Documenta Nepalica

Published by Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities: Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Pre-modern Nepal, Heidelberg, Germany, 2025. 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.
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Commentary

This document records state intervention following the collapse of a śivālaya shrine near the royal cowshed of Kāṃcā Devān. Issued under the authority of the Rāṇā prime minister, it reflects the centralized governance of the period. The inquiry focused on identifying the shrine’s founder, determining responsibility for its restoration, and clarifying whether daily, periodic, or annual rituals should continue.

The record highlights the close interconnection of religion, bureaucracy, and the military in late 19th-century Nepal, where shrines were sustained through formal endowments and supervised by a centralized system to ensure ritual continuity and institutional accountability. Such state initiatives to establish or reconstruct public socio-religious spaces were not merely individual acts of piety but were institutionalized within the legal framework of the Mulukī Ain of 1854. The Ain, in the section “On Guṭhī,” explicitly discourages establishing such institutions abroad, stressing that they must be rooted in the local realm for social, economic, and religious benefit. It reads (section 1; translated in Khatiwoda, Cubelilc and Michaels 2021: 103):

“… No one—from king to subjects—shall construct a Śiva temple or dharmaśālā or establish a guṭhī or sadāvarta in a foreign realm. For if they are constructed in one’s own kingdom, one’s own offspring can carry out repairs even if there is the slightest damage. One’s own country will be well adorned. Upon a realm that has great moral integrity (dharma) will come no disease, illness or epidemic; no famine will befall it. When one’s own country has [such] fame, [the result] will be splendour: the artisans of one’s own country will become skilful. The poor will be protected, since they will receive wages, and the wealth of one’s own realm will not go to a foreign realm. If a sadāvarta is established in one’s own realm, it will support the blind, lame, crippled, handicapped and elderly, one’s own children who run to seed and one’s own relatives’ children who run to seed, and neglected, uninvited foreign guests, poor people who come to this country with the wish to gain a livelihood. Whoever establishes a sadāvarta will uplift 7 preceding and 7 future generations of his family…”

The Ain further stipulates that descendants of a founder have the primary right and responsibility to repair or rebuild public religious structures, and only if they are unable may others take over. It reads (section 3; translated in Khatiwoda, Cubelilc and Michaels 2021: 104):

“If somebody constructs a wayside public shelter with or without water facilities, fountain, plank bridge, step fountain, temple or the like, and [to support it] establishes a guṭhī with birtā land of his own, but if later [an endowed structure] collapses or is damaged, and his descendants are unable to repair it, and someone else comes and declares that he will renovate or rebuild it on the same land, he shall be allowed to do so…”.

These examples underscore how the creation, maintenance, and protection of public heritage were not left to chance or individual initiative but were integrated into state law and policy, ensuring continuity of religious and social institutions within the realm.

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Notes