The Muluki Ain: Nepal's First Legal Code (1854)
The Muluki Ain of 1854
"Muluki Ain" literally means "law of the country" (मुलुक = country, ऐन = act/law). Promulgated in 1854 AD (1910 BS), it was Nepal's first comprehensive, written legal code — and it remained the backbone of the country's legal system for over a century.
Who created it
The code was drafted and promulgated at the initiative of Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana, following his return from a visit to Europe. For the first time, laws that had previously been scattered across custom and royal orders were collected into a single, systematic text.
What it covered
The Muluki Ain was remarkably wide-ranging for its time. A single code governed:
- The organisation of the state, courts and administration
- Criminal law — murder and other offences and their punishments
- Civil and family law — marriage, the joint family, and property
- Customary, religious and purity-related rules of the time
An honest look at its limits
The 1854 code also wrote the caste hierarchy into law. It prescribed different rights and punishments depending on a person's caste and gender. This made the law systematically unequal — a feature that later reforms would have to undo.
The Muluki Ain shows both sides of legal history: it was a landmark act of state-building and codification, and at the same time it entrenched discrimination that Nepal spent the next century working to remove.
