The End of Era Part II

End of Golden Age

As it often happens with a great revolution after the death if its progenitor, with Prithvi Narayan Shah gone, Nepal lost direction, the principal actors lost their character, and the newly unified but still unconsolidated state fell into an era of uncertainity and chaos.

For the next 70 years, before Jung Bahadur Kunwar finally seized power through a bloody coup, Nepal was ruled by Kings and reagents who were either insane, inept, profligate or promiscuous—or all four. The kings and reagent queens ruled for most of those 70 years.

Luckily, the unification project continued. Mainly three persons—Queen Rajendra Laxmi, regent Bahadur Shah and Bhimsen Thapa—at different times gave continuity to the unfinished business of territorial expansion. Before the project ended rather disastrously in 1816 with the Sugauli Treaty with the East India Company, Nepal was well set to become a Himalayan Empire, stretching from Kashmir to the west to Tista in the east.

All Kings of Nepal

British historian John Pemble writes, “In the space of half a century, the Gurkhas had unified, for the first time in history, a belt of territory which was the most beautiful, the most inaccessible and traditionally the most fragmented in Asia. There seems no reason to suppose that had the war with the British not intervened, this empire would not have proved viable.”

But even after ceding a huge swath of territory to the British in India following defeat in the 1814-16 war, Nepal was left with an area of 136,000 sq. km. it had grown over 500 times since the tiny Gorkha kingdom, less than 250 sq. km in size, started the expansion drive just 70 years earlier.

These defeats had more internal reasons than external. Rivalry and betrayal in the palace and among the Gorkha nobility played a key role in the launching of unplanned—and perhaps unnecessary—wars with China and British East India. “The haste with which the decision [to annex the vassal state of Garhwal and its territories further toward the west] was taken again raises the suspicion that Rana Bahadur Shah, grandson of Prithivi Narayan, may have put the nation in awar footing to preempt his domestic rivals.”

Forget the Gorkha nobility, rivalry started right within the Shah family right after the death of Prithvi Narayan Shah. Pratap Singh Shah, son of Prithibi Narayan, put his warrior uncle Bahadur Shah in jail, before forcing him into exile in Betia, India. He was later on recalled by his sister-in-law, Rajendra Laxmi, following Pratap Singh’s death. Rivalry between these two then ensued and they alternately put each other in prison. Bahadur Shah even killed Rajendra Laxmi’s minister Sarbajit Rana, accusing him of an illicit affair with the queen, and also imprisoned her in the palace. Rana Bahadur Shah, after coming of age and resting sovereignty from his uncle, finally killed Bahadur Shah.

Rana bahadur was a mad king by any measure. He married four women in his lifetime, including a Brahmin widow, Kantivati—an act socially not sanctified at the time. According to historian Babu Ram Acharya , Rana Bahadur first saw his young widow of the Mishra caste at Pashupatinath and abducted her to his palace. She was made his unwilling concubine for long before finally agreeing to marry him, but under the condition that their ‘illegitimate’ son, Girwanyudddha, would be made king. Rana bahadur already had sons by his second wife, Subarnaprabha. But he was so much in love and lust with Kantavati that he abdicated in favor of the one-and-half-year old Girwanyuddha. His insanity only grew when his beloved concubine died of smallpox ( some historians claim it was tuberculosis). He killed and tormented those who were involved in her treatment, and uprooted and disfigured idols in temples where prayers had been offered for her recovery.