Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  The capture of Nuwakot would remain an important moment for Prithvi. The town was always close to his heart. Indeed, Prithvi Narayan Shah’s troops didn’t arrive on the edge of the Kathmandu valley out of nowhere, like some foreign marauding horde. The cultural and political connections between the belligerents were deep and broad. The Malla dynasties had often drawn on various groups over the centuries to bolster their position at times of crisis. Ram Shah, for example, the reforming king of Gorkha, did a deal with Siddhi Narasimha Malla, the king of Patan who instituted the Kartik dances, to provide successors for each other in case they died childless. There had been Khas populations in the Kathmandu valley for centuries by Prithvi’s time; eventually the Khas language was included alongside Newari in court documents. And migration went both ways. Ram Shah had invited Newari merchants to set up shop in his kingdom to further trade. When Prithvi commissioned palace buildings in Nuwakot, they were built by Newari craftsmen in the Malla style. So while this was a struggle between competing states, at times it had the intimacy and bitterness of civil war.

  After the fall of Nuwakot, it took Prithvi another twenty-five years to realise his boyhood ambition and capture the Kathmandu valley. It’s tempting to ask what took him so long. Then again, considering the obstacles he faced, the more obvious question might be how he managed it at all. Others had tried before him and even succeeded temporarily: the Khasa Empire from western Nepal and then the first sultan of Bengal, the brilliant Muslim general Ilyas Shah, both occupied Kathmandu in the fourteenth century. But when Prithvi took the cities, he had laid the foundations over decades for something more permanent. The challenges he faced in doing so were as steep as the mountains around him, although he knew better than anyone how to take advantage of the terrain he had grown up in. Most importantly, he was limited in his resources. The mini-states of the Himalayan belt were not only constrained by geography, with hyper-local languages and cultures. They were also constrained economically. Indeed there were so many of these tiny kingdoms not because of political weakness but because of their limited economies. It was almost impossible for one of them to dominate another without becoming vulnerable themselves: there simply weren’t the resources available.

  To escape these limits, Prithvi had created a polity that can loosely be termed the agrarian-military complex. Ordinarily, a king would pay his generals in the rents he took from his people, taken in grain and produce; this was then shared among the troops. Prithvi Narayan paid his soldiers directly with assignments of land, making them personally invested in the success of their missions. (For Prithvi, ‘soldiers are the very marrow of the king’.) Like a shark, therefore, the project needed to keep moving forward, or at least have the prospect of doing so. That required ever more land and the best of it was in the terai, the plains below the mountains. In absorbing hill-states with access to the terai, he created enough wealth to reward his troops, a strategy that would, as we shall see, ultimately lead to conflict with the British. By and large, as Prithvi expanded his kingdom, he left indigenous leaders in place and either co-opted or replaced their Rajput elites; these were assessed on their performance. It was a lean and hungry system of government but one that relied on a determined and competent leader at the centre. As the Indian civil servant and historian Henry Thoby Prinsep suggested, the British had relied on a similarly acquisitive but light-touch approach, ‘which had gained for us the empire of Hindoostan’.

  Capturing Nuwakot plugged Prithvi into a rich stream of Himalayan trade, but this did not, as he had hoped, make him wealthy enough to purchase the weapons necessary to storm the Kathmandu valley. The Tibetans were used to dealing with the Malla kings of Kathmandu, not an aggressive rustic upstart who didn’t understand how things were done. Furthermore, Prithvi now ruled a confederation of small kingdoms acquired largely against their will; they had to be kept in line. Compared to Gorkha, the Malla kings were well funded and cosmopolitan, connected to a network of military support and allies, including the Mughals, from the plains. Autarky was not in their nature. Even though their trade with Tibet was interrupted, they still had a lot of capital assets. Much later, when the Gorkhali threat became critical, Jaya Prakash Malla, the only Malla king to understand the danger Kathmandu was facing, used the treasures of his city to pay for mercenaries to defend the kingdom.

  The strategy Prithvi adopted was one of patience and caution, one that focussed on encircling and then strangling the valley’s commerce, Kathmandu’s lifeblood, while its rulers, like frogs in cold water, remained unaware of his endgame. The Malla kings thought they knew the Gorkhalis: just one more Khas group the Malla cities had been using in their struggles with each other for generations. They failed to understand the scale of Prithvi’s ambition. One by one, over years, strategic points around the valley fell under Prithvi’s control. It was a strategy that bears a striking resemblance to that of the Maoist insurgents in the late twentieth century, a smouldering conflict with little actual fighting. War burned limited resources: men and treasure. Gorkha didn’t have enough of either.

  Having taken control of Tibetan trade routes, Prithvi tried to increase his kingdom’s wealth by capturing the source of Kathmandu’s wealth: minting coins for Tibet. The Tibetans were having none of it; they only wanted coin from the source they recognised: the Malla treasuries. So Prithvi concentrated instead on creating a state of mind in his opponents, one of division and weakening resolve, before striking with a single fatal blow. His lieutenants were trustworthy and experienced, his men battle-hardened and tough. The Malla kings of the Kathmandu valley seemed to Prithvi decadent and effete, more interested in theatre than war. In the Divya Upadesh, he wrote of how life in the city could do that to you: ‘This three-citied Nepal is a cold stone. It is great only in intrigue. With one who drinks water from cisterns, there is no wisdom; nor is there courage.’ All he had to do was wait and let them defeat themselves.

  Even then, Prithvi proved too hasty. When he did strike, thirteen years after taking Nuwakot, he discovered he had fatally underestimated the resolve of ordinary people to keep the Gorkhalis out of the Kathmandu valley. His target was the town of Kirtipur, which sits on the only significant hill wholly within the valley, overlooking the western approaches to its major cities. Taking these heights would be a major step in controlling the valley. In May 1757 he arrived at the village of Dahachok just below Chandragiri. It was a place he would later recommend as his capital, set apart, high above the intrigues and moral weakness of the valley. It was obvious to the Malla kings and their generals what would happen next. Prithvi’s trusted counsellor and general Kalu Pande was the most senior among several advisers who recommended caution: the Malla kingdoms seemed unusually united and the valley’s young men were well prepared to fight the Gorkhalis. Prithvi disagreed, arguing that the Malla forces would only grow stronger: they should attack now. He goaded Kalu Pande, rushing him into battle. Kalu lead twelve hundred Gorkhali troops toward Kirtipur, whose gates were closed to the invaders. The armies of the three cities, three thousand men in total, then attacked the Gorkhali forces from three sides, those from the city of Patan leading the charge. Kalu Pande was struck by an arrow and fell; his enemies leapt forward and cut off his head. The Gorkhalis around him, seeing their general killed, panicked. Prithvi himself barely escaped the battlefield, carried away in his palanquin to Nuwakot. Although their casualties had been far greater, the Malla kings were jubilant: they believed they had neutralised the threat of Prithvi Narayan Shah for good.

  Yet while the Gorkhalis had suffered a setback, and Prithvi had to endure the personal misfortune of losing his most trusted general, they rebuilt their strength, returning to their earlier strategy of isolating the valley while keeping the various kingdoms around Gorkha under control. In 1759, the heights of Shivapuri on the northern rim of the Kathmandu valley fell to the Gorkhalis. In 1762, five years after the disaster at Kirtipur, Prithvi’s troops easily took control of the main fort at Makwanpur, ruled by his wife’s family,
the Sen, which lay on Kathmandu’s trade route with India; another stronghold at Sindhuli to the east soon followed. This brought more land on the terai to reward his troops.

  Makwanpur had good relations with Mir Qasim Khan, nawab of Bengal, the viceroy of the Mughal emperor. Qasim’s relationship with the East India Company, which had put him in power, was at this time fracturing badly; he had as a consequence been reforming his army at his new capital in Bihar. From Qasim’s perspective, Makwanpur’s capture by Gorkhali troops was an opportunity to help an ally and test his troops against what he thought were easy prey. It was a fatal error. The Gorkhali army, battle-hardened after decades of conflict, thrashed Qasim’s soldiers and took their equipment: a clear signal to Prithvi’s neighbours that here was a power to be respected.

  Indeed, the world around the Himalaya had been changing dramatically in the years of Prithvi’s rule. In 1739, Nader Shah, the Persian military genius, following the familiar route of Central Asian migrants and invaders through the Hindu Kush, had destroyed a Mughal army vastly superior in numbers, fragmenting an empire now in its death throes. Across the subcontinent smaller kingdoms emerged from the Mughal shadow and new leaders profited from the changing political landscape, helping re-establish a sense of organised Hindu identity, notably with the rise of the Maratha confederacy. Bands of sannyasi, in this period more swords for hire than godly ascetics, roamed Bengal, turning to banditry whenever necessary. The French and British, at war in Europe, fought for control of each other’s trading interests. Robert Clive, an almost exact contemporary of Prithvi’s, had led the East India Company’s troops to victory at Plassey over the nawab of Bengal in 1757. When Prithvi started his campaign to conquer Kathmandu, the East India Company had been little more than a distant rumour. North of the Himalaya, meanwhile, the Manchu Qing Empire had established its influence in Tibet and Xinjiang. At the end of his life, Prithvi warned that ‘This country is like a gourd between two rocks. Maintain a treaty of friendship with the emperor of China. Keep also a treaty of friendship with the emperor of the southern sea [the East India Company]. He has taken the plains.’

  Boosted with the weaponry he had taken from Mir Qasim, Prithvi closed in on the Kathmandu valley. When Kirtipur fell at last, witnessed by Capuchin missionaries, the Gorkhalis punished at least some of its inhabitants for their defiance by cutting off their noses and lips. Some Nepali historians have disputed this, although Captain William Kirkpatrick encountered a few victims when he visited the valley three decades later. With his enemies at the gates, the raja of Kathmandu, Jaya Prakash Malla sent a desperate appeal to the East India Company’s nearest agent at Bettiah, asking for help. The British had been paying close attention to the gold coming out of the Kathmandu valley: this gold was, in fact, Tibetan, part of the coinage arrangement with the Malla dynasty, but the British didn’t know that. They were also interested in the magnificent stands of timber along their northern border and considered the cool hills of Nepal a possible outlet for British woollens, which weren’t much in demand on the hot plains of India. The Company also judged Gorkha to be a brake on trade and had sympathy for Jaya’s plight. So a substantial force was despatched to relieve Kathmandu under the command of a young captain called George Kinloch.

  Kinloch’s journal of this expedition languished half-forgotten in the papers of Robert Clive’s secretary Henry Strachey, grandfather of the Stracheys who explored Kailas, until its rediscovery by Nepali historian Yogesh Raj. The story it contains is like something from the darker reaches of a Joseph Conrad novel. The envoys Jaya Prakash sent warned there was no time for delay, so Kinloch set off in August 1767, during the monsoon. In those days the plains were thinly populated and the jungles of Nepal barely at all. There was ‘no trace of any living creature, except wild Elephants, Tigers and Bears which are here in large numbers’. Kinloch didn’t have a map and often wasn’t sure where he was. The mountains were like nothing that he’d seen before ‘altho’ I have cross’d the highest and wildest in the Highlands of Scotland’. The army’s artillery was moving too slowly in the difficult terrain so Kinloch went ahead with an advance party that managed to take the fort at Sindhuli despite resolute defence by no more than eighty Gorkhalis. Mr Logan, the expedition surgeon, led the charge, losing a finger in the process; the Gorkhalis, Kinloch wrote, ‘behaved like Brave and resolute Men’.

  At every turn he found himself blocked or thwarted. The grain merchant contracted to supply the troops disappeared for a week and the army became trapped in heavy rain, starving and desperate, reduced to digging up roots in the jungle. By mid October, Kinloch was delirious, most probably with malaria. ‘Sickness now rages and many die, so that my own Malady is heightened by the groans of many poor wretches around me.’ After two weeks without proper food, he awoke at two in the morning, disturbed by a ‘Very strange and sudden noise’. It was his sepoys, originally a Persian term, then used for Indian infantry serving in the Company’s forces, taking up their arms as one body and disappearing into the blackness. ‘It being the Dead of Night, and the matter carried this far with such secrecy, I had reason to apprehend the worst of Consequences and never doubted but it was general . . .’ At this point his journal ends, in mid sentence. Kinloch believed himself only two days from Kathmandu but there’s no way of knowing if he was right. He made it back to Patna, although we don’t know how, and died the following year of the illness he had acquired in the jungle, still arguing that the Company should try again.

  The consequences of this forgotten humiliation were significant. Had Kinloch succeeded in bringing artillery to the valley he might well have stopped Prithvi’s final victory. The Malla dynasties would have proved easier for the Company to deal with than the rugged opposition of the Gorkhalis, who now believed they had the measure of the British. Jaya Prakash himself died from a musket ball defending the durbar or palace, at Bhaktapur, where he had gone for protection after the city of Kathmandu fell. Patan too had fallen. Ranjit Malla, the last king of Bhaktapur, was sent into exile at Benares (Varanasi), supposedly composing a raga as he left the valley for the last time. ‘How,’ he asked, ‘did I fail to comprehend the conspiracy of evil which brought this devastation on me?’ The Shah dynasty took over the palaces of the Malla kings but Newari ateliers and artists found their new Gorkhali patrons not so interested in the politics of theatre. Prithvi, always the accountant, despised performance art as wasteful, warning against the corrupting influence of musicians from India. ‘In rooms lined with paintings, they forget themselves in melodies woven on the drum and sitar. There is great pleasure in these melodies. But it drains your wealth.’

  Having taken Kathmandu, Prithvi was content to let other generals continue the Gorkhali conquest of kingdoms to the east. His vakil, or envoys, were able to negotiate back the land-holdings Kinloch had snatched on the terai. Having been bitten once, the British weren’t going to make the same mistake again. Following a failed monsoon in 1769, north-eastern India was plunged into famine, thanks in part to punitive taxes and grain monopolies imposed by the East India Company. Warren Hastings, the new governor of Bengal, concluded in his report of 1772 that up to a third of the population had died: ten million people. Prithvi watched this from his cool, green valley high in the mountains and pondered where the ‘southern emperor’ would strike next. ‘He will realise that if Hindustan unites, it will be difficult, and so he will come seeking places for forts. Prepare forts, without burdening the people. Set traps in the trails. One day that force will come.’ That day was soon at hand.

  7

  The High Road to Tibet

  Tucked away in Britain’s Royal Collection is an unusual painting done in Calcutta, now Kolkata, in the late eighteenth century. It is the work of Tilly Kettle, the first well-known English portrait artist to travel to India, and shows Tibet’s Panchen Lama, second only to the Dalai Lama in the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, sitting cross-legged on a dais. On the left of the picture, standing near a window looking on, is a young Scotsman in
Bhutanese dress. Through the window is an idealised version of the Himalaya: the young man, we’re being told, has just arrived from the other side of these high mountains. Two attendants, one dressed as a monk, stand either side of the lama. Another figure bows slightly as he presents the Panchen Lama with a white ceremonial scarf, a kada, signifying purity and compassion. Seated under the window are two further local men, relaxed and informal, puffing on long-stemmed tobacco pipes, rather unlikely in a Tibetan monastery. But while much in this painting is invented or stylised, its significance is unmistakeable: it represents the first meeting between political Europe, in the form of a representative of the East India Company, and one of the most powerful figures in the spiritual and temporal world of Tibet. It was an encounter of genuine warmth and personal friendship, but it came at a pivotal moment in Himalayan history, and marked a shift that would lead inexorably, if not inevitably, towards the invasion and occupation of Tibet by Chinese forces in 1950.

  Tilly Kettle’s painting was presented to George III, although it’s unclear who did the presenting. It was probably not the Scotsman, whose name was George Bogle. At the time it was painted, most probably in 1775, Bogle was facing financial hardship, sending home as much money as he could to service his family’s debts. It’s more likely that Bogle’s patron Warren Hastings, the embattled first governor general of India, acquired the picture. It was useful propaganda in his campaign to wrest back control of the Company’s supreme council in Calcutta, snatched away from him with the passing of the Regulating Act of 1773: the British government’s attempt to get a grip of the management of the East India Company and its spiralling debts.