{"id":8793,"date":"2010-02-22T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/02\/22\/last-nepal-king-breaks-ancient-taboo\/"},"modified":"2010-02-22T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-22T12:00:00","slug":"last-nepal-king-breaks-ancient-taboo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/02\/22\/last-nepal-king-breaks-ancient-taboo\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Nepal King Breaks Ancient Taboo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/beta.thehindu.com\/life-and-style\/religion\/article103720.ece\">beta.thehindu.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>KATMANDU, NEPAL, February 9, 2010: Almost two years after he was stripped of his crown and became a commoner, Nepal&#8217;s deposed king Gyanendra hit the headlines Tuesday with reports that he had attended, for the first time in the history of Nepal&#8217;s Shah dynasty, a religious fair in a town till now considered out of bounds for his family.<\/p>\n<p>Escorted by bodyguards and aides, the 62-year-old ousted king drove himself to Panauti on Monday, a town 22 miles southeast of Kathmandu, to attend the Makar Mela, a Hindu fair held every 12 years. In the past, legend had it that Panauti was a forbidden area for the Shah kings of Nepal since it was the domain of Hindu god Narayan and the kings of Nepal were considered incarnations of the same god.<\/p>\n<p>The former king, breaking the taboo, said he was visiting the fair as a common citizen attending a religious event and not as a king. <\/p>\n<p>Nepal&#8217;s history is often closely woven with legends and curses. North of Kathmandu lies a colossal statue of Vishnu, another incarnation of Narayan, lying in a bed of serpents on a pool. The Budanilkantha temple is the only one in Nepal that was forbidden to the royal family of Nepal after a legend arose that the king would die if he ever gazed on the 15 feet high statue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: beta.thehindu.com KATMANDU, NEPAL, February 9, 2010: Almost two years after he was stripped of his crown and became a,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}