essay Experiencing Nepal abha sah
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Abha is a writer-translator based in Mumbai. She taught English at a junior college for 16 years and now freelances as a translator. Photographs: Abha Sah
o you know you were once part of Greater Nepal? The question with which my hostess Rakhi Chhetri floored me,
stemmed from a nascent idea less than a decade old, born of historical fact. At one point of time, in the 1700s, Gorkha king Prithvi Narayan Shah started an extension of Nepali rule. His sons carried on his work and extended the borders of Nepal up to Kangra in the West, to include Kumaon and Garhwal, to the Siwan district of Bihar in the south and to the Teesta river in the east. This sovereignty, however, lasted only about twenty years. In 1814-15, the Nepalese lost the Anglo-Nepal war to the East India Company and, according to the treaty of Sugauli, agreed to surrender the Nepali won territories in India.
Sizzling baras and alu jhol