The Muluki Ain of 1854: Nepal's First Legal Code

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The Muluki Ain of 1854-the law code with constitutional features drafted at the initiative of Prime Minister Janga Bahadura Rāņā is the foundational legal text for modern Nepal. It covers almost every aspect of public, criminal, private and religious law, ranging from the organisation of the state and courts to murder and other delicts, the workings of the caste system and the joint family, matters of purity and penance, customary law, widow-burning and witchcraft. As such, the Muluki Ain is a unique source not only for the political, social and economic life of 19th-century Nepal, but also for the place of traditional Hindu jurisprudence in South Asian legal cultures.

The (Muluki) Ain of 1854, Nepal's first legal code, is a book that is more quoted than understood. So far, only a few Articles have been translated (see Table 1, pp 10-11). This is all the more astonishing as the text is a unique testimony for South Asia, bringing together and recording predominantly Brahmanical social ideas, legal concepts and local practice. Moreover, it captures the richness of life in Nepal in the mid-19th century with all its social, religious and economic problems and conflicts.

I had always wanted to translate this important code, considering it a wonderful example of a text at the confluence of Indology and Anthropology (cp. Michaels 2020) and, in fact, started to do so almost at the beginning of my academic career. In 1990, I was granted a 5-year Heisenberg Fellowship by the German Research Council (DFG) for this task. However, I could enjoy the fellowship only for a few months, because I was then offered the chair for Religious Studies at Berne University in Switzerland. Afterwards, my obligations at Berne and later Heidelberg did not allow me to pursue the translation project.

I was all the more delighted when, in 2015, I was awarded the Lautenschlager Research Award. With the prize money, I was able to employ Rajan Khatiwoda and Simon Cubelic, both at that time my PhD students, meanwhile post-docs at Heidelberg University, for a couple of years.

In our weekly meetings we discussed and reviewed jointly all chapters of the Ain, for most of which Rajan had prepared an initial translation. We have endeavoured to make this first full translation of the Ain of 1854 readable, which is not always easy with legal texts and their technical terminology.

I am extremely grateful for Rajan's and Simon's relentless work, as well as their genuine concern to disentangle the intricated language of the Ain and to pursue every detail. Without them, my dream of a translation of the Ain of 1854 would not have come to fruition 30 years after its inception.

I would also like to thank Manfred Lautenschlager, himself a jurist by training, for the award and his interest in the project and support throughout the years. Thanks are further due to Douglas Fear and Philip Pierce, who both copy-edited the English and suggested many valuable improvements. Manik Bajracharya was an everlasting source of inspiration; thanks also to him. We are grateful finally to Nutan Sharma and Rajendra Shakya, who helped with preliminary translations of some Articles.

The Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities made it possible to include the book in the Documenta Nepalica Series, which we gratefully acknowledge.

The National Archives of Nepal, established in 1967, is the government body authorised to manage and preserve the country's archival documents. It operates according to the Archives Preservation Act of 1989, and its functions as a repository of government records are to collect and preserve manuscripts and other significant documents and to facilitate public access to them. It collaborates with both national and international organisations in pursuit of its goals, and has thereby created a network of partnerships.

The National Archives of Nepal has enjoyed a number of long-term collaborations with Germany. It successfully partnered with the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project, founded in 1970, and its successor Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project. In 2018 the research unit Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Premodern Nepal of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities commenced a publication series titled Documenta Nepalica. The first volume of the series, Studies in Historical Documents from Nepal and India, demonstrated the significance of Nepal's document heritage for historical studies on South Asia and beyond and sparked further scholarly interest in our country's rich archival sources.

I am convinced that the second volume of the series will attract even more attention. The present translation and study of the Mulukī Ain is an important contribution to the study of Nepa- lese legal history and will help to disseminate knowledge about this foundational text of modern Nepal. The National Archives of Nepal is preserving not only the oldest extant manuscript of the Ain, but also manuscripts or prints of all its subsequent amended versions. Even though these manuscripts date from relatively recent times, as noteworthy facets of Nepal's constitutional development they still figure prominently among our collection. I am confident that this book will become a key publication for anyone interested in the complex and at times complicated role law played in the formation of the modern nation state of Nepal.

The Configuration of the Ain

Most modernisation theories cannot adequately expound specific developments in smaller states and must therefore be supplemented or revised. Nepal, which belonged to the few non- European kingdoms that were not colonised and could maintain its ground against (British) India and China, is such a case. It developed forms of social coherence different from colonial or post-colonial ideas of governance. It was a state that did not define itself through the categories of modernisation packages such as common culture, common language and common economic area. On the contrary, Nepal was and is religiously, ethnically and linguistically a highly fragmented and diversified country. According to the Census of 2011, Nepal has more than 70 mutually incomprehensible languages or dialects, 126 recognised castes and 123 national languages, with Nepali being the only official language. Its political and administrative segments for instance, the 22 and 24 pre-unification principalities or petty states of the Karnali basin-were not consistent and firm enough to either separate into stable and strong states or jointly build a modern secular state.

It seems that the autocratic introduction of a unique Hindu civil code like the Ain of 1854, together with administration and jurisdiction, fostered a constant negotiation of the frames for a modern state. It also seems that this process helped to overcome the country's fragmentation and strengthened traditional social structures.