The Silent Cry

In The Silent Cry Stiller presented his most original and provocative interpretation of the early phase of Nepal's modern history. The question he asked was simple; if the land-military nexus had been fundamental to the successful growth of Gorkha, what happened to the equation of the Treaty of Sagauli with the East India Company in 1816. In analyzing why the military strength increased subsquently, Stiller provided us with an original perspective on why Bhimsen Thapa - who dominated Nepali politics for two decades after the treaty of Sagauli - had reasons to do so. Whent he increased stregnth of military could only be supported with the truncated corpus of the land owned by the state following Sagauli, this resulted in the fine tuning of the mechanisms to extract more and more resources generated from the land to the coffers of the state. the outcome was clear: further impoverishment of Nepal's peasants.