The Himalayan hinterland, for all its isolation, has never been far from the economic forces at play in the rest of the subcontinent and the world. Change in bazaar towns was not always for the better.
Common interpretations frame change in terms of the same obvious political events which are accepted as cumulatively making up Nepal´s history. Starting with unification in the 18th century, these events include the ministerial takeovers by the Thapa and Rana families in the 19th, and, in the 20th, the revolution of 1950-51 which brought the fall of, the Rana regime, and the people´s movement of 199O which ended the Panchayat system.
This reduction of history into a document of the careers of regimes allows the complicated lives of the people of Nepal´s villages to fall away from the picture. Their lives are trivialised and formalised in theories that misrepresent them as overly traditional, stagnant and fatalist. Rather than the force and purpose of change, the villagers´ fecundity and conservatism are seen as its roadblock, which must be subjected to the dynamism of "development."
The truth of the matter is that rural Nepal has always dynamically interacted with and shaped the flow of historical events. The Nepali countryside of today was shaped by a long, gradual process of the entry of village society into wider spheres of interaction. It is the villager who produced and traded the products of the land, who filled the coffers of kings and fattened the moneylenders, who built the palaces and fought the wars and who bore, nursed and fed all, from pauper to king.