The choices Kathmandu must make

As the world shifts its focus to the Indo-Pacific, Nepal has a window of opportunity.

In Hanuman Dhoka is a stone inscription from 1664 CE in 15 languages, including the French words for autumn and winter. How did the Mallas know the language? Was it the early Capuchin missionaries? Or was it, as French Indologist Sylvain Levi noted, the Armenian traders mentioned by 17th-century French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier? “These three simple words [Automne, Winter, L’Hiver]...evoke in their moving simplicity the first entry in contact with Europe with this corner of the Himalaya,” Levi wrote , adding, “[A]nd the presence of two French words…reminds as by an expressive symbol the universal preponderance of the French language in the XVIIth century.”