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 of the adjoining principality of 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, Prithvi Narayan Shah, ascended to the throne of Gorkha in 1742 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 Kirtipur in his third attempt, providing the Gorkhalis their first strategic foothold in Kathmandu Valley. Already demoralized by the towering presence of Prithvi Narayan in Kirtipur and economically weakened by his blockade, Kathmandu Valley fell to the Gorkhalis in 1768 without offering much resistance. Patan and Bhadgaon, the other two Malla kingdoms 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  theTista river were now under the Gorkha Empire in-the-making.

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

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 modern Nepal.

As it often happens with a great revolution after the death of 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 uncertainty and chaos.

For the next 70 years, before Jung Bahadur Kunwar finally seized power through a bloody coup, Nepal was ruled by kings and regents who were either insane, inept, profligate or promiscuous-- or all four. The kings were so inept or underage that regent 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 in the west to Tista in the east. 

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 square kilometers. It had grown over 500 times since the tiny Gorkha kingdom, less

than 250 square kilometers 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 a war 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 Naryan, 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 wresting 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 this 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, Girwanyuddha, 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.

By Rana Bahadur Shah’s time, and thereafter, the palace also abandoned the strict austerity measures that Prithvi Narayan Shah had so religiously observed. It became too profligate and engaged itself-- rather extravagantly-- in merrymaking. For instance, according to historian Regmi, Prithvi Narayan Shah received his pocket money in quarter-rupees and half-rupees, with only one recorded payment of a full rupee. He also frowned upon foreign dancers and musicians because, among other things, they were a drain on wealth. However, in 1798, Rana Bahadur recruited an Indian musician, Jivan Shah Kalwar, at a monthly salary of Rs 700! Compare this with the monthly salary of the commander of an army company at the time-- a meager Rs 30 -- and its gives a measure of the growing profligacy in the palace. 

The rivalry between courtiers of the Shah and Thapa, Pandey and Bashnyat clans only grew in the subsequent years. Rana Bahadur Shah himself was forced to flee the country, but came back later on and wrested power from his second wife and killed dozens of her loyal courtiers, before he was himself killed, possibly in a family feud.

It was his teenager fourth wife, Lalitatripurasundari, who provided some stability to this fledging kingdom. She ruled for the next 26 years as queen regent to the two subsequent kings. But even this stability came at a price: Her minister, Bhimsen Thapa, killed 90 people, including her late husband’s other wives and concubines, to consolidate her power.

There are serious questions as to the sanity of the next two kings - Girwanyuddha’s son, Rajendra Bikram Shah and his grandson, Surendra Bikram Shah. Rajendra Bikram was a very week and ineffectual ruler and he declared his younger wife, Rajyalaxmi, his own regent in 1843. By this time, multiple wives, sex scandals, betrayals, rivalry and killings had become the norm at the palace.

The killing of Rajyalaxmi’s confidante Gagan Thapa --some historians say he was her lover, precipitated perhaps the bloodiest massacre in Nepal’s history--the Kot Parwa, or massacre at the armory, in 1846. This gave rise to another Chherti clan at the palace: The Kunwars. About 55 court officials were killed in the Kot Parwa, mostly men from the Kunwars’ rival clans--Thapas, Pandeys and Bashnyats. Historians say the next day over 6,000 members of these clans fled Kathmandu in fear for their lives. Jung Bahadur Kunwar, who proclaimed himself Ranaji later on, rose to power after the Kot Parwa and his descendants were to rule Nepal for the next 104 years, keeping the Shahs confined to the palace as nominal kings. 

Shah re-emergence and end

After the end of World War II, the independence movements in the British colonies reached a fever pitch. Inspired by Gandhi, India finally overthrew its colonial yoke and became an independent nation. Young Nepalis, who studied and lived in India, participated in this movement and in the process became fired up for the liberation of their own country from the clutches of the Ranas. In the meantime, there were already internal efforts underway, especially those led by the Praja Parishad, to overthrow the Ranas. B P Koirala, Subarna Shumsher and other energetic youths started an armed insurgency.

King Tribhuvan, who had suffered humiliation at the hands of the Ranas for years, quietly slipped to the nearby Indian embassy and then made it to Delhi. Some historians suggest that Tribhuvan even urged Jahawar Lal Nehru,

then Indian prime minister, to annex Nepal to India, a suggestion rejected by Nehru.

Rana oligarchy was put to an end through a tripartite agreement reached in Delhi in 1951. Tribhuvan, along with the Nepali Congress leaders came back to Nepal. This was supposed to usher in a democratic era but Tribhuban defaulted on his promise and betrayed the people.

The major political agenda, after the overthrow of the Rana regime, was to write a new constitution through a Constituent Assembly elected by the newly sovereign people. But King Tribhuvan, who was reinstated in power by the people, deferred the election on one or another pretext till his death in 1955. His ambitious son, King Mahendra, never agreed to the idea of a constituent assembly election and forced the parties to settle for parliamentary elections instead. King Mahendra, in 1960, sacked the first popularly elected prime minister of Nepal, B P Koirala, and imposed a partyless Panchayat System that ushered in the absolute rule of the kings for the next 30 years.

King Mahendra, under his Panchayat project, tried to construct a Nepali nationalism based on the single edifice of one nation, one language, one religion, one culture and even one national dress. History textbooks only talked about the glory of the Shah Dynasty, hiding the dark side. Somehow that didn’t go down well with the people. “The jingoism of the Panchayat era rang false,” writes Manjushree Thapa, a novelist.

Students rose up against the Panchayat system in 1979, forcing King Birendra to announce a referendum. But it was in 1990 that the people finally forced a major concession from the monarchy through a popular Janaandolan or People’s Movement. King Birendra promptly accepted multiparty system.

June 1, 2001 was probably the turning point in the monarchy’s demise. King Birendra, an affable man, and his entire family were killed in a royal massacre. People were in a state of shock after they heard news of the massacre but when they came to terms with the reality they had lost faith in the monarchy, whose reins now fell into the hands of a new king, Gyanendra.

It’s hard to pin down Gyanendra’s personality. But above all, he proved to be an arrogant, self-righteous and ambitious monarch. In his lust for power-reminiscent of his father- he was blind as a bat to his own best interests. Before seizing power on February 1, 2005, he miscalculated three things: First, he thought the Maoists and mainstream parties would never join hands and form a collective front against him. Second, given a choice between the Maoists (read terrorists) and the monarchy, the international community would eventually chose monarchy. Third, and most importantly, he underestimated the consciousness of the Nepali people, which had grown by leaps and bounds in the post-1990 open society and during the decade-long Maoist insurgency. 

Finally, in April 2006 the people turned the tables on the monarchy. Janaandolan II vanquished the monarchy and culminated in the declaration of a republic. Maybe a republican order would have come sooner or later, but Gyanendra is solely

responsible for bringing it to this country on MAY 28, 2008, ending the 450-year-old reign of the Shah Dynasty.