6 The Rise of Gorkha

6

 

The Rise of Gorkha

 

If you want to tune in to the mood of a nation, look to its statues. For example, in March 2015 students launched a successful campaign to remove the 1934 bronze of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town, a campaign that spread to universities around the world, including Rhodes’ alma mater, Oxford. In the summer of 2017, a white-supremacist rally marched through the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting against the removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee. One of them drove his car at speed into a group of counter-protestors, killing the 32-year-old anti-racism activist Heather Heyer. In India, in early 2018, prime minister Narendra Modi appealed for calm after a flurry of statue vandalism. An image of Vladimir Lenin, widely admired among Indian communists, was destroyed in the north-eastern state of Tripura. In retaliation a bust of the famous Hindu nationalist Syama Prasad Mukherjee was destroyed in the communist stronghold of Kolkata.

The infant republic of Nepal had its own statue moment in September

2017, although in this case it was a statue going up, not coming down, that prompted debate. With great fanfare, Bidya Devi Bhandari, modern Nepal’s second ever president and the first woman to hold the post, unveiled a golden statue of Prithvi Narayan Shah, the founder of the modern state of Nepal. And yet, this took place less than a decade after the new republic got rid of the last Shah king, Gyanendra, thus terminating the dynasty that had sat on the throne for two hundred and fifty years. Ten years earlier, as the people struggled to drag democracy out from under Gyanendra’s autocratic weight, Maoist cadres from the Young Communist League and other left-wing groups had got to work, systematically smashing up statues of kings. One activist boasted that ‘the vestiges of the Shah kings are being removed as the country is heading toward a republic’. It seemed then that monarchy would have no place whatsoever in the new Nepal.

Those intent on erasing the past didn’t discriminate: all the recent

members of the Shah dynasty suffered, irrespective of reputation. Mahendra, another autocrat, crowned in 1955, was considerably less popular than his father Tribhuvan, who had returned the family to power in 1951 after a century in which the Shah kings were mere figureheads. Nepal’s leading university and national airport are still named after Tribhuvan: he had steered the country away from oppression and towards the light. It made little difference: images of both father and son were destroyed. Mahendra was the glowering type, inscrutable in his trademark dark glasses. In 1960, shortly after the UK government made him a British army field marshal, he threw Nepal’s first democratically elected prime minister into jail. Mahendra’s son Birendra, who inherited the throne in 1972, seemed milder but it still took almost two more decades before democracy was restored. In 2001, in the middle of the Maoist civil war, the crown prince Dipendra, drunk, stoned and angry, murdered his father and mother and seven other members of the royal family before turning the gun on himself. The crown went to Birendra’s widely disliked brother Gyanendra and five years later the Shahs were out.

Maoist cadres didn’t stop their destruction at Nepal’s more recent kings.

They also targeted Nepal’s founding father Prithvi Narayan Shah, who completed his conquest of the Kathmandu valley in 1769, bringing the Malla era, with all its dances and temple building, to a close. In 2003, the Maoists blew up a statue of Prithvi at Nuwakot: a town of totemic importance in his story and the place of his death in 1775. In 2006, protestors attacked the most famous statue of him in the country, which stands on a tall plinth outside the government secretariat in the middle of Kathmandu. While they weren’t able to bring it down, they did manage to damage it, removing his crown and sword. Afterwards it was shrouded from view, much as the statue of General Lee was in Charlottesville after the death of Heather Heyer. The new prime minister announced that National Unity Day, held on 11 January, Prithvi Narayan Shah’s birthday, was henceforth cancelled. The following year, after the last Shah king had already been deposed, another image of Prithvi, this one in his hometown of Gorkha, the starting point of his brilliant career of conquest, was demolished on the orders of local Maoist leaders.

Some senior Maoists drew a comparison between their destruction of

royal symbols and that following the French Revolution in 1789: scraping away the iconography of a repressive regime. Yet there was also an ethnic dimension to this hostility, tension that the Maoists had skilfully exploited during the war. Populations speaking Tibeto-Burmese languages, like Newars in the Kathmandu valley, and other ethnic groups throughout central and eastern Nepal – Gurung, Magar, Tamang and Rai – saw the collapse of the monarchy as a chance to overturn centuries of domination by a Hindu elite speaking an Indo-European language that had emerged in western Nepal a thousand years earlier. Originally it had been known as Khas kura, literally Khas ‘word’ or ‘speech’, Khas being the Indo-Aryan group that spoke it. As the Shahs took power, it became known as Gorkhali; this language is now modern Nepali, the region’s lingua franca and the single most unifying cultural feature of the nation. Nepali is similar to Hindi, in the way that Italian and Spanish are alike. More than any other king, Prithvi Naryan Shah was emblematic of this Hindu Khas group; so that many from other ethnic groups who spoke different languages were delighted to see his dynasty gone and the restrictive caste system they embodied put into reverse. Throwing off this narrow interpretation of what being Nepali meant was a relief for those marginalised for so long.

Then, just at this moment, as Nepalis settled in without their kings,

Prithvi Narayan Shah made a comeback. Khadga Prasad ‘K P’ Oli, a powerful nationalist, albeit from the main grouping of Nepal’s communists, suggested boosting tourism by erecting a new statue of the nation’s founding father at the top station of a cable car recently opened to the Kathmandu valley’s rim at Chandragiri, a significant location in Prithvi Narayan Shah’s story of conquest. A year later, in September 2017, the statue was ready to be inaugurated by Oli’s old political ally and new president of Nepal, Bidya Devi Bhandari. On 11 January 2018, a decade after king Gyanendra was voted out of office, National Unity Day was also resurrected with support from across the political divide. A member of the ruling Nepali Congress told the newspapers: ‘Prithvi Narayan Shah should not be punished for what his descendants did. He should be respected for giving us a sovereign and unified Nepal.’ The country’s president and the Nepali Congress prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba laid flowers at the statue that had been defaced a decade earlier. A leading diversity campaigner, Om Gurung, warned that ‘by reviving Prithvi Narayan Shah’s legacy, politicians have proved they love the status quo’, the ‘status quo’ being the social and religious hierarchy the Shahs had embodied. And yet, when the nationalist-communist K P Oli replaced Deuba as prime minister shortly thereafter, the Maoists entered into negotiations with his party, once their sworn enemies, for a merger: it was a stark indication of how compromised the Maoists, despite their talk of inclusivity, had become. Prithvi Narayan Shah had proved a more lasting influence on the people of Nepal than Chairman Mao.

What message were politicians recruiting from the life and times of

Nepal’s founding father? What did Prithvi’s contested legacy reveal about a nation whose steep mountains and deep valleys create such cultural complexity? Teasing out the answers to these questions reveals the unique challenges of identity and politics in the Himalaya, a mountain range caught between the two most populous nations on earth: India and China. Those challenges obsessed Prithvi Narayan Shah. Only by sticking together, he believed, could the diverse people of Himalaya find enough space for their disparate cultures to survive, even though in practice he favoured some of those cultures more than others. (‘It is merely a matter of interpretation,’ the Nepali writer Kamal P Malla observed, ‘whether one calls it a “vision” of unified Nepal or a vulture’s gaze upon its prey.’) In the modern world, with China’s occupation of the Tibetan plateau and India’s huge military presence in the Himalaya, it’s a message that has more political potency than ever, one that modern kings and politicians alike have been swift to exploit.

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The image of Prithvi Narayan Shah most familiar to Nepalis shows a richly dressed figure wearing an ornate khukuri (the traditional Nepali blade) at his chest and a crown dripping with jewels, topped off with feathers from a bird of paradise. This fabulous headgear was worn by all the modern Nepali kings; the artist and polymath Desmond Doig described it on Birendra’s head at his coronation in 1975: ‘No other crown could be so fantastically devised, so priceless. It is a glitter of closely set diamonds and pearls, hung with drop rubies and emeralds the size of plums and atop it, clasped by more diamonds, is a cascade of bird-of-paradise plumes.’ (The crown hadn’t been refurbished since Mahendra’s coronation in 1956 and its feathers were droopy. Trade in bird of paradise feathers had been banned so the US government helped out with some fresh feathers confiscated from smugglers.)

Although he is depicted wearing it, this was never Prithvi Narayan

Shah’s crown. In fact there are almost no contemporary images of him at all; a bronze figure at Nuwakot, the town where he made his name, may or may not be Prithvi and shows him kneeling piously, hands together in prayer. The image Nepal has of him was painted by a twentieth-century artist called Amar Chitrakar, who started his career painting posters for Bollywood movies and moved on to state insignia: stamps, portraiture and statues. It was Amar Chitrakar who gave us the painting of Prithvi Narayan Shah that now hangs in Kathmandu’s National History Museum; this is the image Nepalis have in their minds when they think of their founding father. It’s the same image used for the statue in front of Nepal’s government secretariat, the Singha Darbar, erected for National Unity Day in 1965, part of the autocratic king Mahendra’s propaganda to legitimise his reactionary putsch and the termination of Nepal’s first attempt at democracy. It’s the same image used for the golden statue that now looks down over the Kathmandu valley from the cable car station at Chandragiri. Prithvi is evidently a warrior, but he is leaning on his sword and it’s in his left hand. This image is about more than martial prowess. His right hand, his sword hand, is raised above his head, the index finger extended. It’s tempting to see him as testing the political winds, but the message is clear: one nation, the Nepali equivalent of e pluribus unum. The implication is equally clear: we’re complicated but we have to get over that. No wonder Prithvi Narayan Shah remains relevant more than two centuries after his death.

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 complicated 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 stressed 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.

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.

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