When discussing the early nineteenth-century foreign relations, lodged in the Nepali memory is the Anglo-Nepali War of 1814 to 1816, which ended in the Treaty of Sugauli, followed by 1857, when Rana Nepal sided with the East India Company during the Sepoy Mutiny. The years in between are largely absent from national recollection.

Marcus Potter’s newly published book ‘Crisis on the Northern Frontier’, which is an updated version of a 2003 university dissertation, deals with these very years, particularly with the years between 1837 and 1846.

Readers learn that years after the Sugauli Treaty, in 1840, the British came close to another invasion of Nepal. And Nepal, for its part, was not completely averse to conflict either.

The book relies mostly on correspondence between the British resident in Kathmandu, first and foremost Brian Hodgson from 1833 to 1843 and, later, Sir Henry Lawrence, and the governor-general in Calcutta to paint a picture of how the Durbar was seen by the Company and how the British sought to deal with it.

Potter’s book addresses how Nepal managed to remain a sovereign state in the latter half of the nineteenth century when every other country fell into British hands, a question made all the more interesting given the at-times hawkish outlook that Kathmandu’s Durbar continued to have towards the Company.

Potter’s book will not be blamed for its precise focus, for looking mostly at a few channels of communication to build its case. Should they choose to, readers will have to go elsewhere to find a more complete account of the events unfolding at the time. Many of these other works are referred to in the book.

As much as it is the telling of a little-known fact, and an alarming one—that the two sides almost came to blows in 1840—the book is also a dive into Kathmandu’s British Resident Brian Hodgson’s character. Potter paints Hodgson the politician, whom he separates from the better-known Hodgson the orientalist, as a man thirsty for conflict. He is shown to be a man who, despite living so close to the Kathmandu Durbar for so long, wanted nothing more than to see the Durbar’s end. In many letters to his governor-general, Auckland, in Calcutta, Hodgson warns of Nepali militarisation and repeatedly calls for a ground invasion of Kathmandu.

Nepal, for its part, does not come across as a nation reeling from the Sugauli Treaty and now willing to get along with the Company. That will come later, namely with the rise of Jang Bahadur Rana after the Kot Massacre. But in the years before the massacre and after the treaty, Potter identifies Nepal as still being an expansionist state, continuing from the Gorkha conquest at the end of the previous century, which had formed the modern nation.

The Durbar, consisting of the many members of the royal family with their different inclinations, the Thapa camp led by Bhimsen Thapa and the Pande camp led by Ranjung Pande, is broadly grouped into two parties—‘the war party’, who want to see the Gorkha era conquest continued, and another party which wants to maintain generally amiable relations with the British.

Bhimsen Thapa, before his untimely death by suicide, is recognised to be hawkish, yes, but also prudent. While using anti-company rhetoric to keep the Durbar unified, he was unwilling to be party to outright aggression. Potter notes that, amid his strongman posturing, Thapa actually signed a commercial treaty with the British in 1835.

Thapa’s effective rhetorical positioning tells readers that Nepal’s appetite for nationalist rhetoric against bigger neighbours as a means to unify various domestic camps and rally support is as old as the country itself.

On the British side, Resident Hodgson had spent a decade looking for legitimate legal and moral grounds for an invasion of Nepal, and Ranjung Pande had given him those grounds.

In February 1840, a small number of Gorkha soldiers crossed into Chaparan, a British district along Nepal’s southern border, severing ninety-six villages from British authority. The act itself was more farcical than consequential in any sense. But for the war hawks in Bengal, who were looking for a reason to invade, it was plenty.

The climax of the book lies in what happens next: the governor-general, Auckland, the same one who would eventually fail to capture Afghanistan, orders General Nicholls to prepare for a war with the stated end goal of nothing less than the ‘entire subjugation of the Nepal territory’.

The invasion is intended for October 1840.

But when the early winter of 1840 comes, the war does not. Potter delves into the various reasons for this. The primary one seems to be the Company’s failure to capture Kabul. The British were fighting a losing war in Afghanistan; they were pinched for both troops and cash.

Additionally, General Nicholls is on record complaining about the difficulty of preparing for a war in the hills.

It would seem that the early years of the 1840s were when the British Himalayan policy, as we think of it today, of leaving the mountains be, began to take shape. The loss in Afghanistan’s mountains seems to have been the primary driver. The Company, now understanding that it lacked the know-how for mountain warfare, shifted to a non-interventionist policy.

The role of pro-peace members of the Durbar and the Company in preventing a war from breaking out is also highlighted in the book.

Now, how Nepal, in the years after 1840 up to Indian independence in 1947, managed to avoid the fates of the other Himalayan states—Kashmir, Sikkim and Bhutan—is a different question.

It is one that Potter touches on but, for the most part, leaves readers to search for answers elsewhere.

Crisis on the Northern Frontier

Author: Marcus Potter

Publisher: Millis Publishing

Year: 2026