The Khasa kings and the birth of Nepali
Long before the Shah kings of Gorkha unified Nepal, the most powerful state in the Himalaya sat in the far west. The Khasa Malla kingdom, founded by a ruler remembered as Nagaraj, grew from the Sinja valley in Jumla from the 12th century. At its height its kings held land across the western Himalaya, into parts of the Tibetan plateau and down towards the Terai. Sinja was the summer capital; Dullu, lower and warmer in Dailekh, served as the winter seat. Excavations in Sinja have found palace foundations, a network of underground water pipes and a ring of large stone columns.
The Khasa kings left their names in stone. In 1312 King Ripu Malla visited Lumbini and carved an inscription on the Ashokan pillar at Nigali Sagar, one of the last royal pilgrimages to the Buddha's birthplace before the forest closed over it. In Dullu, a 14th-century pillar of King Prithvi Malla still stands. Cliffs at the edge of the Sinja valley and stones in Dullu carry some of the earliest writing in the language the Khas people spoke, called Khas Kura, which grew into modern Nepali.
After the 14th century the empire broke apart into the Baise Rajya, the twenty-two small hill kingdoms of the west. Each had its own fort, its own goddess and its own court, and many lasted until the Gorkha conquests of the late 18th century. Dullu survived as a small principality into the 20th century. The habits of those courts linger: the dhami oracles who speak for the Masto gods, the stone dewal shrines in the fields, and Deuda, the circle song and dance said to have begun in Sinja.
The plains had a different history. Bardia, Banke, Kailali and Kanchanpur were lost to the East India Company in 1815 and returned to Nepal in 1860, which is why people still call them Naya Muluk, the new country. For centuries the malarial forest here belonged to the Tharu, who farmed clearings, fished the rivers and built mud-walled longhouses. Malaria control in the 1950s and 1960s brought hill settlers south, and today the Terai towns of Dhangadhi, Tikapur and Mahendranagar are among the fastest-growing in Nepal.
