How did Nepal become a ‘Hindu Rashtra’?

Nepal called itself ‘world’s only Hindu kingdom’ for much of the previous century. However, for most of history, the country was religiously, politically, and ethnically fragmented.

Representational image | A sadhu holding a Rudraksh, a string of beads considered auspicious among Hindus | Photo: Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint

Over the last weeks, yet another neighbour in the Indian subcontinent has seen political upheaval prompted by inequality, corruption, and authoritarian crackdown. While talks between Nepal’s ‘Gen Z’ protesters and the Army still  continue, a number of Indian news outlets have claimed that a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ was one of the demands.

Since the establishment of a secular constitution in 2015, occasional protests have called for a restoration of Nepal’s Hindu monarchy. For much of the previous century, Nepal called itself “the world’s only Hindu kingdom”, with Hindu rituals at the centre of state ceremonies, and conversions away from Hinduism forbidden by law.

However, for most of history, the mountainous country was religiously, politically, and ethnically fragmented. The centrality of Hinduism in the Nepali state only began in the late 1700s. It completely changed how the region’s communities interacted with each other — and not in the way we might expect.

A Hindu-Buddhist milieu

Speaking an array of Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan languages, Nepal’s mountainous principalities historically forged their own relationships with Hindu and Buddhist ideas in circulation. While receptive to Indian ideas, Nepal’s religions often took their own paths.

Scholars have identified two major themes in Nepal’s religious history. The first is the steady integration of Hindu priests into royal rituals, studied by scholar Axel Michaels in his definitive Nepal: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present. In the 14th and 15th centuries, these priests, especially in the Kathmandu Valley, were frequently Maithili Brahmins from present-day Bihar. Thereafter, they were mostly esoteric yogis belonging to various Nath traditions, who spread into the furthest corners of the mountainous region. Letters, deeds, and other documents, preserved in the cold Himalayan air, demonstrate how these yogis established monasteries, conducted trade, and sometimes acted as kingmakers. In the western parts of Nepal, the Gorakhnath yogis, originating in present-day UP, were especially prominent. 

The second theme is the survival of tantric Buddhism. Though not a ‘state’ religion, Buddhism in Nepal received patronage well after it disappeared in India. It survived in part by borrowing from Hinduism. The major watershed in this process came in the 13th century, when Gangetic Buddhism was destroyed by simultaneous political upheavals and Turkic attacks. According to Nepali and Tibetan chronicles, hundreds of Indian monks fled to monasteries in the Kathmandu Valley. There, around the time that Maithili Brahmins consolidated their position in local courts, descendants of esoteric Buddhist monks developed “Newar Buddhism”.

Newar Buddhists follow many Brahminical practices — using religious scriptures written solely in Sanskrit, following caste endogamy, and participating in chariot festivals and the propitiation of planetary deities. At the same time, they worship tantric Buddhist deities who have long since disappeared in India. According to Prof Michaels, Newar Buddhists may have adopted Brahminical notions as a means to retain their prestige, continuing to provide goods and advisors to elite families well into the 19th century.

But it wasn’t just the courtly strands of Buddhism that came to be “Hinduised” in Nepal, but also more local and popular variants. In his paper The Emergence of Conversion in a Hindu-Buddhist Polytropy, anthropologist David Gellner writes of the village deity Bungadyah. From at least the 10th century CE, Bungadyah has been considered a form of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. In the 1600s, the Shaivite and Shakta rulers of Lalitpur, a rival to Kathmandu, declared Bungadyah/Avalokiteshvara the protector of the city. He was identified with the Shaivite saint Matsyendranath. A mural still visible in the Lalitpur palace depicts Hindu gods emanating from Avalokiteshvara’s body, and to this day, Avalokiteshvara’s annual procession is the most important festival in Lalitpur’s ritual calendar. 

Unification and state formation

About a century after these developments in Lalitpur, a new power began to make waves in Nepal. In the mountainous western region, the Gorkha kingdom, under their ruler Prithvinarayan Shah, embarked on an unprecedented programme of military conquest. The Gorkha kings were closely aligned with yogis of the Gorakhnath tradition, and their ties would only grow over time.

In the 1760s, the Gorkha king brutally subjugated the Kathmandu Valley, which had over thrice the population of his home country. Nepali textbooks, like Indian textbooks, tend to valorise “unification”, though local memory records Prithvinarayan’s atrocities, including the severing of over 800 noses at Kirtipur, the burning of houses at Bhaktapur, the seizing of women, and the blockading of water, cloth, and salt supplies. Nath yogis served as the king’s advisors during and after the conquest.

Simultaneously, Prof Michaels notes that this Gorkha unification of Nepal also involved the suppression of other cultures, languages, and ethnic groups, particularly the Tibeto-Burman Newars, in favour of the Indo-Aryan Nepali language and the Khasa-Arya aristocracy. Hinduisation was once a bottom-up process, encouraged but not mandated; Buddhism was not considered any less valid or Nepali than Hinduism. All this changed under the Shah and subsequent Rana dynasties, who steadily moved patronage away from Buddhists in favour of Hindu practices, justifying this as necessary for nation-building. Indeed, the Ranas’ policies were reminiscent of some of the demands of India’s Hindu Right, and demonstrate how state enforcement of religious identity can impact a diverse society. 

Cow slaughter was banned; subjects were mandated to participate in the annual Dasai (Vijaya Dashami) festival. Gellner (The Emergence of Conversion) points out that many elite groups either converted to Hinduism outright or stopped employing Buddhists. He writes: “There was in effect a legally sanctioned hierarchy of religions, with Hinduism at the top, Buddhism as practiced by Newars (i.e., including caste purity practices, avoidance of pork and beef, etc.) ranking in the middle, and Islam and Tibetan Buddhism being very low-ranking indeed, mainly because of their consumption of beef and their indifference to Hindu interpretations of purity.” Conversion away from Hinduism was legally forbidden; in the 1920s, the Hindu aristocrat Prem Bahadur Khyaju caused a national scandal by converting to Tibetan Buddhism, eventually being expelled from the country. Nepal’s Hindu state did not even allow the religion to evolve, which historically has been one of Hinduism’s most consistent features. The Rana regime publicly executed an Arya Samaji reformer in 1941.

Buddhism in Nepal was legally considered only a branch of Hinduism, effectively enabling Brahmins to speak for Buddhists and causing major political tension. In the 1990s, Buddhist revivalists began to identify themselves as ‘indigenous peoples’ and called for more representation, condemning the Hindu aristocracy and accusing Communist leaders of being “Brahmins first and Communists second”. It was only in 2015 that Nepal was formally declared a secular state, but issues remained. The 2021 census claimed that around 82 per cent of Nepalis were Hindus, and only 8 per cent were Buddhists; these numbers are disputed. 

Kathmandu-based political scientist Daniel Loebell told me that the demand for a restored Hindu monarchy in Nepal is a much more contested topic than it may seem. Older generations, particularly of Gorkha descent, see the Hindu monarchy as more stable than recent multi-party democracy. But others, both Hindu and Buddhist of various ethnic and linguistic groups, recall the monarchy as a time of “even more rampant corruption than exists today.” Indian media and politicians have, in recent years, been quite sanguine about the ostensible benefits of a Hindu state. But both Nepal and Sri Lanka offer sobering reminders that in the Indian subcontinent, the forced imposition of a religion, whether ‘dharmic’ or not, inevitably creates more problems than it solves.

Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of ‘Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire’ and the award-winning ‘Lords of the Deccan’. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha.

(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)