Nepali royals lived in a mediaeval timewarp

12.30 pm - By PETER POPHAM

DELHI - All over Kathmandu yesterday, boys as young as two and three and men of all ages were queuing up at the stalls of wayside barbers to have their heads shaved.

The government has commanded the people to show proper respect during the 13-day period of mourning, and the people were responding with a will.

All Nepali public servants have an obligation to shave their heads after the death of the King, but yesterday men and boys of all classes and occupations were doing it.

In the streets of the city, something of the spirit that seized Britain after the death of Princess Diana took hold, though without the gushing sentiment.

Thousands queued patiently outside the palace where the murders occurred, waiting in line to strew lilies and irises on a hastily erected shrine and sign the condolence book.

Braving showers of heavy pre-monsoon rain, thousands more flocked to a life-sized photograph of the late King erected under a canopy in the middle of Durga Marg, the broad ceremonial boulevard, equivalent to London's Mall, which runs past the monarch's sprawling, forested properties in the capital.

The crowds were huge – though dwarfed by the immense masses that lined the route of the funeral procession on Saturday night, perhaps the biggest crowds ever to have gathered in Nepal's recent history – but they were calm, almost meditative.

Nepalis in the main have a dutiful, sober attitude to their religious observances, and the sense in the streets yesterday was of a profoundly shocked people seeking in the ancient customs of condolence a way of dealing with their grief.

As their new king offered a new but baffling explanation for the death of his brother, describing it as accidental, the people of Nepal yesterday seemed to have begun pulling tight the mental curtains and shutting out the daylight.

Walter Bagehot, writing of Britain's monarchy 130 years ago, famously declared, "Our royalty is to be reverenced…Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic."

Confronted by the bloody murder of their monarch and most of his close relatives in Friday night's massacre, Nepal last night was trying to take his advice. Bizarre though the backtracking appeared to be, some loyal subjects of the late King Birendra were last night apparently beginning to accept the explanation as preferable to the idea that the Crown Prince, now lying desperately ill in the Army Hospital but officially the new king, was a multiple killer.

"I don't know what to think," said a young travel agent, Shivani Bista. "First we're told it was the Crown Prince, then that it was an accident. I just don't understand why they won't tell us the truth."

But a city barber, Shiv Thapa, said, "This is no time to be doing anything that will hurt the King. It will hurt Nepal, too."

Despite the official attempts at obfuscation, few if any neutral observers in Kathmandu doubted the veracity of the original explanation for the killings, which was relayed to the media via people in the court from survivors of the mayhem shortly after it occurred: that Crown Prince Dipendra, aged 31, infuriated by his parents' refusal to let him marry the woman he loved, an aristocrat named Devyani Rana, and probably very drunk, sprayed bullets from a submachine gun at the weekly dinner gathering of the royal family then turned the weapon on himself, shooting himself through the head.

The killing spree, the latest and most hideous of many bloody incidents in the history of Nepal's rulers, was the culmination of a struggle of wills that had gone on for years.

Although a member of the Rana clan that ruled Nepal as hereditary prime ministers for nearly a century until 1950, Dipendra's girlfriend Devyani was from a different branch of the clan from Queen Aishwarya, who opposed the union.

Furthermore although Devyani's father was Nepali, her mother was half-Indian, the daughter of the Maharajah of Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh, central India.

Again, the blood was royal blue: but Indian royal watchers yesterday pointed out that is was the wrong shade.

Devyani's grandfather, though a Maharajah, was a Maratha, not a Rajput, and Indian royals have always sneered at Maratha dynasties as jumped up bumpkins compared to the real Rajasthani thing – even though they jumped up a very long time ago.

Queen Aishwarya, it is said, declared that if her son Dipendra went ahead and married his girlfriend, she would cut him out of the succession and the crown would pass to his younger brother Nirajan, aged 22 (now also dead).

But Devyani's mother, allegedly ambitious and embittered, supposedly told Dipendra that she would only allow him to marry her daughter if he made her Queen. Impasse.

Throw in a pampered personality, accustomed like all eldest sons of subcontinental royals to getting their way in everything; throw in far too much drink and a certain reckless instability evident since his wild years at Eton; throw in also a couple of submachine guns allegedly lent him by a dealer hopeful of securing a big order; and the ingredients of a gory tragedy were all in place.

It is the loudest wake-up call the Nepali people have ever received. Only open half a century, Nepal has been through a series of political paroxysms since then in trying to adjust to the realities of the outside world which it was beginning to discover for the first time.

These included the downfall of the Ranas, a brief flirtation with democracy, a sustained attempt by the late King Birendra to run a tame democracy without the encumbrance of political parties; the violent rejection of this 11 years ago in a popular uprising; and finally, 11 gravely disheartening and disillusioning years of parliamentary democracy.

Yet through all the twists and turns, the brutal and mediaeval realities of Nepal have remained largely unchanged. The King, as far as his Hindu subjects is concerned, is an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. That means he is a god, and can do no wrong.

And this is not just empty doctrine: it has legal ramifications, too. A member of the royal family cannot be tried in a court of law without the sanction of the King. Through all the political fluctuations, the spiritual status of Nepal's king has remained unchanged – and likewise the desperate situation of the Nepalese peasantry.

In these impoverished valleys, hundreds of miles from the capital, the only way for many families to make money is to send their sons to be bonded labourers in northern India, or to sell their daughters to the brothels of Bombay.

International agencies pour $US300 million per year into the country in aid, much of which goes into the pockets of people who are already obscenely rich.

Meanwhile in mountain villages, illiterate women give birth in filthy huts, completely alone, because superstition tells them their condition is "polluting". Friday night's carnage reeks of oriental courts of long ago, luxurious, scheming and venal, sunk in mystifying rituals, insulated from the world outside. Now the blinds have been torn away, the daylight floods in. Can Nepalis bear to look?

- INDEPENDENT