Previously on Things Drag On

In the first season titled Listening to the told and untold we met the three main disputants: two young widowed sisters-in-law and the teenage son of one of the women. We followed their claims and counterclaims. One claimed the lands she had been prevented from operating. Another demanded the money that had been hidden from her. Another told the story of a sexual scandal and a related loss of caste. Witnesses chimed in with their own juicy stories.

In Season II, we shift from listening to voices to attending to things. This season, we are Mapping the owned and the owed. In mapping the tangible things they owned and owed we also map things more intangible —obligations, desire, status—but no less important. These maps of the owned and owed offer a fresh point of view on the fiery, simmering dispute Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur remained entangled in.

In Episode 1, we circled above the Guthis, getting a bird’s-eye view of the scale, spread, and duties of the six disputed endowments established to feed people, monkeys, and cows. In Episode 2, we unpacked Raj Kumari’s balance sheet, discovering that the six disputed Guthis brough in the equivalent of a shipping container of grain and a backpack of silver. In Episode 3, we unpacked Ratna Kumari’s balance sheet discovering that the Guthis held the equivalent of 504 football fields of land. In Episode 4, we traced Raj Kumari’s balance sheet, watching the shipping container of grains dwindle to a handful of silver that remained as profit. In Episode 5, Ratna Kumari claimed that the shipping container of grain did not dwindle, but rather turned into pouchfuls of silver. In Episode 7, we explored what it meant, materially, to be elite in 1880s Kathmandu.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

The ghost of husband past
Prithi Bahadur. Sheesh. Even after death, he keeps showing up. And not in a positive light. But rather as a source of additional stress to his family. The list of the consequences he left in his chaotic wake was already long. The sexual transgression. The outcasting. His younger wives and their children’s loss of their inheritance.

We have to add one more consequential item to that list. The man died with unpaid debts.

Prithi Bahadur had incurred the loan in Banaras. Shamsher Bahadur had previously told us that his uncle fled to Moghlana when he was found out in an incestuous sexual act. Even though British power was so firmly entrenched in India by this time, Nepalis colloquially still referred to it as the land of the Mughals. Turns out Prithi Bahadur had fled to the city of Banaras in Moghlana. There, he had taken a loan from a man named Ghisiyavan Sahu who lived in the bustling commercial area of Dughdha Binayak.

That Prithi Bahadur fled to Banaras makes sense. The Gorkhali elite had long relationships and active networks in the city. They travelled there for many reasons. Education. Business. Pilgrimage. And, apparently, also to flee the law. Prithi Bahadur would likely have visited before. He would know how to navigate the place.

Ghisiyavan Sahu was also not perhaps just any random creditor. He likely had previous dealings with other men of Prithi Bahadur’s class. The Sahu evidently had professional contacts in Kathmandu. Enough at least to navigate the legal system. When Prithi Bahadur died without repaying his debts, Ghisiyavan Sahu decided to compel the man’s wife to clear the loan.

On a Monday in January 1873, Devidatta Padhya Dhakal, Ghisiyavan Sahu’s representative in Kathmandu, wrote a petition. He demanded that the courts compel Raj Kumari to pay off the unpaid debts of her deceased husband.

The pending loan amount is not staggering. It alone would likely not have broken Raj Kumari. But, it was not just this one debt that was in play. The precedent it would set mattered. If the courts found Raj Kumari liable to repay this loan, her husband’s other creditors would all be emboldened to pursue her through the courts. That could dramatically alter the balance of what she owned and what she owed. That could dramatically alter the shape of her life.

The long chase
Prithi Bahadur owed Ghisiyavan Sahu 525 Company Rupees, the standardized coinage minted by the colonial state. This was perhaps not a single loan taken at one time. Rather, Ghisiyavan Sahu says he was covering Prithi Bahadur’s daily food costs in Banaras.

Prithi Bahadur made some headway in paying off the loan. Not perhaps much headway in Banaras itself. He seems to have left the city for his Guthi lands in Mahottari without making many payments. But Devidatta, the Sahu’s representative in Nepal, followed him to his new residence.

Devidatta appears to have applied consistent pressure demanding repayment from Prithi Bahadur. And this yielded some results. Prithi Bahadur made payments in multiple chunks. Devidatta was perhaps a skilled debt collector. For he was able to get back 391 company rupees, almost 75 percent of the total debt. The remaining unpaid debt was down to 134 Company Rupees. Then, for reasons unknown, the creditors wrote off about nine Rupees. And Prithi Bahadur was still on the hook for 125 Company Rupees.

Though he had whittled down his principal rather substantially, Prithi Bahadur did not pay off the remaining debt. Based on Raj Kumari’s own reporting in her balance sheet, 125 Company Rupees amounted to just about 4.5 percent of the income of the Tulsiyahi Guthi. Of course, this percentage reflects the Guthi’s income over a decade later in 1886. Still, it is not so large an amount given the scale of this family’s assets.

Whatever the reasons, Prithi Bahadur did not pay off this debt. Instead, in 1868, he signed a tamasuk, a debt document. In the tamasuk, Prithi Bahadur agreed that the creditor could sell his belongings. Whatever debt remained outstanding after his things had been sold, they would deal with later, said Prithi Bahadur.

There is no mention of a tamasuk debt document signed in Banaras. This absence does perhaps confirm that this was credit taken for supplies bought over time as Ghisiyavan Sahu claimed. For if Prithi Bahadur had taken a one-time loan in Banaras, a tamasuk would likely have been witnessed and signed. And the collateral would likely have been clearly written down. Most tamasuk documents I have seen in Nepal are very clear on the collateral that underwrote debt. Lands. Vessels. Standing crops. And sometimes people, the debtors themselves or their children. Without such a document, Ghisivayan Sahu had to pursue years of grinding effort to get his money back. That is, until Devidatta got Prithi Bahadur to sign onto a tamasuk.

Then, Prithi Bahadur died.

Whatever relief Devidatta might have felt at having a tamasuk was perhaps short-lived. When he sold off Prithi Bahadur’s belongings, they brought in a mere five rupees, five anna, and one paisa. Devidatta did not say what they sold. I imagine some clothes. Some basic room furnishings.

Was Prithi Bahadur really living in so barebones a fashion, I wonder. Raj Kumari said her sister-in-law Ratna Kumari had told the disgraced Prithi Bahadur to live off the substantial income of the Mahottari Guthi. Perhaps Raj Kumari was not being entirely truthful. Perhaps Prithi Bahadur lived beyond his means. Perhaps the wives who remained with Prithi Bahadur, no doubt aware of his debts, managed to squirrel away the valuables. Either way, after all the trouble of chasing after him and getting the tamasuk signed, Devidatta and Ghisiyavan Sahu were still in the red.

Unseen, unheard, unpaid
Creditors are nothing if not persistent. Devidatta and Ghisiyavan Sahu shifted their recovery efforts to Raj Kumari. After the meagre income that came from selling Prithi Bahadur’s things, 119 rupees, 10 anna and three paisa of the principal still remained to be paid.

Devidatta went to Raj Kumari demanding payment.

Raj Kumari, predictably, refused to pay. She was firm in her refusal. Devidatta reports her saying: ‘I have not even seen it, do not even know of it, why would I pay.’

Whatever pressure tactics Devidatta used on Prithi Bahadur had worked. Partially. Slowly. But a dribble of money had come in. With Raj Kumari, Devidatta thought it necessary to take a different tack. The law was needed to compel her. In 1873, he wrote a petition asking the courts to compel Raj Kumari to pay both the principal and the interest her husband owed.

The legal system moved quickly. On receiving Devidatta’s petition, the Taksar Court informed Raj Kumari she had seven days to present herself. If she appeared, she would get justice as per the law. If she did not appear, she would lose the case. The official summons giving her seven days to appear before the court was pasted on her door.

Then, silence. The paper trail goes dry.

Mounting cases
But then, just as suddenly, almost a decade later in December 1881, Ghisiyavan Sahu appeared again. His representative Devidatta Padhya Dhakal had died sometime in the intervening years. But Ghisiyavan Sahu had appointed another man in Kathmandu to serve as his representative. His demand remained unchanged. Raj Kumari should be made to repay her husband’s loan.

Raj Kumari’s situation in 1881 was substantially different than it had been eight years earlier. In 1873, she and Ratna Kumari were managing their finances tolerably. Or rather, their household tensions had not spilt over into a legal case with financial consequences. Shamsher Bahadur was still a minor. He was not making damaging claims against his aunt.

By 1881, Raj Kumari was mired in two disputes. Each with substantial financial consequences. Shamsher Bahadur was doggedly arguing that his aunt too had lost her caste. He was claiming that she had forfeited her inheritance after having lived with her outcaste husband. If he won, she would lose everything. The Guthis. The private lands. Her right to live in the Naradevi house. Possibly also her ability to claim support from her natal family.

Then there was the dispute over the six Guthis with Ratna Kumari. The latter had demanded that she be allowed to control the Guthis unilaterally for the coming 12 years. If the courts granted her this right, Raj Kumari would lose a prominent source of income for over a decade.

Ghisiyavan Sahu reappeared with his demands for repayment as these other high-stakes disputes were ongoing.

You will not be surprised, dear reader, to learn that Raj Kumari responded to the renewed legal summons forcefully. And in her vehement refusal to pay, she revealed how she had gotten the earlier case to go cold.

All this next week.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On

In the first season titled Listening to the told and untold we met the three main disputants: two young widowed sisters-in-law and the teenage son of one of the women. We followed their claims and counterclaims. One claimed the lands she had been prevented from operating. Another demanded the money that had been hidden from her. Another told the story of a sexual scandal and a related loss of caste. Witnesses chimed in with their own juicy stories.

In Season II, we shift from listening to voices to attending to things. This season, we are Mapping the owned and the owed. In mapping the tangible things they owned and owed we also map things more intangible —obligations, desire, status—but no less important. These maps of the owned and owed offer a fresh point of view on the fiery, simmering dispute Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur remained entangled in.

In Episode 1, we circled above the Guthis, getting a bird’s-eye view of the scale, spread, and duties of the six disputed endowments established to feed people, monkeys, and cows. In Episode 2, we unpacked Raj Kumari’s balance sheet, discovering that the six disputed Guthis brough in the equivalent of a shipping container of grain and a backpack of silver. In Episode 3, we unpacked Ratna Kumari’s balance sheet discovering that the Guthis held the equivalent of 504 football fields of land. In Episode 4, we traced Raj Kumari’s balance sheet, watching the shipping container of grains dwindle to a handful of silver that remained as profit. In Episode 5, Ratna Kumari claimed that the shipping container of grain did not dwindle, but rather turned into pouchfuls of silver.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode by hitting play where it says “Listen to post” at the very top.

Leaning into frustration
These balance sheets have frustrated me. Part of the frustration has come from my own struggles to make sense of them. Rereading. Recalculating. Recategorizing.

But there are other causes of frustration too.

These balance sheets leave out so much. Without explanation, they obscure information essential to thorough accounting. A large chunk of expense is reported without any explanation of what it was spent on. Calculations that don’t quite add up pepper both sheets. And then, the big one. No one comments on or demands an explanation of the huge discrepancy in profits.

Fortunately, frustrations are often where the most fun and interesting histories lie.

We know someone at the Kotilinga Court reviewed the balance sheets. Recall that they asked Ratna Kumari to clarify the inclusion of a new Guthi in her accounting. But they did not demand explanations of other errors or omissions. I take this to mean that the courts did not care to reconcile these discrepancies. That they were keen to move to a resolution. Perhaps it was high time given that the case had dragged on for over a decade. But this is a story for Season III, when we get to exploring the courts’ handling of the dispute.

For now, we stick to these balance sheets. We have already discussed the big number. Ratna Kumari’s balance sheet showed a 17 times greater profit than Raj Kumari’s. But the very different categories of accounting they used did not let us make finer comparisons at a glance. To make such comparisons possible, I recalculated their balance sheets around comparable categories. And turned each of their accounts into an hourglass. Rather than drown in a tidal wave of numbers, the hourglasses let us quickly grasp relationships and relative scales.

Yes, the bottom lines are impossible to reconcile. Frustratingly, so. Still, these balance sheets do tell us a great deal about the assets, incomes, and accounting of Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari. And they are also a beginning in a much larger sense. If we look at them carefully enough, they start to show us what it meant, materially speaking, to be an elite household in Kathmandu. The accounts of the poor often do not survive in writing. Starting with elites like Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari is often a good way to poke into the fortunes of many other peoples in a society.

Two hourglasses, both unalike in scale

The top half of the hourglass represents the income (left quadrant) and expenses as well as the remainder (right quadrant) in grains the two women reported. Five of the six disputed Guthis reported income in grains. A notable category.

The unspent grains are converted into coin, flowing into the lower chamber through the narrow white waist.

The bottom half of the hourglass represents the income (left quadrant) and expenses as well as the remainder (right quadrant) in coin. The largest of the disputed Guthis reported income entirely in coin. Other Guthis paid small taxes in coin. And the grains converted to coin were a notable part of the Guthis overall income.

Along the grain

Raj Kumari paid out a lot of the incoming rice, wheat, maize, and millet in grain form itself. What did she do with it? She doesn’t say. Perhaps some went to feed the people who came to the sadabarta charitable kitchen. Perhaps some of it went to feed the 60 Brahmins for whom the Saptami Shraddha Guthi prepared kheer every month. But, some of it surely went out as raw grains. Fixed amounts were likely given to her cleaners, cooks, caretakers, gardeners as payment for their labour. Making such payments in kind was a widespread practice at the time.

Amidst all our guesswork, Raj Kumari does reveal some small details of everyday life that year. She wrote off some 18 muris of grain as promised. She does not say to whom or for what. But some of her lands got flooded that year. She also wrote off some 8 muris of grain washed away by a river.

Few expenses

Like her sister-in-law, Ratna Kumari reports income in five types of grains and a lentil. She reveals that the Shraddha Guthi produced the entire amount of husked rice they reported. And that the Chaughara Guthi produced the bulk of the unhusked rice. These two Guthis must have owned fertile, likely irrigated, lands capable of producing rice.

Meanwhile, Ratna Kumari reports a much smaller amount of expenses in grain than Raj Kumari. How come? We don’t know. It is one of the frustrating mysteries of these balance sheets.

Grains to coin

Both women report pretty similar incomes in grains. The total amount of grains earned aligns closely. And the numbers for the individual grains are not dissimilar. Something else they agree on.

But, you need to keep in mind that these numbers don’t represent all the grains produced on the Guthi lands. That amount would be much larger. These balance sheets show us only what the landlords get paid. Tenant farmers took their share at agreed upon rates. Possibly there were other contractors and intermediaries who would have promised the women a fixed amount of grains annually. And they would work in a profit for themselves as well.

The actual amount of grains produced filled more than a single shipping container.

On the expenses end, both women convert the unspent grains into a monetary amount. This was perhaps not just an accounting practice. That is to say, they were not just writing the monetary value of the remaining grains for the courts. Rather, they seem to have sold the grains.

The money they earned from the grains flows down the narrow waist of the hourglass into the bottom chamber.

Confusions and fragments

Raj Kumari’s cash income can be divided into three categories. There was, of course, the money earned from selling the unspent grains. A small amount of money also came in as a type of tax called ghiyukhane. Literally translated as the tax for eating clarified butter (yum!), the ghiyukhane levy was often paid to local power holders. The single largest amount was the income of the Madhesh Narayan Guthi. Here, the tenants or contractors themselves sold the grains. And paid Raj Kumari in coin.

Raj Kumari offers no breakdown of the large income from Madhesh Narayan. Equally, she offers few details (in the lower right quadrant) on where the money got spent. She clubs the expenses of two Guthis together, making it impossible to establish expenses even at the level of the individual Guthi. She claims to have spent over 40 percent of the total cash income on the Madhesh Narayan Guthi. But she does not specify where the large amount of cash went.

Raj Kumari also introduces an expense category for the Paknajol Sadabarta charitable kitchen in Kathmandu. In doing so, she appears to have split the costs of the charitable kitchen from the larger costs of the Annapurneshwar Guthi of which it was a part. She also includes the expenses for Ladeshwar, a manifestation of Shiva– a temple or Guthi which has has not appeared elsewhere in this dispute–in this category. As I said, confusing and frustrating for us. Though it all likely made perfect sense to her contemporaries.

Confusions aside, little fragments of information peer out at us. Raj Kumari writes that she earned some husked rice–amounting to under 4 rupees– from “the broken down house at the Lubhu Dhansar.” This rice came from the granary, dhansar, in Lubhu, a settlement on the eastern outskirts of Kathmandu. This is a little clue that at least a portion of the Guthi lands were located in Lubhu.

Numbers by the Guthi

Ratna Kumari’s cash income too fits under the same three categories. The income she shows from the Madhesh Narayan Guthi compares to that reported by Raj Kumari. So too does the scale of the ghiyukhane tax paid by tenants working the lands of the Shraddha Guthi.

Ratna Kumari helpfully breaks down her expenses by Guthi. We get to see that the largest expenses were incurred by the Madhesh Narayan and Shraddha Guthis. This is perhaps sensible. For the former ran a sadabarta charitable kitchen and the latter fed 60 Brahmins every month.

Irreconcilable

They show such vastly different expenses. Raj Kumari says she spent 94.5 percent of income to keep the endowments properly operational. Ratna Kumari says just 15.4 percent of the total income was required to keep the Guthis running. Raj Kumari’s and Ratna Kumari’s bottom lines are not at all reconcilable.

What it meant to be elite
Throughout these two seasons, I have called Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari elite women. I have stressed that they married into a storied family. One with a long, carefully recorded, genealogy. One with close, fluctuating, ties to power. I have also stressed that Raj Kumari’s natal family likely had close kinship ties to the ruling regime.

But what did it mean, in material terms, to be elite? Genealogies. Political connections. Long recorded histories. Caste Status. These are all important parts of being elites. But wealth, assets, income surely matter too. As a community, we historians of Nepal have not offered any clear answers as to what kind of wealth elite families like Raj Kumari’s and Ratna Kumari’s held. So we cannot say whether these women were financially better or worse off than their kin and peers.

All the digging we have done into these balance sheets over these six episodes sets down firm numbers and scales. A shipping container full of grains. A few pouches full of silver. Did Raj Kumari’s and Ratna Kumari’s kin and peers too own just about this much? Perhaps they had more. Perhaps less.

But, of course, elites also incurred massive expenses. This was true across South Asia. Patronage was and remains essential to being seen as a big, important, family. Entourages have to be fed and clothed. Acts of piety and charity have to be undertaken. The family has to be decked out in splendor.

It is not impossible for everything that comes in to flow right back out. This is what Raj Kumari would have us believe about the Guthis. Old, landed, elites were often cash strapped. And they could be heavily indebted.

Raj Kumari’s and Ratna Kumari’s household too had creditors knocking at the door. The two women did not perhaps enjoy whatever the loans had been used to purchase. For the creditor was suing to get back a loan taken out by Prithi Bahadur. Remember him? Raj Kumari’s husband. Prithi Bahadur had been long deceased by the time these balance sheets were submitted. While alive, he had, in a sense, set this dragging dispute into motion with his sexual transgressions, leaving a trail of chaos in his wake. Prithi Bahadur had taken the loan before he died. He had not paid it back. And the creditor came after his wife, throwing Raj Kumari into yet another dispute over money and assets.

All this next week.

Some notes to read the images

• For an easier reading experience, I have rounded numbers and volumes. If you take the trouble of adding things up, they will not add up exactly. You can check out the precise numbers in the images I shared in Episode 4 and Episode 5.

• There are discrepancies in balance sheets themselves. Places where totals don’t add up. Things are not off by a huge amount. But off all the same. I have reported the amounts as Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari reported them, discrepancies and all.

• I have kept the grain measure in muri, a volumetric unit. It is hard to convert into kilos. Check out Episode 2 for a visual sense of what a muri amounts to.

• As I said last week, I am still figuring out how to read these balance sheets. And I am bad at numbers. If you find any errors (I am sure there are some. Sigh.) do please let me know. I would be so grateful.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On

In the first season titled Listening to the told and untold we met the three main disputants: two young widowed sisters-in-law and the teenage son of one of the women. We followed their claims and counterclaims. One claimed the lands she had been prevented from operating. Another demanded the money that had been hidden from her. Another told the story of a sexual scandal and a related loss of caste. Witnesses chimed in with their own juicy stories.

In Season II, we shift from listening to voices to attending to things. This season, we are Mapping the owned and the owed. In mapping the tangible things they owned and owed we also map things more intangible —obligations, desire, status—but no less important. These maps of the owned and owed offer a fresh point of view on the fiery, simmering dispute Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur remained entangled in.

In Episode 1, we circled above the Guthis, getting a bird’s-eye view of the scale, spread, and duties of the six disputed endowments established to feed people, monkeys, and cows. In Episode 2, we unpacked Raj Kumari’s balance sheet, discovering that the six disputed Guthis brough in the equivalent of a shipping container of grain and a backpack of silver. In Episode 3, we unpacked Ratna Kumari’s balance sheet discovering that the Guthis held the equivalent of 504 football fields of land. In Episode 4, we traced Raj Kumari’s balance sheet, watching the shipping container of grains dwindle to a handful of silver that remained as profit.

No audio this week because the post is intended to give you a sense of how Ratna Kumari organized her balance sheet. And you have to look at the visuals for that.

Just one more
Are you a little bored with how fixated I am on these two Guthi balance sheets, dear reader?

I fear you are.

In the first season, the story moved forward every week. New information. Fresh scandals. Deeper character building. Greater access to their home. Something novel greeted us every week. The twists and turns were non-stop.

This season, things have been somewhat repetitive. We have been stuck at these two balance sheets. We have not moved passed the Guthis.

Let me tell you why I am spending so much time on accounting.

I am convinced that these balance sheets hold many stories that are not found elsewhere in the other legal documents related to this case. But I myself am grappling with how to tease out these stories. Numbers are not my strong suit in life. And the notations and systems and logics that guide these balance sheets are not deeply familiar to me. To make things harder, Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari organized their balance sheets so differently.

I have had to think creatively to make comparable categories and to present them visually. And I have had to check and double check all my readings and interpretations (I have still made many mistakes I am sure!) All this has taken time. And iteration.

But I have now figured out some of the stories hidden in these documents. And I am going to tell you these stories through these two hourglasses representing Raj Kumari’s and Ratna Kumari’s balance sheets next week. Each quadrant and each band has its own tale to tell. The most dramatic tale being the huge difference in Guthi profits the two women claim as the raspberry block of colour closing out the bottom right quadrant shows.

After that, I promise that we will get back to a juicy story filled with new people, places, and things all intersecting to create twists and turns. So, please bear with me and my obsession with these balance sheets for just one more week.

So then, with this promise of more excitement to come shortly, here goes with a breakdown of Ratna Kumari’s balance sheet.

Issuing a Correction
Just a week later, Bakhat Bahadur Thapa Chhetri submitted an amendment to this balance sheet on behalf of Ratna Kumari. The Kotilinga Court had demanded an explanation from Bakhat Bahadur. It asked if the Guthi that fed wheat to cows on the day of the Gai Jatra festival was the same as the Gajadaleshwar Guthi. The former was not included in the balance sheet. And the latter had not been named as part of the dispute before its inclusion in this balance sheet.

Bakhat Bahadur clarified that the Gajadaleshwar Guthi was not part of the dispute. It was wrongly included in the balance sheet. And he submitted an addendum with the accounts of the endowment that fed wheat to the cows on the day of the Gai Jatra festival.

It was a small Guthi. It earned 20 rupees and had a remainder of under 6 rupees.

The error on Bakhat Bahadur’s part is not a good look though. No? I wonder how it happened. I had always assumed that the women appointed men skilled in managing disputes as their representatives. But perhaps this was not the case. We will have to wait till season 3 to unpack all the legal twists and turns of the case.

For now, we just need to wrap up our explorations of the balance sheets by comparing the hourglasses I shared at the top of this episode. We already know that the two women presented radically different expenses. Raj Kumari said she was left with but a handful of silver as profit. Ratna Kumari, meanwhile, said the Guthis cost little to maintain. Most of the money came to the family. And it was a tidy sum. An amount close to the money Raj Kumari accused Ratna Kumari of hiding in the walls of their dhukuti treasury in three leather pouches.

Within this larger drama of the difference in profit, there are many smaller and quieter but no less meaningful stories.

All this next week.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On

In the first season titled Listening to the told and untold we met the three main disputants: two young widowed sisters-in-law and the teenage son of one of the women. We followed their claims and counterclaims. One claimed the lands she had been prevented from operating. Another demanded the money that had been hidden from her. Another told the story of a sexual scandal and a related loss of caste. Witnesses chimed in with their own juicy stories.

In Season II, we shift from listening to voices to attending to things. This season, we are Mapping the owned and the owed. In mapping the tangible things they owned and owed we also map things more intangible —obligations, desire, status—but no less important. These maps of the owned and owed offer a fresh point of view on the fiery, simmering dispute Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur remained entangled in.

In Episode 1, we circled above the Guthis, getting a bird’s-eye view of the scale, spread, and duties of the six disputed endowments established to feed people, monkeys, and cows. In Episode 2, we unpacked Raj Kumari’s balance sheet, discovering that the six disputed Guthis brough in the equivalent of a shipping container of grain and a backpack of silver. In Episode 3, we unpacked Ratna Kumari’s balance sheet discovering that the Guthis held the equivalent of 504 football fields of land.

No audio this week as this is such a visual heavy post.

Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari had very different bottom lines as we saw last week. The profit Ratna Kumari claimed from the Guthis was 17 times larger than that claimed by Raj Kumari. No small amount. As promised, we are now poring over the account sheets. And we are making sense of them visually rather than with our usual text-heavy storytelling.

The throughline of Raj Kumari’s account sheet is how her numbers dwindle from an overflowing shipping container to a mere handful of coins.

The week after next, we will watch her income literally flow out through this hourglass below. Raj Kumari’s income from the Guthis is represented on the left and her expenses on the right. The top portion deals in grains. The bottom portion deals in cash. And the white band in the middle marks the conversion of grain into cash. Each band represents a different commodity or expense category.

The little band of pink at the bottom right represents all the money that was left in Raj Kumari’s hands at the end of the year in April 1886.

This image is just a taste of what is to come. We will give numbers and scales and details to each of these bands in the weeks to come.

For now, this week, have a look below at how Raj Kumari’s account sheet was organized. The differences between the sisters-in-law’s stories will become immediately evident once we see Ratna Kumari’s account sheet alongside Raj Kumari’s and compare their hourglasses side by side

All this starting next week.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On

In the first season titled Listening to the told and untold we met the three main disputants: two young widowed sisters-in-law and the teenage son of one of the women. We followed their claims and counterclaims. One claimed the lands she had been prevented from operating. Another demanded the money that had been hidden from her. Another told the story of a sexual scandal and a related loss of caste. Witnesses chimed in with their own juicy stories.

In Season II, we shift from listening to voices to attending to things. This season, we are Mapping the owned and the owed. In mapping the tangible things they owned and owed we also map things more intangible —obligations, desire, status—but no less important. These maps of the owned and owed offer a fresh point of view on the fiery, simmering dispute Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur remained entangled in.

In Episode 1, we circled above the Guthis, getting a bird’s-eye view of the scale, spread, and duties of the six disputed endowments established to feed people, monkeys, and cows. In Episode 2, we unpacked Raj Kumari’s balance sheet, discovering that the six disputed Guthis brough in the equivalent of a shipping container of grain and a backpack of silver.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

Two styles
As they neared a final decision on the case, the courts demanded financial information from the two women. Like her sister-in-law, Ratna Kumari submitted a balance sheet showing the income, expenses, and remainders of the six disputed Guthis for the year starting in April 1885.

But Ratna Kumari organized her account sheet very differently from Raj Kumari. Of course she did, you are saying. These women just have such different styles.

Ratna Kumari’s balance sheet was organized around individual Guthis. She wrote down the amount of land each Guthi owned, its income, expenses, and remainders. Raj Kumari, meanwhile, had done a great deal more aggregation in her balance sheet. She had presented a more complex–for better or worse–document.

It is tempting to make something of these women’s character from their different styles of account keeping. Sadly, that is too far a stretch with the given evidence. Accountants, scribes, and the like would have had a say in how the balance sheets were made. These experts perhaps even drove the process with little input from the women. It is hard to say.

But Ratna Kumari’s account sheet does tell us a different story than Raj Kumari’s. The conflicting stories present the profits the disputed Guthis brought in distinct lights. And, they suggest something about Ratna Kumari’s access to and relationship with the six disputed Guthis.

The biggest holdings
The Tulsiyahi Guthi was the largest of the six Guthis. It held the most land. And it earned the most income. Recall that this Guthi located in the plains of Mahottari was endowed to run two sadabarta charitable kitchens. One sadabarta was operated in Mahottari itself. And the other in Paknajol, near the women’s home in Kathmandu.

The Guthi in Mahottari owned 500 bighas of land. I cannot be sure what exactly constituted a bigha in this place at the time of the endowment. Units of measurements are diverse and shifting.

But it was a vast amount of land. I asked the internet to help give us a comprehensible sense of scale. As per the current unit of the bigha in the Nepali Terai, 500 bighas is equal to 474 football fields at the standard size mandated by FIFA

From these vast lands, Ratna Kumari says the Guthi generated an income of just under 3142 (3141।।) rupees. Recall that Raj Kumari claimed Ratna Kumari found 3000 mohar rupees and 800 Patna rupees in their dhukuti treasury and hid the amount. The dhukuti find equaled the annual income of their by far largest and most profitable Guthi. No wonder Raj Kumari claimed the money.

With this large income, this expansive Guthi supported the sadabarta charitable kitchen in Paknajol, near the women’s house in Kathmandu. But the Paknajol Guthi had its own lands and income too. It owned 70 ropanis of land. About 5 football fields. And it earned just under 332 (331 ।²।2) rupees in income from these lands.

Equivalent to five football fields is no small amount of land. It pales only when put next to the endless land holdings of the Tulsiyahi Guthi.

The women’s second largest Guthi was the Shraddha Guthi. Recall that this Guthi fed kheer to 60 Brahmins on the seventh day of the fortnight when the moon was waxing towards brightness. And it did so in memory of the assassinated ascetic king Rana Bahadur Shah.

This Guthi had 170 ropanis of land. The size of about 16 football fields. And it had an income just under 1359 (1358।।।.।।1) mohar rupees, just under half the income of the Tulsiyahi Guthi. But unlike the latter endowment, its income was not raised in coin. Rather, the Guthi earned income in husked and unhusked rice, wheat, and a tax called ghiyukhane. The latter was a very minor amount. The bulk of this cash that Ratna Kumari reports came from converting the grains earned by the Guthi into a monetary amount.

The land beneath the numbers
The total amount of land each Guthi owned is, of course, important. But we should not let the football field metaphor mislead us. Football pitches are flat, even, neat. The Guthi lands were none of these things.

Much of the agricultural lands in the plains of Mahottari were likely flat. But the eye would not see them as one visual unit extending continuously into the horizon. Plots would be divided into different sizes, and worked by different peoples. Rivers and streams would run across in places. Tenant farmers would have built homesteads on some of the land. Different crops would be grown depending on many factors. Soil quality. Access to irrigation. Season. And other social considerations.

All the lands were also likely not used for staple crops. Other kinds of uses are almost certain. Fruit orchards. Pasture and fodder for animals. Ponds for water and pisciculture. Clusters of forest. And land marked administratively as ‘waste’. That is to say lands unsuitable for agriculture for any number of reasons.

The conditions were altogether otherwise in the Kathmandu Valley and its surrounding hills where the remaining five Guthis held lands. The climate was dramatically different. Some of the lands must have been terraced fields etched into hills and mountains. The norms of tenancy, labour, and agricultural skill were varied.

So many factors go into working the soil. And small differences in climate, water, altitude, soil quality, and cultures of work and knowledge matter immensely.

Saying each Guthi owned land equal to x number of football fields is useful. It helps us imagine the scale of the lands Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari were fighting over. But we should not imagine these lands as monotonous football fields. These lands were ecologically, demographically, and culturally diverse.

The diversity of these lands required much fine decision making. Crop cycles. Tenancy terms. Taxation norms. Storage. The decision making was continuous. And supervision and enforcement a constant concern.

Did Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari make and drive all these decisions? I am tempted to say not. We do not have the evidence to say for sure. But I imagine layers of workers and intermediaries in the picture. Contractors. Tenants. Managers. Accountants. The small choices and decisions of all these actors were consequential, I imagine.

My instinct that the two women were not involved in the everyday workings of their lands is not only because of their gender. I would assume the same if their husbands were fighting over these six Guthis. These lands were far away from their home. Travel was difficult and time-consuming. And families of this social class had a culture of outsourcing everyday labour.

I wonder though, whether Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari learnt to read the balance sheets and ask piercing questions of their subordinates. It seems an important skill in the middle of a dispute. But, as we know from our own lives, we often fail to acquire life skills we would do well to have.

The rest of the six
Anyhow, back to the Guthis. The four remaining Guthis were progressively smaller in size and income.

The Chaughara Guthi had 88 ropanis of land. About 6.27 football fields. And it had an income of just under 371 (370।.।।।1) mohar rupees.

The Makal Guthi, which fed maize to monkeys, had 36 ropanis of land. About 2.56 football fields. And it had an income of just under 97 (96।।㇀।2) mohar rupees.

The Gai Guthi, which fed wheat to the cows, had four ropanis of land. Just about a quarter of a football field. It earned 20 rupees.

Seventeen times the difference
Ratna Kumari does not give an aggregated number of the total income earned from all the Guthis. Nor does she give an aggregate number for the total remainder. She only reports income, expenses, and remainder by Guthi.

Adding together the remainder she provides for the six Guthis, we get a total of just under 4348 (4347²।।2) mohar rupees.

Compare this to the just under 255 (254³।3) mohar rupees Raj Kumari claimed as the remainder.

4348 is roughly 17 times 255.

This is no small rounding error. The large gap arises from fundamentally different reporting of the six Guthis’ expenses.

Two stories
Balance sheets do tell stories. And the difference in remainder suggests its own stories.

The story of Raj Kumari’s balance sheet was that the bulk of the Guthis’ income was spent. However large the income might have been, she had very little left in hand at the end of the year. This is what Raj Kumari claimed.

Ratna Kumari’s story is that the Guthis were very profitable. The person who controlled them made a neat sum annually. This is Ratna Kumari’s story.

I glean yet another story in comparing the two balance sheets. Ratna Kumari’s balance sheet does not account for the unexpected expenses on the ground. No mention of additional payouts to workers. Or the cost of maintaining infrastructure. Or exemptions for flood-affected lands. These categories of expenses permeated Raj Kumari’s accounts. Ratna Kumari seems to rely on the mandated income and expense numbers. Perhaps she was drawing from an official document–potentially recalculated and recalibrated at various intervals–that laid out the Guthis’ income and expenses.

We can, we should, be suspicious about Raj Kumari inflating her expenses. But we should equally find it unconvincing that Ratna Kumari has such a clean accounting so lacking in the unexpected.

Perhaps we should not be too critical of Ratna Kumari, however. Her entire case is premised on the claim that she has been prevented from running the Guthis for the past 12 years. To provide the courts with detailed accounts, she would have needed to know what had happened in the Guthis that year. If she did not have access to the Guthi operations, Ratna Kumari could not have known the unexpected details outside the formal documents.

At the same time, both balance sheets are engineered to give their respective authors the upper hand in the legal dispute. If Ratna Kumari won, she would presumably be awarded half the income the Guthis had earned over the past 12 years. If the courts decided in her favour, Ratna Kumari would profit from the Guthis having large profits.

If Raj Kumari won the case, the amount she claimed in the balance sheets would not matter. But if she lost, and she had to pay Ratna Kumari half, it would perhaps be to her benefit to show low profits.

We now have a clear sense of the scale, spread, and duties of the six disputed Guthis. We have an equally clear sense of Raj Kumari’s and Ratna Kumari’s bottom lines.

Over the next few weeks, we will dig into all the delicious minutiae in Ratna Kumari’s and Raj Kumari’s balance sheets. I imagine poring over balance sheets and rechecking accounts is not your idea of fun, dear reader. Fear not. I’ll pore over the balance sheets. And I will tell the story of the accounts in visual–rather than our usual text-heavy–posts. You can just browse these fun and insightful visual stories.

All this next week.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On

In the first season titled Listening to the told and untold we met the three main disputants: two young widowed sisters-in-law and the teenage son of one of the women. We followed their claims and counterclaims. One claimed the lands she had been prevented from operating. Another demanded the money that had been hidden from her. Another told the story of a sexual scandal and a related loss of caste. Witnesses chimed in with their own juicy stories.

In Season II, we shift from listening to voices to attending to things. This season, we are Mapping the owned and the owed. In mapping the tangible things they owned and owed we also map things more intangible —obligations, desire, status—but no less important. These maps of the owned and owed offer a fresh point of view on the fiery, simmering dispute Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur remained entangled in.

In Episode 1, we circled above the Guthis, getting a bird’s-eye view of the scale, spread, and duties of the six disputed endowments established to feed people, monkeys, and cows.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

Income, expense, remainder
As they neared a final decision on the case, the courts needed financial information. In 1886, both Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari submitted balance sheets detailing the income, expenses, and remainder of the six disputed Guthis. Shamsher Bahadur was not asked to submit a balance sheet. Though the scion of the lineage, he appears to have been sidelined from the Guthis.

The courts sent the two women the same instructions. They asked for the same information from them. The courts wanted the details of the income, expenses, and remainder of the six Guthis for the year starting in April 1885.

And yet…

There is always an ‘and yet…’, with these two women, isn’t there?

And yet, they both compiled very different balance sheets. Different in terms of how they organized information. But also different in that they ended up with a vastly different number for the profits remaining in their hands after all the required expenses.

Balance sheets seem perhaps like dull, dry things. But balance sheets are as much storytelling as the long petitions that grounded our explorations last season.

Raj Kumari’s and Ratna Kumari’s balance sheets tell divergent stories. It is perhaps no surprise given that these two women have been disputing each other’s stories at every turn.

Today, we start with the story Raj Kumari’s balance sheet tells us.

Grain by the container
Let’s start with the income. The balance sheet is long and detailed. Before we get into its minutiae, we should familiarize ourselves with the top lines.

According to Raj Kumari, in the year ending in April 1886, the six Guthis combined earned a total of just under 404 (she writes 403।1।7।6 in one line and 403।1।7।8 in another) muris of jinsi, goods, and just under 3368 (3367।।।²١) rupees in coin.

The workings of these units and the value of these numbers are likely unclear to you. But fear not. By the end of this piece, you will have clarity enough.

The just under 404 muris of grain Raj Kumari claims as income is an oddly aggregated number. It is the income in goods of five of the six Guthis. But the aggregated number includes different types of grains and lentils. Unhusked rice. Husked rice. Wheat. Maize. Millet. And a small amount of black lentils. It can seem like adding up apples and oranges. A notable choice in this case because their market values are so different.

But Raj Kumari accounts for these differences further down in the balance sheet. She submits disaggregated numbers by grain and by Guthi. And she gives different market rates per unit for each grain and lentil. This aggregate is just the top line opening up the balance sheet.

So, five of the six Guthis produced a total of 403।1।7।6 or 403।1।7।8–both numbers appear in different parts of the balance sheet–muris of grains and lentils. To be more precise, they produced 403 muris, one pathi, seven manas, and six or eight muthis. Muri, pathi, mana, and muthi are all volumetric units. It is difficult to convert the unit into a precise weight because grains are of varied size and density.

The internet tells me that a muri of grain could weigh from 50 to 70 kilos approximately. So 404 muris would be approximately 25 metric tonnes. That is a large number. Still, I find visualizations helpful and asked the internet to help me out. Apparently 404 muris of grain would fill a standard 20 foot shipping container with a little bit even spilling out the door.

I have not fact checked the internet’s numbers. So let’s take it with a pinch of salt. But a muri was made up of 20 pathis. We saw an image of a pathi vessel last week as well. So we could take the 20 pathi vessels below and multiply that by 404 to imagine the giant mound of grains that results.

I went down a rabbit hole of checking the current prices of different grains per metric tonne in different world markets. And multiplying that by 25 metric tonnes. I’ll not bore you with all the numbers. But it is a substantial amount of money.

No wonder Raj Kumari, Ratna Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur were fighting so hard and so long over these Guthis.

Silver by the kilo
Then there was the income in coin. The Tulsiyahi Guthi did not receive its income in grains. It operated entirely in coin. Recall that the Tulsiyahi Guthi was located in the plains of Mahottari very close to the border with Bihar. The Guthi’s many tenants and contractors did grow grains, lentils, and perhaps some cash crops. But they did not simply pay some fraction of these agricultural goods as rents and taxes. Instead, they paid their rents and taxes in coin after selling their products. The area had a deeply monetized economy, it appears. Likely a consequence of the fertility of the soil, the possibility of wheeled transport, and the integration into markets to the north and south.

The total income in coin from the Tulsiyahi Guthi amounted to just under 3337 (3336।।²١) rupees. There was also just over 31 (31।) rupees in the 16 Gandi system of accounting that came as taxes from other Guthis.

This number too is an aggregate. The actual rents and taxes were paid in different currencies. The balance sheet notes four systems of minting and accounting. The Mohar rupees system of minting and accounting prevalent in Nepal. The 16 Gandi Paisa system of counting and accounting for copper coins. The Company Rupees, likely the standardized coins minted across India by the British after 1835. And the Patna Rupees, perhaps the coins minted by the Patna mint before the standardization. Raj Kumari does not just add these coins of varying value into a single aggregate. She converts them into mohar rupees at the prevalent exchange rates.

What would this money be worth today? Precision is difficult. The coins were a combination of silver and copper. Coins of the same denomination could have had different amounts of metal of varied purity in them. But we can do some reasonable speculation to get a sense of the scale. We can take a mohar coin as being made up of 5.6 grams of silver. We can assume that Raj Kumari had 3337 mohar silver coins in hand. In this scenario, she would have over 18 kilograms of silver.

On September 27, the standard rate of silver globally was USD 2,065.96 per kilogram. So 18 kilograms of silver would equal USD 37,187.28 or NPR 5,699,720.44.

This is a lot of money. Again, no wonder Raj Kumari, Ratna Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur were fighting so hard and so long over these Guthis.

The cost of upkeep
So much for income. There was a lot of it. Grains enough to fill a shipping container. And coin enough to be heavy to carry in a backpack. That was when the income came in. How full was the container and how heavy the backpack after all the expenses were paid out?

Raj Kumari claims the container and the backpack were considerably lightened by all the expenses. She says that just under 143 (142।12।4) muris were spent fulfilling the core, mandated obligations of the Guthis.

Just under two thirds of the total income in goods remained after the essential expenses. These remaining grains had a monetary value of just under 1314 mohar rupees (13(13?)।।³। 3–the final two digits of the rupee unit are hard to read). And Raj Kumari still had in hand the just under 3368 (3367।।।²١) mohar rupees income in coin from the Tulsiyahi and other Guthis.

After making the core expenses of the Guthis in grain, Raj Kumari had just under 467(0?) (467(0?)।.।।) mohar rupees in hand.

But most of this flowed out in expenses.

Raj Kumari claims she spent just under 4420 (4419।।²) rupees on the Guthis.

She does not offer very sharp details on where the money went. But there are a few broad headings. Some of the money went to purchase ritual items needed for the daily worship of the deities. Some money went to the ritual specialists. But these are relatively minor expenses.

Most of the money went on building and repair. Building and maintaining infrastructure is a universally expensive affair. Raj Kumari spent money building an embankment when a river flooded lands belonging to the Paknajol Guthi. It cost a pretty sum to repair the sattal rest house and the dewal housing the deities in either the Shraddha or Chaughara Guthis. Repairing the sattal, dewal, and pokhari pond of the Paknajol Guthi was not cheap. The single largest cash expense of just under 1951 (1950।।³।।3) mohar rupees was incurred in the Tulsiyahi Guthi. Raj Kumari does not say what it was spent on.

Raj Kumari says just under 255 (254³।3) mohar rupees remained as profits from all six Guthis for the year ending in April 1886.

A lot or a little?
The story of Raj Kumari’s balance sheet is that the bulk of the Guthis’ income went to maintaining infrastructure. The regular mandated activities of the Guthis ate up a rather small amount of the income. But the cost of building, repairing, and maintaining infrastructure was expensive. This aligns with Raj Kumari’s story that both the Gurujyu and Ratna Kumari gave over control of the Guthis because they could not keep up with all the required repairs.

Though the income from the Guthis looks large, Raj Kumari claimed she ended up with just under 255 mohar rupees in hand at the end of the year.

Whether this was a lot or little is relative. Just a few years after Raj Kumari submitted her account sheet, the Kadel Chowk royal gold and silver workshop needed to hire skilled artisans. They discussed paying the artisans who did the skilled work of cutting patterns in silver some one anna and two paisa per tola, just under 12 grams, of silver worked. We do not know how long it took the artisan to work this amount of silver. If it amounted to a day’s wage–and we are not sure that it did–it would take the artisan over seven years to earn 255 mohar rupees.

But the amount is relative in another direction too. Ratna Kumari says a much, much larger sum of money remained in hand. Ratna Kumari’s balance sheet tells another story altogether. It differs substantially from her sister-in-law’s.

And we are back to where we started. Comparing the two women’s stories and worlds. Last season we probed the very different descriptions of events and agreements the women wrote in their petitions. This season we are probing the numbers and line items in their balance sheet. So then, onwards to what Ratna Kumari has to report.

All this next week.

A note. The aggregated numbers Raj Kumari writes and my calculations of the details she submits are not always tallying up. This could be an error in my transcription. Or an error in my calculation. Or, it could be an error in Raj Kumari’s calculation. I’ll work through the details of the balance sheet in the coming weeks. And I will issue corrections as I identify the errors, whether my own or Raj Kumari’s. Please message me with any discrepancies you spot. Your input will be of great help to me.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On

We have just completed the first season titled Listening to the told and untold where we met the three main disputants: two young widowed sisters-in-law and the teenage son of one of the women. We followed their claims and counterclaims. One claimed the lands she had been prevented from operating. Another demanded the money that had been hidden from her. Another told the story of a sexual scandal and a related loss of caste. Witnesses chimed in with their own juicy stories.

If you are just joining us, please read the introduction that lays out the shape of the story as it will unfold in four seasons, a sequel, and a prequel. Please also check out the guide to Season I with summaries of and links to each episode.

In Season II, we shift from listening to voices to attending to things. This season, we are Mapping the owned and the owed. This household owned vast lands, the grains the lands produced, slaves, and trunks of valuables. But their list of expenses, the spread of what they owed, was vast too. Outstanding loans. Wages. Payouts mandated by endowments. Maintenance of their sprawling infrastructure. The upkeep of a large household.

The lands they fought over so doggedly have their own histories. The account sheets they submitted tell their own stories. The closed trunks dotting the dhukuti treasury have their own textures. In Season II, we map these histories, stories, and textures. In the process, we map things more intangible—obligations, desire, status—but no less important. These maps of the owned and owed offer a fresh point of view on the fiery, simmering dispute Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur remained entangled in.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

Back to the beginning
This case started with Guthis. In the monsoon of 1874, Ratna Kumari wrote a petition saying her younger sister-in-law Raj Kumari had taken sole control of all six of the family’s Guthis. The control of and profit from the Guthis should have been switching between them every year. But Raj Kumari had been running and profiting from the Guthis alone for the past 12 years, from 1861 to 1873. As reparations, Ratna Kumari demanded that she be given sole control of and profits from the Guthis for the next twelve years, from 1874 to 1886. Thereafter, they should take turns running the Guthi, with control and profits switching annually.

In the course of the dispute, neither of the women focused on the workings of the Guthis. Their dispute was about who had rights over the Guthis. Who had been running them. Who owed whom what compensation. And how rights and profits should be handled in the future. Reasonably, these are the issues they were vocal and articulate about.

Our interests range far wider. We will spend three weeks probing the minutiae of these six Guthis. Today, we begin with a bird’s-eye view of the scale, spread, and duties of these six endowments.

Feeding and sheltering
One of the Guthis fulfilled its duties in Paknajol, very close to the family home in Naradevi. It was referred to by different names at different times. Shivalaya Guthi. Mahadev Guthi. Annapurnaeshwar Guthi. These names tell us that the Guthi was associated with the god Shiva and his consort Parvati. The latter in her manifestation as the provider of sustenance, Annapurneshwari.

The name is apt. For the Guthi did offer sustenance. One of its twin tasks was the running of a sadabarta, a charitable kitchen. Its location in Paknajol suggests that the place was perhaps buzzing with people. For Paknajol was a key stop on one of the trade routes between the Kathmandu Valley and Tibet. Animal caravans, porters, managers, financiers, and traders regularly passed through the area. They would be in need of food. And shelter too. The Paknajol Guthi also ran a Dharamshala rest house–the other of its twin tasks–alongside the charitable kitchen.

The Guthi furthest away from their home was located in Tulsiyahi. This was a village in the praganna of Koradi in the district of Mahottari, a stone’s throw from the present-day border with Bihar. This distant Guthi was closely linked, in function and in finances, to the one in Paknajol. Sometimes called the Tulsiyahi Guthi, it also had other names. Tulsinarayan. Lakshminarayan. Garudnarayan. Or simply Narayan Guthi.

Where the Paknajol Guthi had been centered around the figure of Shiva and his consort, this one was centered around Vishnu, his consort, and his celestial mount.

But their functions and finances were bound together. The Tulsiyahi Guthi too ran its own sadabarta, its own charitable kitchen. This too was perhaps in demand. The district of Mahottari was a hub of much activity driven by varied forms of land holdings and commerce. The area was home to many monasteries, run by ascetic sects of multiple Dasnami persuasions. Many loyal elites also held vast estates in Mahottari. Cross-border trade moved across the area.

I imagine all manner of pilgrims, bullock cart drivers, labourers, ascetics, and small-time entrepreneurs moving through the area. This is in addition to all the peoples and families living as tenant farmers, waged workers, bonded labour, and slaves working the fields and serving the estates.

The grains and profits of the land endowed to the Tulsiyahi Guthi were expected to fund both its sadabarta activities and to support the operations of the one in Paknajol.

Honouring a dead king
The Saptami Shraddha Guthi too fed people. Though it was very specific. It fed only one category of persons one kind of food on a particular day every month. The Guthi fed kheer to 60 Brahmins on the seventh day of the fortnight when the moon was waxing towards brightness.

There is a reason for the specificity, of course. The monthly feeding was the performance of a shraddha, a ritual obligation marking the death anniversary of one’s ancestors. In this case, the ritual was being performed for the deceased king, Rana Bahadur Shah. A colourful character, the man had abdicated his throne for his young son, going off to become an ascetic. Then he had returned to the jostle of politics as the Swami Maharaj, the ascetic king, seeking to assert control through his young son. His half-brother had assassinated him in the midst of the jostling.

The king was no blood relative of this family. But monarchs are collective fathers and mothers, I suppose. And the man who endowed this Guthi had served under this king. We will get to know him well in the prequel.

Most people undertake the shraddha ritual once a year, on the day of the death. But this Guthi performed at least the feeding Brahmins part of the shraddha every month. And it did so on the saptami of the Shukla Pakshya, the seventh day of the lunar fortnight when the moon is waxing. The assassination had taken place on the seventh day of the waxing fortnight of Baisakh, corresponding with 25 April 1806 in the Common Era calendar.

Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari had inherited another Guthi set up in memory of the assassinated Rana Bahadur Shah. The women mention a Sattal Chaughara Guthi, without indicating what its duties were. A sattal is a rest house built for travellers and pilgrims. The term chaughara suggests that the sattal was enclosed within four walls. This particular Guthi becomes embroiled in a whole other dispute regarding its boundaries in the generations after Raj Kumari, Ratna Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur. And we will hear a great deal more about it in both the prequel and the sequel.

Both of these Guthis linked to the memory of the deceased Swami Maharaja were located within the complex of the powerful and wealthy Pashupati Temple in Kathmandu.

Of cows and monkeys
The remaining two Guthis too were about feeding. But not humans. Though we have left our mouse behind in season I, animals continue to feature prominently.

One of the Guthis fed boiled wheat to cows on the day of the Gaijatra festival. Those who have lost people in the preceding year participate in this festival that is marked annually in the late monsoon in the Kathmandu Valley. Cows are central to the occasion. Real or symbolic cows are paraded through the city as a means of smoothing the transition of the departed. An apt day to feed cows for merit. Of course, the Guthi was not chasing cows around the festive city. It was likely feeding cows grazing in a specific place on that day.

The final Guthi was tasked with feeding monkeys. Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari referred to it as the makal–the word for monkey in Newari–Guthi.

Every day, this Guthi fed one pathi of maize to the monkeys around Pashupati. One pathi to the monkeys around Guhyeshwari. And one pathi to the monkeys around Gorakhnath. These are all adjacent temples. A pathi is a still familiar unit of volume used to measure both grains and liquids in Nepal today.

The areas around Pashupati, Guhyeshwari, and Gorakhnath are home to hordes of monkeys today as well. In the 19th century, I imagine the forests around the temples were denser. I imagine the surrounding areas that are today concrete buildings were all rice fields. I imagine there were many more monkeys than there are today.

You want to know how the monkeys were fed their pathis of maize I bet. Did the same person go out with the pathis daily? Did s/he leave a trail of maize along one or more fixed routes? Or did s/he just dump the pathis in one place?

I wish I could tell you all this and more. But sadly for all of us, I cannot. I can tell you what I like to imagine. I like to imagine that it was one person. I like to imagine that s/he had monkey favourites. And s/he tried to make sure her favourites got a lot of maize. I like to imagine this caused a lot of dissatisfaction and bickering and accusations among all the monkey factions.

Landing on the details
This bird’s-eye view has been about mapping the scale, spread, and duties of the Guthis. But circling from so high in the sky can be as misleading as it is useful. Our perspective has narrowed the actual scale, spread, and duties of what these Guthis did.

It is misleading, in a sense, to say a particular Guthi was located in one place. Take, for example, the Sattal Chaughara Guthi. Its infrastructure and core activities were located within the Pashupati Temple complex. But the lands endowed to support the Guthi’s activities could be located at a great distance from the temple. The multiple plots of land belonging to the Sattal Chaughara Guthi were scattered across the edges of the Kathmandu Valley in different directions.

It is also misleading to describe the duties of these Guthis as only feeding and sheltering. Each Guthi also had other obligations. At least two of the Guthis had substantial temples attached to them. This meant they had a whole set of other people. Priests. Sweepers. Musicians. Gardeners. Caretakers. These people choreographed a set of rituals that took place both daily and on special occasions.

The Guthis also had infrastructure that required building and maintenance. Water spouts. Rest houses. Ponds. The temple itself. The deities and all their clothes and ornaments. Votive items for worship. Large pots and pans for the charitable kitchens.

Raj Kumari was at the helm, for twelve years if we believe her sister-in-law, of this sprawling operation. Ratna Kumari wanted to be at the helm for the coming twelve years. Shamsher Bahadur wanted to claim the whole as his patrimony, shutting out his aunt and perhaps his mother entirely. None of them told us what it took to run these operations. None of them explained how they would manage it all. In the context of their dispute, they had no need to offer these details.

Raj Kumari, Ratna Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur also did not spell out the value of the Guthis. In their petitions, they did not say how much land, or grains, or money they were battling over. They did not say what they grew. What they earned. What they spent. Despite their reticence, the legal machine with its voracious, insatiable appetite for information dredged up some of these details for us to pore over. With the map our circling has created as a reference, pore over the details we shall.

All this next week.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On

Two sisters-in-law—Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari, both young widows in 1870s Kathmandu—are in a property dispute. Ratna Kumari filed a petition claiming Raj Kumari wrongfully took control of their Guthi lands. Raj Kumari denied the claim, offering detailed histories showing each Guthi came to her with consent and adding accusations of her own. Then Shamsher Bahadur—Ratna Kumari’s son—entered as a litigant with revelations that transformed the case. His uncle Prithi Bahadur committed incest, lost his caste, and fled to India. His three wives, including Raj Kumari, followed him into exile and outcaste status. Yet when Raj Kumari returned to Kathmandu, she inherited valuable family properties. Her two co-wives and their children did not. Shamsher Bahadur highlights these unequal fates to argue that Raj Kumari too forfeited her inheritance rights. He bolsters his legal case by painting his aunt Raj Kumari as a calculating deceiver who exploited his mother’s naiveté through lies about inheritance rights and promises she never intended to keep.

After the disputants had told their stories, witnesses gave testimony on how the partition of 1869 between Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari was enacted. Witnesses disagreed on whether Ratna Kumari actually ceded authority over the Guthis to Raj Kumari. Witnesses agreed that Ratna Kumari confessed to not sharing the bags of money she found in a mousehole with Raj Kumari.

After years of family disputes, simmering tensions kept erupting into open conflict starting in the fall of 1873, foreshadowing the legal case Ratna Kumari filed the following year.

After nine episodes of listening to what was told, we strained to heard what the pivotal slaves and troublesome women who remained silent might have said.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

Of time and place
They were all so young. Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari were perhaps in their mid-20s, if that old, when they became the elders of the household around 1862. Shamsher Bahadur was likely in his mid-teens when he started making legal claims sometime around 1878.

Their youth has come as a shock to many readers. Their coherent pursuit of their agendas through the labyrinth maze of bureaucracy sits, for us, incongruously with their age. The incongruous, that which defies expectation, is a dynamic place. We can learn much from that gap between expectation and reality. Learn much about the past perhaps. But also understand a great deal about our present.

We do not expect young people today to have such clarity of purpose, the shock tells me. The ability to pursue one’s interest doggedly requires age, we believe. Age brings emotional steadiness. Only experience prepares us to manoeuvre in the world. These are our expectations, based on our present.

Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur suggest that youth was no barrier to navigating wealth and bureaucracies in late 19th century Nepal. Perhaps people were trained to become worldly at a younger age. People married younger, had children younger, died younger. Perhaps they began adulting, as the internet likes to say, younger too.

Yet, it is possible that these particular individuals were exceptions. Perhaps their neighbours and relations were as shocked by their gumption as we are.

It is a question to which we will never have a full, satisfactory, and closed answer. But the question opens a line of inquiry worth pursuing: How should this rollicking story of a single family’s drama colour our understanding of what was possible and what inconceivable in their time and place? What do their actions tell us about the lives of others who lived alongside them?

Before the order snapped back
That two young women were at the helm feels extraordinary. That they were widows makes the matter more curious. That one is childless and of suspect caste status makes the situation even more anomalous. Their youth too is noteworthy. For they have not earned the respect and practiced the authority that matriarchs often wield. And yet they seem to be operating well enough. They are pursuing control of the family wealth. They are running the household. They are dealing with the business of managing their far-flung lands. Still, that two young widows are at the helm does not seem normal.

How do we know what is normal and what extraordinary within a society? In a sense, it is easy. All societies have hierarchies they claim as ideal. And all societies work systematically to enforce these ideal hierarchies. Religious precept and laws both give us much insight into how idealized hierarchies were constructed and enforced.

Widows occupied lowly, ambivalent places in both Hindu precepts and mid-19th century legal codes prevalent in Nepal. Neither system of enforcement wanted two women, let alone widows, to wield control over familial wealth. Neither system saw widows anywhere close to the top of the social hierarchy. So, then, we justifiably find the situation of Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari extraordinary. Two flesh-and-blood widows at the helm of an elite household holding vast resources and manoeuvring tricky bureaucracies to stake their claims is an odd situation.

This odd situation was the result of a series of unfortunate events that decimated the idealized household hierarchy. Death had stripped this family bare. Both of Shamsher Bahadur’s grandparents were dead. His father and an elder uncle had died early. His remaining uncle Prithi Bahadur had been outcaste and then died rather young. The early death of two adult men. The outcasting and then death of Prithi Bahadur. The outcasting of Prithi Bahadur’s two junior wives and their children. All these circumstances led to two young widows being in charge. Not at all an ideal or idealized situation.

Was it unusual for the idealized hierarchies to break down so completely? Death is certain. Infections and other diseases easily treatable today took people swiftly. Childbirth was a gamble for mother and child. Young, childless widows were probably numerous. A child without a father was no novelty. But the death of a husband or father-in-law did not necessarily propel a woman to the top of the hierarchy. People did not live in contained nuclear families. Other male relatives stepped in to assert control. A young widow–particularly if childless–might return to her natal family. The system had ways to enforce some semblance of the ideal hierarchies.

And yet, the idealized hierarchies possibly broke down more often than we can know. Certainly, they must have often broken down temporarily. After all, that is what is happening here. At some point, Shamsher Bahadur will successfully claim his share of the family property. He will likely become the head of the Naradevi household, ending the reign of the two widows. In his petitions, we see him making the claim that he is the sole rightful heir. His aunt and mother seem unwilling to let him take this idealized, rightful place without a fight. We do not yet know how the fight ends.

The reign of the two widows may, then, well be a temporary situation in the life cycle of a family. The idealized hierarchy may well snap back into place. Still, Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari strained and fought to hold onto the assets and their authority. Season I has allowed us a glimpse into how people low down in the idealized hierarchies might and could manoeuvre when opportunities–no matter whether extraordinary or temporary–arose.

Subsuming the individual will
Kallay bhadkayecha? Who has incited them? Tyallay bhadkayo hola. Such and such person must have incited them. I heard these phrases often while growing up. At a gathering, someone would tell a story (let’s be honest, gossip) about a person behaving in an unexpected way. Inevitably, the question of who had incited the action–kallay bhadkayacha?– would be raised. I was always amused and bemused by this reaction. Are people really so spineless, so easily swayed by whatever is whispered in their ears, I thought. People surely do not act only when incited, instigated, or provoked by someone else, I said to myself. The phrases never held credence or explanatory power for me.

But, recently, I have been turning these phrases over in my mind. Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari have compelled me to revisit the explanation my family reached for so frequently and with such certainty. Readers have been consistently taken by these women’s capacity for independent action. They have wondered that women– even if elite and connected–were able to navigate courts, bureaucracies, and the logistics of managing their assets with such seeming confidence. Do these phrases in any way illuminate our quest to understand the agency of these women?

After decades of laughing it off, I now wonder if the phrase is a window into how decision-making worked in this society. Perhaps decisions were made collectively. Not collective as in consultative or institutionalized. But collective in that there were always people around who had things to say about your situation. Interlocutors in the Interludes (See Interludes 1, 2, and 3) have all wondered about the role of neighbours and relatives in the case. They have been surprised to see them so lacking in the case documentation. People talked. People stuck their noses in each other’s business. And people were perhaps swayed by others to an extent, frequency, and depth that feels odd to some of us.

But bhadkaunu is perhaps not only about whisper networks. It is perhaps not only about an inciting spark. It might point to a network of connections and supporters without which action–particularly of the extraordinary kind–was difficult if not impossible. Raj Kumari relied on her connections to sections of the sprawling ruling elite to whom she was perhaps related. The men of the extended kin network bolstered Shamsher Bahadur. Both Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari appointed multiple men as waris, representatives who moved their case forward. Would Raj Kumari and Shamsher Bahadur have been able to fight so long and so hard without these networks? If we name these connections a support network, they move to the background. The individual remains the leader, the driving force. But does it seem so farfetched to see the network of connections as the driving force? Does it seem impossible that someone else was the strategist, and if we push the argument far enough, the puppet master behind Raj Kumari, Ratna Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur?

The logic of the incitement, kallay bhadkayo, explanation lies in subsuming or merging the individual’s will into that of another person or network.

Let us apply this theory. Those who are persuaded by it would argue thus: When the ideal hierarchies break down, instigators and provocateurs and connections of all stripes sway those with unexpected power in their hands. This phrase suggests that we not attend only to the agency of the widowed Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari and the young Shamsher Bahadur. But rather that we identify their instigator. And that we think through the networks of connections that made their seemingly extraordinary actions possible. We will do exactly this in Season IV.

Apprenticed to be master
We can, of course, reject this argument of kallay bhadkayo. It seems too invested in the status quo. I can almost hear the latent moral panic bubbling up. We can make a claim that their network was only a support system. We can argue that Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur themselves deftly and cleverly navigated the unusual moment. Indeed, I have put these three people at the center of events across the ten episodes. Readers may then well ask me: How were they able to drive things forward if the systems were not built to accommodate them at the helm?

Let us start with Shamsher Bahadur. He is surprising only because he is so young. Otherwise, he is expected to wield control. It is his birthright as a high-caste man from an elite lineage close to political power.

Note, however, that the likely teenage Shamsher Bahadur had standing in the courts. The law did not deem him too young, too immature, or too inexperienced to make his claims. Perhaps young men like Shamsher Bahadur were trained from a young age for their eventual role as heads of households. Perhaps they become worldly at what seems a tender age to us. In the first Interlude, Anand said the tussle between the three characters reminded him of the cultural politics represented in Korean historical dramas. The women of the household battle for power only till the young prince grows up to take up his mantle.

Even in the absence of male role models within the household, his mother was imparting the necessary training to Shamsher Bahadur. Recall that during the harvest of 1873, his mother sent Shamsher Bahadur to collect her share of the disputed harvest from his aunt Raj Kumari. The mother claims he was a minor at the time, perhaps not yet 12 years old. But his age was no barrier to his travelling for days across difficult terrain to negotiate. Recall that he was in the room when the Gurujyu handed over the Guthi ownership documents to the women. Shamsher Bahadur had likely always been treated as the scion. And he seems to have received the necessary apprenticeship to one day take on the mantle of master. He was perhaps more prepared than we can know to take on this case.

Outside the household
The same explanation does not suffice for Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari. As young women, they were surely not trained to manage lands and wage legal battles.

We could simply say that Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari were extraordinary women of great will. This argument rankles. Some of the discomfort must come from my training as a historian, a discipline that reaches for structural arguments.

But some of the discomfort comes from the number of stories I have been told of domineering and capable women. Grandmothers and great-grandmothers who ruled their successful adult children with an iron fist. I am confident that many readers have inherited similar fragments of lore about stubborn, capable, and domineering women in their families. Some of these women were hoary matriarchs in the early 20th century. And they may well have seen women like Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari in action in the 1870s and 1880s.

Many of these stories focus on these women’s control of the household. In disciplining children. In arranging marriages. In handling servants with a heavy hand. In managing the dhukuti and household accounts. In finding ways to survive tough times.

I myself have not heard any stories of women who jostled in the world of men (Please share them if you have any!). And it is the women’s, particularly Raj Kumari’s, management of matters outside the household that has captivated readers. Her seeming aptitude at managing the dispersed Guthi lands has intrigued readers. The lands, located a long way away from the house in Naradevi, had to be effectively worked to yield benefits. Tenants had to be appointed. Labour hired. Grains transported, stored, and sold. Disputes had to be arbitrated. Punishments and fines enforced.

How was Raj Kumari able to handle all this? Why did Ratna Kumari think she could take on the same tasks? History is not a discipline suited to answering such questions centered around individual feelings and abilities. We can rephrase the questions, though. And come at it from another angle.

Hard boundaries and potential action
This finale episode is intended to be a stocktaking of what we have learnt together over the ten episodes and three Interludes that made up Season I. We learnt a great deal about Raj Kumari, Ratna Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur. We entered their home. We became acquainted with the difficult, scandalous arc of their recent family history. We understood the shape of their dispute. We got a sense of their personalities.

I have not recounted any of these particulars here in the finale. Rather, I have stepped away from the textured sense of the moment I have worked so hard to convey throughout the episodes. And I have tried to connect this household dispute–including people, relationships, places, and of course, mice–to the workings of this society.

The particular arcs and rhythms of this season have raised three layered questions about the workings of this society for me. What was the ideal way of organizing authority within a household? What were the various permutations through which extraordinary situations, where the idealized hierarchies break down, came to be? How do individuals and the structures that enforce ideal hierarchies navigate around each other when the normal, the expected, the planned for gets washed away?

Let’s go back to rephrasing the question in a way suited to the tools of history as a discipline. Where were the hard boundaries beyond which the two widows could not manoeuvre? How vast was the space of potential action open to them? These are questions we can approach by picking apart their actions. And we will return to these questions across the remaining seasons where we build fuller pictures of what they did, adding layers to this season’s emphasis on what they said.

Pursuing the question around boundaries and potential has purchase beyond these two elite, connected women, however. We can ask it of domestic servants and slaves who worked along a spectrum of free and enslaved we have yet to fully understand. We can ask it of tenant cultivators. We can ask it of communities required to provide labour and skills as porters or miners or technicians. In pursuing these questions, we can bring the workings of this society as it was churning–as societies always are–into view.

We will continue to explore this line of inquiry even as we add new ones in Season II. But we will shift our attention. Away from the claims and counterclaims of Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur. And towards the lands they owned, the goods they valued, the debts they owed, and the profits they earned.

We will shift away from listening to their words. We will move to assessing their assets and liabilities. For things matter too. The lands they are fighting over so doggedly have their own histories. The account sheets they submitted tell their own stories. The closed trunks dotting the dhukuti treasury have their own textures. That is to say, we are approaching history not as a masala Bollywood film (fun as they are!) centered tightly around hero, heroine, and villain. Rather, we are treating the past as an ensemble where many creatures and things are actors critical to the plot.

So, we shall continue to piece together the plot by visiting the Guthi lands, poring over the account sheets, and opening trunks to see what was inside.

All this starting next week.

A postscript. A wobble.
In the episode about the slaves and transgressive women, I wrote that we have to be open to the possibility that we have gotten the story entirely wrong. Readers might offer any number of alternate theories and questions that make me shift my nascent speculations. I myself already have a few niggling doubts.

It seems apt to conclude this season this way. Not with the certainty of having pulled everything together neatly. But with the itching doubt that a more truthful explanation might pull in another direction completely.

So then, two other pathways. One undergirded by love. The other by befuddling chaos.

I have portrayed them all as acting out of strategy and self-interest, somewhat coldly. What if these people themselves thought they were acting out of love. Or duty. Ratna Kumari did not disavow either Prithi Bahadur or Raj Kumari after they transgressed foundational norms and laws. We might say that Ratna Kumari, at risk to her own social status and material security, agreed to all manner of obfuscations and workarounds to allow both her brother-in-law and sister-in-law some kind of comfortable life. Perhaps she did this not out of compulsion but care.

Maybe.

My interpretations are all premised on the notion that the people involved were ‘reasonable’. And that too by my, our, present-day standards. That they were clear-eyed. That they took in the facts. That they behaved in strategic ways. But people are often not reasonable, as we all well know. Any of the three claimants could have been consistently behaving in baffling ways. They could be leaving uncertainty and chaos in their wake. Negotiations, efforts, recalibrations, exhaustion, anger would follow and perhaps cycle for a while. Either the despairing and exhausted ‘reasonable’ person or the chaotic and ‘unreasonable’ person could push the family dispute over into a bruising legal case.

Maybe.

What insights and questions would we take from this dispute if the actions of the characters were driven primarily by care or chaos rather than strategic self-interest?

It is something worth pondering. No?

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Hope you have as much fun listening as we did talking to each other.

Listening
Season 1 is coming to an end. In this season, we have been listening to the told and untold stories of a family dispute in 1870s Kathmandu. We have been hearing the voices of those who spoke. And we have been straining to catch the sounds of those who were silent. We have listened to the claims and counter-claims of the disputants and witnesses. We have soaked up the rhythms and textures of everyday life. Over ten episodes, we have understood the currents of the dispute and the situations of the people in conflict.

If you are just joining us, or need a refresher, please read the introduction that lays out the shape of the story. And browse the table of contents with summaries of the ten episodes.

Next week, we will wrap up Season 1 with a long reflection that wonders and wanders far to offer context, think out loud, and riff on the story which has remained close to the ground through the ten episodes.

Before that final wrap-up, I had to hear how old friends and new readers are feeling about the story so far. Last week, I chatted with Karan, Amish, and Roman, three writers, thinkers, and journalists whom I am lucky to call friends.

This week, we have another podcast, another Interlude, to talk through the story and its implications together. Joining me are Aneka, Pranaya, and Shubhanga, fellow substackers writing about and from Nepal.

I asked Aneka, Pranaya, and Shubhanga many of the same questions I posed to Amish, Karan, and Roman last week. Yet the two conversations had their own distinct tenors. It is wonderful and exciting to see the same story spark such different questions and reflections for readers.

Scurrying
The mouse scurried across much of our conversation.

The little creature led Pranaya across many new paths. In searching for the thieving mouse, he imagined the rooms, the house, the space of the city. These places of living and striving and fighting came alive for him through the mouse’s movement.

The mouse recalled old memories for Aneka. As she was growing up in an old house in the city’s urban core, mice were chronic companions. Discussing their misdeeds, finding them, getting rid of them was a constant task. The mouse also took Aneka back to other memories rooted in home. She remembered mothers and grandmothers who were perpetually worried that the neighbours would hear them inside their own homes. In an urban core built together tightly with materials that leaked sound, the old city was porous and the house was not an autonomous private space.

The mouse turned Shubhanga’s expectations on its head. It did not chew up documents as he had anticipated. Rather like Chekhov’s mouse, its unruly behaviour was far more consequential and shocking than imagined.

In following the mouse, Aneka, Pranaya, and Shubhanga were also sent scurrying, chewing off and knotting together pieces of the past.

Improvising
We reflected on the many improvisations crisis demanded.

The rhythms of this family felt familiar to everyone. Shubhanga called to mind wealthy households of today beset by conflict over proximal living and joint assets. A mass of inherited wealth creates a condition where “family trajectories get set in motion quite early on and then you sort of improvise within the constraints,” he said.

In this understanding, crisis catalyzed by a tussle over resources was, and is, at the heart of the family structure. Everyone in the family knows this. From a young age. Whether the crisis explodes or only tautens or is circumvented is a matter of effective improvisation. This improvisation includes foresight, anticipation, nimbleness, the mediation of a social network. And, as always in the human condition, a healthy dose of luck.

The word ‘improvising’ opened up a new chink into this story for me. It has been on my mind since we recorded last week. And I have been pondering and probing and weaving while editing the audio and writing this introduction. Words open up new paths, marvellous things that they are. And so too do thoughtful, generous friends and interlocutors.

Riffing
We chatted away about many things. Here is a brief guide:

• Introductions (Till 00:02:06)

• I asked what they found most surprising. Pranaya was struck by how the teenage Shamsher Bahadur was doggedly pursuing a case. Aneka said her certainties about the case and the characters eroded with each episode. Shubhanga was taken aback that the mouse did not eat the documents, but got up–allegedly–to mischief of another magnitude.(00:09:15)

• I asked if they believed the story of the mouse and what they made of it. Everyone believed that the mice were present. And everyone had followed the mice along different pathways and burrows. (00:14:55).

• I asked what they made of the three main protagonists. Everyone found Raj Kumari compelling. Her journey to the plains and back. Her childlessness. Her fraught reinsertion into the household. Her control of the family assets. Her wielding of connections. Pranaya imagined her as a woman with a great deal of will. And she got us thinking about the role and expectations of childless women in her society. (00:15:56).

• We segued organically into a conversation about the resemblances between past and present. The concerns, arcs, and improvisations of managing assets, emotions, and crises in joint families that live in proximity and hold many, often far-flung, assets. (00:22:23)

• We switched from discussing Things Drag On: Anatomy of a Household in Dispute to discussing our experiences, goals, and approaches to Substack as a platform where we try out and share ideas. (00:30:30).

As you listen to our conversation, do check out Aneka’s, Shubhanga’s, and Pranaya’s Substack newsletters:

Aneka Rebecca Rajbhandari is co-founder of The Arniko Project which publishes historical sources, contemporary reporting, and much more in-between on the Nepal-China relationship.

Shubhanga Pandey writes Daftar: Notes from the Past and the Present which blends his past as a journalist and his present as a historian of 18th and 19th century Asia to bring together evidence, commentary, and reflections on all things Nepal and South Asia.

Pranaya Rana runs Kalam Weekly, a current affairs newsletter which offers a weekly round-up of the news from Nepal with deep context. Kalam is a site to get “opinionated news”, as he put it on the podcast.

Chadke, at a slant
New to Substack, I wanted to hear about Aneka, Pranaya, and Shubhanga’s experiences. What kind of knowledge production and circulation were they pursuing on the platform, I wondered.

The conclusion I came to is that the nature of the platform allows us all to do chadke work. It lets us come at familiar narratives and ongoing concerns at a slant.

The story of Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur has been very chadke indeed. It is not yet over. Before we move on to exploring the story through other points of view, we will take stock of what we have learnt over these ten episodes and three interludes.

All this next week.

Piddu’s kingdom
If you missed Interlude 1 and Interlude 2, you may be confused as to why the cover image has an imposing cat surveying his kingdom.

A reminder. In the first Interlude, my cat, who had then just come home to me, irritated that my attention was focused on the podcast rather than playing with him, decided to bite my foot. Playfully, of course. It shocked rather than hurt. A moment of hilarity ensued as I tried to pick up the cute little demon and lock him out of the room.

This cat, Piddu, became the mascot of all our Interludes. Why? Because he knows how best to listen to the Interludes: lolling, chilling like a boss, while keeping his ears perked and his senses alert.

Hope you have as much fun listening as we did talking to each other.

Season 1 is coming to an end. In this season, we have been listening to the told and untold stories of a family dispute in 1870s Kathmandu. We have been hearing the voices of those who spoke. And we have been straining to catch the sounds of those who were silent. We have listened to the claims and counter-claims of the disputants and witnesses. We have soaked up the rhythms and textures of everyday life. Over ten episodes, we have understood the currents of the dispute and the situations of the people in conflict.

If you are just joining us, or need a refresher, please read the introduction that lays out the shape of the story. And browse the table of contents with summaries of the ten episodes.

In two weeks, we will wrap up Season 1 with a long reflection that wonders and wanders far to offer context, think out loud, and riff on the story which has remained close to the ground through the ten episodes.

Before that final wrap-up, I had to hear how old friends and new readers are feeling about the story so far. So, we recorded a podcast, an Interlude, to talk through the story and its implications together. On this Interlude, I got to chatting with three writers, thinkers, and journalists whom I am lucky to call friends. Karan, Amish, and Roman. See the links to their wonderful work at the end of this post.

That the audio is 45 minutes long will tell you that we had fun talking. We are all guffadis, always ready to shoot the breeze. And we covered a lot of ground, while being silly and teasing in the way that old friends can–ideally must–be.

Covering much ground
Because 45 minutes is a long time, here is a guide to what we discussed with timestamps:

• We continued a conversation we were having before the recording started with Amish asking how I came upon this story and how the remaining three seasons are going to unfold the implications of this case. On hearing about the scale and ongoing nature of the story, Karan said I am starting a Raj Kumari Cinematic Universe. Ha. (0:00:00).

• Where I introduce Karan, Amish, and Roman (00:03:43)

• We discuss Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari as people and characters. Roman expressed a deep curiosity to know what they looked like and how they dressed despite the difficulty of offering a reliable, historically grounded picture. This led us all into a discussion about how we might credibly piece together a picture of what they wore, owned, showed off, and stored. Everyone had thoughts and questions about the two women’s journeys and motivations. Amish got us thinking about access to the legal system and the forms of enquiry that drove the legal system (00:05:45).

• Karan asked about my craft strategies, particularly the balance between evidence and the liberties of imagination. We agreed that there are so many questions which the evidence can never answer. So grounded imagination functions as a tool to ask new questions even when we know we will never get satisfactory answers.(00:19:43)

• I asked if they have picked sides between Raj Kumari, Ratna Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur. Everyone was on the fence. Karan captured the group spirit saying: “Why would you make me choose between two queens, come on, they are both great to me.” (00:24:44)

• I asked what they found most surprising, striking, or funny across the ten episodes. All three had different answers. (00:27:58)

• Everyone shared how the series had shaped their understanding of 19th century Nepal. (00:32:25)

• We ended by discussing the neighbours in Naradevi. If they were anything like the ever-curious and ever-peeping neighbours in Kathmandu today, they surely knew a great deal more about the family than came through in the court documents, we agreed. There was a general yearning to know the even spicier stories the neighbours might have told. (00:44:15)

As you can see, we really did cover a lot of ground.

History through stories
The thing that has stayed with me the most is Roman saying I was “smuggling in the history through the sex and money.” Amish and Karan also said something to this effect. Amish said the “texture of everyday living…that has come out really well.” Karan said the ten episodes showed that “stories can be history and history can be stories.”

Through this substack, I am trying to find a way to weave together engaging storytelling and substantive investigations into the past. I was delighted to hear that Roman, Amish, and Karan felt these ten episodes had managed to do that.

I hope you, wonderful substack reader, feel the same way about this Interlude. We joked, we teased, we were lighthearted. At the same time, we did “smuggle in the history” by reflecting and questioning and pulling things apart.

Do have a listen. Did you make sense of these people, conflicts, and what they tell us about the past as Amish, Roman, and Karan did? Maybe your thoughts went in very different directions?

I’ll be back next week with another Interlude. I’ll be chatting with three substackers from Nepal who also write about ideas, history, the public sphere, and making sense of past and present.

Piddu’s kingdom
Also, if you missed the first Interlude, you may be confused as to why the cover image has an imposing cat surveying his kingdom.

A reminder. In the first Interlude, my cat, who had then just come home to me, irritated that my attention was focused on the podcast rather than playing with him, decided to bite my foot. Playfully, of course. It shocked rather than hurt. A moment of hilarity ensued as I tried to pick up the cute little demon and lock him out of the room. He made an appearance in this second Interlude too.

This cat, Piddu, became the mascot of all our Interludes. Why? Because he knows how best to listen to the Interludes: lolling, chilling like a boss, while keeping his ears perked and his senses alert.

Recommended readings
Also, here are brief bios for the friend-readers who generously showed up to chat on this Interlude. I recommend reading their work.

Amish Raj Mulmi is the author of All Roads Lead North: Nepal’s Turn to China. He has written for Carnegie Endowment, the New York Review of Books, History Today, Al Jazeera, Mint Lounge, Himal Southasian and The Kathmandu Post. He is a contributing editor at Himal Southasian and a visiting fellow at Centre for Social Innovation and Foreign Policy. He is consulting editor at Writer’s Side Literary Agency. He is currently working on the history of mobility in the Himalaya.

Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. He is the author of MONKEY! (2026), Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis In India (2024), and A Beautiful Decay (2022), all published by the Aleph Book Company. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Frontline, Gargoyle, Fifty Two, Scroll, The Plank, the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels (Aleph) and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 (Hawakal). Karan is the co-organizer of the Landour Literature and Arts Festival in Landour, Mussoorie.

Roman Gautam is the Editor of Himal Southasian.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On

Two sisters-in-law—Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari, both young widows in 1870s Kathmandu—are in a property dispute. Ratna Kumari filed a petition claiming Raj Kumari wrongfully took control of their Guthi lands. Raj Kumari denied the claim, offering detailed histories showing each Guthi came to her with consent and adding accusations of her own. Then Shamsher Bahadur—Ratna Kumari’s son—entered as a litigant with revelations that transformed the case. His uncle Prithi Bahadur committed incest, lost his caste, and fled to India. His three wives, including Raj Kumari, followed him into exile and outcaste status. Yet when Raj Kumari returned to Kathmandu, she inherited valuable family properties. Her two co-wives and their children did not. Shamsher Bahadur highlights these unequal fates to argue that Raj Kumari too forfeited her inheritance rights. He bolsters his legal case by painting his aunt Raj Kumari as a calculating deceiver who exploited his mother’s naiveté through lies about inheritance rights and promises she never intended to keep.

After the disputants had told their stories, witnesses gave testimony on how the partition of 1869 between Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari was enacted. Witnesses disagreed on whether Ratna Kumari actually ceded authority over the Guthis to Raj Kumari. Witnesses agreed that Ratna Kumari confessed to not sharing the bags of money she found in a mousehole with Raj Kumari.

After years of family disputes, simmering tensions kept erupting into open conflict starting in the fall of 1873, foreshadowing the legal case Ratna Kumari filed the following year.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

The untold, silent, and silenced
Ram Singh and Tulsi should have been pivotal witnesses. They stuck their hands into the mousehole. They found the three bags of money. They counted the coins before handing the bags over to Ratna Kumari. They knew many household secrets.

But they are mentioned only by the Gurujyu, the family preceptor, in passing. Nobody else speaks of them. They do not give witness statements. They remain silent.

How do we hear what remains untold? How do we discern what the silent and the silenced might have said?

We cannot really. There is no reliable way. But that should not deter us from accounting for those who are absent. The untold, silent, and silenced should weigh as much as the voices of those allowed, able, and willing to speak.

A mother’s dying wish
There were others like Ram Singh and Tulsi at the heart of this case. Other ketas and ketis, men, women, and children, whose experiences of enslavement we know too little about.

Between mid-January and mid-March of 1887, Raj Kumari issued two manumission documents.

First, she freed a young boy named Gopale. Securing the child’s emancipation had been his mother Haribadan’s final act. Raj Kumari explained:

“Your mother was [for a long time] taking care of me. In the month of Māgha in the year [VS] 1943, your mother became sick, kept crying out and could not be cured, and on the full moon day of Māgha, on vākā caturdaśī, as she was being brought to the burning ghats, she said: “The time of my death has come. My son, Gopāle, is still a child. I have served you with loyalty. If you could spare us, mother and son, from the subjection of [slave] labour (kāmakara), our future would flourish, and it would also be meritorious for you.” I therefore freed your mother from the bondage of labour (kāmakara hāḍa) then and there and since you were a child I had freed you as well.”

Excerpt from the manumission document edited and translated by Manik Bajracharya in collaboration with Bal Gopal Shrestha.

The young Gopale would, however, have to wait to enjoy the promised autonomy over body and self. The manumission bound Gopale to serve Raj Kumari during her lifetime. He would be freed from bondage only after her death.

Freedom delayed
Just a month later, Raj Kumari signed a manumission document for Indrabadan and her son Ujire who had come to Naradevi as part of her dowry. Their freedom too was promised. But not imminent. Both were bound to serve Raj Kumari till her death. And they would automatically forgo their promised freedom if they attempted to escape service:

“If, instead of remaining within [the terms of] agreement written in this deed, we go elsewhere while you are still alive, or if we, going [down] to sin and destruction from listening to [my] husband or anybody else, fail to remain within [the terms of] the agreement and go elsewhere, then—even if you have granted us the deed of emancipation, with the deities -1- (i.e., glorious Guhyakālī) and -2- (i.e., glorious Paśupatinātha) and five notables as witnesses—make us [your] slaves [again] and do [with us] as you wish. Since you have provided us with a deed of emancipation, we might mount a legal appeal (against re-enslavement). However, our [case] would admit of no appeal. We would not appeal; there is no appeal (we could mount). If we did file an appeal, please show that what is written in it is false. The agreement (kabulapatra) is [valid] only after your death.”

Excerpt from the manumission document edited and translated by Manik Bajracharya in collaboration with Bal Gopal Shrestha.

Ujire and Indrabadan had to wait many years for their emancipation. And any attempt to escape their situation would null the manumission. The threat of re-enslavement was repeated and reiterated. The path to legal appeals was closed.

Agents and architects
These six enslaved individuals all lived in the Naradevi household. Indrabadan and Ujire arrived as part of Raj Kumari’s dowry. The others might have entered the household in multiple ways. Sold by another owner. Sold themselves during a time of need. Born to an enslaved mother bound to the house.

When the two women partitioned the house, these six individuals were likely part of the division. Raj Kumari would have had inviolable rights over the two people who were part of her dowry. But the other slaves who belonged to the marital household in Naradevi would have been partitioned between the two women.

I imagine these six enslaved people as agents of the twists and architects of the turns in this dispute. They surely heard all the talk–complaints, confidences, conspiracies–as they went about their work. They were also likely the go-betweens. Raj Kumari perhaps sent one of the enslaved people to call the Gurujyu when she wanted witnesses to discuss the discovered money bags. The slaves probably moved things from one part of the house to the other when the two women partitioned all their possessions. The people serving the household as slaves and servants were pivotal. They were the figures in the shadows who kept secrets and moved information.

Ram Singh. Tulsi. Ujire. Indrabadan. Gopale. Haribadan. And all the other unnamed slaves and servants. Through their constant proximity to those they served, these enslaved people knew more about the inner workings of the Naradevi household than anyone else. What did they do with all those secrets? Did they–and how did they–use all that information? Did they fan or put out the fires of conflict?

The stories of Ram Singh, Tulsi, and all the other pivotal slaves and servants remain untold.

The fleeting four
Then there is Kalu. The sister related within four or five generations who was found out in an incestuous sexual encounter with Raj Kumari’s husband Prithi Bahadur. She is only a fleeting name in this case. That too a nickname, one that tells us only that she was considered dark skinned.

Even more fleeting is the bhauju, the sister-in-law related within four or five generations, who was also found out in a sexual encounter with Prithi Bahadur.

Equally silent are Prithi Bahadur’s two junior wives. At least we know their names. Harka Kumari (referenced in one place as Hara) and Hari Lila. Both women had borne children after they fled with Prithi Bahadur. In 1872, the former’s son Nara Bahadur was four years old. And the latter’s daughter Trivikram Devi was five years old. Prithi Bahadur had likely lived on the family’s Guthi lands in Mahottari with a full household until his death in 1871.

Alongside his wives and children, the household had a Brahmin woman named Lakshmi Devi who cooked for them. And a keta called Krishnavira and three ketis called Dharmasila, Mohan Kumari, and Indira Kumari who served them.

We know of this household because of an expiation document from 1872. In the year after Prithi Bahadur’s death, all the nine individuals of this household were granted a water expiation. (See the section ‘Losing caste’ of Episode 4 for more on the process of receiving patiya purificatory documents). Having gone through the ritual-bureaucratic process of obtaining a patiya, they regained some measure of purification and reintegration into caste society. They could share water–but not cooked rice–with caste equals.

At least one of the junior wives had some support, possibly from her natal family. The request for this expiation was made on behalf of these nine people by a Captain Khadga Simha Bhandari Kshetri. And his logic mirrored Shamsher Bahadur’s claims for why his aunt Raj Kumari was ineligible to inherit. The captain argued that the members of this household had behaved exactly as Raj Kumari had. As she had received an expiation, so too should they.

We never hear from these four women whose place in society was irrevocably worsened by their encounters with Prithi Bahadur.

Troublesome women
These women were, I imagine, troublesome for their families. They were daughters and sisters. Duty, affection, and concerns about social perception bound their families to these disgraced, outcast women. They could likely not be fully disowned. But they could not be fully integrated into the fabric of kinship and home either. Unlike troublesome men, they could also not be sent away with some resources in hand.

We never learn what happens to Kalu. I often wonder whether her sexual encounter with Prithi Bahadur was consensual or coerced. And whether that mattered to how her life shaped up. She could probably not flee as Prithi Bahadur did. With the benefits afforded to elite women, there was perhaps no will to punish and humiliate her in the same manner as a man.

How did society deal with such women? According to Purushottam Shamshere J.B Rana, a chronicler of the ruling Rana family, women from the lineage who transgressed sexual norms were sent to live in the Manohara Palace, located at the southeastern outskirts of Kathmandu. I have a romantic feminist fantasy that a bunch of women with nothing to lose were living merry, transgressive lives in Manohara. The reality, to which we have no access, was likely very different.

The transgression of the junior co-wives was substantively different from Kalu’s. They had gone to live with their husband after all. Did this perhaps earn them more familial and social empathy? But they were troublesome nonetheless. Where were they to be housed? How were their children to be supported and married?

All four troublesome women remain silent.

The weight of the absent
Over nine weeks, we have peeled the layers of this case, this dispute and this family. When Ratna Kumari first turned the family conflict into a legal case, we thought it was a contained property dispute. When Raj Kumari brought up the matter of the dhukuti and outlined the histories of the six Guthis, we realized the dispute was more sprawling than we had previously imagined. Shamsher Bahadur came onto the scene like a wrecking ball. He told us the scandal underlying the case meant that his aunt was ineligible to any property due to her outcaste status.

Each of the three claimants substantively shifted our understanding of this dispute. Might the pivotal slaves and troublesome women have done the same, I wonder.

I find the silence of these two junior wives curious, for example. Unlike the enslaved, they had the means to seek legal recourse. They could have testified in support of Shamsher Bahadur. But they remained silent. I wonder if their silence suggests an understanding with Raj Kumari. When their husband was alive, the family resources Raj Kumari had taken control of were likely flowing to him. And he was perhaps using it to sustain the household, including his junior wives and children. Perhaps Raj Kumari continued to provide for her younger co-wives and their children after Prithi Bahadur died. In turn, the junior co-wives did not support Shamsher Bahadur’s claims. For if he succeeded in stripping Raj Kumari of her inheritance, they would gain nothing.

This is wild, ungrounded, conjecture on my part. A desire to reinforce what their silence might hide when I have no evidence to do so. But their silence could be anchored in many other considerations. With the evidence we have to hand, we can only wonder.

But we should not use the lack of evidence to brush aside these absences. We have to be open to the possibility that we have the story all wrong. We have to acknowledge that we have just scratched the surface no matter how diligently we have pieced the story together. We have to account for the presence and weight of these pivotal slaves and troublesome women.

Reflections and sense-making
Every Wednesday for the past nine weeks, I have ended my posts saying ‘all this next week’. The phrase was a promise that the story had not ended. That we had more peeling and probing to do.

We have reached the end of the peeling and probing today. But only for Season 1. Three more seasons await us, of course. We have listened, as we set out to do, to the told and the untold. We have heard the claims and counter-claims.

The next month, before we leave this season behind us, is a time for reflection and sense-making.

Due to upcoming travels, I will be taking a break from posting next week. I’m hoping you will take the break to catch up on any posts you have not read and to send me your thoughts. What say?

In the subsequent two weeks, I will share two podcasts, two interludes. In each interlude, I will be in conversation with reader-friends unpacking the story together.

On Wednesday, 9 September, I will post the final installment of Season 1. As promised, this final installment will be longer than the other posts. I will wander and wonder afar, offering context, thinking out loud, and riffing on the evidence.

All this in the coming weeks.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On

Two sisters-in-law—Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari, both young widows in 1870s Kathmandu—are in a property dispute. Ratna Kumari filed a petition claiming Raj Kumari wrongfully took control of their Guthi lands. Raj Kumari denied the claim, offering detailed histories showing each Guthi came to her with consent and adding accusations of her own. Then Shamsher Bahadur—Ratna Kumari’s son—entered as a litigant with revelations that transformed the case. His uncle Prithi Bahadur committed incest, lost his caste, and fled to India. His three wives, including Raj Kumari, followed him into exile and outcaste status. Yet when Raj Kumari returned to Kathmandu, she inherited valuable family properties. Her two co-wives and their children did not. Shamsher Bahadur highlights these unequal fates to argue that Raj Kumari too forfeited her inheritance rights. He bolsters his legal case by painting his aunt Raj Kumari as a calculating deceiver who exploited his mother’s naiveté through lies about inheritance rights and promises she never intended to keep.

After the disputants had told their stories, witnesses gave testimony on how the partition of 1869 between Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari was enacted. Witnesses disagreed on whether Ratna Kumari actually ceded authority over the Guthis to Raj Kumari. Witnesses agreed that Ratna Kumari confessed to not sharing the bags of money she found in a mousehole with Raj Kumari.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

The petition in hindsight
“During the monsoon of 1874, on a Sunday in July, when the moon was waxing towards brightness, Ratna Kumari submitted a petition that sparked the legal case that would drag on for more than a decade.”

This sentence now holds such different weight for us than it did when we first read it. After eight weeks of being voyeurs into the enduring troubles this household has faced, things are no clearer. The matter seems more congealed and convoluted. It is harder to take sides. There are no heroes here. No villains either. Just three flawed people in an impossible situation. There are no good, clean ways forward for any of these three people.

We can never really know why Ratna Kumari decided to file the legal case. But, we can speculate that the events of 1873 perhaps pushed her over the edge. Three tense eruptions took place in that year. If the proverbial straw is adequate to break the camel’s back, these three straws perhaps provoked Ratna Kumari into igniting a family dispute into a legal case.

Blocking access
In the month of Kartik, in the late fall of 1873–one witness says it was 1872 and another 1873–Shamsher Bahadur blocked his aunt’s entrance to the house. He built a wall that blocked their shared accessway into the house on the ground floor.

I imagine they lived in a walled compound. A main door would lead in from the street into a courtyard, a communal space of feasts, gatherings, chatting in the sun, and meeting visitors. They had not partitioned the main door and walkway. It had remained common property allowing both of them access to the house. That is, until Shamsher Bahadur blocked the walkway. Presumably, Shamsher Bahadur and his mother could access their share of the house from elsewhere."

Building a wall to block someone’s accessway is no small step. I wonder if Shamsher Bahadur himself was angry. Or if he was just acting on his mother’s instructions as Raj Kumari claimed. The young man with his celebrated lineage was surely not putting up the wall himself. Other people must have been instructed to mix the mortar and lay the bricks.

I imagine Raj Kumari found out about this before the wall was complete. It would likely have been news that rippled rapidly across the servants, slaves, and caretakers of the household. I imagine Raj Kumari stormed from her part of the house to the entryway. She would have perhaps gotten angrier and angrier on the way over. She would have said cruel things to her young nephew, perhaps. Loudly certainly. He would perhaps have matched her venom, in substance and tone.

Their exchange was heated enough that two witnesses, Saldur Singh and Narayan Krishna, reported a jhagara, a fight, between the two.

No matter how the exact scene unfolded, the incident remained sharply etched in Raj Kumari’s memory (See ‘Fighting tactics’)

Breaking into the dhukuti
Just a few months later, in January or February 1874, another massive fight erupted inside the dhukuti treasury.

It began when an ill Raj Kumari made a request of her sister-in-law. She asked to stay in the dhukuti treasury in Ratna Kumari’s part of the house.

Why would Raj Kumari want to stay there when ill? I have no idea. Truly none. I speculate often in my posts. I indicate that I am speculating by using words such as ‘perhaps’ or ‘likely’ or ‘possibly’. But I usually ground my speculations in some evidence or cultural practice. Here, I have no explanation. Was there some cultural logic? Or was Raj Kumari just pushing the boundaries, looking for an excuse to breach the dhukuti space?

Ratna Kumari, I imagine, would say it was the latter. And readers who feel kinship with her would perhaps agree after reading what comes next. Ratna Kumari refused her sister-in-law access, of course. It would hardly be a story recounted by witnesses if they were cooperating.

So Raj Kumari broke into the room. An uproar ensued. ‘Mero dhanmal barbad garyo,’ she has ruined my valuables, Ratna Kumari moaned. Calling multiple people as witnesses, she demanded an immediate survey and listing of everything in the room. We will explore the intriguing list that emerged from this survey in a few weeks.

The contested harvest
Another major conflict erupted during the harvest of 1873. None of the witnesses talk about it. This dispute took place on the Guthi lands in Mahottari district, a many-days walk away from Naradevi. All the witnesses were located in Kathmandu. They would not have seen what transpired there. Raj Kumari had named a Gopal Thakur, likely one of their managers in Mahottari, as a witness. He might have known about the incident. But his statement was never recorded.

But both Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari have already told us their version of the event.

From Ratna Kumari’s petition, we learnt that:

“During the harvest of 1873 - the year before she submitted her petition - Ratna Kumari had sent her son Shamsher Bahadur to the plains with instructions to collect the profits of the harvest. But the young man returned empty-handed.

To add insult to injury, her younger sister-in-law had coaxed her minor son into signing an unacceptable written agreement. This document stated that Raj Kumari would operate and profit from the Guthis from April 1870 to April 1875 and Ratna Kumari from April 1875 to April 1880. This agreement infuriated Ratna Kumari. She, as the right holder, should have been consulted, she fumed. Raj Kumari had no right to bypass her and enter into agreements with her minor son, she raged, the droplets of her anger visible through the formality of the petition.”

Raj Kumari denied these claims vehemently, telling a completely different story:

“Angry at having been caught out concealing the money in the dhukuti, her elder sister-in-law also created discord among the tenants who occupied their vast Guthi lands in the Madhesh plains. These disruptive actions took place during the harvest of 1873, when Ratna Kumari sent her son to forcibly collect the harvest profits.

When the mother-son duo interfered with her control of the Guthis, Raj Kumari had petitioned the Western Commanding General about her problem. This man, occupying the third most powerful position in the ruling Rana regime, had instructed another Rana General to sort out the matter. Recall that Ratna Kumari had raged that her sister-in-law had no right to coax her minor son to sign agreements over the Guthis. Raj Kumari denies that she did anything of the sort. Whatever agreements were signed, they were the Rana General’s doing, not hers, says Raj Kumari.”

Straining towards the untold
No matter whose version of events we believe, one fact remains. Simmering tensions kept erupting into open conflict starting in the fall of 1873. Perhaps the increased intensity and frequency of the everyday conflicts led Ratna Kumari to seek legal recourse. We will never really know.

This first season has been all about listening to the told and the untold. Over these nine weeks, we have listened carefully to everyone who spoke to us. The three disputants: Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, and Shamsher Bahadur. All the relations, priests, and officials who gave testimony as witnesses. Everything that has been told to us, we have listened to attentively. Everything that has been told to us, we have tried to make sense of.

The untold remains. Those prevented from speaking are resolutely silent. The untold and the silenced are much harder to hear, no matter how diligently we strain to listen. But we will try nonetheless.

All this next week.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On

Two sisters-in-law—Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari, both young widows in 1870s Kathmandu—are in a property dispute. Ratna Kumari filed a petition claiming Raj Kumari wrongfully took control of their Guthi lands. Raj Kumari denied the claim, offering detailed histories showing each Guthi came to her with consent and adding accusations of her own. Then Shamsher Bahadur—Ratna Kumari’s son—entered as a litigant with revelations that transformed the case. His uncle Prithi Bahadur committed incest, lost his caste, and fled to India. His three wives, including Raj Kumari, followed him into exile and outcaste status. Yet when Raj Kumari returned to Kathmandu, she inherited valuable family properties. Her two co-wives and their children did not. Shamsher Bahadur highlights these unequal fates to argue that Raj Kumari too forfeited her inheritance rights. He bolsters his legal case by painting his aunt Raj Kumari as a calculating deceiver who exploited his mother’s naiveté through lies about inheritance rights and promises she never intended to keep.

After the disputants had told their stories, witnesses gave testimony on how the partition of 1869 between Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari was enacted. Witnesses also disagreed on whether Ratna Kumari actually ceded authority over the Guthis to Raj Kumari. Through these spare testimonies, we begin to understand the fine considerations that went into dividing valuables, lands, and the house itself. No detail was too small. Lines were even redrawn to ensure that both women got half of a single window overlooking an alley.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

‘Kaso ho?’ ‘What happened?’
He does not know the day or month or year. One day, Raj Kumari sent for Gauri Vilas Gurugharana Pandit, the family’s preceptor, their Gurujyu. I imagine Raj Kumari ordered a servant to hurry along to the Bhosiko neighbourhood, some 15 minutes east from the house in Naradevi. The messenger stressed the urgency of the matter on arrival. Perhaps the Gurujyu pressed the person for details. Perhaps he hurried along too. Or, perhaps, he was too important a person to be at someone’s beck and call. Perhaps he dismissed the messenger with a vague message that, yes yes, he would come. In the testimony, he compresses the many decisions that stretched across time into a simple sequence of events: I was beckoned and I went.

On arriving at the house, Raj Kumari told him that Ratna Kumari had found money, rupaiya, in the dhukuti treasury. I imagine her restless, waiting for the Gurujyu, and blurting out her accusations in an angry stream. Though we would have to imagine her otherwise if we believe her nephew. If she really was a devious manipulator, she would perhaps be cool and collected as she implemented the plan she had concocted.

‘Kaso ho?’ ‘What happened?’, the Gurujyu asked Ratna Kumari. I had kept a kush granthi in the dhukuti treasury, began Ratna Kumari. The kush grass is sacred, and essential to many rituals. It is often knotted into rings, mats, rosaries, and other shapes. Ratna Kumari had kept such a knotted object made of kush grass in the dhukuti treasury.

I had kept a kush granthi in the dhukuti treasury and a mouse stole it, Ratna Kumari explained. On discovering the theft, she wanted the kush granthi found. ‘Khoj’, go look for it, she ordered Ram Singh and Tulsi. The Gurujyu calls them ketas. Literally, the term translates to ‘boys’. But, historically, the term was used to describe boys and men of all ages who worked as unfree labour, as slaves or bonded workers. We do not have a fine-grained enough understanding of the spectrum and experience of unfree labour to speculate on Ram Singh and Tulsi’s situation more precisely.

Ram Singh and Tulsi dutifully went looking. As part of their search, they put their hands inside the mousehole in the room. And, voilà, their seeking hands chanced upon something in the dark hole. The object was of an unexpected size and texture. Not the knots of the kush granthi. But a flat, round shape. They pulled out the discs. In the light of the room, they discovered it was money, coins. Ram Singh and Tulsi stuck their hands back into the mousehole. This time, they felt another shape and texture. Their hands emerged with even greater treasures, pouches filled with money. Ram Singh and Tulsi brought these pouches and coins over to her, says Ratna Kumari. And this, she claims, is the true story of how she found thousands of rupees in the unpartitioned dhukuti treasury.

Wondering and wandering
Are you as taken by this story as I am, dear reader? Of all the twists of scandal, turns of drama, and bursts of conflict that make up this case, I find this one the most magnetic. I am brimming with questions about how this moment of happenstance was experienced, narrated, and received. This story urges us to scurry like mice, along the edges, feeling shapes and spaces with our whiskers, jumping up walls, tables, chairs, and walking delicately along suspended ropes. It opens up the possibility that we too might find unexpected treasures when we sniff about in people’s mundane things and stick our hands into dark holes.

Sniffing around the mundane, scurrying lost across the hard-to-explain, feeling about in the darkness, these seem to me fruitful but woefully ignored ways of exploring the past. We will patter around the story of the kush granthi, the mouse, Ram Singh and Tulsi, and the money pouches in the final episode of this season. We will wonder and wander expansively.

For now, let us return to the moment when the Gurujyu is hearing, processing, and acting on–with others in tow– the information that a thieving mouse had led to the discovery of pouches of money which one woman allegedly concealed from the other. These pulsating, textured descriptions are invitations into the moment. We should take time to loiter in them.

Counting money
‘Where is that pouch? Bring it,’ the Gurujyu ordered Ratna Kumari. The pouch she produced had some 100 or 150 Kaldar rupees. The term kaldar usually conveys that the coin was machine struck rather than hand made. The Gurujyu looked closely at the pouch too. He saw some letters or perhaps a symbol of some kind on the pouches. As for the total amount originally found in the dhukuti treasury, the Gurujyu says Ram Singh and Tulsi would know.

Everyone has their own storytelling style. Individual memories operate in their own unique fashions. The Gurujyu does not dwell much on the pouches and the money. But other witnesses do.

The purohit Padma Kesar specifies that Ratna Kumari showed the gathered knot of people three pouches. Leather pouches, more specifically. The purohit recalls Ratna Kumari saying there was about three thousand rupees when the ketas counted the contents of the pouches for her.

Neil Narsingh is even more precise. He says the original haul from the mousehole amounted to 3000 Mohar rupees and 800 Patna rupees. The mohar rupees were coins minted within Nepal.

Strictly speaking, Patna rupees referred to coins minted specifically in the Patna mint during Mughal rule and into the early 19th century till the British standardized their coinage. The latter standardized coinage is often referred to as ‘company rupees’ in 19th century Nepali-language documents.

We do not know the age and provenance of these coins, allegedly resting in a mousehole for who knows how long. They were possibly pre-standardization coins minted in Patna rather than the new colonial coinage. What is certain is that they were minted in India, and not by the ruling regime in Nepal.

Back in Naradevi, the tense moment is still unfolding.

Into the dhukuti
Raj Kumari piped up after the leather pouches and remaining rupees had been inspected. She asked that the whole party go inspect the place where the pouches and money had been found.

The Gurujyu does not describe the inside of the much disputed dhukuti treasury. He mentions only that there was a khaḍakuḍo on top of a trunk. Raj Kumari picked up the object saying, ‘this khaḍakuḍo was not included in the partition’. The khaḍakuḍo was perhaps the same object that is known as a khaḍkulo, a round and deep copper or brass vessel used to store grains or to cook rice for many people, often at large feasts or other such gatherings. (Many thanks to Deepak Aryal for suggesting this reading of the word). Raj Kumari’s observations highlight how every object was expected to be included in the partition.

The purohit Padma Kesar, who has been very detailed in his description thus far, also glosses over the room. He says only vaguely that the wall around the aankhi jhyal, the carved wooden lattice window, was damaged in places. There were some empty trunks in the room, he notes.

Neil Narsingh is far more forthcoming. If the description was about the agreements between the two women, I would urge us to be skeptical. For Neil Narsingh has echoed Raj Kumari closely on all fronts. But his descriptions of the space and contents of the dhukuti treasury can perhaps be taken at face value.

On Raj Kumari’s urging, the Gurujyu, the purohit, Neil Narsingh, both women, and Shamsher Bahadur trooped into the dhukuti treasury. Large wooden posts had been sunk into the ground. A new wall made of unbaked clay bricks had been thrown up, presumably between the posts.

That an old wall had been broken and a new one built near the lattice window is a detail Raj Kumari and her supporter Neil Narsingh repeat. No one articulates how this backs up her accusations about the stolen money. Perhaps it was clear to them and to the officials who read their complaints. Me, I remain bemused. My best guess is: Raj Kumari is arguing that Ratna Kumari broke the old wall to access the money and rebuilt a new one.

Neil Narsingh continues. The room also had other items. There were some 8 or 10 small wooden trunks. There was one copper trunk. And there were two or three bundles of vessels. From one of the wooden trunks, Ratna Kumari removed a pouch. This was presumably not the same leather pouch she had recently shown to everyone. Rather she had perhaps moved the money to another pouch for storage. She took this pouch outside the dhukuti treasury and counted the money it contained. She showed them there was less than 300 rupees left though Neil Narsingh does not remember the exact amount.

No less than half
Then came the words the two women allegedly spoke to each other. Neil Narsingh says Raj Kumari refused to take so small an amount. The purohit Padma Kesar too recalls Raj Kumari refusing the small amount. ‘I will take half if I take anything,’ she insists. ‘This is all I have now,’ Ratna Kumari says, ‘if I have to give you half, I will write over some khet to you’. Short of money, Ratna Kumari promised to make things right by transferring agricultural lands to her sister-in-law. Raj Kumari stalked off without taking the money. And Ratna Kumari returned the money pouch to the wooden trunk in the dhukuti treasury.

The party must have dispersed as the women parted. None of the witnesses say more about that day.

Recalling the partition
Having thrown ourselves into the blow-up as it unfolded, let us now take a step back. It has been almost two months since we first heard about the dhukuti. Let us first recall what kind of space the dhukuti was: “In the Naradevi house, as elsewhere, valuables accumulated over generations were stored in a dedicated room or set of rooms. These spaces were the dhukuti, a storeroom or treasury. The room would have been locked. And access restricted. The key would likely have been guarded by one person. Perhaps the senior female in the undivided house. In the past, the women’s mother-in-law would perhaps have tucked the set of jangling keys into some corner of the abundant fabric she draped herself in.”

The first of Raj Kumari’s two accusations centered on the dhukuti was that Ratna Kumari had not allowed for the room to be properly surveyed before the partition. It is in this context that her statement that the metal vessel on top of the trunk had not been partitioned is pertinent. In episode two, we read Raj Kumari’s story about the non-partition of the dhukuti:

“When she became the senior woman of the house, the keys to the dhukuti came to Ratna Kumari. When the flurry of activities to formalize the partition was taking place, Ratna Kumari controlled access to the dhukuti. Recall Ratna Kumari’s own description of the formalities of the partition process. Sometime before 1869, officials from a nearby thana, security station, had come to survey the contents of the Naradevi house. They had been tasked by the court with listing all the items in the house. The partition formalized in 1869 took place on the basis of this master list. Ratna Kumari herself reported this chain of events.

Raj Kumari alleges that her elder sister-in-law did not let the officers from the thana into the dhukuti. They were kept from surveying the space that contained the family’s most valuable possessions accumulated over generations. Her elder sister-in-law told the men their prayer room was on the other side of the locked doors. Told them it held nothing of material value. She did not open the lock. She deliberately misled them. Deliberately prevented them from surveying the household treasury.”

A few bolts of fabric
Raj Kumari’s accusations include the implicit claim that she never had access to the dhukuti. That she had never seen what it contained. The Gurujyu’s testimony contradicts this implied assertion. After their mother-in-law Raj Laxmi Devi died, he recalls hearing from Raj Kumari about the contents of the dhukuti. She allegedly said the room contained only some than, bolts, of fabric. There were approximately five bolts of chit, printed cotton fabric, likely chintz or calico. There was also a single bolt of gaut and two bolts of nainkirat.

Across the world, textiles were status symbols, often signs of access to cosmopolitan goods. In many places, they also held relatively standardized exchange value. In 19th century Kathmandu, elites distributed fabrics to the servants in their household during specific annual festivals or grand lifecycle occasions such as marriages. This was the norm, essentially a part of the terms of employment and patronage. The Naradevi dhukuti contained bolts of different fabrics for all these reasons.

Raj Kumari too gave some fabrics to her servants. The Gurujyu says she accessed the treasury a second time after she returned from the Madhesh plains. He heard her say that she had found a bolt of gaut at this time. She told him she distributed this among their cook and other servants to make cholo blouses.

Access and complicity
Two pertinent observations. First, Raj Kumari’s claims that her sister-in-law prevented her access to the dhukuti appear false. She had entered the room, surveyed it, and made use of its contents at multiple points in time if the Gurujyu is to be believed.

Second, note how casually the Gurujyu says ‘after she returned from the Madhesh’. It appears to be widely known that Raj Kumari had gone to live with her outcaste husband. So it was widely known that she was ineligible to inherit. Yet, the Gurujyu himself had been a formal witness to their partition. And he continued to uphold Raj Kumari’s rights to property by appearing to meditate at times of crisis.

Many more people than just Ratna Kumari were complicit in covering up Raj Kumari’s transgressions. This matters in how the legal case unfolds, I imagine. If one person lied, it is easy to punish them. Perhaps particularly if the person is a young widow without powerful backers. But the calculations are different if the larger community was involved in the cover-up. It requires a great deal more political will to punish multiple people, particularly those important to maintaining the ruling regime.

Actually, the whole matter takes on a different colour if important people such as the Gurujyu were party to the lie. Would he really stake his reputation and social standing to lie for a young woman who had clearly broken social and legal norms? Recall that Raj Kumari herself has indicated her connections to the highest rungs of power (see ‘Fighting tactics’). Perhaps there was political will of the highest order to ensure she maintained her social status and her access to the family property. We will have to wait till seasons three and four to unravel these mysteries.

Today, we stay focused on the dhukuti.

Comparing tellings
When we first heard about the dhukuti some two months ago, Raj Kumari had also narrated these same events we just heard from the witnesses. To date, there have been such differing versions of events. Let us see if Raj Kumari’s telling matches with that of the witnesses, who broadly concur on the sequence and tenor of what happened. In episode two, based on Raj Kumari’s petition, we read that:

“The same dhukuti treasury was at the center of another dispute in 1870, just a year after the partition. Loose tongues seem to have wagged. Raj Kumari does not tell us how she found out. But find out she did that her sister-in-law discovered some valuables inside a wall in the unpartitioned dhukuti treasury. She confronted her sister-in-law. The latter swore she had concealed nothing. Raj Kumari hurled whatever proof she had.

Ultimately, Ratna Kumari admitted she had indeed found some 3000 to 4000 rupees inside the dhukuti before the partition. Raj Kumari called their priests, preceptor, and other connections to meditate and bear witness.

Ratna admitted, yes yes, I found the money in the wall. But I have spent it. See, I have just some two or three hundred rupees in my hands. Take it. As for the rest, I will write some of my land over in your name.

Raj Kumari rejects these offers of phased repayment. I want to look inside the dhukuti, she says. The entire entourage consisting of Raj, Ratna, Ratna’s son, the preceptor, priests, and others made their way in. The room held some eight or ten trunks. In a part of the room that had a dome-like structure, an old wall had been broken and replaced with a new one. The broken and rebuilt wall is proof that something had been found inside it, says Raj Kumari.”

Raj Kumari’s telling aligns almost perfectly with that of the witnesses. This is unusual in this case. Some key witnesses did not back up Raj Kumari’s claim that Ratna Kumari had ceded full authority of the Guthis to her. The Gurujyu has put into doubt her implicit claim that she had no access to the dhukuti before the partition.

On the issue of money pouches found in the dhukuti, all the witness statements back up her version of events.

Not so sparse after all
Besides the money found in the mousehole, the dhukuti seems very sparse. Have you been thinking this too? Surely some eight bolts of fabric hardly comprise a treasury to be fought over viciously? But Raj Kumari has perhaps not told her Gurujyu the full story. Or he is perhaps only telling us part of a story he knows a great deal more about.

None of the witnesses say they opened the trunks and bundles lying around in the dhukuti as they went to investigate. If they did open it, they do not tell us what was inside.

But we will hear from other witnesses beckoned to the dhukuti at another time, when another crisis exploded over it. We will find out that the dhukuti was much fuller. We will see that it housed many kinds of everyday, extraordinary, and sentimental things.

By the end of 1873, there were fresh eruptions of hostilities not only over the dhukuti but also over the house and lands. In pursuing these eruptions, we come back full circle to the monsoon of 1874, where we started when Ratna Kumari filed her petition.

All this next week.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On

Two sisters-in-law—Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari, both young widows in 1870s Kathmandu—are in a property dispute. Ratna Kumari filed a petition claiming Raj Kumari wrongfully took control of their Guthi lands. Raj Kumari denied the claim, offering detailed histories showing each Guthi came to her with consent and adding accusations of her own. Then Shamsher Bahadur—Ratna Kumari's son—entered as a litigant with revelations that transformed the case. His uncle Prithi Bahadur committed incest, lost his caste, and fled to India. His three wives, including Raj Kumari, followed him into exile and outcaste status. Yet when Raj Kumari returned to Kathmandu, she inherited valuable family properties. Her two co-wives and their children did not. Shamsher Bahadur highlights these unequal fates to argue that Raj Kumari too forfeited her inheritance rights. He bolsters his legal case by painting his aunt Raj Kumari as a calculating deceiver who exploited his mother's naiveté through lies about inheritance rights and promises she never intended to keep.

After the disputants had told their stories, witnesses shared how the partition of 1869 between Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari was enacted. Through these spare testimonies, we begin to understand the fine considerations that went into dividing valuables, lands, and the house itself. No detail was too small. Lines were even redrawn to ensure that both women got half of a single window overlooking an alley.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

Piecing it together
Remember that the dispute started with the Guthis. During the monsoon of 1874, on a Sunday in July, when the moon was waxing towards brightness, Ratna Kumari submitted a petition complaining that her younger sister-in-law Raj Kumari had taken sole control of the family’s six Guthis over which she too had equal legal claims.

Raj Kumari did not contest that she had been running and profiting from the Guthis by herself. But she claimed she had been doing so with Ratna Kumari’s consent. She claimed that Ratna Kumari had given her taluk–a formal, legal term translatable as authority, jurisdiction, or power–to run the Guthis alone.

Looking back at the shape of this dispute just six weeks ago, it all seems far too simple. Since then, there have been so many twists and turns. The case has bloated into an amorphous, many-tentacled shape. Yet, the dispute over the Guthis is still a central thread in the case.

The officials taking down the testimonies must have asked the witnesses what they knew about the sisters-in-law’s arrangements over the Guthis. From their responses, we gather little tidbits. Like the mice that are the mascot of this season, we have to ball together these scavenged fragments to add yet another strand to the tangled skein that is our understanding of these women, their household, and their times.

Back to the Guthis
It has been many weeks since we thought about Guthis at all. So, here is a recap of what we learnt about the family Guthis way back in Episode 1:

“Much of the inheritable family lands were registered as Guthi, a particular category of land tenure. The income from Guthi lands–in cash and crops–were used for specific ritual and charitable purposes. To carry out the rites of deities. To feed ascetics, cows, or monkeys. To build rest houses, water wells, and gardens. The activities the Guthi was obligated to undertake was detailed in a charter established at the time of its endowment. The scale and frequency of the obligations were precisely detailed. The family kept whatever profits remained of the cash and grains the land yielded after these obligations had been fulfilled. If the obligations clearly written down in the original charter were not fulfilled, the state could, and did, confiscate the Guthi lands from families and individuals.

Ratna and Raj Kumari had not partitioned these lands because they were not legally allowed to. Guthi lands could be inherited within families. The women could lay claim to both the obligations and profits attached to the Guthi. But they could not partition the Guthis as they had lands registered under other tenurial terms. The Guthi lands had to remain whole, and all parties eligible to inherit had claims to the whole.

This required a very different set of arrangements over duties and profit sharing than a clear cut division. Ongoing interactions over the sharing of information and records were unavoidable. One party or the other might need the original endowment copper plate or document. Annual account balances, the latest news about tenants, floods, priests, repairs might need to be discussed.

Control over and access to the family’s substantial Guthis holdings was at the heart of Ratna Kumari’s claims against Raj Kumari.

The Pande family had six Guthis with sizeable lands located in the Kathmandu Valley and in the eastern plains region of what is today the district of Mahottari.

Ratna Kumari said her younger sister-in-law Raj Kumari had taken sole control of all six of the family’s Guthis. And it was not a recent takeover. Raj Kumari had controlled these lands for the past 12 years, since they separated their kitchens in 1861.”

Enter the Gurujyu
Let us start with the most prominent of the four witnesses we will listen to today.

As she traced the arc of how each of the Guthis came to her, Raj Kumari said that their Gurujyu–jyu an honorific for the respected Guru–had handed over two of the six Guthis to them:

“The remaining two Guthis had been run by their Gurujyu, the family preceptor and guide. This was perhaps a more recent arrangement. The documents relating to this transfer had been given to the Gurujyu only by Raj and Ratna Kumari’s mother-in-law. Around 1869, the family preceptor said he no longer wanted the Guthis because he could not make the investments required for repair and maintenance. He returned the lal mohars, red seal documents, for the two Guthis. He returned these papers to both women through Shamsher Bahadur, Ratna Kumar’s son. The boy gave one lal mohar to his mother and the other to his aunt. After some 20 or 25 days, Ratna Kumari sent over her lal mohar to Raj Kumari. Like the Gurujyu, she found it difficult to repair and maintain the Guthi infrastructure. So Raj Kumari says.”

The Gurujyu was a man named Gauri Vilas Gurugharana Pandit, resident of the Bhosiko neighbourhood. In one sense, he tells broadly the same story as Raj Kumari. He had control of the Guthis. He returned the copper plates and other documents to the two women through Shamsher Bahadur. Ratna Kumari later sent these documents over to Raj Kumari.

In another sense, he tells a very different story.

The transfers
The Gurujyu begins with how the two Guthis came under his control. They was not just given to him by their mother-in-law as Raj Kumari reported. Rather, the original documents were handed over to him by all the women of the not-yet-torn-asunder household: Raj Laxmi, Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari, Harka Kumari, and Hari Lila. Raj Laxmi was likely the women’s mother-in-law. Harka Kumari and Hari Lila were likely Raj Kumari’s two co-wives.

A few years later, after all the scandal, fleeing, death, and outcasting Shamsher Bahadur narrated, only Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari remained. These two women told him they wanted to run the Guthis themselves, says the Gurujyu. So he returned the necessary documents.

The Gurujyu is very specific about the exact manner in which the documents were transferred. He, the two sisters-in-law, and a very young Shamsher Bahadur were all together for the transaction. The Gurujyu advised the women to run the Guthi in turns as per their share of the family inheritance. As their preceptor, it was his right, his duty, to give them advice.

Then Raj Kumari said to her little nephew: ‘Give one red-seal document to your mother and one to me.’ This reads far more formally than it should. Raj Kumari said: ‘ek lal mohar aamalai dey, ek lal mohar malai dey’. She used the lowest register of ‘you’, the one reserved for children and intimates and inferiors. And she perhaps spoke in that tone of playfulness and authority one often uses with little children. The Gurujyu handed over both documents to the little guy who dutifully bounded over to his mother and then his aunt.

The Gurujyu was an actor in and an eye witness to the transfer of one set of documents to each of the women. Of what came next, he must have been told by someone else. Still, the Gurujyu recounts what unfolded confidently. He makes no clear distinction between what he saw and what he was told. Ratna Kumari later sent over the one red-seal document in her possession to Raj Kumari. She wanted all the documents pertaining to the Guthis to be stored together. So far, this fits Raj Kumari’s narrative that she was given–rather than wrested–control of the Guthis.

But, hold on a second. According to the Gurujyu, Ratna Kumari sent over the red-seal document saying: ‘these two Guthis and all the other Guthis, I will run for a year, you run for one year.’ Raj Kumari agreed, he says. The documents were sent to Raj Kumari for safekeeping, not for her exclusive use, he suggests.

This narration suits Ratna Kumari’s claims.

Divergent valences
But there are other witnesses who lean towards Raj Kumari’s telling. Neil Narsingh Pradhan essentially echoes Raj Kumari’s story of how the six Guthis came to her. We do not know the exact relationship that Neil Narsingh, who lived nearby in Thamel, had with the Naradevi household. But he certainly appears to know a great deal about all the goings-on.

On the two Guthis returned by the Gurujyu, he gives a different reason for why Ratna Kumari sent over the document in her possession. Ratna Kumari hesitated to take on the work of making the necessary repairs, he says, echoing Raj Kumari’s explanation.

What were these tiresome repairs? Guthis came with a whole set of infrastructure. This included temples and the idols of the deities, certainly. And it included all the ornaments, clothes, and votive items required by the deities.

But it could also include a great deal more. Rest houses for travellers and pilgrims. Water spouts, wells, and ponds. Gardens and orchards. Roadways. Cooking pots and pans to feed ascetics. The person managing the Guthi was responsible for keeping all the attendant infrastructure in good repair. And Neil Narsingh claimed Ratna Kumari was unwilling to take on the tasks of repair and maintenance. These were legal–and moral–obligations attached to operating Guthis. The state could–and did–confiscate Guthis if the infrastructure maintenance was lacking.

Neil Narsingh narrates the same set of events as the Gurujyu. But, in his telling, they take on wholly different moral and legal valences.

The taluk question
The officials taking the witness testimonies appear keen to probe Raj Kumari’s claim that her sister-in-law gave her taluk–a formal, legal term translatable as authority, jurisdiction, or power–to run the Guthis alone. It makes sense. This is a legally crucial claim. The story above suggests an implicit hand over of operational control.

But Neil Narsingh backs up Raj Kumari more explicitly on this score too. His confirmation comes in the context of the arrangements over the family’s largest Guthi in the plains of Mahottari. Recall that Raj Kumari’s outcaste husband had been running this Guthi. After he died, in 1870, men from these lands came to the house in Naradevi. They asked that the right holders establish new contracts, new terms. Neil Narsingh mirrors Raj Kumari saying Ratna Kumari told these men she had given taluk of the Guthis to her sister-in-law Raj Kumari. And they should go ask her for the new terms. He shares one new piece of information. The news that Ratna Kumari said she had given over taluk was conveyed to Raj Kumari by Padma Kesar Bhattarai, the purohit ritual specialist who told us how the women divided a window into half.

This word taluk is the key here. Did Ratna Kumari give taluk of the Guthis to Raj Kumari? Or was it another kind of arrangement as the Gurujyu told us. Two witnesses say slightly different things.

Kahar Singh Khatri Chhetri says, yes, Ratna Kumari did give taluk of the Guthis to Raj Kumari. Kahar Singh hailed from Lele, a village in the hills along the southern flank of the Kathmandu Valley. But he lived in Naradevi taking care of ‘kaj kam’, work that arose in the household. As the family had been shorn of any adult men, he was probably hired as the man about the house. He says that the karinda, likely land managers, named Gopal Thakur and Bangsi Lal from the Mahottari Guthi came to the house. He says he heard Ratna Kumari tell the men that she had given taluk of the Guthis to Raj Kumari.

Muddy as ever
Padma Kesar Bhattarai, the purohit, who allegedly relayed the message of the taluk from Ratna Kumari to Raj Kumari says something more equivocal. He is specific. He evokes the moment and the movements precisely.

It was the month of Falgun, sometime between mid-February and mid-March, in 1872. It was Shamsher Bahadur’s wedding day. The house must have been abuzz. People streaming in. Food being cooked. Things being laid out. Activity everywhere.

At this moment of festive action, the men from the Mahottari Guthi arrived in Naradevi. They went to Raj Kumari first, says the purohit. Not to Ratna Kumari as other witnesses have told us. Make arrangements for the lands, these men requested of her. Raj Kumari told the purohit–who would of course be needed in the house on the wedding day–to take the men to Ratna Kumari to make the necessary arrangements. The purohit went, with the men in tow, to convey the message to Ratna Kumari.

Busy though she must have been as the mother of the groom, Ratna Kumari spoke to the men. She asked the men for dam, the payments from the lands. The men said they did not have any. They added that they had already given some payment to Raj Kumari.

Ratna Kumari responded, ‘go ask the person you paid to make the arrangements.’ And so the men trooped back to Raj Kumari.

The purohit did not go back with them. He does not know if and what arrangements they came to.

But he is explicit that he did not hear Ratna Kumari say she had given the taluk of all the Guthis to Raj Kumari. And he did not return to Raj Kumari to say that Ratna Kumari had said she should make all the arrangements because she had taluk.

The waters remain as muddy as ever.

Trust, built and then broken
Listening to the witnesses tell these stories, one thing is clear. The women must have had some sort of agreement over the running of the Guthis. Ratna Kumari did cede all the documents and much of the operational control to Raj Kumari. But Ratna Kumari did not see herself as giving up all rights to and profit from the Guthis. The agreement was more nuanced.

What was it? We are never told explicitly.

The agreement, whatever it was, puts the arc of their relationship in a new light. So far, we only have Shamsher Bahadur’s character sketches–his aunt a devious manipulator and his mother a young, naive, innocent.

Listening to these witness testimonies, I get the sense that they had been co-conspirators. After the family had been decimated by death and scandal, the two women banded together in some form. That is perhaps why Ratna Kumari lied, saying Raj Kumari had not fled with her outcaste husband. And that is perhaps why Ratna Kumari ceded control over crucial Guthi documents. There was a measure of trust and understanding between them. Till, in the way of these things, the trust evaporated.

The breakdown of whatever understanding they had was complete by 1870. More than one explosive scene erupted around the dhukuti treasury during this time. Multiple witnesses detail these blow-ups. And they tell us how the mouse figures in this saga. I fear the tiny creature will be anti-climactic after the long wait. Still, it will scurry about allegedly creating trouble.

All this next week.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

Leave a comment

Previously on Things Drag On
Two sisters-in-law—Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari, both young widows in 1870s Kathmandu—are in a property dispute. Ratna Kumari filed a petition claiming Raj Kumari wrongfully took control of their Guthi lands. Raj Kumari denied the claim, offering detailed histories showing each Guthi came to her with consent and adding accusations of her own. Then Shamsher Bahadur—Ratna Kumari's son—entered as a litigant with revelations that transformed the case. His uncle Prithi Bahadur committed incest, lost his caste, and fled to India. His three wives, including Raj Kumari, followed him into exile and outcaste status. Yet when Raj Kumari returned to Kathmandu, she inherited valuable family properties. Her two co-wives and their children did not. Shamsher Bahadur highlights these unequal fates to argue that Raj Kumari too forfeited her inheritance rights. He bolsters his legal case by painting his aunt Raj Kumari as a calculating deceiver who exploited his mother's naiveté through lies about inheritance rights and promises she never intended to keep.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

Sparse testimonies
Witnesses are essential to adjudicating disputes. Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari both listed witnesses at the close of their petitions in 1874. Just a few months later, witness statements were compiled to be submitted to the Itachapali Court. This was some years before Shamsher Bahadur entered the dispute with his dramatic claims. So we only hear from the people the two sisters-in-law named as witnesses.

None of the witnesses are voluble. They all stick to the three events around which the two women made claims and counterclaims. The property partition of 1869. The control of the Guthis. And the incidents involving the dhukuti treasury room.

Many of the witnesses offer dense details on the fight that took place in the dhukuti. A few tell us who said what to whom about the Guthis. On the partition of the lands, the house, and the valuables within the house, we hear very little. Only two of the twelve witnesses tell us something substantial about how the partition was carried out. Not about the legal process, which Ratna Kumari has already detailed. But the rhythm of the actual days of the partition.

Neither woman ever disputed this partition. And yet, in hearing about how it was carried out, we learn much of the tenor of Raj Kumari’s and Ratna Kumari’s lives, relations, and worlds.

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Partition day
One of these witnesses is a relative, a man named Captain Gambir Dhoj Pande Chhetri who lived in the same Naradevi neighbourhood. The title Captain suggests he was well placed in the army. He would have been a man of some personal means and power, in addition to the status and wealth inherited from his birth into the lineage. Perhaps these factors, alongside his proximity, made him a good candidate to witness the partition. No other relatives appear as witnesses. It appears that Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari did not lean on their marital or natal relations to manage their affairs. Did not call them during crises. Did not seek their advice in ways that they would know the inner workings of the household during this difficult time.

Captain Gambir Dhoj appears familiar with the process by which the partition between the two women was approved. The two women petitioned to have a partition. A judge was assigned to investigate. He reported that of the three wives of Prithi Bahadur, two had gone with him when he fled after being discovered in an incestuous sexual act. They were not eligible to inherit. Neither was the one son they heard one of the wives had borne. Only Raj Kumari, who had stayed behind in Kathmandu–the very narrative Shamsher Bahadur contests–was eligible to inherit. Though she did not go into as much detail, his story matches that told by Ratna Kumari

So then, the partition had to be enacted. This was an event that required witnesses and adjudicators. Captain Gambir Dhoj says he was one of the people ensuring the proper completion of the partition. A handful of other people giving witness statements too were part of ensuring the partition appropriately. It was an event. All these witnesses and facilitators would have gathered in the Naradevi house. Many of them would perhaps have played a role in such partitions before. There would be a pecking order, a hierarchy of who orchestrated the events, perhaps. But things would not be neat, or swift, or without a great deal of back and forth, I imagine.

Between the lines
I wish there was some way for us to watch this partition process unfold. It is the kind of scene anthropologists would observe, narrate, and make meaning out of for us today. I am beset with curiosity about the minutia of the proceedings. I wonder what the weather was like. I wonder who carried the items, once they had been divided, from one part of the house to the other. I wonder what little dissatisfactions were expressed and how they were smoothed over. I wonder if and what they ate and in what configuration. I wonder if they all marked the completion of the fraught process in some way. And when it was all done, after they headed to their own parts of the house, I wonder what went through Ratna Kumari’s and Raj Kumari’s mind. Relief. Victory. Annoyance. Joy. Closure. Injustice. Peace. Or just sheer exhaustion.

Captain Gambir Dhoj’s concise witness statement suggests there were no real issues with the partition. He suggests there were two parts to the proceedings. First, they divided all the items in the house as per the list compiled by the officials who were delegated to complete the task. Though Raj Kumari later contested the completeness of this list, she seems to have raised no issues at the time. Sadly, for us, this list has not come down through the archive. It is the way of the historical record that most things that were uncontested do not remain.

Then, they divided the khets, farm lands, in half, and distributed the grains accordingly. I find it hard to believe that the process was as simple as the preceding statement makes it sound. Dividing farm lands into half is no simple matter. These farm lands were surely scattered. Some were at the edges of the Kathmandu Valley. Others were perhaps further afield. The quality of the soil would differ. Irrigation facilities would be variable. Direction and landscape would affect what could be grown. Some areas might be particularly susceptible to flooding.

They would surely not be thinking of ‘half’ as a measure of total land area. Rather, everyone would have an eye on the total output volume of valuable grains. How to measure equality and fairness in dividing these lands in ‘half’? Like so much else, how this practically and emotionally complicated issue would have been navigated is not told to us. We also never find out the locations, size, and outputs of these lands. However they did it, the farm lands were divided into half. And both women were satisfied enough with the division that neither ever contested it.

No detail too small
With the movable items in the house and the lands partitioned, only the physical house itself in Naradevi remained to be divided. The Captain says he did not witness the process of partitioning the house. This took place a few days later. But the Captain does offer a sliver of insight into the de facto living arrangements the women had in place before the partition: They were occupying their own portions of the house with Raj Kumari living in the outside portion and Ratna Kumari in the inside portion. I do not know exactly how to imagine this arrangement. It means one thing if the structure was an interconnected, multi-sided building wrapping around a courtyard. It means another thing if the house was a single structure running along one side of the property.

But Padma Kesar Padhya Bhattarai was present when they partitioned the house. Also a resident of the Naradevi neighbourhood, Padma Kesar was a purohit, a ritual specialist patronized by the two women. He was probably a regular visitor to the household. He was called in to conduct various regular and special rituals, no doubt. But I imagine him dropping by otherwise too. Just to chat. Ritual specialists need to keep their patrons happy. And he lived nearby.

The house was divided a few days after the lands and movable goods, says the purohit who was a witness to both events. The division of the house was not just a matter of conversation saying ‘you take this part and I this’. Physical markings were made to demarcate the two women’s parts of the house. But the agreement the purohit witnessed did not stick. He later heard that an issue emerged the next day. There was a window facing the galli, the little alleyway outside. And one of the women complained that the window was entirely in the other woman’s part of the house. Partition lines were redrawn such that each woman had access to half the window.

At this stage, the demarcation was erasable. Redrawable. I imagine it did not stay this way in the long term. At some point, walls dividing the two women’s sections probably got built. And dividing windows into half was perhaps an established practice, one that continues into the present.

Photos: The Last Of the Kathmandu Valley

Look at the wall built halfway through the window in the third picture. It is a contemporary division. This house stands today in old Kathmandu, at an easily walkable distance from Naradevi where our two protagonists lived in the 1870s. The people of this house may not have had a drawn out dispute over their partition. But I imagine they had many conversations. There must have been much to discuss. Access. Light. Fairness. Structural safety. And on and on. Only after all this did they build this wall through this window as a demarcation point between two households.

Officials remember
Many more people than these two men were party to Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari’s partition process. And these men–and they were all men–gave witness statements. Most of them repeat simple facts: they were present during the partition process, it was completed, they know little about how the house was divided. Most of these witnesses were named by either one or both of the women.

There are only three witnesses with no personal connection to the women and their household. These are the three men deputed to survey the house and all its belongings in anticipation of the partition. Let me name them. They may not appear anywhere else in the archive. We cannot ever know much of their lives. But that is all the more reason to write down the little we do know.

Shakti Dhoj Mahat Chhetri, a subedar, was from Sanga, a settlement some 20 kilometers east of Naradevi. I imagine Shakti Dhoj rented a room somewhere close by rather than walk the distance to work daily. (Ni)m Naran Shrestha, a bahidar from Thahiti, could have walked to Naradevi in under 30 minutes. Lal Bahadur Putuwar also of Thahiti too was a bahidar. As the subedar, a mid-tier military rank, Shakti Dhoj perhaps supervised the survey of the Naradevi household. The bahidars were book keepers, the men who wrote down the survey list that grounded the partition of the women’s movable properties.

These junior men offer a simple statement that does not aid either of the women’s narrative. They all say that the two women escorted the men individually through their own rooms and together through the other places. They all say they do not know which room was the puja prayer room and which was the dhukuti treasury. Recall that Raj Kumari accused her sister-in-law of not letting these men survey the dhukuti treasury by saying it was their puja prayer room. The men say only that they made lists of everything they were shown, and submitted the list to the Itachapali Court in 1868.

Pulsating textures
There are no fireworks here. This is not only because the 1869 partition was broadly uncontested by both women. Even when narrating the events surrounding the contested Guthis and the disputed dhukuti treasury, the witness statements have no gotcha moments. No witness comes out decisively swinging for one woman over the other. Everyone is measured. A statement here might favour Raj Kumari. A detail there might back up Ratna Kumari. But nothing that cannot be explained this way or that.

The tenor, the goal, of our story changes starting this week. For the past five weeks, the story has been rather a drama. Tensions have built up slowly. Layers have been added. The unexpected has greeted us at every turn. Now, the broad contours of the case have been established. There will be no new scandals. There are no further shocks to grip our attention.

From here on out, for the remainder of this season, we will not run after the twists and turns of an unfolding tale. We will pursue a different kind of exploration. We will seek to enter Raj Kumari’s, Ratna Kumari’s, and Shamsher Bahadur’s world as they went about their lives in their newly partitioned household in Naradevi.

These people who appear as witnesses are threads in the fabric of connections that made up everyday life in Naradevi. They were acquaintances, relatives, intimates, priests, workers, and officials. Their witness statements invite us to inhabit the particular texture of things, happenings, and conversations in the Naradevi household.

About the Guthis, the witnesses share specifics. Not just the bird’s-eye-view trajectory of who operated the Guthis over the years. But the pulsating texture of the moment. The room in which the Guthi ownership documents were handed over. The hands that moved the papers across the house. The back and forth between the two sisters-in-law when men showed up asking for new Guthi terms on Shamsher Bahadur’s wedding day.

All this next week.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

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Hello lovely, generous, subscribers. Last week, I said I would start sending paywalled, behind-the-scenes, posts to you at least once a month. As promised, here goes. Let’s get going with the column I am calling Tentacles, a place to follow the branches of the story far and wide and deep. And yes, one of these branches does lead to monkeys–that’s what those two posing creatures on the cover photo are. Monkeys? You are thinking. Yes, monkeys etched onto the edges of a copper plate document. But have patience. The long tentacles get us to these monkeys only when we reach the prequel of Things Drag On: Anatomy of a Household in Dispute. Only in choosing these images am I realizing how deeply animals are lurking in my subconscious mind–mice, a cat, and now monkeys.

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Previously on Things Drag On

Two sisters-in-law—Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari, both young widows in 1870s Kathmandu—are in a property dispute over six Guthis. Ratna Kumari filed a petition claiming Raj Kumari wrongfully took control of their Guthi lands. Raj Kumari denied the claim, offering detailed histories showing how each Guthi came to her with consent and adding accusations of her own. Then Shamsher Bahadur—Ratna Kumari's son—entered as a litigant with revelations that transformed the case. His uncle Prithi Bahadur committed incest, lost his caste, and fled to India. His three wives, including Raj Kumari, followed him into exile and outcaste status. Yet when Raj Kumari returned to Kathmandu, she inherited valuable family properties. Her two co-wives and their children did not. Shamsher Bahadur highlighted these unequal fates to argue that Raj Kumari too forfeited her inheritance rights.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

Character as credibility
All three of them are effective storytellers. Ratna Kumari was good enough. She told a clear cut story. Raj Kumari muddied the water so successfully that we began to doubt Ratna Kumari’s clear-cut story. But Shamsher Bahadur, well, he has been the most compelling. He has shared the most information. He has pieced together timelines, major and minor incidents, evidence analysis, and the law into a compelling telling bolstering his position.

Building character portraits of his aunt and mother has been among Shamsher Bahadur’s key strategies of persuasion. All storytellers know that character building is important. Often, things boil down to believability. There is a mess of evidence. There is enough culpability to go around. But do you believe the person - Raj Kumari or Ratna Kumari or your neighbour, let’s call him Pradip - capable of such an action? We do this all the time in our lives. ‘I can’t believe she would do that’, we say. Suggesting that we would easily believe that another person with a different character would have done that same most outlandish thing.

So, like a good storyteller, Shamsher Bahadur builds character portraits. In the legal case itself, they seem not to do him much good. But that is the point of view of hindsight. The opinion of the historian who knows how the legal case ended. When the outcome was uncertain, when the three litigants were jostling to gain the upper hand, the character portraits might have made a difference. People might have believed him and tried to help him. He suggests as much in passing in one of his many recorded statements.

I imagine Shamsher Bahadur going around Kathmandu seeking help with his case. I imagine him asking many well-placed people to wield their connections on his behalf. I imagine him everywhere recounting the character of his mother and aunt, one a young innocent and the other a devious manipulator, while begging and railing for justice.

Shamsher Bahadur’s character portraits are essential to how he answers the questions: How did the allegedly out-of-caste Raj Kumari come to claim property? And what does Shamsher Bahadur want done about it?

Deception and sweet talk
His aunt Raj Kumari’s machinations started immediately after she returned to the family home in Naradevi, says Shamsher Bahadur. She rapidly maneuvered a separation of their kitchens in the manu chuttinu process Ratna Kumari told us about. It is no coincidence that both mother and son stress that the separation of kitchens happened immediately after Raj Kumari returned. For they both too would have lost their caste status if they had shared a kitchen and food with her. Still, keen to portray her as an effective manipulator, Shamsher Bahadur says his aunt compelled them to separate their kitchens in 1861.

So, then, knowing of her sister-in-law’s out-of-caste status, why did his mother agree to the partition all those years later in 1869? Recall that Ratna Kumari herself wrote that the two sisters-in-law jointly petitioned to have the family property divided between them. Shamsher Bahadur says his aunt deceived and sweet talked his mother into it.

The deception was a lie about the letter of the law. Shamsher Bahadur claims his aunt said: ‘Yes, I did go knowingly with my husband and returned only with a water purification. But I have only gone with my own husband. I did not run away with someone else.’ She told his mother the distinction was legally consequential. If she had lost her caste for running away with someone other than her husband, she would be barred from inheriting marital property. But she had fled with her own, ritually married, husband. So, she could legally inherit the family property no matter her caste status. His innocent mother, Shamsher Bahadur implies, bought this lie.

The sweet talk was about the future. The childless Raj Kumari said everything would revert back to Ratna Kumari and Shamsher Bahadur on her death anyways. And she promised not to sell any houses and lands. Then, she begged Ratna Kumari not to say she had gone to live with her out-of-caste husband as he fled. ‘I will inherit regardless of what you say,’ her nephew has her saying. But having the information out in public would bring her shame and dishonour. Persuaded by lies and false promises, his mother Ratna Kumari signed on to a joint petition requesting an equal partition of their properties with his aunt Raj Kumari

A liar and a manipulator, that is Raj Kumari’s character according to her nephew.

Naivety and goodness
Having made his aunt into a villain, Shamsher Bahadur has to find a role for his mother. She cannot be emplotted into this story as the hero. The pursuit of justice is, from here on out, his own undertaking. Shamsher Bahadur never says a bad word about his mother. But he does make her a hapless character. Was he sidelining her to take control as the man of the house? Or was the sidelining a strategy mother and son concocted together to protect her from her role in the mess?

Whatever his reasoning, Shamsher Bahadur paints his mother as an innocent, unable to see through the smooth villain’s machinations. He does not say anything about her in the present, as the case is raging. But, at that fraught time when his aunt returned to successfully install herself in the household, Shamsher Bahadur says his mother was a sweet, innocent child.

Are you, dear reader, recalling Raj Kumari’s claim that Ratna Kumari admitted to hiding large amounts of money from her? This is hardly the action of a sweet innocent lamb. Well, Shamsher Bahadur certainly remembers. Following his logic that his aunt is entitled to nothing, no defense of his mother should be technically required. Still, Shamsher Bahadur attempts to explain away his aunt’s claim.

Shamsher Bahadur admits that his mother did find four pouches of money in the dhukuti treasury room. How did she come to find these money pouches? This involves the mouse that greets you at the beginning of every post. But that is still a story for another time. The mouse deserves to be the center of its own story. Not a diversion to the concerns of three bickering humans. Shamsher Bahadur says his mother did not include the money in the partition because she had already spent it. But it had been spent entirely on the household expenses including feeding people.

Would the laws and norms of the time deem this a good enough reason to exclude the money from the inheritance partition process? I cannot tell you. By saying it went to household expenses, Shamsher Bahadur is perhaps claiming his aunt has already consumed and benefitted from it.

Shamsher Bahadur also addresses his aunt’s claim that his mother prevented officials from surveying and listing the items stored in their household treasury. He retorts that this was impossible as the junior officials who came to conduct the survey were deputed by the office headed by his aunt’s close natal relative.

Shamsher Bahadur has offered rich, detailed stories about the events surrounding his outcaste uncle, his devious aunt, and the rippling consequences of their actions. His retelling of circumstances where his mother might be guilty is much patchier.

Perhaps Ratna Kumari was truly very young, very naive, and highly susceptible to suggestion. It is plausible. It is equally plausible that stripping her of sense and agency was intended to protect her. For Ratna Kumari had told a grave lie in hiding her sister-in-law’s contact with her outcast husband. Or, perhaps, Shamsher Bahadur was positioning himself to take full control of the family property by painting his mother as hapless.

Historians can rarely offer motivations based on the evidence that is so essential to the discipline. This is best left to the novelist whose imagination and investigations are so differently tuned from those of the historians.

Rights and magnanimity
Having told his stories and painted these character portraits, Shamsher Bahadur sets down his demands.

He wants everything.

Let’s review all the paperwork, he says. The partition deed his mother and aunt signed. All the ownership documents and years of accounts for the Guthis, and other lands, in his aunt’s possession. The lands she is rumoured to have sold despite her promises not to do so. He, and he alone, has rights to everything, he says.

Shamsher Bahadur makes two arguments to justify his rights to claw back all the family property from his aunt.

The first is the legal argument we encountered him making last week. His aunt Raj Kumari went to live and eat with her out-of-caste husband. She returned with a patiya purificatory certificate that covered only water. She still could not share rice with her caste and lineage relations. She had been born and married to a Kshetriya, placing second in the four-tiered Varna system. But, she had now become ‘akin to a Shudra’, occupying the fourth rung, said Shamsher Bahadur. In this status, she was ineligible by all standards of law and custom to inherit her family property.

His second argument hinges on his position as the sole capable remaining male heir eligible to inherit within the bloodline. When his aunt first returned to enact her machinations, he was just an innocent child, he says. He could not understand, investigate, and intervene in what was unfolding around him. But now he is samartha, capable, of age, fully informed of histories, laws, and rights. Surely, his rights to the patrilineal property far outweigh that of his aunt. Shamsher Bahadur particularly stresses their different position when speaking of the Guthis. I, the descendant of good standing of the person who endowed the Guthi, am here, he proclaims. There is no cause for this person who has lost their caste to control the Guthis which fulfill dharma and the sacred duty of feeding ascetics, Brahmins, cows, and monkeys, he says.

But Shamsher Bahadur wants to note that he is not cruel, not ungenerous. That he will behave magnanimously as befitting a man of his standing. The laws and customs impose no obligations of generosity towards these women on me, he says. Still, if there is need to extend any support to them, I will do as compassion dictates, and of my own will, he concludes.

Shamsher Bahadur, as he entered manhood, was eager to claim what he deemed his property and his rightful status as the head of the household.

But he still needed to win the legal case.

I have the evidence in the form of witnesses to back up my claims, he says. As witnesses he names Raj Kumari’s co-wives, the male members of their patriline, all the priests and preceptors, and their managers and workers as people who would attest to the veracity of his claims.

We never hear from the co-wives. The male members of the patriline appear in one instance in support of Shamsher Bahadur. But we do not hear detailed, insider news from them either. But we do hear from some officials, priests, preceptors, and a smattering of other people named as witnesses by Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari. What do they say? And whose side do they take?

All this next week.

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Previously on Things Drag On

Two sisters-in-law—Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari, both young widows in a patrilineal society in 1870s Kathmandu—are in a property dispute over six Guthis, a particular category of land and ritual obligations. Ratna Kumari submitted a petition claiming Raj Kumari wrongfully took control of these properties and kept the profits for herself. Raj Kumari denied the accusation, explaining how each Guthi came under her control with Ratna Kumari's consent. She also accused Ratna Kumari of hiding a large sum of money and some grains that should have been shared. Her detailed histories introduced doubt into Ratna Kumari's clear-cut story. Now, Shamsher Bahadur—Ratna Kumari’s son and Raj Kumari’s nephew—enters with revelations that turn the case from a simple property dispute to a question of caste status.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

Mixed inheritances
As he approached adulthood, Shamsher Bahadur had been piecing together the full measure of his inheritance. He was fortunate that his material inheritance was vast: the Guthis, personal lands, the house in Naradevi. His genealogy, carefully maintained and frequently recounted by his family, too was a material asset. Dating back centuries, it distinguished his family as one among a handful of lineages that brought the then ruling political order to power across the places that would become Nepal starting in the mid-18th century. The young man was keenly aware of these patrimonies.

But Samsher Bahadur had inherited misfortunes too. He had been in the womb when his father died. Both his paternal grandparents too passed away in his early childhood. His two uncles had not been around to scold and mould him into manhood. One had died in Benaras. As for his younger uncle, well, one might fairly call him the root of Shamsher Bahadur’s most pressing problem.

Pinpointing original culprits in family disputes is futile. Culpability compounds and accretes, fragments and diffuses over time. But Shamsher Bahadur would be justified in placing a weighty share of the burden on his younger uncle.

Samsher Bahadur lays out this family history in the first few lines of a complaint he wrote a few years after his mother initiated the case in 1874. He would go on to write many angry and informative petitions, bonds, and statements over the coming decade.

Samsher Bahadur is voluble. He reveals many mundane and explosive household happenings. He takes a distinctly aggrieved tone, far more so than his mother or aunt. Perhaps because he himself, a young man likely in his teens, is just piecing together these pasts. And perhaps because, being a child when the scandal hit the family, he has no complicity to obscure in the matter.

Shamsher Bahadur reveals that the seemingly mundane dispute over property is shot through with the rippling, enduring, consequences of the transgression of a foundational taboo.

Losing caste
The younger uncle, Prithi Bahadur, had thrown himself into disrepute and his family into crisis. He had been found out in sexual acts with a woman identified only as Kalu. Besides the fact that the society considered her skin dark, as the name Kalu indicates, we never learn anything else about her as a person. The only thing we know is that she was a didi, an elder sister, related by blood within four generations, to Prithi Bahadur. In some of the many pieces of legal documentation he writes, Shamsher Bahadur mentions that his uncle had also had taboo sexual relations with a married sister-in-law related within four or five generations. Mentioned in passing, this sister-in-law is never acknowledged by name.

Across many indigenous communities in what is today Nepal, cross-cousin marriage was and is widely practiced. For this caste Hindu family, marriage and sexual relationships within seven generations on the paternal side and five generations on the maternal side constituted incest. It was taboo. And it was illegal. No matter if Kalu was a maternal or paternal relative, Prithi Bahadur had made a mess. He had transgressed a foundational taboo. And he had broken the law.

Many kinds of transgressions can be worked around. It requires a cooling off period. But the breaches they open up can be sutured, patched over. Partially. Over time. This is true for all societies. For all times and places. This was not one of those kinds of transgressions. Prithi Bahadur was never absorbed back into the fabric of his household and his lineage.

In transgressing the foundational incest taboo, Prithi Bahadur had lost his caste. Nepal in the 19th century was decidedly a caste society. Adjudicating caste status was political. And a ritual-bureaucratic apparatus was in place to deal with caste norms. The transgressions of these norms were presumably widespread for procedures that allowed individuals who has transgressed caste rules to be purified and reintegrated into society were in place. These were called patiya in Nepali from the Sanskrit prayaschitta.

The patiya purificatory procedures were at once ritual and legal. The transgressor applied for the patiya which was issued by a high-ranking official and religious judge called the Dharmadhikari after the applicant had undertaken the prescribed rituals and paid a fine. Intent was key in deciding whether a purification was justified.

Say, for example, someone drank water without knowing that the person offering it had transgressed a caste rule. In this case, the person who drank the water transgressed a caste boundary unknowingly. They could appeal to be purified and retain their caste status. Presumably, the breaking of caste norms were prevalent enough that the entire system of caste would collapse without a system flexible enough to absorb many kinds of breaches.

But Prithi Bahadur’s transgression was knowing. It was deliberate. And it violated a foundational taboo. The purificatory protocols of the patiya were likely not available to him. He could not inherit his family property. That was the law. As for his family and society, the law and the society outcaste anyone who had contact with him. Anyone sharing water, food, or touch with Prithi Bahadur would lose their caste.

Still, interestingly, his wives maintained contact with him. They went to live with him when he fled.

Unexpected choices
Caught and with no way to reintegrate into his household, family, and society, Prithi Bahadur had fled. Shamsher Bahadur says his uncle went to Moghlana, India. He later came to settle in the family’s Guthi lands in the Terai plains of Nepal. Had he stayed in Kathmandu, he would have faced further punishments including perhaps acts of public humiliation. He likely never returned to Kathmandu.

Prithi Bahadur had three wives. Raj Kumari was the first of the three. When their husband fled to India, Raj Kumari and the youngest wife went to live with their husband. They left the middle wife in-charge of the family properties in Kathmandu. Or so Shamsher Bahadur says. But then, he has reason to say his mother was not in-charge. After some three to four months, the eldest wife, Raj Kumari returned to Kathmandu. She then sent the middle wife to their husband.

This is an unexpected set of events. Whatever else may be disputed in this case, the facticity of Prithi Bahadur’s transgressions is not. He was caught in a sexual act breaking incest taboos. He did flee. He did lose all his rights to the legal, material, and social benefits of family. And the consequences for anyone sharing food, water, and touch with him knowingly was certainly the loss of caste. All his wives, young though they may have been, would have known this.

Whatever contact they had with him before he was caught in the taboo transgression, that could be managed. The three wives could be legally and ritually purified. For they had that contact without knowing of his transgressions. Or so they could argue whatever the truth of the matter. But going with him after he was found out. This deliberate flouting of taboos and laws would make them outcaste too.

Why did they do it?

Perhaps they did not have much choice in the matter. Their mother-in-law was still alive at the time. She died only the year after her son fled Kathmandu. Perhaps she did not want her son, possibly beloved despite his transgressions, to go alone.

Possibly they made the choice themselves. Perhaps they had a sense of obligation. Maybe the full measure of what he had done was not yet clear to them. Perhaps there was a sense that the well-connected family could pull some strings. That the witnesses could be made to keep quiet. Or that connections could be wielded to patch things over. Perhaps it was just a misjudgment in the chaos and panic of the moment.

We cannot know the balance of considerations.

Shamsher Bahadur claims, and legal documents confirm, that all three wives went with their husband after he was found to have transgressed the incest taboo. That they lived with him. That they shared food, water, and touch with him. In doing so, he says, they all became out-of-caste and outcast like him.

Unequal fates
Then, Raj Kumari returned. She settled back into the shared family house in Naradevi. She sought and received a share of the family property. She took control of the family Guthis. We know how this unfolded. Raj Kumari and Ratna Kumari have been telling us their versions of the unfolding over the last few weeks.

How did Raj Kumari get so much access to control the Guthis? How was she eligible to inherit at all? An even more basic question: How did she find a place for herself back in the Naradevi house? Raj Kumari herself never addresses these questions. Nor does Ratna Kumari.

Shamsher Bahadur attempts an explanation. His case, his demands, hinge on characterizing his mother as a manipulated innocent and his aunt as a well-connected, devious, manipulator. We can, we should, take these character portraits with suspicion. But Shamsher Bahadur does also offer facts that must be grappled with. Evidence that demands closer attention.

Recall that Raj Kumari had two co-wives. She was the first of three women her husband had married. Shamsher Bahadur points out that the other two are nowhere in this property dispute. They do not appear to live in Naradevi. Certainly, they have not inherited any of the family properties. Their names must have come up when the judge sorting out their inheritance petition investigated who was eligible for a share of the family property. He must have decided that these two co-wives were not. There are also children. The co-wives bore a son and a daughter between them after they went to live with their outcaste husband. The daughter would not have rights to the property. But the son certainly would. That is, if he had not been born to an out-of-caste father. He too features nowhere in the inheritance partition.

Shamsher Bahadur’s claims of manipulation aside, Raj Kumari had, in fact, gotten a patiya. But not all patiyas were created equal. Raj Kumari’s patiya certificate did not say whether she had been cleared only to share water with caste equals. Or whether her patiya included the sharing of rice. The kind of patiya mattered immensely in terms of the social and legal status the person enjoyed, as Shamsher Bahadur insisted. We will unpack the murky case of the uncertain patiya document as legal evidence in season three.

Shamsher Bahadur does not recount these detailed family histories of transgression and scandal merely out of spite. He draws an effective contrast. His uncle had three wives. The uncle transgressed the incest taboo, lost his caste, and fled to avoid the full measure of punishment that would have followed. This is uncontested. The uncle’s three wives all went to live with the outcaste uncle, so Shamsher Bahadur claims and the patiya documents confirm. But look at their very different, unequal fates, says Shamsher Bahadur

How did this come to be? And what does Shamsher Bahadur want done about it? Oh, the voluble and aggrieved young man tells us. In great detail.

All this next week.

Housekeeping

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Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

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The Story so Far:

Three episodes in, the tensions and stakes of this case are beginning to surface. At its heart is something unusual: two sisters-in-law—both young, both now widows—fighting over property in a society where inheritance flows along the male bloodline. What began as a question of control over property has become a meditation on crisis, survival, competing points of view, and how situational arrangements calcify into permanent claims. From here, the case only gets more complicated. If you care about the real texture of disputes—the emotions, strategies, and survival instincts at play in different times and places—told through the unusual vantage point of two young women and a fatherless young man navigating unprecedented power and pressure, this is the moment to join.

Today, something different. A podcast. An interlude. A chat with friends about the story thus far.

Hope you have as much fun listening as we did talking to each other.

We’re trying something a little different today. A podcast.

An Interlude, let’s call it.

A different, fun, tone and perspective before we jump back into the regular rhythm of the story next week. Joining me on the chat are three friends: Gokul in Kathmandu and Shireen and Anand in Chicago.

So, what are we trying to do here? Shireen - the wonderful mastermind behind the Interlude - had the hour blocked in her calendar for ‘Surabhi’s Housewives Moment’. I was not sure whether to be excited or terrified by this. I’ve never watched the housewives. They seem terrifying.

The point is this. I’ve told three weeks of stories about these two women. I’ve stuck to the facts. I feel it’s important for the readers to get to know them in their own words. For readers to make up their own minds about them. But there’s a lot of context that hasn’t come through in this careful telling.

Also, human beings are always a little bit crazy. And when we’re in a dispute, we certainly do whacky things. So let’s lean into that a little bit. Let’s let our imaginations loose. Let’s indulge in conjecture. Honestly, let’s be a little bit gossipy. But grounded, meaningful, remembering-to-be-empathetic gossiping.

Here are some things we chitchat about during the conversation:.

• Our impressions of Ratna Kumari and Raj Kumari. If we met them walking down the street, what would they be wearing and how would they be carrying themselves? Some of us thought of them as badass empire builders. Some of us wondered whether they were flailing young women struggling with a situation they were thrust into.

• We talk through the intricacies of the sex and social scandal caused by Raj Kumari’s husband transgressing an incest taboo. Anand perked up really only after I brought this up. Why have I been burying the lede, he asked. Jokes aside, the taboo transgression led to rippling consequences. Loss of caste. Fleeing. Becoming ineligible to inherit property. All manner of lies. It affects this case deeply.

• We talk about the woman with whom Raj Kumari’s husband was found out. She appears only as a passing name in the archives. A casual nickname at that. What do we make of these fleeting lives, we wonder.

• We wonder what to make of Shamsher Bahadur, Ratna Kumari’s son, who brings up his uncle’s transgression, his aunt’s alleged loss of caste, and claims all the property for himself. We haven’t met him yet. But, oh, we will. The coming few weeks are all about listening to the voluble, aggrieved young man. So this is a bit of a spoiler and teaser of what is to come.

• Caste and gender are recurring themes. We discuss how this textured story helps us get into the lived cracks and crevices of these overarching, hierarchical, systems of social organization.

Highlight of the chat. My cat, who just came home to me last month, irritated that my attention was focused on the podcast rather than playing with him, decided to bite my foot. Playfully, of course. It shocked rather than hurt. A moment of hilarity ensued as I tried to pick up the cute little demon and lock him out of the room.

This cat, Piddu, is now the mascot of all our Interludes. Why? Because he knows how best to listen to the Interludes: lolling, chilling like a boss, while keeping his ears perked and his senses alert.

We ended the chat agreeing that we should all watch more Korean historical soap operas. Huh, this is a non sequitur you must be thinking. As we were talking through the story, Anand said it resembled the cultural and gender politics of ruling elites in Korean historical dramas! A really interesting comparison. I’ll let you listen and find out.

We started with housewives and ended with Korean historical dramas as the pop culture mood for this story. I haven’t seen either. But I’m pretty sure I prefer the latter to the former.

My question: Am I writing a Korean historical drama?

My wish: May a small fraction of Korean historical drama fans find their way to my substack.

Some housekeeping

First, an apology and a request for patience. The editing on the podcast is very amateurish. Ugh. It is choppy in places. The volume fluctuates. Continuity issues pop up. Eeks. I am a rank beginner. This was my first time recording a podcast. And my first time doing any kind of audio editing. I’m a one woman show over here. (Shout out to Gokul who helped smooth over a few pretty egregious spots I was stuck at. But given my original cut, he couldn’t do much.) I’m learning. The next one will be better. Promise. Please bear with me.

Second, aren’t you going to jump into the comments? Please do! Tell us how you imagine Ratna Kumari, Raj Kumari and Shamsher Bahadur. Ask questions of your own that Shireen, Gokul, Anand, and I didn’t get around to. Let’s chat.

Third, want to join us for the next Interlude recording? You’re so welcome. Just drop me a message. We’ll make it happen.

Previously on Things Drag On
Ratna Kumari wrote a petition that turned a long-standing family dispute with her younger sister-in-law Raj Kumari over inherited property into a legal case. She accused her sister of running the family’s Guthi lands, a specific category of land tenure including ritual obligations, unilaterally for 12 years. She demanded that she be allowed to run the Guthis for the next 12 years as reparations, with control switching between them annually thereafter. Raj Kumari responded by calling all the accusations entirely ‘false and fabricated’. She went on the offensive, accusing Ratna Kumari of keeping money, grains, and other goods that should have been divided between them to herself.

If you prefer audio, you can listen to me reading the episode:

Raj Kumari denies everything. Unequivocally.

She does not contest that she has been running the Guthis by herself. She does not contest that she has not been sharing the profits with Ratna Kumari.

But she does deny that she has been running the Guthis without Ratna Kumari’s consent. And she does deny that she has been running all the Guthis for 12 continuous years.

Raj Kumari recounts detailed histories for each of the Guthis. Each has its own distinct trajectory. True, the family had endowed the Guthi lands. True, they had rights over them. But the family had not run all the Guthis in the past. Management of the Guthis had been parceled out to different people. Guthis had switched hands at different times. Raj Kumari goes to great pains to detail how each Guthi came to be in her control.

A flood of information can dim as much as it can illuminate.

Raj Kumari’s narration illuminates much about this milieu. The different forms of land management available to land-holding elites. The difficulties inherent to these different management strategies. The ways in which changing family circumstances made certain forms of management more or less desirable.

These illuminations are of interest to us, the curious voyeurs hungry to inhabit this historical milieu.

For the legal case, Raj Kumari’s narration dims the impact of Ratna Kumari’s coherent, clear-cut story. It sows doubt. It turns Ratna Kumari’s single story about the right to six Guthis into unique stories about the arcs of individual Guthis.

Receiving authority
Raj Kumari lays out a timeline for how the Guthi in the plains of Mahottari, previously managed by her in-laws, came to be in her sole control. The story starts with her husband. In 1859 he went to the Madhesh plains. She tells us only of his journey. Others will be more forthcoming about the events that compelled him to journey. The following year, her mother-in-law passed.

In their absence and passing, control of the household and family wealth passed to Ratna Kumari. This created tensions between the two women. Around 1861, Raj Kumari separated her kitchen - the manu chuttinu process laid out in Episode I - finding the finances to run her household outside the family assets.

In 1862, Ratna Kumari made an offer. She wrote to her younger brother-in-law, Raj Kumari’s husband, telling him to live in their Guthi holdings in the Madhesh plains. She told him to take control of the extensive lands. He was to do everything the Guthi required. Manage tenants. Undertake repairs. Ensure the ritual obligations written into the endowment charter were carried out. Having fulfilled these duties, he could then live on whatever profits remained from the land. And so he did just that till he passed away as the contractors and older tenants in the villages in Mahottari can attest.

Raj Kumari’s husband died in 1870. On his passing, it was neither assumed nor automatic that Ratna Kumari would agree to the same arrangement with her newly widowed sister-in-law.

New terms needed to be established.

People - likely contractors, overseers, or tenants, possibly priests - from these lands came to the house in Naradevi. They asked that the right holders establish new contracts, new terms. Ratna Kumari told these men - for I assume they were all men - that she had given authority over the Guthi to her younger sister-in-law. The word Raj Kumari uses is taluk, a formal, legal term translatable as authority, jurisdiction, or power. The men ambled over from Ratna Kumari’s part of the house to Raj Kumari’s.

With her sister-in-law’s consent, Raj Kumari settled on terms for these men to operate the Guthi for five years starting in 1871.

Navigating disequilibrium
Raj Kumari narrates all these events in a matter-of-fact manner. She does not call the years from 1859 to 1871 difficult ones. Neither did Ratna Kumari. A legal petition is hardly the place for vulnerability. But I suspect these years were far from easy for both women. Across these years, life altering events piled on, one atop another. A transgression whose inescapable consequences rippled across their lives. The wobbling of social status. Deaths that perhaps sparked intense feelings. Certainly deaths that placed the full burden of navigating complex life and financial logistics on the two women.

One widow with a young child. One childless woman with a husband on the run. Both, I think, rather young. I can only imagine them as strained and overwhelmed.

Human emotions may not be the same across time and place. People may not experience grief, loss, and shame in the same way in all societies. But turbulent, unpredictable currents are perhaps ubiquitous at the confluence of the unexpected, the distressing, and the ignominious. The tentacles of disequilibrium are perhaps universal.

How to restore poise? How to protect oneself from being swept away? How to engineer a new normal where the pieces are organized in a more advantageous, more desirable manner? Perhaps both women were asking themselves these questions. Or perhaps, one or both of them had gotten swept up in the current. Perhaps their only concern was to escape the eddies. Perhaps they sought simply to climb out and collapse onto the river bank.

The agreements the two women came to about the Guthis - and all their other assets - unfolded in disequilibrium with the uncertain future it portended.

Pinpointing reasons behind choices is difficult at the best of times. In the swirling disequilibrium in which the women found themselves, with the mere, scattered, slivers of knowledge we have about their times and circumstance, it is impossible to assign motivations.

All we know, what Raj Kumari tells us, is that the same pattern repeats: Ratna Kumari willingly and freely gives Raj Kumari control over the remaining five Guthis.

Reclaiming lands
Three of the six Guthis had been outside the family’s direct control for some time. They had been run by two men, perhaps brothers, called Dhandeu and Pundeu Jyapu. These men were not term-limited contractors or tenants. The copper plate where the terms of the endowments were etched had themselves been handed over to them. And the rights to the Guthis were inheritable and inherited by Dhandeu and Pundeu’s descendants.

That is until 1866 when the grandsons of Dhandeu and Pundeu were found to be engaged in some kind of misconduct over the Guthis. After they initiated proceedings against the grandsons, control of the Guthis returned to the women. And here comes the kicker. After they got these three Guthis back in 1866, Ratna Kumari gave complete rights over the guthis in writing to Raj Kumari. Raj Kumari alleges that her elder sister-in-law gave her akthiyari, power of attorney, over the three Guthis.

Accepting documents
The remaining two Guthis had been run by their Gurujyu, the family perceptor and guide. This was perhaps a more recent arrangement. The documents relating to this transfer had been given to gurujyu only by Raj and Ratna Kumari’s mother-in-law. Around 1869, the family preceptor said he no longer wanted the Guthis because he could not make the investments required for repair and maintenance. He returned the lal mohars, red seal documents, for the two Guthis. He returned these papers to both women through Shamsher Bahadur, Ratna Kumar’s son. The boy gave one lal mohar to his mother and the other to his aunt.

After some 20 or 25 days, Ratna Kumari sent over her lal mohar to Raj Kumari. Like the Gurujyu, she found it difficult to repair and maintain the Guthi infrastructure. So Raj Kumari says.

Consent or misappropriation?
Raj Kumari’s flood of information sows doubt over Ratna Kumari’s claim that the former had been running all six Guthis alone since 1861. Raj Kumari’s timeline is substantively different. The Guthi in the Mahottari district came to her in 1871. The three Guthis run by Dandeu’s and Pundeu’s grandsons came to her in 1866. And the two Guthis run by the Gurujyu came to her in 1869.

So then, starting in1871, Raj Kumari had full and sole control of the guthis. Operational control, certainly. But also, importantly, she alone had access to all the legal documents pertaining to the Guthis. The founding endowment charters. Any subsequent red seal documents. Accounts of expenses and income. Control of these documents is important. Legally, certainly. To project control over the lands socially, yes. But control of the papers was also likely psychologically important, giving Raj Kumari a sense of the upper hand.

Raj Kumari is emphatic that she ran all the Guthis with Ratna Kumari’s consent. She stresses the fact that they did not sign an agreement saying they would alternate control of the Guthis annually at the time they partitioned the rest of their assets. She implies: Why would Ratna Kumari not have demanded such an important document during the partition? Was this not the absolute correct time to formalize such an arrangement? Her implied answer: Because Ratna Kumari had already willingly handed over control of all the Guthis to me.

Did Ratna Kumari really give Raj Kumari the right to run and profit from all the Guthis for eternity? This is now the issue to be fought over legally.

Still bloating into amorphous shape
Disputes are ravenous monsters. They eat up everything that came before them. Arrangements made with a particular notion of the future. The dispute eats it up. Agreements entered into because a situation demanded it. The dispute eats it up. A confidence shared in a moment of feeling. The dispute eats it up. When things break down, everything temporary, tenuous, conditional becomes evidence. And in becoming evidence, it becomes fixed and hard. With their infinite gluttony, disputes keep bloating.

This dispute is not yet done shoveling things into its roaring belly. It is not done distending further into amorphous shape.

Have you, dear reader, been wondering how two sisters-in-law came to be the sole heirs to property in their marital homes in a society where inheritance flowed along the male blood line? It is an apt question. Shamsher Bahadur, son of Ratna Kumari, the third major party in this bloating dispute is going to tell us.

All this next week.

Did this episode spark something? Questions. Skepticism. Corrections. Suggestions. Tangents. Remembrances. I am keen to hear them all. Please share anything at all that came to mind in the comments. Or message me if you aren’t quite ready to make your thoughts public.

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