After 25 years of persevering belligerence, Prithvi Narayan Shah conquered the three cities of the Kathmandu Valley in 1769. One year later, on 23 March, he shifted his capital to newly occupied Kathmandu. With his court came his kinsmen, retinue, priests and soldiers — the new aristocracy of the hill region — to settle permanently in Kathmandu. They symbolised what Nepal's leading economic historian Mahesh C. Regmi calls "a shift of political and economic power". Among them were the thar-ghar, the chosen and select families of hill brahmins such as Aryal, Khanal, Pandey and Panta who were rewarded with the best lands and houses in the Valley as their jagirs in return for their services to the Gorkhali court in war and peace. Thus begins the success story of the parbate Bahuns, the brahmins from the hills.
After 25 years of persevering belligerence, Prithvi Narayan Shah conquered the three cities of the Kathmandu Valley in 1769. One year later, on 23 March, he shifted his capital to newly occupied Kathmandu. With his court came his kinsmen, retinue, priests and soldiers — the new aristocracy of the hill region — to settle permanently in Kathmandu. They symbolised what Nepal's leading economic historian Mahesh C. Regmi calls "a shift of political and economic power". Among them were the thar-ghar, the chosen and select families of hill brahmins such as Aryal, Khanal, Pandey and Panta who were rewarded with the best lands and houses in the Valley as their jagirs in return for their services to the Gorkhali court in war and peace. Thus begins the success story of the parbate Bahuns, the brahmins from the hills.
The Sanskrit word brahmana has more than one meaning and is therefore potentially ambiguous. Without the contextual clue it might mean any of these four: supernatural power or the absolute world-spirit; a Vedic text of the brahmanic class; the god Brahma; or a member of the priestly order in the Hindu society. Relatively speaking, the native term Bahun is decidedly preferable for it is starkly unambiguous in its social and cultural reference. Manu, the Hindu law-giver, prescribed six main functions to a brahmin: study and make others study, sacrifice and make others sacrifice, give and receive gifts (Manusmriti X: 75). However, Manu nearly forgot the central political or ideological function of the brahmana, that is to legitimise the political power, no matter who holds it, for which he receives the munificence of the powers that be. It may not be instantly possible to verify if all the known clans of parbate Bahuns, listed for example in Shikhamatha Subedi's Tharagotra Pravaravali, perform all these ritual functions. Perhaps, they don't. Nor is it possible to chronologise and substantiate the claim of these clans to have migrated from the heartland of Aryavarta into the laps of the rugged hills of Nepal. Perhaps, it is even silly to expect them to observe Manu's prescriptions in the cold Himalaya at the high noon of the Kali Yuga. But a number of these clans and lineages with gotras and pravaras allegedly drawn from eponymic Vedic and Upanishadic rishis claim nothing if not pristine purity of blood and Aryan descent. However, only a few families have published their authentic genealogies, going back eight to ten generations, and fewer have bare lists of dead manes. Those who migrated to the Kathmandu Valley came with their jajaman families such as the Chhetri families of the Th apas, Pande, Basnet, Bohara and Kunwars — who later on staked a claim to have descended from the Ran as of Chitor. Both the purohits as well as the jajamans speak khas kura (or Nepali as it is known today) and are known as khasa — a people originally classified by Manu as vratya or "those who have abandoned sacred rites and lost their caste" (Manusmrti X: 22)
Not only the Gorkhali army but also their civil administration did not recruit the Newars — the inhabitants of the conquered Valley because of the deeply ingrained distrust and contempt for them in the Gorkhali psyche — graphically expressed in such sayings as Newar ista ra babu dusta kahilai hundaina: a Newar is never a friend just as a father is never an enemy. Only since October 1804 were some Newars admitted in the revenue administration, then only because the Gorkhali sardars didn't comprehend the the Valleys land administration system.