Nepal

• 1. Introduction

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  Nepal holds eight of the world's ten highest mountains, including Mount Everest, the highest point above mean sea level on Earth. Over 340 people have died on Everest, and roughly 200 bodies remain there, some so well preserved they have become recognizable landmarks along the climbing routes. This is a landlocked country in South Asia, wedged between China and India, never separated from Bangladesh by more than a narrow strip of land called the Siliguri Corridor. Its capital, Kathmandu, sits in a valley that once was the whole of Nepal. The questions ahead are these. How did a single Himalayan valley lend its name to an entire nation? Why was this country never colonised when the powers around it were? What turned the world's last Hindu monarchy into a federal republic, and what tore through Kathmandu in September 2025?

• 2. Name From A Valley

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  Before the unification of Nepal, the Kathmandu Valley alone was known as Nepal. The precise origin of the term Nepāl is uncertain, and scholars admit the picture is incomplete. The name first appears in ancient Indian texts dated as far back as the fourth century AD, though even the oldest texts may carry anonymous additions from much later periods. Hindu mythology traces the name to an ancient sage called Ne, also known as Ne Muni or Nemi, who according to the Pashupati Purāna protected the land in the heart of the Himalayas. Buddhist mythology tells it differently. Manjushri Bodhisattva drained a primordial lake of serpents to make the Nepal valley, then proclaimed that Adi-Buddha Ne would watch over those who settled it. The Gopalarājvamshāvali, a genealogy compiled around the 1380s, names Nepal after Nepa the cowherd, founder of the Nepali scion of the Abhiras. The Ne Muni etymology was dismissed by early European visitors. Norwegian indologist Christian Lassen proposed instead that Nepāla combined Nipa, the foot of a mountain, with -ala, a short suffix for abode, making the name mean abode at the foot of the mountain. Indologist Sylvain Levi found that theory untenable but offered none of his own. Another reading holds that Nepa is a Tibeto-Burman stem of Ne for cattle and Pa for keeper, fitting the valley's early Gopalas, the cowherds, and Mahispalas, the buffalo-herds.

• 3. Cradle Of Two Faiths

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  Around 600 BC, small kingdoms and clan confederations rose in the southern regions of Nepal. From one of them, the Shakya polity, came a prince who renounced his status, took up an ascetic life, and founded Buddhism. He is known as Gautama Buddha, traditionally dated 563-483 BC, and he was born in Lumbini in southern Nepal. The name Nepal itself is first recorded in texts from the Vedic period, the era when Hinduism was founded, the religion that would come to predominate. By 250 BC, the southern regions fell under the influence of the Maurya Empire. Emperor Ashoka made a pilgrimage to Lumbini and raised a pillar at the Buddha's birthplace. The inscriptions on that pillar mark the starting point for properly recorded history of Nepal. Ashoka also visited the Kathmandu valley and built monuments to commemorate the Buddha's visit there. Nepal became a land of spirituality and refuge, carrying Buddhism to East Asia by way of Tibet and helping to preserve Hindu and Buddhist manuscripts. The peepal tree, Ficus religiosa, appears on the ancient seals of Mohenjo-daro, and the Pali canon records that Gautama Buddha sought enlightenment beneath it.

• 4. Kingdoms Of The Valley

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  In the late 14th century, Jayasthiti Malla introduced sweeping socio-economic reforms in the Kathmandu valley, the principal one being the caste system. By sorting the indigenous non-Aryan Buddhist population into castes modelled on the four Varna system of Hinduism, he set a pattern for the Hinduisation of tribal populations across the principalities. The Mallas had established themselves in Kathmandu and Patan by the middle of the 14th century, first under the suzerainty of Tirhut, then independent by the late 14th century. By the middle of the 15th century, Kathmandu had grown into a powerful empire that, according to Kirkpatrick, stretched from Shigatse in Tibet to Tirhut and Gaya in India. In the late 15th century, the Malla princes split their kingdom four ways, into Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur in the valley and Banepa to the east. The competition for prestige among these brotherly kingdoms fed a flourishing of art and architecture. It produced the famous Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur Durbar Squares. Their mutual mistrust also led to their fall in the late 18th century. Apart from one destructive sacking of the valley in the mid 14th century, Nepal stayed largely untouched by the Muslim invasion of India that began in the 11th century. By the 16th century there were about 50 Rajput-ruled principalities in Nepal, including the 22 Baisi states and the 24 Chaubisi states to their east. Among the Baisi states was Gorkha, an ambitious kingdom that codified the first Hinduism-based laws in the Nepalese hills.

• 5. Unification And The Buffer State

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  In the mid-18th century, Prithvi Narayan Shah, a Gorkha king, set out to assemble what would become present-day Nepal. He began by securing the neutrality of the bordering mountain kingdoms, then fought several bloody battles and sieges, notably the Battle of Kirtipur, before conquering the Kathmandu Valley in 1769. Gorkha control reached its height when lands from the Kumaon and Garhwal Kingdoms in the west to Sikkim in the east came under Nepalese rule. A dispute with Tibet over mountain passes drew in the Qing Emperor of China and the Sino-Nepali War, forcing the Nepali to retreat north. Rivalry with the East India Company brought the Anglo-Nepali War of 1815-16. The British underestimated the Nepali and were soundly defeated until they committed more military resources than expected. From that war grew the reputation of the Gurkhas as fierce soldiers, and the fighting ended in the Sugauli Treaty, under which Nepal ceded recently captured lands. The country was never colonised. It served instead as a buffer state between Imperial China and British India. In 1846, a discovered plot revealed that the reigning queen had planned to overthrow Jung Bahadur Kunwar, a fast-rising military leader. The result was the Kot massacre, in which several hundred princes and chieftains were executed. Bir Narsingh Kunwar emerged victorious and founded the Rana dynasty, becoming known as Jung Bahadur Rana. The king was reduced to a titular figure while the post of Prime Minister was made powerful and hereditary. The Ranas were staunchly pro-British, assisting them during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and both World Wars. Sati was banned in 1919, and slavery was officially abolished in 1924.

• 6. From Monarchy To Republic

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  King Mahendra, who ruled from 1955 to 1972, scrapped Nepal's democratic experiment in 1960 and installed a partyless Panchayat system. Political parties were banned and politicians imprisoned or exiled. Parliamentary democracy had been introduced in 1951, after Nepali Congress, with India's support and the cooperation of King Tribhuvan, toppled the Rana regime. In 1990, the People's Movement forced King Birendra, who ruled from 1972 to 2001, to accept constitutional reforms and a multiparty democracy. In 1996, the Maoist Party launched a violent bid to replace the royal parliamentary system with a people's republic. The long Nepalese Civil War that followed caused more than 16,000 deaths. The King and the Crown Prince both died in a massacre in the royal palace, and in 2001 King Birendra's brother Gyanendra inherited the throne, then assumed full executive powers to crush the insurgency himself. The Maoist Party rejoined mainstream politics after the peaceful democratic revolution of 2006. Nepal became a secular state, and on the 28th of May 2008 it was declared a federal republic, ending its status as the world's only Hindu kingdom. A new constitution was promulgated on the 20th of September 2015, dividing the country into seven provinces.

• 7. The 2025 Reckoning

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  Between March and June 2025, about half a dozen pro-monarchy protests took place in Kathmandu, calling for the restoration of the old Kingdom of Nepal under former King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah. On the 19th of February 2025, a holiday commemorating the 1951 Revolution, Shah delivered a video speech addressing frustration with the ruling communist government. He stopped short of explicitly calling for a restored monarchy, but his emphasis on unity and sacrifice was read by some as hinting at a royal revival. On the 9th of March 2025, thousands of supporters welcomed him as he arrived in Kathmandu. A spokesperson for the pro-monarchy Rastriya Prajatantra Party said the turnout showed how frustrated people were with the present government. In September 2025, widespread protests over a social media ban and economic inequality erupted into rioting that killed or injured dozens, damaged Parliament and other buildings, and forced the resignation of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli. Oli fled Kathmandu and sought refuge with the Nepali Army. The army took control of nationwide security and held talks with protest leaders, who chose former chief justice Sushila Karki as interim prime minister. On the 27th of March 2026, Balendra Shah was sworn in as prime minister after a landslide victory of his party, the Rastriya Swatantra Party, in the March general election.

• 8. Festivals Of Blood And Belief

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  The Gadhimai festival, a Hindu event held every five years at the Gadhimai Temple, has been described as the world's bloodiest festival. The reason is the large-scale slaughter of animals and birds, including buffaloes, goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, pigeons, pigs, rats, and white mice, performed to appease the goddess Gadhimai. Critics have condemned the ritual as barbaric, unsanitary, and wasteful, while Hindu devotees insist it holds deep significance. Dashain, a major Hindu festival, is driven by the belief that offerings of fresh blood will appease the goddess Durga. Thousands of buffaloes, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, and ducks are slaughtered during the celebration, and the Nepali government has tried to ban the filming of these sacrifices. An animal welfare group that witnessed the festival reported severe hostility, stating their equipment and cameras were ripped from their hands and smashed to pieces. The same group described walking among human feces and being chased down the street by individuals carrying machetes. The Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu sits along the banks of the Bagmati River and includes the Pashupati Aryaghat, a series of platforms for the open-air burning of human corpses. Cremations there take place in public view, drawing many international tourists, who, because of nearby vendor stalls, are commonly seen eating and drinking while locals mourn. Witch-hunts continue in Nepal even in the twenty-first century, with vulnerable people of lower castes most often the victims, and politicians, army officers, and police officers have been implicated in various incidents.