Towering monument to 2015

Dharara must have been an eyesore when it was first built in 1825. The Moghul-style minarets towered over the low brown tile roofs of Kathmandu.

Prime Minister Bhimsen Thapa erected two towers at the gate to his palace as a symbol of the power he wielded before palace intrigue and rivalry led to his downfall.

The towers collapsed in 1833, and only one of them was rebuilt to be damaged in a lightning strike in 1856. It was destroyed again in the 1934 earthquake, rebuilt and once again collapsed on 25 April 2015, killing about 180 people who were sightseeing from the top that fateful Saturday. 

A chubbier replica now stands next to the stump of the earlier structure that has been preserved as a monument to the earthquake exactly ten years ago. For many in Kathmandu and Nepal, the destruction of the iconic tower has become a motif of the 2015 disaster.

More than 180 bodies were pulled out of the rubble from the collapsed Dharara after the earthquake, although there were some miraculous escapes — like Sanjib Shrestha and his friend Ramila Shrestha who were on a secret tryst on top of the tower when it started swaying. 

They held on the railings of the balcony as it tottered and fell. Both were thrown off and survived the 75m fall. Sanjib came to in the pavement outside Bir Hospital and Ramila was rushed to the Trauma Centre. A nearby CCTV camera actually recorded at the edge of its frame the Dharara collapsing that day.

At nearby Te Bahal, Prabhakar Nakarmi and his family had just returned to their house that day from a trip to Bungamati that day exactly 10 years ago. He had put the kettle on for tea and looked out of the window of his house. It was a Saturday, and he could see more people than usual high up on the balcony atop of Dharara.

“The weather had turned gloomy, and I had an uneasy feeling,” he recalls. “It may have been a premonition, but I even remember thinking that if an earthquake struck right then, a lot of people in Dharara were going to die.” 

Sure enough, his house began to shake. Nakarmi’s only thought was to gather his two young daughters and get out of his house. In his panicked rush, he did not even notice that Dharara had collapsed.

Nakarmi and his family stayed in a tent in Tundikhel for a month before returning to their house, where he also runs a sewing machine repair shop on the ground floor.

“Now, the windows of the house rattle a bit when vehicles pass by,” says Nakarmi, now 67. “But my house is strong, it withstood the 1934 earthquake, and it survived 2015.”

Kanchi Khadgi, now 81, sits in her usual spot near the entrance of her family’s meat shop, and recounts what happened that Saturday 10 years ago. She was inside when the building started shaking, she ran out of the house with her daughter and noticed that Dharara was just a heap of rubble.  

“My daughter told me many people were buried under the collapsed Dharara, and we tried to help rescue them,” Khadgi recalls. “But when I saw parts of their belongings and clothes peeking out from the rubble, I was too frightened to look anymore.”

Born and raised in Lagan Tole, Khadgi has lived in Te Bahal since she came to the neighbourhood as a newly married young girl. 

“As a young girl, I used to go and watch the horses in the stables at the Dharara compound and do my washing in Sundhara,” Khadgi says. “I have climbed Dharara countless times.”

Except for Dharara, Te Bahal, like nearby Asan and Lagan Tole, escaped relatively unscathed in the earthquake, in large part because traditional Newari houses were packed together.

But the neighbourhood around Dharara had started to change even before the 2015 earthquake. Khadgi’s own home which was a modest two-storey traditional tile roof house is now a multi-story building. 

In the ten years since the quake, Prabhakar Nakarmi’s young daughters have grown into adults, and many of his neighbours have rebuilt their damaged homes and have concrete multi-storey buildings. 

The Nepal Madani Masjid and Muslim Musafirkhana has stood in front of Dharara ever since they were built 80 years ago. Kaleem is a caretaker at the mosque.  

Just before noon on that Saturday ten years ago, Kaleem had begun preparations for afternoon prayers. Suddenly, the ground began to shake and the walls of the mosque trembled.

Realising it was an earthquake, Kaleem rushed outside just in time to see the Dharara come crashing down into an eatery beside the mosque, killing its owner and employees. Like others from inner city Kathmandu, Kaleem headed to the open ground at Tundikhel for safety. 

“Every day as we returned to the mosque for prayers, there would be aftershocks , it was a time of great fear,” he recalls.

Digging foundations for the new houses in the neighbourhood has disturbed the water channels that fed the spouts of Sundhara which have gone dry, depriving Te Bahal of a vital source of water it has depended on for centuries. 

“Before the earthquake, you could come and go down to fetch water from Sundhara as you pleased, but no water has come out of the stone sprout for years now, ” says Kaleem, looking out the window of the mosque towards the ruins of the old tower. “The old post office, tax department, the businesses around Dharara, they have all gone. This place is not the same anymore.”

The Nepal Madani mosque itself suffered no major damage, but added an extra floor during the Covid-19 lockdown to accommodate those seeking shelter. 

Residents of Te Bahal have watched over these past 10 years as Dharara transformed from a single-structure monument to a sprawling two hectare compound: Kaleem from the stoop of his mosque, Prabhakar Nakarmi through the windows of his traditional brick house, and Kanchhi Khadgi from her usual perch near the entrance of her meat shop. 

Khadgi has climbed the replica twice since it was hastily inaugurated by Prime Minister K P Oli in 2021 even before it was completed and earned the moniker ‘Oli’s Folly’ instead of ‘Bhimsen’s Folly’.

Khadgi says, “The new one does not come close to capturing the history of Dharara, it just does not feel the same.”

Kaleem and Prabhakar Nakarmi have no desire to climb the new tower. But there is no shortage of visitors who want to get to the balcony for a bird’s eye view of the densely-packed city below. 

Crowds gather in front of the gates to the compound even before it opens every morning to pay the Rs200 entry fee to climb to the high viewing platform to look down at Kathmandu.  

More than 165,000 people have climbed Dharara since it was opened to the public last November. The new Dharara that towers over visitors is a bigger replica of the old tower that collapsed during the 2015 earthquake.

“There were multi-agency discussions about how to reconstruct Dharara after it came down, and since it had collapsed many times before, it was agreed that a completely new modern structure would be most appropriate,” explains Saubhagya Pradhananga of the Department of Archaeology. 

The two-hectare Dharara compound also includes the historic Sundhara, a multi-level basement parking, along with a future museum and an exhibition hall. Nepal’s historic post office and tax department, as well as businesses along the old tower were relocated to accommodate the new compound. 

Despite the Nepal government’s special committee that entrusted the operation and management of Dharara and five other structures across the country to the federal government, it has been unable to take over. 

The Ministry of Urban Development’s Central Level Project Implementation Unit (CLPIU) which designed and built the Dharara compound is in charge of operating the site. 

“With this project, we have tried to build back better to create a more open public space,” says Prakash Aryal of the CLPIU.

But the Rs3.16 billion project is still not completed even though the contractor’s agreement with the government expired last October. Construction of the museum and other facilities have been halted. There is no word of contract extension.

The restoration of the Sundhara spout and preservation of the base of the old Dharara remains a significant challenge as they are now surrounded by new structures. 

“None of what we have done with the new Dharara has been traditional from the technology to the materials used,” says Pradhananga. “It is more appropriate to call the new tower a modern heritage.”

The modernisation of the Te Bahal neighbourhood came at the cost of the ancient communal stone spouts of Sundhara, which have gone dry.

“We cannot call this heritage restoration,” says Aryal. “We have not been able to properly preserve what’s left of the old Dharara, or restore the flow of water in Sundhara.”  

Sundhara used to be open to the community for water supply and washing, but is now dry and within the Dharara so the local people cannot access it without paying entrance fees.

Even though he is from the CLPIU, Aryal says people should not be charged: “The community is a part of the Dharara and Sundhara heritage, the government should not keep them out.”

One of those waiting to climb the tower this week was Sita Ram Rai, an orange farmer from Khotang who has come to Kathmandu to visit his son and his family. Finding himself with free time between errands, he decided to visit Dharara. 

“I had climbed up the old Dharara a long time ago,” recalls the 72-year-old, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the small foyer at the top of the new structure. “I was curious to see what this new one would be like.”

Rai took the lift to the top, but was nonetheless breathless before he went out onto the balcony to look at the city below. 

“This Dharara is much better than the previous one, much bigger and cleaner,” he marvels. “I had to climb and climb the winding staircase to reach the top of the old one, but today I stepped into a box on the ground floor, and when the doors opened, I was instantly at the top!”

Rai looks around as the viewing platform begins to fill up with visitors who had climbed up the stairs to reach the top. A few minutes later, his son calls his father to join him on the balcony. 

Rai gathers up his walking stick leaning on the wall beside him, carefully getting to his feet. His son then gently leads him towards the glass panel where people jostle to catch a view of Kathmandu shrouded in haze, just like it was on 25 April 2015. 

Days of Dharara’s past

Prime Minister Bhimsen Thapa built two 61m high minaret-style towers to the gate of his palace in 1825 under the commission of Queen Lalit Tripurasundari. 

Nepal had just fought and lost a war against the British East India Company with the humiliating Sugauli Treaty of 1816, and did not like Bhimsen Thapa. They started calling the towers ‘Bhimsen’s Folly’.

Eight years later, both towers collapsed in the strong 1833 earthquake that destroyed many buildings in Kathmandu. Only one of them was rebuilt as a taller and more slender tower that was damaged in a lightning strike in 1856. It was repaired but could not withstand the 1934 earthquake that killed over 10,000 people in Kathmandu. The reconstructed second Dharara was 72m tall, and had a spiral staircase containing 213 steps that ended on a high balcony overlooking Kathmandu Valley. It collapsed once again during the 7.8M earthquake that struck Nepal on 25 April 2015.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, Dharara underwent a complete facelift starting 2017, after it was decided that the base of the old Dharara, the only part of the monument that remained, would be preserved as a monument, and a bigger replica rebuilt. 

Construction work soon began to expand the Dharara premises, and the old post office and tax department were relocated to make way for the new compound. 

In 2021, a day before the sixth anniversary of the 2015 earthquake, Prime Minister K P Oli inaugurated the New Dharara, and the compound officially opened to visitors in November 2024. 

Currently, the two-hectare Dharara compound includes the base of the old tower, the 22-storey replica tower, a park, the historic Sundhara, multi-level basement parking, with planned museums and exhibition halls.