Published in Voice of History, Vol. XV, no.2: 69-38, 2000.

(some later amendments are indicated by

bold or red typeface with consequent change in footnote numbering but not main pagination)
FROM THE BEGINNING: THEMES IN THE PREHISTORY AND ANCIENT HISTORY OF
NEPAL
John Whelpton

Introduction
Arising from ongoing work on a history of Nepal, this article aims to review briefly some of the
methodological problems in studying early Nepal and also some of the main areas of controversy
among students of the period. Since my own primary research has been limited to the 19th. and 20th.
centuries, this contribution is offered with apologies to specialists but in the belief that the questions
raised can usefully be debated amongst all those with a serious interest in Nepals past and its relevance
to her present situation.
The Scope of Nepalese History
The word `Nepal referred originally to the Kathmandu Valley and it is only in the present century that
is has become the official name of the entire country.1 In addition,, for as far back as we have records
the Valley has been the most important economic and political centre in the east-central Himalayas and
therefore the one for which the most source material is available. There are thus two reasons tempting
historians to concentrate on Nepal in the narrower sense and to take note of other areas only in so far as
they effect developments at the centre. A history of Nepal in the wider sense must, however, deal with
other regions, including particularly the Tarai, which has long been the most important area for food
production and is now home to over half the countrys population.
Linked with the geographical issue is the broader question of precisely what kinds of events and
processes we should be studying. If history is defined as the systematic investigation of the past then
any aspect of human activity falls legitimately within its scope. Down the centuries, however, historical
writing has generally tended to concentrate upon the state and the interrelationships of those who
wielded state power or contended for it. This focus on `high politics came under increasing criticism
during the 20th century and there was a steady growth of interest in economic and social history, in the
study of `mentalities as advocated by the Annales school in France, and in `history from below. For
South Asianists, the last-mentioned is particularly associated with the work of Ranjit Guha and his

For the shift in the meaning of the word, and the political implications behind it, see Richard Burghart, `The Formation of the
Concept of Nation-State in Nepal, Journal of Asian Studies,vol.. 44, no.1 (1984), 118-19 and John Whelpton, `Political Identity
in Nepal: State, Nation and community, in David Gellner et al. (eds.), Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom,
Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997, p.45

40
colleagues in the `subaltern studies group.2 In the Nepalese context, Mahesh Chandra Regmi was an
early critic of the traditional approach and chose to focus instead on the states economic impact on the
ordinary people.3 In his critique of Nepalese historiography, Krishna Kant Adhikari, partly anticipating
the current concerns of the `janajati yuga, argued that `..our history has hitherto been the history of
ruling elites. The common man, including the ethnic groups of the hills and the Tarai, have been
ignored. we need to write the history of the origin of each ethnic group and its past political, social
and economic life.4 More recently, Pratyoush Onta similarly criticised historians for an obsession with
`elite prosopography , calling instead for concentration on the perspective of less privileged groups. 5
Everybody will have his or her own view on where the balance is to be struck between the more
traditional style of history writing and newer approaches. I feel myself that there is still an important
place for the former. First, because attitudes and behaviour among the elite in any society do impact on
that society generally. Secondly, for the simple reason that political history is an important part of what
the reader, particularly the non-specialist reader, wants a historian to provide. Anyone aiming to write a
general history of Nepal or any other country has to try to cover both sides of the picture.
Using the sources
It is, of course, the available sources for different periods which partly determine what kind of history
can be written. The use of interviews is a very effective tool for unearthing `history from below for the
recent past, as shown, for example, in work by Mary Des Chene on Gurkhas in the British army or
David Holmberg and his colleagues on Tamang forced labour.6 Reliance on tales handed

41
See Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies 1: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1982 and subsequent volumes in the series.
3
Mahesh Chandra Regmi, A Study in Nepali Economic History, Delhi: Manusri, 1971, p.i-ii;
4
Krishna Kant Adhikari, A Brief Survey of Nepali Historiography (Kathmandu: `Buku, 1980), p.70.
Recent advocates of a `subaltern approach (notably Mary Des Chene, `Ethnography in the Janjatiyug: Lessons from Reading Rhodi and other Tamu Writings, Studies in Nepali History and Society,
vol.1, no.1 (1996), p.97-161) do, however, go beyond Adhikari in their stress on studying a group
through that groups own self-perceptions.
5
Pratyoush Onta, `Whatever became of the golden age?, Himal 6(4), 1993, p.29-31. His critique is
further developed in `Rich possibilities: notes on social history in Nepal, Contributions to Nepalese
Studies 21(1), (Jan 1994), p.1-43, which also responds constructively to my own criticism of his earlier
paper.
6
Mary Des Chene, `Relics of empire: a cultural history of the Gurkhas, 1815-1987, PhD thesis,
Stanford University, California, 1991; David Holmberg & Kathryn March, `Local production/local
knowledge: forced labour from below. Studies in Nepali History and Society 4(1), 1999, p.5-64.
2

down from one generation to the next can extend the methods reach back into the nineteenth century,
as with Stanley Stevens investigation of land-use in Solu Khumbu, but it can tell us little about the
ways of life and the feelings and beliefs of a more distant past. For the Licchavi and early medieval
period, where the scholar is mainly dependent on inscriptions and manuscript colophons, it is often
only political history that can be written with any kind of confidence. K.P. Mallas criticism of Luciano
Petechs concentration on kings and their dates is thus not entirely fair. To go beyond this chronological
skeleton is to enter a realm of speculation, as with Prayag Raj Sharmas interpretation of the landtenure system or Mallas own reliance on Engels views on the consequences of the introduction of
money into ancient society.7 The speculation may be well worth attempting, especially if it starts from
the realisation that the inscriptions are official, public pronouncements and thus, as Malla puts it, the
ancient equivalent of Gorkhapatra editorials. Nonetheless, establishing the framework of dynastic
history is the logical first step. In contrast, where there is no written record, it is generally only very
broad social and economic history that can be written at all. The tools here are archaeology, linguistics
and ethnography, which tell us nothing about the doings of individual rulers.
Each of these tools has its individual limitations. Archaeology reveals only material aspects of culture,
though we can, of course, use the results to make intelligent guesses about religious belief or social
stratification. Major changes in the archaeological sequence in a particular area, for example, the
introduction of a new style of pottery, are often taken as evidence of mass migration but may simply be
the result of cultural borrowing. Comparison of existing languages enables the linguist to build up a
picture of the extinct proto-languages from which they developed. The process is hazardous, however,
since the tendency for one language to borrow words or even grammatical patterns from another belies
the simplified picture conveyed by the linguists conventional tree-diagrams. In addition, differences in
language, like differences in pottery, do not necessarily correspond to physical differences in
population. Virtually complete replacement of one population by another does sometimes occur, as
with the European colonization of North America and the much earlier supplanting of Neanderthal man
in Europe by modern humans migrating from Africa.8 To a large extent, however, `over centuries and
millennia, it is generally languages and not peoples that are replaced. 9 The main evidence for this last
statement is genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA, which is normally transmitted unchanged from the
female to her offspring but mutates over long periods of time at a known rate. This is now beginning to
give us
42

Kamal Prakash Malla, review of Luciano Petech, Medieval History of Nepal c.750-1482 (Rome:
ISMEO, 1984), in Contributions to Nepalese Studies, vol.12, no.2 (1985), p.121-36
8
For the Neanderthal case, see Bryan Sykes (ed.), The Human Inheritance: Genes, Language and
Evolution (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1999), particularly essays by the editor and by Chris
Stringer.
9
Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Language, London: Reaktion Books, 1999, p.85
7

a window onto the development of biological populations, though the techniques remain controversial.
Ethnography offers another window into the past because of the survival into the present age of
some groups whose life-styles seem to preserve an earlier stage in the cultural evolution of other
communities. Nepals Rautes still live as hunter-gatherers, millennia after agriculture became the main
source of subsistence for the vast majority of Nepalese. Caution is needed here, however, since a
societys culture is not fully determined by its technology. In particular, it was one thing to be a huntergatherer before agriculture became an option, but rather different to make a conscious rejection of that
option as encapsulated in the slogan `Ill die before I farm. However, while nowhere on earth is totally
free from the influence of modern society, a few remote areas do remain almost untouched. In his
recent analysis of the contrasts in development of different societies, Jared Diamond draws extensively
on data from Papua New Guinea, where Stone Age cultures have persisted right up to the present
century in virtual seclusion from the outside world.10
Returning to Nepals indigenous written record, after the inscriptions and colophons already
mentioned, we have the evidence of the vamsavalis. The earliest of these, the Gopalarajavamsavali,
dates only from the fourteenth century and there are differing views on the vamsavalis value as sources
for earlier periods, particularly the pre-Licchavi era. Riccardi argues that their accounts of the `Kirata
and earlier dynasties lack any historical basis and criticises those who scour the archaeological record
trying to find evidence that matches the written one. In contrast, Sylvain Lvi regularly sought to find a
basis for the dates in the vamsavalis, believing that although they are clearly inaccurate as they stand,
they can frequently be explained by assuming transposition of figures or confusion between the Vikram
and Shaka eras etc. Lvi almost certainly went too far in this regard, but there is much in the vamsavali
tradition that does match the inscriptional record. There is broad correspondence in the names of rulers,
though with some distortion of their order. The dates in terms of the Kaliyuga, which generally put
historical figures like Amsuvarman much too far back into the past, may perhaps be partly explained if
we assume the tradition originally preserved genealogies but not dates. Assuming too many years for
each generation is similarly a reason why some of the traditional dates for early Greek history are too
early
There is then material evidently produced in Nepal but forming or purporting to form part of
the broader Indian Puranic tradition. The Puranas in general contain a mixture of the purely mythical
with lineage history which might have some basis in fact.11 In any case the circumstances in which such
literature
43
was produced is itself of some historical interest, whatever the accuracy of the actual contents.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, New York: Norton, 1998.
These remarks are based on Romila Thapars Ancient Indian Social History , London: Sangam, 1979,
which includes a discussion of the nature of the Puranic tradition and use of it as a source of
information on broad historical processes, though she rightly dismisses attempts to reconstruct a
chronology of pre-Mauryan India from its genealogical data. In their Nepalko Pauranik Itihas
(Kathmandu: CNAS, 2054 V.S.), Ramnivas Pande and Dineshchandra Regmi discuss both Nepals own
local Puranic material and references to the Nepal Tarai in the wider Indian tradition.
10
11

Preserving an account of the successive generations of ruling families had originally been the function
of bards and chroniclers (suta, magadha), but in the early centuries A.D. they were replaced by
Brahman families who wrote accounts of the world from its mythical origins down to their own times.
The Brahmans presented the finished product as the work of sages living at the close of the
Mahabharata War. Events after that time were therefore generally related as a prophecy in the future
tense, which generally ended in the Gupta era around the 4th. century and so provided the clue to the
real date of composition. The process of compiling the main accounts in fact probably spanned the
period from the 1st to 6th centuries.12 They served the purpose of providing legitimisation for ruling
families, now that kshatriya descent, to which the rulers of the Magadhan monarchy had made no
claim, was again felt important. They could also constitute propaganda for particular religious shrines
in the competitive struggle to attract pilgrims which was becoming an increasingly prominent part of
religious life.
For the modern historian, the Puranas can be used as evidence for memories of historical transitions
and also of contact between cultures. Romila Thapar argues that their contrasting of the pre- and postMahabharata war periods echoes the real change from lineage-based political units to a state system.
Similarly, the story of the banishing of Nisada (supposed ancestor of various `barbarian tribes) and his
replacement by King Prithvi, the inventor of agriculture, could be seen as a guilty recollection of the
dispossession of hunter-gatherer populations.13 She also sees parallels between the Puranic and
Sumerian flood myth, which was the prototype for the Old Testament story of Noah and for the Greek
Deucalion.14 Something of this kind may have happened with the Nepalese legend of the draining of
the Kathmandu Valley by Manjusri, one suggestion being that this myth was originally associated with
Khotan but then transferred south of the Himalayas.15
Use of the Nepalese Puranic literature is complicated, however, by the problem of dating. Just as the
authors of the better-known Indian Puranas tried to pass them off as written many centuries previously,
the Nepalese authors sought to give their own creations greater authority by representing them as a part
of the older Indian tradition. In particular the Nepalamahatmya, which gives legends

44
associated with the main shrines of the Valley, claims to be part of an otherwise unknown
12

Pande & Regmi, op.cit., p.20.

Romila Thapar, op.cit., p.270-71.
14
Thapar, p.266-7.
15
John Brough, `Legends of Khotan and Nepal, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol.12, part 2, 1948,
p.333-39. Although Broughs specific arguments are open to challenge, some such transfer remains a possibility. Slusser (1983:
303) argues a Khotanese connection with Valley mythology is supported by the style of the monument at Namobuddha, where a
Jataka story of Buddha offering himself in the form of a prince to a hungry tiger has been made into an origin story involving a
local rulers son.
13

`Himavatkhanda of the Skandapurana. The Skandapurana is recognised as part of the main Indian
canon, and includes legends linked with sacred sites outside Nepal.. It appears to be a kind of
receptacle for material which could not be fitted into any other Purana.16 Just when the Nepalese
section was written is uncertain as scholars disagree on the interpretation of the date given in the
earliest known manuscript of the work.The author of a recent English translation places it in the 9th
century whilst K.P.Malla argues for 175517
Conceptual framework
If their work is to be more than an anthology of source material, historians need organising concepts to
make sense of their data. At the same time, they also have to be aware of the danger of forcing facts
into an unsuitable framework, something particularly likely to happen when the abstractions used form
part of a strongly held ideological standpoint. A second danger is failure to define clearly and
unambiguously the concepts applied.
One of the most commonly employed abstractions for the study of pre-modern society, but also one of
the most likely to generate confusion, is `feudalism. Over the last generation there has been a lively
debate amongst Indian historians over whether this word can be usefully applied to ancient and
medieval Indian society and, if so, to precisely what period (s). The crux of the Indian debate seems to
be whether the word should in fact be used broadly for any socio-economic order with a peasantry and
a class of landlords extracting surplus by `extra-economic means, or whether it should be restricted to
the specific kind of social structure that emerged in western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire
in the West. The European system involved a quasi-religious bond between lord and vassal and the
institution of serfdom, which obliged the peasant to divide his time between his lords land and his
own. European feudalism was also characterised by `parcellised sovereignty, under which those at the
bottom of the pyramid were governed by their immediate superiors instead of directly by the sovereign
ruler at the top of the hierarchy.18 The lack of many of these features in the South Asian system has
lead Mukhia and others to question whether it really qualifies as a `mode of production in the classic
Marxist sense. Even if it is

44
decided to use `feudalism in the wider sense, some would wish to make a distinction between
`feudalism from below, in which intermediaries manage to interpose themselves between the

16

Sylvain Lvi, Le Npal, Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1905, vol.1, p.201; Ludo Rocher, The Puranas, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz,
1986, p.228-9, cited in Jayaraj Acharya, The Nepala-mahatmya, Jaipur: Nirala, 1992, p.2-3
17
Acharya, op.cit,, p.3-7; K.P. Malla,`The Nepala-Mahatmya: a IX-century text or a pious fraud?,' Contributions to Nepalese
Studies , vol.19, no.1 (Jan 1992), p.144-158
18
See the contributions to Hernmann Kulke (ed.), The State in India 1000-1700, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995, and
particularly the essays by R.S. Sharma, the best-known advocate of using `feudalism in the broader sense, and H.Mukhia, who

prefers the more restricted use.

peasantry in a restricted area and a pre-existing central government, or `feudalism from above, where a
formerly independent king is conquered by a neighbour but remains in place as a subordinate ruler.
Significantly, the Sanskrit term samanta, which originally meant `neighbouring ruler subsequently
came to mean a dependent one.19
Thus, although the controversy is to some extent simply a dispute over terms, there are also important
disagreements on empirical issues. For example, what was the relative importance for political
evolution in medieval South Asia of the land grants to Brahmans which are attested on a large-scale
from late Gupta times onwards and of the `samantaization of the state as more powerful kingdoms
swallowed weaker ones? And, perhaps most crucially, does the states alienation of its revenue
collection rights to others reflect an internal crisis within a hitherto strongly centralised structure or
rather simply the extension of state authority, albeit in an indirect form, into areas where it had not
really been exercised before.20 All these complexities have tended to be ignored by historians of Nepal,
who treat `feudalism as an unproblematic term. This is true not only of writers such as Dilli Raman
and Dhanbajra Bajracharya, whose focus is on the micro-detail of the ancient evidence, but also of
those like Prayag Raj Sharma and Kamal Prakash Malla, who have made stimulating attempts to tackle
broader issues of interpretation.
A second key concept for the analysis of Nepalese history and society is that of the `tribe, a tribal order
being generally seen in contrast to a Hindu (and feudal) order which supplants it. The theme of South
Asian history as the progressive incorporation of `tribal elements within the Hindu order has been
taken up by many writers. Particularly celebrated is Sylvain Lvis suggestion that the process in
Nepal, coming later than in the core areas of South Asian civilisation, offers the
46
historian a window onto the earlier process in India: `Le Npal est lInde qui se fait.21 The term `tribe
is, however, an imprecise one. It can often be used simply as equivalent to what Anthony Smith terms
The `above/below distinction was introduced by D.D.Kosambi (An Introduction to the Study of
Indian History. Bombay., 1956, p.294, cited in Kulke, `Introduction, The State in India., op.cit.) . The
term samanta still later came to include even a power holder who had never enjoyed independent
status. The modern Nepal/Hindi samantabad is used as an equivalent of `feudalism regardless of
which meaning of samanta is involved. Gopal ( `Samanta its varying significance in Ancient India.
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1963, p.21-37, cited by Brajadulal
Chattopadhyaya, `Political processes and the structure of polity in early medieval India, in Kulke (ed.),
op.cit.) suggests that the meaning of `dependent ruler replaced that of `neighbouring ruler as the
dominant one in the 5th-6th. centuries A.D. However, although the Ashokan inscriptions use the word
only in the `independent sense, the `dependent one is apparently already found in Vedic usage
(Monier-Williams, Sanskrit Dictionary, s.v.).
20
The former view is particularly associated with R.S.Sharma, the latter suggested by, among others,
Hermann Kulke (`The early and the imperial kingdom: a processual model of integrative state
formation in early medieval India, in The State in India., op.cit., p.243) and by Chattopadhyaya,
op.cit.p 231.
21
`Nepal is India in the making (Lvi, op.cit., vol.1, p.28)
19

an `ethnic fragment a group of people with strong cultural similarities but no single political
structure and no sense of common identity.22 It is only in this sense that most of the groups now termed
janajati could be described as tribes, since, in most cases, they possessed neither political unity nor a
real sense of solidarity before their incorporation in the Nepalese state. An alternative definition for
`tribe, however, would be a group with strong cultural homogeneity and a unified political structure
but with much simpler institutions and a less stratified social structure than a `state. This formulation
could itself be applied to a great variety of groups and, in the interests of clarity of discussion, I
propose to use in this paper the more restricted definition offered by Jared Diamond as part of an
overall schematisation of the development of human society. Diamond reserves the term `tribe for the
stage beyond `bands of up to eighty closely related individuals wandering constantly in search of food.
Diamonds `tribe is a face-to-face community, consisting of no more than a few hundred individuals,
all of whom are known to each other. Its members dwell in a single village or group of adjacent hamlets
with a system of ritual exchange between families and individuals and a division into exogamous clans,
but no economic stratification and no formal mechanism for the regulation of internal conflicts. A more
complex form or organisation probably only first emerged in the in the 6th. millenium B.C, in the form
of `chiefdoms, grouping together up to fifty thousand individuals. The lineage that supplied the chief
enjoyed a superior position over the others and a one-way flow of tribute replacing egalitarian
exchange. The chief and his relatives frequently owned luxury goods, the unearthing of which by
archaeologists may enable the emergence of this political forms in specific areas to be approximately
dated. Land was typically under the chiefs control rather than being held in common by the clan as had
been the case in tribal communities. A rudimentary bureaucracy might develop at this stage, along with
buildings for public purposes but the political unit remained culturally quite homogeneous. The final
transition, probably first achieved in the early 4th. millennium B.C. in Mesopotamia, was from
`chiefdoms to `states, in which political power was no longer tied to descent and the population might
be multi-ethnic. The state was characterised by an elaborate bureaucracy with specialised functions and
by the change of `tribute into `taxation.23
47
Diamonds model would be rejected by some as too much of a simple, linear progression. Indeed, as
Diamond himself readily admits, it is a rough-and-ready classification and examples of societies
blending the characteristics of two or more of the four stages are frequently found. In particular smaller

Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. See also the discussion by
David Gellner (introduction to Gellner et al. (eds), Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom,
Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997, p.14-15), who, however, uses `ethnic category in a broader sense than
Smith, including also the latters `ethnie (groups with strong similarities plus a sense of solidarity)..
23
Diamonds schematic account (Guns, Germs and Steel, New York: Norton, 1998, p. 267-81) does not
elaborate on the precise definition of the two terms but presumably taxation is payment on a fixed and
regular basis as against a less formalised tribute system. The latter would then be equivalent to the
`prestations which Romila Thapar (From Lineage to State, Delhi: OUP, 1984, p.39 sees as typical of
the lineage-based political units preceding the rise of the state in early India.
22

units representing an earlier stage are frequently found embedded in a larger unit which exemplifies a
later one. In the Nepalese context, villages inhabited solely or predominantly by one ethnic group, such
as have been the subject of many ethnographic studies, may still retain many `tribal features in
Diamonds sense. The kipat land-holding system in such Nepalese settlements will originally have
involved straightforward clan-tenure, also as in Diamonds `tribal model, but with a tendency towards
control of the land by a village headman or a chieftain with authority over more than one village. 24
In view of these complexities, use of the word `tribal is perhaps best avoided when discussing
economy and society above village level. Here the concepts of ethnic group and of nation are regularly
brought in as organising principles but also bring their own difficulties. It is obviously possible to
write a history of the territory now claimed by a particular group or an account of the biological or
cultural forerunners of a present-day population. We cannot, however, assume that a particular nation or
ethnic group recognised themselves as such in the past. This is true of populations with strong cultural
similarities, as already argued in the case of the Nepalese janajatis and it is even more true in the case
of a multi-ethnic state which wishes to see itself as a nation now but which has only a short history as
an integrated political unit.
Anachronistic projection of a contemporary reality into the past is a constant danger, whether or not the
writer is a member of the group in question. A British archaeologist in 1950 brought out a book entitled
Five Thousand Years of Pakistan, although Pakistan had not formed a distinct political unit before 1947
and its inhabitants, apart from their adherence to Islam, had no common culture that was not also
shared by South Asia as a whole. In writing British history, writers have often tried to interpret early
centuries through the lens of an insular, Protestant English ideology, which was not really present until
the early modern period.25 In

48
the Nepalese case, many local scholars seek to show that Nepals present territory, though obviously
fragmented in the centuries immediately preceding Prithvi Narayan Shah, had been politically unified
in ancient times. The very use of the term `unification for the formation of the modern state in itself
See Werner M.Egli, `Below the surface of private property: individual rights, common property, and
the Nepalese kipat system in historical perspective, European Bulletin of Himalayan Research no.18,
(2000) p.5-16, for the differing perspectives of headman and ordinary cultivators on who the land
belonged to. The article also makes clear that, among the Sunuwar community studied, although sale of
land to outsiders was not permitted, individual families normally controlled their own plots.
25
An example of history in this mould is Paul Johnson, The Offshore Islanders London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1972. For a revisionist perspective, see Norman Davies, The Isles: a History.London:
Macmillan., 1999. While taking a critical approach towards British (and particularly) English
nationalist formulations, Davies at times appears to endorse the reverse simplifications associated with
Irish nationalist historiography. A more sceptical account of the latter by a prominent Irish historian is
24

Roy F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972, London: Allen Lane, 1988.

also arguably implies an assumed pre-existing sense of shared identity which was only waiting to be
given political expression. This might have conceivably been the case and, as I have argued elsewhere,
there was at least a certain basis for unity among some parts of the population. However there are
reasons for scepticism and sufficient evidence to refute the doubters has not been produced. The same
also applies to the assumptions of many janajati activists. The inhabitants of medieval Kathmandu
certainly spoke Newari but they are unlikely to have had the same sense of `being Newar as developed
by their descendants in a modernising state dominated by Parbatiya culture. 26
If the `Nepalese nation is seen as a very late creation indeed as something still under process of
creation and Gorkhas expansion as in many areas the imposition of alien rule, can the concept of
colonialism be usefully applied? If one believes that the rulers in question were indeed newcomers,
can the same be said of Licchavi rule in the Kathmandu Valley in the ancient period and of the
establishment of Thakuri principlaities in the hills in medieval times? Janajati activists would often
want to answer `Yes, but, as with `feudalism, `colonialism can be used in both a broad and a
narrower sense. If colonialism is defined as one group of people moving into and assuming control of a
territory already occupied by another, then the process has been repeated time after time in human
history and certainly did not begin with the European expansion of the last few centuries. The outcome
varied between: (1) total displacement of the original population (relatively rare); (2) the newcomers
constituting a distinct, ruling elite; or (3) the assimilation of one society into the other. Over time, the
second scenario of course finally gave way to the third. The expansion of Indo-European languages
into Europe and northern

49
India may have been examples of this kind of colonialism,27 whilst the southwards expansion of the
On the development of Nepalese identity, see Richard Burghart, `The formation of the concept of
nation-state in Nepal, Journal of Asian Studies, vol.44, no.1 (1984), p.10125 and Gellner et al.
(eds.) Nationalism in a Hindu Kingdom, op.cit., especially chapters by Gurung, Sharma, PfaffCzarnecka and Whelpton; and, for Newar identity, Gellners `Language, caste, religion and teritory,
Newar identity ancient and modern, European Journal of Sociology, vol.27, 1986, p.102-48. Pratyoush
Onta, `Creating a brave Nepali nation in British India, Studies in Nepalese History and Society, vol.1,
no.1, 1996, p.37-76, argues that a crucial role was played by ethnic Nepalese intellectuals in Darjeeling
who needed to raise their own status in Indian society by providing Nepal with a glorious past. For a
view of Prithvi Narayan Shah as conqueror rather than unifier, see Kumar Pradhan, The Gorkha
Conquests, Delhi::Oxford University Press, 1991.
27
Colin Renfrew (`Reflections on the archaeology of linguistic diversity, in Bryan Sykes (ed.). The
Human Inheritance, op.cit.) argues that there may have been straightforward `elite dominance by
newcomers in India but that in Europe the newcomers, who on his reckoning were the first European
agriculturists, had their language adopted by their neighbours without military domination as a factor.
In the Indian case, the key factor is in fact how far the new culture was brought in by a totally new
26

early Chinese state from the Yellow River and the conquest of England by the Anglo-Saxons certainly
were. We may choose, however, to restrict the use of the word to the expansion of European peoples
from 1500 onwards, when distant and culturally very different lands were conquered and retained
under the control of the metropolitan country, generally without assimilation of the peoples involved.
Unlike the new lands occupied by the Han Chinese, Europes colonies were generally viewed as `not a
component but an annex.28 The conquest of Kiranti territory by the Gorkha armies in the 18th. century
could not be termed `colonialism in this narrower sense but it certainly could in the broader one.
Perhaps, though, the difference is more apparent than real, since assimilation may be the long-term fate
for the remaining indigenous peoples of Australia and North America. In addition where nonEuropeans expanded, for example as with the Austronesian movement into the islands of South-East
Asia, there may have been a very clear-cut separation of indigenous and settler population initially. For
the analyst, the solution is perhaps to employ for the process in Nepal the term `internal colonialism,
originally coined to describe the situation of Celtic areas on the periphery of Britain.29
The evolution of society and state in Nepal
With any country, the story of human society must begin with the physical environment within which it
developed. Nepals earliest history is geological history, with the northwards movement of the Indian
sub-continent towards central Asia and the slow disappearance of the Tethys (or Ganges) Sea which
once separated them. About 70 million years ago came the first stage in the formation of the Tibetan
marginal mountains, which still form the watershed between the Ganges and Brahmaputra river
systems. Between 16 and ten million years ago, rock strata on the edge of the Indian plate were forced
upwards and folded back towards the south. The root zone of this so-called nappe formation became
the main line of the Himalayas, whilst the section which now overlay younger rocks to the south was
eroded to form the present Nepalese midlands. At around the same time the Tibetan mountains rose
further and then, between 800, 000 and 500,000 years ago the main Himalayan range was also uplifted
to reach its present height. Finally, further movements produced the Siwalik and Mahabharat hills to
the south.30
50
These last movements blocked the path of rivers draining towards the Ganges plain, forming lakes in
the Duns (inner Terai valleys between the Mahabharat and the Siwaliks) and also in the Kathmandu
Valley. The Kathmandu Lake may have dried up as recently as 100,000 years ago by which time its
shores were almost certainly inhabited. The mythical account of the draining of the Valley by
Manjushri (Buddhist version) or Pradyumna (Hindu version) could thus conceivably represent an oral
population (see below, p.20).
28
David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, New York: Norton, 1998, p.425.
29
See Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism : the Celtic Fringe in British National Development,
1536-1966, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1975.
30
Toni Hagen, Nepal, New Delhi: Oxford and IBH, 1980,p.97-103.

tradition dating back more than three thousand generations. It is, though, unlikely that memories could
have been preserved over such a time depth. By way of comparison, there is a Chinese folk story about
a land link between Taiwan and the mainland, which were in fact joined until around 4000 B.C31, but,
to the best of my knowledge, there is no folk memory of the land bridge between Britain and mainland
Europe, which certainly existed until about 7000 B.C.
The way in which the mountains were formed had important consequences. In particular, as the force
of the main rivers was normally sufficient to cut their way down as the land beneath then was uplifted,
a pattern of rivers flowing south through deep gorges in the main Himalayan chain was created. Young
mountains are easily eroded so the loss of top soil and its deposition further south to form the Ganges
plain began millions of years before human activities further increased the strain on the slopes. The
slopes themselves provided a very different environment depending on whether or not they faced south
towards the rain and the sunshine. There were also important climatic consequences for the region as a
whole. The uplift of the Tibetan marginal mountains to 6000m, blocked the monsoon winds from
reaching the Tibetan plateau. This effect was strengthened by the subsequent raising of the Himalayas
to even greater heights. There seem nevertheless to have been major fluctuations in the air circulation
pattern after that, at least in the far-western section of the range, as SW monsoon winds may have been
reaching Chinese Turkestan as recently as 20,000 years ago.32 Though climatic change was thus
probably a more complex process than generally believed, progressive desiccation is likely to have
been one factor inducing population movement from

51
the Tibetan plateau into the Himalayas.
Before the Himalayas attained their present height, they constituted less of a barrier to movement
and it may be assumed that many species of animal life could roam relatively unhindered between
south and central Asia. One of these may have been Ramapithecus, a primate whose fossil remains
were first discovered in the Panjab. In 1980 a Ramapithecus skull was found at Butwal dating from
about 11 million years ago, when the Himalayas may have been somewhere between 1000 and 3000
M.V. Lee (ed.), Zhong Guo Shen Hua Yu Min Chuan Shuo [Chinese Myths and Legends], Hong
Kong: Readers Digest Association Far East, 1987, p.206; Chan Kai-cheung, `History, in Choi Po-king
and Ho Lok-sang (eds), The Other Hong Kong Report 1993, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press,
1993, p.463. The land-bridges in both Taiwanese and British cases were created when the sea level fell
during the last Ice Age. Hagen suggests the Kathmandu Lake dried up 200,000 years ago but Ramniwas
Pandey (`Paleo-environment and prehistory of Nepal. Contributions to Nepalese Studies, vol.12, no.2
(1987), p.112) citing work by Japanese geologists in the early 80s, suggests the Bagmati cut through
the ridge to the south `in the middle to late pleistocene. The end of the middle pleistocene period for
South Asia is currently estimated at around 127,000 B.P..
32
Bridget & Raymond Allchin, The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982, p.12.
31

metres high. There was understandable excitement amongst Nepalese researchers and some extravagant
claims were made. One scholar wrote in 1989 that members of this species `could walk erect, move
their hands freely and had even the power of communicating their ideas with words. He also saw them
as ancestors of the makers of the earliest tools found in Nepal.33 Unfortunately, recent thinking is that
Ramapithecus was not in the evolutionary line leading directly to man and is more likely to have been a
forerunner of the orang-utangs of SE Asia.34 In any case, it is generally recognised that the first
members of the genus Homo evolved in Africa rather than Asia.35
The earliest evidence of human activity in Nepal is provided by stone tools found in the valleys
(Duns) of the Inner Tarai, between the Siwalik and Mahabharat ranges . Further to the east, where the
archaeological record starts a little later, discoveries have been made on teraes formed by rivers as they
leave the Siwaliks and enter the Gangetic plain The outer foothills of the Himalayas appear to have
been a particularly suitable environment for early man, as the Indian Siwaliks have also yielded
extensive remains. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers presumably lived on the shores of the lakes formed as
the hills were uplifted. A similar environment will have existed on the shores of the lake which once
filled much of the Kathmandu Valley: fossils discovered there include those of an alligator and a
hippopotamus.36 It should be remembered, though, that discoveries here have been made easier by the
pattern of river erosion exposing formerly buried material and that areas where no remains have yet
been found might still have been used by early man.
The first discovery of stone tools was made by Ramniwas Pande in the far-western district of Bardia in
1966/7 and it has been claimed that one of his finds
52
is of pre-Chelean type, implying an age of several hundred thousand years. 37 However, this and other
early finds had been washed away from their original site and are thus extremely difficult to date. The
Ramniwas Pande, `Ancient Nepal, in Kamal Prakash Malla (ed.), Nepal: Perspectives on Continuity
and Change, Kathmandu: CNAS, 1989, p.53.
34
Sonakia, Arun. 1992. `Human evolution in south Asia, in Takeru Azakawa, Kenichi Aoki, Tasuku
Kimura (eds), The evolution and dispersal of Modern Humans in Asia. Tokyo: Hokusen-sha, 1992,
p.337-9.
35
Chris Stringer, `The fossil record of the evolution of Homo sapiens in Europe and Australasia, in
Bryan Sykes (ed.), The Human Inheritance, op. cit., p.33. There is still disagreement over whether the
transition to modern man was also made uniquely in Africa though a majority of scholars probably now
accept that view. A nationalist-inspired wish to trace a peoples ancestry on their present territory as far
back as possible is not, of course, a purely Nepalese phenomenon possible. See Barry Sautman,.
`Peking Man and the Politics of Palaeoanthropological Nationalism in China,Journal of Asian Studies
60(1):95-124 (2001) for its effect on the work of Chinese palaeo-historians.
33

Gudrun Corvinus, `Report on the Work done on the Project of Quarternary and PrehistoricStudies in
Nepal, Ancient Nepal 86-88, 1985, p.5; Pande, `Palaeo-Environment, f.n. no. 33..
37
R.N.Pande, op.cit.,p.118 Tools of Chelean style are placed early in the Middle Pleistocene period
(J.L.Sharma, Hamro Samaj: Ek Adhyayan, Kathmandu: Sajha, 2039 V.S., Tables on p.11 and 13),
which is now reckoned to have lasted from about 900,000 to 127,000 years B.P. (D.K.Chakrabarti,
India: an Archaeological History, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, p.51 ). N.R.Banerjee
(`Discovery of the Remains of Prehistoric Man in Nepal, Ancient Nepal, no.6 (1969), p.6-9) appears to
claim that hand-axes which he and J.L.Sharma discovered in 1968/9 date back about 200,000 years.
Corvinuss presentation of her own later discoveries as the earliest reliable ones caused some
resentment amongst Nepalese researchers.
36

first discoveries of Palaeolithic remains in stratified contexts were made more recently by Gudrun
Corvinus. They included a hand-axe site at Gadari in the Dang valley and another further east at
Satpati. The`hand-axe (in fact probably used as a scraper rather than axe) is the name conventionally
given to a tool typically used by Homo erectus, the predecessor of both the Neanderthals and modern
men. Homo erectus was already an inhabitant of much of the globe by 750,00 years B.P, at which time
the second uplifting of the main Himalayan range was under way.38 The Nepalese hand-axes are of a
design common in Africa and India but not found north of the Himalayas. Corvinus believes the Dang
site dates back `at least to the later Middle Pleistocene, viz. roughly between 500,000 and 127,00 years
BP or perhaps earlier.39 For comparison, the oldest tools discovered in South Asia (in the Indian
Siwaliks further west along the Himalayan foothills) are thought to be about two million years old. A
skull discovered in the Narmada Valley in Madhya Pradesh and belonging either to Homo erectus or an
early Homo sapiens, is believed to date from in or just after the later Middle Pleistocene.40
From early on, Nepal was a meeting point for different traditions, a feature which was to characterise it
in later periods also. Bishnu Bahadur Shrestha, relying on the disputed material available before
Corvinuss work, argued that Nepal was home to separate Palaeolithic cultures, one connected with that
of the oldest Indian hand-axes (conventionally termed `Madrasian) and the other with that of the Soan
Valley in Kashmir.41 The earliest tools discovered in the Kathmandu Valley, dating

53
from around 30,000 years ago, show similarities to those found in parts of central Asia, 42 while stone
tools of the same or earlier date in the Arjun Valley in Dang are on the Indian pattern.43 The Mesolithic
site discovered by Corvinus in the Rato Khola valley in Mahottari (Eastern Tarai), which dates from
5000 B.C. or earlier, has unique features of its own but also some SE Asian affinities, especially to the
Hoabinhian culture of Vietnam. The occupants of the Mahottari site used large stone tools (macroliths)

J.M.Roberts, The Penguin History of the World, London: Penguin, 1990, p.28.
Gudrun Corvinus, The Prehistory of Nepal after Ten Years of Research, In Ram Pratap Thapa &
Joachim Baaden (eds.), Nepal: Myths and Realities, Delhi: Book Faith India., 2000. The article also
reports the finding of flake and core tools in one of the tributary valleys to the Dang Dun.
40
Chakrabarti, ib.
41
Bishnu Bahadur Shrestha, `The Prehistoric Archaeology of Nepal with Special Reference to the
Beginning of Agriculture, University of Minnesota thesis, 1982, cited in Theodore Riccardi, Jr.,
`Change and Continuity in the Kathmandu Valley: the Archaeological Perspective, in S.Lienhard (ed.),
Change and Continuity in the Nepalese Culture of the Kathmandu Valley, Turin: Edizioni dellOrso,
1996. Riccardi also claims that Shresthas work supports a belief that the Kathmandu Valley was
inhabited from Lower Paleolithic times. This would imply a date similar to that suggested for the Dang
hand-axe industry. It should be noted, however, that the Soan culture itself, formerly regarded as Lower
Palaeolithic, is now thought to be mostly Middle Palaeolithic (Bridget & Raymond Allchin, The Rise of
Civilization in India and Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p.36.)
42
Schetenko. `The Outcomes of the Scientific Mission to Nepal in Brief. Ancient Nepal nos. 43-45
(1977-78), p.1-2.
43
Corvinus, op.cit.
38
39

in contrast to the smaller ones (microliths) typical of contemporary Indian sites

A similar pattern is found with the neolithic tools found in many different parts of the country,
including the Kathmandu Valley, and dated on grounds of typology to the 2nd millennium B.C. These
mostly resemble Assamese types but there appears to be an additional influence in the Dang Valley,
which has been described as `a meeting place of two cultures, one expanding from Assam and
Sikkim and the other north Indian.44 The distinctive axe-head which prompts this conclusion (again a
discovery of Ramniwas Pande) is similar in shape, and probably also in function to the iron blade
which, fastened to a pole, is still used by the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley for breaking up clods of
earth .
In contrast to the adzes of the Mahottari culture, which appear to have been used for cutting grass and
wood, particularly bamboo, the neolithic implements indicate the arrival of agriculture. Excavations of
settlement sites in southern Mustang abandoned during the period 300 B.C. to 1650 A.D.have
discovered remains of the varieties of barley, wheat and buckwheat still planted in the locality today.
This raises the possibility that the crop pattern in most parts of Nepal remained much the same from the
beginnings of agriculture until the introduction of New World crops such as maize, chillies and potatoes
from Moghul times onwards45. Tool discoveries so far perhaps suggest a date in the third millennium
B.C. for the arrival in Nepal of the `Neolithic Revolution but it could well have been somewhat earlier
in view of the current estimates for the transition from hunting and gathering in neighbouring regions..
The references in the vamsavalis to

54
the legendary Gopala and Mahishpala dynasties and also K.P.Mallas derivation of the word nepala
from the Tibeto-Burman roots nhet (`cattle) and pa (`man) suggest that herders may have been the
earliest remembered inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley. Whilst we are here in the realm of
speculation, it is possibly significant that in the Hindu Kush local people were already exploiting wild
sheep and goats as early as 14,000 B.C. and that domestication of sheep there had taken place before
5000B.C.46 Rice may have been under cultivation in the Ganges Valley south of Allahabad before 6000
D.R.Sharma, `Archaeological Remains in the Dang Valley. Ancient Nepal, no.106 (1988) 8-12. See
also Banerjee, N.R. & Sharma, Janak Lal, `Neolithic tools from Nepal and Sikkim. Ancient Nepal no.9
(1969), p.53-58 and J.L.Sharma, 1983. `Neolithic tools from Nepal. AncientNepal 75: 1-5.
45
Predita Pohle, `Geographical research on the history of the cultural landscape of Southern Mustang
the Land Use Map of Kagbeni as a Basis. Ancient Nepal, no.134, 1993, p.57-81.
46
K.P.Malla, `Linguistic Archaeology of the Kathmandu Valley: a Preliminary Report, Kailas 8(1-2),
1981, p.19; B. & R.Allchin, op.cit., p.97. The Allchins also believe that in the Fertile Crescent animals
were domesticated before plants, though Diamond (op.cit., p.99) and Roberts (op.cit., p.50) maintain
44

B.C., while wheat and barley were domesticated in the Indus Valley not long after 7000.47 Transmission
into Nepal from the north or east is another possibility, as some scholars believe that millet and rice
agriculture was established in SE Asia around 10,000 B.C. and a similar date for rice in China has also
been tentatively proposed.48
The shift to food production has frequently been linked with language spread, since it gave new
immigrants an edge over earlier-established hunter-gatherers, The latter might be supplanted
completely, as in the case of the pre-Austronesian population of Java and Sumatra, or, as may have
happened with the spread of farming into Europe, they adopted the newcomers technology and often
their languages also. A third possibility was survival on the margins of the new society. The Kusunda, a
small group of hunter-gatherers, still surviving in the Mahabharat hills, exemplify this, as their
language is apparently unrelated to any other and may represent the oldest linguistic stratum in Nepal. 49
Another hunter-gather group, the better-known Raute, now speak a recognisably Tibeto-Burman
language but are probably also the descendants of a pre-Tibeto-Burman population. In addition, though
Tharu speech has now almost totally converged with local Indo-Aryan dialects, 50 it is believed that their
language contains a pre-Tibeto-Burman

55
substratum, while Gaborieau has argued that their social structure resembles that of tribal groups in
central and eastern India.51
A popular candidate both for a substratum language(s) in the Himalayas and for the language of early
agriculturalists has been Munda, the western branch of the Austroasiatic family. Munda is now
the reverse.
47
Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760, Berkeley: University of
California, 1993, p.4-5; Diamond, op.cit., 100-101.
48
Roberts, op.cit., p.49; Yan Wenming, `Woguo Daozuo Qiyuan Yanjiu de xin Jinzhan [New advances
in research on the
origins of rice cultivation in China], Kaogu, no.9 (1997), p.71-6, cited in L.Sagart, Roots of Old
Chinese, Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1999, p.180. For Tibet, however, present evidence shows only
that millet was under cultivation by around 2500 B.C.( Laurent Sagart, personal communication).
49
Although sometimes erroneously classed as Tibeto-Burman, Kusundas status as a linguistic isolate
(like Basque in SW Europe) is generally recognised. See Michael Witzel, `Nepalese hydronomy:
towardsa history of settlement in the Himalayas. In:
Grard Toffin (ed), Nepal: Past and Present: Proceedings of the France-German conference, Arc- etSenans, June1990. New Delhi: Sterling, 224, 256.
50
Witzel, op.cit., p.256, n.21. For a discussion of modern Tarai ethnicity, see Arjun Guneratne,
`Modernization, the state and the construction of a Tharu identity in Nepal Journal of Asian Studies,
vol.57, no.3 (August 1998), p.749-73.
51
. Marc Gaborieau (Le Npal et ses populations, Brussels: Editions complexes, 1978, p.81). CavalliSforza and his colleagues (The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, p.239) claim to have discovered a close genetic similarity between Tharus and
`Gurkhas (the latter term apparently referring to Pahadi speakers in northern Uttar Pradesh) but the
Tharu are perhaps best seen, like the Newars, as an agglomeration of peoples who entered the Terai
jungles at different times (cf. Giselle Krauskopf., `Corves (Begaari) in Dang: Ethno-Historical Notes,
in Harold O. Skar (ed.), Nepal: Tharu and Tarai Neighbours, Kathmandu: EMR, 1999 p.50)

represented in Nepal only by Sant(h)ali which has something over thirty-thousand speakers in Jhapa
and Morang districts. Although the present Santal population appears to be the result of migration from
India since the mid-19th. century,52 Munda languages were conceivably spoken widely in Nepal before
the arrival of the Tibeto-Burmans from their presumed original homeland in western China.53 The most
frequently cited evidence for this used to be the existence in languages such as Rai and Limbu of a
complex system of verbal affixes showing agreement with the grammatical object as well as the
subject. This grammatical feature (`pronominalization) was believed to be due to influence from
Munda, but in fact it is common in Tibeto-Burman languages outside Nepal and thus probably inherited
from the parent language.54

56
Nevertheless, there still remains the river name Gandaki, which has been plausibly derived from the
Munda word for `water (gad, gand)55 and this, together with the survival of Munda languages in
pockets of NE and central India, still makes it plausible that its distribution once included a much wider
area, including at least part of Nepal. Comparison of the vocabulary of present-day Munda languages
suggests that the speakers of the parent language, which is believed to have broken up some time in the
second millennium BC, were familiar with subsistence agriculture based on rice, millet and legumes. 56
Early Munda expansion across north India could thus well have been driven by a food production and
Buggeland, Anne.. `Kali worship among the Santals of Nepal: Hinduization and ethnic boundaries,
in Michael Allen (ed.). Anthropology of Nepal: People, Problems and Processes,Kathmandu: Mandala,
1994, p.441. The 1991 census gives just over 30,000 speakers of Santali/Satar in Nepal, while there are
over 3.5 million in India. Although Satar is treated as a distinct category in census statistics (followed
by Salter and Gurung 1996: 77) anthropologists generally regard them as one group.
53
Early Tibeto-Burmans were probably at one stage located in Sichuan and Gansu provinces to the west
of the area where a distinctively Chinese culture first developed (Sagart, op.cit.p.193; George van
Driem, `Neolithic correlates of ancient Tibeto-Burman migrations, in Roger Blench & Matthew
Spriggs (eds.), Archaeology and Language II: Correlating Archaeological and Linguistic Hypotheses,
London: Routledge, 1998. Van Driem accepts Matisoffs hypothesis that proto-Tibeto-Burman was
spoken around the headwaters of the Yangtze, Mekong and Brahmaputra.. He then argues that early
agriculture in Gansu and on the Chinese Central Plain (the Dadiwan and Peiligang-Cishan civilisations)
was the result of migration north from Sichuan in the 7th. millenium B.C. Sagart (personal
communication) believes this is too early a date for agriculture in Sichuan and envisages a spread from
rather than towards the Gansu section of the Yellow River.
54
Jim Bauman, `Pronominal Verb Morphology in Tibeto-Burman. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman
Area 1(1) (1974), p. 108-55.; George van Driem, `The Proto-Tibeto-Burman Verbal Agreement
System, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol.56, no.2 (1993), p. 292-334. There
is thus no reason for regarding languages which retain pronominalization as closely related, although
this notion, first proposed by Konow at the beginning of the 20th. century, is still entertained by many
writers, probably both because of its enshrining in the Linguistic Survey of India and because it was
relied on in Suniti Kumar Chatterjis influential Kirata-Jana-Krti (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1951
and 1974)
55
Witzel, op.cit., p.230, 256.
56
Arlene R.K. & Norman H. Zide 1976. `Proto-Munda Cultural Vocabulary: evidence for Early
Agriculture, in Laurence C. Thompson & Stanley Starosta (ed.), Austroasiatic Studies, pt.2, Honolulu:
University of Hawaii, cited in Eaton, op.cit., p.4-5.
52

the NE Indian neolithic culture which influenced developments in Nepal could have been developed (or
adopted) by Munda-speaking peoples.57
Neolithic population growth may also have been behind the immigration of Tibeto-Burman
speaking peoples. The Himalayan foothills in Kashmir saw the development from 3000 BC onwards of
the `northern neolithic, a culture which was roughly contemporaneous with the urban civilisation of
the Indus Valley cities to the south but showed few signs of any interaction with the more advanced
culture. The `northern neolithic had several similarities with the neolithic cultures of northern China,
including the use of perforated stone knives and the burial of dogs with their masters. It was suggested
first by Parpola that these people were Tibeto-Burmans and the linguist George van Driem has recently
suggested that their subsequent movement eastwards through the hills was the process that brought
most of Nepals Tibeto-Burman languages to their present locations.58 The possibility of migration from
the west rather than from the east or north had already been raised in Witzels examination of river
names in the hills. These suggest the presence at one time of Rais as far west as Mugu and also of
Magars in western hill areas that are now exclusively Nepali-speaking. This evidence is supported by a

57
tradition among some Rai that they migrated from Mugu and among the Thami that they originally
came from Humla. It may finally also be relevant that the term `Kirata, found in classical Indian
sources from the Vedas onwards and usually understood as referring particularly to Tibeto-Burman
populations, must originally have referred to inhabitants of the western Himalaya, since this was the
only part of the range the Vedic Aryans would initially have had contact with.59
The facts can, of course, be interpreted in a different way: peoples who entered from the east
might have begun moving in the opposite direction later on, whilst the term `Kirata may well have
been extended to include any aboriginal inhabitant of the Himalayas. 60 Given the probable very low
population densities at the time and the fact that most of the groups involved would have remained
Van Driem, `Tibeto-Burman correlates, op.cit., p.71. While reporting this theory, Van Driem
himself prefers to see an early wave of Tibeto-Burman migrants into Assam as the originators of the
NE neolithic.
58
Van Driem, `Tibeto-Burman correlates.., p.77-82. Van Driems theory is presented as part of a larger
structure, involving a series of migrations corresponding to nodes in the Tibeto-Burman family tree as
he himself reconstructs it. It is highly controversial, particularly in placing Chinese as a member of a
`Sino-Bodic sub-family within Tibeto-Burman and also because of the early dates he has suggested for
initial population movements, but the eastward movement can be accepted independent of the rest. See
also his `Sino-Bodic, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol.60, no.3 (1997), p.5588 and (for a strong rebuttal of his evidence for a special link between Chinese and the Bodic
languages), J.A.Matisoff (2000).
59
Witzel, op.cit.p.243.
60
Dilli Raman Regmi, Ancient Nepal,Calcutta: Firma K.L.Mukhopadhyay, 1960, p.23.
57

dependent on part in hunting and have practised shifting rather than settled cultivation, a zig-zag
pattern of movement must have been frequent. The theory of a general drift to the east nevertheless
remains attractive since it would parallel the later migration trajectory of the Indo-Aryan Khas people
and also the eastward advance of Indo-Aryan settlement down the Ganges Valley. The pattern could be
part of an even wider one if van Driem is right in placing the original Austroasiatic homeland in South
Asia, so that the linguistic forerunners of the Vietnamese and Cambodians must also have migrated
eastwards to reach their current position in SE Asia. One conditioning factor for the trend could have
been climatic: although there are wide micro-regional variations, rainfall generally increases towards
the south-east and, in periods of drought, it would have been the logical direction to move. Also
important could have been pressure from other peoples entering the sub-continent from the north-west
and penetrating the hills either via the Iranian plateau or directly from central Asia.
Whatever the general trend in the hills, some Tibeto-Burmans did certainly enter what is now
Nepal directly from the north, the most famous case being the well-documented migration of the
Sherpas into Solu-Khumbu in the 16th. century.61 While less recent arrivals, the Tamang, Gurung and
Thakali almost certainly entered in a similar way. The three languages are clearly closely related and
they are also closer to Tibetan than are other Nepalese Tibeto-Burman languages. 62 This

58
migration trajectory is confirmed by the oral traditions preserved in the Gurung pye. A published
account based on the pye has the Gurungs settle in Mustang between the 1st cent.B.C. and 1st cent. AD.
and cross to the south side of the Himalaya in around 500 A.D. It is, however, difficult to evaluate
Bhovar and Yarjung Tamus claims as they do not make it clear how far they are relying purely on the
pye itself and how far on deductions made from other sources.63 Estimates based on the degree of

Marc Oppitz, ``Myths and facts: considering some data concerning the clan history of the `Sherpas,
in C. von Frer-Haimendorf (ed), Contributions to the Anthropology of Nepal, Warminster: Aris &
Philips, 1974.
62
Scott DeLancey, (`Sino-Tibetan Languages, in Bernard Comrie (ed.),The Major Languages of the
World, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, p.802) actually includes them with Tibetan in a
Bodish sub-group. Van Driem (`The Quest for Mahakiranti, Contributions to Nepalese Studies. Vol.19,
no.2 (1992), p.243) prefers to make them a co-ordinate unit alongside Bodish and Himalayish (the bulk
of the other Nepalese Tibeto-Burman languages). Van Driem also prefers to regard the Manang dialect
as a fourth member of the group rather than including its speakers within Gurung.
63
Bhovar Palje Tamu and Yarjung Kromchhe Tamus account (`A Brief histroy of the Tamu Tribe, in
Bernard Pignde, The Gurungs (English edition by Sarah Harrison and Allan Macfarlane, ),
Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandar,1993) also gives elaborate details of earlier migration through
western China, mentioning both Sichuan and Gansu. The pyes account of the fist settlement on the
south side of the Annapurna range is probably reliable as the ruins of the first settlement (Kohla
Sombre) have been located (Mark Temple,`The Ruins of an Early Gurung Settlement, European
Bulletin of Himalayan Research, no.5 (1993), p.43-47; Judith Pettigrew and Yarjung Tamu, `The Kohla
Project, Studies in Nepali history and Society, vol.4, no.2 (1999), p.327-64.
61

divergence of the three languages are said to indicate a date around 800 or 900 A.D for their separation,
which probably coincided with the first migration. Glottochronology is a notoriously unreliable tool
but, following Witzel, one might suppose that the 7th to 9th centuries A.D., corresponding to the
formation, expansion and collapse of a united Tibetan kingdom, might have seen at least one of the
migrations involved.64
Witzel has also suggested that the Newars might also have arrived in the Kathmandu Valley at this
time, mainly on the grounds that the old Newari names found in the earliest land sale documents (from
983 AD onwards) appear very different from the non-Sanskrit nominals in the Licchavi inscription.
However, as he himself accepts, it is possible both that the forms in the Licchavi inscriptions (5 th to 8th
centuries) might already have been archaic and also that the post-Licchavi period was one of turbulence
which promoted rapid linguistic change. One also wonders whether a large-scale migration from the
north at this point would not have left at least some trace in the vamsavali tradition.
The search for Newar origins is, as Prayag Raj Sharma aptly puts it, rather like peeling an onion:
there is no solid core beneath all the layers.65 There has been plenty of speculation about original
Australoid or Dravidian elements and particularly about a Munda contribution,66 but it is very hard to
evaluate this. The most reliable evidence remains the Newari language itself . Witzel was perhaps
influenced by the belief of some Tibeto-Burmanists that Newari is most closely

59
connected with Tamang and Gurung. However, Benedicts tentative linking of it with the Kiranti
languages (Rai and Limbu) has recently been confirmed by van Driems comparison of the latters
verbal morphology with that of the archaic Newari of Dolakha.67 This strengthens the case for the
generally accepted view that Newar society evolved out of the `Kirata period preceding the
establishment of the Licchavi rule.. Whatever their genetic make-up, the inhabitants of the Kathmandu
Valley are most likely the linguistic heirs of an earlier, probably eastward movement of peoples and
cultures that also brought the Rais, Limbus and Magars into their current locations. Over the centuries
they have certainly also assimilated a number of immigrants from the south, as is made clear

Witzel, op.cit.p. ; there is also a Tamang folk tradition deriving their name from a Tibetan word for
cavalry and claiming that the first Tamang were soldiers of Srong Tsen Gampo, the 7th. century founder
of the Tibetan empire (Janak Lal Sharma, Hamro Samaj: Ek Adhyayan, Kathmandu: Sajha, 1983,
p.349.)
65
Prayag Raj Sharma, Kul, Bhumi ra Rajya, Kathmandu: CNAS, 2054 VS, p.39.
64

66

See K.P.Mallas rather sceptical review of earlier suggestions (`Linguistic archaeology, op.cit.,p.8-11.)
Scott DeLancey, `Sino-Tibetan Languages in Bernard Comrie (ed.), The Worlds Major Languages, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987, p.799-810; P.Benedict, Sino-Tibetan: a Conspectus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972;
George van Driem, `In Quest of Mahakiranti, Contributions to Nepalese Studies, 19(2), 1992, p.241-7. For a review of earlier
work on Nepalese Tibeto-Burman languages see Tej R. Kansakar,`The Tibeto-Burman Languages of Nepal: a General Survey.
Contributions To Nepalese Studies, vol.20, no.2 (1983), p.165-73.
67

both by their caste-structure and the origin myths of particular castes.68

All of the cultures so far discussed, from the paleolithic era to the eve of the Licchavi period,
were at the pre-state stages in terms of Diamonds categories discussed above. Before the neolithic,and
in some cases even after it began, human beings in Nepal lived simply in bands. The `tribal pattern,
with villages normally divided into exogamous clans, then probably became the dominant form in
some parts of the country. The crucial stage of chiefdoms which implies structures larger than a faceto-face community was presumably reached only under the Kirata rulers of the Kathmandu Valley.
Nothing much more can be said about social conditions. It is often assumed that life before the arrival
of social stratification and the state was a harmonious affair, and hunter-gatherer communities in
present-day South Asia do generally seem able to manage their internal relations quite peacefully. As
has been pointed out already, however, we cannot simply extrapolate from such cultural survivals to the
situation before such societies were in contact with more technologically advanced neighbours. Even in
present conditions , hunter-gatherers do have their internal tensions and defusion of these depends
heavily on the ease with which aggrieved parties can put physical distance between themselves. FrerHaimendorfs well-known study refers to the disorder that ensued when at the beginning of the last
century the Madras Presidency government brought the Chenchus of Andhra Pradesh together in large
settlements.69 Diamonds New Guinean data shows that breakdown is also a possibility even without
intervention from a modern state. He gives us this account of a friends visit to the Fayu, a New
Guinean people who had previously had no contact with the modern world, and whose numbers had
been cut down drastically by internecine violence:
`the Fayu normally lived as single families, scattered through the swamp and coming together once
or twice a year to negotiate an exchange of brides. Dougs visit coincided with such a gathering, of
a few dozen Fayu. To us, a few dozen people constitute a small, ordinary gathering, but to the Fayu
it was a rare, frightening event. Murderers suddenly found themselves face-to-face with their
victims relatives. For example, one Fayu man spotted the man who had killed his father. The son
raised his axe and rushed at the murderer but was wrestled to the ground by friends; then the
murderer came at the prostrate son with an axe and was also wrestled down. Both men were held,
screaming in rage, until they seemed sufficiently exhausted to be released. Other men periodically
shouted insults at each other, shook with anger and frustration, and pounded the ground with their
axes.70
This example is not intended to replace the stereotype of Eden-like harmony with the opposite
one of a Hobbesian war of all against all. It should, however, remind us that the reality is a
complex one. Early Nepalese hunter-gatherer society need not always have been so dysfunctional, but
we can assume some groups had the same problem. It was not

68

David Gellner, personal communication.

See the account in Christoph von Frer-Haimendorf,. Morals and Merit: a Study of Values and Social controls in
South Asian Societies. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967.
70
Diamond, op.cit.p.265-6.
69

60
greater gentleness that distinguished such societies from more advanced ones but rather greater
intimacy and one can have intimate enemies as well as intimate friends.
The transition to state-societies was, of course, made first in the Ganges Valley before influencing
the hills. What is now the Tarai was important to this development for two reasons. First, one of the
principal routes for migration down the Ganges Valley lay along the base of the hills, probably because
it was easier to clear forest for agriculture there than nearer the Ganges itself. 71 According to the
Puranic genealogies, the ruling families of Kosala and Videha, the territories below the hills to the west
and east of the Gandaki respectively, shared Suryavamsi descent and this might indicate that the
dominant lineages (or, less likely, the ancestors of the two peoples generally) might originally have
been part of a single eastward expansion.72 Secondly, the area along both sides of the present Indo71
72

Ramila Thapar, From Lineage to State, op.cit., p.70 and 73.

Ramila Thapar,`Genealogy as a Source of Social History, in Ancient Indian Social History, op.cit.p.296

Nepalese border provided the initial context in which Buddhism emerged. The archaeological record
also shows that Painted Grey Ware pottery, often associated with the eastward Indo-Aryan expansion,
was in use from early on at sites such as Tilaurakot, probably the ancient Kapilavastu.73 Though much
of the Terai was to revert to jungle in medieval times and become something of a marginal area, it
played a key role at an earlier date.74
Several important trends were operating together on the Ganges plain during the first millennium
B.C. First was technological progress, in particular the use of iron. The metal, which was already in use
in south India, appears to have been used by the Indo-Aryans initially mostly for weapons, but by the
middle of the millennium iron implements were probably being used extensively for forest clearance
and particularly for plough-shares. This enabled the heavier soils to be exploited more efficiently, even
though farming of such soils and settlement in the Ganges-Jamuna doab had already begun with only
stone and bronze tools.75 In any case, the introduction of new varieties of rice and of improvements in
transplanting techniques allowed substantial growth in population. Secondly, the Vedic chiefdoms were
evolving towards greater stratification with a growing emphasis on

61
the ideology of kingship.76 The strong monarchical state that emerged in Magadha (Bihar) was in some
way a culmination of this trend, though also breaking with the lineage principle on which the chiedoms
had been based. The `republican tribes of the Terai and , of which the Licchavis and the Shakyas are
the best known, appear to have been confederacies of older-style chieftaincies, perhaps also with a
Tibeto-Burman background.77
A third factor was the growing importance of trade and of towns, dependent on a rural economy
boosted by the new techniques and involving now not lineage-tenure but peasant-proprietors (grihasta)
working their land with family and also with paid and slave labour. Buddhism and Jainism were from
early on particularly linked to the merchant class, which perhaps helps explain why the radically
73

Maintaining the identification of Tilaurakot with the Shakyas capital, made first during by 19th. century archaeologists,has
become a point of national pride for Nepalese scholars. See, for example, Bhuvan Lal Pradhans Lumbini-Kapilwastu-Dewadaha,
Kathmandu: CNAS, 1979 and Babu Krishna Rijal, Archaeological remains of Kapilavastu, Lumbini and Devadaha, Kathmandu:
Educational Enterprises, 1979. The counter-arguments in favour of Piprahawa in Basti district, Uttar Pradesh, are presented in
K.M. Shrivastava, Discovery of Kapilvastu, New Delhi: Book & Books, 1986. Wherever the truth lies, both sides of the present
border formed a single cultural unit in the Buddhas time, as, in some respects, they still do.
74
David Gellner (personal communication) reports the belief of the librarian in charge of the Buddhist library at Lumbini that the
the area was intensively farmed until around the middle of the first millennium A.D.
75
This last point is stressed by R.A.E.Conningham (``Dark Age or Continuum? An Archaeological analysis of the Second
Emergence of Urbanism in South Asia, in F.R.Allchin (ed.), The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
76
George Erdosy, `The Prelude to Urbanisation: Ethnicity and the Rise of Late Vedic Chiefdoms, in Allchin (ed.), Archaeology,
op.cit.
77
Hit Narayan Jhas arguments (The Licchavis (of Vaisali), Varanasi: Chowkamba Sanskrit Studies Office, 1970, p.4-11) for
rejecting Vincent Smiths theory of the Licchavis Tibeto-Burman connections are rather weak and the Licchavis own origin
legend seems to contain non-Aryan elements. In any case, as Erdosy argues (see below, p.21), it is probably wrong to see the
Aryans as an ethnic group at all.

egalitarian implications of their rejection of Brahmanism were not fully worked out. As Romila Thapar
puts it. `the element of social protest in Buddhism was .. limited to providing the intellectual
encouragement and justification for the formation of a new elite.78
The renouncer cults also developed close links to the emerging monarchies in Magadha,
culminating with the Mauryas in the 3rd. cent.B.C., and then elsewhere. For the Mauryans and for later
royalty the monasteries were useful agents of acculturation and of social control. This was a major
factor behind the land grants to Buddhists and Jains and, later on, to sects like the Pashupatas, who
emerged in the 2nd century A.D.. Grants to monasteries, and also to Brahmans were to become an even
more important feature from the time of the Gupta empire in the 3rd. to 5th.centuries A.D.
The extent to which the Mauryan state and its would-be imitators exercised direct control over its
subjects remains a highly contentious issue. The picture of centralised, almost totalitarian rule
presented in the Arthasastra may well have been a royal aspiration rather than a reality, or at any rate
represents the reality only at the centre of the royal domain.79 As Hindu monarchy developed over
succeeding centuries this aspiration was not lost but, in contrast to the Magadhan rulers who had made
no attempt to conceal low-caste `origins, there was by Gupta times a renewed emphasis on pedigree
and Puranic literature emerged in large part to meet that demand.
The Licchavi state in Nepal emerged against this Gangetic background and its public
pronouncements, which form the major part of the surviving inscriptions of the period, faithfully reflect
Indian developments. The inscriptional record begins

62
with a statue of 184/5 or 284/5 A.D. commissioned by King Jaya Varman and perhaps depicting the
king himself.80 The statue is in the Kushan style prevalent at the time in India. The earliest substantial
inscription, that of Manadeva at Changu Narayan dating from 464/5, likewise corresponds fully with
contemporary Gupta epigraphic conventions. The highlighting in that inscription of a supposed
dialogue between Manadeva and his mother also perhaps parallels that between Chandra Gupta and
Samudra Gupta in the latters 4th. century Allahabad inscription. Manadeva is depicted as persuading
his mother against ending her own life on his fathers death. Assuming that she was indeed
contemplating joining her husband on the funeral pyre, we have here the earliest reference to sati in any
South Asian inscription. The earliest in India is a monument at Sagar (Madhya Pradesh) erected in 510
A.D. The practice of widow burning is attested for earlier periods, with some references in the Smritis
78

Romila Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History, op.cit, p..53.

Kulke,
80
The reading of the date on the statue pedestal is in dispute. Kashinath Tamot & Ian Alsop, (`A Kushan period sculpture from
the reign of Jaya Varma - 184/185 A.D., Kathmandu, Nepal.), Asian Art 10/7/1996, argue for the earlier one. Their article, with
some updating is currently (December 2000) available at www.asianart.com/articles/jaya/index.html., with hyper-link to an
undated article by Angelo Andrea Di Castro and Riccardo Garbini, `An Inscribed statue of the Year 207 from Maligaon,
Kathmandu. The third century date would bring the average reign length for kings between Jaya Varman and Manadeva in line
with that for later Licchavi rulers. I am grateful to Prayag Raj Sharma for providing information on the find.
79

and Epics, but it appears to have been rare before the latter half of the first millennium.81 For good or
ill, the Licchavi state was abreast, or even slightly ahead, of trends in the south and the matrimonial
links of later rulers with prominent north Indian families show that the south itself acknowledged this.
The emergence of such a state in Nepal was part of a general expansion of Hindu kingship into hitherto
peripheral areas and the Licchavi rulers grants of revenue rights to intermediaries, particularly religious
beneficiaries, was similarly part of a regional trend already alluded to. The Nepalese data is thus
relevant to the debate on whether the latter process can usefully be termed feudalisation. As has already
been pointed out, this controversy is not solely a dispute over terminology but also involves the real
question, of whether such grants reflected a weakening of the central government in the face of peasant
resistance, or rather an extension of state authority (albeit indirectly exercised) into areas from which it
had earlier been absent. Prayag Raj Sharmas analysis of the Licchavi land system suggests that the
officials who are so often forbidden from entering particular village were parts of

63
the revenue collection machinery set up by the previous Kirata rulers. 82 On this view, the Licchavis
replaced that system with one based on limited direct taxation by royal agents, recognition of a degree
of local self-government and delegation of transfer of revenue rights to grantees. If we suppose that the
mechanism the new regime sought to replace had functioned only weakly, we can perhaps see the new
system as an extension, not a weakening of state authority, even if presented to the public as a policy of
leniency. Very probably grants in Nepal to, for example, the Pashupatas, who were clearly linked with
the emergence of Pashupatinath as the Valleys central shrine, reinforced Licchavi authority in a similar
way to that in which the Kanphata Yogis aided the establishment of Thakuri principalities in the later
medieval period.83
A number of writers have pointed out that the Nepalese Licchavis claim to descent from the Licchavis
of Vaisali, like the later claims of Shahs and Ranas to Rajput descent, might well have been spurious. 84
81

A.L.Basham, The Wonder that was India. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1967, p.188-9. See also, for a discussion of sati in
Nepal generally, Axel Michaels, `Widow burning in Nepal, in Grard Toffin (ed.), Nepal Past and Present, New Delhi, Sterling,
1993. The inscription does not, however, explicitly mention immolation and the word sati is used only in the context of the life of
widoly virtue to which the queen now devoted herself. It is thus possible that Rajyavati was contemplating suicide by some other
means.
82
Prayag Raj Sharma,,`The Land System of the Licchavis of Nepal. Kailash, vol.10, nos. 1-2 (1983), p.11-63.
83
See for the latter process G.Unbeschied, Kanphata, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1980.
84
See Mahesh Chandra Regmi, `Some Questions on Nepals History, Contributions to Nepalese History 3 (2), 1976, p.1-5, K.P.
Malla, `Epigraphy and Society; op.cit.and Theodore Riccardi, `Change and Continuity in the Kathmandu Valley: the

Even greater scepticism is justified in the case of H.N.Jhas suggestion that the Gupta family who
rivalled the Licchavis for power in the 6th and 7th centuries were identical with the imperial Indian
Guptas.85 There is no doubt, however, of the cultural links between the Nepalese state and the Vaisali
region: recent excavations have found similarities between ceramic remains at Dumakhal in the Valley
and at Basarh, the ancient Vaisali.86 The interesting question is how complete was the break between
the older, Tibeto-Burman Nepal and the Sanskritic culture of the the Licchavi period. Prayag Raj
Sharma believes that the inscriptions hint at the settlement in existing villages of substantial numbers of
immigrants from the plains and that the panchali village committees which figure prominently in the
records were composed solely of those immigrants. In contrast, Malla assumes that they were
indigenous institutions allowed to continue under the new regime. In any case it should be remembered
that the transition from autonomous face-to-face communities to the chiefdom stage must already have
been made before the commencement of Licchavi rule. A slow Sanskritisation of an emerging
indigenous elite, together with a limited amount of immigration, particularly of Brahmans and ascetics,
is quite possible. This would accord well with Erdosys model for the `Aryanisation of India itself:
`Aryas do not constitute a racial group; rather, belonging to diverse

64

ethnic groups, they are distinguished by a set of ideas and it is these - instead of the people holding them which spread rapidly over the sub-continent.87

Another controversy mentioned earlier concerns the extent of the territory included in the Licchavi
domain. A majority of Nepalese scholars probably still believe that it was approximately the same as
the area of modern Nepal. The nationalist consensus is expressed in his 1989 survey by Ramniwas
Pandey, who declares that the country `since the time of the Mauryas [fourth century to second century
B.C.] thrived as an independent state to the south of the Alpine Himalayan region between the
Mechi and the Mahakali rivers.88 There is a stock list of arguments in favour of this view and they
appear in most textbooks written for Nepalese students. They include the figure of 4,000 li (about 1,330
miles) mentioned in the memoirs of the 7th.century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsan-tsangs memoirs as
the total length of the countrys borders; the fact that, according to the Tang dynasty history,
Archaeological Perspective, op.cit Malla (p.80) argues specifically that Samudra Gupta, who boasted of his own Licchavi
descent) would have been very unlikely to mention Nepal as a pratyanta if he accepted its rulers as Licchavis.
85
Hit Narayan Jha, The Licchavis, op.cit. p.110-111.
86
Riccardi, op.cit., p.21-2.
87
George Erdosy, `The Prelude to Urbanisation: Ethnicity and the Rise of Late Vedic Chiefdoms, in F.R.Allchin (ed), The
Archaeology of Early Historic south Asia: the Emergence of Cities and States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995,
p.90.
88
R.N.Pande, `Ancient Nepal, in K.P.Malla (ed.), Nepal: Perspectives on Continuity and Change, Kathmandu: CNAS, 1989.

Narendradeva was able to field a force of 7000 cavalry in support of the 647 punitive Chinese
expedition into northern India; and also Nepals being the only state mentioned between Kartipura
(Kumaon) and Kamarupa (Assam) in Samudra Guptas 4th. century Allahabad inscription. This
evidence certainly establishes that the Kathmandu Valley was the only major power centre in the region
which is now Nepal, but it does not, of course, prove that the rulers of the Valley were in day-to-day
control of the whole area. It first has to be remembered that precise territorial boundaries were not a
feature of the pre-modern state and that a kings authority gradually faded away as one moved further
from his capital rather than vanishing abruptly at a fixed line on the map.89 Secondly, control in any
particular area will also have fluctuated over time. If an analogy with modern structures is needed, the
best analogy is with a modern states sphere of influence, rather than with the states own borders. The
USAs sphere, for example, certainly includes Central America and the Balkans, but its ability to
intervene in Panama or force a Serbian withdrawal from Kosovo does not make either area part of the
United States.
At the height of their power, the Licchavi rulers would similarly have been able to intervene throughout
most of present-day Nepal. We cannot be sure, however, that they maintained a regular administration
even in the much smaller area where their inscriptions have been discovered: a de facto independent
ruler could easily have thought it worth his while to make a nominal submission to Kathmandu to
strengthen his hand in struggles with rival chieftains. It is also
65
highly unsafe to argue, as does Jha from a literal interpretation of the references to elephant warfare
and an ocean-like river in the Changunarayan inscription of 465, that Manadeva conquered an
extensive area of the plains.90 The most plausible estimate of the area of effective control from
Kathmandu is probably that of Dilli Rahman Regmi, who places it between the Trisuli Gandaki in the
west and the confluence of the Sun Koshi and the Rosi in the east, with the jungles of the Siwaliks as
the southern limit..91 The Aramudi who fought against a ruler of Kashmir in the 8th. century on the Kali
Gandaki and and is called king of Nepal in Kashmirs own vamsavali,the Rajataringini, was probably a
Magar chieftain whose realm was confused by the Kashmiris with the area further east.92
There is also difficulty in determining exactly when Nepal emerged as an entity in the regional state89

This issue has been discussed by many authors. See, in particular, Ludwig Stiller, The Silent Cry, Kathmandu: Sahayogi, 1976,
p.220-21(citing Lord Curzons 1907 pronouncement on the matter) and Bernardo A. Michael, `Statemaking and space on the
margins of empire: re-thinking the Anglo-Gorkha Way of 1814-1816, Studies in Nepalese History and Society, vol.4, no.2
(1999), p.247-294.
90
Hit Narayan Jha, The Licchavis (of Vaisali), Varanasi: Chowkamba Sanskrit Studies Office, p.108. The claim by the Licchavi
ruler Jayadeva II in his 733 Pashupati inscription to overlordship of Kamarupa (Assam), Magadha (Bihar) and other parts of
India is on a par with the claims to overlordship of Nepal made by South Indian rulers a few centuries later.
91
Regmi, Inscriptions of Ancient Nepal, op.cit.Delhi: Abhinav, 1983,, vol.3, p.16-17. Regmi seems to have abandoned his earlier
belief (Ancient Nepal, op.cit. p.143) that Amsuvarman had conquered extensive territory in the plains. The most easterly
inscription site is at Dumja near the Sun Kosi-Rosi confluence and finds have also been made as far west at Gorkha. Sylvain Lvi
(Le Npal, op.cit., vol.2, p.144, suggests that the story in the vamsavali of Amsuvarmans bringing back a god from `Prayag
refers to the shrine of that name near Panauti and that the reality behind the tradition is Amsuvarmans extension of his authority
to the area east of the Valley.
92
Regmi, loc.cit. Witzel (op.cit., p.226-27) points out that the suffix di could be the Magar for river and that the ruler may have
taken a river or area name as his own.

system and what role it then played. Even though we may suspect that the name Nepala was known on
the plains from Mauryan times, there is, in fact, no firm evidence that this was so. Nepalese writers,
including even the normally sceptical K.P.Malla, consider that the early date is established by the
reference in the Arthasastra to wool blankets imported from Nepal. However, Indologists in general do
not believe that the text as we have it today is the work of Kautilya, since the terminology employed
seems post-Mauryan and there are references to China, with which Indians were probably not familiar
in Kautilyas time. The most that can safely be said is that it is pre-Guptan and that it might be an
elaboration of something Kautilya himself originally wrote. 93 A Buddhist text, the Mulsarvastivada,
which refers to merchants journeying to Nepal, was probably composed only in the 6th or 7th cent. AD.94
The earliest known mention of the

66
country in Indian literature is most likely in the lost Prakrit original of the Brihatkatha story cycle,
which was probably composed in the 2nd.cent.A.D. and contained a reference to a Nepalese king.95
There is thus a possibility that the word Nepala did not come into general use in north India until the
Licchavi dynasty established itself in the Valley, perhaps in the 1st or 2nd century A.D.
The Valleys strategic importance and its flourishing commerce, which so impressed Chinese visitors in
the 7th. century, rested on its location on a major trans-Himalayan route. With the establishment of a
united Tibetan kingdom under Srong-tsen-Gampo (reigned c.627-49), the Banepa-Kuti and RasuwaKirong routes into Tibet became important links between India and China. Traded items included musk,
yak-tails, iron and copper-utensils and presumably also craftwork. There was also a strong political
connection, seen particularly in the Tibetan assistance to Narendradeva in ousting the Guptas in around
642, as a result of which Nepal became a Tibetan dependency. Full independence was restored in 703705 when the 8th to 9th. century Manjusrimulakalpa records a successful revolt.96 While the reality of
this episode is generally accepted, there is controversy over the existence of a second period of Tibetan
93

Basham, op.cit., p.80.

Lvi, op.cit., vol.2, p.64-5. A reference to Nepal in the Atharvaparisisti, another favourite with textbook writers, is similarly
irrelevant because the work is probably a late one (Levi, vol.2, p.62).
95
Lvi Le Npal, op.cit., p.62-3. The mention in both the surviving Sanskrit versions of the otherwise unknown Yashahketu
suggests the name was used in the original. Brihatkatha.
96
Mary Slusser, Nepal Mandala, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, p.32-33
94

domination, which seems to be suggested by one interpretation of the Gopalarajavamsavali; the

ambiguity arises because the word Bhota in the vamsavali might instead refer to Banepa. Some
historians also doubt the existence of the Bhritkuti, the Nepali princess who, according to Tibetan
sources, married Srong-tsen-Gampo.97 The main argument is the silence of Chinese and Nepalese
sources on the marriage but it is also suggested that a kshatriya ruler would not have given his daughter
to a mlechha ruler. In fact, of course, if power politics had dictated a marriage, caste difficulties could
easily have been overcome. Obliging genealogists might have `discovered a suitable ancestry for
Srong-tsen-Gampo, and there is indeed one tradition that he was of

67
Licchavi descent.98 In any case Srong-tsen-Gampo was not a man to take no for an answer, as his
threat of force to obtain the hand of a Chinese princess amply demonstrated.99
Whatever the exact details of Nepals status vis--vis Tibet, it is important not to see it within the
conceptual framework of inter-state relations prevalent in Europe since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648
and extended later to most of the world. The Westphalian model is of sovereign states totally free to
determine their own internal arrangements and interacting with each other as formal equals, despite
disparities of power and size. The theory does not fully match the realities of modern European practice
and it fits even less well those of the pre-modern world with its `fuzzy boundaries already discussed.
On the older view, relations between rulers were conceived of as hierarchical but formal subordination
might still in practice leave the lesser ruler with virtual independence. This certainly applied to Nepals
status as a pratyanta kingdom, proclaimed in Samudra Guptas Allahabad Inscription. This was a
nominal dependency, which Sylavain Lvi plausibly compares with that of the later Malla rulers on the
Moghul Empire or of the Shah dynasty on China during the 19th century.
To end where this essay started, what of the condition of the ordinary cultivators under Licchavi
97

See D.R.Regmi, Ancient Nepal, op.cit., p.155-57; K.K.Adhikari, A Brief Survey of Nepalese Historiography, Kathmandu:
`Buku, p.47-9.Both writers somewhat contradictorily denounce the whole story but also seems to accept it might possibly be
true if the princess is regarded as a sister or daughter of Narendradeva, not the daughter of Amsuvarman as supposed by Lvi and
others. Slusser (opcit.) also argues making her Narendradevas daughter would be easier chronologically.
98
Upendra Thakur, History of Mithila Darbhanga, 1956, p.112, cited in Jha, op.cit., p.5,
99
For Tibet as a major military power in the 7th and 8th centuries see now Christopher Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central
Asia, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987; and Pan Yihong, Son of Heaven and Heavenly Qaghan: Sui-Tang China and
its Neighbours. Bellingham: Western Washington University.

rule? The analyses of Licchavi society by Sharma and Malla referred to earlier take different lines.
Sharma, following a hint in the Pashupati Purana, sees the dynasty establishing itself by offering
milder rule than that of the Kirata rulers and he suggests that ` tenancies prevalent in Nepal in those
days of a pre-capitalistic and pre-colonial economy, probably operated more leniently . Than forms
of tenancy practised in recent centuries within Nepal itself or in South Asia as a whole.100 In contrast,
Malla sees the system as harshly exploitative, the expressions in the inscriptions of concern for popular
welfare as `mystification. As the society was one which had only recently seen the introduction of
money and the rise of a merchant class, he assumes that it was marked by the `primitive cruidity (sic)
and

68
violence that Engels saw as typical of this state in the development of civilisation. 101 The authors
interpretations perhaps reflect the different stances that Sharma, a hill Brahman, and Malla, a Newar
take towards the incorporation of Nepals Tibeto-Burman speaking janajatis within the framework of
an Indic, caste society, though Malla is very much aware, that the Lichavis themselves were not
necessarily immigrants. Sharmas more positive evaluation of the Licchavi regime is perhaps the
mainstream one in Nepal today. A recent essay on the impact of globalisation on food supply for the
Kathmandu Valley contrasted a relatively benign Licchavi agrarian order with that of Rana times, and,
by implication, with that obtaining under the Congress governments liberalisation policy.102
It is hard to say whether Sharma or Malla is nearer the truth as the inscriptional evidence admits
either reading and there are also many complicating factors. In ancient and medieval India generally,
the peasantry may well have been kept at or near subsistence level,103 and the fact that land could
almost certainly be bought and sold in the Valley in Licchavi times means that reduction of peasants to
landlessness was a possibility. While these considerations favour Mallas view, it is also true that in the
hills as a whole there was land for the taking by whoever chose to clear it. Any ruler or revenue grantee

100

P.R.Sharma, `Land system op.cit., p.56.

K.P.Malla, `Epigraphy and society, op.cit., p.84.
Jagannath Adhikari & Hans-Georg Bohle, `Urbanization, Government Policies and Growing Food Insecurity in the
Kathmandu Metropolis, Studies in Nepalese History and Society, vol.4, no.1 (1999), p.204-5.
103
Harbans Mukhia, `Was there feudalism in Indian society?, op.cit., p.127-28.
101
102

who squeezed them too hard ran the risk of seeing them `vote with their feet by moving to a new area.
In fact, we simply do not at present have enough evidence to answer the question of how harsh
Licchavi rule was in comparison either with contemporary Indian states or with later practice. I end
then with a confession of ignorance, which is, regrettably, often the only honest course for the historian
of the periods with which this essay has been dealing.

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