Blood Against the Snows

In the space of a single afternoon the beauty of the palace gardens was bloodied with the bodies of royalty. Crown Prince Diprendra committed matricide, patricide, fratricide and then suicide, ensuring that the country that looked to its king as if looking to its god would suffer not only socially at the loss but be cut to their souls with the death of their god.

Gregson's book Blood against the Snows: The Tragic Story of Nepal's Royal Dynasty (2002) is not an attempt to explain what took place on the dreadful night of June 2001, but a look at the sequence of events that led up to the matter. Knowing exactly what took place was consumed in the ashes of the dead Crown Prince's funeral pyre. Yet, to expose the growing shakiness of the Shah kingdom which had lost its functional power in recent decades, Gregson takes the reader back in time so he/she can see how the kingdom came to power over the centuries and how its king has been steeped in immortal legend and belief systems which elevate his status to pantheonic proportions, and how those godly proportions slowly became estranged from actual management in an expanding trade and economic developing world.

Gregson provides understanding to his readers on the profound loss and sense of disbelief and denial concerning what took place. The mountains, the deeply secluded places, are an age-old place of tradition for retreat and refuge, not a place for treachery and deceit. They are to be a place to safely harbor the king, a space for celestial enlightenment.

The king, in his elevated status on his elevated mountain, was/is still revered in traditional ways long forgotten elsewhere. In Nepal the King was a god, the father and protector of his people; therefore, killing the King was not just regicide, but deicide. Reverence and obedience to the King was the only life-choice to make and so killing him and his family was equivalent to destroying one's gods, one's belief system and therefore one's faith. A nation without faith is a nation without hope.

Jonathan Gregson explores the meaning of the Nepalese regent and his functional importance still in Nepal. With unrivaled contacts among the surviving courtiers and members of Nepal's royal family, Gregson was the only non-Nepalese writer to interview King Birendra in the subsequent decade since the regicide. Born in India, he is also the author of Kingdoms Beyond the Clouds and Bullet Up the Grand Trunk Road. He is a regular writer and broadcaster for BBC, Channel 4, the Sunday Telegraph, the Independent, among diverse others.