Talk:Mahendra of Nepal
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There is quite a lot more to be written about Mahendra. In lieu of full democracy, he instituted the "Panchayat" system. "Panchayat" comes from the number five ("panch"). Villages elected councils of five. Village panchayats in turn elected district panchayats, and I think these elected a national panchayat. Unfortunately even the national panchayat had limited power. Ultimately Mahendra called most of the shots.
At age 13, Mahendra fathered a son Rajkumar with a palace servant. He first married Indra Rajya Laxmi Devi and had three sons, Bhirendra Gyanendra and Dhirendra and three daughters Shanti, Sharada and Shobha but Queen Indra died in 1950 while Mahendra was still Crown Prince. Mahendra then married Indra's sister Ratna. Queen Ratna was wounded in a hunting accident in 1972 by a riccochet from Crown Prince Dhirendra's gun, but she recovered and was murdered in the palace massacre of 2000.
The Royal family belongs to the Thakuri caste who are considered Kshatriyas ("Chhetri" in colloquial Nepali), i.e. military-political leaders. They seem to have antecedents both in the Khas peoples who have lived in Nepal's far western Karnali-Bheri river basins for at least a thousand years, and in Rajputs from northwestern India who moved to the hills to escape Muslim invasions during the Middle Ages.
Their most illustrious ancestor was Prithvi Narayan Shah who started out as the hereditary ruler of Gorkha in the mid 1700s, a region of not more than a few hundred square kilometers. Prithvi Narayan raised an army, mostly of Magars, Gurungs and other hill tribesmen, and proceeded to unify the rest of what is now Nepal from as many as a hundred minor pricipalities, by the time the conquests of Prithvi Narayan's successors are counted. Ultimately the expansion of Nepal ended with wars with the British and with the Chinese. Instead of trying to gobble up Nepal, the country was allowed to continue as a buffer state, just as Afghanistan was maintained as a buffer state to avoid direct confrontation between the British and Russian empires.
The family name Shah is really an honorific that they were given or assumed. Whatever the original family name was, it seems to have been discarded along the way.
The royal family, including collateral branches, are rumored to have had a finger in many businesses. Supposedly they controlled most trucking enterprises that serviced trade with India, and a ropeway that transported goods up from the plains across "hills" (up to 3,000 meters high) to the outskirts of Kathmandu. They even ran a monopoly on the production of high-grade marijuana and hashish. Into the 1970s it was possible to buy these substances in an official government store in Kathmandu. They ran prostitution services out of a certain palace and a royal park. The royal family also took a cut of foreign aid. In order to do good works anywhere in Nepal, foreign aid programs first had to pay commissions to the royal family.
