The history and geography of grief in Nepal

I had been coming to Kathmandu for the better part of a decade before I saw Gai Jatra, and I saw it for the first time in the week the Bhote Koshi came down.It is difficult to describe that Saturday. The processions went out from the old quarters as they do every year: cows where a household could manage one and children painted and horned where it could not, drums, the tall paper cylinders that stand in for the animal, families walking behind photographs of people who had died since the last Bhadra. It is not a solemn occasion. There is noise, and a good deal of open mockery, and the crowd is in a decent mood. Three days earlier, a wall of water had come out of Tibet and taken a border town, several hydropower stations, dozens of bridges, and, by the count available as this is written, more than 900 lives, with thousands still missing. Nobody from the flood was in the procession; it was far too soon. But everyone walking had spent three days reading about it.Gai Jatra is a piece of 17th-century ritual. The Malla king Pratap Malla lost a son, and his queen would not stop grieving. So, the king ordered that every household in the city which had lost someone that year send a procession past the palace, and she saw at last that her grief was not exceptional. Whether or not it happened that way, the story is an exact description of what the festival does. It takes private loss, of which there is always an unbearable quantity, and makes it public, countable, and shared, on a fixed date, whether or not anyone feels ready. The processions are still organised by the old Newar guthi associations, and the anthropologist Robert Levy argued in Mesocosm, the deepest study we have of how a Newar city works, that this is a mechanism by which the city is held together and made legible to itself.In the days after, while I kept meeting people in Kathmandu, the flood was part of most of our conversations. There were conversations in the online world as well: footage from a hillside as the water came through Timure, drone passes over the wrecked customs yard at Rasuwagadhi, families at the district headquarters reading names off a list, helicopters lifting off from the riverbank and then being grounded again when the barrier lake upstream was reported to have breached.Of these, one reel caught my attention. It had one phrase, in Nepali script and Roman transliteration, in the caption: satile sarapeko desh—the country is cursed by a sati.Every Nepali knows the story behind this well-worn idiom. The most common version takes it back to Kantipur, where Bhim Malla, a noble who had negotiated a favourable trade arrangement with Tibet, was denounced on his return and executed, and his widow declared, as she went to the pyre, that whoever does good for this country will never come to a good end. Another version is from two centuries later: the widow of Bhimsen Thapa, the mukhtiyar who ran the state for 31 years and died two years after he fell from power. It is quite common to mix up the two Bhims, which suggests the phrase has been around for a while now and has moved beyond its original meaning. It turns up in newspaper articles, in captions on football posts, and it is often the first thing someone says when something bad happens, whether a bridge collapsing or a government failing.

A demonstrator shouts slogans during a protest outside the parliament in Kathmandu, Nepal, on September 8, 2025, condemning social media prohibitions and corruption by the government. | Photo Credit: Prabin Ranabhat/AFP Which is what makes the last week of August strange. The people holding those phones include many who, not a year ago, brought down a government on the explicit proposition that Nepal’s condition is nobody’s fate. The protests of September 2025 began over a social media ban and corruption, and ended with the resignation of K.P. Sharma Oli, who had served four terms as Prime Minister of Nepal since 2015, and installed an interim administration under the former chief justice Sushila Karki. An early election in March saw the Rastriya Swatantra Party take an outright majority. Balen Shah, a 36-year-old rapper and structural engineer who had been Mayor of Kathmandu, became Prime Minister on 27 March, and Oli was arrested the following day.The argument of that movement was that potholes and unbuilt hospitals have authors, that the names are known, and that fatalism offered as an explanation was, in practice, a form of protection for whoever offered it. It was, among other things, a public refusal of satile sarapeko desh. And then, not a year later, a flood—and the same generation reaching for the curse.What the state used to tell itselfFor most of two centuries, the Nepali state told a confident story about itself. The story was not built on ethnicity or language, both of which were manufactured and contested, but on a condition: Nepal had never been conquered. Prithvi Narayan Shah’s Divya Upadesh, the founding political text of the Gorkhali state, supplies both of its famous formulations: the kingdom as a yam between two boulders; and the kingdom as asal Hindustan, the true Hindustan, the last unconquered Hindu realm now that the original had fallen first to the Mughals and then to the East India Company. The historian Richard Burghart showed how that state fused land, ruler, and people into a single object, so that sovereignty was not a legal attribute of the state but the content of nationhood itself. The scholar Pratyoush Onta has traced how the accompanying story of Nepali bravery was assembled largely by Nepali intellectuals writing in Darjeeling and British India. The first of the narrative’s many ironies since the martial pride of the never-conquered nation was drafted inside the empire.The story was never entirely accurate. The Treaty of Sugauli stripped away a third of Nepal’s territory in 1816 and installed a British Resident in Kathmandu, and Rana foreign policy stayed mindful of Calcutta long after. But it did not have to be true to function; it needed a reason to exist. And it had one: a king who was not just head of state but, as the scholar Marie Lecomte-Tilouine and others have shown, a sacred figure in the land, his standing reaffirmed each year by the Kumari’s tika. Under the Panchayat system, this was compressed into a slogan about one language, one dress, one religion, and one king.When ten members of the royal family, including King Birendra, died inside Narayanhiti Palace on the night of June 1, 2001, that guarantor was gone. But the story had already been under sustained attack, and not only from the palace’s own catastrophe.Nepal’s Maoist insurgency began in 1996 and ran for a decade, killing an estimated 17,000 people. It is usually described as a war over land, caste, and exclusion, which it was. But it was also an argument about the national story. Baburam Bhattarai’s doctoral work had characterised Nepal as semi-feudal and semi-colonial, a country whose independence was formal rather than real, and the party’s programme carried that claim into the villages. In other words, the insurgency’s ideological position was precisely that the thing Nepal took pride in—never having been conquered—had never been true. By the time the king was dead, an armed movement had spent five years arguing that the sovereignty story was a fiction maintained for the benefit of the people it enriched.The war is also why there remains a generation in Nepal for whom none of this has been settled. Seventeen thousand dead, thousands of disappearances, children recruited, and whole districts displaced. Then, a 2006 peace agreement that produced a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons, neither of which has concluded a single case in nearly two decades. There is no festival to mark it, and no common phrase to describe it, because the victims were on both sides and the perpetrators rose to power. A generation that grew up during those ten years has been left with a loss the country has not agreed on how to name, which is a different thing from grief.When the republic came into being in 2008, it inherited two open problems at once: a national identity without a settled foundation, and a war that had not been fully resolved. What followed was a rebuilding effort that has drawn less attention outside Nepal than it deserves for how deliberate it has been.

Nepal’s currency used to include an image of its king, Gyanendra, until October, 2007. | Photo Credit: M. Devendra Singh/AFP The national anthem went first. “Shriman Gambhir”, adopted in 1962 and addressed to the king, was discontinued by the interim legislature on May 19, 2006. A competition drew 1,272 entries, and on August 3, 2007, the country adopted “Sayaun Thunga Phulka”, written by the poet Byakul Maila with music by Amber Gurung. It addresses no individual. It states that the country is hundreds of flowers forming one garland, that it runs from Mechi to Mahakali, and that its peoples, languages, religions, and cultures are many. A song to a sovereign was replaced by an inventory of plurality.The Royal Nepal Army became the Nepal Army; Royal Nepal Airlines became Nepal Airlines. Prithvi Jayanti, a public holiday for the birth anniversary of King Prithvi Narayan Shah since the early 1950s, was dropped in 2006. However, it was reinstated in 2023, which suggests the argument over it is far from settled. Then the currency: from October, 2007, the king’s portrait came off the banknotes and Mount Everest went on. But notes had already been printed with Gyanendra’s watermark, and rather than pulp them, the Nepal Rastra Bank printed the rhododendron, the national flower, over the watermark area. For several years, Nepalis carried money with a flower covering the king’s face. And if you held a note up to the light, he was still there underneath, visible.The symbolic changes did not, on their own, produce a settled national imagination. The republic inherited a claim of inviolability and had no way to support it at a moment when the evidence kept contradicting it: an earthquake that required international assistance, a border blockade that demonstrated the costs of being landlocked, a labour migration that now supplies close to a quarter of national income, and mud arriving from a neighbouring territory without warning.Two idioms have filled that space, each doing the same job in its own way. The first is formal, and becomes visible the moment you open an official document: small, landlocked, mountainous, least developed, disaster-prone, a country of limited resources. The second is the curse, which says the same thing in everyday language and rather better prose. Both convert what happens into what is happening, and both explain a setback before anyone has worked out who is responsible.This is where the argument departs from Dor Bahadur Bista, whose Fatalism and Development: Nepal’s Struggle for Modernization (1991) proposed that a fatalistic worldview was the cause of Nepali underdevelopment, in a book that provoked a dispute that has never quite settled. The arrow, however, seems to point the other way. Fatalism is not the cause of the condition; it is the idiom in which the condition gets administered, and it became the national idiom because the confident one had been overprinted and nothing of comparable weight was put in its place.How catastrophe becomes a storyThe sociologist Jeffrey Alexander makes a point Nepal illustrates unusually well: a catastrophe does not become a collective event on its own. Someone has to claim that the pain belongs to everyone, and that claim can fail. What Nepal has, and most states do not, is a set of instruments that make that claim succeed quickly. In the absence of a positive national story, those instruments have become the main way the country produces a sense of itself. Nepal now knows what it is largely through what has happened to it.In 2001, after the royal massacre, what brought people together was kinship. Men across the country shaved their heads in mourning for the king, as a son would for a father. Nobody needed to be told what to do; a family tragedy became, almost instantly, a shared sorrow. By 2015, the response to the earthquake had gone partly digital, with a hashtag telling Indian television crews to go home. Then came a winter of closed border crossings, experienced as a single continuous event alongside the earthquake, though the two were unrelated. Two years later, a Left alliance won an election on national pride and a push to diversify trade northward. The road that diversification built is the same road the Bhote Koshi has now destroyed twice.When last September’s protests produced a resignation within 48 hours, part of what was on display was a generation that had watched its parents wait two decades for an answer, and had decided not to.Grief is collected, made public, made countable, and made national, in a pattern many nations share. The curse is simply the caption that anchors it. The three episodes share a widening pattern. In 2001, the disaster was entirely domestic: a king killed inside his own palace, and every credible account, official or otherwise, pointed to Nepalis. The decade that followed told the same story at a greater scale—an insurgency, a state, 17,000 deaths, citizens fighting each other, and a peace that still has not settled who did what to whom. Whatever the country learned about itself during that decade, it learned by looking inward, and it has not yet found a way to say it aloud.In 2015, the address changed. An earthquake has no author, so the trauma only acquired a shape once other fault lines—between hill people and Madhesis—opened up. India was seen to side with the Madhesis, and an unofficial blockade followed. The trauma was traced to an external actor, used by political entrepreneurs for electoral gain, and became, in the process, part of the settled national memory.In 2026, the address moved north. The water came out of Tibet, down a valley whose road exists because of what happened in 2015: Rasuwagadhi is part of the northern diversification Nepal undertook precisely to reduce its dependence on the southern boulder. The flood destroyed the border post, the customs yard, the dry port, and the only overland route to China. Which is to say, it destroyed the physical answer Nepal had given to the last catastrophe.

An overview of the China-Nepal border and Gyirong Port/Rasuwagadhi border post after flash floods and landslides hit the area on August 28, 2026. | Photo Credit: Planet Labs via AFP There is less Nepal can do about the north. Against the blockade, there was at least a politics available, and a nationalism was built out of it that went on to win an election. Against a river there is no equivalent. Kathmandu’s central demand after this flood is that it be told when the water is coming—a modest, technical request for hydrological data from upstream—and no instrument obliges Beijing to grant it.What remainsThe escalation has nowhere further to go. The palace could be held responsible, and was. India was blamed, and that blame proved useful at the ballot box. But a glacier cannot be held responsible, and that is the difference. What the country has been doing with its catastrophes for 25 years is converting them, quickly and with real skill, into answers to the question of what Nepal is. The massacre took the monarchy down with it. The earthquake and the blockade produced a nationalism that won an election, and the road that nationalism built is the road the Bhote Koshi has now destroyed twice. None of it has yet been converted into an answer to the question of who decided. An identity assembled this quickly out of what happens to it turns out to be very good at producing meaning, and very poor at producing an account.What I remember most from the procession is how grief and mockery seemed to walk side by side. Gai Jatra is not mourning first, followed by humour. The year’s dead and the ridicule of those in power appear together on the same street, a pairing three centuries old. The same juxtaposition was everywhere that week: footage of the water, jokes about the ministers, and satile sarapeko desh in the captions—a curse people say with a smile but mean all the same.Nepal’s repertoire for absorbing catastrophe is fixed; only the intensity varies. A 17th-century ritual has simply been fitted to a mobile phone. That is an achievement, but also a cost: a society that can grieve on a fixed date and mock its rulers on the same day has made catastrophe survivable, and, in the process, repeatable. Scheduled sorrow and scheduled anger both end when the day does. The Lhende had 13 months’ warning last time and no siren. Next Bhadra, the procession will begin again.Harsh Pandey is a PhD Candidate at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is also a visiting researcher at the Delhi-based Centre for Peace StudiesAlso Read | When a flood crosses three countries, why can’t South Asia’s disaster plans?Also Read | India can see the danger in the Himalaya. Can it manage the risk?