Baise Rajya

Twenty-two

When the Khasa Malla kingdom fragmented in the fourteenth century its territory divided among a set of principalities conventionally numbered at twenty-two — Jumla being the senior among them, with Doti, Achham, Jajarkot, Salyan and others.

They were small, mutually hostile and ruled by families claiming Rajput descent from migrants who had come north after the Muslim conquests in the plains. That claim is central to the self-understanding of the Khas hill aristocracy of Nepal and has shaped the country's social order since.

The Baise states and the Chaubisi states to their east together comprised the political landscape of the Nepal hills before unification: some fifty kingdoms in a strip of mountain country, each holding a few valleys.

Conquest

The Gorkha expansion under Prithvi Narayan Shah and his successors absorbed the Baise principalities in the later eighteenth century, and Jumla, the last of them, fell in 1789.

The unification that resulted created modern Nepal, and the administrative and land-tenure systems the Gorkha state imposed on these hills — and the migration of Khas settlers eastward that followed — did as much to shape the country as the conquest itself.