A Himalayan republic may take its name from a protecting sage
Nepal, a landlocked South Asian federal republic, sits mostly in the Himalayas with an Indo-Gangetic fringe, between Chinese Tibet and India. Before unification, the name meant only the Kathmandu Valley, seat of the Newar confederacy called Nepal Mandala, while northern districts shared Tibetan culture and valley traders ran a Himalayan branch of the Silk Road.
Eight of the world’s ten tallest mountains stand here, Everest among them, above fertile southern plains and forested hills. The narrow Siliguri Corridor keeps Nepal from touching Bangladesh, and Sikkim separates it from Bhutan. Kathmandu is the capital, Nepali the official tongue. Never colonised, the kingdom served as a buffer between imperial China and British India; it joined the UN in 1955 and houses the SAARC secretariat.
Hindu legend credits a sage called Ne, or Nemi, whose protection gave the valley its name, and a Buddhist story has Manjushri draining a serpent lake to create it. A chronicle compiled around the 1380s instead honours Nepa, a cowherd who found the Pashupatinath shrine. Christian Lassen proposed a Sanskrit meaning of abode at the mountain’s foot, while others suggest Tibeto-Burman roots for cattle and keeper. The name turns up in Indian texts from the fourth century AD.
Gautama Buddha came from the Shakya polity, and Ashoka later raised a pillar at Lumbini whose inscription begins Nepal’s written history. The Licchavis ruled the valley from about 400 AD; in 641 Tibet’s Songtsen Gampo sent Narendradeva back with an army. A Khas empire rose in the west in the 11th century, and its language became Nepali. The Mallas held Kathmandu and Patan by the mid-14th century, Jayasthiti Malla reformed society, and in the late 15th century the realm split into Kathmandu, Patan, Bhaktapur and Banepa, whose rivalry produced the Durbar Squares.
Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha took the Kathmandu Valley in 1769 after battles such as Kirtipur. Rana premiers later allied with Britain. Parliamentary rule began in 1951 but monarchs suspended it in 1960 and 2005, and after a civil war the country abolished the world’s final Hindu throne in 2008 and became a secular republic.
Source: Nepal
