grouping of these minuscule polities, known as the Baisi, or the ‘twenty-two’. About these we still know remarkably little, but this is where the modern state of Nepal’s story starts, in the eleventh century, centuries before the birth of Prithvi Narayan Shah, with the rise of a near-forgotten empire.

  Almost nothing was known about the Khasa kingdom before the twentieth century. It was understood that Gorkhali, or Khas kura, the language that became Nepali, arrived from the west, migrating with the Indo-Aryan people who spoke it. Chroniclers in Kathmandu also recorded, in the thirteenth century, how Khas-speaking raiders had suddenly appeared from the same direction. Even now, their origins aren’t certain, but the Khas are particularly associated with Garhwal and Kumaon, Indian districts to the west of the modern border with western Nepal. For centuries they had been migrating east through the middle hills of the Himalaya, earning themselves the name parbatiya, meaning mountain dwellers. By the end of the first millennium they had reached the Karnali watershed in what is now Nepal and established a kingdom. It was here in 1956, at a village called Dullu, that Giuseppe Tucci, the Italian anthropologist who had recorded the remains of the Guge kingdom just to the north in Tibet, found ancient inscriptions they had left, half-buried in the ground. Local people had no idea where they had come from or what they meant. Brushing dirt from the lettering, Tucci was able to read them. ‘Kings until now unknown,’ he wrote, ‘sang to us from the stones in the Sanskrit tongue the glories of their ancestors and their own deeds.’

  What Tucci had found were the remnants of a highly decentralised polity often referred to as the Khasa Empire and to Tibetans as Yatse. (It’s also known as the Malla kingdom, but to avoid confusion with the unrelated Malla dynasty in Kathmandu we’ll ignore that.) Local chieftains were in day-to-day control but paid tribute to a dynasty founded by a king called Nagadeva. This lineage, at the zenith of its power, controlled a vast area, including Garhwal and Kumaon, and as far east as Gorkha. It was from the latter, under the leadership of a chieftain named Jitarimalla, that they attacked Kathmandu. The kings were Buddhist at the start, but as he recorded their religious architecture Tucci realised this culture was not Tibetan but a distant relic of the long-dead Mauryan Empire. If their rulers were Buddhist, the ordinary Khas had a more egalitarian, animist spiritual framework. Ancient shamanistic rites associated with the Khas divinity Masto are still practised in western Nepal.

  Early in their history, the Khasa kings moved up the Karnali valley into western Tibet, attracted by its gold mines and the wool and salt trade. As the Guge kingdom there weakened in the twelfth century, raided by Turkic tribesmen from Central Asia, it also came under Khas control. To boost trade, the Khas rulers invested in irrigation systems to increase rice yields and pack-animal roads to boost trans-Himalayan trade along the uttar pata, the northern route linking Nepal and western Tibet to the Silk Roads. For a time they had their capital up on the plateau at Purang, called Taklakot in Nepali, at an altitude of well over four thousand metres. That proved too high and dusty for southerners. So the main capital was shifted to the Sinja valley, north-west of Jumla. (The early Nepali language is sometimes called Sinjali.) This region was the focus for much of the Khas dynasty’s architectural effort. Recent excavations have uncovered the remains of palaces and temples, as well as the capital’s ancient settlement. Archaeologists have also found underground pipes, testament to the kingdom’s technological skill in irrigation. Growing rice was central to their success and their identity. How indigenous groups, often Tibeto-Burmese in origin, regarded this influx of Khas migrants is largely conjecture, but conflict wasn’t inevitable. These existing groups often relied on shifting cultivation and herding to survive; it’s likely the Khas exploited new ecological niches rather than displacing established populations. The consequence was that ethnic groups with very different origins became enmeshed.

  By the end of the fourteenth century, the Khas were well established in Nepal but their empire was in fast decline. Nagadeva’s dynasty ended, replaced by the family of their chief ministers. The Tibetan provinces were lost. What was left fractured, with new kingdoms emerging in Garhwal and Kumaon. The region’s progress subsided, the stone steles and monuments the Khasa kings had built were half-forgotten in the patchwork of isolated and impoverished statelets: the Baisi, or ‘twenty-two’, and Chaubisi rajya, the ‘twenty-four kingdoms’, where the Shah dynasty would arise.

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  From the start of the thirteenth century, when the Muslim Delhi Sultanate conquered India, to the sixteenth century and the arrival of the Mughals, Hindu warrior clans known as Rajputs migrated, swords for hire, on the lookout for new opportunities. The Himalaya attracted its share of this migration. Sometimes the new arrivals were escaping Muslim control; often they were looking for new frontiers in the mountains to escape the more congested plains. Rajputs were from the Hindu kshatriya or warrior caste, men from the plains who regarded themselves as nature’s rulers and looked down on the Khas parbatiya, the hill-men. They brought with them their religion, a more hierarchical Brahmanic Hinduism that was at odds with the looser, more shamanistic version practised by Khas and indigenous groups, like the Magars and Gurungs around Prithvi’s hometown of Gorkha.

  As long as their own practice wasn’t contradicted, ordinary people were happy. On the other hand, local Khas chiefs and landowners were just as happy to adopt this more rigorous version of Hinduism: it gave them a better structure with which to secure their own personal power. The Khas elite acquired the caste of kshatriya themselves, Chhetri in Nepali, regarding themselves as ‘twice-born’, upper-caste Hindus, a process legitimised by Brahmin priests who in the process became society’s regulators. As a ruler, the quality of your priest’s learning was a reflection of your kingdom’s status; Khas priests were widely regarded as ignorant and poorly educated: only Indian gurus would do.

  The Scottish surgeon Francis Buchanan-Hamilton was in 1802 part of a diplomatic mission to Kathmandu, a posting he loathed, judging Nepalis ‘such cursed liars’. Despite the prejudice, his account remains one of the most heavily quoted sources on the emergence of the modern state of Nepal. He saw clearly how its rulers were deepening the role of caste religion.

  The ignorance of the Parbutty [parbatiya] Bramins, and their neglect of the rules of the sacred order in eating unclean things, seem early to have disgusted the Gorca [Gorkha] Rajas, who have long employed two families of Canogia [Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh] Brahmins to act as hereditary Gurus . . . When the power of Prithi Narain [Prithvi Narayan] had extended to Nepal [meaning the Kathmandu valley], he invited from Tiruhut [Tirhut, south of Kathmandu] a hundred families of pure Brahmins, and settled on them lands of considerable value.

  This was the process of Nepal’s intense socio-religious stratification. For a while, the boundaries remained fluid between Chhetri and indigenous groups. But in the nineteenth century, long after Prithvi Narayan Shah’s reign, this process hardened, became codified and deeply oppressive, condemning large parts of Nepal’s population to inescapable poverty, a wellspring for discontent that finally erupted in the late twentieth century.

  We tend to see cultures as accreting, like sedimentary rocks, but in reality they metamorphose, under pressure to conform to the demands of the world around them. This is what happened to the Shahs, a family that were rising in power at this time and from which Prithvi would emerge. The dynasty’s origins are hazy, emerging from a complica
ted ethnic and religious world that was up for grabs: the dynasty’s founding legends are designed to make the family more appetising, sprinkle some Rajput spice over Prithvi’s lineage and add the flavours of aristocracy. For his part, Hamilton dismissed them as Magars, indigenous hill-dwellers speaking not Khas but their own Tibeto-Burmese language, as though there was something wrong with that.

  Besides the issue of rewriting its origins, the Shah story is also one of younger sons: less entitled, more ambitious. Chronicles of their dynasty record the bartabhanda, the taking of the sacred Brahmin threads, of two Shah brothers, and of the younger becoming ruler of the settlement of Nuwakot, on the banks of the Trisuli river. This strategic town sits on the other side of the mountain ridge that encircles Kathmandu. A few generations later, a younger son from this Shah lineage returned west at the invitation of the people of Lamjung to become their king. A younger son from this new lineage, Drubya Shah, used his older brother’s men to take over the neighbouring village of Gorkha. The older brother, lord of Lamjung, expected the prize to be handed over: it wasn’t. Thus began a feud between the two kingdoms that Prithvi Narayan would still be fighting generations later.

  The kingdom of Gorkha under its new Shah rulers filled a bigger space than its territory, which barely stretched between the Marsyangdi and Trisuli rivers, an area smaller than Rhode Island or Kent. This was in large part because of an early seventeenth-century king called Ram Shah. He was a bullish leader, who acquired new territories and led raids into Tibet. But he is best remembered now for a series of administrative reforms that were so practically useful that his neighbours soon adopted them. Some were superficially mundane but significant in their impact: standardising weights and measures for example, of benefit to commerce and those most vulnerable to being short-changed. He boosted trade with his neighbours and bore down on the more predatory behaviour of money and commodity lenders, fixing interest rates. He valued environmental management too, ordering tree planting to secure a year-round water supply, prevent landslides and offer shade to the poor as they walked along the trails. He expedited justice and ruled that only the person who committed a crime should be punished, not the whole family. These judicial reforms in particular mean his name still has currency; there is a Nepali proverb that originated with Ram Shah: nyaya napaya Gorkha janu; if you want justice, go to Gorkha. In return for this levelling of the playing field, the elite families that supported him were entrenched in their positions of privilege.

  Statecraft was a hallmark of Prithvi’s reign as well, captured in his memoir, the Divya Upadesh, among the most important political statements in the history of modern Nepal. Another was failure: in particular the failure of his father Nara Bhupal to achieve his ambition of capturing the town of Nuwakot, recently brought under the control of the city of Kathmandu. Take Nuwakot, strategically positioned on one of two trade routes between the valley and Tibet, and an invader would open the way to conquering the valley itself. Nara Bhupal underestimated the task. Nuwakot was on the far bank of the Trisuli river and protected by a fort, kot being a fortified place in Nepali. When his favoured general judged the challenge too great for the limited Gorkhali force, Nara Bhupal replaced him with a Brahmin called Maheshwar Pant and, as his deputy, a Magar, Jayanta Rana. In 1737, when Prithvi was fourteen years old, these two led the attack on Nuwakot but were beaten back. Nara Bhupal was devastated at the defeat and withdrew from his kingdom’s affairs.

  His wife Chandraprabha was made of sterner stuff. Although not Prithvi’s mother, she began instructing the boy in his responsibilities, preparing him to rule. Prithvi married the first of his wives, the daughter of the king of the powerful Sen dynasty of nearby Makwanpur, a strategic alliance Nara Bhupal had brokered but which after the defeat at Nuwakot no longer interested him. A story from this wedding, well sourced, tells how Prithvi demanded he be allowed to take his bride Hemkarna straight home to Gorkha, as was the Gorkhali custom. The bride’s family demanded to keep her, as was theirs. After an acrimonious dispute, with Prithvi threatening to cut his way out with his sword, the young prince was forced to leave without her. Here was a man quick to temper: advisers told him he had ‘the voice to frighten elephants’. On the way home, he got his first sight of the Kathmandu valley, at Chandragiri where his golden statue now stands. His retinue pointed out its three cities: Bhaktapur, Patan and Kathmandu.

  The thought came to my heart that if I might be king of these three cities, why, let it be so. At this same time these two astrologers said to me, ‘O King, your heart is melting with desire.’ I was struck with wonder. How did they know my inmost thoughts and so speak to me? ‘At the moment your gaze rested on Nepal you stroked your moustache and in your heart you longed to be king of Nepal, as it seemed to us.’

  Experiencing for the first time the splendour of the three cities, comparing this to his own austere home at Gorkha and smarting at the humiliation of his father, it’s hardly surprising that when Prithvi became king in 1742 at the age of nineteen, his first thought was to attack Nuwakot. Nation building was far from his thoughts in those days: he wanted to avenge a humiliation and take the valley’s wealth. When his more cautious Magar lieutenant called a halt, he turned to his father’s general Maheshwar Pant who crossed the Trisuli and launched an attack uphill towards the fort. The valley’s Malla kings were for once united and well prepared: the Gorkhali troops were easily repulsed and had to burn the bridge as they retreated across the Trisuli to escape being destroyed. This antagonised his Magar subjects, who pointed out that all their replacement had managed to do was ‘dry up a golden river’, meaning set fire to the Trisuli bridge. ‘Thereafter,’ as the Nepali historian Mahesh Chandra Regmi put it, ‘Prithvi Narayan Shah began to act prudently.’ Despite his antipathy towards the parbatiya, the Khas hill-men of Nepal, Francis Buchanan-Hamilton had a grudging respect for Prithvi Narayan, ‘a man of sound judgement, and great enterprise’, a man who understood how to use the factionalism of the Kathmandu valley to his advantage. ‘Sometimes by force, but oftener by fraud and perfidy, he subjected most of the country to an authority, which he maintained by the terror of his cruelty.’

  This reputation for cruelty is contentious. Hamilton had reason to discredit him, beyond the racial prejudices of his time; Prithvi had interrupted the business of his employer, the East India Company, a corporation that readily suspended its humanity in pursuit of profit. Nepali historians, notably the father of modern Nepali history Baburam Acharya, defended Prithvi’s excesses as necessary to maintain unity in the face of external threats, particularly the British, although when Prithvi came to power the British were barely on the horizon as an influence on the Himalayan region. A famous early example of someone who suffered ‘the terror of his cruelty’ was the former Gorkha general Jayant Rana, who had fled to Kathmandu after the first attempt to take Nuwakot. Before attacking the town again, Prithvi tried to lure his father’s general back to the Gorkha side: Jayant was a valuable asset to Prithvi’s enemies, Kathmandu’s Malla kings, for his knowledge of Gorkha’s martial habits. Jayant told Prithvi he would remain ‘true to his salt’, meaning his Kathmandu employer, and ‘would be true to this until death’. The challenge was accepted. When eventually Nuwakot fell to Prithvi in 1744, Jayant was flayed alive. Despite this, in the context of his day, Prithvi’s recorded acts of violence, with rare and famous exceptions like this, seem typical.

  If he could be impetuous when angry, and publicly humiliate his rivals, Prithvi was more often shrewd and patient. What Hamilton read as ‘perfidy’ was simply tactical awareness: Prithvi knew where he was weak and how to use the advantages of the country. The failure at Nuwakot had shown him the value of firearms, so he went down to the plains and got firearms. He had his men trained in their use and maintenance, although because procuring ammunition and gunpowder was difficult, for both sides, they were used sparingly. Most fighting was done hand to hand, with khukuris, swords and spears. Throughout his reign, and particularly in the Divya Upadesh, Prithvi s
tressed the virtues of autarky, the reliance of the state on its own resources. When appointing key advisors he also exploited the political complexities of the elite families around him. He made the superbly capable Kalu Pande his kazi, or chief minister, and then had Pande’s daughter marry into the rival Basnyet clan. ‘I made a Pande the shield,’ he boasted in his memoir, meaning the minister in charge of diplomacy, ‘and a Basnyet the sword.’

  Having reorganised his army and equipped himself with better counsel, Prithvi then shored up his rear flank. He signed treaties with Lamjung to halt their old feud and left troops under the command of trusted lieutenants to defend Gorkha from any threat of rebellion from the Chaubisi, should they take advantage while he was busy elsewhere. He made diplomatic overtures to the king of Bhaktapur, splitting the unity that had thwarted him before. Then he embarked on the Shah family’s third attempt to take Nuwakot in seven years. Gorkha’s tactics had so far proved inept, so Prithvi changed those too. Head-on assaults were foolish bravado: insurgency and tactical nous suited the country far better. Prithvi would make an art form of disinformation, of messing with his enemies’ minds. In September 1744, when he moved on Nuwakot, his men went as farmers with the subterfuge of digging an irrigation-channel on Gorkha’s side of the Trisuli river. Nuwakot’s defenders were not expecting an attack during the tail of monsoon season.

  With his men in place, Prithvi made his offer to the defiant Jayant Rana, who promptly rushed to Kathmandu for more troops, leaving his son Shankha Mani in charge. The valley was celebrating one of its main festivals, Indra Jatra, and the reaction was slow and insufficient. Prithvi divided his forces, sending Kalu Pande north to cross the Trisuli upstream of Nuwakot out of sight of the defenders to attack from the north-east, from high ground. The Newari troops, expecting an attack from the south, were disoriented and quickly routed. Shankha Mani exhorted his men to fight and moved to challenge Prithvi’s younger brother Dal Mardan Shah, who, as the story goes, cut him down. Jayant Rana was at Belkot on the road back to Nuwakot when the news reached him and he prepared to counterattack. Prithvi knew that Nuwakot would not be safe with Jayant’s large force positioned above the Trisuli river so he attacked at once, with substantial casualties on both sides, capturing Belkot as well as Nuwakot and fulfilling his promise to punish Jayant Rana.