[6] The Treaty of Sagauli (1816) ended a series of military clashes between the Nepalese and the forces of the British East India Company. Because the treaty deprived Nepal of some of its most fertile territories, many felt it to have been a humiliation. Bhimsen Thapa was the commander in chief of the Nepalese army, and therefore the most powerful man in Nepal, from 1804 until his assassination in 1837. For the Nepali belief that Nepal was cursed by a sati as she mounted her husband's funeral pyre, so that altruism would never be rewarded in Nepal, see Raj (1979, 29).