Our History Series 10 is eclectic, it shows how our forebears have passed through in the past ages some hitherto unrecorded stages of history.
The first picture shows Alexander the Great hunting lion barefoot. This ancient fresco depicts Alexander killing a lion with a single stroke of a khukuri and there is another picture which shows Alexander severing the Gordian Knot with a single stroke of his khukuri. And this establishes the link. Our ancestors had followed the monk missionaries into the West and upon return brought back that handy weapon along.
The second picture shows King Prithiwinarayan Sah Thankuri as he ascended the throne of Kathmandu. He had employed the Brahmins to spread disinformation among the targeted princedoms which had greatly helped him unify the nation of Nepal. To the Brahmins it was godsend gift for they wasted not a moment to declare and anoint him their god Bisnu (Visnu) and thereafter, none but the Brahmins could approach his sacred person.
Jangbahadur Rana Magar of Nepal shown with his two brothers is the real architect of modern Nepal. With the King now only a titular godhead, Jang wielded all the power and had his plans succeeded, Nepal would have been something absolutely different. In 1850, he visited England as a personal guest of Queen Victoria and within next few years mutiny had engulfed British India. None can deny, had Jang opted out of the mutiny and worst still, if he had made a common cause with the mutineers, the world history would have been entirely different.
The facsimile of Queen Alexandra’s letter comes next; she was Queen Mother during World War I and this letter indicates that she had influenced her son, King George V to invite Kulbir Thapa Magar to the Buckingham Palace and award him the Victoria Cross, the highest of British Military honours.
Brian Houghton Hodgson is the last in this series; he was appointed The Post Master and Assistant to the British Ambassador to Kathmandu while still a teenager. What he lacked in formal education he made it up with his extremely hard working ethics and before long he began to explore and write serious discourses on flora and fauna of Nepal. Credit goes to him for discovering the Buddha to have been a Nepalese Prince who was until then believed by European scholars to be of African descent basing their opinion on the Buddha’s curly locks. Whilst in Kathmandu he was tutored by Amritananda Bandya, a Kirati Mongolian scholar but Hodgson took undue advantage of the trust of his tutor and clandestinely ferreted out several hundred volumes of pre-brahminic Sanskrit manuscripts and sent them to the Universities of Paris, Cambridge and Oxford and East India Company Library where they have been gathering dust.
In retrospect we can find him guilty of cheating a nation of its heritage but we may exonerate him for without a patron he was as helpless and by default helped Nepal recover its treasure.
This therefore, is an appeal to all good souls to help us establish a modern Kirati Museum and Research Centre with the nucleus of these manuscripts retrieved from the Universities named.