Nepal's history: never colonised yet rarely governed by its own people

What was here before there was a Nepal

The territory now inside Nepal's borders was, before 1768, a set of independent kingdoms rather than one state.

The Kathmandu Valley alone contained three: Kantipur, Lalitpur and Bhadgaon. The valley was known as Nepal Mandala and was the seat of the prosperous Newar confederacy. Beyond it lay the Baise Rajya, the twenty-two kingdoms, and the Chaubisi Rajya, the twenty-four. The country's cultural geography still follows those divisions: the north is intertwined with Tibetan culture, the valley with Indo-Aryan.

So the founding act is a conquest of neighbours rather than a liberation from an outsider, and that is unusual enough to shape everything else.

How the kingdom was made

Prithvi Narayan Shah, king of Gorkha, began the campaign in 1768, and the Shah dynasty he founded absorbed the Malla kingdoms into a state that eventually stretched from the Sutlej in the west to Sikkim in the east.

The campaign started with Nuwakot, the eastern boundary of the Gorkha kingdom, which sat on the trade route between Tibet and Kathmandu and formed the western entrance to the valley. The first attack failed. So did the first assault on Kirtipur in 1757, and so did the second in 1764, in which the king's brother lost an eye to an arrow while scaling the walls.

Those failures matter to the character of the state that resulted. This was not a swift conquest by an overwhelming power but a decades-long campaign by a small hill kingdom against neighbours who were frequently better prepared, and it produced a military aristocracy whose claim to rule was that it had done the conquering. That claim is hereditary by construction, and it is the same claim the Ranas would make eighty years later against the dynasty that first made it.

Expansion continued until it met two empires. A dispute with Tibet over mountain passes brought the Qing emperor into a war that pushed Nepal back to its northern borders. Rivalry with the East India Company over the states along the southern frontier produced the Anglo-Nepali War of 1815 to 1816. The British initially underestimated the Nepali forces and were soundly defeated before committing more.

Nepal was therefore never colonised, and the reason is not isolation. The reason is that it fought two neighbouring empires to a standstill and negotiated a boundary with the stronger of them.

What the Gorkha campaign was fought over

The targets were chosen for trade rather than for territory, and the sequence shows it.

Nuwakot came first because it sat on the route between Tibet and Kathmandu and formed the western entrance to the valley. The plan was then to take every kingdom and principality surrounding the Kathmandu Valley before attempting the valley itself, which is a blockade strategy rather than a conquest strategy: a valley that cannot trade is a valley that will eventually open.

The campaign drew in outside powers almost immediately. In January 1763 forces sent by the Nawab of Bengal reached Makwanpur and attacked one of three defensive positions the Gorkhalis had built around the fort there. Neighbouring kingdoms took their own chances: Tanahun invaded Gorkha while its king was occupied at Nuwakot, crossing the Chepe river and capturing Sirhanchowk before reinforcements arrived.

None of that is the story of an inevitable unification. It is a decades-long contest among a crowded field of small states, won by the one that kept going after losing.

Why a prime minister mattered more than a king

The most consequential event in Nepalese history is a palace massacre.

In 1846 a plot was uncovered in which the reigning queen had planned to overthrow Bir Narsingh Kunwar, a fast-rising military leader. The Kot massacre followed: armed clashes between military personnel and administrators loyal to the queen ended with the execution of several hundred princes and chieftains across the country.

Kunwar emerged from it and founded the Rana dynasty under the name Jung Bahadur Rana. The settlement he imposed inverted the state:

The Rana regime governed for 105 years, from 1846 to 1951. Two reforms are recorded from that century and both came late: sati was banned in 1919 and slavery officially abolished in 1924. The period is otherwise described as one of tyranny, economic exploitation and religious persecution.

A country that was never colonised spent the entire colonial era under a hereditary autocracy of its own, which is the fact that most complicates the usual reading of Nepalese independence.

It also explains why the pro-democracy movement of the 1940s took the shape it did. Nepalese activists had joined the Indian independence movement, learned its methods against a colonial administration, and came home to apply them to a government that was not colonial and was in some respects less accountable. The Ranas held power by inheritance and had no metropole to appeal to, no parliament elsewhere debating their conduct, and no timetable for withdrawal.

What democracy arrived and how it was taken away

By the late 1940s pro-democracy movements and political parties were criticising the Rana autocracy openly, and Nepalese activists had taken part in the Indian independence movement and returned with its methods.

With Indian support and the cooperation of King Tribhuvan, the Nepali Congress toppled the Rana regime in 1951 and established a parliamentary democracy. The king was restored to real power in the process, which is the seed of what happened next.

After a decade of struggle between the palace and the government, King Mahendra scrapped the democratic experiment in 1960 and installed a partyless panchayat system. Political parties were banned. The arrangement lasted three decades until a joint civil resistance by the United Left Front and the Nepali Congress overthrew the panchayat in 1990.

So within forty years Nepal moved from hereditary prime ministers to elected government, back to royal absolutism, and back to multi-party democracy. Each transition was won by a movement and each was reversible.

What the panchayat decades did

Thirty years is long enough for a system to become the normal state of affairs, and the partyless arrangement imposed in 1960 lasted exactly that.

Political parties were banned and politicians were removed from public life. The system was presented as a Nepalese alternative to imported party politics, governing through tiers of assemblies with the palace at the top, and it held until a joint civil resistance overthrew it in 1990.

Two things came out of those decades that matter afterwards. The first is that an entire generation of political organisation happened underground or in exile, which is where both the parties that would govern the republic and the movement that would take up arms were formed. The second is that the monarchy spent thirty years as the working executive rather than as a symbol, so when the question of abolition arrived it was a question about the actual government rather than about a ceremonial office.

How the monarchy ended

In 1996 the Maoist Party began an armed campaign to replace the royal parliamentary system with a people's republic. The civil war that followed killed more than 17,000 people.

What ended the monarchy, though, began inside the palace. King Birendra and Crown Prince Dipendra both died in a massacre in the royal palace in 2001, perpetrated by Dipendra. Birendra's brother Gyanendra inherited the throne and then assumed full executive powers, intending to defeat the insurgency himself.

He did not. A monarch assuming executive power to defeat an insurgency that existed to abolish the monarchy united almost everyone else against him, and the parties and the Maoists found common ground they had not had while the palace stayed above the fight. A peaceful democratic revolution in 2006 brought the Maoist Party into mainstream politics, and on 28 May 2008 Nepal was declared a federal republic. The country became secular at the same time, ending its status as the world's only Hindu kingdom, which was a change to the state's own definition rather than only to its form of government.

The republic then struggled to write itself down. Two constituent assembly elections and a decade of instability were required before the constitution was promulgated on 20 September 2015, creating a federal democratic republic of seven provinces.

What happened while the constitution was being written

The republic's most difficult years had an event in the middle of them that the political chronology usually omits.

On 25 April 2015 an earthquake of moment magnitude 7.8 killed nearly 9,000 people and injured nearly 22,000, and triggered an avalanche. It was the worst natural disaster in Nepal since the Nepal-Bihar earthquake of 1934.

The constitution was promulgated five months later, on 20 September 2015, after seven years and two constituent assemblies. A settlement that had resisted agreement through a decade of ordinary politics was concluded within months of a catastrophe, which is a fact about the timing rather than a claim about the cause.

What the earthquake also did was expose the country's physical position. Nepal is roughly trapezoidal, about 800 kilometres long and 200 wide, and it remains isolated from the world's major land, air and sea routes. Internal aviation carries much of the load, with 47 airports, 11 of them with paved runways. A state whose relief effort depends on eleven paved runways in mountainous terrain is a state whose geography is a permanent term in its politics.

What is not settled

The question the last two centuries kept reopening has been reopened again, and recently.

Between March and June 2025 a half-dozen pro-monarchy protests took place in Kathmandu, calling for the restoration of the kingdom with the former king Gyanendra at its head. On 19 February 2025, the public holiday commemorating the 1951 revolution, Gyanendra delivered a video address discussing frustrations with the government; he stopped short of calling for restoration, and the emphasis on unity and sacrifice was read by some as hinting at one. On 9 March 2025 thousands welcomed him on his arrival in Kathmandu, and a spokesperson for a pro-monarchy party said the turnout showed how frustrated people were with the government of the day and that they were looking for an alternative to the system then in place.

What that demonstrates is not a coming restoration. What it demonstrates is the shape of the problem this history has produced. Every Nepalese settlement since 1846 has been imposed by whoever most recently won, has been genuinely popular at the moment of its imposition, and has been reopened within a generation by people who felt the previous arrangement had served them better.

The 2015 constitution is the first of them to be written by two successive elected assemblies rather than by a victor, and whether that changes the pattern is the open question in Nepalese politics. It has held for more than a decade, through the protests of September 2025 and the election of 2026, which is longer than the parliamentary democracy of 1951 and shorter than the panchayat.