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Clarence Comyn Taylor / British Library

One of the key questions regarding the historical development of the Nepali state pertains to its independence. Even as “native princely states” of the subcontinent—such as those of the Marathas and the Sikhs, with whom the Gorkhalis were in close contact with, and had even attempted a possible alliance to overthrow the incipient East India Company (EIC)—succumbed to the military might of the British, why was Nepal never colonized? Nepali ultra-nationalists will answer this question with the claim that the British could never “defeat” Nepal in open warfare. The British continued, they argue, through subterfuge and intrigue, to attempt to bring Nepal into its fold, in which it failed, thereby leaving Nepal as the “only nation to not be colonized.”
The study of history merits a different answer. There was little fear of British military intervention in Nepal from the moment the British acquired its newly conquered territories of Kumaon, Garhwal and parts of Sikkim after the Anglo-Gorkha war; the difficulties of a military expedition in the hills of Nepal were clear to the British. A three-decade period of what historians have called “peace without cordiality” followed, but with the advent of the Ranas, Kathmandu’s disposition towards the British noticeably changed from adversarial to acquiescent. The British had initially hoped to profit from the trade in Nepal. But subsequent to the war, and the Rana policy of appeasement, it did not need to intervene militarily to secure that either.
In examining why the British never colonized Nepal, it is imperative to first clarify the nature of British rule in the subcontinent, and how it varied from preexisting state formations like that of the Gorkhas. What we today call the “British Raj” in the subcontinent consisted of two different territories: areas that were directly governed by the British, such as the province of Bengal; and princely states under British paramountcy, like in the Rajputana region of today’s Rajasthan, which accepted British suzerainty but continued to be ruled by native rulers.

Map of British India in 1805, from A Historical Atlas of India for the use of High-Schools, Colleges, and Private Students, Joppen, Charles [SJ.] (1907). Photo credit: Fowler&fowler / Wikipedia

When the British arrived in the subcontinent, they brought with them a European notion of sovereignty, including a novel conception of a nation-state’s boundaries. For the British, a political boundary was a key feature of a nation-state’s sovereignty: a clearly demarcated line that differentiated between territories. This was as alien to the Gorkhali political tradition as it was to other princely states of the subcontinent, where “boundaries” were fluid constructs defined by physical and geographic features. “Boundary lines were alien to [Bhimsen Thapa’s] thinking,” historian Ludwig Stiller writes in The Silent Cry. “[Thapa] was concerned with the control of villages, which waxed or waned according to the military strength and vigour of the ruling dynasty,” which was the existing basis for states in the subcontinent.
In British political thought, however, a boundary was a static idea, well-defined by border pillars, surveys, and other accoutrements that continue into the modern era. In an exchange of correspondence between the governor general in Calcutta, the Resident Edward Gardner in Kathmandu, and the Nepali court in July 1816 after the Sugauli Treaty, when negotiations to return a part of the Nepali Terai began, the British insistence on clear demarcation of the border is evident. On instructions from Calcutta, Resident Gardner wrote to the Nepali court, “A new border would be established about four miles south of these northern points on the old border…The actual line cannot be settled without surveys, but wherever it is placed, it must prevent future disputes and be clearly defined.”
The British emphasis on the fixity of a political boundary was one of the reasons they went to war with the Gorkhas in 1814. Even before things took a turn for the worse in 1814, the British were perplexed by the lax definitions of a boundary that existed in the region. As far back as 1795 itself, EIC Governor General Lord Cornwallis had assured the Gorkhas he was willing to “define the long-uncertain border between the Morang and the district of Purnea”; in the areas around Awadh and in the Gorkha territories of Kumaon and Garhwal, the boundary had “been made so uncertain” that the British were “perplexed as to how to react” when the Gorkhas moved into new territories. Historian John Pemble quotes the curious example of the Bareilly magistrate who, in 1811, noticed the Gorkhalis had built a fort in Kheri—which didn’t exist till two years prior. “Such is the undefined boundary between the two governments,” the magistrate wrote.
Farther west, towards the foothills of the newly conquered Sutlej-Garhwal region, General Ochterlony, on behalf of the governor general, offered Nepal the ‘Principle of Limitation’ in 1810. He informed Amar Singh Thapa, commander of Gorkha forces in the region, that the Gorkhalis should stick to the hills, which the British had no interest in: “all territory below the line of the foothills, whether previously attached to hill states or not, were now under the protection of the Company.” But Ochterlony was, as Pemble suggests, “itching for a fight,” and in 1813, when the Gorkhas seized six villages that were supposedly in the lowlands, he began making preparations for a military expedition that would expel the Gorkhas “from all hill areas west of the Ganges.” Amar Singh Thapa, who was hesitant to meet the British in open confrontation, asked for time to consult Kathmandu; its response was based on a sole factor: who conquered the areas first? Thapa suggested to Ochterlony that the Gorkhas and the Company could share the contested territory, but that was anathema to the half-American, half-Scot military commander. Pemble writes:

Ochterlony’s refusal to respond to Amar Singh’s overtures made the Kaji feel humiliated, and his aversion to the British deepened; but he knew better than to goad them beyond a certain point…Others of his race were not so circumspect, and in negotiations over disputed borders further east words and actions of uncontrolled impetuosity led to the collapse of negotiations and the declaration of war.

The disputes further east Pemble refers to occurred in the tracts of Butwal and Makawanpur. Butwal—held by the Palpa kingdom as a tenant of the Nawab of Awadh—was incorporated into the Gorkha empire in 1804. The British, who by then controlled Awadh, insisted the Gorkhas withdraw from the villages, but to no avail. This dispute remained on the sidelines until 1811, when another boundary dispute occurred in Makwanpur. The Gorkhas had occupied villages that they claimed were part of the Makwanpur hill state. But the Raja of Bettiah—who paid tribute to the Company—insisted the villages came under his dominion, as he paid rent for them, and sent an armed contingent to wrest them back. When a Gorkha subba was killed in the ensuing confrontation, Calcutta proposed an Anglo-Gorkha commission to look into disputes in both Makwanpur and the Butwal area. With both tracts lying in the fertile Terai region, Kathmandu was reluctant to give them up, and when its representatives asked for time to consult on the matter, the Company’s representative, Major Paris Bradshaw, announced the documentary evidence they had produced was enough to establish the rights of the Company in the occupied territories.

“Assemblage of Ghoorkas,” a coloured aquatint made by Robert Havell and Son, based on James Baillie Fraser’s Views in the Himala Mountains. Fraser’s brother William was a political agent during the Anglo-Gorkha War. Photo credit: British Library

The “petty bickering” between the two parties led to further distrust, and on April 22, 1814, the deadline for the Gorkhali surrender of the territories in the Butwal area passed. The Company moved its troops to the area without any resistance from Gorkhali troops, who retreated to the hills. On May 29, Gorkha troops attacked a police thana in Butwal that had been left behind by Company troops for defence, killing 18 policemen. “The daroga was wounded, and surrendered. The Gorkha commanding officer ordered him to be tied to a tree, and he was then shot dead with arrows.”
War was now inevitable. The Marquess of Hastings—a “hawk” by modern military standards—had decided that military aggression against the Gorkhas would, apart from resolving the disputes, also signal to the other princely states of the subcontinent that Company authority in the region would be “de-facto” from hereon.

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The war brought severe losses to the Gorkhalis. Almost a third of Gorkha territory was lost to the British, including the key territories of Kumaon and Sikkim. The British had long insisted Gorkha authorities allow them to trade through their territories onwards to Tibet, but Kathmandu had been adamant about not allowing the firanghis in their country. All trade with Tibet, they insisted, “be confined to channels through Nepal.” With the control of Kumaon and Sikkim, the Company no longer had to rely on the Gorkhas to trade with Tibet. At any rate, as Pemble argues, by 1814, the trade with Tibet would bring little in value to the Company. If trade with China was a concern, the port of Canton was already open to the Company’s ships. Further, the Company had realised, through Maulvi Abdul Qadir’s 1795 Nepal expedition, that Nepali traders were essentially middlemen between Tibet and Indian merchants, and that direct trade with Tibet and China would be “highly beneficial” to the Company’s interests. Kirkpatrick’s 1792 mission had already made it clear that the fabled gold of Nepal was actually Tibetan in origin, and Nepal itself didn’t have any gold mines.
Nonetheless, whether the motives behind the war were boundary disputes, trade issues, or a simple itch by the Company to assert its might in the region is of little significance. War seemed to be inevitable between the two powers in the north the moment Gorkha troops came into conflict with Company troops over issues of territorial demarcation.
The war reshaped the political boundaries of Nepal, and hemmed it in on three sides with Company forces. If the loss of territory wasn’t sufficient reason for Bhimsen Thapa to be convinced that the Company had the firepower to overrun Kathmandu, Ochterlony’s punitive and lightening-quick expedition to Makwanpur in February 1816, when Kathmandu delayed the ratification of the Sugauli treaty, would have conveyed to Thapa the extent of British military might. The treaty also formalised the political boundary between Nepal and British India, and few disputes were to occur in the years to come on this issue. As Stiller writes, Thapa’s commitment to the fixed border was “total”: “Thapa realized that the best way to insure Nepal’s continued freedom from interference was to grant the governor general’s basic desire, a secure and trouble-free border.”
The subsequent three decades saw a period of “peace without cordiality,” where the British resident in Kathmandu was increasingly pitted against the bharadars, with political intrigue being the order of the day. A section of the Kathmandu court continued to insist on challenging the British militarily and demand a return of the erstwhile territories. But Thapa managed to keep them at bay till the end of his premiership. Another section of the court believed the British to be able allies, and solicited their support to further their own agendas. The residents were instructed to keep a close eye on British interests in the country, and they became part of the intrigue that marked this period in Kathmandu. In June 1840, “an army mutiny over proposed pay reductions almost turned into an attack on the Residency because the soldiers were led to believe that the cuts had been forced on the Nepalese government by the British,” according to historian John Whelpton. But this was by far the most serious transgression during this period.

“A Nepalese Official (Perhaps Prime Minister Bhimsen Thapa, served 1806-1837)”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

During this period of extreme fluidity, the British were essentially watchers of the Nepali political sphere. Resident Brian Hodgson’s attempts to interest Calcutta into following the affairs of the Kathmandu court more closely were rebuffed initially, with Calcutta maintaining a strict policy of wait-and-watch. Hodgson’s own political manoeuvring, intended to secure British interests, found him little favour among the court, where alliances were made and broken rapidly. Finally, the 1842 affair over the Indian merchant Kasinath Mull, who was a defendant in a debt lawsuit in Nepal, and whose protection Hodgson had personally guaranteed, ensured Hodgson would not be party to any more political confabulations in Kathmandu. Kasinath had been living at the Residency, and when the debt case was reopened, King Rajendra Bikram himself appeared outside the gates with guards, demanding the surrender of the merchant. “[Hodgson] refused to give up Kasinath, at one point throwing his arms around Rajendra and telling him, ‘You take both of us or neither.’”
Such intransigence would not be suffered either by Kathmandu or by Calcutta, and the new governor general, Lord Ellenborough. The governor general had decided against a policy of allying British interests with those of certain ministers in the Kathmandu durbar who were in “constant fear about their own personal safety.” And those who could not prevent embarrassing episodes like the Kasinath affair from happening could not “guarantee British security” either. Hodgson would be relieved of the Residency in 1843, and Whelpton argues, correctly, that “despite Hodgson’s success in gaining widespread support among the bharadari…it would probably have been better for Anglo-Nepalese relations if the [EIC] had…confined itself to demanding a change of policy, and not concerned itself with the identity of the king’s counsellors.”
Hodgson’s attempts to play one section of the bharadari against another after the fall of Bhimsen Thapa won him few friends in the tense political atmosphere of the time, especially in a court that was used to political intrigues since its beginnings. One can argue that the Residency support did little to undermine the section of the court which insisted on a military confrontation with the British to regain the lost territories. It was only Thapa’s near-total political control that kept the warmongers at bay. It must be remembered that the flux that marked Jung Bahadur’s ascendancy began only after Thapa was removed from his post, imprisoned, and forced to commit suicide. It was also during this period of flux that Anglo-Nepal relations were at their nadir after the war.

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On April 16, 1853, 400 people got onto 14 carriages pulled by three steam locomotives from Bombay to Thane—the first passenger train journey in India. The Times of India reported: “The 16th of April 1853 was, and would long continue to be one of the most memorable days, if not the most memorable day, in the annals of British India.” Little did the old lady of Boribunder know that the train journey would be momentous not just for India but for the fortunes of the Ranas in Nepal too.
The Kot Massacre had brought the Ranas to power, a transition that historian Mahesh Chandra Regmi has called the beginnings of a “centralized agrarian bureaucracy.” The Rana period was marked by a dedicated commitment to extract as much revenue as possible from Nepal’s resources—land or otherwise. The administration subsequently developed an intricate network of local authorities who were primarily revenue officers across the state, and indebted to the Ranas for their positions. After the introduction of railways in India, the British began to develop an infrastructural network across northern India to support industrial development. The demand for timber—to be used as railway sleepers, railroad ties, planks for bridges, or for use in homes—was growing exponentially. Jung Bahadur, sensing a change in the winds, banned all logging operations in the eastern Tarai—around Morang—in 1855. As most of north India’s sal forests had been depleted by then, “the major sources of supply were, consequently, left on the Nepali side of the Tarai border.” A restricted supply of timber resulted in a sharp increase in their prices, with prices in 1860 three times what it was three years prior, according to the magistrate in Champaran.

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Why did the British not colonize Nepal ... recordnepal.com

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