Jupiter Pradhan was standing on the highway outside Kathmandu’s National Archives when he heard the parliament building was on fire. ‘It was around noon on 9 September, the second day of the protests. I was doing a performance on the street in memory of the deaths of the 19 protesters,’ he recalls. Jupiter is an artist and teacher, and runs an art space around the corner from the Archaeology Department, and the National Archives next door. ‘Then I received a text saying the parliament was on fire.’

Now it’s October, and we’re sipping tea on his roof terrace, which is crowded with paintings and sculptures, replete with a small, makeshift kiln. On one wall is a graffitied image of Dumbo the elephant, transformed into the Hindu god Ganesh, by American artist Jeffrey Gillette, who did a residency here earlier this year. The terrace where we’re sitting with my fellow reporter and translator, Aayush, overlooks the new Supreme Court, under construction. Behind it, obscured by buildings is the former Supreme Court – now a hulking wreck of red brick and twisted iron tightly masked in green construction cloth. From up here, the destruction is easier to notice – a couple kilometres away, barely visible above the skyline is the Prime Minister’s office, Singa Durbar. It, too, is a shell of its former self, its white stone and grand neoclassical pillars blackened with soot.

Across the road, one building stands out untouched. The archaeological department – and beside it, less conspicuous, Nepal’s National Archives. Aside from a squashed mass of crippled vehicles, rust-coloured and piled in a precarious stack, neatly framed by the building’s entrance gates, one might fail to notice the relics of last month’s destruction – the day of deadly riots on 9 September that followed Nepal’s deadliest day of protest, during which 19 young students, many in school uniform were shot dead by police.

‘I grew up in front of this archaeological centre. For ten years I would go to school, and my bus stop was there, in front of the main gate,’ Jupiter says. Over the years, he developed a special relationship with the building. His grandfather had been a historian working with the archives. In 2008, just a couple of minutes’ walk from Jupiter’s childhood home, he set up his art space, Space-A, in a building his father built. It’s opposite the National Archives. In 2019, he converted it into an artist’s residency space. Every year he and his wife give four funded fellowships to Nepali artists, providing a studio and materials costs for two months a year.

Little more than a month ago, Nepal’s government was toppled in a youth-led revolution that began as a peaceful anti-corruption protest, triggered by a ban on social media. On 8 September, anger exploded across Nepal after the police opened fire on protesting students in school uniform; rioting broke out, which led to the destruction of nearly every government building in the city. Less than 24 hours later, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, who many accused of executing a shoot-to-kill order, had resigned and vanished – airlifted from his official residence to an army base on the outskirts of Kathmandu Valley.

When Jupiter saw a group of ten or so men setting fire to the Supreme Court just outside his doorstep, he realised it was unlikely that any official building in the area would survive. ‘We live in an area of heightened security,’ he says. ‘The police department is just down the road. The Supreme Court is here, tons of government buildings, the army headquarters. If the protesters manage to get here – if the revolution comes here – you know it’s already over. When I saw them set fire to the Supreme Court, I realised – I had to go back.’ ‘They started coming from the south – and the first office you can see from that direction is the Archaeological Centre. So I went and tried to stop the first group. I told them, I am trying to save this building.’

Jupiter spent the day glued to the gates of the building, attempting to barricade it from the protesters’ wrath. His tactics to deter the rioters became increasingly far-fetched: he posted on Facebook summoning friends and relatives; he begged officers policing the streets for help; he argued with protesters, rotating between passionate pleas and convoluted philosophical argument. At points the altercations turned physical. He asked friends to bring vast red and white Nepalese flags, stretching them out across the building’s entranceway. ‘Sometimes we had to resort to tricks like this,’ he recalls with a smile. ‘At one time we had up to 25 people protecting the building.’ It was only at 11pm, when the protesters had dispersed and the army took over security, that Jupiter finally returned home.

The National Archive, and the archaeology department next door, were the only government buildings to survive September’s Gen-Z revolution. The arson attacks on the Supreme Court on the other hand, led to the loss of thousands of case files – approximately 26,000 ongoing case files and 36,000 archived files – and the collapse of Nepal’s judicial archives. It has created uncertainty on how to proceed with pending cases.

The National Archive was constructed in 1967 – but the history of Nepal’s archives goes back at least to 1812, when the archive was first formally institutionalised through a royal charter, given by the king to a Brahmin, authorising him to take care of the kingdom’s manuscripts. Historically, Nepal was in the centre of a trans-Himalayan trade route, meaning manuscripts from across South Asia would concentrate in Nepal: from Buddhist texts originating in Tibet to Nepal’s north, travelling across the Himalayas, to palm-leaf manuscripts from Kerala in the south. The building that houses the archives today has survived five major earthquakes – including the Gorka earthquake of 2015, in which approximately 9,000 people died.

For now, the archives are safe from fire, but they have long been suffering a slower – and far less glamorous – demise. A student I spoke to who attempted to use the archives refers to them as ‘chaotic’ and ‘impenetrable’. She added that many documents have not been subject to the correct preservation methods, with ancient documents reportedly kept wrapped in bedsheets and bags, simply labelled ‘Sack One’, ‘Sack Two’, ‘Sack Three’, and so on. Many documents, shoved in a basement and collecting dust, are being slowly eaten away by termites.

The mismanagement is concerning because Nepal’s archives contain manuscripts and artefacts of inestimable historic and cultural value, dating back as early as the 5th century. Among the 32,000 handwritten ancient documents contained within the archives is one recognised in UNESCO’s memory of the world register: Niśvāsattatvasahitā, the earliest surviving tantric manuscript. Another UNESCO-recognised document, the Susrutasamhita, considered to be the oldest complete manuscript in the field of Ayurvedic medicine, is housed in the nearby Kaiser Library.

Yet, for Dr Diwakar Acharya, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at All Souls College, Oxford, the recognition of just two manuscripts is absurd. ‘That Library of the World manuscript, the Niśvāsattatvasahitā – there are hundreds of such manuscripts. Actually, the entire archive should be recognised as Memory of the World. This is probably the most important archive in the entire of South Asia. It has the oldest Pali manuscript, the oldest Vedic manuscript, a number of Buddhist canonical texts – a number of Daśabhūmikasūtra manuscripts from at least the seventh century, among many more.’

Daśabhūmikasūtra – the oldest manuscript in the archive – is a Mahāyāna Buddhist text written in Sanskrit and considered by practitioners to be the words of the Buddha. It deals with the ten stages, or bhūmis, which a bodhisattva – one who strives towards enlightenment – must pass through on the path to nirvana. Also housed in the archive is a complete original scroll of the ancient Hindu epic, The Mahabharata – a rare copy of the entire story, handwritten. While working with the archives, Acharya even stumbled by chance across the original manuscript of Panhavayarana – a canonical Jain text, he said, that had been believed lost for centuries.

Many of the archive’s manuscripts are written on fragile supports like palm leaf and birch bark, materials naturally subject to decay by humidity, or contamination by insects, mould and fungi. Some initiatives have been in place since 2015, aimed at long-term preservation of sections of the archive – such as the July 2018 project, ‘Safeguarding the Manuscripts in Nepal’ — but the contents are so vast that any progress made so far is fractional. According to Acharya, the complete contents of the archive is not known – let alone catalogued.

‘(Normally) the archive is the most structured place you’d ever visit as an institution,’ says Chakshita, an archivist based in Kathmandu. Yet, in Nepal: ‘The national archives are the opposite. It’s the most chaotic place.’ ‘It’s really been mishandled by the government,’ added Acharya. ‘It’s a really unfortunate situation. They simply don’t understand the importance of these archives.’ Acharya also said that the manuscripts and microfilms are located in close proximity in a single building – meaning that if the building were damaged, both the originals and the copies would be destroyed.

Chakshita highlighted another major problem: access. ‘Everyone has always had difficulty accessing the national archives’, she says. ‘Then even if you can access them, you can never find anything. There’s no catalogue’. Another barrier is that access historically has been limited to the higher castes. Nowadays, students who do manage to gain access to the archives are obliged to pay a per page fee to view texts, something many view as a deliberate deterrent.

Acharya added that some 12,000 sacks of official government records, dating from the early 19th century, are inaccessible even to him. None of these, he says, have been preserved in any other form.

For young people dedicated to engaging with the archives against all odds, the mission is almost sacred. ‘I started working in archives because of this fear that things will vanish one day,’ said Chakshita, laughing. But unless Nepal’s National Archives are safeguarded – and urgently – that day might come sooner than we’d like to think.

Additional reporting from Aayush Basyal.