Published by Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities: Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Pre-modern Nepal, Heidelberg, Germany, 2026. Published by the courtesy of the National Archives, Kathmandu. The copyright of the facsimile remains with the Nepal Rashtriya Abhilekhalaya (National Archives, Government of Nepal). All use of the digital facsimiles requires prior written permission by the copyright holder. See Terms of Use.
The accompanying edition, translation/synopsis and/or commentary are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .

Commentary

This document is a copy of a lālamohara (red-seal order) issued by King Raṇabahādura Śāha in VS 1852 (1795/96 CE), prior to the issue of the copper plate in VS 1853 (1796 CE) (document ID K_0350_0013, edited separately). The scribe who made this copy of the lālamohara does not give the year. It can, however, be inferred from the order of the document copies in this series: the documents immediately preceding and following it both date from VS 1852. These are K_0001_0032C, addressed to a certain Bhavānīdāsa Vaidya, and K_0001_0032E, addressed to a certain Somāragīrī Gosāī. This document must therefore have been copied or abstracted in VS 1852 (1795/96 CE). The date given, the 5th of the bright fortnight of Pauṣa, falls in December 1795 or January 1796.

Both documents, the lālamohara and the later copper plate, state that the guthi land was originally endowed by King Jayaprakāśa Malla and reconfirmed by Raṇabahādura Śāha. Strikingly, however, the size of the land differs. The copper plate mentions 120 ropanīs, whereas this document mentions 100 ropanīs endowed for the Sindūrajātrā and the other rituals for Vatsaleśvarī at Paśupati. The difference lies entirely in the first plot: the land at Jogipha is given as 60 ropanīs in both documents, but the land at Kaṃpathali is 40 ropanīs here and 60 ropanīs in the copper plate. How this discrepancy arose is not clear. The land may have been re-measured or partly restored to the guthi between the two orders, so that the copper plate recorded a larger area. It is also possible that the scribe of this abstract miscopied the figure. The figure of 120 ropanīs in the copper plate is the one followed by Michaels (2008: 241) and was edited and translated into German in an earlier publication (1994: 362–363)., who states that Jayaprakāśa Malla donated 120 ropanīs for the Vatsalā Sindūrajātrā and that this was affirmed by Raṇa Bahādura.

The two documents also differ in other respects. Here the king grants the supervision (citāī) of the guthi to Menaraṃ Vaidya, whereas the copper plate grants the guthi itself to Melamha Vaidya. Both are most probably the same person, with the name spelled differently by different scribes. The ritual instructions in this document are brief: the fivefold worship and a sacrifice on Piśācacaturdaśī, followed by the Sindūrajātrā on the new moon. The copper plate issued a year later specifies the ritual in detail, prescribing the sacrificial ram, the fees for the priest and the Kumārīs, the rice for the night worship, the horns of the wild buffalo and the vermilion from Thimi. The lālamohara thus appears to be a first, summary reconfirmation of the endowment. The copper plate then fixed the guthi and its ritual obligations in a more durable and more detailed form. For a detailed commentary on the context, see K_0350_0013.

---

Notes