Four Varna, Thirty-Six Jaat

What “four varna, thirty-six jaat” actually means

The phrase borrows its first half from the classical Hindu varna model — Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra — as it was historically mapped onto hill Hindu Nepali society: Brahmin priest-scholars, Kshatriya rulers and warriors, and so on down. The “thirty-six jaat” half is the older, vaguer part — a stock phrase for “many sub-groups” that predates any modern census and was never meant as an enumerable list. Treating it as one invites exactly the kind of false precision it was never built to support.

Source: National Population and Housing Census 2021, National Statistics Office, Government of Nepal.

Nepal's actual social landscape — Newar, Tharu, Magar, Tamang, Rai, Limbu, Gurung, dozens of Dalit occupational castes, Madhesi caste groups from the Tarai plains, and many more, alongside the Bahun, Chhetri and Thakuri groups covered below — is far more numerous and far less orderly than a “four-by-thirty-six” grid suggests. The idiom survives because it is a compact way of naming the varna framework itself, not because it was ever a complete registry.

The Khas-Arya formation: Bahun, Chhetri, Thakuri

The Khas were an Indo-Aryan hill people native to Nepal's far-western hills, part of the same language family that produced Khas Kura — also called Parbatiya, later Gorkhali — the language that became modern Nepali, now the country's official language and lingua franca. Khas society was not originally organized by the Hindu caste hierarchy. Over time, upper Khas families commissioned Brahmin priests to ritually initiate them into higher caste status, adopting Bahun (Brahmin) and Chhetri (Kshatriya) identities; families that could not afford this transition remained outside that hierarchy, some later folded into caste society as “Matwali” (liquor-drinking) Chhetri under the 1854 code described below. The Shah and Rana families who ruled Nepal from the 18th century into the 20th both drew their own identity from this same Chhetri/Thakuri stratum.

That concentration of identity tracked a concentration of state power. Rana-era land policy handed out birta — tax-exempt land grants — disproportionately to Bahun, Chhetri and Thakuri courtiers and officials, a pattern documented in Mahesh Chandra Regmi's land-tenure histories of 19th-century Nepal. The pattern persisted into the bureaucracy of the 20th century and is still measurable today (see the inclusion-debate section below). The modern Constitution of Nepal formally recognizes this cluster as a single electoral category, “Khas Arya,” covering Bahun, Chhetri, Thakuri and Sanyasi (Dashnami) citizens — a legal echo of the old Khas ethnonym, even though the word “Khas” itself has mostly fallen out of everyday use.

The 1854 Muluki Ain

On 6 January 1854, Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana promulgated the Muluki Ain, Nepal’s first written national legal code. Its stated purpose was administrative — Nepal had no uniform written law before it, and punishments for the same offense varied by region — but rather than reforming the existing caste order, it wrote that order into a single hierarchy applied across the whole kingdom for the first time, covering both Hindu caste groups and the many non-Hindu hill and Himalayan communities the state now ruled. The standard academic account of this hierarchy is Andras Höfer’s The Caste Hierarchy and the State in Nepal. Its broad tiers, from top to bottom:

This is described here as a documented historical structure, not endorsed as a defensible one. The caste provisions of the Muluki Ain were not repealed until the New Muluki Ain of 2020 BS (1963 CE), which removed caste as a legal category nationwide. Legal abolition did not end social practice on its own: Nepal legislated against caste discrimination again in 2011, with the Caste-Based Discrimination and Untouchability (Offence and Punishment) Act criminalizing untouchability directly.

The Janajati and Madhesi movements

Nepal's 1990 return to multiparty democracy opened space for groups classified under the old Matwali tiers to organize as Janajati (“indigenous nationalities”) — ethnic communities outside the Hindu caste hierarchy who together make up roughly a third of the population. The Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities, founded in 1991 as NEFEN and renamed NEFIN in 2003, became the movement's central umbrella body, eventually representing several dozen member organizations. Its demands included formal recognition as indigenous peoples, secularism, mother-tongue education, and proportional representation in the state.

A parallel movement grew in the Tarai plains, home to roughly half of Nepal's population but long under-represented in a state apparatus centered on the hill capital. Madhesi uprisings in 2007 and 2008 — led by Upendra Yadav's Madhesi Janadhikar Forum-Nepal and, in 2008, the broader United Democratic Madhesi Front — demanded federalism, proportional representation and citizenship reform, and were a direct force behind putting federal restructuring on the table during constitution drafting.

The constitution promulgated in 2015 responded to both movements only partially. It confirmed Nepal as a secular, federal democratic republic, restructured the country into seven provinces, and mandated proportional inclusion of Dalit, Adivasi Janajati, Khas Arya, Madhesi, Tharu, Muslim and “backward region” categories in state bodies on the basis of population, alongside a one-third women's quota in federal parliamentary representation. It also passed over the objection of a number of Madhesi-based parties, and its citizenship provisions in particular drew criticism — including from commentator C. K. Lal — for preserving descent-based tests that disadvantaged Madhesi families with cross-border ties. Protests over the new constitution coincided with a months-long blockade of the India-Nepal border in late 2015.

The inclusion debate today

Representation gaps of the kind these movements organized around are still measurable. Figures compiled in Nepali social-inclusion research put Bahun civil-service representation at roughly three times their population share, Bahun-Chhetri-Newar groups together holding around three-quarters of higher-education access against a Janajati share in the low twenties and a Dalit share under three percent, and Janajati (excluding Newar) representation in senior political and bureaucratic posts at around 7 percent despite being close to a third of the population. Exact survey years behind some of these figures were not confirmed during research for this page; treat them as illustrative of a well-documented pattern rather than a precise current snapshot. What to do about that pattern is genuinely contested, and this page attributes rather than adjudicates the dispute.

Named, on-the-record advocates for proportional inclusion were straightforward to source through NEFIN, Madhesi party platforms and published Nepali social-inclusion scholarship. Named, on-the-record critics were thinner in the English-language sources reachable while writing this page — the National Inclusion Commission report above is the one clearly sourced exception found so far, not a sign the gap is closed. The other skeptical positions are still presented in general, attributed-to-position form rather than tied to specific individual commentators. This section rests on thinner sourcing than the historical sections above it, and a human editor with direct access to Nepali-language commentary and current academic literature should review it before this page is treated as final.