Composite image by Aishwarya Iyer; photographs from Sushan Bhattarai, Wikimedia Commons, Jim Fisher (Nepal Peace Corps) and Larry Daloz (Nepal Peace Corps)

Nepal’s forgotten cultural revolution

Nepal’s civil war ended two decades ago, but the reckoning with the Maoists’ destruction of heritage and culture has barely begun

Sushan Bhattarai is an early-career researcher and curator based in Kathmandu. He has held fellowships at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and research positions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA) and Achi Association India (AAI). His research centres on the archaeology and material culture of the central Himalaya.

Published on:

26 May 2026, 9:58 am

THE SCHOOLTEACHER walked ahead of me through the terraced hillside above Dullu, in Dailekh district in the west of Nepal, and paused where the path crests a small rise to gesture at a clearing below. We descended together into it. There was one standing wall, sun-bleached, cracked along its upper courses, listing slightly as though exhausted, rising from weeds and what looked, from a distance, like piled rubble. This was all that remained of the Dullu Durbar, a palace built in the 1920s by artisans from Kathmandu on the site of the old Malla royal compound – centuries earlier the winter seat of Khas-Malla kingship.

“It burnt for several days,” the teacher said. “You could see smoke from several villages away. Nobody came. Nobody stopped it.”

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Nepal