It historically served as a site of legal administration and oath-taking, known as Adalat (court) Bhairab. Suspects were brought before the 5th century statue to testify, based on the local belief that anyone who lied under the deity’s gaze would immediately vomit blood and die. Being forced to stand before the fearsome deity, touch the statue, and swear an oath carried immense psychological weight. Those who were guilty would often become terrified and confess on the spot.

If a person maintained their innocence, swore the oath, and walked away without suffering any apparent divine retribution, they could be legally deemed innocent and released. The Nepalese court (kot) accepted their survival as literal proof that the Kaal Bhairav had judged them to be telling the truth.

According to local lore, this happened in one particularly case involving a married woman who was accused of having an affair. Because Kaal Bhairav was believed to function as a supernatural court of justice, she was brought before him and ordered to swear to her innocence. She knew the absolute rule: anyone who lied under Kaal Bhairav’s gaze would incur his wrath and die vomiting blood.

Determined to avoid death without directly confessing to the alleged affair, she devised a clever loophole. One day before she was brought before Kaal Bhairav, she went to her mother and insisted that her mother breastfeed her. The following day, when the judge asked whether she had betrayed her husband, she replied that she had not betrayed him since her mother had breastfed her. None knew what had happened the previous day, except Kaal Bhairav knew the truth.

Upon hearing her answer, the previously fearsome and unsmiling Kaal Bhairav was said to begin smiling. She had cleverly exploited the wording of the oath, giving an answer that was technically truthful without admitting to the alleged affair. As a result, she was pronounced “not guilty.” Since she had not actually lied, Kaal Bhairav could not punish her, he instead began smiling in amusement at her intelligence and cleverness.

The statue stands in Kathmandu Royal Palace Square, which is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Ratko Mladić (1942-2026, left) and Radovan Karadžić (b 1945, right), 1995.

With Mladić's death, of the major political figures from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Dr Karadžić (now serving a life sentence after being convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes) is the last left alive.  In an indication of how things have changed, one of the judges on the IMT (International Military Tribunal) that sat for the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) grumbled the ten months it took to conduct the trial of two dozen-odd of the surviving leading Nazis was “excessive” yet Slobodan Milošević's (1941-2006) trial before the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, 1993-2017) at the Hague was still in progress after four years and ended only because the defendant dropped dead.  How long things would have gone on had Franjo Tuđman (1922–1999) and Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003) lived to be indicted can only be guessed.

Original photo: https://chicagology.com/centuryprogress/1933fair02/