Khas

The Khas are an Indo-Aryan hill people of the western Nepalese Himalayas, whose old Khasa tongue was the ancestor of Nepali. From the eleventh century the Khasa Malla kings held a kingdom centred on Sinja in the Karnali basin, reaching western Tibet as far as Guge and Purang under Prithvi Malla in the mid-fourteenth century.

Ripu Malla marked his 1312 pilgrimage to Lumbini on the Ashokan pillar; the kings' records used an early form of Nepali in Devanagari and mixed Buddhist and Hindu devotion. After Abhaya Malla's death the empire broke into the Baise and Chaubisi hill principalities, which absorbed Rajput immigrants from the plains.

The Khas kept their language and Shaivite Masto cult; when Gorkha absorbed the hill states, their speech spread to become the language of the unified Nepalese kingdom.