Kirāta dynasty

A name and a dynasty

Kirāta appears in the Mahābhārata, the Purāṇas and other Sanskrit texts as a designation for hill peoples of the eastern Himalaya — Śiva appears to Arjuna in the guise of a Kirāta hunter, in an episode that became a favourite of poets and sculptors.

Nepali chronicles, principally the Gopalarajavamshavali, give a list of twenty-nine Kirāta kings said to have ruled the Kathmandu valley for well over a millennium before the Licchavis. The list cannot be corroborated and the chronology is not sustainable, but the tradition itself is old and consistent.

The Kirant communities of eastern Nepal — Rai, Limbu, Sunuwar, Yakkha — identify with this ancestry, and the Mundhum, their oral scriptural tradition, is the basis of a religion practised today. The dynasty's historical reality is unresolved; the identity built on it is not in question.