THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

controlled the Kathmandu valley. Because of this, Hodgson saw the Yakha
and Limbu, along with some of the Rai tribes, as the diminished remnants
of a once powerful group. The rest of the Rai, he speculated, were
similarly the 'broken' remnants of a once larger tribe (Hodgson,
1858),' -
However, it is questionable whether either the Kiranti or the rest
of the Rai were ever unified entities, linguistically, socially or
politically, The inhabitants of Pallo Kira-t were probably divided up
into small chieftainships, perhaps corresponding to contemporary ethnic
or linguistic groups. At the time the Gorkha king Prithvi Narayan Shah
began his ' conquest' of East Nepal in 1773, some of these groups were
under the suzerainty of the Sen dynasty of Makwanpur (a more western
settlement), and others were nominally controlled by the Raja of Sikkim.
One branch of the Sen dynasty ran its affairs from Chaudandi in MBih
Kir6-t, and another, which controlled some of the areas now inhabited by
the Yakha, was based at Vijayapur, a hill fort located about two miles
east of Dharan on the edge of the Tarai (Regmi, 1978). Given the
topography of the region, it is hard to imagine that the Sen kings had
much real influence on the day-to-day affairs of the various Kiranti
chieftains, or what political forms the chieftains upheld, Leach's
study of the Kachin of highland Burma (1954) should alert us to the
potential of Tibeto-Burman tribal systems for oscillation and change.
The Gorkha Conquest
Makwanpur was conquered by Prithvi Narayan Shah on 23rd October
1762, and Vijaypur fell nearly twelve years later on 17th July 1774
(Stiller, 1973: 122-3, 137). From here the Gorkhali troops moved