The Khasa Malla Kingdom: Nepal's Forgotten Empire

Ask a visitor about Nepal's history and you will hear about the Newar kings of the Kathmandu Valley, the pagodas of Patan and Bhaktapur, and Prithvi Narayan Shah's unification in the 18th century. Very few will mention the Khasa Mallas. Yet for about two centuries the most powerful state in the central Himalaya was ruled not from Kathmandu but from a small valley in Karnali, the Sinja valley near present-day Jumla.

At its height in the 14th century, the Khasa kingdom held land from Purang and Guge in western Tibet, around the sacred mountain of Kailash, south and east across the Karnali basin to Dullu in Dailekh and as far as Kaski in the Gandaki hills. Its armies raided the Kathmandu Valley more than once. Its kings patronised Buddhist monasteries in Tibet and Hindu temples in the hills. Then, within a few generations, it broke apart into small states, and its story slipped out of the history most Nepalis learn at school.

Travelling in the far west today, you meet the Khasa world constantly without always knowing it: in the stone pillars by the roadside, the square stone shrines called dewal, the water spouts carved with inscriptions, and in the Nepali language itself.

The dynasty's history is pieced together from inscriptions, copper plates, Tibetan records and the chronicles of the Kathmandu Valley. Dates are often approximate, and historians still debate details. What follows are the rulers most often named in the sources.

Sinja lies along the Hima river in Jumla district, at about 2,490 m, a broad green valley with terraced fields and scattered villages. Inscriptions call the capital Semja. On a promontory above the river, a place known locally as Lamathada, stand the Kanakasundari temple and the remains of palace and settlement buildings that archaeologists have excavated in recent decades. Walking among the stone foundations, you get a sense of a royal centre that once received envoys from Tibet and the plains.

Why rule from such a remote valley? For a kingdom that controlled the trade routes between Tibet and India, the Karnali basin was not remote at all. Salt, wool and borax came down from the Tibetan plateau; grain, cloth and metal went up. Sinja sat between Jumla's fertile valley and the passes to the north, close to the trade and the grain that sustained an army.

Today Sinja is reached by a rough road from Jumla or on foot as part of the Rara Lake trek. People here say with pride that the Nepali language was born in their valley, and they are not far wrong.

The Khas language spoken in Sinja and across the Karnali basin is the ancestor of modern Nepali. Its earliest known written forms appear in Khasa royal inscriptions, and the most famous of these stands at Dullu in Dailekh district: a stone pillar, or kirti stambha, raised by King Prithvi Malla in the 1350s. Its text mixes Sanskrit with early Khas, Buddhist syllables with Hindu invocations, and lists the king's ancestors. Scholars treat it as one of the key documents of the Nepali language.

Dullu itself was an important centre, described in local histories as the winter capital of the Sinja kings. After the Khasa kingdom broke up, Dullu became the seat of its own small kingdom, which survived as a semi-autonomous principality inside Nepal until 1962. Around Dullu are shrines where natural gas escapes from the ground and burns as small, steady flames, and a pilgrimage circuit, the Panchkoshi, links five sacred sites around them.

To see the pillar and the flames, travellers drive from Surkhet into the Dailekh hills, about four to five hours on a winding road. A local guide is essential, both to find the sites and to explain the inscriptions.

One of the most interesting things about the Khasa kings is how comfortably they moved between religions. Early rulers were strong patrons of Buddhism, linked to the monasteries of western Tibet, and Tibetan records mention them. Later kings increasingly worshipped Hindu deities. Many inscriptions begin with the Buddhist mantra om mani padme hum and continue with invocations to Hindu gods.

The clearest example is at Lumbini, the Buddha's birthplace in the Terai. In 1312 King Ripu Malla visited the site and had a line carved on the Ashoka pillar, which had then stood for more than fifteen centuries: the Buddhist mantra, followed by a wish for the long rule of Ripu Malla. The words are still visible on the pillar today, a few lines below Ashoka's original inscription. He left a similar inscription on the Ashoka pillar at Niglihawa near Kapilavastu.

Kakrebihar in Surkhet is another witness to this mixed faith. The ruined base of a stone temple stands on a forested hill above Birendranagar, surrounded by hundreds of carved blocks with Buddhist and Hindu figures. It is widely attributed to Ashoka Challa in the 13th century.

You do not need to be a historian to enjoy Khasa sites, but it helps to know what to look for. The most common monument is the dewal, a small square shrine of dressed stone with a flat or pyramidal top, often carved with panels showing a deity, a horse and rider, or the donor who paid for it. Many stand alone in fields or by trails, and some are still worshipped with flowers and red powder.

Look also for the dhunge dhara, stone water spouts set into a wall below a spring, where women still fill water pots. Several in the Jumla valley carry short inscriptions in old Nepali script, recording who built them and when. Free-standing stone pillars, like the one at Dullu, record royal deeds and genealogies. Your local guide will know which village stones are old and which are recent copies, and which can be touched and which should be left alone.

In the late 14th century the Khasa kingdom fragmented. Local rulers took control of their own valleys, and the region became a patchwork of small states known as the Baise rajya, the twenty-two kingdoms, west of the Gandaki basin, alongside the Chaubise, the twenty-four kingdoms, further east. Jumla, inheriting the prestige of Sinja, became one of the most important of the Baise states, and Doti and Dullu remained significant powers.

These small kingdoms lasted until the Gorkha conquests of the late 18th century, when Prithvi Narayan Shah's successors brought the western hills into the expanding kingdom of Nepal. Jumla fell to Gorkha forces in 1789. Ironically, the language of Gorkha, which spread across Nepal as the national tongue, was itself a descendant of the Khas speech of Sinja.

• Sinja valley, Jumla: the capital ruins and the Kanakasundari temple at Lamathada.
• Dullu, Dailekh: the pillar of Prithvi Malla and the flame shrines of the Panchkoshi.
• Kakrebihar, Surkhet: the ruined stone temple on a hill above Birendranagar.
• Jumla valley: carved dewal shrines and inscribed stone water spouts.
• Lumbini: Ripu Malla's inscription on the Ashoka pillar.