A forgotten empire
The Khasa Malla kingdom, centred on the Sinja valley in what is now Jumla district, was for two centuries the dominant power of the western Himalaya, ruling western Nepal, parts of Kumaon and Garhwal, and territory in western Tibet including the Kailash country. It raided the Kathmandu valley repeatedly.
It is among the least known of substantial Indian-Himalayan states, partly because its territory is remote and little excavated and partly because the historiography of Nepal has been written from the Kathmandu valley.
The kingdom's inscriptions are in an early form of the Khas language, which developed into Nepali — the Dullu inscriptions of the Karnali are the earliest documents of that language, and the kingdom is therefore the origin point of the national language of modern Nepal.
Break-up
The kingdom fragmented in the fourteenth century into the Baise principalities of the Karnali and the kingdom of Doti in the far west. Those fragments were reunified four centuries later by the Gorkhas, in an expansion that reassembled much of the old Khasa territory.
Sinja is now a valley of terraced fields with scattered ruins, and its archaeology has only recently begun to be studied.
Further reading
- Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
- Samuel, Geoffrey. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra. Cambridge University Press, 2008
- Basham, A. L. The Wonder That Was India. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.