There were five severe punishments: 1_st_, confiscation of the whole estate; 2_dly_, banishment of the whole family; 3_dly_, degradation of the whole family by delivering the members to the lowest tribes; 4_thly_, maiming the limbs; 5_thly_, death by cutting the throat.
The people of Gorkha have introduced other capital punishments, hanging and flaying alive. Women, as in all Hindu governments, are never put to death; but the punishments inflicted on them are abundantly severe. The most common is the cutting off their noses. Even those of considerable rank are tortured, by being smoked in a small chamber with the suffocating fumes of burning capsicum, and by having their private parts stuffed with this acrid substance.
There were two kinds of fines; Prayaschitta for the neglect of ceremonies, and those inflicted as punishments for crimes. The latter went to the Raja, and do so still. The former went to the Dharm’adhikar, or chancellor; but having been enormously multiplied since the Gorkha government, their amount is divided into eight shares, of which the Raja takes one, the collector (Gomashtash) one, the Dharm’adhikar one, and one goes to each of five families of Brahmans, named Pangre, Pantha, Arjal, Khanal, and Agnidanda. These families divide their shares equally among their members, who have multiplied exceedingly. Besides the fine, all delinquents in matters of ceremony are compelled to entertain a certain number of these five families; the two first fattening on the wicked of the country west from the Narayani; and the other three on those east from that river. The number to be fed is restricted by the sentence, and the criminal may select those to whom he gives the entertainment, in any manner he pleases, confining himself strictly to the families entitled to participate.
Colonel Kirkpatrick, when he visited the country, thought { 104} that the government, on the whole, afforded considerable protection to foreign merchants, rendering them in all cases as strict and prompt justice, as the imperfect nature of its general polity will admit. This, perhaps, is not saying much, as in the subsequent page he mentions, that the trade between Nepal and Thibet, the principal one in the country, is subject to very enormous, and at all times arbitrary exactions. In fact, all other branches of commerce, so far as I could judge, were in a state of decay, owing partly to these exactions, and partly to the recovery of debts being now very much neglected in the courts of justice, which seems to be one of the causes of the increase of trials by ordeal. A poor creditor, in general, has no resource against a powerful debtor, except sitting Dherna on him; and unless the creditor be a Brahman, he may sit long enough before he attract any notice.