In September 2025, Singha Durbar burned for the second time in its history. Unlike the accidental 1973 fire, this second inferno was ignited during the fury of the Gen Z anti-corruption protests. As the seat of Nepal’s government went up in flames, hijacked by violence after a deadly state crackdown, it left behind an exhausted question: Why does heritage in Nepal make headlines only after it has disappeared, or once damage becomes irreversible?

Nepal consistently mourns its heritage loudly and briefly, only after it is lost. We wait, grieve, promise to rebuild and move on. Whether born of bureaucratic inertia, political short-termism or a cultural tendency to postpone difficult decisions, this pattern reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of preservation.

Too often, we equate conservation with construction, treating heritage as purely physical and repairable with stone, timber, scaffolding and budget allocations. But a restored building is not necessarily a preserved heritage site; restoration is only the beginning. True heritage is equally made of memory, language, ritual, craftsmanship, belief and the communities that keep traditions alive. Preserving a monument without preserving the life surrounding it is not conservation. It is beautification.

Consider the National Library of Nepal. Since the 2015 earthquake rendered its Pulchowk building unusable, the country’s principal repository of knowledge has operated from temporary rooms inside Harihar Bhawan, another Rana palace. Over a decade has passed, despite land having long been allocated for a permanent facility in Jamal. A nation without a functioning national library ought to provoke public concern, yet it barely registers, perhaps because we have convinced ourselves that digital access renders physical institutions obsolete.

What counts as heritage?

Under Section 2A of the Ancient Monument Preservation Act, any structure more than one hundred years old is legally recognised as heritage. Before deciding what deserves saving, we must first decide what we consider heritage—a conversation that remains surprisingly unsettled in Nepal.

I have often heard it argued that the neo-classical architecture of the Rana-Shah period is not truly Nepali heritage because it is European in style and imposed through autocratic rule. This is a misleading reading of history. Any structure over a century old becomes part of our historical inheritance. A mature society can hold two ideas at once: That a building may represent oppression, and that it nevertheless deserves preservation as part of the historical record. Stripping away dynastic politics allows us to see who actually deserves our memory. These buildings were shaped by unnamed Nepali masons, carpenters and labourers whose endurance gave form to what political power merely commissioned. They are monuments to unknown Nepali craftsmanship, not the regime that demanded them.

Geography and pluralism of memory

Nepal, by contrast, continues to approach heritage as a finite collection of monuments concentrated within the Kathmandu Valley. When our national gaze occasionally looks beyond the capital, it fixes exclusively on predictable polarities: The high Himalayan monasteries or the ancient ruins of Lumbini. Everything else in between is met with a vast, empty silence. Heritage remains concentrated only where global visibility, tourism and state branding intersect.

This narrowing flattens our identity. Walk through many national museums and public galleries, and one could easily conclude that Nepal’s spiritual history begins and ends with Hindu and Buddhist iconography. Yet Kirat traditions, Muslim communities, Christian histories, Bon practices and countless indigenous belief systems have shaped this country for centuries. Our national narrative has simply chosen not to make space for them.

I encountered this erasure firsthand during a heritage workshop early this year. As a room of practitioners discussed potential projects, the conversation revolved entirely around the predictable indigeneity of the Kathmandu Valley and the Himalayas. We were blind to our own exclusion until a participant from the Muslim community spoke up. They reminded the room that Tajiya, the centuries-old Muharram procession tradition deeply rooted in the Tarai, particularly in districts like Rautahat, is now an endangered form of living heritage.

The silence that followed was revealing. It wasn’t hostility that kept Tajiya out of the discussion; it was the casual, unexamined apathy of an elite cultural circle that simply hadn’t thought to include it. It is proof of an institutionalised ignorance that rules our sector. We only protect what we allow into our collective imagination. If an entire culture doesn’t even register as ‘heritage’ to the people tasked with saving it, its erasure is guaranteed.

The intangible landscape

Our obsession with the tangible means that some of Nepal’s most endangered heritage cannot be photographed at all. When communities call for the return of stolen deities, the issue is often framed merely as one of ownership or restitution. But for these communities, a deity is a living presence, woven into daily ritual and collective memory. Returning a god is the restoration of a relationship.

A shrine may be rebuilt, but if its rituals disappear, something vital is lost. Kakre Bihar illustrates this quiet neglect. Despite its historical, archaeological and spiritual significance, it has rarely attracted the sustained national attention afforded to the Kathmandu Valley’s more well-trodden monuments.

To Nepal’s credit, the country has pursued new nominations to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage lists. Yet, listing a tradition does not guarantee its survival. What happens after scaffolding comes down? If local mechanisms to maintain its chants, protect its manuscripts, or fund the daily rhythm of its community vanish, its listing is nothing more than a bureaucratic data point.

Crisis of cultural governance

Currently, heritage policy in Nepal operates in silos. Archaeologists, conservators, academics, local communities, guthis and bureaucrats work in isolation. This fragmentation is explicitly clear in how we manage public finances.

Every fiscal year, substantial budgets are swept into constructing static cultural centres or repairing material facades for political legacy. This performative strategy treats heritage as something that belongs behind a velvet rope or is solely for aesthetics. True cultural preservation demands investment in dynamic public spaces all around the country—open community squares, town junctions and public platforms where living heritage can actually breathe and interact with daily civic life.

Funding the material structure of a monument is never enough; we must fund the active programming that animates it. Bricks and mortar mean nothing without creative ideas, public outreach, research initiatives and community events. Yet, our fiscal allocations completely starve programming in favour of physical construction.

This stagnation is compounded by an acute human resource crisis. Heritage management remains gatekept by an insular circle of the same rotating experts passing ideas back and forth. So we desperately need specialised training programmes and capacity-building initiatives across the provinces to foster a new generation of local conservators, cultural managers and practitioners.

The real task is not funding new concrete, but auditing how our existing public spaces and institutions are governed, how leadership is appointed, and how effectively they represent the plural realities of Nepal. Perhaps this is the question the government should ask—not how many monuments can be restored during its tenure, but whether Nepal’s living heritage ecosystem will be stronger when its tenure ends. Success should be measured by whether the living networks that give these places meaning remain vibrant a generation from now.