Among these myriad details that I speak of are facts that we once knew or were perhaps taught (or not) in school, about how the Valley has always been a cradle of culture, though little is known about the Gopalas and the Mahishapalas, the first known inhabitants and rulers of the Valley, who were followed by the Kiratas, and then the Licchavis, who made spectacular monumental stone carvings between the 5-7th centuries and established the holy sites of Pashupati, Changu Narayan, and Swayambhu; these are sites that scholars such as Michael Hutt believe were already regarded as sacred.

While I re-learned a great deal of things I had forgotten, I also discovered, through my research, how much I didn’t know and would never have known had I not embarked on my now defunct documentary.

Did you know that the Buddha very possibly never visited the Valley and that the Ashoka stupas in Lalitpur attributed to the Mauryan emperor of the same name (who reigned from circa 268-239 BCE) could not have been established by him because in addition to the fact that he never made it into the Kathmandu Valley (he did come as far as Lumbini, very definitely), these stupas might even pre-date the Mauryan era?

I came across a great many such legends clouded by the haze of time. Another example being that while scholars now believe that Bhrikuti did exist and married the Tibetan King Songsten Gampo, she was most probably not the daughter of Amshuvarman, the Licchavi king who built the famed palace Kailashakuta, but rather of a slightly later ruler. Most scholars will also hesitate to continue further regarding her influence in taking Buddhism to Tibet, and while the myth that she became the Green Tara is pervasive, it is impossible to trace that legend to real factual documentation.

All these discoveries were of course precursors to learning about the great Newar Malla Kings themselves, who supplanted the Licchavis, though again, very little is know as to exactly how.

I do not wish to give you a history lesson; personally, I have always found that learning history through monuments, art, and architecture makes potentially tedious facts and dates stick in my mind easier. Suffice to say that my forays into learning about the monuments of this Valley taught me how very little any of us know about anything really, and how much our amateur knowledge of the history of our Valley is intertwined with urban legend and anecdotal “evidence”—which is a nightmare for the precise scholar who must have original sources to be able to extrapolate theories that need to be based on firm ground.

In the end, this rather rambling article, rambles because it is echoing my own befuddling research, where the more I learnt, the more I realised how little I knew, and how incredibly inept my own documentary would be, conceived as it was on the basis of trying to achieve a kind of “walk through spaces accurately evoking moments in history” a là Alexander Sokurov’s filmic masterpiece Russian Ark (2002), a tour de force that consists of an 87 minute unbroken tracking shot that moves through the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and encapsulates centuries of Russia’s history and art in an elegiac, magical way.

Still, I am grateful to my foiled attempt because I learnt a valuable lesson as a film-maker, which is that if you want to shoot something that is epic, then you need a proportionately epic budget in addition to a team that can block off Durbar Squares from traffic (human and otherwise), a horde of highly skilled crew and camera people shooting from different angles on mile-long dollies, and at least a few cranes mounted with massive lights—the kind that can light up Times Square, let’s say.

However, the more important lesson that I learnt is this: ours is a complex history; we need more scholars who we can turn to with our questions, ones that are rigorous in their academic research. Finally, we need to change the nonsense written in our children’s textbooks so that they don’t grow up spouting the same false historical rhetoric that we were forced to memorise.