Nepali culture: a country with no majority to speak for it

What the constitution says about language

The constitution adopted in 2015 names two categories rather than one. Nepali, written in the Devanagari script, is the official language of Nepal. Every other mother tongue spoken in the country is a language of the nation. The text then obliged the government, within a year of the constitution taking effect, to set up a Language Commission with members drawn from the provinces, to recommend the criteria by which a language becomes official, the measures needed to protect and develop the others, and how far each mother tongue could be carried into a classroom.

The census explains why the drafters bothered. At the 2021 count Nepali was the first language of 44.9% of the population, followed by Maithili at 11%, Bhojpuri at 6.2, Tharu at 5.9, Tamang at 4.9, Bajjika at 3.9, and Awadhi, Nepal Bhasa and Magar at around 3 each. The 2011 census recorded 123 mother tongues across 125 ethnic groups. Three linguistic stocks meet here, Indo-Aryan, Sino-Tibetan and a set of indigenous isolates, alongside at least four indigenous sign languages.

They are not scattered at random. Maithili, Awadhi and Bhojpuri belong to the southern Terai. Urdu is common among Nepali Muslims. Varieties of Tibetan are spoken in and beyond the higher Himalaya, where literary Tibetan is understood by anyone with a religious education. Most hill and Terai dialects have never been written down, and the work of fitting them to Devanagari or the Roman alphabet is still going on.

Literature in the official language is younger than the country's temples by a long way. Before unification, writing here meant Sanskrit, produced by Brahmin priests often educated at Varanasi: scripture, and legends of kings, gods and demons. The oldest surviving text in Nepali dates to the thirteenth century, and apart from inscriptions nothing in the language survives from before the seventeenth. Newar literature runs back about five hundred years. The modern tradition starts with Bhanubhakta Acharya, who lived from 1814 to 1868 and put the Ramayana into the language ordinary people spoke; Motiram Bhatta printed his work at the end of the nineteenth century and pushed it into general circulation. After 1951 the presses opened to Nepal's other languages, and the Nepal Academy was founded in 1957 to look after the arts.

Who made the buildings the world calls Nepali

The oldest architecture in the country is Buddhist: stupas around Kapilvastu in the south-west, and those Ashoka raised in the Kathmandu Valley around 250 BC. The form the word Nepali now calls to mind was worked out later, and in one place. Newar artisans of the Kathmandu Valley developed the multi-roofed pagoda temple no later than the Lichchhavi period, and a Tang dynasty Chinese travel book drawing on records from about 650 AD already describes one: a seven-storeyed tower at the centre of a palace, roofed in copper tiles, its balustrades and beams set with precious stones, four golden makaras at the corners of the base spouting water through copper pipes fed from the top.

The construction is consistent wherever it appears. The temple is timber, and every visible piece of it is carved, with geometric pattern or with gods, goddesses and beasts. The roofs are tiled in clay and sometimes plated in gold, each smaller than the one below, until the topmost carries a golden finial. The base is a stack of rectangular stone terraces and the entrance is guarded by stone figures. The same workshops cast the bronze and copper, painted the paubha scrolls that Tibetan Buddhism calls thangka, and cut the ankhijhyal, the lattice window that lets a person inside see out without being seen, which still turns up in houses built today.

Changu Narayan, built around the fourth century AD, holds the finest of the woodwork, and the Durbar Squares of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur are where two millennia of it accumulated. The capital is named after a single building: Kasthamandapa, a wooden public shelter said to have been cut from the timber of one tree, raised under Gunakama Deva, who ruled from 949 to 994.

The form travelled outward. In the fourteenth century Araniko was sent to China at the request of Abhaya Malla to show what the valley's artisans could do, and he introduced the pagoda there, from where it spread further. Chinese chronicles of the period describe the Nepali king's palace as an immense structure of many roofs, in the tone of writers meeting something they had no word for. The style became one of the defining features of Chinese architecture. Nepal Bhasa, the language of the people who worked all this out, was the mother tongue of about 3% of Nepalis at the 2021 census.

What the earthquake took and what left the country

UNESCO listed the Kathmandu Valley in 1979, and listed it as one site assembled from seven separate clusters: Swayambhu, the three Durbar Squares, and the Hindu temples of Pashupatinath and Changu Narayan. Lumbini, where the Buddha was born, was listed separately in 1997.

The earthquake of April 2015 struck that listing head on. More than 30 monuments in the valley collapsed and about 120 were partially damaged. Dharahara, the nine-storey tower of 1832 standing 61.88 metres, came down and killed at least 180 people. Kasthamandap was demolished. In Patan the Char Narayan Mandir and the Taleju temple went, and in Bhaktapur the seventeenth-century Vatsala Durga. Repair across the country was costed at 160 million United States dollars for roughly a thousand monasteries, temples, shrines and historic houses. Rebuilding was possible at all because architectural drawings existed, and drones were flown over the sites to record the damage in three dimensions.

The other loss is slower and has no single date. Objects have been leaving Nepali shrines for decades, and volunteers working for the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign have been tracing them. In 2022 the London branch of the Barakat Gallery gave up a sixteenth-century carved wooden torana, a ceremonial gateway, and a seventeenth-century stone statue of a kneeling devotee, both taken from sacred sites near Kathmandu. In 2023 objects suspected of having been looted were identified at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Rubin Museum, and in sales at Christie's and Bonhams. A torana is the frame above a doorway that worshippers walk through, which is the difference between this material and most museum holdings. It was made to be used rather than looked at.

What Nepalis believe and how it is counted

At the 2011 census 81.3% of the population returned as Hindu and 9% as Buddhist. Measured as a share of population Nepal is more Hindu than India, though India holds far more Hindus in absolute numbers.

Nepal was a Hindu kingdom until the monarchy ended, and the constitution now calls the state secular while defining the word in a particular way: religious and cultural freedom, together with the protection of religion and culture handed down from time immemorial. The same document gives nobody the right to convert another person, and a stricter anti-conversion law followed in 2017. The constitution spends a great deal of its length on balances of this kind.

Hindu and Buddhist practice here run back more than two thousand years and have never been cleanly separable. Pashupatinath in Kathmandu is among the older Shiva temples anywhere. The philosophical inheritance passes through Kashmir Shaivism, the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, the work of the Karmacharyas of Bhaktapur, and a deep tantric tradition, and it is the tantric strand that keeps animal sacrifice inside the practice. Five kinds of animal are acceptable and all of them must be male: water buffalo, goat, sheep, chicken and duck. Cows are sacred and are never sacrificed. The Gadhimai festival, held every five years at the Gadhimai Temple, involves slaughter on a scale that critics have condemned as barbaric, unsanitary and wasteful, while devotees hold that the practice carries deep significance. The argument has run for years without either side moving.

Why the festival calendar runs the year

Dashain falls between late September and mid-October, immediately after the monsoon ends, and is understood as a victory over demons. Newars keep the same days under the name Mohani. Tihar, also called Dipawali, follows it. Around those two sit Holi, Teej, Chhath, Maghi, Sakela, Saraswati Puja, Gai Jatra, Nag Panchami, Janmashtami and Maha Shivaratri, with Buddha Purnima for the birth of the Buddha and Mani Rimdu among the Sherpas of the Everest region. Individual festivals run from one day to several, and public holidays for them are declared regionally rather than nationally, which is what a state does when its festivals are not shared by everyone under it.

Two of the valley's own observances can be dated. The Indra Jatra procession goes back to the reign of Gunakama Deva, from 949 to 994. The worship of the Kumari, a prepubescent girl held to embody the divine female energy, was introduced under Laxmikama Deva, who ruled from 1024 to 1040, which makes it a thousand-year-old institution still running inside a republic.

The counting of the year is plural as well. The official calendar is Bikram Sambat, whose new year falls in mid-April: the republic was declared on 15 Jestha 2065, which is 28 May 2008 by the Gregorian reckoning. The Newar era, Nepal Sambat, is lunar and starts its year in November. A government form, a Newar festival and an international flight booking can carry three different dates for the same day.

What altitude does to a Nepali meal

What grows depends on the monsoon and on height, so the staple changes as the land rises. Rice and wheat come from the Terai and the irrigated valleys. Maize, millet, barley and buckwheat come from the drier hills. High above them, barley is roasted into tsampa, the staple of the Himalaya proper. The three belts arrange the menu as firmly as they arrange the weather.

The shape of the meal holds across all three. A plainly cooked cereal sits at the centre of a thali and small bowls of savoury things go around it: lentils and pulses, vegetables spiced with ginger and garlic and, more selectively, with coriander, cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamom and jimbu. Dal bhat, built on steamed rice, is the standard form. Chapati stands in for rice in parts of the Terai, and dhindo, maize, millet or buckwheat flour boiled and stirred until it is nearly solid, stands in for it through the hills. Gundruk, leafy greens fermented and then sun-dried, is eaten as a delicacy and relied on as the winter vegetable.

Nepali cooking is distinguishable from the food on either side of the border. The curries are tomato-based and leaner than the cream-based Indian versions, and Nepali momo are spiced far more heavily than dumplings to the north. Newar cuisine is the most elaborate in the country, a single meal running past a dozen dishes: kwanti, chhwela, chatamari, bara, kachila and samaybaji among them, with juju dhau, the sweet yoghurt of Bhaktapur. Thakali cooking blends Tibetan and Indian technique in both directions. In the Terai, sidhara and biriya, both built on taro leaves, are made in quantity to stock against the monsoon floods.

Vegetarianism has a long footing through the doctrine of ahimsa in Upanishadic Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, though the vegetarian share of the population is lower than in India because Shaktism, with its sacrifices, is widespread. Almost every janajati community brews or distils something: raksi is distilled, jaand is rice beer, tongba is millet beer, chyang is the Himalayan version. Potatoes, tomatoes, maize, peanuts and above all chilli peppers arrived with the Columbian exchange and became staples of a cuisine that now reads as unthinkable without them. At the Sagan ceremony five foods are presented to a person to bring good fortune: boiled egg, smoked fish, meat, lentil cake and rice wine.

What people wear and what it signals

For most of the country's history the clothing was draped rather than cut. Women wore a length of cloth about six yards long, knotted at the waist, wrapped around the lower body and taken over the shoulder, which in the Terai is also drawn over the head and sometimes across the face. Worn with the cholo blouse it becomes the formal cholo-sari; in its working form it is the shorter fariya, or gunyu. Men wore the dhoti over a langauti. Both sexes wound a patuka tightly at the waist, and a man wearing one tucks his khukuri into it.

Stitching arrived from outside. Cut and sewn clothing in the Central Asian manner spread with the Kushans from about 48 AD, and the simplest of those garments, the bhoto vest, is still what small children wear until a rite of passage such as the gunyu-choli ceremony hands them adult dress. The daura is a closed-neck double-breasted shirt with five pleats and eight ties. Suruwal trousers, wide above the knee and tight at the ankle, displaced the dhoti.

Daura-suruwal and gunyu-cholo were the national dress until 2011, when the designation was dropped to stop the state favouring one group over the others. That decision belongs beside the language clause of the constitution. In both cases the state gave up nominating one community's practice as the country's own.

Jewellery still marks community precisely. Hindu women wear the mangalsutra and tilahari with the pote. Limbu women wear the samyafung, a large gold flower on the head, and nessey, flattened gold earrings. Magar women wear sirphuli, sirbandhi and chandra. A Tharu woman's silver can weigh as much as six kilograms, including the mangiya on the head and the tikuli on the forehead. In the cities over the past fifty years the sari has retreated into formal wear, younger women wear jeans instead of kurta suruwal, and the dhoti has narrowed to the working dress of shamans and Hindu priests.

Why family and caste still shape a life

Social position is organised through more than a hundred endogamous hereditary groups, the jatis, and the restrictions attached to them are recognisable across South Asia. Untouchability was made illegal in 1963, and further anti-discrimination law and welfare programmes followed, including the constitution's proportional lists and its standing commissions for named communities.

The household is the other structure. Multi-generational patriarchal joint families have been the norm, with nuclear households becoming ordinary in the cities. An overwhelming majority of marriages are arranged by parents or family elders, with or without the consent of the people marrying. Marriage is treated as permanent, and fewer than one marriage in a thousand ends in divorce. Child marriage remains common in rural districts, and many women are married before eighteen.

The darker practice attached to the same order has proved durable. Witch-hunts still take place in the twenty-first century, and the people accused are typically vulnerable, often of lower caste. Politicians, army officers, police officers and other community members have been implicated in cases. Victims have been burned alive, and many of those who survive an accusation die later of injuries from beating and torture. Setting this beside the temples and the festivals is the honest way to describe the culture, because it comes out of the same social arrangement.

What Nepalis do when the work stops

Volleyball has been the national sport since 2017, when the cabinet accepted a proposal from the Ministry of Youth and Sports; the Nepal Volleyball Association had argued for it on the ground that the game is played in every district of the country. It replaced dandi biyo, which along with kabaddi had been an unofficial national game and is still played in rural areas. Kabaddi has only recently been professionalised, its first franchise competition, the Nepal Kabaddi League, launching in January 2025. Bagh-chal, a board game thought to have originated in Nepal, needs a chalk-drawn grid and a handful of pebbles, which is why it never went away.

The professional games are football and cricket, and their records diverge. Nepal has never won the SAFF championship though it has done well at the South Asian Games. In cricket it holds one-day international status. The country has never won an Olympic medal. It has one international stadium, Dasarath Stadium, where both national football teams play at home, and cricket is played at the Tribhuvan University International Cricket Ground. The police, the armed police force and the army produce most national players, and ambitious athletes join them for the facilities, because underfunding, corruption, nepotism and political interference leave very few people able to make a living from sport.

Nepal was never a European colony, so no outside power imposed a language, a script or a set of holidays on it, and no community inside the country has ever been large enough to impose one either. What is left has to be listed rather than summarised: three language families, five acceptable sacrificial animals, three staple grains stacked by altitude, two calendars running at once. The temples of one valley are what the world files under the word Nepali, and the people who built them speak a language that about three Nepalis in a hundred use at home.