The End of Era Part I

Rise and fall of Shah Dynasty

The Shah Dynasty that unified and ruled Nepal for the last 240 years, often through bloodshed, came to a peaceful end on MAY 28, 2008. If the rise of Shahs was spectacular, so was their downfall. In modern history, hardly and monarchy has been abolished either through the ballot or so peacefully.

The story of the Shah Dynasty, stretching over a period of over 450 years, is a saga of both triumph and tragedy.

After Drabya Shah, a prince of the royal house off the adjoining principalityof lamjung and progenitor of the Shah Dynasty, wrested Gorkha from local tribal chiefs in 1559, the Shahs remained confined to this impoverished, hilly principality for the next 183 years.

But that changed once and for all after an audacious prince, Prithivi Narayan Shah, ascended to the throne of Gorkha in1742 at the age of 20.

Two years later, he had already conquered Nuwakot ensuring Gorkha’s participation in the profitable trade between Kathmandu and Tibet. A shrewd king, he was strategic in his thinking, meticulous in his planning and ruthless in obtaining his military objectives. His eyes were fixed on Kathmandu valley from the very beginning, but he made a strategic detour: He decided to first cut Kathmandu’s trade lifeline with both Tibet and India, He did so by conquering the kingdom of Makawanpur and seizing the Kuti and Kerung passes to Tibet.

In March 1767, Prithvi Narayan Shah conquered kritipur in his third attempt, providing the Gorkhalistheir first strategic foothold in Kathmandu Valley. Already demoralized by tge towering presence of Prithvi Narayan in kirtipur and economically weakened by the blockade, Kathmandu Valley fell to the Gorkhalis in 1768 without offering much resistance. Patan and Bhadgaon of the Valley, fell in line within a year.

By the time he died in 1775, Nepal’s expansion eastward was complete. The whole of the eastern tarai upto jhapa and the entire eastern hills up to the tista river were now under the Gorkha Empire in the making.

Prithvi Narayan Shah died at a relatively age of 53 without completing his unification project—but more importantly,withour providing a people of vast cultural diversity within the newly acquired frontiers, a sence of belongingness to this new kingdom.

Founder of Nepal, Prithiv Narayan Shah

But he did something fundamentally different and more important than past kings of the Indian subcontinent: He refused to share his conquest with his brothers even though they had worked alongside him, and equally hard. Instead, he devised the principle of allegiance to the Dhungo, which literally means stone. But metaphorically it represented the state. “The concept of Dhungo, implied that the Gorkhali state was a permanent entity that transcended the person of the ruler. In other words, allegiance to the state superseded personal loyalty to the ruler,” writes historian Mahesh Chandra Regmi.

The Dhungo concept implanted in people the idea of the permanency of the state. This was perhaps so instrumental an idea that it kept the Nepali state from unraveling even during difficult times and helped it emerge into a modern state. In that sense, too, Prithvi Narayan was a true founder of Nepal.