Aashish Mishra

There might hardly be a man, woman or child in Kathmandu who has not at least heard of New Road. The beating heart of the capital’s nervous system, many of us also know that the road was constructed by Rana Prime Minister Juddha Shumsher after the earthquake of 1934. However, if we were to hear of a place named Pako Pukhudya, most of our minds would go blank. The name Pako sounds familiar and some of us familiar with Kathmandu might know of it as a place near New Road that has become more popularly known as Peepal Bot. But Pukhudya is almost unanimously unknown.
Well, Pukhudya is the old name of New Road. Or, perhaps more appropriately, New Road is what replaced Pukhudya – both from nomenclature and existence.
If one was walking around New Road before 1934, the only “road” they would have seen is a relatively wide stone-paved path from the popular tree (which today lies near the building of the Gorkhapatra Corporation) to the Ranamukteshwor Temple. To the left of this road were houses belonging to Manandhars and to the left was a pond. Indeed, the pond was not a huge spectacle in terms of size but it was also not something to dismiss. The area which is present-day New Road was the bank of this pond and was called Pukhudya (meaning ‘the pond’s bank’).
But all that changed when the ground shook on January 15, 1934. The mega quake that struck the country that day was a calamity for the citizens but a competition for the ruling Ranas. Each Rana was eager to show that they did something for the people. They took it as an opportunity to earn goodwill and build a base of support to challenge Juddha Shumsher and establish their supremacy. Of course, Juddha Shumsher knew this and thus, was doing everything possible to outshine his rivals.
One of the things he did for this was to build a new “modern, European-style” motorable road to enter the city from Tudikhel. The people who were displaced by this “new road” were told to reclaim land from the pond for their housing and that is what they did. The government also brought people displaced by the earthquake from other parts of the valley and resettled them there. Slowly, over the span of a few years, the pond vanished. Kathmandu’s New Road replaced its old Pukhudya, in reality and in the tongues of the people.
But Juddha Shumsher was not content with having the road stretch from Tudikhel to the Basantapur palace complex. He wanted to connect it to the busy Indra Chowk square too. So, he cut straight through, demolishing the structures that stood in his path. One of the structures he demolished was the Di: Pyakha Dabali; where the Devi Naach used to be staged every year during the Indra Jatra.
The road also covered the statue of Kanteshwor Mahadev which lies in front of the Akash Bhairav temple. Kanteshwor is where the city got its name Kantipur from. The locals were very dissatisfied and the authorities almost immediately uncovered the statue, clearing the road from around it. But this left a hole in the ground. The hole got deeper over the years and the road around keep rising up and today, the statue is almost unnoticeable to people not consciously looking for it.