For a small Himalayan state, squeezed uncomfortably between India and China, Nepal has played a surprisingly pivotal role in Asian history. In its early days, the country reared the Gautama Buddha; much later, its remarkable conquests led it into wars with Tibet and Britain. Its name and recorded history go back nearly three thousand years, although it has existed as a nation in its current form for barely two hundred: before 1769, “Nepal” referred only to a kingdom based in the Kathmandu Valley. Some rural people still talk about it as such.
All Nepal’s history – its peoples, its politics and its development – is founded on its extraordinary landscape. The Himalayas, which march across the country’s northern border, are a kind of cataclysmic, geo-scale crumple zone. Despite being astonishingly young – they began rising a “mere” 55 million years ago – they’re already so high that they have created the desertified Tibetan plateau, parts of which lie within the northwestern borders of Nepal.
The body and cultural heart of Nepal – and its capital, Kathmandu – lies in the Middle Hills, or pahaad, a mightily upswelling belt of green created as much by water as plate tectonics. Beginning deep within Tibet, the Karnali, Kali Gandaki and Arun rivers have carved some of the world’s deepest and grandest gorges through the country. Towards Nepal’s southern edge, the geologically more recent uprising of the Mahabharat Lek and Churia Hills has formed a barrier, forcing the great southbound rivers to make lengthy east–west detours before they flood out across the flat Terai region, and on into India.
According to the Newars, who it’s believed have lived there longest of all, the Kathmandu Valley was once filled with a primordial lake. Geologists agree that a lake dried up some 100,000 years ago. Whether the valley itself was inhabited is uncertain, but hilltop shrines such as Swayambunath may once have existed to rise above the waterline. Archeologists have found simple stone tools in the Churia Hills, to the south, which date back at least 100,000 years.
Folk myths suggest that most of Nepal’s current ethnic groups arrived as migrant hunter-gatherers. (Many preserved those ways of life until around the seventeenth century.) Semi-mythological genealogies talk about the warlike Kiranti (or Kirati) people who, by the sixth or seventh century BC were controlling the eastern hills – where they remain today – and the Kathmandu Valley. By this time, Hindus from the south were clearing the malarial jungle of the Terai, founding the city-states of Mithila (modern Janakpur), the scene of many of the events in the Ramayana epic, and Kapilvastu (now Tilaurakot), where the Buddha spent his pre-enlightenment years during the sixth century BC.
During the first millennium, the hills were populated from all sides. The Khasas steadily pushed eastward into what would become western Nepal, bringing their Indo-Aryan Nepali language and Hindu religion with them. From Tibet and the north came waves of migrants: first the Tamangs, then the Gurungs, in about 500 AD. At first these northerners were animists, practising nature worship and Shamanism; after Buddhism took root in Tibet, they reimported their version of the religion into its original homeland. Not counting modern-day refugees, the last Tibetans to cross the passes into Nepal as a distinct group were the Sherpas, from the 1530s onwards.
In the second century AD, the Licchavi clan, of North Indian origin, overthrew the Kirants and established their capital and their dynasty at Deopatan (modern Pashupatinath), exploiting the valley’s position as a trading entrepôt between India and Tibet. Although Hindus, the Licchavis endowed both Hindu and Buddhist temples and established Nepal’s long-standing policy of religious tolerance. No Licchavi buildings survive, but Chinese travellers described “multi-storeyed temples so tall one would take them for a crown of clouds” – perhaps a reference to the pagodas that would become a Nepali trademark. Sculptors, meanwhile, ushered in a classical age of stonework, and Licchavi statues still litter the Kathmandu Valley.
The earliest stone inscription, dated 464 AD and still on view at Changu Narayan, extols the Licchavi king Mandev (often spelled Manadeva), the legendary builder of the Boudhanath stupa. The greatest of the Licchavi line, Amsuvarman (605–621) was said to have built a splendid palace, probably at present-day Naxal in Kathmandu. But by this time Nepal had become a vassal of Tibet, and Amsuvarman’s daughter, Bhrikuti, was carried off by the Tibetan king. She is popularly credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet as a result.
The Licchavi era came to a close in 879. The three centuries that followed are sometimes referred to as Nepal’s Dark Ages, though Nepalese chronicles record a long list of Thakuri kings, who may have been puppets installed by the various powers controlling the Terai. From the eleventh century onwards the Kathmandu Valley became an important centre of tantric studies.
From the twelfth century, the great regional power was based in Sinja, in the Karnali basin near modern-day Jumla. The Khasa empire, at its height, controlled the Himalayas from Kashmir to present-day Pokhara. The resurgence of the Kathmandu Valley – then known as “Nepal” – began when the Thakuri king of Bhaktapur, Arideva, took the title Malla, probably in the year 1200. The name came to be associated with three major dynasties across more than five centuries, presiding over a golden age of Nepali culture.
The early Mallas had to defend their nascent kingdoms against destructive raids by Khasas and, in 1349, Muslims from Bengal. Yet trade and the arts flourished. Arniko, the great Nepali architect, was even dispatched to teach the Ming Chinese to build pagodas. Jayasthiti Malla (1354–95) inaugurated a period of strong central rule from Bhaktapur, and legendarily imposed the caste system. Malla power reached its zenith under Yaksha Malla (1428–82), who extended his domain westwards to Gorkha and eastwards as far as present-day Biratnagar. Upon his death, the kingdom was divided among three sons, and for nearly three centuries the independent city states of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur (and occasionally others) feuded and competed, building ever more opulent palaces and temples in a battle of regal theatricality.
While the Kathmandu Valley flourished, new powers were arising in the west. A steady stream of Rajasthani princes fled the Muslim conquest of North India, seeking conquest or refuge in the hills, and by the early fifteenth century the Khasa empire had fragmented into a collection of petty provinces. Those in the Karnali basin came to be known as the Baaisi Rajya (Twenty-two Kingdoms), while those that ruled over subjugated Magar and Gurung states further east, in the Gandaki basin, became the Chaubisi (Twenty-four). Khasa peoples, meanwhile, began migrating eastward towards and into the Kathmandu Valley, laying down the ethnic foundations of Nepal’s long-dominant Parbatiya, or caste Hindu population.
The Chaubisi and Baaisi confederacies were small, weak and culturally backward, but politically stable. Then Gorkha, the most easterly territory, began to have ambitions. Under the inspired, obsessive leadership of Prithvi Narayan Shah (1722–75), the Gorkhalis launched a campaign that was to take 27 years to conquer the valley kingdoms of “Nepal”, and as long again to unite all of modern Nepal.
Prithvi Narayan hoped to create a single pan-Himalayan kingdom, a bastion of Hindu culture in contrast to North India, which had fallen first to the Mughals and then the British. He first captured Nuwakot, a day’s march northwest of Kathmandu. From there he directed a ruthless twenty-year war of attrition against the valley. Kirtipur surrendered first, following a six-month siege. Its inhabitants had their lips and noses cut off as punishment for resistance. Desperate, the Kathmandu king, Jaya Prakash Malla, sought help from the British East India Company. It was to no avail: of the 2400 soldiers loaned by the Company, only eight hundred returned to India. On the eve of Indra Jaatra in 1768, Jaya Prakash, by now rumoured to be insane, let down the city’s defences and Kathmandu fell to the Gorkhalis without a fight. Patan followed, two days later, and Bhaktapur the following year; by 1774 the Gorkhalis had marched eastwards all the way to Sikkim.
Suspicious of Britain’s ambitions in India and China’s in Tibet – he called his kingdom “a yam between two stones” – Prithvi Narayan closed Nepal to foreigners. The gates would remain almost entirely shut until the 1950s. Instead, Nepal turned in on itself, becoming embroiled in a series of bloody battles for succession which set the pattern for the next two hundred years. Yet when they weren’t stabbing each other in the back, the Shahs managed to continue the wars of conquest. Lured on by promises of land grants – every hill man’s dream – the Nepali army became an unstoppable fighting machine, and by 1790 Nepal stretched far beyond its present eastern and western borders.
Expansion was finally halted first by a brief but chastening war with Tibet and then, in 1814, by a clash with Britain’s East India Company after Nepal annexed the Butwal sector of the Terai. It took Britain two years and heavy losses before finally bringing Nepal to heel. The 1816 Treaty of Segauli forced Nepal to accept its present eastern and western boundaries and surrender much of the Terai. Worst of all, it had to accept an official British “resident” in Kathmandu. Yet so impressed were the British by “our valiant opponent” that they began recruiting Nepalis into the Indian Army, an arrangement which continues today in the famed Gurkha regiments. Britain restored Nepal’s Terai lands in return for its help in quelling the Indian Mutiny of 1857.
The intrigues and assassinations that bedevilled the Kathmandu court during the first half of the nineteenth century culminated in the ghastly Kot massacre of 1846, in which more than fifty courtiers were butchered in a courtyard off Kathmandu’s Durbar Square. Behind the plot was a shrewd young general, Jang Bahadur Rana, who seized power and proclaimed himself prime minister for life. He later made the office hereditary, in a move that speaks volumes about the court: his title was attached to a grade of kingship, Shri Tin Maharaja (short for Shri Shri Shri Maharaja), or His Three-Times-Great Highness the King.
The Shah king may have had five Shris before his title but the Ranas held all the power. For a century, they remained authoritarian and isolationist, building almost no roads or schools, only overweening Neoclassical palaces. They kept on careful good terms with the British, but only allowed a handful of foreigners to actually enter Nepal – and usually only as far as Chitwan. Even the British resident was corralled within the Kathmandu Valley. The eastern and western tracts of the country were treated as colonies, the religious and land-tenure customs of the hill tribes subject to ever-greater “sanskritization” – meaning colonization by Parbatiya, or caste Hindu, culture. Peasants migrated ever further eastward across the hills, and south into the Terai’s jungle in search of ever-scarcer land. Slash-and-burn agriculture gave way to subsistence farming, while the Tibetan salt and trade networks were increasingly bypassed by the new British route via Darjeeling. Newari merchants fanned out across Nepal, mean-while, establishing bazaars where they could sell imported goods. And from the early twentieth century, the population began to grow.
Chandra Shamsher Rana, who came to power in 1901 by deposing his brother, is best known for building the thousand-roomed Singha Durbar and (belatedly) abolishing slavery and the practice of sati, or widow-burning. He also built Nepal’s first college and hydroelectric plant, along with suspension bridges on the hill trails and the celebrated ropeway connecting Kathmandu with the Terai. India’s railway network was joined to Nepal in the inter-war years, but never penetrated more than a few miles into the Terai. Factories were established around Biratnagar in the 1930s, and Nepal’s first airstrip arrived in 1942.
The absurdly anachronistic regime could not hope to survive the geopolitical seismic shifts of the postwar era. In 1947 the British quit India. In 1949, the Communists took power in China – and within two years had taken over in Tibet. Seeking stability, Nepal signed a far-reaching “peace and friendship” treaty with India in 1950. Despite the upheavals that were to follow, it remains the contentious basis for all relations between the two countries.
In 1950, the Nepali Congress Party, which had recently been formed in Kolkata, called for an armed struggle against the Ranas. Within a month, King Tribhuvan had requested asylum at the Indian embassy and was smuggled away to Delhi. Sporadic fighting and political dealing continued for two months until the Ranas, internationally discredited, reluctantly agreed to enter into negotiations. Brokered by India, the so-called Delhi Compromise arranged for the Ranas and the Congress Party to share power under the king’s rule. Power-sharing squabbles between Ranas and Congress factions, however, ensured that the compromise was ineffective and short-lived. Tribhuvan himself died in 1955, and the promised Constituent Assembly, which was supposed to write a new democratic constitution, never came to fruition.
Crowned in 1955, King Mahendra pushed through a constitution which guaranteed him emergency powers, and ultimate control of the army. Long-delayed elections were eventually held in 1959, but this “experiment with democracy” was too successful. Under Prime Minister B.P. Koirala the Nepali Congress Party began bypassing palace control; in response, Mahendra banned political parties, jailed the Congress leaders and created the “partyless” panchayat system. His national assembly, elected ultimately from local village councils (panchayat), served in practice as a rubber stamp for royal policies and a conduit for corruption and cronyism. The regime only survived on foreign aid and by playing India and China off against each other.
King Birendra assumed his father’s throne in 1972, immediately declaring Nepal to be a Zone of Peace, a Swiss-style neutrality pledge which won international plaudits – but antagonized India. Birendra made minor concessions towards political reform throughout his reign, and was widely admired, but it became clear in the 1980s that he could neither curtail ever-growing corruption – which involved his own family – nor keep the lid on simmering discontent.
Under the three Shah kings, Nepal’s population exploded: from 8.4 million in 1954 to 18.5 million in 1991. Much of that growth was absorbed in the flat Terai region, bordering India, where the jungle was cleared for farmland and malaria sprayed almost out of existence. But slowly, the land began to run out. So too did forest – a crucial fuel and fodder resource for farmers in the hills. Up to a third of Nepalis lacked sufficient food, and the majority of men would migrate in winter in search of paid employment. The Kathmandu Valley’s population trebled to well over a million by 1991, and over a million more crossed the border into India. Piecemeal development projects failed to stimulate growth, instead bloating the bureaucracy and distorting the budget so that during the peak dependency era, in the late 1980s, forty percent of all government spending derived from foreign aid.
Royal rule was not entirely disastrous for Nepal. Literacy rates stood at a dismal forty percent by 1991 – but it was an improvement on the five percent rate of fifty years earlier. In the same period, infant mortality fell from an appalling twenty percent to a merely shocking ten percent. Notwithstanding huge problems over tariff and trade agreements with India, industrial estates were established at Balaju, Birgunj and Hetauda, and carpet-weaving, a trade largely controlled by Tibetan refugees, employed up to 250,000 people by the mid-1980s. But tourism was perhaps the most conspicuously successful of Nepal’s endeavours. The kingdom that had once accepted a single British resident was welcoming 4000 visitors in 1960, 100,000 in 1976, at the close of the hippy era, and – due to a new kind of tourism cleverly marketed as trekking – 250,000 by the early 1990s.
The panchayat government might have tottered on for many more years if it hadn’t been for a trade and migration dispute with India, whose government punished Nepal with a virtual blockade through most of 1989. The government might still have ridden out the crisis had it not been for the inspiration provided by China’s failed pro-democracy movement at Tiananmen Square, and the successful revolutions in Eastern Europe.
The banned opposition parties united in the Movement to Restore Democracy, calling for a national day of protest on February 18, 1990 – the anniversary of the first post-Rana government, a date already known as Democracy Day. Street clashes with police and the arrest of leading opposition figures did little to contain the desire for change, and the Jana Andolan (“People’s Movement”) gathered pace. On March 31, the Newari inhabitants of Patan took control of their city. On April 6, the king promised constitutional reform – but his move failed to placate the 200,000 people marching up Kathmandu’s Durbar Marg towards the Royal Palace. After the army fired into the crowd, killing dozens, the king’s hand was forced. He dissolved his cabinet, lifted the ban on political parties and invited the opposition to form an interim government.
Once again, calls for a constitution to be written by a Constituent Assembly were bypassed; and once again the king clung onto key powers as constitutional monarch – and Nepal remained officially a Hindu state, not a secular one. However, the old Rastriya Panchayat was replaced by a true bicameral parliament, and free elections were held in May 1991. Again, the Nepali Congress Party, under Girija Prasad Koirala, younger brother of B.P. Koirala, came out on top. The challenge from Nepal’s several Communist parties, however, was strong: they maintained their traditional strongholds in the east and, incredibly, captured the Kathmandu Valley. For the next five years, power swung between Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal–United Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML). No matter who was in power, political infighting and horse-trading for the powers of patronage and the proceeds of corruption took precedence over the real business of government. The impoverished millions living outside the Kathmandu Valley seemed all but forgotten.
The royal massacre of June 1, 2001 – in which Crown Prince Dipendra killed most of his family, including his father, the king – traumatized and ultimately transformed the nation. The Shah dynasty had created Nepal back in the eighteenth century, and the monarchy was seen as the very bedrock of national identity, holding dozens of ethnic groups and castes together in peaceful coexistence. The king was regarded as an incarnation of the god Vishnu, a supreme patriarch whose very existence proclaimed Nepal’s uniqueness – as the last Hindu kingdom, when all of India had fallen to either the Mughals or the British.
Most monstrous of all, the alleged killer was the king’s own son. In a culture where parents still command the highest respect from their children, and where murder is rare, such a crime was almost unimaginable. Nepalis felt grief, anger and deep shame at the egregious breaking of taboos. But above all they felt disbelief. Could the crown prince really have done it? Based on the testimony of survivors and palace employees, it’s known that before an untypical family gathering, Dipendra was drinking whisky and smoking hashish laced with an unnamed “black substance” – presumably opium. Shortly after, he had to be helped to his room. A few minutes later, he entered the billiard room where the royal family was assembled, dressed in camouflage fatigues with an automatic weapon in each hand. He opened fire, coolly targeting the king first and then other members of his family. He then retreated to the garden where he apparently shot his mother, who had fled, and finally himself.
His motivations seemed oddly run-of-the-mill. Dipendra was apparently furious with the queen for opposing his plans to marry his girlfriend, Devyani Rana. He was also known to have a lethal temper, a fetish for weapons, a predilection for alcohol and drugs, and – observers concluded – a propensity for violent psychotic outbursts. It seemed clear cut. But the hastily produced High Level Committee Report, delivered just two weeks after the tragedy, was riddled with unanswered – indeed unasked – questions. Why was the first response of the royal aides de camp on duty that night to call a doctor, rather than to overpower the attacker, and why did it take them ten minutes to do that? Why were no post-mortems performed on the victims? Why did Dipendra, who was right-handed, shoot himself behind the left ear? Why did a soldier throw the weapon lying next to Dipendra’s body into a pond?
Conspiracy theorists thought it no accident that Gyanendra, alone among the immediate family, was absent from the palace that evening, and that his unpopular son Paras, who was present, escaped unhurt. Others connected the killings with the Maoists – who in turn claimed it was a plot coordinated by the CIA and its Indian counterpart, RAW. Whoever did it, some said, killed Dipendra and replaced him with a stand-in wearing a lifelike mask (which would account for why Dipendra reportedly neither spoke nor showed any expression during the rampage). Others held that Dipendra was a patsy, drugged and given weapons by the real perpetrators and then bumped off afterwards. Whatever the truth, the damage done to the institution of the monarchy was severe – if not fatal.
Between 1990 and 2000, Nepal certainly developed. The road network doubled in size, phones proliferated, literacy rose by twenty percent (to 58 percent) and infant mortality improved substantially. But growth was quickly swallowed up by demographics, and hope was increasingly replaced by cynicism. By the end of the decade half a million young Nepalis were leaving school and seeking work each year, but few had any hope of finding employment. In the roadless hills, meanwhile, where three-quarters of the population lived, development still seemed a world away.
In February 1996, members of the Nepal Communist Party (Maoist) broke with what they considered to be Nepal’s failed democratic system, launching a “People’s War” from their base in the midwestern hill districts of Rolpa and Rukum. The Congress government paid little heed – a miscalculation that it would regret. The Maoists picked off police stations and district offices one at a time, financing their operations by robbing banks and demanding protection money. Political enemies were intimidated or killed. Political friends were won by aggressive development programmes: schools, courts and health posts were run with renewed efficiency, land redistributed and programmes empowering women, lower castes and minorities launched. Five years later the rebels effectively controlled nearly a quarter of the country’s 75 districts, and had infiltrated another half.
In 2001, Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal – better known by his nom de guerre Prachanda (“the Fierce”) – issued his preconditions for peace: a Constitutional Assembly with seats for Maoists, and the abolition of the monarchy. Girija Prasad Koirala’s government responded by creating a paramilitary Armed Police Force with broad powers to combat the rebels. As yet, parliament was unwilling to cross the political Rubicon by letting the army out of its barracks. It owed its loyalty to the king, after all.
The monarchy was soon to enter politics for a very different reason. On the evening of June 1, 2001, King Birendra, Queen Aishwarya and seven other members of the royal family were massacred in the Narayanhiti Royal Palace by the heir to the throne, Prince Dipendra, who then turned the gun on himself. Dipendra survived on a life-support machine for almost two days, during which time the country boiled with anxiety, speculation and conspiracy theories. When Dipendra’s death and his uncle Gyanendra’s ascension were finally announced, riots broke out.
The royal massacre gave the Maoists a golden opportunity to tap into anti-monarchist feelings. Gyanendra was known to be sharper-nosed and harder-line than his brother, and his son Paras, now crown prince, was widely loathed. The Maoists stepped up their offensive, even bombing the hitherto safe Kathmandu Valley and successfully enforcing a general strike.
The Congress party, as ever, seemed more concerned with infighting than government. When Sher Bahadur Deuba took over from Girija Prasad Koirala in July 2001, his was the eleventh government in as many years. In November 2001, the new king proved his critics right by declaring a state of emergency in which he suspended civil liberties, began imprisoning thousands of dissidents, and mobilized Nepal’s army. Aggressive “search and destroy” operations took Nepali troops deep into the hills. In response, the Maoist People’s Liberation Army began to target dams, telecommunications facilities and other infrastructure. A regional insurgency by a fringe political party was escalating into civil war. By 2004, the Maoists were strong enough to be able to blockade Kathmandu for an entire week.
Before the war was over, it would kill some fourteen thousand Nepalis, leaving the economy in tatters, the tourist industry in ruins and the Kathmandu Valley straining at the seams with villagers fleeing the fighting in the hills. Nepalis had given up hope. The Maoists, it seemed, could not succeed in taking control of the capital and winning outright. The army could not militarily defeat a movement whose roots ran deep into the roadless hills. The government, meanwhile, was collapsing in a series of failed administrations, postponed elections and compromises with an ever-more interventionist Royal Palace.
In February 2005, Gyanendra snapped, seizing power and imposing martial law; as a result, the previously fractious political parties united against him. As the Seven Party Alliance (SPA), the politicians signed an understanding with the Maoists: they would back Maoist demands for a Constituent Assembly and drop support for the monarchy; the Maoists, in return, would announce a ceasefire. Everyone would mobilize against Gyanendra’s regime.
During the winter of 2005–06, the scale and belligerence of the protests, rallies and strikes grew – as did the aggression of the government response. Hundreds of political leaders were arrested and, once again, Nepalis died under government bullets. Bandhs, or complete shut-downs of the Kathmandu Valley, became commonplace. By early April it was like 1990 all over again – indeed, the movement became known as Jana Andolan II (Second People’s Movement) though others preferred to call it the Loktantra Andolan (Democracy Movement). During April, hundreds of thousands of Nepalis came out onto the streets of Kathmandu day after day, in the face of aggressively enforced curfews. On April 21, Gyanendra played his last card, asking the leaders of the SPA to name a new prime minister. With Maoist guns behind them, the SPA could afford to call the king’s bluff, and three days later parliament was duly reinstated under Girija Prasad Koirala.
After ten years of war and stagnation, the pace of political change was now astonishing. In June, the mysterious Comrade Prachanda arrived in Kathmandu for talks with the SPA. His public arrival caused a sensation: most Nepalis had never even seen a photograph of the guerrilla leader, who had spent the last 25 years moving between India and secret locations in the hills. Parliament quickly moved to scrap the 1990 constitution and hold elections for a Constituent Assembly. The king’s powers were dramatically curtailed, and Nepal was declared to be no longer a kingdom. In November 2006 the Maoists formally ended their insurgency with the Comprehensive Peace Accord, agreeing to put their weapons under UN supervision and send their combatants into UN-monitored cantonments. That winter, snow fell in Kathmandu for the first time in sixty years.
All of Nepal was determined that, this time, democracy would be made to work. But without Gyanendra’s regime to unite them in opposition, the political parties were free to squabble. And without the monarchy to bind the country, the tensions that had been building between ethnic groups for years could break out. From late 2006, activists in the Terai launched the Madheshi Andolan, or “Movement for Madhesh”, to fight for the rights of ethnically and culturally Indian people, or Madheshis, against the historic dominance (or indifference) of hill peoples and the Kathmandu elite. A host of political parties and pressure groups sprang up, aspiring to regional autonomy or a separate state – ek pradesh, ek madhesh (“one state, one Madhesh”), as the slogan went. In 2007 and 2008, the major Terai towns were the site of bomb blasts and violent clashes.
In April 2008, the Maoists won an astounding victory in the Constituent Assembly elections, taking 220 seats, over a third of the total – and twice as many as either Congress or the CPN-UML. Nepal was duly transformed into a republic in May 2008, and Gyanendra was given three days to quit the Narayanhiti palace. In August, Comrade Prachanda – who increasingly used his proper name, Pushpa Kamal Dahal – became the first prime minister of the secular Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal.
The new government quickly came up against intractable realities. Attempting to merge those former adversaries, the Royal National Army and the People’s Army, proved predictably difficult. So too did persuading self-serving politicians to stop fighting long enough to even discuss writing the new constitution. Girija Prasad Koirala’s Nepali Congress Party quickly established itself as an official, obstructive opposition while the Maoists began to split over issues such as the extent of federalism, and whether the new Nepal would officially be a People’s Republic.
Across the country, highly politicized youth and ethnic identity groups proliferated, posing a serious threat to stability. As so often, a natural disaster added real injury to the insults the country was already suffering: in August 2008, floods smashed the Koshi Barrage, killing thousands downstream in India, and dealing a massive blow to Nepal’s already faltering electricity supply. Poor maintenance, lack of new projects, “pilferage” of power, and demand growing at ten percent a year resulted in scheduled “load shedding” – ie power cuts – which blacked out the capital for up to twenty hours a day. The effect on industry – already feeling the first chill wind of global recession – was catastrophic; the effect on Kathmandu’s morale was, if anything, even more severe.
As ever, tourism held out the greatest economic hope. Thousands, it seemed, had just been waiting for the conflict to end. In 2007 and 2008, more than 500,000 foreigners visited Nepal (roughly one for every Nepali working in the tourism sector), finally surpassing the record set in 1999 before the conflict really took hold and tourism halved. Once again, the trails were buzzing with trekkers. These numbers reached a peak of 803,000 in 2012. However, since then, a series of natural disasters, culminating in the 2015 earthquake, saw Nepali tourism take a serious knock. Things are looking up, though: as of 2017, visitor numbers were starting to climb sharply again.
In May 2009, Prime Minister Dahal abruptly resigned, supposedly because President Ram Baran Yadav had countermanded his order sacking the army’s Chief of Staff. In truth, it was a tactical move. The Maoists wanted a better deal on key issues such as the integration of Maoist combatants into the new Nepal Army, and the shape of the constitution – and they were prepared to undermine the government in order to get their way.
Madhav Nepal of the left-wing CPN-UML struggled on ineffectually as the chosen prime minister of a 22-party anyone-but-the-Maoists coalition while the Maoists organized vast street protests, mobilizing up to half a million supporters in Kathmandu, and arranging endless bandhs, or strikes, that shut down the country day after day, and road blockades that actually cut off the capital. In May 2010, the deadline for writing a constitution and holding elections expired. The Assembly voted itself an extra year to sort out its mess. Sixteen times parliament attempted to elect a new prime minister; sixteen times it failed due to political manoeuvring.
Meanwhile, the constitution remained unwritten and the country remained barely governed. And, at the same time, the forests of the Terai were being plundered to the point of extinction and the wildlife reserves freely poached, while the country’s social structure was under increasing strain as young people continued to flee the hills. Hundreds of thousands of migrants were continuing to pour into the bulging cities of Kathmandu, Pokhara and the Terai, and 200,000 young people every year were heading overseas to take on “dirty, dangerous and demeaning” jobs in the Gulf, Korea, Malaysia or India. Their remittances of foreign currency were just about keeping Nepal afloat but, for the first time in generations, many of Nepal’s hill terraces were being abandoned to weeds.
In reality, Nepal was not going to work without the Maoists in government and, in August 2011, the perpetually squabbling parties agreed to elect Maoist co-leader Baburam Bhattarai as prime minister. Known as the intellectual of the party, Bhattarai is famous for coming first in Nepal’s national school examinations, and for earning a PhD (for a Marxist analysis of Nepal’s under-development) at an Indian university – a link which is evidence, for some, of a suspicious closeness to Nepal’s neighbour. Leaving aside the issue of his role in the violent Maoist insurrection, Bhattarai is often seen as the Maoist leader with the most honesty and integrity. He was praised for choosing a basic, Nepali-made Mustang jeep as his ministerial car over the usual fancy foreign SUV, for instance. It looked less impressive when he appointed a jumbo-sized cabinet, and then got it to press the president to pardon a convicted murderer from his own party.
Bhattarai was also admired for his ability – not least his ability to cool or at least balance the revolutionary zeal of his co-leaders, including his potential rival, Dahal. In October 2011, Bhattarai pulled off a major coup by signing a Seven-Point Pact with the main opposition parties. Under its terms, 6500 Maoist combatants would be integrated into the Nepal Army, with generous payments for those who opted out, and the Maoists would return seized property. A Truth and Reconciliation Committee, meanwhile, would examine murders by Maoists and extrajudicial killings by the army. Predictably, the hardline faction within Bhattarai’s party, led by Mohan Baidya, aka Kiran-ji, decried the deal as a sellout, but everyone knew that few Nepalis would take up arms for the Maoists again.
However, Bhattarai soon ran into trouble. In May 2012 the Constituent Assembly missed the final deadline to agree a new constitution, and the following year the Supreme Court suspended the plans for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission over concerns that it could allow amnesties for serious crimes. No party was able to secure a majority in the November 2013 elections and Nepal was paralysed by political deadlock. Finally, in February 2014, Sushil Koirala, leader of the Nepali Congress, was elected as prime minister after securing parliamentary support.
Nepal, and its vital tourism industry, was hit by several major natural disasters between April 2014 and April 2015. On April 18, 2014, an ice avalanche on Everest’s Khumbu Icefall resulted in the death of sixteen Nepalese climbing guides and support staff; this was the worst accident in the mountain’s history. Angered by the meagre compensation offered to the families of victims by the government, the Sherpa climbing community went on strike, and within days the remainder of the 2014 Everest climbing season was cancelled.
On October 14, 2014, almost six months to the day after the Everest disaster – and during the height of the autumn trekking season – the remnants of Cyclone Hudhud smashed into the Himalayas. In certain areas, up to 1.8m of snow fell within 24 hours. The most extreme effects of the storm were felt in the Annapurna region, where at least 43 people of various nationalities were killed, most of them in the vicinity of the Thorong La pass, the high point of the popular Annapurna Circuit trekking route. It was the worst natural disaster in Nepalese trekking history, and it had an immediate impact on local and national tourism, as trekkers decided to head elsewhere.
Just as visitor numbers were beginning to rise again, on April 25, 2015 during the peak spring trekking season, a devastating earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, its epicentre close to the historic town of Gorkha, rocked Nepal. It was the most destructive earthquake in nearly a century; it left around 9000 dead and 22,000 injured in its wake. Hill towns across central Nepal were flattened, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, while ancient temples crashed to the ground in the Kathmandu Valley and beyond. At least two massive avalanches were triggered in trekking areas: one, on the slopes of Everest, killed 21 people; another hit the Langtang Valley, completely burying the village of Langtang and killing at least two hundred locals and foreigners. In the days and weeks that followed, numerous aftershocks were recorded, including a 7.3-magnitude one on May 12, which was centred on the area between Kathmandu, the Chinese border and the Mount Everest area. This resulted in a further two hundred deaths and many injuries in the Khumbu region. The earthquake and its associated aftershocks caused at least US$10 billion dollars worth of damage. Even after the buildings are restored and communities rebuilt, it will take many more years for the wounds of this catastrophic event to heal.
As Nepal picked up the pieces from the earthquake, the politicians finally, after nearly ten years of trying, agreed on a new constitution. It was announced in September 2015 that the country was to become a federal republic, divided into seven states. But not everyone was happy. There were concerns that in an already highly male-dominated Nepal, the new constitution further discriminated against women and made it very hard for single mothers to pass citizenship on to their children. Various ethnic groups also claimed that they would be discriminated against and lose some of their rights under the new constitution.
The Madhesis, who live on both sides of the Nepal–India border, were especially worried about how they would be represented. The Indian government, alarmed by several clauses in the constitution – and concerned that a Madhesis uprising in Nepal might lead to unrest on its side of the border – demanded Nepal make alterations to it. In the Terai lowlands, near India, anger boiled up to such a degree that protests against the government soon became fatally violent. The demonstrations led to a blockade of Nepal on the Indian side of the border; the Nepalese government laid the blame on India, while they in turn pointed the finger solely at the Madhesis.
For four months, almost no fuel, medicines or building construction materials (which were desperately needed for the earthquake reconstruction effort) were transported from India into Nepal. This led to a severe shortage of many basic goods throughout Nepal. Finally, the standoff was resolved after Kathmandu made some minor changes to the constitution to allow for a more proportional and inclusive representation of marginalized communities.
The blockade has led to Nepal re-evaluating its relationship with India. India has long regarded Nepal as a client state, due to the onerously one-sided 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, and the careful “cultivation” of individual Nepali politicians, but this is changing. Before the blockade, many of Nepal’s mainstream politicians had already started to look instead to its vast northern neighbour, China; this cosying up only increased during the blockade crisis.
The Chinese authorities are taking full advantage of this, with massive new hydroelectric schemes and roads under construction throughout Nepal, alongside calls to continue the Tibet railway right through Nepal to Lumbini and the Indian frontier. At the time of writing, engineers were looking into extending the train line from Lhasa to Nyalam, just 35km north of the Nepali border.
It can be easy to succumb to periodic despair looking at Nepal’s raft of development problems and vulnerability to natural disasters. While tourism continues to prop up the economy, along with remittances from expat workers, it’s never enough. The once-thriving carpet industry has been destroyed by cheap competition and other exports are still hampered by corruption, poor management and the sheer difficulty of getting goods out of the country. The budget deficit has become a yawning gulf and Nepal’s manifold problems seem set to be exacerbated by climate change. Landslips, flooding and erosion are gathering pace, and the larger Himalayan glaciers have lost up to half their volume in the last fifty years. The one feature of Nepal that has seemed a constant through centuries of astonishing transformation, its Himalayan backbone, suddenly looks as if it too is vulnerable to change.
Yet, literacy, life expectancy and access to health care have all improved. Community-based schemes are bringing power – real and metaphorical – into remote areas. And, most excitingly, Nepalis themselves are demanding change. Women’s groups are combating domestic violence, alcoholism and gambling. Environmentalists are pioneering a renewed concern for woodland and wildlife. For all the many problems besieging this terrifyingly young, post-monarchical republic, a smell of spring is undoubtedly in the air. It might seem strange to ascribe national characteristics to a country made up of such an extraordinary diversity of cultures, ethnicities and religions, but the fame of the Nepali for great-heartedness and resilience has not been won easily. If any people can face down the future that seems to loom ahead of them so ominously, it is the people of Nepal.
The number of travellers who return from Nepal and say that, for all the breathtaking scenery, it was the people they were impressed by the most – is astonishing. Nepali friendliness is proverbial, and hospitality is deeply embedded in the national culture. “Guest is god” is a much-used saying, and children are taught early to press their hands together in the namaste greeting. Alongside this refined courtesy culture exists a tough-minded, proud independence and a rare talent for laughing in the face of hardship.
But the fascination of Nepal’s people is about more than charm. Despite the country’s modest size, it has a continent’s share of ethnic groups, with more than fifty languages and as many cultural traditions. Much of this diversity is owed to geography. North of the Himalayan wall live the Mongoloid peoples of central and east Asia. To the south, beyond the malarial plains, are the Indo-Aryans of the Subcontinent. The people of Nepal are the descendants of daring or desperate migrants.
The Kathmandu Valley has its own indigenous group: the Newars, whose tight-knit communities are recognizable by their distinctive architecture of warm red brick and carved wood. Newars are found across Nepal, however, as their enterprising merchant class founded the bazaars around which so many hill towns grew. The Newars could be said to represent a mixture of all Nepal’s cultures: they are Hindus and Buddhists at the same time; they look by turns “Indian” and “Tibetan”. But it would be more true to say that they created the culture that is Nepal – including the culture of extraordinary religious and ethnic tolerance, which persists, admirably, today.
Nepal’s most famous ethnic group, the Sherpas, makes up less than one percent of the population. Alongside other “Bhotiya” peoples of Tibetan origin, such as the Humlis of Humla and the Lo-pa of Mustang, they live at the harshest, highest altitudes, traditionally herding yaks and growing barley, buckwheat and potatoes. All follow the Tibetan school of Buddhism, and are in many ways indistinguishable from Tibetans – as are their communities, with their stone houses, and their chortens, prayer walls and prayer flags. Bhotiya people are noticeably less tradition-bound than Hindus, and women are better off for it. Looks aside, they’re recognizable by their clothing, especially the rainbow aprons (pangden) and wraparound dresses (chuba) worn by most married women.
The Middle Hills, or pahad region, are occupied by an extraordinary mixture of peoples, sometimes known collectively as pahadiyas. Some areas, especially further west, are quite ethnically homogenous; further east it can be extraordinarily mixed: in one valley you might find a Chhetri (caste Hindu) village at low elevation, Rai and Gurung villages higher up, along with adjacent Dalit (untouchable) hamlets, and Tamangs or Sherpas occuping the high ground. Traditionally, however, the Middle Hills are the homelands of distinctive ethnic groups, known as janajaati or tribal peoples: the Gurungs and Magars of the west, the Tamangs of the central hills, and the Rais and Limbus of the east. The janajaati now make up roughly a third of Nepalis and, with Maoist encouragement (combined with a long-standing hostility towards Brahmin oppression), they are increasingly assertive about their ethnic identities.
Mongoloid features and Tibeto-Burman languages are signs of ancestral origins; short stature and muscularity say more about rugged lives. The janajaati follow broadly animist traditions, overlaid by shamanism and subject to varying degrees of Hindu or Tibetan Buddhist influence. Social mores are relatively relaxed: women have more independence than their caste Hindu sisters, for instance, and meat and alcohol are consumed enthusiastically. Print skirts, heavy gold jewellery and pote malla (strands of glass beads) are traditional dress for women; men have mostly abandoned the elfish daura suruwal (shirt and jodhpur pants) of old, but a topi on the head and a khukuri (machete) in the waistband are often seen.
Folk music (git lok) traditions vary among the country’s many ethnic groups, but the true sound of Nepal can be said to be the soft, melodic and complex music of the hills. Jhyaure, the maadal-based music of the Western hills, is the most popular. Selo, the music of the Tamangs, has also been adopted by many other communities. Meanwhile, the music of the Jyapu (Newari farmers) has a lively rhythm, though the singing has a nasal quality.
The improvised, flirtatiously duelling duets known as dohori, traditionally performed by young men and women of the hill tribes, have become the soundtrack of modern Nepal. You’ll hear them on mobile ringtones and bus music systems, as well as in the dedicated rodi ghars (nightlife restaurants), and will soon come to recognize the repetitive back-and-forth, him-then-her structure, with wailing flutes and unison choruses punctuating each verse.
While folk music is by definition an amateur pursuit, there are two traditional castes of professional musicians: wandering minstrels (gaaine or gandarbha) who play the sarangi (a four-stringed fiddle), and damai, members of the tailor caste who serve as wedding musicians.
Nepali dance is an unaffected folk art – neither wildly athletic nor subtle, it depicts everyday activities such as work and courtship. Each region and ethnic group has its own traditions, and during your travels you should get a chance to join a local hoedown or two. Look out, too, for the stick dance of the lowland Tharus, performed regularly at lodges around Chitwan National Park. Staged culture shows in Kathmandu and Pokhara are a long way from the real thing, but they do provide a taste of folk and religious dances. Most troupes perform such standards as the dance of the jhankri (shaman-exorcists); the sleeve-twirling dance of the Sherpas; the flirting dance of the hill-dwelling Tamangs; and at least one of the dances of the Kathmandu Valley’s Newars.
The majority of Nepalis descend from Hindus who fled the Muslim conquest of northern India – or their converts. In the west, especially, they’re sometimes called Parbatiyas (“Hill-dwellers”) or caste Hindus, since nearly all were high-caste Baahuns and Chhetris who had the most to lose from the advance of Islam. High levels of education and a sense of entitlement provided the ambition necessary to subjugate the hill tribes they encountered. In the process they provided the country with much of its cultural framework, including its lingua franca, Nepali.
Although Baahuns (Brahmans) belong to the highest, priestly caste, they’re not necessarily the wealthiest members of society, nor are they all priests. However, their historic ability to read and write has long given them a significant edge in Nepali society, and they have tended to occupy the best government and professional jobs – even half the Maoists’ leaders belong to the caste. Rural Baahuns have a reputation for aggressive moneylending that is sometimes deserved.
Baahuns are supposed to maintain their caste purity by eschewing foods such as onions, hens’ eggs and alcohol, and they are technically prohibited from eating with lower castes – including foreigners – or even permitting them to enter the house. In practice, the stricter rules are only followed by traditional families in the remote west of Nepal. Priest-work – which usually consists of reading Sanskrit prayers and officiating over rites for fixed fees – is usually a family business. Some Baahuns make a full-time living out of it, others officiate part-time alongside other work.
The majority of Nepal’s caste Hindus are Chhetris. They are ranked in the classical caste system as Kshatriyas, the caste of warriors and kings. Like Baahuns, they rank among the “twice-born” castes, because men are symbolically “reborn” at thirteen and thereafter wear a sacred thread (janai) over one shoulder. While Baahuns usually claim pure bloodlines and exhibit classic, aquiline “Indian” features, many Chhetris have more mixed parentage. Some descend from the Khasa people of the western hills, others are the offspring of Baahun and Khasa marriages and are known as the Khatri Chhetri, or “KC” for short. Those whose Khasa ancestors didn’t convert or intermarry are called Matwaali Chhetris – “alcohol-drinking” Chhetris – but because they follow a form of shamanism and don’t wear the sacred thread, they’re sometimes thought to be a separate ethnic group. Chhetris who claim pure Kshatriya blood – notably the aristocratic Thakuri subcaste of the far west, who are related to the former royal family – can be as twitchy about caste regulations as Baahuns. Chhetris have long been favoured for commissions in the military and, to a lesser extent, jobs in other branches of government and industry. Significantly, the Shah dynasty was Chhetri, and their rule owed much to the old warrior-caste mentality.
A significant number of Sudras – members of the “untouchable” caste – immigrated to Nepal’s hills over the centuries. The members of this caste are now known as Dalits, or “the oppressed”, and they certainly suffer severe disadvantages in Nepali society, being typically landless and lacking access to education, health facilities or representation in government. Many villages have an attached Dalit hamlet, often a cluster of smaller, meaner dwellings. Although untouchability was officially abolished in 1963, Dalits threaten orthodox Hindus with ritual pollution, and in many parts of the country they’re not allowed to enter temples, homes or even tea stalls, or they may be asked to wash up their own utensils after eating daal bhaat.
Another name for the Dalits is the occupational castes, as they fall into several occupation-based thars, such as the Sarki (leather-workers), Kami (blacksmiths), Damai (tailors/musicians) and Kumal (potters). While the importance of their labour traditionally helped offset their lowly status, nowadays they cannot compete with imported manufactured goods. Many are turning to tenant farming, portering and day-labouring to make ends meet.
Thanks in part to Maoist pressure, the Constitutional Assembly has taken significant steps to improve political representation, and the old barriers are breaking down in the cities, but it is unlikely that attitudes will change quickly at the village level.
Until recently, the Terai was sparsely populated by forest-dwelling groups like the Tharus, Danuwars and Majhis. But the malaria-control programmes of the 1950s finally opened it up for several million gung-ho immigrants from the hills and India alike, and today the Terai is ethnically the most mixed area of Nepal – alongside the capital, of course.
It often surprises Western visitors to learn that Nepal is, by a huge margin, a Hindu country, not a Buddhist one. That’s what the statistics say, anyway. In truth, both religions are underpinned by shared tantric traditions that are distinctively Himalayan. For long the Subcontinent’s last great Hindu kingdom, Nepal was also the birthplace of Buddhism. Today, you can broadly judge a Nepali’s religion by altitude: Tibetan-style Buddhism prevails on the ridgetops and in the high Himalayas, where you’ll find Sherpas, Tamangs and other Bhotiya or Tibetan peoples; the Madheshi peoples of the plains, and the caste Hindus of the Middle Hills, are fairly orthodox Hindu.
In the hilly heartland of the country, Nepal’s ethnic groups intertwine Hinduism with animist or nature-worshipping traditions, ancestor veneration and shamanistic practices, often worshipping local gods under nominally Hindu names. Many Rais and Limbus, however, are partly or largely “Hinduized” in terms of religion, while Magars and Gurungs have been more strongly influenced by Tibetan Buddhism. In the Kathmandu Valley, the Newars practise their own extraordinary, tolerant mix of the two main religions, bound together by Nepal’s vibrant tantric legacy.
Long supported by the monarchy and Brahmin-dominated government, many Hindu institutions are now facing a more uncertain future. Elements within the Maoist movement are aggressively secular, and in 2008 the government attempted to throw traditional priests out of the Pashupatinath temple and withdrew funding for key Kathmandu festivals. By contrast, Buddhist and indigenous religious groups are enjoying something of a renaissance – partly thanks to the mighty amounts of foreign funding that Tibetan Buddhism attracts. The ethnic groups of the hills, meanwhile, are increasingly asserting political and religious autonomy, rejecting the creeping Hinduization of past decades and turning back to local traditions.
Hinduism isn’t so much a religion as dharma, meaning duty, faith – an entire way of life. Hindus seek the divine not in books or prayer meetings but in the ritual rhythms of the day and the seasons – festivals are hugely important – and in the very fabric of family and social relationships. Having no common church or institution, Hinduism’s many sects and cults preach different dogmas and emphasize different scriptures, and worshippers can follow many paths to enlightenment. By absorbing other faiths and doctrines, rather than seeking to suppress them, Hinduism has flourished longer than any other major religion.
According to the philosophical Upanishads, the soul (atman) of each living thing is like a lost fragment of the universal soul – brahman, the ultimate reality – while everything in the physical universe is mere illusion (maya). To reunite with brahman, the individual soul must go through a cycle of rebirths (samsara), ideally moving up the scale with each reincarnation. Determining the soul’s progress is its karma, its accumulated “just desserts” (nothing to do with kama, which means sexual desire), which is reckoned by the degree to which the soul conformed to dharma in previous lives. Thus a low-caste Hindu must accept his or her lot to atone for past sins, and follow dharma in the hope of achieving a higher rebirth. The theoretical goal of every Hindu is to cast off all illusion, achieve release (moksha) from the cycle of rebirths, and dissolve into brahman.
You cannot escape the sound “AUM” or “OM” in Nepal. Once you’ve learned to recognize the written form of the sacred syllable, you can see it everywhere: on temples gates and monastery walls, carved on rocks beside trails, painted on the sides of buses and hanging on pendants around people’s necks. Once your ear is attuned, you’ll hear it everywhere too: in Hindu prayers and the bhajan hymns sung at dusk, in the endlessly repeated sotto voce incantations of Buddhist pilgrims, and in the relentless blaring of tourist music shops playing New Age mantra recordings.
Some would say you can’t escape the sound anywhere outside Nepal either, as it represents the very vital energy of the universe, of which all material things are manifestations. Among Hindus, it is known as the “four-element syllable”, standing for birth, existence and dissolution, as represented by the three great gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. It also stands for the three human states of selfhood: wakefulness, dreaming and sleep. The fourth element is the eloquent silence out of which the sound arises, and into which it returns; it represents the transcendent state of “peaceful, benign pure oneness”.
The syllable itself reflects the idea: the basic sound (and the core shape of the written letter) is an open “a”; this is modified by the “u” part of the vowel (represented in writing by a hook-like curl behind) before being closed off with a nasalized “m” (shown as a moon-like dash with a dot on top).
As with any good mantra, actually uttering OM is supposed to have real effects: it is said to align your body with the resonant spirit of the universe itself. For Tibetan Buddhists, OM is the first element in the most essential mantra of all: Om mani padme hum (pronounced “om mani peme hung” in Tibetan). It’s usually translated as “Hail to the jewel in the lotus”, which is a salutation to the bodhisattva (a kind of Buddhist saint) Avalokiteshwara, who represents compassion and is known as the jewel-lotus.
For Buddhists, the mantra’s meaning is many-layered, however. Each syllable corresponds to different deities, symbolic colours and magical effects in the Tibetan tradition, and each represents one of the six paramitas, or “perfections”. Om and Hum, for instance, do not have any meaning as words, but represent white and black respectively, and the perfections of generosity and diligence. The mantra also has political significance. Chanting it is a sign of devotion to the Dalai Lama (said to be an incarnation of Avalokiteshwara), and thus of resistance to the Chinese.
Hinduism’s earliest known origins lie in the Vedas, sacred texts composed in India in the first and second millennia BC. They tell stories of a pantheon of nature gods and goddesses, some of whom are still in circulation: Indra (sky and rain) is popular in Kathmandu, while Surya (sun), Agni (fire), Vayu (wind) and Yama (death) retain bit parts in contemporary mythology. As the messenger between the gods and humanity, Agni was particularly important, and sacrifice was thus a major part of Vedic religion. Gradually, the Vedic gods were displaced by the Brahminical “trinity”: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer. Every locality has its own forms, often derived from ancient nature worship. Even today, many ancestral spirits of the Nepali hill peoples are being given Hindu names, their worship adapted to fit more conventional rituals – a process known as Hinduization. When pressed, Nepalis often refer to their local deities as aspects of Mahadev (Shiva), Vishnu or one of the other mainstream gods, either out of respect for foreigners’ potential bewilderment or out of a widespread notion that they all boil down to one god in the end. Shaivism, or the worship of Shiva, is the most widespread devotional cult in Nepal, as part of the tantric legacy.
In art and statuary, the most important gods can easily be identified by certain trademark implements, postures and “vehicles” (animal carriers). Multiple arms and heads aren’t meant to be taken literally: they symbolize the deity’s “universal” (omnipotent) form. Severed heads and trampled corpses, meanwhile, signify ignorance and evil.
Vishnu (often known as Narayan in Nepal) is the face of dignity and equanimity, typically shown standing erect holding a wheel (chakra), mace (gada), lotus (padma) and conch (sankha) in his four hands, or, as at Budhanilkantha, reclining on a serpent’s coil. A statue of Garuda (Garud in Nepal), Vishnu’s bird-man vehicle, is always close by. Vishnu is also sometimes depicted in one or more of his ten incarnations, which follow an evolutionary progression from fish, turtle and boar to the man-lion Narasimha, a dwarf, an axe-wielding Brahman and the legendary heroes Ram and Krishna, as portrayed in the much-loved epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
Ram is associated with Hanuman, his loyal monkey-king ally, while blue-skinned Krishna is commonly seen on posters and calendars as a chubby baby, flute-playing lover or charioteer. Interestingly, Vishnu’s ninth avatar is the Buddha – this was a sixth-century attempt by Vaishnavas to bring Buddhists into their fold – and the tenth is Kalki, a messiah figure invented in the twelfth century as Muslims took the upper hand in India. Vishnu’s consort is Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, to whom lamps are lit during the festival of Tihaar. Like Vishnu, she assumed mortal form in two great Hindu myths, playing opposite Ram as the chaste princess Sita, and opposite Krishna as the passionate Radha.
Shiva’s incarnations are countless but to many devotees he is simply Mahadev, the Great God. He is the pre-eminent divinity in Nepal. The earliest and most widespread icon of Shiva is the linga, a phallic stone fertility symbol often housed in a boxy stone shivalaya (“Shiva home”), often garlanded in marigolds and dusted with red abhir powder, and sometimes encircled in a yoni, or vulva symbol. Shiva temples can be identified by the presence of a trisul (trident) and the bull Nandi, Shiva’s mount.
Many sadhus worship Shiva the yogin (one who practises yoga), the Hindu ascetic supreme, who is often depicted sitting in meditative repose on a Himalayan mountaintop. In his benign form as Pashupati (“Lord of the Animals”), he occupies Pashupatinath as his winter home. As Nataraja, lord of the “dance” of life, he maintains and destroys the cosmos. As the loving husband of Parvati and father of Ganesh, he represents family life – the divine couple can be seen leaning from an upper window of a temple in Kathmandu’s Durbar Square. Nearby stand two famous statues of the grotesque Bhairab, the tantric interpretation of Shiva in his role as destroyer: according to Hindu philosophy, everything – not only evil – must be destroyed in its turn to make way for new things. Bhairab alone is said to take 64 different forms.
The mother goddess is similarly worshipped in many forms, both peaceful and wrathful. Typically, she is the consort of Shiva, and represented as the vulva-like yoni symbol. In Nepal she is widely worshipped as Bhagwati, the embodiment of female creative power, and in the Kathmandu Valley she takes physical form as the Kumari, a young girl chosen to be her virginal incarnation. She is appeased by sacrifices of uncastrated male animals, a practice far more common in tantric Nepal than in more orthodox India. In art, she is most often seen as Durga, the many-armed demon-slayer honoured in the great Dasain festival; as angry Kali (“Black”, but often painted as dark blue), the female counterpart of Bhairab, wearing a necklace of skulls and sticking out her tongue with bloodthirsty intent; and as the Ashtamatrika in the form of eight (or sometimes seven) ferocious “mothers”. On a more peaceful level, she is also Parbati (“Hill”, daughter of Himalaya), Gauri (“Golden”) or just Mahadevi (“Great Goddess”).
Several legends tell how Ganesh, Shiva and Parbati’s son, came to have an elephant’s head: one states that Shiva accidentally chopped the boy’s head off, and was then forced to replace it with that of the first creature he saw. The god of wisdom and remover of obstacles, Ganesh must be worshipped first to ensure that offerings to other gods will be effective, which is why a Ganesh shrine or stone will invariably be found near other temples. Underscoring Hinduism’s great sense of the mystical absurd, Ganesh’s vehicle is a rat.
Of the other classical Hindu deities, only Annapurna, the goddess of grain and abundance (her name means “Full of Grain”), and Saraswati, the goddess of learning and culture, receive much attention in Nepal. Saraswati is normally depicted holding a vina, a musical instrument something like a sitar.
In practice, Hinduism is chiefly concerned with the performance of day-to-day rituals. Puja, a gift to the divine that acts as worship, is particularly important. It can be done before a shrine in the home – and should in fact be performed first and last thing – at a public temple, or simply on an ad hoc basis: when encountering a sacred cow in the street, for instance, or while whizzing past a particular shrine on a motorbike. In a more formal puja, offerings (prasad) are made to the chosen god: flowers (usually marigolds), incense sticks, light (in the form of butter lamps), abhir (coloured powder) and “pure” foods such as rice, milk or sweets. In return for the puja, the worshipper often receives a mark (tilak, or tika in Nepali) on the forehead, usually made of sandalwood paste, ash or coloured powders.
If the day is regulated by puja, the year is measured out in seasonal festivals. The most important Nepali festivals, Dasain and Tihar, both take place in the autumn. Life, meanwhile, is marked by key rites of passage (samskaras). Among the most important in Nepal are the ceremony for a baby’s first rice and the upanayana or “rebirth” rite for higher-caste (Baahun and Chhetri) pubescent boys. The boy’s head is shaved (except for a small tuft at the back) and he is given the sacred thread (janai) to wear sash-like over one shoulder, next to the skin, signifying his twice-born status. In some communities, especially Newari ones, girls may undergo barha, a purification rite around the time of first menstruation. Weddings are hugely important and correspondingly lengthy, involving endless processions, gifts and offerings. In Nepal, they’re often loudly signalled by a live band – either the traditional Nepali ensemble of sahanai (shawm), damaha (large kettledrum), narsinga (C-shaped horn), jhyaali (cymbals) and dholaki (two-sided drum) or, for more urban types, a brass band in military-style uniforms. The other key rite is, of course, the funeral. Hindus cremate their dead, and the most sacred place to do so in Nepal is beside the river at Pashupatinath, just outside Kathmandu. Mourning sons are supposed to shave their heads and wear white.
Priests can be full-time professionals or simply the local Brahman. They officiate at the more important rites and festivals, and may also give private consultations for wealthier patrons at times of illness or important decisions. Temple priests preside over the act of darshan (audience with a deity), providing consecrated water for the devotee to wash him or herself and to bathe the deity, leading the puja and the symbolic offering of food to the deity, and bestowing the tika on the devotee’s forehead.
The most visible form of Hindu sacred music is bhajan – devotional hymn-singing, usually performed in front of temples and in the half-covered loggias, or sattals, of rest-houses. Bhajan groups gather on auspicious evenings to chant praises to Ram, Krishna or other Hindu deities and to recite classical devotional poetry. Like a musical puja, the haunting verses are repeated over and over to the mesmeric beat of the tabla and the drone of the harmonium. The group of (male) singers usually follows one lead voice, gradually coming together as the hymn accelerates to a triumphant, energizing conclusion. During festivals, round-the-clock vigils are sometimes sponsored by wealthy patrons.
Bhajan is mostly a Hindu import, but Newars have their own style, often sung in the Newari language and sometimes even invoking Newari Buddhist deities. Some Newari Buddhist priests still also sing esoteric tantric hymns which, when accompanied by mystical dances and hand postures, are believed to have immense occult power. The secrets of these are closely guarded by initiates, but a rare public performance is held on Buddha Jayanti, when five vajracharya costumed as the Pancha Buddha dance at Swayambhu.
One of Hinduism’s unique features is the apartheid-like caste system, which theoretically divides humanity into four main varnas, or groups. The Rig Veda, Hinduism’s oldest text, proclaimed that priestly Brahmans (Baahuns in Nepali) had issued from the head and mouth of the supreme creator, warrior Kshatriyas (Chhetris) from his chest and arms, Vaishyas from his thighs, and “untouchable” Sudras from his feet. In Nepal, the system is thought to have been instituted by the fourteenth-century king Jayasthiti Malla, who further subdivided his subjects into 64 hereditary occupations – a system that remained enshrined in Nepali law until 1964.
Discriminating according to caste is now illegal in Nepal, though most “higher” caste Hindus are still careful about ritual pollution, being careful not to accept food or water from lower castes, and avoiding physical contact with them. Marriage has been slowest to change: intercaste couplings remain shocking, often resulting in families breaking off contact – a serious punishment in a country where connections are everything.
The ethnic peoples of the hills, or janajaati, don’t quite fit into the caste system, though internal migration has led to much intermixing, and a great deal of Hinduization. As a result, the janajaati have been given a place half inside Nepal’s caste system: practices such as eating meat and drinking alcohol have placed them below Chhetris but above Dalits. This puts them roughly on a par with foreigners (bideshis), incidentally – though Westerners are technically untouchable.
The usual term for caste in Nepali is jaat, though it can signify ethnicity and traditional occupation, as well as caste in the proper sense. A further subdivision is thar, usually defined as a clan. Members of a thar have a common surname, which may or may not indicate common lineage, but may often indicate a hereditary occupation and position in the social hierarchy – and may enforce caste-like rules regarding marriage.
The Buddha was born Siddhartha Gautama in what is now Nepal in the fifth or sixth century BC. His teachings sprang out of Hinduism’s ascetic traditions, adapting its doctrines of reincarnation and karma, along with many yogic practices, but rejecting the caste system and belief in a creator God. The essence of the Buddha’s teaching is encapsulated in the four noble truths: existence is suffering; suffering is caused by desire; the taming of desire ends suffering; and desire can be tamed by following the eightfold path. Wisdom and compassion are key qualities, but the ultimate Buddhist goal is nirvana, a state of non-being reached by defeating the “three poisons” of greed, hatred and delusion.
Buddhism quickly became a full-time monastic pursuit but it also evolved a less ascetic, populist strand known as Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”), which took root in Nepal from around the fifth century. Reintroducing elements of worship and prayer, Mahayana Buddhism developed its own pantheon of bodhisattva – enlightened intermediaries, something akin to Catholic saints, who have forgone nirvana until all humanity has been saved. Some were a repackaging of older Hindu deities. Nepal – and especially the Newari people of the Kathmandu Valley – gradually developed its own unique blend of Hindu and Buddhist traditions, with a strong tantric flavour. Buddhism reached its apogee in the medieval Malla dynasty, but following the Mughal invasion of India, the arrival of orthodox Hindus from the south and west increasingly diluted the Buddhist part of the mix. When the Hindu Shah dynasty took control of Nepal, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Buddhism went into a long decline. The fortunes of Buddhism in Nepal only recovered thanks to the arrival of another wave of refugees, this time Tibetans fleeing the Chinese takeover during the 1950s. They brought with them their own unique form of the religion, Vajrayana. As a relatively structured typeset of beliefs and practices, it is now far stronger and more visible than the indigenous Nepali strains.
Nepal’s highly coloured religious practices owe much to the feverish influence of tantrism, a ritualistic and esoteric strain of religion that courses through the religious blood of Hindus and Buddhists alike. The tantric cults originated in the Shiva worship of Nepal and the surrounding Himalayan regions in around the eighth and ninth centuries, but their influence soon spread across India, pervading both Hinduism and Buddhism. When India succumbed to first Islamic and then British overlords, Nepal became not just the last remaining Hindu kingdom, but the bastion of tantric traditions. Tibet, meanwhile, developed its own distinctively tantric version of Buddhism.
Tantra has nothing to do with the Western invention of “tantric sex”. Or almost nothing: some extreme Hindu followers turned orthodoxy on its head by embracing the forbidden, seeking spiritual liberation by means of transgression. Ascetics from the Kapalika tantric sect took up residence in cemeteries, following “left-hand” ritual practices such as the consumption of meat and alcohol, and the use of sexual fluids in sacrifice. But these now-notorious rituals were always rare, and tantrism today is chiefly concerned with using rituals to speed up the search for enlightenment or union with the divine. Quasi-magical techniques are passed from teachers to initiates, who progress upwards through levels of understanding. Through meditation and the practice of yoga, the body’s energy can be made to ascend through the seven (or sometimes six) chakras or psychic nodes, beginning at the perineum and ending at the crown of the head, where blissful union with the god Shiva can be achieved. Mantras, or sacred verbal formulas, are chanted; worship is intensified with the use of mudras (hand gestures). Arcane geometrical diagrams known as yantras or mandalas are drawn to symbolize and activate divine principles.
So strong did tantrism become in Nepal, that the entire Kathmandu Valley – then known as Nepal mandala – could be conceived as a kind of interactive map of the divine cosmos, studded with religiously supercharged sites and temples. Many sites are dedicated to the chief objects of tantric worship: the “Great God” Shiva, and his female counterpart Shakti, the mother goddess. In Nepal, they are often depicted in art as the fierce god Bhairab and his terrifying consort Kali, and sometimes seen locked in a fierce sexual embrace which symbolizes the creative unity of the male and female principles: masculinity is conceived as passive and intellectual, female as active and embodied; together, they sustain the life force of the universe.
Buddhist tantra, known as Vajrayana (“Thunderbolt Way”), reverses the symbolism of these two forces and makes the male principle of “skill in means” or compassion the active force, and the female principle of “wisdom” passive. In tantric rituals, these forces are symbolized by the hand-held “lightning-bolt sceptre” (vajra; dorje in Tibetan), which represents the male principle, and the bell (ghanti), representing the female. Expanding on Mahayana’s all-male pantheon, Vajrayana introduces female counterparts to the main Buddha figures and some of the bodhisattva, and sometimes depicts them in sexual positions.
Buddhism was originally exported from Nepal to Tibet, courtesy of the Licchavi princess Bhrikuti, who married Tibetan emperor Songstän Gampo in the seventh century. At the time, Tibet was under the sway of a native shamanic religion known as Bön, and Tibetan Buddhism absorbed many of Bön’s symbols and rituals. (Even today vestiges of the Bön tradition may be encountered while trekking in Nepal: for example, a follower of Bön will circle a religious monument anticlockwise, the opposite direction to a Buddhist. There are a number of Bön temples in the remote Dolpo region.)
Buddhism only really took off in Nepal and Tibet in the eighth century, however, thanks to the founding father Padmasambhava. Better known as Guru Rinpoche or “Precious Teacher” – and recognizable in paintings by his wide-eyed stare, and the thunderbolt symbol and skull-cup he holds in each hand – he introduced magical and ritualistic practices from the tantric cult (see box above) that was then sweeping across South Asia. In doing so, he apparently meditated in just about every cave in the region, frequently leaving foot or handprints in the rock as signs of his passing.
Bön and tantra proved an explosive mix, giving rise to the spectacular branch of Buddhism now known as Vajrayana, or “thunderbolt way” Buddhism. It takes its name from the vajra or thunderbolt (dorje in Tibetan), a diamond sceptre or dagger used in tantric rituals to signify indestructability. True to its tantric roots, Vajrayana placed great emphasis on close contact with a lama, or spiritual guide, who steers the initiate through the complex meditations and rituals, and progressively reveals teachings at ever higher and more esoteric levels. (It’s sometimes called Lamaism for this reason.) The most important lamas are regarded as tulkus, reincarnations of previous teachers.
Four main sects developed in Tibet, all now represented in Nepal. The oldest, founded by Padmasambhava, is the Nyingma-pa sect – known as the “Red Hats” for obvious reasons. The Sakya-pa and Kagyu-pa orders emerged in the eleventh and twelfth centuries – the latter inspired by the Tibetan mystic Marpa and his enlightened disciple Milarepa, who also meditated his way around Nepal. The Gelug-pa sect, or “Yellow Hats”, led by the Dalai Lama, is the only one that takes a significantly different theological line. Born out of a fifteenth-century reform movement to purge Lamaism of its questionable religious practices, it places greater emphasis on study and intellectual debate.
Vajrayana disciples make heavy use of quasi-magical rituals, such as the ringing of bells, the reading aloud of holy texts and the chanting of mantras or sacred syllables – most importantly, Om mani padme hum. In part, these rituals are aids to meditation, the most important action of all, but they also serve to accelerate the passage of the disciple towards the ultimate goal: enlightenment.
The most visible sign of Vajrayana Buddhism is the stupa (chorten in Tibetan), a dome-like stone structure that serves to enshrine the relics of the saints and to act as a giant abstract representation of Buddhist beliefs. Around Kathmandu’s Swayambhu stupa, for instance, stand five statues representing the transcendent or dhyani (meditating) Buddhas. Stupas are also surrounded by prayer wheels and prayer flags, Tibetan innovations that allow written mantras to be not spoken but spun or fluttered into the air.
Increasing numbers of lavishly endowed gompa, or monasteries, have sprung up all over Nepal in the last 25 years, thanks to the growing wealth of the Tibetan community and the generous sponsorship of Western followers. Rather like medieval cathedrals, gompa are vehicles for esoteric religious symbolism as much as places of worship. Fierce guardian demons (dharmapala) flank the entrance, while the interior walls are riotously covered in paintings of deities, Buddhas and geometric mandalas, and hung all over with silken thangka icons. Gorgeous banners of brightly coloured silk brocade hang from the ceiling, often with elaborately carved and gilded cornices and panelling. On low trays, butter lamps burn pungently alongside heaps of rice piled onto three-tiered silver stands, rows of incense sticks and offerings of fruit, money, flowers and conical dough cakes called torma – sacrifices of a uniquely vegetarian kind. The eye is inevitably drawn, however, to the golden statues of Buddhas and bodhisattvas that line the altars. Often mistaken for deities, these provide a focus for meditation as well as an object of devotion. The most popular figures are Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha; Avalokiteshwara (Chenrezig in Tibetan), a white male figure with four arms (or, sometimes, a thousand), who represents compassion; Tara, a white or green female figure, also representing compassion; Manjushri, an orange-yellow male youth gracefully holding a sword above his head, who represents wisdom; and the founder of the monastery’s sect, perhaps the Nyingma-pa’s Padmasambhava, better known as Guru Rinpoche. Though these figures are peaceful and benign, there are also wrathful bulging-eyed figures wearing human skins and bearing skulls filled with blood; they symbolize the energy and potency of the enlightened state, and the sublimation of our crudest energies.
Ask a Newari man whether he’s Hindu or Buddhist, the saying goes, and he’ll answer “yes”: after fifteen centuries of continuous exposure to both faiths, the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley have concocted a unique synthesis of the two. Until the eighteenth century, most Newars held fast to the original monastic form of tantric Buddhism – as the bahal of Kathmandu and Patan still bear witness. Gradually, the Kathmandu Valley became “Hinduized” thanks largely to the Hindu kings who ruled it. The monasteries largely disappeared, and the title of Vajracharya (Buddhist priest) became a hereditary subcaste much like that of the Baahun (Brahman) priests. When Newars refer to themselves as Buddha margi (Buddhist) or Shiva margi (Hindu), they often do so only to indicate that they employ a Vajracharya or Baahun priest. Yet many jyapu (farmers) will attend Hindu festivals and use Vajracharyas as well.
Animal sacrifice is an important part of Hindu – but not Buddhist – Newari religious practice. Newari priests don’t perform sacrifices, but they do preside over the rituals that precede them. Similar ceremonies and feasts are held at private gatherings of patrilineal groups during the Newars’ many festivals and during digu puja, the annual reunion based around the worship of the clan deity (digu dyo).
More astounding, even, than the polychrome decor of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery is the crashing, thumping, rasping ritual music that rings out during the puja or prayer ceremonies. The cacophony is supposed to shock you out of your everyday thoughts – and it works. At the core of the ritual is the recital or hymn-like chanting of texts, which usually begins with the master, or cantor, and spreads in rhythmic ripples down the rows of monks. Monks from the Gelug-pa order, most dramatically, use the extraordinary overtone or “throat-singing” technique; this ultra-low, growling tone produces rich harmonics sometimes called the gyü-ke, or “tantric voice”. Alongside the virtue regarded as inherent in the recitation of holy texts, such demanding vocal techniques create their own meditational discipline.
In the Tibetan tantric tradition chanting alternates antiphonically with instrumental music, whose crashes and blasts and bangs punctuate and disrupt the hypnotic vocal line – and thus serve to turbo-charge the meditation. Music can represent fierce protective Buddhas or calming, peaceful ones, and different instruments have different ritual significance or uses. The dung-dkar conch, for instance, embodies the clear voice of the Buddha. The rkang-gling trumpet, traditionally made from a human thighbone, is apparently like the whinnying of horses on their way to paradise. Cymbals can be soft and peaceful (gsil-snyan) or brassily fierce (rol-mo). The rgna, or double-drum with its distinctively crooked beater, typically leads the orchestra. Oboe-like rgya-gling shawms play intense, microtonally sliding melody lines, while the long (up to 3m long), alpenhorn-like dung trumpets play sustained, almost subsonic rasping notes in discordant pairs. The dril-bu hand bell and damaru rattle drum usually mark off different sections of the ritual, or guide the tempo. The damaru is a particularly powerful instrument: commonly used by shamans in Nepal, it may be made of two human half-skulls, and the pair of pellet beaters should ideally contain male and female pubic hairs.
All the Hindu and Buddhist deities are fair game for Newars, along with a few additional characters of local invention. Some deities specialize in curing diseases, others bring good harvests – as far as Newars are concerned, it doesn’t matter whether they’re Hindu or Buddhist so long as they do the job.
The widely worshipped Ajima, or Mai, the Newars’ grandmother goddess, is both feared as a bringer of disease and misfortune and revered as a protectress against the same. There are innumerable Ajimas, each associated with a particular locality. Some are also worshipped as Durga, Bhagwati or Kali, including the Ashta Matrika, the eight mother goddesses, whose temples in and around Kathmandu are considered especially powerful. Similar are the tantric Bajra Yoginis (or Vajra Joginis), who command their own cults at four temples around the Kathmandu Valley. Local manifestations of Ajima are represented by clusters of round stones (pith) located at intersections and other strategic places. Chwasa Ajima, the Ajima of the crossroads, has the power to absorb death pollution, which is why Newars traditionally deposited possessions of deceased persons at crossroads. Nag (snake deities), who control the rains and are responsible for earthquakes, may be similarly indicated by modest roadside markers.
Machhendranath, the rainmaker par excellence, is known by Buddhist Newars as Karunamaya, and associated with Avalokiteshwara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Depending on his incarnation (he is said to have 108), he may be depicted as having anything up to a thousand arms and eleven heads. Kumari, the “Living Goddess”, is another example of Newari syncretism (religious fusing): although acknowledged to be an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga, she is picked from a Buddhist-caste family. Bhimsen, a mortal hero in the Hindu Mahabharat, who is rarely worshipped in India, has somehow been elevated to be the patron deity of Newari shopkeepers, both Hindu and Buddhist. Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, plays the lead part in the Kathmandu Valley’s creation myth, and is often confused with Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge. He is always depicted with a sword, with which he cuts away ignorance and attachment, and sometimes also with book, bow, bell and vajra. Tara, the embodiment of the female principle in Vajrayana Buddhism, assumes special meaning for Newars, who consider her the deification of an eighth-century Nepali princess.
To Newars, the astrologer is a counsellor, confessor, general practitioner and guide through the maze of life. He acts as mediator between the self and the universe (which are one), and his prognostications are considered as important as a priest’s blessings and as vital as a doctor’s diagnosis. He knows most of his clients from birth. For new parents, the astrologer will prepare complex planetary charts based on the baby’s precise time and place of birth, together with a lengthy interpretation detailing personality traits, health hazards, vocational aptitude, characteristics of the ideal marriage partner, and a general assessment of the newborn’s prospects. When a marriage is contemplated, he will study the horoscopes of the prospective couple to make sure the match is suitable and to determine the most auspicious wedding date. During an illness, he may prescribe a protective amulet, gemstone or herbal remedy corresponding to the planets influencing the patient. He may also be consulted on the advisability of a business decision or a major purchase.
Credit: David Reed
Shamans – sometimes called medicine men, witch doctors and oracles, or jhankri and dhami in Nepali – exist to mediate between the physical and spiritual realms. Shamanistic practices are often found alongside animism, or nature worship, and the ethnic groups of Nepal’s hills, including those who would unhestitatingly describe themselves as Hindu or Buddhist, will often turn to a jhankri. Urbane Nepalis may publicly ridicule the shaman in favour of more “modern” beliefs such as orthodox Hinduism, but many will privately call on a shaman to exorcise a new house or deal with a case of toothache.
Most ethnic groups clearly distinguish between the true shaman, whose duties, rituals and powers are concerned with the spiritual world, and other types of tribal priest, whose concerns may be with seasonal rituals, rites of passage or tribal myth, and whose roles have been more easily absorbed by mainstream religion. For all the many local variations, a jhankri – usually carrying a double-sided drum and often wearing a headdress of peacock feathers – is always unmistakeable. And even across ethnic and religious divides, jhankris may come together on high hilltops or at lakes deep in the mountains for melas, or religious fairs.
The jhankri may be “called”, or born, or both, and his (almost never her) main job is to maintain spiritual and physical balance, and to restore it when it has been upset. As a healer, he may examine the entrails of animals for signs, gather medicinal plants from the forest, perform sacrifices, exorcise demons, chant magical incantations to invoke helper deities, or conduct any number of other rituals. As an oracle, he may fall into a trance and act as a mouthpiece of the gods. As the spiritual sentry of his community, he must ward off ghosts, evil spirits and angry ancestors. All this, plus his duties as funeral director, dispenser of amulets, teller of myths and consecrator of holy ground and so on, puts the jhankri at the very heart of religious and social life in the hills.
Few visitors to Nepal will encounter a jhankri, as their rituals are usually performed in homes, at night, and shamans have a tendency to guard their esoteric knowledge jealously, wrapping it up in archaic, poetic language that veers between the mystical and the mystifying. There are signs of new confidence, however, with the recent establishment of a Gurung shamanic cultural centre and training school in Pokhara.
Nepal has a rich lore of demons, ghosts and spirits who meddle in human affairs and, like deities, must be propitiated to safeguard passage through their respective domains. Demons are sometimes thought to be the wrathful or perverted manifestations of deities, or more often as supernatural ogres, vampires and the like. Some demons, such as the lakhe, are regarded somewhat fondly, or, like the betal, can also serve as temple protectors. Bhut pret – restless ghosts – are thought to be the spirits of people who died an accidental or violent death and were not administered the proper funeral rites. Other evil spirits take the form of poltergeist-like dwarfs, furry balls, or temptresses with their feet pointing backwards; the design of traditional Newari windows is intended to prevent such spirits from entering the house. Since spirits are believed to attack mainly at night and are repelled by light, it is sometimes said that they are driven out when electricity arrives in a village.
Nepalis often blame their troubles on witches (bokshi), who are believed to be able to cast “black” tantric spells by giving the evil eye or reciting mantras over their victims’ food. Evidence of bewitchment is often seen in bruises called “bokshi bites”. “Witches” are usually neighbours, in-laws or other people known to their alleged victims. Although laws prohibit false accusations of witchcraft, this doesn’t protect many people (particularly elderly women) from suffering unspoken fear and resentment for their alleged dark arts.
A final category of supernatural forces is negative planetary influences (graha dosa), caused by the displeasure of the deity associated with the offending planet.
A significant number of Muslims inhabit the Western Terai, especially around Nepalgunj, where they’re in the majority. Musalmans, as they’re called in Nepal, form a distinctive cultural group. They have their own language (Urdu), clothing styles and customs – including the institution of purdah for women. In the hill areas, Nepali Musalmans are traditionally wandering traders. They specialize in selling bangles and in “teasing” cotton quilts, and they can often be heard in Kathmandu and other towns calling on housewives to come-buy-my-wares, or giving a prompting twang on the instrument of their cotton-teasing trade. Many are now farmers, tailors or run clothing shops.
Christianity barely registered in Nepal for centuries, due to a vigorously enforced ban on missionary conversions. The interdict was largely lifted in 1990, however, and since 2006 Nepal has been an officially secular state. The result has been a significant influx of evangelicals from all over the world, mostly targeting lower castes and other disadvantaged groups. There has been a corresponding growth of churches, especially in the Kathmandu Valley, and since the 2015 earthquake, many Nepalis say there has been an increase in missionary activity. Today, there may be as many as half a million Nepali Christians.
Development – or bikas, in Nepali – has been the country’s political mantra ever since the Ranas were booted out of office in 1950. And yet Nepal remains one of the world’s poorest nations, with a per capita income of just under US$700 a year. Even this pitiful figure though is distorted by migrant labourers’ remittances, and perhaps half of Nepal’s population survives on little more than a dollar a day. On the UN’s 2015 Human Development Index, Nepal ranked 145th out of 188 countries – sandwiched between Kenya and Pakistan.
Everything seems stacked against Nepal. It is landlocked, and squeezed between two economic giants. The steep terrain makes farming inefficient and communications difficult. Earthquakes and monsoons can undo dams, roads and other infrastructure as fast as they’re built. A combination of Hindu fatalism, the caste system and a legacy of aristocratic paternalism has long kept the doors of opportunity tightly shut – the regime did essentially nothing for its people before 1951. While corruption and clientism remains endemic at government level, the recent growth of “bottom-up” community-led developent schemes, whether in hydro power, micro loans or simply litter picking, signifiy a refreshing culture of home-grown activism.
Nepal’s population was around 29 million in 2016. The rate of growth may be slowing down (it currently stands at some 1.2 percent per year, down from 2.25 percent around ten years ago), but the population continues to increase. Each year there are some 400,000 more Nepalis to feed and employ – and, indeed, requiring health care, education, clean water, sewage disposal, electricity and roads. Population growth will continue as long as women remain comparatively ill educated and low status, and as long as children are needed to fetch water, gather fuel and tend animals – and to care for the aged parents in the absence of pensions or state support. Moreover, Nepalis tend to have large families because they can’t be sure all their children will survive. Hindus, especially, may keep trying until they’ve produced at least one son, who alone can perform the prescribed rites (shradha) for his parents after their death.
It’s often said that “development is the best contraceptive”, and indeed, there is a close correlation between rising standards of living and declining birth rates. Unfortunately, in most countries this so-called demographic transition involves a period of rapid population growth until the birth rate settles down to match the lower death rate. The slowing in Nepal’s growth rate is probably partly a result of improved women’s education – and anxiety in the face of insecurity and inflation.
And the growth is just about balanced, for the time, by outward migration. The hill peoples, especially men, have long sought work in Kathmandu, the Terai and India. Nowadays, young Nepali men are as likely to emigrate to the Gulf and Southeast Asia or East Asia, or indeed the West. Some two million Nepalis currently work abroad, which is twice the number ten years ago, and for the first time in living memory, some Middle Hill districts are becoming depopulated. Instead of new terraces being painfully carved out by hand, old fields are lying fallow. At the same time, the country’s urban population is exploding. The population of the Kathmandu Valley more than doubled between the early 1990s and late 2000s, and is set to continue rising at an unsustainable rate.
The average life expectancy is now 67, up from 43 in 1975 – though the poor can still expect to live some fifteen years less than the average, and the typical Nepali will live in poor health from his or her mid-50s onwards.
Mortality rates for mothers and babies have improved dramatically over the last few decades, thanks largely to improved sanitation and the availability of cheap oral rehydration treatment; the chief cause of infant death is usually nothing more complicated than diarrhoea. Access to safe (or at least “improved”) drinking water has widened significantly in recent years: almost ninety percent of Nepalis now have access to a spring, well or communal tap, though demand often outstrips supply, particularly in Kathmandu where residents pump what water they can get up to rooftop storage tanks.
Surviving infancy is only the start. Around half of Nepali children are considered underweight. Parasitic infections are also rife. Almost half the population is thought to carry tuberculosis, and some forty thousand Nepalis develop TB actively every year, leading to more than five thousand deaths. There are successes: leprosy is becoming more rare, though Nepal still has one of the highest per capita rates in the world, and mosquito spraying in the Terai has reduced malaria cases to about five thousand annually – compared with two million a year during the 1950s.
Nepal avoided the HIV-AIDS epidemic for many years, but sex workers, long-distance truck drivers and seasonal migrants provided a channel for transmission of the disease from India – one recent study found that two-thirds of women trafficked into India for sex work acquired HIV. The infection is common among the country’s thirty-thousand-odd injecting drug users and twenty to thirty thousand sex workers, and starting to spread into the general population as well: roughly seventy thousand Nepalis are currently living with HIV-AIDS.
There are no statistics on alcoholism, but it is certainly one of the major public health problems among men from the hill ethnic groups. Since the late 1990s, Maoist-affiliated women’s community groups have aggressively tackled drinking, and in government the Maoists have introduced ever-more stringent regulation, but drinking culture is fairly embedded. Tobacco use seems if anything even more entrenched: more than half of adult Nepalis smoke.
In addition to all these problems, access to health care is extremely poor. Many hospitals lack even a single resident doctor, since the vast majority of qualified physicians prefer to practise privately in the Kathmandu Valley. For rural Nepalis, medical assistance means a local jhankri or health post that’s a day or more’s walk (or piggyback ride) down the trail and where the only person on staff may effectively be the janitor, or perhaps an assistant with some ayurvedic training.
More than two-thirds of Nepalis still make their living from agriculture, on some of the most intensively cultivated land in the world. Nepal has been a net importer of rice since the 1970s, and localized food deficits are a serious problem, especially in the remote northwestern districts of Humla and Mugu, where famines and emergency food airlifts are a regular spring occurrence.
Clearing new land for cultivation only adds to deforestation, so productivity has been chased instead. High-yielding seeds and animal breeds such as the Jersey cross – fondly known as bikasi gai, or “development cow” – have had some success, while pesticides and chemical fertilizers are now widely used in the Kathmandu Valley and Terai. In the hills, however, it can be impossible or uneconomic to transport these inputs. Where fertilizers are used, they’re often misapplied. Irrigation is a promising area, but the big canal systems underwritten by the government and foreign funders are often inefficient and poorly maintained, and tend to benefit only the bigger landholdings. Tractors and other mechanized equipment, similarly, are only really workable on bigger farms in the plains.
Thanks to subdivision across generations, many farms have simply become too small to feed a family – which is why so many Nepalis are now undernourished. Many small farmers are locked in a hopeless cycle of debt, or have been forced to sell or hand over their land to unscrupulous moneylenders. Supplying credit through the official Agriculture Development Bank has grown impossibly bureaucratic, but microcredit loan programmes look more promising. Allowing farmers to grow cash crops is another possible solution, but roads are needed to export, and the development of the road network may actually make it impossible to compete with Indian imports.
In the circumstances, many younger and more educated Nepalis are abandoning the land and seeking paid employment. Areas under Maoist control during the ten-year conflict saw large areas of land seized and redistributed, sometimes turned over to farms working on a “cooperative” model. In government, the Maoists have come under pressure to return much of it, and whether or not their promises of country-wide, “scientific” land reform will bear fruit is uncertain.
An expanding population needs not only more land, but more firewood and more fodder for animals – which, in Nepal, is gathered by hand in the forest. The result is deforestation, which itself causes erosion and landslides, thus reducing productivity and contributing to flooding. In practice, there are counterbalancing forces: the further people have to walk to find firewood or fodder, the more likely they are to emigrate, taking pressure off the area’s resources.
No one has a clear idea of the rate of forest loss in Nepal but certainly the government got it badly wrong when it nationalized the forests in the 1950s. From the 1980s, however, the policy of sustainable, locally managed community forestry slowed or even reversed deforestation in some hill areas. The breakdown in law and order during the conflict, however, and the massively increased road network, meant that the community forests were corruptly or illegally plundered on a dramatic scale from the late 1990s onwards. The Terai suffered worst: trees have been clear-felled right across the south, leading to the loss of some 2640 square kilometres of forest in the five years up to 2005 alone. Overall, a quarter of Nepal’s forest has vanished in the last twenty years, including almost all of the magnificent native forest outside the national parks and wildlife or forest reserves. Perhaps a quarter of Nepal’s total land cover is woodland today, and less than half of that is true, “primary” forest.
Efforts to reduce deforestation produced one apparently brilliant solution: the “smokeless” chulo (stove), which burns wood more efficiently. The positive side effect, however – reducing levels of health-destroying kitchen smoke – turned out to be problematic: insects were no longer smoked out of traditional thatched roofs, leading to infestations and increased use of corrugated metal. The miracle stoves also emit less light, causing increased dependency on kerosene for lamps or electricity – both of which require hard cash to purchase.
An astounding number of foreign news stories relating to Nepal focus on pollution – usually of the “Everest is a rubbish dump” or “Kathmadu is choking in smog” sort. There’s a bit of truth to the first example and a lot of truth to the second. The most popular “yak route” up Everest is indeed bestrewn with the remnants of old expeditions, and expeditions regularly find funding by offering “clean-up Everest” missions – one removed 8000kg of rubbish from Everest Base Camp. There’s a lot of the Himalayas beyond Everest, however. Even the environmental pressure on trekking routes is restricted to a few ribbons of the country – admittedly, in relatively fragile mountain areas.
Waste disposal is a major national problem, of course. Consumption of manufactured goods has boomed, yet there are few organized methods of waste disposal outside the major cities (and precious few within them). The less visible pollution issues are arguably more serious, however. Air pollution in the cities is life-threatening, due to a lethal combination of brick manufacture in kilns, burning of fuel woods and rubbish (including plastics), and ever-swelling volumes of traffic. Vehicular pollution is exacerbated by the routine adulteration of fuels (low-taxed, subsidized kerosene is illegally added to petrol and diesel), and the dust clouds caused by unsealed road surfaces. In the 2016 Pollution Index, Kathmandu had the unenviable rating of third-most-polluted city in the world.
Human waste also presents a major challenge. Many development programmes have focused on the building of toilets in recent years, from the “one family one toilet” scheme, to Eco Himal’s “public toilets for Everest” campaign and Kaski District’s proud declaration of itself as “Nepal’s first open-defecation-free zone”. Yet sewer systems are still poor where they exist at all (and they certainly struggle to cope with the toilet paper used by tourists – paper should be put in separate bins for burning later). Composting toilets and pit latrines are becoming ever more sophisticated, however, and more common.
Western visitors are frequently horrifed by the amount of visible rubbish in Nepal, but often forget to ask themselves how they would manage their own waste if no one ever came to take away their bins. Tourists also consume items that are particularly hard to get rid of (bottles, toilet paper, batteries and plastic, for instance), and with a much greater intensity than locals. The traditional, local methods of waste disposal – composting in the fields and burning – just can’t keep up. Next time you’re horrified by the sight of a child dropping a sweet wrapper, consider that the average carbon emission of a Nepalese person is 1 tonne per capita: about a tenth of most Europeans, and a twentieth of the average North American. Next time you buy a bottle of mineral water, consider that, at best, it’s going to be burned in someone’s courtyard.
Nepal’s steep, mountain-fed rivers have enormous hydroelectric potential – enough to power the British Isles, by some estimates. Unfortunately, getting materials and technical experts into the rugged backcountry, not to mention handling the Himalayan-scale seismic problems, has made this potential difficult to harness. However, despite these problems both Indian and Chinese hydroelectrical projects have been launched in Nepal with a view to both increasing available electricity in Nepal and to export to power-hungry India and China. According to the World Bank by 2012 some 76.3% of Nepalis had access to electricity – although in rural areas that percentage is far lower and at night the hills still remain largely swathed in darkness.
Small-scale successes have been achieved with microhydro projects, which supply electricity for a few hundred households each. Locally manufactured solar water-heaters are also promising, as are biogas plants, tank-like super-composters of manure and agricultural waste which collect the gas given off for burning. But to satisfy demand growing at ten percent a year, and currently estimated at 850MW (megawatts) at peak, Nepal has to persuade international donors and lending bodies to finance hydroelectric projects.
The idea of building huge-scale storage dams fell out of favour in 1995, after the World Bank finally withdrew from the monstrous (404MW) Arun III project, citing environmental and social concerns. The emphasis now is on licensing of private sector companies to build mostly small- to medium-sized “run-of-river” diversions. Many such projects were mothballed during the Maoist conflict, but political stability and an improved climate for foreign investment may lead to an explosion: plans exist for two dozen hydropower projects, capable of producing over 1000MW, and construction is starting on some of them.
In recent years, two 70MW projects on the Marsyangdi, on the east side of the Annapurna range, and the 144MW Kali Gandaki ”A” project, on the west, have started production. In August 2011, plans for the huge (and hugely controversial) 750MW West Seti dam project, in Nepal’s Far West region, were shelved after the Asian Development Bank finally admitted that the scheme met none of its own criteria for information disclosure, public participation, environmental assessment or proper acknowledgement of the rights of local people. Then, in November, the China Three Gorges Corporation agreed to provide a US$1.6 billion loan for the West Seti dam, and, at the time of writing, the project had a prospective completion date of 2019. In 2016, agreements were signed between India and Nepal to instigate the return of the Arun III project, and bids for the dam’s construction opened at the end of December 2016. The Chinese are also building the Trushuli 3A dam (which will be one of a number of different dams proposed for the Upper Trisuli River), but this was severely damaged during the 2015 earthquake. As well as delaying progress, this raised the issue of the questionable safety of building large dams in such a seismically active region.
Until the 1950s, the only way to get to Nepal was to walk. In fact, the only way to get anywhere within Nepal was to walk. VIPs might be carried in palanquins, the royal elite could drive up and down a few kilometres of road in cars dismantled and imported piecemeal from India, and valuable freight was swung over from the plains on a 42km ropeway (which operated from the 1920s to the early 1990s) – but otherwise, you had to walk.
Nepal began to open up to the rest of the world in the 1950s. Cows in a field outside Kathmandu were surprised when the first plane landed, in 1953. Three years later, the tortuous Tribhuvan Rajpath was completed, connecting Nepal’s capital to India. In the 1960s, the Chinese managed to blast the Arniko Highway down from the Tibetan border (the bridges, it was said, were exactly strong enough to carry a Chinese tank), and they funded the Prithvi Highway, which joined Kathmandu with Pokhara. India chipped in with a link from Pokhara to its own border, at Sonauli, and by the end of the 1960s, a faster route from Kathmandu to India was opened, via Narayangadh.
In the hills, meanwhile, scores of rivers and gorges were being spanned by spidery suspension footbridges, which saved villagers hours or even days of walking. Airstrips were being hammered out in remote areas, while in the south, the plains and forests were being pierced by the Mahendra Highway which, by the early 1980s, sped east–west though the Terai in one unbroken (if not always smooth) ribbon.
Today, road building is one of the big stories of the moment: more roads were built in the five years following the end of the civil conflict than in the fifty years before, and only a handful of the country’s 75 districts now remains roadless. Even the extravagantly beautiful Kali Gandaki gorge, on the Annapurna Circuit, has been penetrated, and it now links up with the Chinese border at Mustang. The Trisuli road, which is being upgraded along its entire length, now creeps beyond the Langtang trailhead at Syabrubesi, and continues through to the Tibetan town of Kerung. New roads snake due south from the Kathmandu Valley, making for the Terai – and work has begun on a “fast track” link, which will reduce the journey time to India by around half. (It is supposed to hit the East–West Highway at Nijgadh, where there is a proposal to build a new international airport.) Kathmandu is also supposed to get an outer ring road – one day – and there’s even talk of a grand Mid Hill East–West Highway.
The perennial problem is maintenance. With every monsoon many roads are washed away or buried in landslides. The other, greater problem is that roads are not universal panaceas. With every new road, barefoot porters will no longer people the trails, while only those Nepalis who can afford a bus ticket will be able to get to hospitals and universities. Cheap imports of goods and foodstuffs will arrive in ever greater quantity. And what was once a country whose every step – political, developmental, cultural – was measured at walking pace, whose people met and talked with each other (and with foreign visitors) on the hill trails, will, for better or worse, become more like the rest of the world.
Education is one of Nepal’s relative success stories: the result, perhaps, of how well respected it is in Nepali culture: “book is god”, as the saying goes. The system has certainly come a long way in a short time: before 1951, schools only existed for the children of the ruling elite, and two percent of the population was literate. There are now government primary schools within walking distance of most villages, and secondary schools in most areas of denser population. According to results from the last census in 2011, literacy has soared to almost 66 percent. Of course, that’s still an appalling figure by international standards, but the government has launched an adult literacy programme, with the intention of making the population fully literate in the coming years.
The major problem with education in Nepal is that Government schools are chronically underfunded, especially in rural areas, and the current policy of handing over school management to communities is unlikely to address the problem. Teachers may be unqualified, poorly trained, underpaid or simply absent. Classes regularly number eighty or more, and are held in rooms with mud floors and no glazing. Toilet facilities, if they exist at all, are execrable – a major factor in putting children off school. There are rarely enough benches, let alone desks – even though many children will be off school on any given day due to illness, the need for their labour in the fields, or lack of funds to buy a book or pen, or to find the modest subscription fee.
In these conditions it’s no surprise that while three-quarters of young Nepalis now attend primary school, around half fail to finish. Girls and disadvantaged castes make up the bulk of the dropouts. Secondary attendance is under a third, and many rural secondaries fail to get even one of their final-year students through their School Leaving Certificate (SLC). As a result, any family that can afford it sends its children away to one of the legion of private “English medium” boarding schools which have sprung up in the cities and towns, teaching in the English language. Those who make it to one of Nepal’s colleges or universities often find that there’s no work for them when they graduate. Frustrated by a lack of opportunities or just plain bored, the educated youth of the cities make up a growing class of angry young men and women.
Women have particularly low status in much of Nepal, making them exceptionally vulnerable to exploitation. Their status is generally slightly higher among the ethnic groups of the hills, and considerably so among Buddhists and in wealthy urban families, but even these women rarely enjoy true power-sharing. Rural women may still be considered their husband’s or father’s chattel (property). They work far harder than men, by and large: rising before dawn to clean the house, doing the hardest fieldwork and all of the cooking and childcare. Women wait for men to finish eating before they begin.
Typically married off in their teens, women are frequently subject to institutionalized domestic violence. In orthodox Baahun families, low status is underpinned by religious sanction. The touch of a menstruating woman, for example, is traditionally considered as polluting as that of an untouchable. During their menstrual period, or in the wake of childbirth, women in the far west may still be sent into ritual seclusion.
It’s estimated that each year, some 10–15,000 Nepali girls and women – twenty percent of them under the age of sixteen – are trafficked into sexual slavery. Kathmandu’s sex industry is burgeoning, but most are bound for India, where Nepali girls are reputed for beauty (partly on account of their relative pallor), purity and supposed lack of inhibition. To poor families in Nepal, a daughter is a financial burden; when a broker comes offering thousands of rupees for a pubescent girl, families can find it difficult not to accept. This trade is most pronounced in the Central Hills north of Kathmandu, where it has historical roots: Tamang girls were forced to serve as court concubines for generations, and some men are still complicit in the enslavement of their own female relatives.
One solution to women’s low status is to boost education and earning power. The Bangladesh-based Grameen Bank and the Nepali government’s Production Credit for Rural Women programme, make microcredit loans to small, self-organizing groups of women, and support the borrowers with literacy, family-planning and other training. Another route is political. Legally, the position of women has vastly improved in recent years, with the Maoists being particularly vociferous about improving the status of women; female involvement in the insurgency has presented Nepal with a new image of women’s empowerment.
Agriculture simply cannot absorb the country’s growing workforce, and unemployment and underemployment are rife. Nepal also desperately needs to earn foreign exchange to pay for the imported technology and materials it needs for development. All of this means boosting industry, which in Nepal’s case accounts for an unusually low proportion of gross domestic product – import values are nearly ten times higher than those of exports.
Other countries in the region have used their low wages and high unemployment to attract the sweatshops of Western brand-name companies. Without a seaport, Nepal can’t even do that. It achieved surprising success in the 1990s, with carpet manufacture, though the industry has collapsed since due to quality-control problems, bad PR over child labour, saturation of the market and undercutting by more mechanized competitors. Where once one million Nepalis worked in the industry, the number is now less than a tenth of that. Pashmina (cashmere) items have seen less dramatic rises and falls, while ready-made clothes and shoes seem to be on the up. Beer and cigarettes, curiously enough, are two other success stories, alongside the more prosaic bricks and cement, and agricultural products like sugar and timber (most of the latter being illegally exported). There is also a brisk trade in Himalayan medicinal herbs, along with the fabled yarsagumba caterpillar, which is used as a stimulant and aphrodisiac, and various essential oils. In herbs and medicines, there is a thriving illegal market.
Recent liberalization of rules on foreign ownership and investment may stimulate entrepreneurship, but in many of its industries, Nepal finds itself in a classic developing-country bind. Even if it could fairly access external markets, it can’t compete with high-volume market leaders in manufacture. But importing even modest amounts of high-value items quickly runs up a nasty trade deficit. The government therefore subsidizes the production of run-of-the-mill goods for domestic consumption, according to the economic theory of import substitution: for a country short on foreign exchange, a penny saved is a penny earned.
Nepal’s main trading partner, India, is as much a part of the problem as it is the solution. It levies high import duties to protect its own industries, thus benefiting Nepali border traders (who can sell imported goods for less than their Indian competitors), but crippling Nepali exporters (whose goods become uncompetitive with duty added on). The balance of power is so disproportionate that India can always present Nepal with take-it-or-leave-it terms of trade. Thus, when India imposed a “luxury tax” on Nepali tea leaves, it instantly pulled the rug from under the Nepali growers’ market. However, in recent years, Nepal has started trading more and more with China, and this pattern looks set to increase – particularly with improved roads (and relations) between China and Nepal and after the India–Nepal border blockade in 2015.
Most of Nepal’s institutional problems – bureaucracy, corruption – are common to most poor countries, but some may be unique to Nepal. One of Nepal’s foremost anthropologists, Dor Bahadur Bista, controversially argued that along with Nepalis’ beguilingly relaxed ke garne (“what to do?”) attitude comes a crippling fatalism. Responsibility is supposedly passed on to higher-ups (whether a boss, an astrologer or a deity), and the relationship between present work and future goals glossed over, resulting in haphazard planning. Nepali society also values connections very highly. The cult of the aafno maanche (one’s “own man”) makes it hard for minorities to advance, while the tradition of patronage ensures that loyalty is rewarded rather than skill or innovation.
Nepal has three religions, or so the saying goes: Hinduism, Buddhism and tourism. The last is Nepal’s top foreign-exchange earner (not counting the massive remittances from migrant workers). Around annual 800,000 tourists bring in some US$700 million (excluding the 2014–16 downturn period), and give work to roughly half a million people. With the return of relative political stability, and the growth of tourism from India and China, visitor arrivals to Nepal are once again growing, but the infrastructure to cope with them is still lacking – and all tourism jobs tend to be both seasonal and intensely vulnerable to economic and political downturns. The fruits of tourism, so arbitrarily awarded, have turned legions of Nepalis into panhandlers. And while tourism can claim some credit for shaping Nepal’s environmental record, it has imposed its own ecological and cultural costs. Independent trekking may encourage tourists to spend money at the local level in rural areas, but it has placed an environmental strain on the fragile “honeypot” areas in the mountains.
Nowhere in the world is there a transition of flora and fauna so abrupt as the one between the Terai and the Himalayan crest. In a distance of as little as 60km, the terrain passes from steaming jungle through monsoon rainforest and rhododendron highlands to glacial valleys and the high-altitude desert of the Himalayan rain shadow. As a result, Nepal can boast an astounding diversity of life, from rhinos to snow leopards.
Nepal’s vegetation is largely determined by altitude and can be grouped into three main divisions. The lowlands include the Terai, Churia Hills and valleys up to about 1000m; the midlands extend roughly from 1000m to 3000m; and the Himalayas from 3000m to the upper limit of vegetation (typically about 5000m). Conditions vary tremendously within these zones, however: south-facing slopes usually receive more moisture, but also more sun in their lower reaches, while certain areas that are less protected from the summer monsoon – notably around Pokhara – are especially wet. In general, rainfall is higher in the east, and a greater diversity of plants can be found there.
Most of what little lowland forest remains in the Terai consists of sal, a tall, straight tree much valued for its wood – a factor which has caused its catastrophic decline outside protected areas. Sal prefers well-drained soils and the purest stands were once found along the Bhabar, the sloping alluvial plain at the base of the foothills; in the lower foothills, stunted specimens are frequently lopped for fodder. In spring, its cream-coloured flowers give off a heady jasmine scent. Other species sometimes associated with sal include saj, a large tree with crocodile-skin bark; haldu, used for making dugout canoes; and bauhinia, a strangling vine that corkscrews around its victims.
The wetter riverine forest supports a larger number of species, but life here is more precarious, as rivers regularly flood and change course during the monsoon. Sisu, related to rosewood, and khair, an acacia, are the first trees to colonize newly formed sandbanks. Simal, towering on mangrove-like buttresses, follows close behind; also known as the silk-cotton tree, it produces bulbous red flowers in February, and in May its seed pods explode with a cottony material that is used for stuffing mattresses. Palash – the “flame of the forest” tree – puts on an even more brilliant show of red flowers in February. All of these trees are deciduous, shedding their leaves during the dry spring. Many other species are evergreen, including bilar, jamun and curry, an understorey tree with thin, pointed leaves that smell just like their name.
Grasses dominate less stable wetlands. Of the fifty-plus species native to the Terai, several routinely grow to a height of 8m. Most grasses reach their greatest height just after the monsoon and flower during the dry autumn months. Locals cut khar, a medium-sized variety, for thatch in winter and early spring; the official thatch-gathering season in the Terai parks (two weeks in January) is a colourful occasion, although the activity tends to drive wildlife into hiding. Fires are set in March and April to burn off the old growth and encourage tender new shoots, which provide food for game as well as livestock.
The decline in precipitation from east to west is more marked in the Middle Hills – so much so that the dry west shares few species in common with the moist eastern hills. Central Nepal is an overlap zone where Western species tend to be found on south-facing slopes and Eastern ones on the cooler northern aspects.
A common tree in dry western and central areas is chir pine (needles in bunches of three), which typically grows in park-like stands up to about 2000m. Various oak species often take over above 1500m, especially on dry ridges, and here you’ll also find ainsilo, a cousin of the raspberry, which produces a sweet, if rather dry, golden fruit in May.
Although much of the primary forest in the wet midlands has been lost to cultivation, you can see fine remnants of it above Godavari in the Kathmandu Valley and around the lakes in the Pokhara Valley. Lower elevations are dominated by a zone of katus (Castanopsis indica or Nepal chestnut) and chilaune (Schima wallichii), the latter being a member of the tea family with oblong concave leaves and, in May, small white flowers. In eastern parts, several species of laurel form a third major component to this forest, while alder, cardamom and tree ferns grow in shady gullies.
The magical, mossy oak-rhododendron forest is still mostly intact above about 2000m, thanks to the prevalent fog that makes farming unviable at this level. Khasru, the predominant oak found here, has prickly leaves and is often laden with lichen, orchids and other epiphytes, which grow on other plants and get their nutrients directly from the air. It’s estimated that more than three hundred orchid varieties grow in Nepal, and although not all are showy or scented, the odds are you’ll be able to find one flowering at almost any time of year. Tree rhododendron (Lali guraas), Nepal’s national flower, grows to more than 20m high and blooms with gorgeous red or pink flowers in March and April. Nearly thirty other species occur in Nepal, mainly in the east – the Milke Danda, a long ridge east of the Arun River, is the best place to view rhododendron, although impressive stands can also be seen between Ghodapani and Ghandrung in the Annapurna region. Most of Nepal’s three hundred species of fern are found in this forest type, as are many medicinal plants whose curative properties are known to ayurvedic practitioners, but are little studied in the West. Also occurring here are lokta, a small bush with fragrant white flowers in spring, whose bark is pulped to make paper, and nettles, whose stems are used by eastern hill-dwellers to make a hard-wearing fabric.
Holly, magnolia and maple may replace oak and rhododendron in some sites. Dwarf bamboo, the red panda’s favourite food, grows in particularly damp places, such as northern Helambu and along the trail to the Annapurna Sanctuary. Cannabis thrives in disturbed sites throughout the midlands – including beside roads and paths, handily enough.
Conifers form the dominant tree cover in the Himalayas. Particularly striking are the forests around Rara Lake in western Nepal, where Himalayan spruce and blue pine (needles grouped in fives) are interspersed with meadows. Elsewhere in the west you’ll find magnificent Himalayan cedar (deodar) trees, which are protected by villagers, and a species of cypress. Two types of juniper are present in Nepal: the more common tree-sized variety grows south of the main Himalayan crest (notably around Tengboche in the Everest region), while a dwarf scrub juniper is confined to northern rain-shadow areas. Both provide incense for Buddhist rites. In wetter areas, hemlock fir (distinguished from spruce by its upward-pointing cones) and even the deciduous larch may be encountered.
One of the most common (and graceful) broadleafed species is white birch, usually found in thickets near the tree line, especially on shaded slopes where the snow lies late. Shivery poplars stick close to watercourses high up into the inner valleys – Muktinath is full of them – while berberis, a shrub whose leaves turn scarlet in autumn, grows widely on exposed sites. Trekking up the Langtang or Marsyangdi valleys you pass through many of these forest types in rapid succession, but the most dramatic transition of all is found in the valley of the Thak Khola (Upper Kali Gandaki): the monsoon jungle below Ghasa gives way to blue pine, hemlock, rhododendron and horse chestnut; then to birch, fir and cypress around Tukche; then the apricot orchards of Marpha; and finally the blasted steppes of Jomsom.
Alpine vegetation predominates on the forest floor and in moist meadows above the tree line, and – apart from the dwarf rhododendron (some species of which give off a strong cinnamon scent and are locally used as incense) – many flowers found here will be familiar to European and North American walkers. There are too many to do justice to them here, but primula, buttercup, poppy, iris, larkspur, gentian, edelweiss, buddleia, columbine and sage are all common. Most bloom during the monsoon, but rhododendrons and primulas can be seen flowering in the spring and gentians and larkspurs in the autumn.
Most of Nepal’s rich animal life inhabits the Terai and, despite dense vegetation, is most easily observed there. Along the trekking trails of the hills, wildlife is much harder to spot due to population pressure, while very few mammals live above the tree line. The following overview progresses generally from Terai to Himalayan species, and focuses on the more charismatic or visible animals – anyone interested in identifying some of Nepal’s 55 species of bats or eight kinds of flying squirrel will need a specialist guide.
The Asian one-horned rhino (gaida) is one of five species found in Asia and Africa, all endangered, and all at serious risk from poaching. In Nepal, 605 rhinos, or a little under twenty percent of the world’s total, live in Chitwan – something of a success story. Forty-eight were introduced to Bardia, but only 29 remain. Rhino conservation in Nepal is something of a rare success story, as numbers here are growing at an impressive rate. In a 2015 survey, 645 were counted in the country. Rhinos graze singly or in small groups in the marshy elephant grass, where they can remain surprisingly well hidden.
Although trained elephants (hatti) remain important to Nepali culture, their wild relatives are seen only rarely in Nepal by tourists – though they kill literally dozens of Nepalis every year, especially near the eastern border, where hundreds of wild elephants roam between Nepal and India. Since elephants require vast territory for their seasonal migrations, the settling of the Terai is putting them in increasing conflict with humankind. More than half of Nepal’s resident wild elephants, some eighty animals or so, are found in Bardia National Park; Chitwan has another thirty or so.
Koshi Tappu is the only remaining habitat in Nepal for another species better known as a domestic breed, wild buffalo (arnaa), some two hundred of which graze the wet grasslands there in small herds. Majestic and powerful, the gaur (gauri gaai), or Indian bison, spends most of its time in the dry lower foothills, but descends to the Terai in spring for water.
Perhaps the Terai’s most unlikely mammals, Ganges river dolphins – one of four freshwater species in the world – are present in increasingly small numbers in the Karnali and Sapt Koshi rivers. Curious and gregarious, they tend to congregate in deep channels where they feed on fish and crustaceans, and betray their presence with a blowhole puff when surfacing.
The most abundant mammals of the Terai, chital, or spotted deer, are often seen in herds around the boundary between riverine forest and grassland. Hog deer – so called because of their porky little bodies and head-down trot – take shelter in wet grassland, while the aptly named barking deer, measuring around half a metre high at the shoulder, are found throughout lowland and midland forests. Swamp deer gather in vast herds in Sukla Phanta, and males of the species carry impressive sets of antlers (their Nepali name, barhasingha, means “twelve points”). Sambar, heavy-set animals standing 1.5m at the shoulder, are more widely distributed, but elusive. Two species of antelope, the graceful, corkscrew-horned blackbuck and the ungainly nilgai (blue bull), may be seen at Bardia and Koshi Tappu respectively; the latter was once assumed to be a form of cattle, and thus spared by Hindu hunters, but no longer.
Areas of greatest deer and antelope concentrations are usually prime territory for the endangered Bengal tiger (bagh). However, your chances of spotting one – there are thought to be between 163 and 253 in Nepal – on an average visit to a national park are exceedingly slim, and not just because they’re rare: they’re mainly nocturnal, and incredibly stealthy. In the deep shade and mottled sunlight of dense riverine forest, a tiger’s orange-and-black-striped coat provides almost total camouflage. A male may weigh 250kg and measure 3m from nose to tail. Tigers are solitary hunters; some have been known to consume up to twenty percent of their body weight after a kill, but they may go several days between feeds. Males and females maintain separate but overlapping territories, regularly patrolling them, marking the boundaries with scent and driving off interlopers. Some Nepalis believe tigers to be the unquiet souls of the deceased. Though there are currently very few tigers, the good news is that – like the rhinos – the population is thought to be increasing, and the government is putting resources in place to try and double the number of tigers by 2022.
Leopards (chituwa) are equally elusive, but much more common and widely distributed: they may be found in any deep forest from the Terai to the timber line. As a consequence, they account for many more maulings in Nepal than tigers, and are more feared. A smaller animal (males weigh about 45kg), they prey on monkeys, dogs and livestock. Other cats – such as the fishing cat, leopard cat and the splendid clouded leopard – are known to exist in the more remote lowlands and midlands, but are very rarely sighted. Hyenas and wild dogs are scavengers of the Terai, and jackals, though seldom seen (they’re nocturnal), produce an eerie howling that is one of the most common night sounds in the Terai and hills.
While it isn’t carnivorous, the dangerously unpredictable sloth bear, a Terai species, is liable to turn on you and should be approached with extreme caution. Its powerful front claws are designed for unearthing termite nests, and its long snout for extracting the insects. The Himalayan black bear roams midland forests up to the tree line and is, if anything, more dangerous; some believe this, or the very rare and little-known Tibetan blue bear is the origin of the Yeti myth. Wild boars can be seen rooting and scurrying through forest anywhere in Nepal.
Monkeys, a common sight in the Terai and hills, come in two main varieties in Nepal. The delightful grey langurs have silver fur, black faces and hands, and long, ropelike tails; in forested trekking areas, it’s quite common to see and hear them crashing about in the trees, or sitting around in placid family groups. Nepalis know them as “Hanuman” monkeys, after the monkey god: one story has it that they have been blackened since the fire that singed the monkey god when he tried to rescue Sita from the demon Ravana. Russet-brown rhesus macaques (red monkeys or raato bandar) are more shy in the wild, but around temples are tame to the point of being nuisances. There is a third species, the Assamese macaque, but it’s found only in small populations in remoter areas such as the Langtang region and Makalu-Barun National Park.
Many other small mammals may be spotted in the hills, among them porcupines, flying squirrels, foxes, civets, otters, mongooses and martens. The red panda, with its rust coat and bushy, ringed tail, almost resembles a tree-dwelling fox; like its Chinese relative, it’s partial to bamboo, and is very occasionally glimpsed in the cloud forest of northern Helambu.
Elusive animals of the rhododendron and birch forests, musk deer are readily identified by their tusk-like canine teeth; males are hunted for their musk pod, just one of which can fetch well over US$100 on the black market (a pittance compared to its value at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was worth twice its weight in gold). Though by no means common, Himalayan tahr is the most frequently observed large mammal of the high country; a goat-like animal with long, wiry fur and short horns, it browses along steep cliffs below the tree line. Serow, another goat relative, inhabits remote canyons and forested areas, while goral, sometimes likened to chamois, occurs from middle elevations up to the tree line.
The Himalayas’ highest domesticated, or at least semi-domesticated, resident is the yak – true wild yaks are considered extinct in Nepal. While smaller and usually gentler than cows, they look shaggier, tougher, with their long horns, and distinctly more eccentric. The female is called a nak. The bovines more often seen on trekking paths, however, are the dzopkio (male) and dzum (female) yak-cow crossbreeds, recognizable by their more even temper, forward-curving horns and lowing – yaks can only grunt. The truly wild mammals you’ll most often see above the tree line are blue sheep, or bharal, which graze the barren grasslands year-round. Normally tan, males go a slatey colour in winter, accounting for their name. Herds have been sighted around the Thorung La in the Annapurna region, but they occur in greater numbers north of Dhorpatan and in She-Phoksundo National Park. Their chief predator is the snow leopard, a secretive and beautiful cat whose habits are still little understood. Nepal has a critical population of 350–500 of this globally endangered species.
Native to the Terai’s wetlands, crocodiles are most easily seen in winter, when they sun themselves on muddy banks to warm up their cold-blooded bodies. The endangered mugger crocodile favours marshes and oxbow lakes, where it may lie motionless for hours on end until its prey comes within snapping distance. Muggers mainly pursue fish, but will eat just about anything they can get their jaws around – including human corpses thrown into the river by relatives unable to afford wood for a cremation. The even more endangered gharial crocodile lives exclusively in rivers and feeds on fish.
Nepal has many kinds of snakes, but they are rarely encountered: most hibernate in winter, even in the Terai, and shy away from humans at other times of year. Common cobras – snake charmers’ favourites – inhabit low elevations near villages; they aren’t found in the Kathmandu Valley, despite their abundance in religious imagery there. Kraits and pit vipers, both highly poisonous, have been reported, as have pythons up to 6m long. However, the commonest species aren’t poisonous and are typically less than half a metre long.
Chances are you’ll run into a gecko or two, probably clinging to a guesthouse wall. Helpful insect-eaters, these lizards are able to climb almost any surface with the aid of tiny barbed hairs on their feet. About fifty species of fish have been recorded in Nepal and most ponds are stocked with carp and catfish.
More than eight hundred bird species – one-tenth of the earth’s total – have been sighted in Nepal. The country plays host to a high number of birds migrating between India and central Asia in spring and autumn and, because it spans so many ecosystems, Nepal provides habitats for a wide range of year-round residents. The greatest diversity of species is found in the Terai wildlife parks, but even the Kathmandu Valley is remarkably rich in birdlife. The following is only a listing of the major categories – for the complete picture, get hold of Birds of Nepal.
In the Terai and lower hills, raptors (birds of prey) such as ospreys, cormorants, darters, gulls and kingfishers patrol streams and rivers for food; herons and storks can also be seen fishing, while cranes, ducks and moorhens wade in or float on the water. Many of these migratory species are particularly well represented at Koshi Tappu, which is located along the important Arun Valley corridor to Tibet. Peafowl make their meowing mating call – and peacocks occasionally deign to unfurl their plumage – while many species of woodpeckers can be heard, if not seen, high up in the sal canopy. Cuckoos and “brain fever” birds repeat their idiotic two- or four-note songs in an almost demented fashion. Parakeets swoop in formation; bee-eaters, swifts, drongos, swallows and rollers flit and dive for insects, while jungle fowl look like chickens as Monet might have painted them. Other oddities of the Terai include the paradise flycatcher, with its lavish white tail feathers and dragonfly-like flight; the lanky great adjutant stork, resembling a prehistoric reptile in flight; and the giant hornbill, whose beak supports an appendage that looks like an upturned welder’s mask.
Many of the above birds are found in the midlands as well as the Terai – as are mynas, egrets, crows and magpies, which tend to scavenge near areas of human habitation. Birds of prey – falcons, kestrels, harriers, eagles, kites, hawks and vultures – may also be seen at almost any elevation. Owls are common, but not much liked by Nepalis; it’s considered unlucky if an owl roosts in or around your house. Babblers and laughing thrushes populate the oak-rhododendron forest and are as noisy as their names suggest. More than twenty species of flycatchers are present in the Kathmandu Valley alone.
Nepal’s national bird, the iridescent, multicoloured danphe (impeyan pheasant), can often be spotted scuttling through the undergrowth in the Everest region. Kalij and monal, two other native pheasants, also inhabit the higher hills and lower Himalayas. Migrating waterfowl often stop over at high-altitude lakes – ruddy shelducks are a trekking-season attraction at Gokyo – and snow pigeons, grebes, finches and choughs may all be seen at or above the tree line. Mountaineers have reported seeing choughs at up to 8200m on Everest, and migrating bar-headed geese are known to fly over Everest.
Perhaps no other creature in Nepal arouses such squeamishness as the leech (jukha). Fortunately, these segmented, caterpillar-sized annelids remain dormant underground during the trekking seasons; during the monsoon, however, they come out in force everywhere in the Terai and hills, making any hike a bloody business. Leeches are attracted to body heat, and will inch up legs or drop from branches to reach their victims. The bite is completely painless – the bloodsucker injects a local anaesthetic and anticoagulant – and often goes unnoticed until the leech drops off of its own accord. Removing them, however, can be tricky.
More than six hundred and forty species of butterflies have been recorded in Nepal, with more being discovered all the time. The monsoon is the best time to view butterflies – in fact, they provide a reason in themselves for a visit in that season – but many varieties can be seen before and especially just after the rains: look beside moist, sandy banks or atop ridges; Phulchoki is an excellent place to start in the Kathmandu Valley. Notable hill varieties include the intriguing orange oakleaf, whose markings enable it to vanish into forest litter, and the golden birdwing, a large, angular species with a loping wingbeat. Moths are even more numerous – around five thousand species are believed to exist in Nepal, including the world’s largest, the giant atlas, which has a wingspan of almost 30cm.
Termites are Nepal’s most conspicuous social insects, constructing towering, fluted mounds up to 2.5m tall in the western Terai. Organized in colonies much the same as ants and bees, legions of termite workers and “reproductives” serve a single king and queen. The mounds function as cooling towers for the busy nest below; monuments to insect industry, they’re made from tailings excavated from the colony’s galleries and bonded with saliva for a wood-hard finish. Honey bees create huge, drooping nests in the Terai and especially in the lush cliff country north of Pokhara. Spiders aren’t very numerous in Nepal, although one notable species grows to be 15cm across and nets birds (it’s not poisonous to humans). Fireflies, with orange and black bodies, give off a greenish glow at dusk in the Terai. For many travellers, however, the extent of their involvement with the insect kingdom will be in swatting mosquitoes: two genera are prevalent in the lowlands, one of them, Anopheles, the infamous vector of malaria.
In the reviews that follow, publishers are only listed for books published outside the UK and US. Most titles – including those that are out of print (o/p) – are a lot easier to come by in Nepal, and some will only be available there. Books marked with the 
symbol are particularly recommended.
Barbara Crossette So Close to Heaven. A survey of the “vanishing Buddhist kingdoms of the Himalayas”, including a chapter focusing on Nepal’s Tibetans, Bhotiyas and Newars.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Ed Douglas House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal. A monster of a book with contributions from many of the world’s best-known writers, explorers and mountaineers, both Nepalese and foreign. Weaves a beautiful portrait of Nepal.
Harka Gurung Vignettes of Nepal (Sajha Prakashan, Nepal). This vivid but dated travelogue, illuminated by a native’s insights, is one of the best books written by a Nepali in English about his country.
Peter Matthiessen The Snow Leopard. Matthiessen joins biologist George Schaller in a pilgrimage to Dolpo to track one of the world’s most elusive cats, and comes up with characteristically Zen insights and magnificent writing on landscape.
Dervla Murphy The Waiting Land. A personal account of working with Pokhara’s Tibetan refugees in 1965, written in the author’s usual entertaining and politically on-the-ball style.
Barbara J. Scot The Violet Shyness of Their Eyes: Notes from Nepal. An American woman crash-lands in the Nepali hills; the writing strikes a nice balance between observation and introspection.
Colin Thubron To a Mountain in Tibet. Thubron reaches the holy Mount Kailash the hard way, by trekking through western Nepal and pondering on life, death and Buddhist belief along the way.
Coburn Broughton Himalaya. Produced by the American Himalayan Foundation and National Geographic, this wonderfully illustrated book recounts the personal stories of people across the Himalayas and Tibet. Perhaps the only gripe is that it’s a little too much of an advert for the American Himalayan Foundation.
Broughton Coburn Nepali Aama: Life Lessons of a Himalayan Woman (Adarsh Enterprises). Delightful study of an old Gurung woman in a village south of Pokhara. Told in her own words, and includes photos.
Monica Connell Against a Peacock Sky. Beautiful, impressionistic rendering of life among the matawaali (alcohol-drinking) Chhetris of Jumla District, capturing the subtleties of village life in Nepal.
Hugh R. Downs Rhythms of a Himalayan Village (o/p). An extraordinarily sensitive synthesis of black-and-white photos, text and quotes, describing rituals and religion in a Solu village.
Tessa Feller Culture Smart! Nepal. Sensitivity training for tourists, with valuable insights into social mores, religion, caste and cross-cultural relations.
William P. Forbes The Glory of Nepal: A Mythological Guidebook to the Kathmandu Valley (o/p). A lively retelling of myths from the Nepal Mahatmya and other medieval texts, linking them to modern-day locations.
Eva Kipp Bending Bamboo, Changing Winds: Nepali Women Tell Their Life Stories (Pilgrims, Nepal). Powerful oral histories and photographs of women from all over Nepal, revealing not only the country’s amazing cultural diversity but also the universal trials of being a Nepali woman.
Robert I. Levy and Kedar Raj Rajopadhyaya Mesocosm: Hinduism and the Organization of a Traditional Newar City in Nepal (o/p). A heavy anthropological study of Bhaktapur, but its thesis – that the city’s inhabitants collectively operate a sort of well-oiled cultural and spiritual machine – is fascinating.
Rory Maclean Magic Bus: On the Hippy Trail from Istanbul to India. Entertaining and easy-to-digest book that follows in the stoned footsteps of hippy travellers, as they made their way from Istanbul to Kathmandu in the 1970s. Contains some interesting insights on the impact that flower power had on Nepalese tourism.
Mary Slusser Nepal Mandala: A Cultural Study of the Kathmandu Valley (o/p). A gorgeous (though exorbitantly priced and hard-to-find) two-volume set, this is the definitive study of Newari culture and religion.
Isabella Tree The Living Goddess. A wonderful book that weaves together myth, history, gossip and cultural and religious background in its examination of the life of the Kumari, the “living goddess” of Kathmandu.
Robert Twigger White Mountain. A fascinating and rambling mishmash of history, culture, wildlife, mountaineering challenges, climate change and more. Something of a biography of the Himalayas.
Thomas Bell Kathmandu. Entertaining and easy-to-read chronicle of Kathmandu, which also weaves in a general history of the country and the story of the author’s time reporting on the Maoist conflict for a British daily newspaper.
Jonathan Gregson Blood Against the Snows. Occasionally lurid account of the royal massacre, prefaced by rather dustier diggings into the history of Nepal’s monarchy.
Prashant Jha Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal. This book combines history, reportage, interviews and biography to make it one of the best and most engaging recent books on the modern history and politics of Nepal.
Percival Landon Nepal (o/p). The most comprehensive study of the country when it was written (1928), and still a classic – but having been commissioned by the Maharaja, it has a distinct political bias.
John Parker The Gurkhas (o/p). One of many books lionizing Nepal’s famous Gurkha soldiers.
Manjushree Thapa Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy. Published just before the royal coup in 2005, this trenchant account of the early years of the Maoist insurrection weaves it into the context of Nepal’s deeper history. Thapa is a novelist, and uses personal memoir and travelogue – she visits the Maoist heartland – to bring the politics alive.
John Whelpton A History of Nepal. A little long in the tooth now (it was published in 2005), but a good introduction to Nepalese history up to 2000.
Kevin Bubriski and Keith Dowman Power Places of Kathmandu. A collaboration by two eminent authorities on Hindu and Buddhist holy sites. Rich colour photographs are accompanied by well-researched text.
Georg Feuerstein Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy. Clear-sighted and readable introduction to tantra, dispelling the usual “tantric sex” myths and offering a vision of an alternative thread in Subcontinental spirituality.
James McConnachie The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra. Investigates the role of sex in Hinduism, touching on tantra, and traces how those ideas became known in the West.
Axel Michaels Hinduism Past and Present. Heavyweight, and still one of the most insightful books on Hinduism. Written by a Nepal specialist, it focuses on living practices rather than texts and mythology.
Arshia Sattar (trans.) The Ramayana of Valmiki. One of the most engaging retellings of this magnificent tale.
Barbara Stoler Miller (trans.) The Bhagavad-Gita. A poetic English rendering of Krishna’s teaching.
John Powers Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism. A thorough introduction for beginners.
Robert A.F. Thurman Essential Tibetan Buddhism. Weaves together classic texts with modern commentary; not for beginners.
Hannelore Gabriel Jewelry of Nepal (o/p). A thorough cataloguing of traditional highland jewellery (less coverage is given to hill and Terai styles).
Michael Hutt Nepal: A Guide to the Art and Architecture of the Kathmandu Valley. An in-depth discussion of iconography, design and construction, from one of the leading scholars of Nepal.
Eva Rudy Jansen The Book of Buddhas: Ritual Symbolism Used in Buddhist Statuary and Ritual Objects (Binkey Kok, Netherlands; Motilal Banarsidass, India) and The Book of Hindu Imagery: The Gods and Their Symbols (New Age, India, plus Weiser, UK). Good introductory guides to the iconography of religious statuary.
Laxmi Prasad Devkota Muna Madan (Nirala, Nepal). The most famous work by one of Nepal’s best-loved poets recounts the tragic, almost Shakespearean tale of a young Newari trader who leaves his young wife to travel to Lhasa.
Manjushree Thapa The Tutor of History (Penguin, India). Tensions build before an election in a small roadside town between Kathmandu and Pokhara. Hugely vivid evocation of politics, social mores, alcoholism and a quintessentially Nepali struggle against what appears to be fate. Seasons of Flight, her most recent novel, follows a navel-gazing young Nepali woman on her journeys through the post-globalization Nepali diaspora.
Samrat Upadhyay Arresting God in Kathmandu. This acclaimed collection of stories, written by a Nepali living in the US, takes on typically introspective Nepali themes – jealousy, self-doubt, desire, family tension. Upadhyay’s debut novel, The Guru of Love, tells a story of disturbed domesticity against the charged atmosphere of late-1990s Kathmandu.
Narayan Wagle Palpasa Café (Nepa-laya, Nepal). Perhaps the definitive novel of the Maoist conflict era, written by a leading journalist. Conveyed in a direct, youthful, Murakami-like style, it puts a blighted romance between a drifting artist and a Nepali-American girl in the highly charged context of the troubles.
Bikram Grewal and Rohit Chakravarty A Naturalist’s Guide to the Mammals of India. Covering two hundred of the more commonly seen mammals of the Indian Subcontinent, this is the most useful general guide available.
Richard Grimmett, Carol Inskipp and Tim Inskipp Birds of Nepal. The authoritative guide. The authors have published numerous shorter guides as well.
Reinhold Messner My Quest for the Yeti. After a face-to-face yeti encounter in remote eastern Tibet, Messner, the renowned mountaineer, goes on a multi-year quest to try and solve the riddle of the Himalayas’ most famous “animal”.
George Schaller Stones of Silence: Journeys in the Himalaya (o/p). Written by the wildlife biologist who accompanied Peter Matthiessen on his quest for the snow leopard, this book provides a detailed view of ecosystems of the high Himalayas.
Peter Smetacek A Naturalist’s Guide to the Butterflies of India. Covering 280 of the most alluring of the Subcontinent’s butterflies.
Adrian and Jimmie Storrs Enjoy Trees (Book Faith India). Great beginner’s guide to the more common flora of Nepal, covering flowers as well as trees, and with sections on medicinal and religious plants.
W.E. Bowman The Ascent of Rum Doodle. This much-loved parody of a mountaineering expedition is the Spinal Tap of the Himalayan climbing scene. It even has a bar in Kathmandu named after it.
Chris Bonington and Charles Clarke Everest: The Unclimbed Ridge. The classic story of the bold but ill-fated first attempt of Everest’s fearsome Northeast Ridge in 1982.
Maurice Herzog Annapurna. One of the greatest true adventure stories ever written, describing the search for, and first successful ascent of, an 8000m peak. Herzog’s dreamlike description of his summit stupor and the tale of the desperate descent are riveting.
Jon Krakauer Into Thin Air. The best-selling first-person account of the 1996 Everest tragedy reads like a whodunnit and has all the elements of high tragedy: hubris, heroism, angry mountain gods, rivalry, vanity, triumph and agony.
Jan Morris Everest. Produced by the Royal Geographical Society to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the first successful climb of Everest, this magnificent book contains stories and original photos from all the main attempts leading up to the day man first stood atop the great mount.
Philip Parker and Peter Hilary Himalaya. A beautifully illustrated coffee-table book covering the history of exploring and climbing in the Himalayas. It’s an ideal first introduction to the subject.
H.W. Tilman Nepal Himalaya (Pilgrims, Nepal). A chatty account of the first mountaineering reconnaissance of Nepal in 1949–51. Tilman was one of the century’s great adventurers, and his writing remains fresh and witty.
Stephen Bezruchka and Alonzo Lyons Trekking Nepal: A Traveler’s Guide (Mountaineers). Covers only the “teahouse” treks, not those in restricted areas, but is perhaps the most culturally sensitive book, containing background pieces on Nepali language, culture and natural history.
Robin Boustead Nepal Trekking and the Great Himalaya Trail. A solid general trekking guide from Trailblazer, though it doesn’t offer all that much more detail in terms of the standard routes than is covered by this Rough Guide. That said, it’s good on more remote areas, and of course covers the monumentally ambitious, country-length, high-altitude Great Himalaya Trail, as pioneered by Boustead himself.
Bob Gibbons and Sian Pritchard-Jones A Trekking Guide to the Nepal Himalaya. A comprehensive overview of pretty much every trek in Nepal. Many routes are described in taster fashion here, but the same team produce highly detailed regional guides to almost every trekking area in Nepal.
Margaret Jefferies Highest Heritage: The Mount Everest Region and Sagarmatha National Park (Pilgrims, Nepal). Superbly detailed guide to the Everest region, covering Sherpa culture, landscape, history and wildlife, as well as giving brief trekking itineraries.
Bradley Mayhew, Lindsay Brown and Stuart Butler Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya. This Lonely Planet guide divides treks into fixed days, which can be limiting, but is hugely detailed and written in an enjoyably breezy style, and the maps are decent. Unless you’re doing lots of treks, however, it makes more sense to buy a dedicated, single-region guidebook.
Jamie McGuinness Trekking in the Everest Region; Trekking in Langtang, Helambu and Gosainkund. The Trailblazer series has a friendly, useable feel, with hand-drawn maps and a chatty tone.
Steve Razzetti Nepal: Trekking and Climbing – 25 Classic Treks and 12 Climbing Peaks (New Holland). Currently the only book in print – published in the US by Interlink – that describes trekking peaks in any detail.
Kev Reynolds Trekking in the Himalaya; Annapurna and Everest. British publisher Cicerone produces well-written guides to all these areas, all by the indefatigable Reynolds, with plentiful colour photos, simple but easily readable maps, detailed route guides and lots of cultural background.
Bryn Thomas Trekking in the Annapurna Region. A good, workmanlike guide to this popular region from Trailblazer, though the 100 pages of trek descriptions are rather overshadowed by general information on Nepal, Kathmandu, Pokhara and so on. Reviews of trekking lodges are unusually detailed.
James Giambrone Kathmandu Bikes & Hikes (o/p). Now over twenty years old, this book still gives a reasonable account of cycling routes around Kathmandu (though keep in mind that the city has expanded hugely since the book was written), especially when paired with an up-to-date map.
Peter Knowles and Darren Clarkson-King White Water Nepal. Updated in 2011, this is the definitive guide.
Jim Duff and Peter Gormly The Himalayan First Aid Manual (World Expeditions, Nepal). Handy pocket-sized booklet.
Jyothi Pathak Taste of Nepal. Authoritative, comprehensive and mouthwatering cookbook.
Andrew J. Pollard, David R. Murdoch and James S. Milledge The High Altitude Medicine Handbook (Book Faith India). Everything you need to know for a trek.
Basic Nepali is surprisingly easy to learn, and surprisingly useful: nearly all Nepalis who deal with tourists speak English, but almost all enjoy attempts to reciprocate. Off the beaten track, a few phrases are essential, as good English is rare.
Nepali is closely related to Hindi, so Nepalis and North Indians can usually get by – and many Nepalis in the Terai speak languages that are even closer to Hindi, such as Bhojpuri and Maithili. The ethnic groups of the hills and mountains speak utterly unrelated Tibeto-Burman languages – some Rai languages are only spoken by a few thousand people within a single valley – but almost all have adopted Nepali as a lingua franca. Fortunately for foreigners, many hill people use a relatively simple form of Nepali that’s easy to learn and understand. Nepali is written in the Devanaagari script but signs, bus destinations and so on are usually written in English.
There are lots of useful phrasebooks available in Kathmandu; internationally the choice is limited to Lonely Planet’s useful Nepal Phrasebook & Dictionary. For a full-blown teach-yourself book, by far the best is Complete Nepali: Teach Yourself, by Michael Hutt and Abhi Subedi (Teach Yourself, UK), which comes with a CD; David Matthews’ A Course in Nepali (SOAS, UK) offers a more literary perspective.
Nepali has to be transliterated from the Devanaagari script into the Roman alphabet; the resulting spellings may vary, and aren’t always exactly phonetic.
a as in “alone”
aa as in “father”
b sounds like a cross between “b” and “v”
e as in “bet”
i as in “police”
j as in “just”
o as in “note”
r lightly rolled; can sound like a cross between “r” and “d”
s can sound almost like “sh”
u as in boot
w sounds like a cross between “w” and “v”
z sounds like “dj” or “dz”
Nepali has lighter accents than English, but the accent almost always goes on any syllable with “aa” in it. If there’s no “aa”, it usually falls on the first syllable.
The distinction between “a” and “aa” is important. Maa (in) is pronounced as it looks, with the vowel stretched out and open. Ma (I), by contrast, sounds shorter and more closed: something like “muh” or perhaps the “mo” in “mob”; mandir (temple) comes out like “mundeer”.
Some Nepali vowels are nasalized – to get the right effect, you have to honk nasally, rather like a French “en”. Nasalized vowels aren’t indicated in this book, but they’re something to be aware of: listen to a Nepali say tapaai (you) or yahaa (here) – it’s like saying “tapaaing” or “yahaang”, but stopping just before the end.
The combinations “ch” and “sh” are pronounced as in English, but in all other cases where an “h” follows a consonant the sound is meant to be aspirated – in other words, give it an extra puff of air. Thus bholi (tomorrow) sounds like b’holi and Thamel sounds like T’hamel.
chh sounds like a very breathy “ch”, as in “pitch here”; almost like “tsha”
ph sometimes sounds like an “f” (as in phone) but may also be pronounced like a breathy “p” (as in haphazard)
th is pronounced as in “put here” (as in Kathmandu, not as in think)
The sounds “d”, “r” and “t” occur in two bewildering forms, dental and retroflex; to Nepali ears, English “t” falls somewhere between the two. The retroflex sound is made by rolling the tip of the tongue back towards the roof of the mouth – a classic “Indian” sound. The dental form is like saying a “d” with the tip of the tongue right up against the teeth. An obvious example of a retroflex (and aspirated) “t” is Kathmandu, which sounds a little like a breathy “Kartmandu”. Rarely, retroflexion changes meaning: saathi means friend, but with a retroflex “th” it means sixty.
For advice on the nuances of some of these basic phrases, check “Cultural and etiquette”. Separate words for “please” and “thank you” are rarely used, though dhanyebaad is increasingly common in tourist areas. Politeness is indicated by manner and the grammatical form of the verb.
Hello, Goodbye (formal) Namaste
Hello (very formal) Namaskar
Thank you (very formal) Dhanyebaad
Yes/No (It is/isn’t) Ho/Hoina
Yes/No (There is/isn’t) Chha/Chhaina
How are things? Kasto chha? or Sanchai chha?
It’s/I’m OK, fine Thik chha or Sanchai chha
OK!/Sure thing! (informal) La!
OK!/Sure thing! (formal) Hos!
What’s your name?
(to an adult) Tapaaiko naam ke ho?
(to a child) Timro naam ke ho?
My name is… Mero naam…ho
My country is… Mero desh…ho
I don’t know Malaai thaahaa chhaina
I didn’t understand that Maile tyo bujina
Please speak more slowly Bistaarai bolnus
Please say that again Pheri bolnus
I speak a little Nepali Ali ali Nepali aunchha
Pardon? Hajur?
No thanks Pardaina (I don’t want it)
I’m sorry, excuse me Maph garnus
Let’s go Jaun (often sounds like djam)
It was an honour to meet you Hajur lai bhetera dherai khushi laagyo
Thank you [very much] for everything Sabai kurako laagi [dherai] dhanyabaad
See you again Pheri betaaula
Excuse me… (more polite) O…Hajur…
Elder brother Daai; Daajyu (said to men your age or older; more respectful)
Elder sister Didi (women your age or older)
Younger brother Bhaai (men or boys younger than you)
Younger sister Bahini (women or girls younger than you)
Father Buwa (a man old enough to be your father)
Mother Aama (woman old enough to be your mother)
Grandfather Baje (old men)
Grandmother Bajei (old women)
Shopkeeper, Innkeeper
(male) Saahuji
(female) Saahuni
Whether you’re making a statement or asking a question, the word order is the same in Nepali. To indicate that you’re asking, not telling, raise your voice at the end.
Do you speak English? Tapaailaai Angreji aunchha?
Does anyone speak English? Kasailaai Angreji aunchha?
I don’t speak Nepali Ma Nepali boldina
Is/Isn’t there [a room]? [Kothaa] chha/chhaina?
Is [a meal/tea] available? [Khaanaa/chiya] painchha?
Is [smoking] okay? [Curot khaane] hunchha?
Please help me Malaai madhat garnus
Please give me… …dinus
I’m [hungry] Malaai [bhok] laagyo
I’m not [hungry] Malaai [bhok] laageko chhaina
I like…[very much] Malaai…[dherai] manparchha
I want/don’t want Malaai…chaahi nchha/chaaidaina
What’s [this] for? [Yo] ke ko laagi?
What’s the matter? Ke bhayo?
What’s [this] called in Nepali? [yas] laai Nepali maa ke bhanchha?
What does [chiya] mean? [chiya] ke bhanchha?
Really? Hora?
How? Kasari?
What? Ke?
When? Kahile?
Where? Kahaa?
Who? Ko?
Why? Kina?
Which? Kun?
How much does this cost? Esko kati parchha?
How much for a [room]? [Room] ko kati parchha?
Is there somewhere I can stay here? Mero laagi basne thau chha holaa?
How many people? Kati jana?
For [two] people [Dui] jana ko laagi
Only one person Ek jana maatrai
Can I see it? Herna sakchhu?
Go away! (to a child) Jaau!
It’s very/too expensive Dherai mahango bhayo
Is there a cheaper one? Kunai sasto chha?
I don’t need/want it Malaai chaaidaina
I don’t have any change Masanga khudra chhaina
Please use the meter Meter-maa jaanus
Just a moment Ek chin (literally, “one blink”)
I’ll come back Ma pharkinchhu
Good job, Well done Kyaraamro
Don’t worry Chinta nagarnus
Where is the…? …kahaa chha?
Where is this [bus] going? Yo [bas] kahaa jaanchha?
Which is the way/ trail/road to…? …jaane baato kun ho?
Which is the best way? Kun baato raamro chha?
How far is it? Kati taadhaa chha?
Where are you going? Tapaai kahaa jaanuhunchha?
I’m going to… Ma…jaanchhu
Where have you come from? Tapaai kahaabaata aaunubhaeko? – (also means “where are you from?”)
Here Yahaa
There/Yonder Tyahaa/Utyahaa (the “u” is drawn out on a high note to indicate a long distance)
[To the] right Daayaa [tira]
[To the] left Baayaa [tira]
Straight Sidhaa
Near/Far Najik/Taadhaa
Rough/tarmac road Kachi baato/pitch road
Car/wheeled vehicle Gaadi
What time is it? Kati bajyo?
What time does the bus leave? Yo bas kati baje jaanchha?
When does this bus arrive [in Kathmandu]? Yo bas kati baje [Kathmandu-maa] pugchha?
How many hours does it take? Kati ghanta laagchha?
[Two] o’clock [Dui] bajyo
[Nine]-thirty Saadhe [nau] bajyo
[Five] past [six] [Chha] bajera [paanch] minet gayo (formal); chha paanch (informal)
[Ten] to [eight] [Aath] bajna [das] minet bakichha
Minute Minet
Hour Ghanta
Day Din
Week Haptaa
Month Mahina
Year Barsaa
Today Aaja
Tomorrow Bholi
Yesterday Hijo
Now Ahile
Later Pachhi
Ago, Before Pahile
Next week Aarko haptaa
Last month Gayeko maina
[Two] years ago [Dui] barsa aghi
Morning Bihaana
Afternoon Diuso
Evening Belukaa
Night Raati
Bag, Baggage Jholaa
Bed Khat
Blanket, Quilt Sirak
Bus Bas
Candle Mainbatti
Clothes Lugaa
Ear Kan
Eye Akha
Food Khaanaa
Foot Khutta
Friend Saathi
Hand Haat
Head Taauko
Hotel/Lodge Hotel/Laj
House Ghar
Job, Work Kaam
Lamp Batti
Mattress Dasna, ochhan
Medicine Ausadhi
Mistake Galti
Money Paisaa
Mouth Mukh
Nose Naak
Pain Dukhyo
Problem Samasya
Restaurant Resturent, bhojanalaya
Road Baato, rod
Room Rum, kothaa
Shoe Jutta
Shop Pasal
Son Chori
Stomach Pet
Teahouse Chiya pasal, chiya dokan
Ticket Tikot
Toilet Chaarpi (rural), toilet
Town, Village Gaaun
Trail/Main trail Baato/mul baato
One tricky thing about Nepali adjectives: the ones that describe feelings behave like nouns. Thus to express the notion “I’m thirsty”, you have to say Malaai thirkaa laagyo (literally, “To me thirst has been felt”).
A little Alikati, thorai
A lot Dherai
After Pachhi
Again Pheri
All Sabai
Alone Eklai
Always Sadai
Another Aarko
Bad Kharaab, naraamro
Beautiful Sundari
Best Sabbhandaa raamro
Better Ajai raamro
Big Thulo
Cheap Sasto
Clean Safaa
Closed Banda
Cold (person or weather) Jaado
Cold (liquid, food) Chiso
Difficult Gaaro
Dirty Phohor
Downhill Oraallo
Early Chaadai
Empty Khali
Enough Prasasta
Expensive Mahango
Far Taadhaa
Few Thorai
Full (thing) Bhari
Good Raamro
Heavy Garungo
Hot (person or weather) Garam
Hot (liquid, food) Taato
Hungry Bhok (laagyo)
Hurt Dhukyo
Late Dhilo
Less Kam
Lost Haraayo
Loud Charko
Many Dherai
More (quantity) Aru
More (degree) Ekdum, ajai
Near(er) Najik(ai)
Never Kahile paani
New Nayaa
Noisy Halla
Often, usually Dheraijaso
Old (thing) Purano
Old (man) Budho
Old (woman) Budhi
Only Maatrai
Open Khulaa
Quick Chitto
Pretty, good Ramaailo
Right (correct) Thik
Similar Jastai
Slowly Bistaarai
Small Saano
Soon Chaadai, chittai
Stolen Choreko
Strong Baliyo
Tasty Mitho
Terrible Jhur
Thirsty Tirkha
Tired Thakai
Too much Atti
Uphill Ukaalo
The following verbs are in the infinitive form. To turn a verb into a polite command (eg, “Please sit”), just add -s (Basnus); for a request, replace the -nu ending with just -u, said through the nose, almost like “Basun?”. For an all-purpose tense, drop the -u ending and replace it with -e (eg jaane can mean go, going or will go, depending on the context). The easiest way to negate any verb is to put na- in front of it (nabasnus, najaane).
Arrive Aaipugnu
Ask Sodhnu
Buy Kinnu
Carry Boknu
Close Banda garnu
Come Aunu
Cook Pakaaunu
Do Garnu
Eat Khaanu
Feel Laagnu
Forget Birsinu
Get Paunu, linu
Give Dinu
Go Jaanu
Hear, Listen Sunnu
Help Madhat garnu
Hurry Hatar garnu
Leave Chodnu
Lie (speak untruthfully) Jhutho bolnu
Look, See Hernu
Need Chaahinu
Open Kholnu
Receive Paunu
Rent Bhadama linu
Rest Aaram garnu
Run Daudinu
Say, Tell Bhannu
Sleep Sutnu
Speak Bolnu
Steal Chornu
Stop Roknu
Think Bichaar garnu, sochnu
Try Kosis garnu
Understand Bujnu
Wait Parkhanu
Walk Hidnu
Want Chahanu
Wash (face, clothes) Dhunu
Wash (body) Nuhaaunu
Most of the following words are what we would call prepositions. However, those marked with an asterisk (*) are actually postpositions in Nepali, meaning they come after the thing they’re describing (eg, “with me” comes out masanga).
Above, Over, Up Maathi*
Behind Pachhadi*
Below, Under, Down Talla*
Each Pratyek
From Baata*
In, Inside Bhitra*
In front of Agaadi*
Near Najik*
Out, Outside Bahira*
That Tyo
This Yo
To, Towards Tira*
With Sanga*
Without Chhaina*
Unlike the English counting system, which uses compound numbers above twenty (twenty-one, twenty-two, etc), Nepali numbers are irregular all the way up to one hundred – the following are the ones you’re most likely to use. A further complication is the use of quantifying words: you have to add wotaa when you’re counting things, jana when counting people. Thus “five books” is paanch wotaa kitaab, “three girls” is tin jana keti. But note these irregular quantifiers: ek wotaa (once) = euta; dui wotaa (twice) = duita; tin wotaa (three times) = tintaa.
half aada
1 ek
2 dui
3 tin
4 chaar
5 paanch
6 chha
7 saat
8 aath
9 nau
10 das
11 eghaara
12 baara
13 tera
14 chaudha
15 pandra
16 sora
17 satra
18 athaara
19 unnais
20 bis
25 pachhis
30 tis
40 chaalis
50 pachaas
60 saathi
70 sattari
80 asi
90 nabbe
100 ek say
1000 ek hajaar
first [time] pahilo [palta]
second dosro
third tesro
Sunday Aitabar
Monday Sombar
Tuesday Mangalbar
Wednesday Budhabar
Thursday Bihibar
Friday Sukrabar
Saturday Sanibar
Alikati A little
Dherai A lot
Aarko Another
Bil dinus! Bill, please!
Mitho Delicious
Pugchha! Enough!
Malaai pugyo! I’m full!
Aru More
…dinus Please give me …
Sahakaari Vegetarian
Ma maasu khaanna I don’t eat meat
Umaaleko [paani] Boiled [water]
Roti Bread
Makhan Butter
Achhaar Chutney, Pickle
Chiso Cold
Paakeko Cooked
Taareko Deep-fried
Phul Egg
Khaanaa Food
Kaata Fork
Gilaas Glass
Taato Hot
Chakku Knife
Dudh Milk
Tel Oil
Marich Pepper (ground)
Plet Plate
Sahuji Proprietor (male)
Sahuni (female)
Bhaat Rice (cooked)
Chaamal Rice (uncooked)
Chiura Rice (beaten)
Nun Salt
Piro Spicy
Chamchaa Spoon
Chini Sugar
Bhuteko Stir-fried
Guliyo Sweet
Mithaai Sweets, Candy
Paani Water
Dahi Yogurt, Curd
Daal bhaat tarkaari Lentil soup, white rice and curried vegetables
Dahi chiura Curd with beaten rice
Momo Steamed dumplings filled with meat and/or vegetables
Pakora Vegetables dipped in chickpea-flour batter, deep fried
Samosa Curried vegetables in fried pastry triangles
Sekuwa Spicy, marinated meat kebab
Taareko maachhaa Fried fish
Chataamari Rice-flour pizza, usuallytopped with minced buffalo
Choyila Buffalo cubes fried with spices and greens
Kachila Pâté of minced raw buff meat mixed with ginger and oil
Kwati Soup made with sprouted beans
Momocha Small meat-filled steamed dumplings
Pancha kol Curry made with fivevegetables
Woh Fried lentil-flour patties served plain (mai woh) or topped with minced buff (la woh) or egg (khen woh)
Kothe Fried meat or veg dumplings (momo)
Thukpa Soup containing pasta, meat and vegetables
Tsampa Toasted barley flour
Bhanta Aubergine (eggplant)
Simi Beans
Gaajar Carrot
Kaauli Cauliflower
Chaana Chickpeas
Dhaniyaa Coriander (Cilantro)
Makai Corn
Lasun Garlic
Daal Lentils
Chyaau Mushroom
Pyaaj Onion
Kerau, Matar Peas
Alu Potato
Pharsi Pumpkin
Mulaa Radish (daikon)
Palungo, Saag Spinach, Chard, Greens
Golbheda Tomato
Raangaako maasu Buffalo (“buff”)
Kukhuraako maasu Chicken
Khasiko maasu Goat
Bungurko maasu Pork
Syaau Apple
Keraa Banana
Nariwal Coconut
Nibuwaa Lemon
Kagati Lime
Aaph Mango
Suntalaa Orange, Mandarin
Badaam (Mampale, near India) Peanut
Kismis Raisin
Ukhu Sugar cane
Avalokiteshwara The bodhisattva of compassion (also known as Chenrezig)
Avatar Bodily incarnation of a deity
Baahun Nepali term for the Brahman (priestly) caste
Baba Holy man
Bagh Tiger
Bahal (or Baha) Buildings and quadrangle of a former Buddhist Newari monastery (a few are still active)
Bahil (or Bahi) Newari term for Buddhist monastery
Bajra see vajra
Bajra Yogini (or Vajra Jogini) Female tantric counterpart to Bhairab
Bakshish Not a bribe, but a tip in advance; alms
Ban Forest
Bar Banyan (fig) tree
Barahi (or Varahi) Vishnu incarnated as a boar
Bazaar Commercial area or street – not necessarily a covered market
Beni Confluence of rivers
Betel see paan
Bhaat Cooked rice; food
Bhairab Terrifying tantric form of Shiva
Bhajan Hymn, hymn-singing
Bhanjyang A pass (Nepali)
Bharat India
Bhatti Simple tavern, usually selling food as well as alcohol
Bhojanalaya Nepali restaurant
Bhot Tibet
Bhotiya Highland peoples of Tibetan ancestry (pejorative)
Bideshi Foreigner (or gora – “whitey”)
Bidi Cheap rolled-leaf cigarette
Bihar (or Mahabihar) Buddhist monastery (Sanskrit)
Bodhisattva In Mahayana Buddhism, one who forgoes nirvana until all other beings have attained enlightenment
Brahma The Hindu creator god, one of the Hindu “trinity”
Brahman Member of the Hindu priestly caste (Baahun in Nepali); metaphysical term meaning the universal soul
Chaitya Small Buddhist monument, often with images of the Buddha at the four cardinal points
Charash Hashish
Chautaara Resting platform beside a trail with trees (bar and/or pipal figs) for shade
Chhang (or Chhyang) Home-made beer brewed from rice or other grains
Chhetri Member of the Hindu ruling or warrior caste
Chilam Vertical clay pipe for smoking tobacco or ganja
Cholo Traditional half-length woman’s blouse
Chorten Another name for a chaitya in high mountain areas
Chowk Intersection/crossroads, square or courtyard (pronounced “choke”)
Chulo Clay stove
Daada (or Danda) Ridge, often used to signify a range of connected hilltops
Damaru Two-sided drum
Danphe Nepal’s national bird, a pheasant with brilliant plumage
Daura Suruwal Traditional dress of hill men: wrap-around shirt and jodhpur-like trousers
Devi see Mahadevi
Dewal (also Deval, Degu) Stepped temple platform; temple with prominent steps
Dhaara Communal water tap or tank
Dhaba Indian-style fast-food restaurant
Dhaka Colourful hand-loomed material made in the hills
Dhami Shaman; the word is often used interchangeably with jhankri, or even as dhami jhankri
Dharma Religion (especially Buddhist); correct behaviour
Dharmsala Rest-house for pilgrims
Dhoka Gate
Dhoti Indian-style loincloth
Dhyani Buddhas meditating figures representing the five aspects of Buddha nature
Doko Conical cane basket carried by means of a headstrap
Dorje Tibetan word for vajra
Dun Low-lying valleys just north of the Terai (sometimes called inner Terai, or bhitri madesh – “inner plains”)
Durbar Palace; royal court
Durga Demon-slaying goddess
Dyochhen Private “home” of a Newari deity
Dzopkio Sturdy yak-cattle crossbreed; the female is called a dzum
Gaaine Wandering minstrel of the western hills (ghandarba is now the preferred term)
Gaida (or gainda) Rhinoceros
Gajur Brass or gold finial at the peak of a temple
Ganesh Elephant-headed god of beginnings and remover of obstacles
Ganja Cannabis, marijuana
Garud Vishnu’s man-bird carrier
Gaun Village
Ghandarva Traditional musician
Ghanta A bell, usually rung at temples as a sort of “amen”
Ghat Riverside platform for worship and cremations; any waterside locality
Ghazal Crooning, poetic, sentimental form of Indian music
Gidda Vulture
Gompa Buddhist monastery (Tibetan)
Goonda Hooligan, thug
Gupha Cave
Gurkhas Nepali soldiers who serve in special regiments in the British and Indian armies
Guthi Newari benevolent association that handles funeral arrangements, temple maintenance, festivals, etc
Hanuman Valiant monkey king in the Ramayana
Hatti Elephant
Himal Massif or mountain range with permanent snow
HMG His Majesty’s Government (as was)
Jaand (or Jaar) Nepali word for chhang
Jaatra Festival
Janai Sacred thread worn over left shoulder by high-caste (Baahun and Chhetri) Hindu men
Jhankri Shaman, or medicine man, of the hills
Jyapu Member of the Newari farming caste
Kali The mother goddess in her most terrifying form
Karma The soul’s accumulated merit, determining its next rebirth
Kata White scarf given to lamas by visitors
Khat A litter or platform on which a deity is carried during a festival
Khola Stream or river
Khukuri Curved knife carried by most Nepali hill men
Kora Circumambulation or pilgrimage around a Buddhist monument
Kot Fort (pronounced “coat”)
Krishna One of Vishnu’s avatars, a hero of the Mahabharat
Kumari A girl worshipped as the living incarnation of Durga
Kund Pond, water tank
La Pass (Tibetan)
Lakshmi Consort of Vishnu, goddess of wealth
Lali Guraas Rhododendron
Lama Tibetan Buddhist priest or high-ranking monk
Lek Mountain range without permanent snow
Linga (or lingam) The phallic symbol of Shiva, commonly the centrepiece of temples and sometimes occurring in groups in the open
Lokeshwar see Avalokiteshwara
Lokta Traditional Nepali paper made from the bark of an indigenous shrub
Lungi Brightly coloured wrap skirt worn by hill women
Machaan Watchtower used by Terai farmers to ward off wild animals
Machhendranath Rain-bringing deity of the Kathmandu Valley; also known as Karunamaya or Bunga Dyo
Mahabharat (or Mahabharata) Hindu epic featuring Krishna and containing the Bhagavad Gita
Mahabharat Lek Highest range of the Himalayan foothills
Mahadev “Great God”, an epithet for Shiva
Mahadevi The mother goddess
Mahayana Form of Buddhism followed in Nepal, Tibet and East Asia; follows deities, saints and teachers
Mahout Elephant handler
Mai Common name for any local protector goddess
Mandala Mystical diagram, meditation tool
Mandap Pavilion
Mandir Temple
Mani Stone stone inscribed with the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum
Mantra Religious incantation
Maobaadi Maoist
Masaala Spice; any mixture (thus masaala films, with their mixture of drama, singing, comedy, etc)
Math Hindu priest’s home
Mela Religious fair or gathering
Nadi River
Nag Snake deity or spirit, believed to have rain-bringing powers
Nagar City
Nak Female yak
Namaste Polite word of greeting
Nandi Shiva’s mount, a bull
Narayan Common name for Vishnu
Nath “Lord”
Nepali The adjective Nepalis use when referring to themselves and their language
Nirvana In Buddhism, enlightenment and release from the cycle of rebirth
Om Mani Padme Hum The mantra of Avalokiteshwara, roughly translating as “Hail to the jewel in the lotus”
Paan Mildly addictive mixture of areca nut and lime paste, wrapped in a leaf and chewed, producing blood-red spit
Padma Sambhava alias Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century saint who brought Buddhism to Tibet
Pahad Hill, or the area of Nepal also known as the Middle Hills; hence pahadiya, hill person
Panchayat Council or assembly, the basis for Nepal’s pre-democratic government
Pandit Hindu priest
Parbat Mountain
Parbati (or Parvati) Shiva’s consort
Pashmina Nepali equivalent of cashmere
Pati Open shelter erected as a public resting place
Phanit Elephant driver
Phedi Foot (of a hill, pass, etc)
Pipal Holy fig (ficus religiosa); also known as bodhi, the tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment
Pokhari Pond, usually man-made
Poubha Newari-style scroll painting
Prasad Food consecrated after being offered to a deity
Puja An act of worship
Pujari Hindu priest or caretaker of a particular temple
Pul Bridge
Raksi Distilled spirit
Ram (or Rama) Mortal avatar of Vishnu, hero of the Ramayana
Ramayana Popular Hindu epic in which Sita, princess of Janakpur, is rescued by Ram and Hanuman
Rath Chariot used in religious processions
Rinpoche “Precious jewel”: title given to revered lamas
Rudraksha Furrowed brown seeds, prized by Shaivas
Sadhu Hindu ascetic or holy man
Sahib Honorific term given to male foreigners, pronounced “sahb”; women are called memsahib
Sajha Cooperative
Sal Tall tree of the Terai and lower hills, valued for its timber
Sanyasin (or Sunyasan) Hindu who has renounced the world, usually in old age
Sarangi Nepali four-stringed violin
Saraswati Hindu goddess of learning and the arts
Sati (or Suttee) Practice of Hindu widows throwing themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres
Sattal Public rest-house
Shaiva Member of the cult of Shiva (pronounced “Shaib”)
Shakti In Hindu tantra, the female principle that empowers the male; the mother goddess in this capacity
Shaligram Fossil-bearing stones found in the Kali Gandaki River, revered by Vaishnavas
Sherpa Man from one of Nepal’s highland ethnic groups, originally; sometimes (incorrectly) used by foreigners to mean any Nepali guide or climber. A woman is a Sherpani
Shikra (or Shikhara) Indian-style temple, shaped like a square bullet
Shiva “The destroyer”, one of the Hindu “trinity” – a god of many guises
Shivalaya One-storey Shiva shrine containing a linga
Shradha Prescribed rites performed after a death
Shri An honorific prefix
Sindur Red mark on the parting of married women
Sirdar Nepali trek leader
Sita Ram’s wife, princess of Janakpur, heroine of the Ramayana
STOL “Short Takeoff And Landing” (read “hair-raising”) landing strip
Stupa Large dome-shaped Buddhist monument, usually said to contain holy relics
Tal (or Taal) Lake
Tantra Esoteric path to enlightenment, a major influence on Nepali Hinduism and Buddhism
Tara Buddhist goddess; female aspect of Buddha nature
Tashi Delek Tibetan for welcome, namaste
Tempo Three-wheeled scooter; also called autoriksha, tuk-tuk
Thangka Buddhist scroll painting
Tika Auspicious mark made of rice, abhir powder and curd, placed on the forehead during puja or festivals or before making a journey
Tol Neighbourhood
Tola Traditional unit of weight (115g); precious metals are sold by the tola, as is hashish
Topi Traditional Nepali brimless hat, either black (called bhadgaonle) or multicoloured (dhaka)
Torana Elaborate wooden carving, or metal shield, above a temple door
Torma Dough offerings made by Buddhist monks
Trisul The trident, a symbol of Shiva
Tudikhel Parade ground
Tulku Reincarnation of a late great teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition
Vaishnava Follower of the cult of Vishnu (pronounced “Baishnab”)
Vajra Sceptre-like symbol of tantric power (pronounced “bajra”)
Vajracharya Buddhist Newari priest
Vajrayana “Thunderbolt Way”: tantric Buddhism
Vedas The oldest Hindu scriptures (pronounced “Bed” by Nepalis); hence Vedic gods
Vipassana Ancient and austere Buddhist meditation practice
Vishnu “The preserver”, member of the Hindu “trinity”, worshipped in ten main incarnations (pronounced “Bishnu”)
Yangsi Reincarnated successor of a Tibetan lama
Yoni Symbol of the female genitalia, usually carved into the base of a linga