Mesocosm
a book written by Robert I. Levy with the collaboration of Kedar Raj Rajopadhdyaya
This book is also published by Mandala Book Point, Kathmandu, Page 828+XXII. Price NRs. 880.00 http://www.mandalabookpoint.com/main_details.php?sid=39&cat=
Source:
Preferred Citation: Levy, Robert I. Mesocosm: Hinduism and the Organization of a Traditional Newar City in Nepal. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6k4007rd/
 | MesocosmHinduism and the Organization of a Traditional Newar City in Nepal
Robert I. Levy
|
For Upendra Raj Radjopadhyaya and Nerys
Preferred Citation: Levy, Robert I. Mesocosm: Hinduism and the Organization of a Traditional Newar City in Nepal. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6k4007rd/
For Upendra Raj Radjopadhyaya and Nerys
― xxi ―
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The
many years of research and writing that resulted in this book required
the support of many people and institutions. I am grateful and relieved
to be able, at long last, to acknowledge them.
The
years of research in Nepal were supported by grants from the University
of California and the National Science Foundation. There were two
one-year periods when I was providentially freed from other
responsibilities and able to write at leisure. The first was made
possible by a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, supplemented by a grant
from the Social Science Research Council, and the second by a Fellowship
at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo
Alto, once again with supplementary support from the Social Science
Research Council. The Center for Advanced Study provides an incomparable
setting for intellectual stimulation and for getting work done. Its
Fellows are usually burdened for life with affectionate nostalgia and
gratitude, as am I.
Leslie Lindzey at the Center,
and Marian Payne at the University of California, San Diego, helped
enormously in various stages of preparing the manuscript. Cathy Hertz of
the University of California Press meticulously saved me from a
multitude of errors. The ones that remain are mostly a matter of my own
stubbornness. Susan Coerr carved an orderly index out of the tangled
materials of the book.
I had invaluable aid in
getting started on the study from Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, Leo
Rose, the late Bhuwan Lal Joshi, and Jaya Pratap Malla. In Nepal I
received much information and support from
― xxii ―
Abner
and Sylvia Hurwitz, Jacob and Patricia Crane, Gabriel Campbell, Lynn
Bennett, and the staff of the United States Educational Foundation. Many
departments of His Majesty's Government generously helped me with maps,
statistical information, and support of various kinds. In Bhaktapur the
great scholar Ramapati Raj Sarma gave me patient and invaluable help
with my many linguistic, historical, and interpretive problems. The very
many others in Bhaktapur who wish to remain anonymous helped as
informants, teachers, and scribes. In the United States Devi and Gautam
Vajracharya helped in the translation of masses of interview materials
and acted as living reference works during the years in which the book
was being written. Steven Parish had many useful comments to make on the
manuscript based on his own research in Bhaktapur. Roy D'Andrade helped
me through some of the more tangled patches of the material on kinship
terminology.
My indebtedness to the works of
contemporaries and predecessors in the study of the Kathmandu Valley is,
as the following chapters will show, enormous. Among these, I am
especially indebted to Niels Gutschow, whose many years of work in
Bhaktapur, whose maps— including the ones he has prepared for use in
this book, and whose frequent "personal communications" stimulated by
his careful reading of the manuscript inform and embellish the book.
The
introductory chapter tells something of what I owe to my collaborator,
Kedar Raj Rajopadhyaya. This book would have been something entirely
different and very much less without him.
And, finally, to the one without whom there would have been no book, and not much of anything else, my beloved wife, Nerys.
The
maps in the book were prepared by Niels Gutschow. He is also
responsible for the photograph used on the jacket and as a frontispiece.
Roy Porello prepared the color plates of the Nine Durga masks. The
other photographs are by Robert Levy.
In the
quotations used in the book we have generally altered the
transliteration of Nepali, Newari and Sanskrit terms to follow the
usages of the text.
― 55 ―
The Physical City
Bhaktapur
(see fig. 1) at the time of this study had not, at first sight, changed
very much in appearance from nineteenth-century descriptions and aside
from a general weathering and decay, probably not much from its
appearance at the end of the reign of the Malla kings. Built on the
sides and summit of a broad hill rising from the valley floor, the city
suddenly appears, clearly demarcated from the extensive farmlands around
it. The city is roughly elliptical, about one mile in length and about
one-half mile in breadth, with its long axis running from west to east
with a slight southwest-northeast rotation. A main road enters the city
from the west and meanders along the central axis running parallel to
the Hanumante River, which borders Bhaktapur to the south. This road
soon becomes the bazaar, a dense conglomeration of small shops that line
the street for much of its extent. At intervals the road widens out
into various public squares full of temples and shrines as is the case
in many Newar settlements. Its inhabitants think of Bhaktapur as
consisting of a lower city to the southwest and an upper city to the
northeast. The bazaar street has two prominent large squares, Ta:marhi
Square in the lower city and Dattatreya in the upper. The main axis is
intersected by a number of routes that have bridged the Hanumante and
entered the city from the south. It leads finally to a road leaving
Bhaktapur to the east, once an important route to Tibet.
To
the north of the central axis in the western part of the city is the
former Malla Royal center, the Durbar square or Laeku. At its northern
side is a prominent gateway covered with golden images of gods, the
entrance to a complex of courtyards, shrines, and sanctums—the temple of
Taleju, the tutelary goddess of the Malla kings. Adjoining the Taleju
temple is the large palace, formerly the seat of the Malla kings of
Bhaktapur, now administrative offices for a new polity. Around the
Durbar square are the tall, tile roofed houses of many of the
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, once closely associated with the court, as well
as houses of descendants of the old court aristocracy.
In
various parts of the city there are clearly differentiated
neighborhoods. There is the potters' quarter with its potting wheels,
its kilns and open spaces for the firing and sun-drying of pots; the
dyers' quarters with various brightly colored woolen yarns hanging to
dry near the dying vats; farmers' quarters with—depending on the
season—rice, wheat, corn, peppers, and other crops being threshed,
winnowed, dried. There are neighborhoods of Buddhists, mostly in the
northern parts of the
― 56 ―
city,
surrounding their old monasteries, now centers of Tantric, non-monastic
Buddhism. There are other neighborhoods not so clearly marked by
external contrasts, but clustered around a central square with its
temples or shrines. Toward the borders of the town are generally poorer
areas with lower, simpler houses. But among them there are groups of
taller, more elaborate houses, those of the butchers whose low status
places them toward the periphery of the city, but whose comparatively
high earnings have allowed them to build larger houses than their
neighbors. To the south of the city, in an area that is said to be
outside its boundaries, in squalid small houses, tightly grouped
together, live the untouchables.
Along the Hanumante River at a number of places are clusters of shrines and ghats
or steps leading down to the river. Here clothes are washed, and here
and there are ramps for dipping the feet of a dying man into the river
at his last breath. Along the Hanumante River, mostly on the far side,
are cremation grounds. There is another river, the Kasan, to the north
of Bhaktapur, which joins the Hanumante to the west of the city. This
northern river has little to do with the life of the town.[1]
Everywhere
there is a bustle of activity, of people coming and going, of
processions, of music, of business, of craftsmen working. Scattered here
and there are new buildings in modern styles, offices and houses for
officials, modern houses for some rich merchants, schools, a hospital, a
cinema.
And everywhere are dirt and foul smells,
the dust and wear of centuries, the feces of animals and children in the
streets, of adults in the fields and at the riverside. There are houses
cracked and fallen during the last of the series of earthquakes that
regularly trouble the Kathmandu Valley. The fields and streets are full
of scavenging emaciated dogs and of large carrion crows. Huge fruit bats
hang in some seasons in the trees, and on clear nights jackals howl in
the fields outside of the city and occasionally a predatory, hungry
leopard snatches off the infant of an unwary farmer in a field bordering
on the forest. All this is a reminder that Bhaktapur was and is still a
clearing in h yet more ancient world.
An Excursion. Caste, Class, And Varna[*]
If
we take any summary definition of a "caste system," such as Bouglé's
(as given in Dumont [1980, 21]), that a caste system is one that,
"divides [a] whole society into a large number of hereditary groups,
distinguished from one another and connected together by three
characteristics: separation in matters of marriage and contact . . . ; division
of labor, each group having, in theory or by tradition, a profession
from which their members can depart only within certain limits; and
finally hierarchy , which ranks the groups as relatively
superior or inferior to one another,"—does Bhaktapur have a caste
system? It has a hierarchical system of separated units (separated by
marriage and aspects of contact), and the system ensures and controls
most of the city's division of labor. It thus has a caste system by
these criteria.[5] The problem with such a definition is that real local groupings, that is, thar s and status levels, are not necessarily characterized by all three of Bouglé's condi-
― 74 ―
tions and the idea of "a caste" as a particular group in which all of Bouglé's criteria coexist is not generally useful, although it works for some groups, such as Brahmans and untouchables.
Some thar s resemble the units that are called jati in some other South Asian settings, while the macrostatus levels resemble more closely what David Mandlebaum has called "jati clusters."[6]Thar s are not always jatis in Mandlebaum's sense, however. In some clusters of thar s constituting a status level, the thar s may consider themselves equal and intermarry, and the cluster of thar s becomes in itself something like a jati
, although the cluster itself is not, usually, named. In other clusters
there is a disputed or agreed-upon internal hierarchy within the same
macro-status level, and thar members do not marry other thar s within the level but only within the thar . It is in this situation where the thar s are like jati , and the thar cluster like a "jati cluster."
By avoiding terms such as "caste," "subcaste," and "jati " and rather discussing the variety of relations of thar
s with occupation, marriage arrangements and macrosocial rankings,
however, one can present Bhaktapur's status system without forcing it
into a procrustean bed of generalizing analytic terms.
There is another kind of status designation superimposed on the system of macrostatus levels. Although many professions are thar -specific, there are some professions as there are elsewhere in South Asia that involve people from many thar s and more than one status level. The main ones in traditional Bhaktapur are farmers (jyapu ) and shopkeepers (sahu ).[7]
There are other groupings that have some unity of definition,
characteristics, or interests. There are craftsmen, priests, "unclean" thar
s, and in earlier times (but still vividly represented in various
symbolic enactments) the city's own royalty, court, and military.[8]
Such groups are associated directly with differentiations in power,
kinds of production, and differential control of resources and represent
something like a "class" stratification superimposed on "caste." In
recent years shifts in the economic and political system have caused the
beginning of a dissociation of the relative unifications of the
traditional system in which prestige, wealth, power, and purity were all
controlled and ranked to reflect a common order. There has been a
disruption of this unity for Bhaktapur, and a further disequilibrium
produced by people's awareness of their relative poverty and low living
standards in comparison to Newars and non-Newars elsewhere in
Nepal—particularly Kathmandu and the towns in the relatively wealthy
agri-
― 75 ―
cultural and industrial area along the southern border of Nepal, the Terai. Some people in Bhaktapur speak of "class," barga (from Nepali). Thus Brahmans and members of other upper status levels talk of themselves as "middle class," madhyambarga , when thinking of larger, modern Nepal and its modern upper class, the pujipatti , people of a wealth and power that has nothing to do with their traditional thar heritage.
The classical concept of varna[*] , the ideal ancient Vedic four-level hierarchy of Brahman, Ksatriya[*] , Vaisya[*]
, and Sudra, has as elsewhere in South Asia, a vague residual existence
in Bhaktapur. People occasionally speculate on the relation of the
macrostatus groups to these ancient classifications and occasionally
make use of them to add further metaphorical point to some status
distinction,[9] but the use of varna[*] is mostly an intellectual game, with no implications for Bhaktapur's society.
Who In Bhaktapur Is A Newar?
We
will be concerned in this volume with the social and symbolic
organization of the 99 percent of the city's population who are called
by others and by themselves Newars, and, for the most part, with the 92
percent of the city's population who call themselves not only Newars but
also Hindus.
The term "Newar" is used by those
people whom other groups in Nepal refer to as Newars in a complex way.
It is used in a general way by the "Newars" themselves to differentiate
themselves from various kinds of outsiders, usually lumped as "Khae (n)," the western Indo-Nepalese "invaders" on the one hand and the "Sae(n)
," or Mongoloid hill peoples of northern origin, the Sherpas, Tibetans,
Tamang, and so on, on the other. In Bhaktapur in reference to people
living in the city, the maximal use of "Newar" distinguishes those
groups who "follow Newar customs," from others living in the city, whom
we will introduce later in this chapter as "non-Newars." Some of those
non-Newar groups have lived in Bhaktapur since the time of the Newar
Kings (for example, the Jha and Bhatta[*]
Brahmans, and the Lingayat temple priests). These groups (and other
"outsider" groups) are not Newars because although they have various
functions in the city, they are not members of the central hierarchical
and symbolically integrated system. They have not, in contrast to so
many other groups over the centuries,
― 76 ―
become
incorporated into the "Newar" sociocultural synthesis. Such people are
simply omitted from the listings "Newars" make for themselves and for
inquiring outsiders of the members of Bhaktapur's "caste system." No one
including members of those outsider groups seems to have any hesitation
in saying that they are not Newars, in much the same way as tourists
and visiting anthropologists are not Newars.
The
usage of "Newar" is further differentiated internally within the "Newar
community" in certain contexts. Middle-status and upper-status people
will often use the term "Newar" to refer to the upper-status "ksatriya[*] " and merchant thar
s, those that were traditionally attached to the courts, in distinction
to the Brahmans above them and the Jyapu farmers and others below them.
The "Newar Brahmans," the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans (below), although, in
most contexts they consider themselves Newars, conform to this usage in
certain contexts, and refer to those upper-status groups who were their
traditional patrons in the Malla days as "Newars" in distinction to
themselves on the one hand and to the remaining mass of people—that is,
the farmers and all middle and lower groups—on the other. The very
lowest thar s, for example, the Po(n) and Jugi, will also in some contexts refer to all the Bhaktapur's "core" thar
s—including Rajopadhyaya Brahmans—above them as "Newars," and say that
they themselves are not Newars. This may be considered perhaps as a
rejection of the system in which they are disadvantaged and stigmatized,
but it also reflects a hesitation by others above them as to whether
they are in or out of the Newar society. They are, in fact, uniquely
both. The same low-status people will refer to themselves as "Newars" in
other contexts, where they are emphasizing their membership in the town
system. For those groups that have been integrated into the core
systems as "Newars" in the largest sense there seems to have been an
historical process, where a group coming from elsewhere slowly finds a
position in the system, perhaps functionally replacing or displacing
another group, and slowly becomes defined as Newar, with some hesitation
for decades or centuries among those people with long historical
memories. These usages and equivocations should not obscure the point
that there is a major difference between those who are essential role
players and carriers of symbolic meaning within Bhaktapur's mesocosmic
system—whatever play on the term "Newar" may be involved—and those,
whatever their economic and occasional ritual contributions to the city
may be, who are "non-Newars" because they are ignored by that system,
not defined in or
― 77 ―
given precise symbolic value by it except in perfunctory ways as one or another kind of foreigner.
The
vast majority of the Newars of Bhaktapur think of themselves—and define
themselves to the census takers—as Hindu, or more precisely as Siva margi (followers of the path of Siva) Newars, in contrast to Buddha margi
Newars. We will return later in this chapter to the fairly complex
question of what it means for a Newar to be a "Buddhist" rather than a
"Hindu," and the various ways that such Buddhists are related to
Bhaktapur's core macrostatus system.
The Macrostatus Levels: Newar Hindus, The Core System
In this and the following sections we will introduce all the thar
s in the core system that have in themselves a differentiated
macrosocial significance and the macrosocial levels into which these thar s are sorted. (In appendix 2 we list all of Bhaktapur's thar
s, placed in their respective status levels.) We will also introduce m
the following sections the Newar Buddhist groups and those non-Newar
groups that are stable components of the city's population and who live
within the city. We will return in much more detail to many of these thar
s and other social units in later chapters. They are brought together
here for a necessary overview of the city's social structure before we
lose ourselves in the details and special issues of later discussions.
As we have noted, the list of thar
names comes from Bhaktapur civic population records and is presumably
complete. Their ranking in status levels is something else. Ranking is
in the conception of individual rankers, among whom Brahmans—who
represent and legislate the order that the "caste system"
represents—have a privileged position. As seems to be true everywhere in
complex South Asian social hierarchies, the Brahmans (and other
upper-status people) are certain about the upper and lower ordering, but
not sure of the details of the position of every one of the great
number of middle—that is, for the most part farming—thar s, which
are arranged in several middle-level strata. There are two bases for
disagreements. One is the relative ranking of status levels—for example,
are butchers higher or lower than some neighboring level? The other is
the membership of a particular thar at one or another level.
Ordering of status levels may be argued about by people in adjacent
levels, but in these cases we accept the certainties of
― 78 ―
upper-status
people. We have rechecked membership in the middle-ranking levels with
people of similar status, however, and accepted their disagreements as
more "correct" than the Brahmans' disinterested guesses about such
cases. There is still some uncertainty in our lists about the membership
of some thar s in the farming ranks.
The
view of the upper reaches of the system by low-status people is
significant in ways that we will discuss later. Thus members of
lower-level thar s consistently give certain of the upper-status thar s with priestly functions, such as astrologers and Tantric priests, higher status than they are given by their near peers. Members of lower-level thar s also tended to simplify and collapse some of the status levels.
Middle-level and upper-level thar
s appear to agree exactly on the number and ranking of levels, however,
and to a very large degree on the membership of each level. In Malla
days the thar s were assigned to their proper levels in written
documents setting out privileges, restrictions, and sanctions, as we
have noted in our discussion of Jayasthiti Malla in chapter 3. The many
legalistic written orderings of the status system in Bhaktapur helped
stabilize and force agreement on status ordering,[10] more so than in other South Asian communities where the order is not so anchored.[11]
We
will list the macrostatus levels (numbered by roman numerals) from the
top down. In later sections we will discuss the "entailments and
markers," that is, the significance of the levels. We will note some of
the internal differentiations within the levels when they have some
general significance elsewhere in the city organization.
I. Brahmans. These are all members of one endogamous thar ,[12] the Rajopadhyaya thar
. They are sometimes referred to as "Dya: ("God") Brahmans" or "Newar
Brahmans" in those contexts where it is necessary to distinguish them
from other, "non-Newar," Brahmans in Bhaktapur itself, or from the
Indo-Nepalese Brahmans of elsewhere in Nepal. There is also a lower,
separate, nonintermarrying section consisting of three or four families,
the "Lakhe Brahmans,"[13] with their own
traditional low-status clients. We will discuss the Brahmans, along with
Bhaktapur's other priestly practitioners, in chapter 10.
"Brahman"—or one of the Newari variants of the word—refers in Bhaktapur's usage to both the status level and the thar , which is (ignoring the Lakhe, as is usually done) its only member. This is characteristic of all levels with only one member thar . A problem in naming arises for
― 79 ―
levels that contain more than one thar
. Most of these levels are, in fact, not named, although they are
clearly understood. They may be referred to, if necessary, sometimes by
the name of one of their leading thar s, sometimes by some
characteristic of the level that is relevant to the context of the
discussion. The next two status levels (II and III) contain groups of thar s and do have names; these are the Chathar and Pa(n)cthar levels.
In the literature on the Newar social and economic system these two groups are collectively referred to as srestha[*] or sesya :.[14] These two terms are not used in Bhaktapur, where they are thought of as Kathmandu usages. The two groups of thar s are sometimes referred to as "Newars" (by themselves, by Brahmans, and by Jyapu s), and sometimes, particularly by the lower levels emphasizing their most visible economic function, as sahu or shopkeepers. Occasionally the lower thar s (who tend to separate out the two thar s with religious vocations in these two levels and to ascribe higher status to them) refer to the remaining secular thar s as girastha . That term, used in both Nepali and Newari, is derived from the Sanskrit term "grhastha[*]
," "householder," one of the traditional stages of life of classical
Hinduism, upper-status people who had not yet renounced the life of the
household.[15]
These two groups of thar s were traditionally the patron thar s who employed the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans as purohit
s or family priests. They include the descendants of the Malla kings
and the families of their advisors and administrators and also of the
suppliers of various commodities required by the old court. All these
families were traditionally landowners (with Jyapus as tenants before
the land reforms), and many had members who worked as government
functionaries, sometimes at high Royal Palace levels in Kathmandu during
the Saha and Rana periods. These families now include most of
Bhaktapur's shop owners and shopkeepers and people in various trading
and business enterprises and provide many of the present-day members of
the government bureaucracy in Kathmandu (to which they commute each day)
as well as schoolteachers and other learned professionals. The two
groups also include within them two thars with religious
functions, astrologers, Josi (found at each of the two levels) and
Tantric priests, Acaju, at the Pa(n)cthar level.
There are important contrasts between the two groups. Upper-level informants say that the term "Srestha[*] " used elsewhere would properly apply only to the Chathariya.[16] The Chathariya are thought to be "Ksatriya[*] " in origin; the Pa[n]cthariya are thought to be "Vaisya[*] "[17]
― 80 ―
and to have close connections in religious practices and origins with the farming thar s.
II. Chathar. The general term "chathar " for the group that now includes thirty-one thar s means the "six thar
s," and is of unknown origin to present informants. The group includes,
as has been noted, descendants of the Malla kings and families closely
involved with the Malla court as officials and to some limited extent as
Royal provisioners and is said to be of Ksatriya[*] origin. One segment of the Josi or astrologers, are also included.[18] There are also several thar
s who are said originally to have belonged to level III—Pa(n)cthar—but
who rose into the Chathar category at various times after the fall of
the Mallas.
III. Pa(n)cthar. This is a group of thirty-five thar s that seems to have had as a core group a set of thar
s that provided services and provisions to the Malla courts. They
include one important group of auxiliary priests, the Acajus, who
specialize in Tantric procedures (chaps. 10 and 11). They also include a
thar , Josi, whose specialty was astrology, which is also (and mostly) represented in the Chathar, and a thar
whose name (Baidhya) indicates that its members were, traditionally,
Ayurvedic physicians. Within the Pa(n)cthar level there are thirteen thar s (called the "Carthar," the "four thar
s") who claim to be at a higher level within the Pa(n)cthar group, and
there is some restriction of marriage between these two internal levels.
As we have noted, upper-status informants say that the Pa(n)cthar is of
Vaisya[*] origin, and that their religious
customs are closer to those of the Jyapus than to those of the Chathar.
This suggests a different origin for levels II and III. The Pa(n)cthar
may have been derived in part from some earlier upper stratum of Newar
society, while the Chathar may have shared with the Malla kings a more
recent North Indian origin.
Brahmans, Chathariya,
and Pa[n]cthariya are considered together, in some contexts, as the
dominant high "castes" or levels of Bhaktapur society. The next large
status-level cluster below them are the Jyapus or farmers. Between the
high-status groups and the groups of farmers is another level, the Tini.
This is one of several groups of priestly specialists scattered
throughout the status hierarchy (chap. 11).
IV. Tini. This level consists of one thar , with the thar name Sivacarya, whose members have special priestly functions during the ritual
― 81 ―
sequence
following death for middle-level and higher-level groups. They are also
auxiliary priests in an important rite of passage for girls, the
mock-marriage or Ihi (app. 6). The Tini also serve as family priests, purohita , for one of the marginally clean thar s at level XIII, the Bha.
Male members of groups I to IV and of one anomalous thar
of priests, the Jyapu Acaju, situated in the highest segment of
farmers, have the exclusive right to wear the sacred thread upon
initiation into their thar s, and, of very much greater
importance in Bhaktapur's religious life, exclusive rights to Tantric
initiation. Their families have special lineage gods, Aga(n) Gods. These
rights place them in a special aristocratic sector of the city's Hindu
religious life (chap. 9).
The next seven sections (levels V to XI) include the four separate levels of Jyapu or farming thar s (levels V, VIII, IX, and XI).[19] Mixed with the farming thar s, sometimes at the same status level, sometimes at separate levels, are a number of "clean" craft thar
s. These Jyapu and craft levels constitute the middle range of the
ranked macrostatus system. The group as a whole are often referred to
collectively as "Jyapu," although the term may be used in more
restricted ways.[20]
V. Jyapu (level 1) . A group of seventy-four farming thar s.
VI. Tama . This level has only one thar , with the thar
name "Tamrakar." These are metalworkers in brass and bronze, makers of
metal dishes, pots, small bells, and cast-metal god images and other
equipment for rituals. As is the case with all thar s in the levels V to XII, some individuals also farm.
VII. Kumha: and Awa :. This section contains two thar s who are considered at the same level and who intermarry. They are the Kumha: or hereditary potters (whose thar name is Prajapati), and the Awa: or Awal, whose hereditary profession is masonry and tile roofing.
VIII. Jyapu (level 2) . This is a group of about 146 mostly farming thar s, but includes two thar s with occupational specialties who intermarry with other thar s at this level. One of the occupational groups is Kami (thar
name Silpakar) who were traditionally wood carvers, one of the Newar
high arts and now make furniture and do woodwork in the construction and
repair of houses. The other is Loha(n)kami, or stone carvers.
― 82 ―
IX. Jyapu (level 3) . This is a group of fourteen intermarrying farming thar s.
X. Chipi . This is a group of about six thar s, one of which uses the high-status name "Srestha[*] ." They are shopkeepers, in government service, and farmers.[21] There are two other thar
s considered to be at the same level that are not usually included with
the Chipi, and who form a separate section at this level.
XI. Cyo (or Cya) . A farming thar , with the thar name Phusikawa[n], which has some ritual functions during the death ceremonies of upper-level thar s.
XII. Dwi(n) . This level has one thar , Dwi(n). They farm and operate small shops and foodstalls. Their low status is now manifested in a thar duty to clean the courtyard of the Taleju temple.[22]
Levels
I to XII are those levels that are, in ways that will be specified
later, "clean" levels. Although all the hierarchical differences between
status levels are associated with relative differences in purity,
manifested focally in regulations regarding the consumption of boiled
rice, starting with level XIII, which we call the "borderline clean thar
s," another issue, that of classes and degrees of "absolute impurity,"
associated with increasingly extensive avoidances and prohibitions,
becomes salient. These groups can be designated not only as "less clean"
than some other but also, in one or another degree and sense, as
"unclean." Starting with this level whose "uncleanliness" is the concern
of only Brahmans and the most orthodox individuals—that is, those who
attempt to mimic Brahmans' ways of life—in the upper-status thar
s, each successively lower level is progressively more contaminating, in
relation to the extent of the upper levels who are vulnerable to them,
to the conditions under which they become polluting, and to the
"quantities" of pollution that they can transmit.
XIII. The borderline-clean thar s. This group contains ten (or in some listings eleven) thar s who perform personal services or who engage in crafts or in "ritual"[23] activities that render them contaminating to high-status people. The thar s at this level do not intermarry or interdine together. Each group tends to marry members of the same thar in
― 83 ―
other Valley towns. Each thar within the level tends to consider itself higher than the other thar
s in the group. For Brahmans and for many or most individuals in the
upper three or four levels, water touched by members at this level (and
below) was considered polluting. in the last twenty or so years for less
strict individuals in these upper levels, water-unacceptability has
begun at level XV, the Jugi.
Many of the families and individuals in these thar
s now make their living primarily from farming, small shops and
business enterprises, and government jobs, but we will list the
traditionally thar -ascribed occupations still practiced by some
or many individuals in each group. Gatha are performers of the major
ritual dance cycle, the Nine Durgas cycle, during which they incarnate a
particular set of deities (see chap. 15). They are also growers of
flowers for religious use. Bha perform actions in the course of
upper-status death ceremonies to help assure a human form for the spirit
of the dead person (chap. 10, app. 6). Kata: women cut umbilical cords
and dispose of placentas following birth. Cala(n) lead funeral
processions to clear the route and prevent inauspicious cross traffic at
crossroads. Kusa: are litter or palanquin bearers. Nau are barbers, who
do both cosmetic shaving and haircuts and are essential for major
"ritual" purification (chaps. 10 and 11). Kau are ironworkers and
blacksmiths. Pu(n) are painters of religious objects and makers of masks
used in religious ceremonies. Sa:mi are pressers of mustard seed for
the production of a commonly used kind of oil.[24] Chipa are dyers of cloth. A few remaining families m a thar called "Pasi" are now considered to be at this level. Some members of the Pasi thar
traditionally had the duty on the tenth day following a death to wash
contaminated clothes worn during the ten-day mourning period by the
chief mourner in upper-status thar s (app. 6). This thar probably once had a considerably lower status.[25]
We
call this group (level XIII) "borderline unclean" in that there is now
an optional response to them by higher-status people as
water-unacceptable and they are not considered by middle-ranked groups
to be unclean. Their marginality is reflected in their treatment in
previous descriptions and records of Newar status levels.[26] In contrast to the groups still lower than they are, they participate along with the clean thar s in one of the most significantly Newar rites of passage, the mock-marriage, or Ihi (app. 6).
Starting with the next group, the Nae, we enter the clearly contaminating segments of the status system.
― 84 ―
XIV. Nae . There is one thar at this level, the Nae, who use various thar names. These are hereditary butchers who slaughter water buffaloes and sell their meat.[27]
Below
this level there are some five or six (depending on whether the
Halahulu are to be considered as a "macrostatus level") of the city's
lowest ranks. Only two of these, Jugi and Po(n), now have more than a
very few members, but those two are of major significance in the status
system in both the services they perform and their use in giving
intellectual representation and emotional significance to the low end of
the status system (chaps. 10 and 11).
XV. Jugi . Members of this group use three thar names, Darsandhari[*] , Kapali, and Kusle. There is another thar , Danya, which is ranked with the Jugis by others, but that the Jugis and the Danyas themselves consider an inferior thar
, performing pollution-accumulating services for the Jugis in the
Jugis' death ceremonies. The Jugis are musicians, hereditary performers
on the mwali , a double-reed instrument, and also on certain
kinds of drums (Hoerburger 1975, 71-74). They have important functions
during the course of death ceremonies (chap. 10, app. 6).
XVI. Do(n) . Members of this thar play a kind of trumpet, used during funeral processions of high-status people.[28]
XVII. Kulu . The members of this thar were traditionally drummakers, whose use of animal skins for drum heads accounted for their low status.
The
next levels are the true "untouchables," whose functions and prescribed
way of life follows traditional South Asian patterns. For Bhaktapur the
focal and most clearly defined untouchables are the Po(n)s. The other
two categories are ambiguous.
XVIII. Po(n) or Pore .[29] The members of this level are one thar , whose thar name is Matangi[*]
. These are sweepers, cleaners of latrines, fishermen, and makers of
certain kinds of baskets. They have important "ritual" functions as
accumulators of pollution (in relation to death and more generally) and
of "bad luck" (chaps. 10, 11). They must live just
― 85 ―
outside the city boundaries, and thus help define those boundaries and the meaning of city space (chap. 7).
XIX. Cyamakhala
:. The Po(n)'s function as transporters of fecal material may have been
one of the occupations ascribed in earlier periods to a still lower thar
, the Cyamakhala:. Nineteenth-century accounts give the traditional
occupations of the Po(n)s such as fishermen, executioners, dog killers,
and basket-makers (Oldfield [1880] 1974; Hamilton [1819] 1971; Earle
1901 [cited in Chattopadhyay 1923]; Hodgson n.d.), but specify that they
will not remove "night soil" which is said to be the function of the
still lower Cyamakhala: (Chattopadhyay 1923, 546, 558). One account
(Hamilton) described the Cyamakhala: as "dressers of leather" and
"shoemakers," which is what the Sanskrit origin of the name (Manandhar
1975, 123) means. There is one household in Bhaktapur that is still
designated as Cyamakhala:. Some of its members have subordinate "ritual"
relations to the Po(n)s, accepting polluting offerings during death
rituals.
XXI. Halahulu . This is a
miscellaneous category of true outcastes—drifters and beggars, Newars,
and others, who have been excluded from the status system for one reason
or another, but are sometimes listed as a lowest social category. There
were none in Bhaktapur at the time of this study, but they were said to
exist in Kathmandu.[30] They are inferior to
the Po(n)s (as well as the Cyamakhalas:) and, it is said, sometimes
perform polluting ritual functions for them.
.
― 89 ―
Thar, Macrostatus, and the Organization of Occupational and Ritual Roles
The organization of thar
s into macrolevels sorts out their members into the hierarchical
system, and in so doing organizes by level (and by larger groupings of
macrolevels) much of their members' economic activity and standard of
living. The levels they belong to determine whether they can be served
by Brahmans, or by other priests, or—if they are sufficiently low—only
by ad hoc priests in their own thar s. It is the levels
that entail the organizing implications of the Hindu hierarchical
system—purity; patterns of association, commensality, and marriage; and
relative public esteem—to which we will return later in this chapter and
in chapter 11. The relationship between status level and occupation is
obscured by those status levels that include only one thar . When there is more than one thar in a status level, it is evident that levels join together occupational type
s, not specific occupations. They sort such categories as court
officials, shopkeepers, farmers, craftsmen, and providers of essential
symbolic-ritual services that are demeaning to those who do them.
Individual thar s may specify narrowly defined professions within these larger groupings. In those cases where there is only one thar
at a particular level, this is simply a special case where occupation
and status level coalesce so that the classical definition of a "caste"
is approximated, but it is a special case of considerable interest. In
some cases such as Tini and Tama: this exclusive convergence seems to be
an historical residue of some problem in categorization. However, most
of the examples of such "castes" are thar s that are essential
not only for their specific vocation but also for the very definition,
constitution, and maintenance of the symbolic component of the
hierarchical system; Brahman, Nae, Jugi, and Po(n) are evident examples.
It is also of interest that the isolation of thar s into
discrete status levels as "castes" is represented at the top of the
system with the Brahmans only (the king is traditionally included with
various Ksatriya[*]thar s) but pervasively throughout the "unclean" thar
s from level XIV down, each of whom is ranked at its own discrete
level. This is one of many suggestions that Brahmans and the unclean thar s are joined closely in the same enterprise.
In contrast to the effects of all thar s on occupation because of their placement in a particular status level, and the resulting assignment of its
― 90 ―
Figure 3.
A member of the Kumha: (potter) thar making pots on his wheel.
A member of the Kumha: (potter) thar making pots on his wheel.
― 91 ―
Figure 4.
Awa:s (masons) and Ka:mis (carpenters) building a house.
Awa:s (masons) and Ka:mis (carpenters) building a house.
― 92 ―
Figure 5.
Young wives chatting while collecting water at a communal tap.
Young wives chatting while collecting water at a communal tap.
― 93 ―
members to some general class of activities (e.g., farming or shopkeeping), there are about forty-five thar
s whose membership at present specifies for its members either a
particular and exclusive hereditary trade and/or some hereditary
"ritual" function, that is, a function in the marked symbolic realm of
the city. There are various combinations of occupational and ritual
functions. Some thar s have ritual functions that reflect their
occupational functions (e.g., potters and carpenters). There are some
groups whose hereditary occupational functions have disappeared but who
may still have ritual responsibilities deriving from and faintly echoing
those functions. There are groups with occupational specialties (e.g.,
Ayurvedic physicians) and no ritual functions. There are groups whose
occupation is a ritual occupation, that is, entirely within the realm of
marked symbolism (e.g., priests). Among these various groups there are
some thar s whose ritual or occupational function accounts for
most of the livelihood of most of the adult male members of the group
(e.g., Brahmans, sweepers). In contrast, there are other thar s for whom the ascribed occupational or ritual function, while it is limited to the thar
and tends to explain or justify its status in the overall system, may
actually be performed by only a few of its members, selected in some way
by the thar , and sometimes involving only a small segment of
the selected member's time and economic activity. Such variety, which,
furthermore, has shifted during the course of Bhaktapur's history, makes
the question as to how thar membership determines differentiated ritual and occupational behaviors of its members very complex.
For the purposes of the city's organization, we may emphasize again that it is the output of the thar
that is essential, not its internal affairs and organization—as long as
those internal features guarantee that output. The important thing for
the city as a whole is that sufficient numbers of the members perform
their essential functions within the traditional system, and that their other economic functions and social behaviors do not appear dissonant with the status of the thar . The city is, in fact, differentially exigent and severe in its pressures on different thar
s to maintain their traditional functions. This is for both material
and "symbolic" motives. The city can now do without local drum makers if
necessary, but for many reasons it cannot do without the economic
and/or symbolic functions of, say, Brahmans, potters, and sweepers. The
symbolic practitioners, in fact, must be locally in place. One
can import pots from another town, but such actors as Brahmans and
sweepers are essential constituting components of
― 94 ―
the city system, and must be in place for the traditional system of city action to work at all.
In order to sketch the relation of thar s to differentiated urban roles, we will use an ad hoc sorting that, however, reflects some important contrasts in the implications of thar -assigned roles. In listing these specialized thar
s we will briefly gloss their special functions that have been given
already above, many of which will be discussed elsewhere in the book.
The roman numerals following the thar names indicate the status level. Recall that occasionally the same thar name may occur at more than one status level.
1.
Priests, auxiliary priests and "para-priests" (see chap. 10).
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans (level I), Lakhe Brahmans (level I, lower section)
(priests), Josi (level II) (astrologers), Acaju (level III) (auxiliary
priests, with Tantric specialties), Josi (level III) (astrologers), Tini
(level IV) (priests), and Acaju (level IV) (auxiliary priests, with
Tantric specialties).
2. Thar s who are
allied to group 1, the priests, in that their traditional roles,
services, products, and behaviors are expressive of and constituent of a
special component of the city's symbolic order, which is associated
with purity and impurity, "ordinary" deities, and "priestly morality."
We will delineate this component in later chapters, and contrast it with
other aspects of symbolic order and of power. In contrast to the
priests, the functions of these thar s are overtly stigmatizing or at least associated with a depressed status:[37] Cyo (level XI) (purifying services during the cremation phase of the death ritual cycle of upper-level thar
s), Gatha (level XIII) (flower growers, deity-possessed performers as
the "Nine Durgas"), Kata (level XIII) (cut umbilical cords and remove
and dispose of placentas), Nau (level XIII) (barbers, purifyers), Pu(n)
(level XIII) (painters of religious images and mask makers), Bha (level
XIII) (death ritual services for upper-status thar s); Cala(n)
(level XIII) (services in funeral processions of upper-status people),
Khusa (level XIII) (esoteric services for one of the Tantric deities
during the Mohani festival cycle), Sa:mi (level XIII) (oil pressers,
special functions in the Biska: festival cycle), Nae (level XIV)
(butchers, kill animals in some sacrifices in major temples), Jugi
(level XVI) (tailors; performers on drums, trumpets, and shawms;
important roles in the cycle of death ceremonies and other
pollution-accumulating tasks), and Po(n)
― 95 ―
(level
XVIII) (sweepers, fishermen, basket makers; various important pollution
representing and pollution accumulating functions).
3.
Stigmatizing, occupational specialties with no marked symbolic
functions. These are craftsmen whose craft has a traditional
status-depressing implication, but who, in contrast to the other thar
s listed in group 2, do not have (in the present at least)
corresponding additional symbolic functions: Kau (level XIII)
(blacksmiths, workers in iron), Chipa (level XIII) (dyers of cloth), and
Do(n) (level XVI) (players of trumpets).
4.
Nonstigmatizing occupational specialties: Baidhya (level II) (Ayurvedic
physicians), Baidhya (level III) (Ayurvedic physicians), Tama: (level
VI) (caster of metal pots, plates, and icons), Kumha: (level VII)
(potters), Awa: (level VII) (house builders), Kami (level VIII) (wood
carvers, carpenters), and Loha(n) kami (level VIII) (stone carvers). (In
this group some families of Tama: and Kumha: have some ritual functions
in some rites of passage.)
5. Thar s
including members who have ritual or ceremonial functions in Bhaktapur's
focal festivals (chaps. 12 to 16) and/or in association with the Taleju
temple. This represents the "symbolic reconstruction" of the old
society centering on the Malla court and the temple of its tutelary
deity Taleju: from level II (above), Malla, Pradhana(n)ga, Hada, Bhau,
Tacabhari, Muna(n)karmi, Bhari, and Go(n)ga; from level III, Madikami
and Bhari; from level V, Suwal; from level VIII, Kalu, Caguthi, Muguthi,
Haleyojosi, and Jatadhari; and from level XII, Dwi(n). (Among thar
s included in other lists, those with additional special Taleju ritual
and/or ceremonial functions include Josi [II], Acaju [III], Tama:,
Kumha:, Gatha, Khusa, Pu(n), Jugi, Nae, and Po[n].)
6.
We can add to this list those groups outside the Newar Hindu core group
who have essential occupational or ritual functions. We noted
previously some of the occupational specialities of these groups
(shoemakers, knife sharpeners, washermen, etc.). Only two groups outside
of the core group have ritual-symbolic functions for the core system.
The Bhatta[*] Brahmans have a very limited (but theoretically interesting) function for one upper-status thar (chap. 10). The Bare Buddhist thar
provides the children who become the "living goddess" Kumari and her
attendant gods and goddesses during the major ceremonial cycle, Mohani
(chap. 1.5).
There are, thus, some forty-five thar s in the core system, about 13
― 96 ―
percent of the city's approximately 340 thar
s, whose membership in itself (rather than through its status level)
entails ritual and/or occupational specialties. For the city as a whole,
seventeen of these thar s, particularly the upper-status ones,
whose ritual activities are confined to the Taleju temple, are of minor
differentiated importance. So it is, finally, some twenty-eight thar s, about 8 percent of the whole, whose members have major
specializations—against the more diffuse background of farmers and
merchants and craftsmen and specialists in being impure, which is
organized by the larger macrostatus system. In addition to the total
number of specialized thar s we need to consider their relative size and the number of households and individuals that they contain. Their combined size is, as we shall see, a larger percentage of the city's population than their numbers alone would indicate.
Thar And Macrostatus Demography
In an attempt to get some rough idea of the numbers of families and individuals in the various thar s and status units, we asked various informants for estimations of numbers of households in various thar s. Subsequently Gutschow and Kölver (1975), using an early version of our macrostatus and thar lists, gathered survey data on the numbers of households in many of the units.[38]
The total number of households located by Gutschow and Kölver was
5,216. Assuming that the 1971 census report of 6,484 households is
accurate, this sample is incomplete, but not biased in any evident way.
Certain thar s are clumped in their report—for instance, some
groups of Chathariya and the large groups of Jyapus. Their materials
(with four additions from our informants' estimations), however, give a
basis for estimating rather closely the number of households
incorporated in various segments of the system. The previous section
listed the number of thar s that had various kinds of differential significance. As some thar s contain only two or three households while others may contain hundreds, however, a composite listing of thar s and the number of thar s at each level gives us limited demographic information. The number of discrete specialized thar
s is of a different kind of significance for the structure and
organization of the city than the quantitative extent of their various
memberships.[39]
Table 1, modified from Gutschow and Kölver (1975), gives what is probably a close approximation of thar and status level demography.
Table 1 shows that out of a total of 6,450[40] households all but some
― 97 ―
Table 1.
NUMBER OF HOUSEHOLDS IN BHAKTAPUR CLASSIFIED BY MACROSTATUS LEVEL | ||
Level
|
Household
|
Number
|
I
|
Brahman
|
32
|
II
|
Chathar
|
677
|
III
|
Pa(n)cthar
|
247
|
IV
|
Tini
|
2
|
V
|
Jyapu
|
1,867
|
VI
|
Tama:
|
19
|
VII
|
Kumha:
|
419
|
Awa:
|
99
| |
VIII, IX
|
Combined, Jyapu thar s
|
1,420 (total)
|
X
|
Chipi
|
466
|
XI
|
Cya
|
5
|
XII
|
Dwi(n)
|
1
|
XIII
|
"Borderline clean thar s"
|
437 (total)
|
Gatha
|
56
| |
Bha
|
19
| |
Kata:
|
2
| |
Cala(n)
|
16
| |
Khusa
|
1
| |
Nau
|
46
| |
Kau
|
27
| |
Pu(n)
|
25
| |
Sa:mi
|
160
| |
Chipa
|
82
| |
Pasi
|
3
| |
XIV
|
Nae
|
177
|
XV
|
Jugi
|
57
|
XVI
|
Do(n)
|
4
|
XVII
|
Kulu
|
1
|
XVIII
|
Po(n)
|
90
|
XIX
|
Halahulu
|
1
|
Non-Newar Hindu households
| ||
1
|
Sakya Buddhists
|
260
|
2
|
Misra and Bhatta[*] Brahmans
|
26
|
3
|
Matha[*] priests
|
6
|
4
|
Gaine
|
7
|
5
|
Sarki
|
6
|
7
|
Mushm
|
3
|
8
|
Dhobi
|
2
|
9
|
Other ethnic groups (Tamang and Indo-Nepalese)
|
129
|
― 98 ―
eighty
are "Newar." Of the Newars, approximately 6,110 households are in the
Hindu core system, while 260 households are Buddhist Bare households,
which are not directly involved in the core system. For the broader
hierarchical and functional divisions of the core system, 32 households
are Brahman; 924 households are at the "sahu" levels; 4,389 households
are in the several Jyapu farming groups; and 765 households are engaged
in services, crafts, and professions that are considered in some way to
be polluting. Of these polluting households 435 have a borderline
status, and 330 are unequivocally polluting.
By adding other available information on the number of households in particular thar s within the status levels amalgamated in Table 1, we can suggest the number of households within those thar
s that have differentiated functions. Arranged in the grouping we used
in the previous section, the number of households are as follows:
1.
Priests, auxiliary priests, and para-priests. Total of 333 households:
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans (32), Josi level II (44), Acaju level Ill (85),
Josi level III (120), Tini (2), Acaju level IV (50).
2. Thar
s engaging in stigmatized ritual-symbolic activities. Total of 649
households: Gatha (56), Katha (2), Nau (46), Pu(n) (25), Bha (19),
Cala(n) (16), Khusa (1), Sa:mi (160), Nae (177), Jugi (57), Po(n) (90).
3. Stigmatizing, nonritual occupational specialties. Total of 113 households: Kau (27), Chipa (82), Do(n) (4).
4.
Nonstigmatizing occupational specialities. Total of 844 households:
Baidya level II (3), Baidya level III (8), Tama: (18), Kumha: (508),
Awa: (99), Kami (194), Loha(n)kami (14).
5. Thar
s, some of whose members have ritual or ceremonial functions in
Bhaktapur's focal festivals and/or in association with the Taleju
temple. The total number of households in the seventeen thar s with such functions is about 650.
The number of households in the forty-five specialized thar s, is on the average far more than those in the nonspecialized thar s. When we listed all the thar s in the city with a specialized function, they represented about 13 percent of all the city's thar s, among which twenty-eight, or 8 percent of all the city's thar
s, had major differentiating importance. In terms of the number of
households, however, there are some 2,589, or 40 percent of the city's
households that are in thar s having some differentiated importance to the city, and about 29.5 percent of the households in thar s having major specializations.[41]
― 99 ―
The numbers of households in a thar that follow its traditional speciality,[42] and the number of individuals in a household who do, vary greatly from thar to thar . Sometimes women are involved in the thar
specialization (e.g., farmers, barbers, as purifiers); sometimes they
are concerned with subsidiary aspects of the speciality (Brahman's wives
for some rituals), or perhaps exclusively with the general running of
the household and with other nonspecialized or subsidiary economic
activities. Moreover, we do not know from such enumerations how those
who do not participate in a thar's traditional activities, activities that define the thar , are affected by their membership.
These
internal questions are not our present concern, however. It is the
Kumha: as potter, not as farmer or bank clerk, who concerns us here,
that is his defining and constituting role in the hierarchical urban
system that becomes interwoven with deities, symbolic space, and
symbolic performances in the mesocosmic segment of the city's order. For
such purposes these demographic notes give a rough idea of the
available numbers of role players in that mesocosmic system, numbers
distorted by social change and by the loss of some of the controls that
may once have more closely regulated the supply of labor in such
immobile societies.
1. Groups within Bhaktapur: Buddhist Bare.
For
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, the Buddhist Bare (including both
sections—priests and precious metal craftsmen) were considered
water-unacceptable. The justifications given by Brahmans for their low
rank are miscellaneous, but not necessarily more post hoc than
other such justifications for status. These include their metalworking,
their traditional performances on "contaminating" musical instruments,
and their short seven-day period of contamination after death—such short
periods being characteristic of low-level groups. Furthermore, the Bare
do not, in con-
― 106 ―
trast
to Hindus, maintain a residual queue of hair in the course of the
shaving of their heads at the time of (and in purification rituals
subsequent to) boys' ritual initiation into their thar . This
last, a reminder of their original status as monks (Buddhist monks'
shaving of the entire head being a sign of renunciation of ordinary
lineage and social ties), probably reflects one of the historical
reasons for their ambiguous rank—recalling the ambiguous social ranking
of all Hindu renouncers. For other members of upper-level thar s, Chathariya and Pa[n]cthariya, the Bare were considered on the levels of the Jyapus, and thus "water-acceptable."[51]
2. Groups within Bhaktapur: non-Newar Brahmans and Matha[*] priests.
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans traditionally considered the Jha and Bhatta[*] Brahmans and the Matha[*]
priests to be water-acceptable. The Newar Chathariya, and Pa(n)cthariya
treated them as they did the highest segments just below themselves;
that is, they accepted all food except boiled rice and pulses from them.
Middle-level and lower-level Newar groups accept rice from these
priests. Conversely, the Jha and Bhatta[*] Brahmans accepted rice from neither Rajopadhyaya Brahmans nor the levels below them.
Marriage
Dumont
has remarked on the importance for South Asia of separating a "true and
complete marriage" from other kinds of "marriage." He makes some
terminological distinctions that are useful for a discussion of marriage
in Bhaktapur (1980, 114 [original italics]):
The only true and complete marriage whereby one moves from the category of an unmarried person to that of a married person is the first. But the cere-
― 127 ―
mony which effects this transition is especially important for the woman, and one must distinguish the case of a male from that of a female. In the case of a woman we shall call the first marriage the primary marriage. Once this marriage has been contracted, either it is indissoluble even by the death of the spouse (superior castes) or else the woman may, after her husband's death or even after divorce, contract another union, legitimate, but infinitely less prestigious, involving much less ritual and expense, which we shall call secondary marriage. Secondary marriage, being of lower status, is freer, sometimes much freer, than primary marriage. In the case of a man his first marriage becomes the principal marriage only if it bears him children, preferably sons. But a man has the option, either in the case of the barrenness of the first marriage, or freely in other castes (royal, etc.) of taking other wives, either with full rite (necessary for the wife if she has not been married before) or with secondary rite (if the wife has already been married). Thus for a man there are supplementary or subsidiary marriages, with a corresponding hierarchy of wives.
Dumont
further notes that, "in various groups, in order to secure for women
great freedom of [secondary] marriage or of sexual unions in general,
primary marriage is, or rather was, reduced to a mere ritual formality.
Sometimes women are married in this way to a god, an object, a fruit, or
a man who immediately disappears from their lives" (1980, 118). Dumont,
in fact, cites the Newar Ihi as one of his examples, although
he erroneously believes that the consequences of the mock-marriage is to
allow Newar girls "probably to have unions with men of inferior status"
(ibid., 119).
The Newar mock-marriage is not, in
fact, fully equivalent to a "primary" marriage, for the first "real" or
"social" marriage still retains in its ceremonial and social
implications most of the implications of primary marriage in contrast to
any possible further, fully, and "really" "secondary" marriages. The
mock-marriage has at least some of the force of a primary
marriage, however, in that it allows the "real" marriage to be a
postmenarche one, and in that it is associated with a somewhat greater
liberality of divorce and with a considerably less disadvantaged
position for women.[17]
Until
the late 1950s the Newar Brahmans followed orthodox Hindu marriage
practices rather than the Newar modification. They did not have
mock-marriages, and were married to premenarche child brides.[18]
In the later 1950s the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans decided to follow
Nepalese law banning child marriage and to ease their restrictions on
divorce and remarriage.
For non-Brahman Newars in
the past (and for Newar Brahmans now) the great majority of social
marriages take place when the girl is
― 128 ―
postmenarche.
Some few premenarche marriages exist among farmers, where the
motivation is said to be economic, for in a small and often poor family
the bride will help with the work of her conjugal home. Such marriages
are illegal under Nepalese law and are frowned upon even among other
Jyapus. It is said by Jyapu informants that the ideal age for a woman's
marriage among them should be between sixteen and eighteen. Before
sixteen she is too young to work and to be of much help in her husband's
house,[19] and if she marries too much later
than eighteen, it is said that her children will be still too young to
help their father at the time in his life when he ages and will need
help in his farming. The Jyapu husband should be somewhat older, between
the ages of, say, twenty and twenty-three, among other reasons because
"it will be easier for them to manage a younger wife, who will fear
them." The daughters of sahu —Chathariya, Pa(n)cthariya, and those lower thar s who are in business and shopkeeping—are said to marry later, often at twenty-two or twenty-three.[20]
For
his "principal" (to use Dumont's terminology) marriage, that is, for
the vast majority of marriages, a man will marry a woman who has not
been married before (with the exception of the Ihi ), who is
within the proper intermarrying macrostatus level, and who is at the
proper exogamous distance. The marriage ceremony will be a "major
marriage ceremony," modified somewhat from the orthodox Indian marriage
ceremony to take the Ihi into account (app. 6).
People are forbidden to marry within an extended and active patrilineal group, the phuki
(below), and more vaguely within larger groups thought to have a
significant and close patrilineal connection, to be the same
patrilineage or kul . Such larger exogamous units are distinguished within different thar
s in different ways. Tracing degree of relationship and permissible and
impermissible unions through female lines is more difficult, as it is
not revealed in present organization, and has to be based on
genealogical information. Ideally, any relationship derived from the
out-marriage of any woman of the kul within less than six
generations (the seventh generation being permitted) is forbidden. In
practice, no objection is made after five generations if there is some
"good reason" for that particular marriage.[21]
Almost all the thar s marry within Bhaktapur by preference, and often within the same part of the city.[22]
Almost all marriages are still arranged. The availability and qualities
of potential spouses are first discussed among informal networks of
friends and relatives. Ideally, as elsewhere in South Asia, a wife
should be modest and shy, respectful to
― 129 ―
elders, in good health, and willing and able to work as necessary in the particular thar
. She should not have any disfigurements, particularly skin diseases,
the facial scars of smallpox having been considered particularly
disadvantageous. A prospective son-in-law should be able to support his
wife through his own efforts or his household situation. He should be of
good moral character, a support to his own family, and not a gambler or
a heavy drinker. He should be good-natured, and not irritable and
potentially abusive to his wife. The reputation and behavior of the
other household members, and the extended-family group, the phuki
, are also of great importance. Immorality, crime, insanity, scandal
anywhere in this group will affect the desirability of all its members.
After an informal decision has been made, a representative of the man's household, a lami
, is chosen from among family or friends, and begins a more formal
investigation of the potential bride's nature and situation. Eventually,
if she seems acceptable, the lami approaches her family to
discuss the prospects, and later the arrangements, for the marriage. A
symbolic sequence begins at this point which in a number of phases gives
the marriage increasing social reality; we will discuss the sequence in
relation to rites of passage (app. 6).
In the past
the perspective spouses did not see each other before the marriage
ceremony, although they usually had some idea about each other from
networks of friends or relatives. They could refuse when the marriage
was proposed, but this was reportedly quite rare. Now it is customary
for the couple to see each other, often at a mutual friend's house,
before the arrangement reaches a formal phase, a meeting that may
provoke objections to the marriage.[23]
There
were always "love marriages" in the past, as there are now. These are
marriages that were in violation of the parents', or phuki
members' wishes, and were motivated by romantic love or, sometimes, by
pregnancy. As long as these were within the acceptable macrostatus
marrying sections, they usually became acceptable to the couple's
families. Only marriages violating these regulations caused a rupture of
family and thar relationships. Incestuous marriages within the bounds of kin exogamy would be "a great sin" or crime, maha aparadha , and would result in outcasting and banishment.
The
bride's family will provide a dowry and will also bear the expenses of
the first portion of the sequence of marriage ceremonies, which take
place at her house. The groom's family will have the expenses of the
subsequent major marriage ceremonies and feasts. They
― 130 ―
also
provide presents to the bride, which include (particularly among
farmers) substantial quantities of gold jewelry. If a husband divorces a
young wife, or forces her to leave him, and if this is not considered
to be through her fault, she has the right to take back her dowry and
keep the jewelry she has been given. If she leaves the household because
of her own dissatisfaction (an attribution that the wife's family may
dispute, and that may require arbitration), she forfeits these. Among
some Jyapu groups some of the wife's dowry is withheld by her family
until after she has borne a child, a guarantee that the marriage will
probably be permanent. It is estimated that the total expenses of the
bride's side and the groom's side at the time of marriage are about
equal, or, in the case of Jyapus, somewhat higher for the groom's
family.
While the contribution from the bride's
side is overtly said to be a dowry, a payment for taking the daughter,
the expenses of the groom's side are interpreted as indicating the
ability and commitment of the groom's family to the continuing support
of the bride. The groom's side also gives gifts to the bride's family in
the course of the ceremonial sequence preceding the marriage. Among
some thar s these involve substantial cash gifts. G. S. Nepali,
in a discussion of such gifts among the Newars, notes that when cash
offerings are given in lieu of "symbolic" offerings of sweets by the
groom's family, "though the payment of cash is looked down upon by the
society, since it amounts to paying for a wife, it has not diminished at
any rate; and it is a favoured practice among the poor. There is no
social sanction against it, except the moral disapproval" (1965, 215).
The moral disapproval comes from Brahmanical ideology of the wife as a
free gift or offering, a kanya dana . In actual practice for all
except the most Brahmanical families, there seems to be a balancing of
both symbolic and material calculations of the value of the marriage
transaction to both the giving and the receiving families. Among the
middle and lower levels, where the economic value of the wife is most
clear, there is an additional emphasis on the tentativeness of the
contribution from the bride's side, as it protects her and will be
returned if she is rejected by the groom's family. Dumont (in a comment
on a claim of L. S. S. O'Malley for Bengal that "bridegroom price"
characterized high hypergamous castes; and "bride price," low castes)
remarks that it may be supposed for Bengal, as elsewhere, that "there is
an exchange of prestations, in which the tangible prestations
dominate in one or the other direction (Dumont 1980, 379). In the Newar
case the general emphasis on equality of prestations corresponds to an
emphasis on isogamy.
― 131 ―
There exists, relatively rarely among upper levels and somewhat more frequently among farming thar s, "barter" marriages, hilabula , between two households, in which a son and daughter from one household respectively marry a daughter and son from another.[24] Much less wealth needs to be amassed by the participating families in these cases (cf. G. S. Nepali 1963, 215).
A
couple will be married in an elaborate set of ceremonies for a
principal marriage (app. 6) and a simpler set for subsidiary ones. The
vast majority of marriages are monogamous and endure until one of the
partners dies, the survivor living on as a widow or widower. However,
the marriage may break up in one way or another for other reasons than
death or may be altered by the husband taking a second, additional wife.
Hindu
societies, while making it relatively easy for the husband or his
family to dissolve a marriage, have severely limited or prohibited a
wife's right to divorce. The Newar woman's relative freedom to dissolve
her marriage compared to other, including neighboring Nepalese, Hindu
groups have led, among those accustomed to standard Hindu practices, to
exaggerated statements regarding her freedom and her "licentiousness."
Kirkpatrick wrote in 1793 (comparing the Newars and the matrilineal
Nayars of Kerala, as is still frequently done), that "It is remarkable
enough that the Newar women, like those among the Nairs [Nayars], may,
in fact, have as many husbands as they please, being at liberty to
divorce them continually on the slightest pretenses" ([1811] 1969, 187).
Francis Hamilton visited the Kathmandu Valley a few years later during a
fourteen-month period in 1802/03. His remarks on the Newar women are
also a mixture of realities, misunderstandings, and prejudice. We can
identify the probable source of the prejudice in one Ramajai Batacharji,
who accompanied Hamilton on his visit. Batacharji was "an intelligent
Brahman from Calcutta, whom I employed to obtain information, so far as I
prudently could, without alarming a jealous government, or giving
offense to the Resident, under whose authority I was acting" (Hamilton
[1819] 1971, 1). Newar manners, Hamilton/Batacharji remarks, are
"chiefly remarkable for a most extraordinary carelessness about the
conduct of their women" (ibid., 29); to wit:
The Newar women are never confined. At eight years of age, they are carried to a temple and married with the ceremonies usual among Hindus to a fruit called Bel.[25] When a girl arrives at the age of puberty, her parents, with her consent, betroth her to some man of the same caste and give her a dower,
― 132 ―
which becomes the property of the husband, or rather paramour. After this, the nuptials are celebrated with feasting and some religious ceremonies. Among the higher casts [castes] it is required that girls should be chaste till they have been thus betrothed; but in the lower casts, a girl, without scandal, may previously indulge any Hindu with her favours, and this licentiousness is considered a thing of no consequence. Whenever a woman pleases, she may leave her husband; and if, during her absence she cohabits only with men of her own cast or of a higher one she may at any time return to her husband's house, and resume the command of the family. The only ceremony or intimation that is necessary before she goes away is her placing two betel nuts on her bed.[26]
Hamilton ([1819] 1971, 42f.) further writes:
So long as a woman chooses to live with her husband he cannot take another wife until she becomes past child bearing; but a man may take a second wife when his first chooses to leave him or when she grows old, and at all times he may keep as many concubines as he pleases. A widow cannot marry again, but she is not expected to burn herself, and may cohabit with any Hindu as a concubine. The children, by the betrothed wife, have a preference in succession to those by concubines. The latter, however, are entitled to some share. A man can be betrothed to no woman except one of his own cast, but he may keep a concubine of any cast whose water he can drink.
This kind of view of
Newar practices, which starts with a perception of relative differences,
and then salaciously exaggerates them, still is held by some non-Newar
Nepalis about the Newars, and, indeed, mutatis mutandis , suggests the way upper-status Newars regard the morals and nature of women in the lower Newar thar
s—and the way all Newars seem to think about what they take to be the
free behavior of women among northern hill peoples. We can find some
basis for such reports in some persisting present practices. Other
aspects may have referred to practices of particular thar s at
the time, or may have been based on misunderstandings. What was
fundamentally distorted, however, was the romantic picture of liberty or
anarchy.
G. S. Nepali (1965, 247ff.) provides some
indication of the amount of separation and remarriage among 734 Newar
men and women in 1957/58. Among his 353 male informants, 13.3 percent of
their marriages had ended in separation. Some 40 percent of those
separations were by formal divorce and the remaining 60 percent, by
informal separation. Among his women informants 14.4 percent of their
marriages were reported as ending in separation. Of these, about 15
percent were reported as ending in formal divorce and 85 percent in
informal separation. Among the men some 72 percent of the men whose
marriages had ended in separation remarried, as did about 41 percent of
the
― 133 ―
women.[27]
Nepali's tables do not indicate to what degree divorce or separation
was initiated by the husband or the wife, but his discussion implies
that many of the nondivorce separations, at least, involve desertion by
the wife. Nepali's survey of divorce and separation suggests, in fact,
that marriage among the Newars, if not as fluid as reported by Hamilton,
is relatively fragile. We do not have statistics on separation and
divorce for contemporary Bhaktapur; it is very possibly similar to
Nepali's rates, and almost certainly significantly higher than for
non-Newar Hindu Nepal.
"Divorce" is usually referred to in phrases using the word "par " or "pa
," which in other phrases signifies the conclusion of a transaction by
making a final payment. Simple separation is phrased in various ways,
often simply as tota beigu , "to let go of." Until recently
neither marriage nor divorce had a clear legal status under Nepalese
national law, which followed the varieties of local customary law.
Bennett, in a study of the relations of both traditional and national
law to the situations of Nepalese women, writes "Under the present
[National Civil] Code, the performance of any form of wedding ceremony
or simply evidence of sexual relations (even as a single event) can
amount to marriage" (1979, 46). A "divorce" implies the consent of both
parties and their kin to the separation, initiated by some kind of
formal discussion. The one who wishes to dissolve the marriage obtains
permission, often in writtern form, from the spouse or the head of the
spouse's household or patrilineal extended-family group, the phuki
The wife must agree to leave the household; if she objects to this and
resists a separation, the husband may use various means to force her
out. Previously, and still in some thar s, the simplest way for a
man to separate from his wife was to leave her at her natal home when
she returned there for a visit; she was not supposed to return to her
conjugal home from these visits unless a member of the husband's
household came to fetch her. Another device the husband or other members
of his household can use to force a separation is to begin to mistreat
the wife and provoke quarrels with her, thus attempting to make her
decide to return to her natal home. If the wife wishes to initiate the
separation, it is simpler: all she has to do is to leave her husband's
house.
Separation is complicated for both husband
and wife if there are children. They belong to the father's household,
and will be raised by the women there. This is general in Hindu Nepal.
"Nepalese law considers the right of child custody as well as the duty
to maintenance of the child as the right and liability of the father. A
mother has no right upon the issue she has given birth to. The law is
based on the Hindu
― 134 ―
concept of woman as jaya
or one who bears children for her husband. The mother simply gives
birth to children for her husband" (Shilu Singh, quoted in Bennett
[1979, 64]). The comparative special rights of Newar women do not
include rights over the possession of their children.
There
is less social stigma attached to an agreed-upon separation, a divorce,
than to a unilateral separation. A "divorced" woman is free of the
insults and interference that might come from her husband's home if she
were only separated, and still in some sense belonged to the household.
Divorced or separated, all parties can remarry, however, with a
simplified ceremony of remarriage, which as the figures cited from G. S.
Nepali (above) indicate, is frequently done.
The
most frequent reasons given for breakdown of marriages in Bhaktapur are,
as everywhere in Hindu families, one or another of the difficulties of
fitting a new wife into the husband's household, that is, her relations
with various family members other than her husband, particularly her
mother-in-law.[28] Such problems may arise and
cause the marriage to break up even if (and sometimes to some degree
because) the husband and wife may like each other and are close to each
other. Modernization has produced a different kind of marital problem.
In the course of higher education or professional careers young
Bhaktapur men and (more rarely) women of the upper levels often meet
potential lovers or spouses—sometimes from other communities and ethnic
groups—who are attractive to them often because they share more modern
values and interests. These men and women have often been previously
married in an arranged marriage with a spouse who (again, this is the
case particularly for the men) has a more limited, traditional, and
conservative upbringing and experience. Although the families have
approved and arranged such marriages, the spouse becomes a target of the
husband's (or wife's) resentment. The wife and her children have close
relations with others in the household, but the husband (who may have a
"girlfriend" outside the household) will be cooly proper and more than
conventionally distant from her. Occasionally such marriages also end in
separation.
The City As An Icon of A God
Bhaktapur,
as we have noted in our discussion of its history, grew through time in
conformance with the limits of early settlements and of topographic
constraints. As attempts were made to organize its space as a symbolic
resource, it was necessary to deal with hard and resistant forms and
forces. The forms that resulted from the interactions of planning and
what was—from the viewpoint of an ideal symbolic order—accident or
constraint could be coerced into that order in various ways. An existent
form might be discovered to have a direct, iconic resemblance to
something of transcendent significance; approximate relationships could
be abstracted and transformed imaginatively into ideal geometric forms
or iconic representations.
The inhabitants of
Bhaktapur were thus able to imagine its irregularly ovoid shape as a
direct representation of something significant, while at the same time,
as we shall see, for other and more important purposes they conceived
that shape as a perfect circle. In the eighteenth century Kirkpatrick
wrote that Newars described Bhaktapur as resembling "the Dumbroo, or
guitar, of Mahadeo" ([1811] 1969, 163). The "dumbroo" was undoubtedly
the damaru[*] , the hourglass-shaped drum
of Siva. Oldfield, writing of the Nepal Valley m the 1850s, said that
Kathmandu, according to Buddhist Newars, was built to resemble the sword
of its founder in Buddhist legend, Manjusri, while according to Hindus
it resembled the sword of Devi ([1880] 1974, vol. 1, p. 101). Patan, a
largely Buddhist city, was said to resemble the wheel of Buddha (vol. I,
p. 117), while Bhaktapur (vol. I, p. 131) was said now to represent the
conch of Visnu[*] , which is what many present inhabitants still say.
In
the case of Bhaktapur (and as far as we know the same is true for the
other Newar cities), such iconic images that connect the cities to gods
have no ritual or doctrinal significance at all. In contrast to the
geometrically regular idealized spaces of the city, they are not used in
any way in the actions and elaborations of meanings that constitute the
symbolic order of the city. The identification of Bhaktapur's shape
with Visnu[*] has no present significance. The
city is sometimes thought of as Siva's, sometimes Parvati's, sometimes
the Tantric Goddess's, but never Visnu's[*] city.
― 152 ―
Figure 6.
Ceremonial bathing m the Hanumante River.
Ceremonial bathing m the Hanumante River.
― 153 ―
A Note on Hill and River
Bhaktapur,
like very many cities, makes use of a hill—on which it is built—and a
bordering river (see fig. 6), but characteristically elaborates and adds
to their elementary "practical" significance—the hill as potential
citadel, or as a residential center for the exploitation of the
surrounding arable farmland, the river as a source of water (but not, in
the Kathmandu Valley, for navigation). The hill, with its higher-status
temples, palaces, and residential areas located toward its crest, adds
to the more significant orientation of central-peripheral (discussed
below) an additional dimension of higher-lower. Bhaktapur is situated in
accordance with the traditional ideals of South Asian town planning on
the right bank of its river (Dut [1925] 1977, 24), the Hanumante. As is
the case for all Newar royal cities and for those secondary Newar towns
situated on rivers, the direction of the flow of the river is one basis
for the discrimination of an important division of the city or town into
two halves, an upper half (upstream), and a lower half (downstream).
The river, a locus for dying, cremation, and purification, is outside
the traditional boundaries of the city and takes much of its meaning
(which it shares with the ideal symbolic Indian river, the Ganges) from
its transitional position at a boundary to another world and its flow
toward still another, whose orders are other than that of the city.
The Idealization of Space: Bhaktapur As A Yantra
In
map 1, a schematic illustration of the location of the shrines of the
nine guardian goddesses of Bhaktapur (those who protect its boundaries
and what we shall refer to as its "mandalic[*]
sections"), one of the city's Rajopadhyaya Brahmans represented the
goddesses' locations as points in a symmetrical diagrammatic city. The
drawing is labeled "Yantrakara khwapa dey'"—"Khwapa dey'," "the city of
Bhaktapur," portrayed as a "yantra ." The diagram shows Bhaktapur's boundary as a circle, a mandala[*]
, a pervasive South Asian representation of a boundary and its
contained area within which "ritual" power and order is held and
concentrated.[2] The circumference of the mandala[*]
separates two very different worlds, an inside order and an outside
order, and suggests the possibility of various kinds of relations and
transactions between them. Within the mandala[*] in the drawing is the yantra , "a mystical diagram believed to possess magical or occult powers" (Stutley
― 154 ―
Map 1.
Idealized symbolic form. A drawing by a Bhaktapur Brahman of Bhak-
tapur as a yantra with the nine Mandalic[*] Goddesses represented at the eight
compass points and at the center. The actual spatial location of the nine god-
desses is given in map 2.
Idealized symbolic form. A drawing by a Bhaktapur Brahman of Bhak-
tapur as a yantra with the nine Mandalic[*] Goddesses represented at the eight
compass points and at the center. The actual spatial location of the nine god-
desses is given in map 2.
and
Stutley 1977, 347), typical of Bhaktapur's imagery (chap. 9), here made
up of two overlapping triangles, representing the relation of
opposites, of male and female principles, unified in a point at the
center of the diagram. At that central point is written the name of one
of Bhaktapur's nine protective goddesses, Tripurasundari. Toward the
periphery, at the circular boundary are the names of the eight other
protective goddesses. They are exactly arranged at the eight points of
the compass, with the top of the diagram conceived as representing the
north.
These goddesses exist in the actual space of Bhaktapur (map 2), but
― 155 ―
Map 2.
The spatial positions of the pithas of the nine Mandalic[*] Goddesses. These are the actual spatial locations of the idealized
points of the symbolic yantra and mandala[*] in map 1. The numbers designate the deities in the sequence in which they are worshiped
when treated as a united collection of deities: (1) Brahmani, (2) Mahesvari, (3) Kumari, (4)Vaisnavi[*] , (5) Varahi, (6) Indrani[*] , (7)
Mahakaili, (8) Mahalaksmi[*] , and (9) Tripurasundari. The dense band of dots in this map and the following maps indicating the extent
of the city represents the edge of the presently built-up area of the city, the "physical city," and does not necessarily correspond to the
city's symbolic boundaries. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
The spatial positions of the pithas of the nine Mandalic[*] Goddesses. These are the actual spatial locations of the idealized
points of the symbolic yantra and mandala[*] in map 1. The numbers designate the deities in the sequence in which they are worshiped
when treated as a united collection of deities: (1) Brahmani, (2) Mahesvari, (3) Kumari, (4)Vaisnavi[*] , (5) Varahi, (6) Indrani[*] , (7)
Mahakaili, (8) Mahalaksmi[*] , and (9) Tripurasundari. The dense band of dots in this map and the following maps indicating the extent
of the city represents the edge of the presently built-up area of the city, the "physical city," and does not necessarily correspond to the
city's symbolic boundaries. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
― 156 ―
the
central shrine and the ones at the boundaries are only approximately at
the eight points of the compass and at the city center (cf. Auer and
Gutschow n.d., 22). One of them is even further displaced from where it
is "supposed" to be, being physically within the symbolic boundary of
the city instead of at or beyond its outer border as are the other
boundary protecting shrines. As Mary Slusser speculates of that shrine,
that of Mahalaksmi[*] , in the course of the
construction of a boundary-marking city wall "the sanctity of the
[preexisting] old shrine forbade moving it to an optimal location
outside the wall; engineering or other considerations dictated the
latter's course, thus enclosing the . . . [shrine] within the city
walls" (1982, vol. I, p. 346). In accordance with the struggle and the
dialogue between the given on the one hand and the ideal symbolic form
on the other, Bhaktapur had to construct and imagine a yantra and its encompassing mandala[*] as best it could.
This
imaginative process takes features of real space, many of them
constructed under the impetus of that imagination, and perfects them—the
city becomes a bounded circle instead of a flattened irregular oval.
Simultaneously in a dialogue of imaginative and actual space city
halves, "mandalic sections"—various axes and centers—have been
constructed. Those imaginatively perfected forms exist in real space
like a geometric image reflected in a distorting mirror. But people have
no trouble finding their ways about in one or the other kind of space
or, for that matter, in both at the same time.
.
City Halves: Ritually Organized Antagonism
The
bounded units we are considering are in part defined by their contrasts
with their adjoining units, in a contrast where that adjoining unit is
often an encompassing one (the city and its environment, the house in
its twa: or neighborhood), although it may be, as in the case of adjoining mandalic[*]
sements, a contrast of units at the same level. For the most part any
antagonistic implications of these contrasts are mitigated by a
pervasive Hindu metaphorical move, an emphasis on the organic unity and
interdependence of the contrasting units to form some higher vital
synthesis, the various units being metaphorically related (like the
ancient four Varnas[*] ) as being like the parts
or organs of the body. Neither the high head nor the lowly feet,
although different and of different status, can live without the other;
they are joined into something superior on which they are dependent, on
which their very lives depend.
― 169 ―
However,
there is one symbolically marked division of the city, its halves,
where the major emphasis is precisely on conflict, albeit a conflict
periodically and tenuously resolved in symbolic acts. This emphasis on
the antagonism of the halves seems to deflect other more dangerous
antagonisms within and among smaller city units.
Bhaktapur is divided into halves, an upper half (cwe , or up, or tha:ne , above, upward) and a lower half (kwe , down, or kwane
, below, downward) (map 5). As D. R. Regmi wrote, the division may have
been a general feature of all Newar settlements and "obtained in every
case whether it was a town or townlet" (1965-1966, part I, p. 554). The
division has been described for Kathmandu (Regmi 1965-1966, part I, p.
554; Slusser 1982, 90-91), for the Newar village of Theco (Toffin 1984,
186ff.), and for the large Newar town of Panauti (Barré et al. 1981,
46). As Barré writes, the division into upper and lower city is "a
characteristic common to Newar settlements whether urban or rural."
It
is often stated that the upper and lower segments are designated in
relation to the flow of neighboring rivers (e.g., Toffin 1984, 200) with
upstream locating the direction of cwe , downstream of kwe
. Inhabitants of Bhaktapur attempt various explanations of the
designations "up" and "down." Bhaktapur's "upper half" for some is upper
because it is more northerly, for others because it is in the direction
of the high Himalayas, in contrast to the progressively lower, that is,
less elevated southern regions. This north-south interpretation of
"upper" and "lower" is reflected in a use of "kwane " among Valley Newars, at least until the last generation, to indicate India. Other speculations are that the upper half, cwe , was the earliest part of the city settled (as was, in fact, true for Bhaktapur), followed by a later settlement, kwe . (Here the usage corresponds to the temporal terminology for ancestors [cwe , up] and descendants [kwe
, down].) Still other people give the upstream/ downstream,
explanation. It is possible, at least, that the upper/lower contrast is
basic to the social organization of all Newar settlements, and that a
variety of relations to physical space and settlement history can be
used to choose between the terms of the distinction or to justify them.
Bhaktapur's upper and lower cities are divided by a line perpendicular
to the long (the southwest-northeast) axis of the city, and thus consist
of a somewhat northerly eastern portion, and a somewhat southerly
western portion, which are respectively upstream and downstream in
respect to the Hanumante River (see maps S and 11 [below]).[14]
As D. R. Regmi writes, in contrast to Kathmandu, where the royal palace
was at the central position in the city and provided a locus
― 170 ―
for
the division of the city into upper and lower halves, "the [Bhaktapur]
Royal palace was situated at the western extremity of the town and the
center dividing the city was the courtyard surrounded by the Nyatapola
[Natapwa(n)la] and Bhairava temples" (1965-1966, part II, p. 554). This
square, Ta:marhi (also pronounced or written Tamari, Taumadhi[*]
, Taumarhi, etc.), is conceived as at the center of the city division
in one of its most important ritual expressions, the struggle between
members of the two halves of the city to pull a huge chariot positioned
there into their respective halves of the city during the Biska:
festival at the time of the solar New Year, a struggle sometimes marked
with considerable violence (chap. 14). At that time the square is
considered the neutral center between the halves, but ordinarily it is
considered as belonging to the lower city and the people living around
it consider themselves at all times to be members of the lower city.
Guts-chow and Kö1ver note that the Ta:marhi Square has a "profuse
endowment" of religious buildings and is the site of the highest temple
(and building) in Bhaktapur, the Natapwa(n)la temple (fig. 10). They
argue that this profusion of monuments may be understood as a device for
unifying the town by installing a mediating center and affirming the
unity of the city (1975, 50). Although the old Malla Royal Palace, the
square in front of it, and the adjacent residential area of the
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans (maps 5 and 6) is, like Ta:marhi, in the lower
half of the city, during the struggles of the city halves in the course
of the Biska: festival that area is also said to belong to neither the
upper nor lower city. It is often said that the Malla kings encouraged
the division and conflict between the two city halves, which they
transcended, to strengthen their power and divide any potential
opposition. Thus, if Ta:marhi Square acts as a neutral ritual center
between the upper and lower cities, the royal central area, in spite of
its peripheral western positions, is in its own way also a neutral
point.
In recent years conflict between members of
city halves has also sometimes broken out at certain other festivals,
but these rare and recent struggles are considered to be accidental and
unintended disorder and breakdown. The peculiarity of the Biska:
festival is that it includes as one element in its complex dramatic
structure a prolonged struggle between the two city halves, a struggle
that eventually comes to a resolution.
Ritualized
struggles (that is, struggles induced and regulated by traditional forms
and conventions—which does not prevent them from having, sometimes,
serious consequences) between socially organized
― 171 ―
Map 5.
The struggle of the upper and lower halves of the city and its resolution. The routes into the upper and lower halves of the city
contested in the struggle to pull the Bhairava chariot during the Biska: festival (chap. 14). The arrows in the upper and lower segment
of the city show the ideal termini of the chariot and the acceptable shorter termini if there is not time to reach the ideal ones. The
southerly arrow shows the chariot's ultimate "central" route into Yasi(n) Field, where it must witness the raising of the Yasi(n) God to
mark the solar New Year. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
The struggle of the upper and lower halves of the city and its resolution. The routes into the upper and lower halves of the city
contested in the struggle to pull the Bhairava chariot during the Biska: festival (chap. 14). The arrows in the upper and lower segment
of the city show the ideal termini of the chariot and the acceptable shorter termini if there is not time to reach the ideal ones. The
southerly arrow shows the chariot's ultimate "central" route into Yasi(n) Field, where it must witness the raising of the Yasi(n) God to
mark the solar New Year. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
― 172 ―
Map 6.
Space and status. Households of Rajopadhyaya Brahmans. The greatest concentration is just south of the Taleju temple and
the Royal Palace and represents a center of the city. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
Space and status. Households of Rajopadhyaya Brahmans. The greatest concentration is just south of the Taleju temple and
the Royal Palace and represents a center of the city. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
― 173 ―
halves
or moieties of a community—are reported for traditional South Asian
communities as they are elsewhere in the world. Dubois, for example,
remarked on the struggles between the "left-handed" and the
"right-handed" factions in the Deccan and Madras areas in the early
nineteenth century, factions to which "most castes" belong, which
"proved a perpetual source of riots, and the cause of endless animosity
amongst the natives" (1968, 24f.). He also remarks on something that has
a bearing on the conflict in Bhaktapur, that "in the disputes and
conflicts which so often take place between the two factions it is
always the Pariahs [the untouchables] who make the most disturbance and
do the most damage" (ibid., 25). And, he states, also in an echo of
Malla Bhaktapur, "the Brahmans, [and] Rajahs. . .are content to remain
neutral, and take no part in these quarrels. They are often chosen as
arbiters in the differences which the two factions have to settle
between themselves" (ibid., 25).
Hamilton cites a
report for the turn of the nineteenth century by a Colonel Crawford,
which describes a "vile custom" of the Newars of Kathmandu, who had
previously been described by Hamilton as being an otherwise peaceable
people ([1819] 1971, 43f.):
About the end of May, and beginning of June, for fifteen days, a skirmish takes place between the young men and boys of the north and south ends of the city. During the first fourteen days it is chiefly confined to the boys or lads; but on the evening of the fifteenth day it becomes more serious. . . . [A fight then takes place which] begins about an hour before sunset, and continues until darkness separates the combatants. In the one which we saw, four people were carried off much wounded, and almost every other year one or two men are killed: yet the combat is not instigated by hatred, nor do the accidents that happen occasion any rancor. Formerly, however, a most cruel practice existed. If any unfortunate fellow was taken prisoner, he was immediately dragged to the top of a particular eminence in the rear of his conquerors, who put him to death with buffalo bones. . . . The prisoners are now kept until the end of the combat, are carried home in triumph by the victors, and confined until morning, when they are liberated.
There
has been speculation, deriving from a further remark of Hamilton's
(1971, 44) that some people alleged that the Kathmandu battle reflected
some old division of the city into two towns under two Rajas and first
arose as skirmishing among their respective followers, and that the
division in Kathmandu, at least, and perhaps in other Newar towns may
have reflected some earlier antagonistic political segments later merged
into the towns (Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p. 91; Toffin
― 174 ―
1984,
201f.). Yet, the ubiquitousness, persistence, and evident usefulness of
the division in Newar communities would suggest that such historical
explanations would only apply to some towns, and would only help explain
the location of the halves, not their existence and persistence.
In some ways the upper and lower cities in Bhaktapur are
two different cities. it is said that people usually marry within their
own half of the city. In many contexts, they identify themselves as
belonging to one or another hall Significantly, when there are crimes or
disturbances in the city whose perpetrators are unknown, it is common
to hear remarks by people from the lower city that it must have been
someone from the upper city, and vice versa. Although the lower city has
the main concentration of Brahmans and high-status Chathariya, and the
upper city the main concentration of upper-status Buddhists, for the
most part each city half has a full representation of important social
and occupational units.
For ordinary considerations of residence (where we can ignore the mandalic[*] sections), the city halves are the next largest segment after the village-like twa:
s (see discussion below). It is our impression that the antagonism
directed toward the relatively distant other city half, out of and away
from one's own closely interdependent area, deflects intra-twa: resentments that would affect relations between families, phuki s, thar
s, and macrostatus levels—relations whose disturbance would be
disruptive to the basic integration of the social system—to the other
city within the city where they can be expressed in comparatively very
much less disruptive and dangerous ways. Members of lower thar s
who are annoyed and resentful of their treatment by higher groups find
it easier, like the pariahs in the quotation from Dubois, to help
precipitate a fight against members of a disliked group in the other half of the city, where it would be interpreted as a spatial struggle rather than one within the social system.
Status and Space: Concentric Circles
It is convenient to introduce in this chapter aspects of the urban spatial distribution of some of the thar
s and status levels (see fig. 7). Only a portion of this distribution
is directly related to the urban symbolic order in our present sense,
the greatest part being closely related to aspects of economic function,
to communication and transportation, to
― 175 ―
Figure 7.
The Royal center. Statue of King Bhupatindra[*] Malla in Laeku Square.
The Royal center. Statue of King Bhupatindra[*] Malla in Laeku Square.
― 176 ―
relations of power, to the special needs of the old court, and to historical "accident," thus reflecting other kinds of meaning.
In
his study of the classic Indian treatises on town planning, Dutt (1925)
notes the planned "segregation of the classes following different
pursuits. . . . Every ward was set apart for a caste or trade guild . . .
which enjoyed an autonomy of its own" (1923, 147). In some classic
texts, such as Kautilya's[*] , detailed
prescriptions are set out for the location of many occupational
specialites and castes, as well as the location of royal kitchens,
elephant stables, water reservoirs, camel stables, and so on (Dutt 1925,
149f.).[15] But, as Dutt points out, in cities,
because of the larger scale and because "corporate life connotes
manifold needs and responsibilities and consequently necessitates
interdependence and inter-communication," various areas or sites were
subdivided to have a representation of occupations, and became "a
prototype of the whole city on a smaller scale." And, he adds, in a
suggestion connected with our interpretation (above) of the city's
halves, "This admixture and congregation of classes came as a remedial
measure against possible accentuation of class differences" (1925, 148).
We have argued that the city halves are such city prototypes in
Bhaktapur, as are, to some degree, the twa: s, which we will discuss in the next section.
Although many of the thars
are widely distributed through the city according to the kinds of
functional principles suggested above, the arrangement of certain
symbolically important groups has the kind of idealized mythic
arrangement characteristic of marked symbolic space. When these thars
are considered—the king and his associates, Brahmans, farmers as a
group, butchers, and untouchables—a geometrically idealized Bhaktapur is
organized in a series of concentric circles from a center out, and at
the same time, as it is built on a hill, from top down. At the center of
high status is the palace of the Malla kings, and the temple of the
Malla kings' lineage deity, the supreme political goddess of Bhaktapur,
Taleju. Just to the south of the palace, but also centrally located is a
major concentration of Rajopadhyaya Brahmans (map 6), including those
families who were the king's and his goddess' special priests.
Intermingled in central residence with the Brahmans, but filling a still
larger segment of the city are the Chathar and Pa(n)cthar groups of thar s (map 7), formerly royal officials and suppliers. Still more peripheral from the center are the various farming thar
s, the Jyapus (map 8), who fill most of the city's area except for the
Brahmans' area and those portions of the Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya
area adjoining the east-west road, the city's bazaar, where the
Chathariya and Pa(n)c-
― 177 ―
Map 7.
Space and status. The area of settlement of Chathar and Pa(n)cthar households. They occupy the city's central sector. Com-
pare the distribution of Jyapus in map 8. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
Space and status. The area of settlement of Chathar and Pa(n)cthar households. They occupy the city's central sector. Com-
pare the distribution of Jyapus in map 8. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
― 178 ―
Map 8.
Space and status. Jyapu household. These households overlap the Chathar and Pa(n)cthar areas to some degree but are most
densely situated in the areas of the city peripheral to those settlements. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
Space and status. Jyapu household. These households overlap the Chathar and Pa(n)cthar areas to some degree but are most
densely situated in the areas of the city peripheral to those settlements. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
― 179 ―
Map 9.
Space and status. Butcher households. The households of the Naes (butchers) are located along the edges of the built-up area
of the city. They are conceived to be within the symbolic boundaries of the city. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
Space and status. Butcher households. The households of the Naes (butchers) are located along the edges of the built-up area
of the city. They are conceived to be within the symbolic boundaries of the city. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
― 180 ―
thariya
have their shops and, often, adjoining houses. At the very periphery of
the farmers' area, and forming a ring around the outer extremes of the
city, are the houses of the butchers (map 9). Finally, outside the city
to the inauspicious south, live the untouchable sweepers, the Po(n)s
(map 4, above).
The hill on which Bhaktapur is
built has a broad plateau at its summit with no visible distinctly
highest spot. The Malla palace and Taleju temple are situated on a
plateau that is bordered by slopes that gradually descend some twenty
meters to meet the fields outside the boundaries. This slope adds a
dimension of top-down to the imagery of central to peripheral. The
highest spot of the plateau at 1,339.8 meters (slightly higher than the
site of the palace at 1,335 meters) lies just to the west of the
Tripurasundari pitha , the central mandalic[*]
shrine, and during the twelfth to sixteenth centuries was apparently
part of the site of the large Newar Royal Palace compound of the day,
Tripura (Slusser 1982, vol. I, p. 204). At that time the highest point
in the city was, in fact, within the royal precincts.[16]
Detailed maps of the location of the various craft thar
s, which are ranked in the lower segments of the Jyapu and below, made
by Guts-chow and his associates (Gutschow 1975; Gutschow and Kölver
1975), show the occupational castes distributed in various ways,
generally throughout the city, except for the central area, the area of
the palace, the main Brahman cluster, and the central portion of the
Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya settlements. The craftsman areas are in the
outer portions of the Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya areas and throughout
the area of Jyapu settlement. The number of settlements of any one thar vary. The Chipas or dyers, for example, have only one settlement, but other professional thar
groups have several. The Kumha:s, potters, for example, have one large
settlement in the south, and two in the northeast of the city. The oil
pressers, or Sa:mis, have four dusters, two toward the east, and two
toward the west. The barbers, or Naus, live in six clusters throughout
the city. The house masons, the Awa:s, have three settlements, one to
the west, and two to the northeast. The Jugis live (map 10) in an
irregular pattern with some central clustering within the city, cutting
into and intermingling with the Chathariya, Pa(n)cthariya, and farmers'
areas. This inner location of the Jugis is in striking contrast with
what might have been expected in the status gradient from center to
periphery signaled and created by the arrangement of the most centrally
important thar s in the city hierarchy, and in marked contrast to the external position of the Po(n)s, who along with the Jugis are
― 181 ―
Map 10.
Space and status. Jugi households. In marked contrast to the Naes and the Po(n)s, the Jugis are distributed throughout the
city. They are the city's internal absorbers of pollution (chap. 10). Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
Space and status. Jugi households. In marked contrast to the Naes and the Po(n)s, the Jugis are distributed throughout the
city. They are the city's internal absorbers of pollution (chap. 10). Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
― 182 ―
the
central foci of ideas regarding pollution (chaps. 5 and 11). The
position of the Jugis, as we will see, seems closely related to aspects
of their significance in the city order.
In
contrast with the other spatial features discussed in this chapter, the
center-to-periphery, top-to-bottom, arrangements of status are not used
or emphasized in the course of the city's symbolic enactments. The royal
center is a focus in the city's two major festival sequences (Mohani
and Biska:) and the untouchables' quarter has occasional symbolic
representations, but the overall spatial status arrangements, insofar as
they do reflect a symbolic order, are not given further representation.
.
Visnu-Narayana[*] And His Avatars
Visnu[*] is usually referred to in Bhaktapur by one of the names historically associated with Visnu[*] , Narayana[*] (Newari, Narayan). Visnu[*]
(as we will here refer to this divinity for comparative convenience)
belongs centrally to what we will call the "moral interior" of
Bhaktapur. Although other gods may be addressed on their special days or
for particular unusual problems, Visnu[*] and Laksmi, his consort, are at the loci of ordinary household prayer. Visnu[*] is that fragment of divinity that dwells in individuals as their soul or atma , in the Newar version of the ancient South Asian correspondence of soul and cosmic divinity.
Although
there are several and conflicting ideas about the possible fates of the
soul after death and about various heavens, and a number of theories as
to what determines a person's postdeath state, the focus of most belief
and action in regard to personal fate after death centers on Visnu[*] . In the ceremonies devoted to dying, attention is focused on Visnu[*] , and the dying person must pray to Visnu[*] , meditate on him, and address his or her last words to him. In the kingdom of the Lord of the Dead, Yama Raj, it is Visnu's[*]
representative who argues the case for the deceased in front of King
Yama. This case is based on the individual's merits and sins, virtues
and vices, in relation to his following or violating the moral law, the
Dharma. Those who follow the Dharma can expect to go to Visnu's[*]
heaven. To get to Siva's heaven one must make Siva a focus of
meditation, another and radically different path to salvation from the
moral path of following the social Dharma. In Visnu's[*]
heaven one keeps one's social identity and is joined with one's family
in reward for one's social virtue. The salvation associated with Siva
and the Tantric gods, moksa[*] , has, in contrast, a problematic and uncanny relation to the social self.
Visnu[*]
is represented in Bhaktapur by idealized, princely human forms.
Occasionally he is represented in the forms of one of his incarnations,
or avatars . He is also represented occasionally by small, rounded stones, locally called salagrams.[5] In contrast to other places in South Asia, Visnu's[*]avatars (Sanskrit, avatara ) in Bhaktapur have minimal cultic significance in themselves and are of major importance only as aspects of Visnu[*] .[6] In contrast to Visnu's[*] twenty-nine active temples and shrines in Bhaktapur, only two temples are actively devoted to Krsna[*]
― 216 ―
and three to Rama and his consort Sita (see fig. 12). One of the two Krsna[*]
temples is in Laeku Square, and was one of the temples built by the
Malla kings for their personal merit. It is attended by a Rajopadhyaya
Brahman and contains a portable god image, which is carried around the
city once a year. The other temple, in the northern part of the city,
has no priest and is used in a casual way by some local people or
passersby. Both of the active Rama temples are outside the city
boundaries at places where roads meet the river. One of them is part of a
complex of temples built by the potter thar , the Kumha:s,
living in the southern half of the city, and is attended by Kumha:s and
people living in nearby areas. The other, to the southwest, is of some
general importance once a year, in connection with the worship of one of
the Eight Astamatrkas[*] , Varahi.[7]
There are two Hanuman temples associated with the southwestern Rama
temple that are visited by many people on the same day of the annual
festival calendar as that temple. Hanuman, a divinity in monkey form
associated with Rama in the Hindu epics, is also represented in other
Visnu[*] temples. Newari art represents still other of Visnu's[*] avatars (particularly Vamana, and Narasimha[*] ), as it also represents Visnu[*] in relation to his cosmogenic aspect,[8] but these representations have no contemporary uses.
The conception of Visnu's[*] avatars is closely related to the idea of Visnu[*] as the divine portion, the atma , of each individual. The avatars represent the incarnation of a portion of Visnu[*] into the ordinary world, as part of a mixture that is in part human (or animal) and part divine.[9] Visnu's[*]avatars
are not only incarnated in human or animal forms, but by and large they
lead recognizable social lives, albeit with legendary heroic powers.[10]
The lives of the incarnations were furthermore located in real space
and historical time. These lives were lived for the purpose of
reestablishing some desirable social order for humans or for the gods
after that order's derangement through some antisocial force usually
personified as a "demon" or antigod, an Asura . This is in marked
contrast to the case of Siva, whose transformations, such as Bhairava
and the Goddess, are emanations in which Siva's identity is transformed
and lost, and which are themselves "demonic" forms of the same sort as Asuras . Rather than exist through a unique lifetime, as Visnu's[*]avatars
do, Siva's transformations appear and are "reabsorbed" in some contexts
or, in others, are as eternal as Siva himself. Although they can defeat
the Asuras and other forces of disorder, they are, in themselves,
dangerous and problematic to the orderly social world, and must be
controlled in turn. In another significant contrast, while Siva's emana-
― 217 ―
Figure 12.
Rama and his consort Sita. Note the difference in size.
Rama and his consort Sita. Note the difference in size.
― 218 ―
tions (or in some versions the emanations of Parvati herself) defeat other demons through brute magical force, Visnu's[*]avatars characteristically restore order through cunning and other social skills allied to their divine power.
In
Bhaktapur's stories it is Siva in his wanderings and absent-mindedness
who is either sometimes dangerous himself, or who allows some devotee to
accumulate through meditation and austerities some god-like power,
which he then uses in defiance of the gods' order for his own selfish
purposes. Visnu[*] must undo the damage, calm
Siva, overcome the magic power of Siva's devotee, and restore order. In
this contrast Siva is the passionate, romantic dreamer for whom social
propriety is a burden. Visnu[*] represents
sobriety, decency, and order. The pair represent a familiar universal
tension within societies and within individuals.
The twenty-nine Visnu[*]
temples and shrines are distributed around the city in close proximity,
for the most part, to the city's main processional route. Of these, two
are large temple complexes—one immediately south of the upper-lower
city axis, and the other in the eastern part of the upper city. Although
these two largest temples are located in the lower city and upper city,
respectively, they are not considered representative of these city
halves in the way that other space-marking deities represent spatial
units, and there is no special religious activities that tie them to the
halves as such. All these temples are attended optionally by people in
their vicinities, sometimes for casual prayer, sometimes in quest of
support in some undertaking. Usually Visnu[*] is worshiped not in a temple or shrine but at home. Visnu[*]
, along with his consort Laksmi, is, as we have noted, the usual focal
god of the household, the focus of most of the ordinary household puja
s. They represent the ordinary relations, the moral life of the
household, in its inner life. As we will see, for the family Visnu[*]
contrasts with another quite different kind of deity, the lineage
deity, most often a form of the Dangerous Goddess, which binds the
households of the phuki group into a unity and protects them against the dangers of the outside (chap. 9).
Visnu[*]
resembles Siva in not being used, in contrast to certain other gods, to
mark off the city's important spatial units. He is, as we shall argue,
not the proper kind of a divinity for this for Bhaktapur's purposes.
Visnu[*] has no major festival in the public city
space. He is a major focus of household worship throughout the year,
and of special household and temple worship and of out-of-the-city
pilgrimages on some
― 219 ―
annual
occasions, particularly during the lunar month of Kartika (Newari,
Kachala, October/November) as he is elsewhere in South Asia at this
time.
In recent decades the worship of Visnu-Narayana[*]
at the two major temples with music and dancing and without the
mediation of a priest in expression of an individual direct devotion to
the god free from the spatial, temporal, and social orderings of
Bhaktapur as a city, has been growing. Visnu[*] and his avatars have become the object of bhakti
, loving devotion, a focus for private salvation and private emotion.
Here he is not functioning as a component in a complex system of urban
order, but as the kind of personal god who arises when such a city-based
system begins to break down. This is no longer the Visnu[*] who is Siva's complement. This is, to recall our conceits of chapter 2, a transcendent "postaxial" Visnu[*] .
Taleju, Bhaktapur's Political Goddess
An integral part of Bhaktapur's Malla palace complex of buildings and courtyards[30]
is the temple of the goddess Taleju. The temple is approached through
an elaborately decorated outer "golden gate" leading from Laeku Square,
and is built around a set of inner courtyards which are closed to
non-Hindus.[31] Taleju was the lineage goddess of
the Malla kings. As such, she was one of the many tutelary divinities
of the bounded and nested units of which Bhaktapur is constructed,
divinities chosen by individuals or "given them" by their guru s, lineage divinities, divinities of guthi and associations of various sorts, special thar deities, and so forth.
As
the Malla king's lineage deity and located in his palace compound,
Taleju became a dominant city deity as manifest in the various symbolic
enactments centering on her temple, reaching a dramatic climax during
the festival that most clearly and dramatically portrays the various
aspects of the Goddess and their relations, the harvest festival Mohani.
Taleju is the dominant goddess and, in fact, deity, of Bhaktapur in
those contexts where the centrality of royal power is being emphasized.
She has survived the replacement of the Malla dynasty by the Gorkhali
Saha dynasty as, for Bhaktapur, a powerful symbolic representation of
traditional Newar political forms and forces, one that persists
alongside of the new symbols and realities of modern politics.
There
are extensive legends about the introduction of Taleju into Bhaktapur
combining aspects of history, myth, and explanatory speculation about
local topography and about aspects of the symbolic enactments that are
associated with Taleju. The sketch of a version of the story that
follows is derived from a lengthy written version provided by a
Bhaktapur Brahman who works as a public storyteller, and is based on his
public stories. His account begins with a short summary statement
situated within the secular realm, and having to do with power and
politics. "The Sultan Gayasudin Tugalak," the account begins, "having
gained power in Bengal, attacked the town of Simraun Gadh[*] . The king of Karnataka[*] , Harisimhadeva[*]
, having been defeated by Gayasudin, ran away to Nepal with his
soldiers and captured Bhaktapur from King Ananda Malla, who had been its
ruler. Then Hari-
― 235 ―
simhadeva[*]
established the goddess Taleju in her [supernaturally determined]
proper place in Bhaktapur. The place where the Goddess was ritually
established is called the Mu Cuka [the main courtyard of the Taleju
temple]. The goddess Taleju was brought by King Harisimhadeva[*] from Simraun Gadh[*] ."
Now
the account abruptly shifts from legendary history to the mythic and
epic realm of Hindu tradition. "Once the Yantra of Taleju had been kept
in Indra's heaven. [The Yantra is the powerful mystic diagram
that embodies the goddess in this account, and is the only way she is
represented in this account aside from her appearance as an
anthropomorphic form in dreams]. There the god Indra worshiped her
properly [her proper worship is an issue in the account]." Now (to
continue in a paraphrase of the account) Taleju was stolen from Indra by
Meghanada, the son of Ravana[*] , the demon king of Lanka, in the course of Ravana's[*] attack on heaven. Taleju was taken to Lanka and worshiped there. When Ravana[*] was defeated in Lanka by Rama, the hero of the Ramayana , Rama took Taleju, in the form of her yantra , to Ayodhya, his capital in India. In time the goddess Taleju appeared to Rama in a dream and told him that be must throw the yantra
in the river Sarayu, which flowed past Ayodhya because no one would
worship and sacrifice properly to her after his approaching death. After
five or six generations a descendant of Rama, King Nala, found Taleju's
yantra in the water, and brought it to his palace, but he did
not worship her properly (which would have been with blood sacrifice),
and had to return her to the river. Subsequent kings of Ayodhya, Nala,
Pururava, and Alarka, had the same experience, each finally returning
her to the river. The kings of this dynasty, the Solar Dynasty, were
finally defeated by the Mlechhas (non-Indo-Aryan barbarians).
Now
the story's mode shifts into a sort of fairy tale, as it is recounted
how through wondrous signs the goddess comes into Harisimhadeva's[*]
possession, in a turn of events that will lead to Bhaktapur. Now,
according to the story, King Nanyadeva, a king of the Solar Dynasty, had
"lost his country" and become a servant of the Mlechhas. One day
wandering restlessly here and there he happened to stop to rest at the
bank of the Sarayu river. He dreamt there of a beautiful girl who said
to him, "Oh, King Nanyadeva, your lineage god is in the Sarayu river.
You must find her in order to worship her. I am she, your lineage
goddess. Black insects will be flying around the surface of the river
where I am hidden." The king awoke immediately and went to search for
the goddess in the early morning. He found her by means of the black
insects.
― 236 ―
He
found a copper casket. Inside it was a smaller box of gold. On the
golden box was an inscription saying that it contained a hidden treasure
that had been Rama's and Nala's and was to be Nanyadeva's. The
treasure, contained m the box, was Taleju's yantra , that is,
Taleju herself. The story then continues in its wondrous mode to recount
how with Taleju's council given in a dream, Nanyadeva has encounters
with wondrous serpents, hidden treasure, twelve architects, a host of
workers, and a female demon (raksasi[*] ), resulting in the magical construction in one night of a city that came to be called "Simraun Gadh[*] ". The legend begins to correspond to history here.[32]
The
story goes on to recount that Nanyadeva worshiped Taleju properly, that
is, with Tantric worship and with flesh-and-blood offerings, and that
after his death she was so worshiped for another five or six
generations. During the time of Nanyadeva's descendant Harisimhadeva[*] , however, the Muslims were expanding their territories and thus came to Simraun Gadh[*] . Then, following the orders of the goddess Taleju, King Harisimhadeva[*] , having fled Simraun Gadh[*] , entered Nepal through the forest carrying Taleju.
Now
the story begins an attempt to explain certain aspects of Taleju's cult
in Bhaktapur and to record and to account for her historical
displacements within and near Bhaktapur. On their trip through the
forest, Taleju informs Harisimhadeva[*] that if
no proper sacrificial animal can be found, such as a goat, then it would
be permissible to sacrifice a water buffalo, an animal that had
previously not been acceptable to her—and that is now the main
sacrifice, along with goats, offered to her during Mohani.[33]
The king, having found a buffalo, then noticed a man defecating facing
east (a sign that he was not of twice-born status) and selected him to
kill the buffalo.[34]
Then, the story continues, Harisimhadeva[*]
came to Bhaktapur and became king. He established the goddess Taleju in
the "Agnihotra Brahman's" house in Bhaktapur. (This is her present
site. "Agnihotra Brahman" refers to a particular Rajopadhyaya Brahman;
see below here and chap. 9.) The story now moves backward a little in
time to tell of the prior search for the proper location. Taleju has
told the king that the proper place for the installation will be known
when a hole is dug and the soil removed from it will, upon being
returned to the hole, fill it exactly to the surface. The story tells of
the various places where Harisimhadeva[*] tested
the ground unsuccessfully. First he tried in the village of Panauti
(just outside the Kathmandu Valley, to the southwest of Bhaktapur). "He
dug there in the Dumangala Twa:." The soil did not
― 237 ―
fill
the hole. Nevertheless he established a temple to her there (from the
point of view of Bhaktapur and this story, a secondary temple). "The
people of Panauti still say that the goddess Taleju came to Dumangala
from Simangala, which is Simraun Gadh[*] ." Next
he began to dig in Bhaktapur, first at the Dattatreya temple area in
northeastern Bhaktapur. This time the soil overflowed the hole. He then
went to dig in a "garden," called "Megejin," but the replaced soil
overflowed the hole. He went on to the Kwache(n) Twa: in eastern
Bhaktapur (where there is now an important Bhagavati temple associated
with Taleju), but this also proved not to be the proper place. Finally
he went on to the home of the Agnihotra Brahman, in the area of the
present Laeku Square. Here he dug, and the soil exactly refilled the
hole. "Therefore the king established the goddess Taleju in that place."
The
story now introduces another theme, which seems to echo some now
obscure past events, perhaps the establishment of a new group of Royal
Brahmans (see chap. 10). The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans who had lived in the
place did not want to leave their homes. King Harisimhadeva[*] gave them money and a substitute house. This substitute house still exists; it is still called the palisa che(n) or palsa che(n)
, literally "substitute house." The Agnihotra Brahman (whose name in
the story is "Agnihotra") was a Tantric practitioner. He did not want to
leave his family land, even if he were given money and a substitute
home, he was not a greedy man. He always sat on Chetrapal Bhairava's
stone (an area-protecting "stone god" in the Taleju main courtyard)
which was then bordered by four stone pillars, each with an image of
Ganesa[*] and Durga. The Brahman wanted to kill himself rather than leave his own ancestral home. King Harisimhadeva[*]
finally chased Agnihotra away from his ancestral home by force.
Agnihotra committed suicide in his temple there, a temple of Siva
(Mahadeva), because he had lost his public prestige. Agnihotra became a
ghost (preta ) because he had killed himself. The ghost gave Harisimhadeva[*] trouble every day. Thus, Harisimhadeva[*] had the Siva temple entirely destroyed. He then did the necessary pacifying rituals.
Then, the story concludes, the four pillars with the Ganesa[*] images were sent to various places. One, a dangerous form of Ganesa[*] , was placed at the left side of the Golden Gate (the entrance to the Taleju temple complex). Another is at Bidya pitha (Tripurasundari's pitha ). Another was brought to the Indrani[*]pitha .[35]
(Our story doesn't mention the fourth pillar.) Then, the story
concludes, "In the Beko courtyard (the courtyard just outside the inner
gate and compound of the Taleju
― 238 ―
complex) the Bhairava Chetrapal stone where that Brahman used to sit exists, still, until now."
It seems likely that Taleju had, in fact, been introduced to the Kathmandu Valley from Mithila, although not by Harisimhadeva[*]
, who never reached it (chap. 3), and that the pressures of the Turkish
Muslims on Mithila with the consequent movement of Maithili Tantric
Hindus into Nepal contributed to the subsequent importance of the
goddess and of Tantrism to the valley. Slusser summarizes the historical
evidence as follows (Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p. 318):
That Taleju's cult in the Kathmandu Valley antedated Harisimhadeva[*] is documented history . . . but Taleju appears to have been held in high regard in that country [Mithila], and it is not improbable that she was the tutelary of Nanyadeva's dynasty. She was almost certainly well-known to Harishimha's[*] queen, the omnipotent Bhaktapur refugee, Devaladevi. It is abundantly clear that Taleju was favored by Sthitirajamalla [Jayasthiti Malla] and with his subsequent eruption into the affairs of Nepal Mandala[*] , the goddess was apparently raised to an eminence she had previously not enjoyed in Nepal. As we know, on Sthitimalla's visit to Patan, the fractious nobles made haste to please the new Valley strong man by restoring the run-down temple of Taleju. . . . That many of the Newars associated with Taleju's cult claim Maithili descent [as do the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans of Bhaktapur] is also suggestive of the deity's ties with Mithila.
Whatever its
historical relevance, the story as it is still told in Bhaktapur also
suggests some special aspects and qualities of this particular goddess
in the domain of Bhaktapur's goddesses. She is located first in a
traditional Hindu heaven, in contrast, say, to the members of the Nine
Durgas troupe whose legends identify them first as forest-dwelling
demonic figures (chap. 15). She is the favorite goddess of a particular
god; as a divinity's divinity, this places her in a hierarchy—her
devotee is a figure remembered as the "king" of the gods. Her subsequent
history is associated with invasions, thefts, and dynasties, and with
politics and power struggles. From the start she is embedded, available
for use by humans and quasi-humans, in a concrete form, a diagrammatic
representation on a piece of metal. The form when properly worshiped is
protective. The proper worship is Tantric with blood sacrifice. This
captured divinity, with its history and functions relating it to power,
belongs to a political dynasty, a legitimate form of power. The legend
associates it not only with Indra, but with Rama, an avatara of Visnu[*] , a divinity closely associated with Newar (and Hindu) royalty and with
― 239 ―
civic
moral order. When Taleju was established in Bhaktapur, she necessarily
took precedence over other deities with similar political claims, which
may perhaps be part of the significance of the displacement of the
Agnihotra Brahman, the destruction of his Siva temple, and his suicide.[36]
We may note that in contrast to other forms of the Goddess, Taleju is
not conceptually related to and in a sense dependent on Siva, but is the
Tantric goddess as independent and self existing and fully powerful.
Taleju
is kept in a secret inner part of the Taleju temple. The nature of her
image is also secret. Only a very few Rajopadhyaya Brahman priests from
households traditionally providing Taleju Brahmans, and who have special
initiation are allowed to see the image. Outsiders generally follow the
description in the legend and assume that it is a yantra .
Hamilton was also told at the beginning of the nineteenth century that
"there is no image of this deity which is represented by a yantra " ([1819] 1971, 210f.).[37] In worship in the Taleju temple, Taleju is represented by various forms—yantra , the metal vase-like container called the Thapi(n)ca (or alternatively Ku(n)bha, a vessel that also represents the true Devi pitha goddess, Guhyesvari), sometimes by a metal vessel with a pouring spout (a Kalas), and sometimes by an anthropoid image.
Like
most of Bhaktapur's component organizations the Taleju temple has its
esoteric internal ceremonies and public external ones related to the
larger city organization. The internal functions center around the
worship of Taleju by her attendant priests[38]
during the course of the year. Many of these take place during city-wide
calendrical festivals, but there are some thirty-five important annual
internal worship ceremonies unconnected to external urban events. Many
of these commemorate Taleju's functions as the Malla kings' lineage
goddess. These acts of worship or puja s are called tha (Kathmandu Newari tha ) puja , or tha taegu , "elevation worship," or "elevation producing and maintaining" acts. Tha taegu is thought of as a kind of initiation, dekha
(chap. 9). It lacks some features of a full Tantric initiation, and is
sometimes thought of by those who have such full initiation as a baga dekha , a "half-full" initiation. Those tha puja
s that commemorate the Malla king and, in fact, treat him as if he were
still present, take the Malla king (represented by a priest) through
three successive levels of initiation, during each of which he is
presented new mantra s, new secrets, and new instruction on ritual procedures. There are other tha puja
s as well as full initiations given at Taleju, all necessary for Taleju
temple's internal functions. These are necessary not only for the staff
and for the
― 240 ―
"king"
but also for all those for whom Taleju is in one way or another a
special deity. Descendants of the Malla kings, that is, members of the
present Malla and Pradhananga[*]thar s, have Taleju as their lineage goddess, and male thar
members have some of their initiations at the Taleju temple, although
they do not receive the highest levels of initiation in Taleju's
mysteries. Those are reserved to the chief Taleju Brahman. He is
considered to be the surrogate for the Malla king in many rituals, and
the king was entitled to higher levels of initiation than his male kin
and descendants (who are furthermore now considered by the priests to be
no longer "pure Mallas"). The Taleju principal priests who were the
king's guru s, had even higher levels of initiation than the king
himself, a fourth level, one beyond the Malla king's three. Taleju is
also the object of special devotional rituals of the other temple
priests. She is considered a sort of lineage goddess for them, in the
limited sense that the temple priesthood is inherited in their families'
lineage. All these priests also have in all other contexts another
Tantric lineage divinity, for ordinary family rituals and rites of
passage (see below and chap. 9).
In addition to the two thars of Malla descendants and three priestly thar s attendant at the temple, there are about twenty thar
s throughout the macrostatus system, some of whose members (as we have
noted in chap. 5) have some special assigned ritual function at some
time or other during the year at the Taleju temple. Many of these people
must be given tha taegu initiations, in which they must swear secrecy about their duties and about what they see in the temple.[39]
Taleju's
external function is uniquely important to the Tantric component of
Bhaktapur's symbolic system. Through her priests and by means of her mantras , she is understood by initiated practitioners to empower all city-level legitimate Tantric procedures in Bhaktapur.[40] The Brahman Taleju priest is in this context considered the ultimate guru
of all who have Tantric power. Some of this power must be transmitted
annually. For the rest, the great majority, such as the special
knowledge and efficacy of various Tantric priests (chap. 9), or the
effective ritual knowledge of the people who make religious
paraphernalia, it is said that the special knowledge, initiation, and
mantras were originally given to ancestors by a Taleju priest, but then passed down within the family or the thar from father to son or guru to student in repeated internal initiations.
Taleju's
external relation to the city is manifested and enacted at length in
the course of the harvest festival, Mohani. In the course of this
festival Taleju, as we shall see (chap. 15), is brought into relation
with
― 241 ―
several forms of the Goddess—with all the Mandalic[*] Goddesses, with Kumari (as another deity than the similarly named Kumari of the Mandalic[*]
group of goddesses), with the Nine Durgas group of deities, and with
the Goddess Devi herself in her form as Bhagavati. In this festival
Taleju is seen as participating in the basic myth of the Dangerous
Goddess and, in fact, temporarily becoming Mahisasuramardini herself
(chap. 15). During Mohani, Bhagavati/Taleju represents the maximally
powerful and full form of the Goddess. This maximal Taleju then becomes
manifest in certain ways, controlled and mediated by her temple priests.
She possesses a maiden to become manifest in the form of Kumari, in
which form she can give oracular advice to kings. She provides the mantra
that empowers the partial forms of the Nine Durgas troupe to begin
their annual nine-month cycle of manifestations of the Goddess
throughout the city. Taleju is a central focus in the interrelated set
of symbols and symbolic enactments associated with the dangerous deities
of Bhaktapur.[41]
― 243 ―
The Brahmans' Vedic Gods
The
term "Vedic" is sometimes used in Bhaktapur to separate the "ordinary"
gods and religious practices from the dangerous gods and their
associated worship, which are then sometimes called "Tantric." In this
usage "Vedic gods" are for the most part the Puranic[*]
gods of later Hinduism. However, there are many ancient truly Vedic
gods, who are invoked in the litanies, mantras, and practices of some
ceremonies of the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans for their own internal thar
and family uses, and for aspects of ceremonies performed for their
clients. As Michael Witzel writes in an article entitled "On the History
and the Present State of Vedic Tradition in Nepal," "the Vedic
religion, which preceded both Buddhism and medieval Hinduism, had
already in Licchavi time largely been superseded by Puranic[*]
and Tantric elements, yet this oldest form of Aryan worship and
learning has come down to the present age" (1976, 17). Witzel traces the
history of Vedic practices and texts in Nepal, and (for our present
purposes) notes the continuing performance of some ancient rituals such
as the Agnihotra through the centuries. He also reports the persistence
into the present of an annual Vedic Soma sacrifice. Bhaktapur Brahmans
still learn and chant the Yajurveda , although (as Witzel notes)
the knowledge of the other Vedas is dying out and there has been a
diminution in Vedic studies among the Brahmans in recent generations.
― 267 ―
The
persistence of these rituals and their associated gods is of
considerable historical interest, but from the point of view of
Bhaktapur's city religion, these Vedic gods are the internal gods of the
Brahmans and a canonical reference in some phases of Brahman conducted
worship for others. These Vedic gods are the gods that add special
supernatural effectiveness to the Brahmans' practices. Many other thars
also have special, internal divinities of diverse origin, who are of
importance to the life of the city insofar as they guarantee the
effectiveness of the thar 's output into the city system, although for these other thars they have later historical origins. Thus, for city religion the true Vedic gods have become the internally validating thar deities of the Brahmans as one cell in Bhaktapur's complex religious system.
Pilgrimage Gods of the Royal Center
There
are a number of shrines and temples that are found for the most part in
the large square in front of the Malla palace and within the Taleju
temple complex which represent gods that are not important to the public
ritual or symbolic life of the city. These include such forms and
appellations as Pasupatinatha, Guhyesvari, Annapuna[*]
, Jagannatha, Ramasvara, Kedarnatha, and Badrinatha. These shrines were
erected by the Malla kings to represent gods found at famous pilgrimage
centers in India[63] and in other parts of
Nepal, particularly the Valley shrine complex, Pasupatinatha. These
shrines are now maintained and worshiped in a perfunctory way by
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans in their continuing function as the Malla kings'
priests. They were conceived of as places where worship could be a
substitute for pilgrimages for the convenience of the court. The Malla
kings, local Brahmans say now, could get as much merit from erecting
them and in subsequent generations praying at them as by going on a
pilgrimage. It is also said that such shrines were especially important
when war or other external conditions made such pilgrimages impossible.
These sites are now sometimes worshiped by passersby or local residents,
and sometimes the local Pasupatinatha and Guhyesvari may still be
worshiped as a substitute for a visit to their main shrines at the
Pasupatinatha temple complex.
The structures are of
interest to our present study in that in contrast to most of the
temples and shrines and associated gods of Bhaktapur, they have a
reference to real space and location elsewhere than Bhaktapur and its
immediate environment. The placement of these sites at
― 268 ―
Bhaktapur's
Royal center, their Royal use, and their identification with "foreign"
shrines, echoes, perhaps, a symbolic device for relating a city as a
"cosmo-magical" symbol, as Paul Wheatley phrases it, to an "empire."
Wheatley illustrates this with a summary of Paul Mus's (1936, 1937)
study of twelfth-century Bayon in Cambodia, a city that contained
statues of provincial gods, "so that Bayon as a whole constituted a
pantheon of the personal and regional cults practiced in the various
parts of the kingdom. By thus assembling them at the sacred axis of
Kambujadesa, the point where it was possible to effect an onto-logical
passage between the worlds so that the royal power was continually
replenished by divine grace from on high, Jayarvarmin, the King, brought
these potentially competitive forces under his own control" (Wheatley
1971, 432).
Traditional Bhaktapur's "imperial"
impulses began to fade rapidly beyond the boundaries of the Valley, but
they were, in however attenuated form, an aspect of royalty and its
symbolism, as we will see in other contexts. The loss of Bhaktapur's
Malla kings, that is, of its "own kings," exaggerated and distorted the
balance toward Bhaktapur's inner orientations. The "Gods of the Royal
Center" are, perhaps, a wistful sign of past Royal conceits.
.
Tantrism As A Religious Mode
There
is a substantial literature discussing aspects of the Tantric tradition
in Buddhism and Hinduism (see, particularly, the synthesis by Gupta,
Hoens, and Goudriaan [1979]). Tantrism has been characterized as an
"historical current" within the larger South Asian tradition, a current
that is relatively easy to recognize in its manifestations and
notoriously difficult to define. "The extremely varied and complicated
nature of Tantrism, one of the main currents in the Indian religious
tradition of the last fifteen hundred years, renders the manipulation of
a single definition almost impossible. There is, accordingly, a general
uncertainty about the exact scope of the word" (ibid., 5). These
authors attempt, however, a definition, which will serve as a useful
introduction to Bhaktapur's Tantrism (ibid., 6 [emphasis added]):
In our opinion, it is mainly used in two meanings. In a wider sense, Tantrism or Tantric stands for a collection of practices and symbols of a ritualistic, sometimes magical character (e.g., mantra, yantra, cakra, mudra, nyasa . . .). They differ from what is taught in the Veda and its exegetical literature but they are all the same applied as means of reaching spiritual emancipation (mukti ) or the realization of mundane aims, chiefly domination (bhukti ) in various sects of Hinduism and Buddhism. In a more restricted sense, it denotes a system, existing in many variations, of rituals full of symbolism, predominantly—but by no means exclusively—Sakti, promulgated among "schools" . . . and lines of succession . . . by spiritual adepts or gurus . What they teach is subsumed under the term sadhana , i.e. the road to spiritual emancipation or to dominance by means of Kundaliniyoga[*] and other psychosomatic experiences. . . . It is important to remark at this point that the true Tantric sadhana is a purely individual way to release accessible to all people, women as well as men (at least in theory), householders as well as ascetics . At present the practicers (sadhaka ) of the Tantric system are mainly people who live an ordinary life within family and society. But beside this ordinary reality, they try to come into touch with a higher stratum of divine reality by a course of identification with their chosen deity who Is usually the Goddess.
Elsewhere
in South Asia the individualistic, anti-Brahmanical,
anti-social-structural aspects of Tantrism, although they influenced
renouncers of Hindu society (see, for example, fig. 18) and those who
tried to manipulate the world through magical power, became for most
― 295 ―
Figure 18.
Outside the city. A wandering Indian sadhu doing yoag on a public
porch in a mountain village.
Outside the city. A wandering Indian sadhu doing yoag on a public
porch in a mountain village.
― 296 ―
practitioners—for
those who "live an ordinary life within family and society," that is,
within the Brahmanical order—comfortably bracketed into safe and
nondisruptive contexts (ibid., 32):
The Kularnavatantra[*] states that anything which is despised in the world is honorable in the Kula [a particular school of Tantrism] path. On certain occasions, the texts even express a preference for anything which is associated with low social standing or with the breaking of taboos. . . . Of course, this was an important factor in creating for Tantrism its bad repute with the orthodox. But anti-caste statements should never be read outside their ritual context. Returned into ordinary life, no high caste Tantric would think of breaking the social taboos. One might even argue that the predilection for contact with low-caste people, especially women, in a ritual environment served to render the high-caste practicer still more conscious of the violent breakthrough of his ordinary situation which he had to make in order to proceed on the way to spiritual emancipation. Seen in this light, the ritual egalitarianism of Tantrism in practice acted as a caste-confirming and class-confirming force. One can compare the confirmatory and stabilizing role of festivals like Hob or Sabarotsava, during which caste or class relations are temporarily eliminated.
Bhaktapur
has gone further in the use and transformation of Tantrism than as an
exciting and cathartic antistructural fantasy for upper status
men—although that is still one of its important uses. It has transformed
the Tantrism of transcendence of Brahmanical order for the purposes of
individual salvation and individual power and put it to the use of the
civic order, in so doing complexifying that order. Legendary accounts of
the capture of Bhaktapur's protective deities, the Nine Durgas (chap.
15), vividly portray this double movement. The stories tell how the
demon-like deities who make up the group once lived in a jungle outside
of Bhaktapur where they killed and ate the innocent passers-by whom they
happened to encounter. Eventually the gods were captured by the spells
and wiles of a powerful Tantric practitioner. He took them into the
city, put them in a secret room in his house, and, using them for his
own private amusement, "played with them" and made them dance for him.
But then through the interference of his wife—representing one of the
central symbolic mediators from private masculine pleasure to social
order—the demon deities escaped his private control and fled the house.
The Tantric practitioner was able to recapture them, but by now they had
taken measures to prevent his taking them back into his house. Now
unable to use them for his own purposes, he, in a compromise, forces
them to pledge to protect the public city, to use their power against
those external forces of disruption that they originally repre-
― 297 ―
sented
in themselves. The Tantric expert who presided over this transition
(who in some versions is different from the magician who originally
captured them) was, significantly, a Rajopadhyaya Brahman. However, once
the secret was out, once the dangerous, blood and alcoholic
spirit-swilling, order-destroying, and polluting[1] gods were out in the visible public space of the city, special kinds of priests, Acajus
(chap. 10) had to replace the Brahman to deal with them in
public—although the Brahman's descendants would continue to be engaged
with them in more esoteric arenas.
For Bhaktapur's "Newar Brahmans" (chap. 10) and Ksatriya-like[*]
Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya groups, Tantrism is not only, as it was
for the Tantric master who captured the Nine Durgas in the
self-indulgent time before his wife's interference, a source of private
fascination but also central to the worship of their partilineal lineage
deities. Their exclusive right to Tantric initiation is, in fact, one
of the most important markers setting them off from middle-status and
low-status groups in the city. This "gentrification" of Tantrism existed
in other parts of South Asia. "The study of later Tantric literature
seems to reveal an ever tightening grasp of Brahmans and other
intellectuals on the movement—or, as one could as well say, an ever
greater hold of Tantrism upon the traditional bearers of Indian literary
culture" (Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan 1979, 27). This elite
domestication existed and exists in a somewhat uneasy relation with
Tantrism's asocial and, in fact, antisocial central thrust, as well as
with the low origins and family connections of its central deities.
The
problem is clarified by the situation of the dangerous deities in
non-Tantric communities. In a consideration of ritual in the Indian
village of Konduru in Andhra Pradesh, Paul Hiebert made a distinction
between the "high religion" of the village and its "low religion." The
"high religion" centers around the benevolent Hindu gods of the "great
tradition." Its priests are Brahmans (for the higher castes), the
offerings to the gods are vegetarian. The "low religion" centers around
"regional Hindu gods and local gods linked to Hinduism" (1971, 133).
Hiebert further notes (pp. 135-136):
Chief among these [supernatural beings] are the local and regional goddesses who reside in trees, rocks, streams and whirlwinds and are enshrined in crude rock shelters in the fields, beside the roads, and in the home. Capricious and bloodthirsty, they demand the sacrifice of animals to satisfy their desires; therefore, the Brahmans refuse to serve them. Their priests are Washermen, Potters, and Leatherworkers. . . . All villagers fear their anger
― 298 ―
which can bring disease and death to those who neglect them, blight to crops, fires to houses, barrenness to wives, and plague and drought to the village. Even the local Brahmans who deny their existence take no chance and send their offerings by the hand of a family servant to be sacrificed to the goddesses of their fields.
This
village arrangement reflects the hierarchical predominance of
"Sanskritic" over the other deities in Indian village pantheons that we
noted in the last chapter, but it also emphasizes the social
peripherality of such "local and regional" deities whose worship and
characteristics are those of Bhaktapur's dangerous deities. Even as the
status of the dangerous deities—who have been, like the Nine Durgas,
captured and taken into the city, albeit in an ambiguous
incorporation—has changed in Bhaktapur, so has the social status of
their cult and their priests. Yet, the Indian village situation clearly
suggests the contradictions and tensions in the apparent urban
respectability of these deities in Bhaktapur. The Newar Brahman, the
Rajopadhyaya Brahman, has, as we will see below and in chapter 10,
important Tantric functions, but these are hidden within private,
esoteric arenas of the city's worship. Public Tantric worship is usually
done by other priests, the Acajus (which has sometimes led to the
erroneous statement in descriptions of the Newars that they are somehow
the "Tantric priests" in some sharp opposition to the Brahmans as
"Sanskritic priests"). As we will see in chapter 10, the interlocking
roles and relations of Brahmans and Acajus in relation to Tantrism and
ordinary Hinduism in Bhaktapur are complex. As he is in Hindu
communities everywhere the Brahman is a central priestly figure in the
"ordinary" Hinduism of Bhaktapur. In relation to the Tantric component
of the city religion, however, he has special functions—as guru , giver of mantras
, officiant at some Tantric ceremonies for clients, performer of his
own private and family Tantric ceremonies, and as priest at the Royal
temples of the dangerous deities (particularly Taleju)—which make him,
the priestly master of Bhaktapur's urban, civilized Tantrism, a much
more complex figure than the ideal Sanskritic Brahman.
Tantrism In Popular Fantasy
People
in Bhaktapur without Tantric initiation have various interpretations
and fantasies regarding Tantrism. Such fantasies are encouraged by the
Tantric strategy of protecting esoteric doctrines through multiple
veilings and obfuscations of its doctrinal and symbolic implications
(cf. Bharati, 1965, chap. 6). Those veilings and obfuscations are, as we
will
― 299 ―
discuss below, often associated with some sort of an "advertisement" that there is
, in fact, a secret that is being hidden. For the noninitiate, Tantrism
means primarily "magic" practices, sometimes referred to as tantra-mantra
, that is, to practices that are capable of direct manipulation of
supernatural power for worldly ends. Noninitiates, particularly—although
not exclusively—lower-status ones, assume that this magic power is used
for legitimate, albeit usually private, ends, such as curing disease,
chasing off evil spirits, and keeping wandering bulls out of cultivated
fields.[2] Occasionally, it is assumed, the power
may be used for love magic or for harming an enemy. It is also
popularly believed that particularly powerful Tantric experts can (and
could more frequently in the past) levitate themselves or objects,
travel through the air to distant places, and control and dominate
powerful supernatural beings. From the viewpoint of the legitimate
practitioner, such direct personal uses of "power" are possible
but illegitimate and peripheral to their goals. However, even
sophisticated initiates believe that outside the civic esoteric system,
out of Brahmanical and civic moral control, there are such figures as
sadhus (wandering "renouncers") witches, sorcerers, and healers who use a
degree of Tantric power sometimes for good (in a struggle against a
contrary harmful supernatural power), sometimes for evil.
Noninitiates often believe that Tantric pujas
are associated with major violations of ordinary moral and religious
regulations such as the eating of forbidden foods and overt sexual
intercourse—including (according to one informant) even the incestuous
intercourse between brothers and sisters. In general, however,
noninitiates seem to believe that legitimate Tantric practice is, albeit
strange, good behavior and in the pursuit of socially acceptable goals.
These same people also seem to believe that most Brahmans, at least, do
not know much Tantrism, their fantasies about the dharma -violating procedures of Tantrism are directed to the secular upper thars
. This interpretation is, in fact, consonant with another essential
aspect of Bhaktapur's Tantrism, its alliance with the realm of power of
the king in opposition to the realm of moral order of the Brahman, in
his role (for Bhaktapur only one of his roles) as a priest of the benign
deities.
Upper-Status Tantrism
As
we have noted in chapter 5, there is an upper segment of Bhaktapur's
macrostatus system whose male members, after completing initiation as
full members of their thar (and whose female members under certain
― 300 ―
conditions and restrictions), have the right to Tantric initiation. These are the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, all the thars at the Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya levels, the Tini, and one Jyapu thar with some priestly functions, the Jyapu Acaju.[3] All of these thars share certain rights and customs in contrast to other, lower, thars . Their male members have the exclusive right to wear the sacred thread, the jona ; they alone have a special kind of lineage deity, the Aga(n) God; they alone have the right to have Tantric gurus
(who are Rajopadhyaya Brahmans), initiation, and practice. The worship
of the dangerous deities by people of the middle and lower thars is not considered Tantrism by upper-level initiates, nor by members of the lower-level thars themselves.
We will follow this distinction and consider Tantrism per se as the practices of initiates. We will begin with Tantric worship, that is, Tantric puja
, in Bhaktapur. We can then consider the uses of that worship. These
are of two general kinds for upper-status initiates, worship directed to
the phuki's lineage god and practices directed to mukti
or "individual salvation." We will then turn to forms that span both
esoteric initiate religion and the symbolism and religion of the larger
city.
Upper-Status Tantrism: Individually Centered Practices and Initiation
The aims of the Tantric tradition for the achievement of mukti , "spiritual emancipation," or bhukti
, "domination," as the quotation from Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan
(1979) at the beginning of the chapter epitomizes it, are aims to be
achieved by individuals, not by groups of Tantric followers, and
certainly not by traditional Hindu social units. This is the aspect of
Tantrism that is emphasized in popular books directed toward the West
and toward modern South Asians. Tantrism,
― 313 ―
so
conceived, is a practice that is supposed to alter the relation of the
individual practitioner of Tantrism to the ordinary social, religious,
and logical reality in which he or she lives. Able through Tantric
practice to see that reality as maya , illusion, an individual achieves liberation from it.
Thus, as put in a passage typical of such books (L. P. Singh 1967, 2):
In an esoteric sense Tantra means "the spiritual cult by which divine knowledge is unfolded." . . . The mystic definition of Tantra is that It is the spiritual cult which liberates from the bondages of crudeness and ignorance. . . . Tantra is a process . . . which relieves one from the fetters of crudeness. Thus Tantra is an intuitional science which stands for the progressive realization of the divine. It liberates one from the cimmerian darkness and leads unto the divine effulgence. It is a path of salvation. It is a science of the soul. The authoritative definition of Tantra is, that which brings liberation, emancipation from the bondage of Maya.
This particular
path to salvation among the several offered by Hinduism, a salvation
centered on the nature of the individual, his or her personal and
private effort and transcendence of maya , links Tantrism to
those South Asian practices such as yoga, meditation, and social
renunciation, which are based on temporary or permanent withdrawal from
social relationships and modes. Such practices, like bhakti ,
devotion to a personal god, are antithetical to Hinduism's and
Bhaktapur's dominant emphasis on submission to—and salvation by means
of—the sacralized forms of social life, a submission phrased as
adherence to the dharma . It is the very density of the familial and larger social world regulated by dharma
that gives renunciation its special oppositional force and motivation
in South Asia. In Bhaktapur the "reality" that is being seen through
includes in large part the symbolically constructed mesocosm itself and
the self that is to be dissolved is the socially constructed self. The
salvation produced by escape from moral reality, the salvation of mukti or moksa[*]
, is, on the face of it, quite different from and subversive of the
idea of salvation produced by adherence to the moral and religious
system of the city.
The technique for achieving mukti
and its consequences is, like the goals of Tantric practice, typically
described in effulgent terms even in the scholarly literature. Thus
Gupta, in a discussion of nyasa and the associated practices of bhutasuddhi in Tantric puja s, describes the sequence in terms that are typical of Tantric commentary (Gupta, Hoens and Goudriaan 1979,136):
― 314 ―
Using his yogic technique and his highly developed powers of Imagination and concentration, the Tantric practicer envisages all the ontological realities that go to make up his personality. He then proceeds to envisage within himself the process of cosmic creation . . . in reverse order. . . . He follows every single step, imagining the dissolution of each element into its preceding cause, until in the end he is ultimately dissolved or immersed m his cosmic source. He then envisages his own resurrection, retracing each step of cosmic creation. Only now, having burned away with cosmic fire and blown away with cosmic air all his human imperfections and limitations, he experiences bliss and, permeated with it, remains immersed in the cosmic source. . . . He now has a body made of pure substance . . . identical with that of the deity's and he is free to invite her to descend into it—to invoke the divine ego to descend on to his ego.
What is the
relation of such ideal transcending procedures—these techniques for a
blissful escape from self, family, and city in Bhaktapur—to the actual
individual uses of individual Tantrism there? As we did in the yogic
references in familial Tantric puja s, we will find echoes of
these antistructural, reality-transcending, and self-altering programs
in the goals and forms of individual practice and symbolism, transformed
and tamed, as all Bhaktapur's Tantrism is, by a careful fitting into in
the civic system.
Individually centered Tantrism is presented to upper-status males in conjuction with a sequence of initiations, dekha (sometimes dikha , both deriving from diksa in Sanskrit), which are conducted by the family's Brahman guru , the same Brahman who is also the family's purohita , or family priest. In the course of each initiation certain information is passed on by the guru to the pupil or initiate (sisya[*] in Sanskrit). There are three significant levels or stages in relation to Tantric knowledge for the upper-status thar s: (1) the initiation to "caste," the Kaeta ("loincloth") Puja
(app. 6); (2) the initiation into the worship of the Aga(n) God; and
(3), an initiation in preparation for dying, death, and "salvation," the
moksa[*] or mukti initiation.
There are many kinds of initiation in Bhaktapur. They all entail the transmission of some esoteric knowledge by the guru
, or his equivalent, and a solemn and sacred pledge of secrecy by the
initiate. When, for example, a new wife comes to a household, or a new
Acaju is employed, they are told the names and some of the mantras
of the particular form or forms of the household lineage gods they must
deal with, in a ceremony in which they pledge secrecy. Such initiations
are sometimes called ba dekha (or "baga dekha ") or "half-initiations" by those familiar
― 315 ―
with more advanced Tantric initiations. There are also many special initiations within those thar
s that have a craft profession, such as the playing of some particular
musical instrument, the making of masks, or the making of metal images.
These initiations initiate and make sacred the teaching relation between
guru and initiate, introduce the appropriate mantras and
procedures of worship to the deity who will give effectiveness to the
studies, and may introduce technical instructions or esoteric knowledge.
At all levels and in all thar s, now including the Po(n)s, there is an initiation of boys into their thar , the Kaeta Puja . All thar s have Kaeta Puja ceremonies that are associated with the idea of a radical change of status for a boy, his entry into his thar 's secrets, and his becoming fully morally responsible for following the dharma . The Kaeta Puja is a samskara , one of Bhaktapur's rites of passgage (app. 6) derived mostly from the Hindu tradition. In the upper thar s, the boy receives not only a loin cloth symbolizing his maturity but also the jona or sacred thread. For these upper-status boys this is the first in a potential series of initiations. For boys of other thar s it is the last (with the exception of craft initiation, which is sometimes given in conjunction with the Kaeta Puja ). During the Kaeta Puja boys are told something about their lineage god and are given some mantra s to use in worship. These mantra s, given by the guru (who in lower-status households may be a family member), like the mantra s given in more advanced initiation, are those shared by the larger phuki group and are thought by the phuki members to be their particular and special mantra , although they may, in fact, like the name of the phuki Aga(n) God, be common, not only to other groups that have split off from the lineage, but also to much larger groupings.
The next level of initiation, possible only to the upper thar s, is the one that is usually designated by the unqualified term "dekha ," the initiation to the phuki 's Aga(n) God practices. In previous times almost all men in the upper thar
s took this initiation as young adults. Now, except for those Brahmans
and Acaju priests who need this and other initiations for their priestly
duties, many upper-status men delay taking this initiation until after
the active years of their education and professional life—and some may
never take it. Once having taken the Aga(n) dekha , one has time-consuming obligations in the ceremonies for worship of the Aga(n) God. In this second dekha the initiate enters into the secret Aga(n) religion of the phuki , is told the name of the god and its proper mantra , and can see it—or in those thar s where noninitiate family
― 316 ―
members
are able to see the Aga(n) God wrapped and hidden in cloths on some
occasions, see it uncovered—for the first time. The initiate is now also
told the proper procedures necessary in the worship of the Aga(n) God.
He is introduced to japa meditation, where he repeats the same mantra
for some given number of times, while counting off the repetitions by
means of the beads of a special necklace. The new knowledge and practice
is taught to the initiate over several days (depending on the student's
quickness and ability) by the family guru , who has now become his guru . In the context of this initiation the phuki 's Aga(n) God is referred to as the student's istadevata , the student's own tutelary god.[24] The initiate is also told something about cakra
meditation, the idea that the Goddess can be brought into his body, or
resides in his body, and can be moved through a series of internal cakras
or centers. The meditative practices he is introduced to are not for
his private purposes—for either power or for penetrating illusion in a
quest for salvation—but as instruments in the worship of his lineage
deity. These introductions to yogic procedures in conjunction with the
remainder of the esoteric information he is given moves him into the
group of initiates which constitutes his phuki in their focal shared relation to their secret lineage deity.
The third possible initiation is often called Nirban (Sanskrit, Nirvana[*] ) initiation. This is available to men in the upper thar
s who had the previous initiations and who would typically take it in
their forties or fifties. For Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, the techniques
learned at this level of initiation are considered necessary for the
really powerful forms of Tantric worship, particularly those associated
with the Taleju temple,[25] for conducting Brahman-assisted Aga(n) God worship of upper-status families, and for undertaking the role of guru to members of these families in their middle- and upper-level dekha s. Brahmans, like other upper-status men, also may undergo this stage of initiation for their own "salvation," for mrban , or mukti . Not all practicing Brahmans have this level of dekha ; some will undergo it later in life, while others—those with middle-level clients or temple pujari
work—may never have it. Even fewer of the non-Brahman upper-status men
now undergo it. Many of them do not even undergo the Aga(n) initiation,
which is a necessary prerequisite to this one. However, for those men
who are especially interested in continuing Tantric studies—either from
interest in Tantrism in itself, or for the specific salvation promised
by the initiation—this aristocratic option is available.
During the third-level initiation and studies, the initiate learns more
― 317 ―
about
his Aga(n) Goddess and her secret connections with the other Tantric
deities in the city. He is instructed further in meditation technique,
particularly cakra meditation. This is often in a limited form in
comparison with the way this kind of meditation is known and used by
Tantric practitioners and yogi s elsewhere, but is more elaborate than the initiate's previous meditation. It is considered to be a kind of Kundalini[*] Yoga for the purpose of moving the Goddess into the cakra located in the "heart," for meditation and worship. The instruction at this level requires daily study with a guru
during a period of about one month. Following Nirban initiation, the
initiate may now also read esoteric books, often in the possession of
families, which deal with meditation, with Kundalini[*]
Yoga, and with the secret connections and relations of Tantric deities
in the city. It is said that the unauthorized reading of such books
without initiation leads to insanity or blindness.
What has this to do with mukti , or nirban
, that is, with "salvation"? The cosmic fire and cosmic air that the
initiate experiences are considerably less freeing and transforming than
our introductory quotations promised. He must await his death for their
full effect, and even then his self, he hopes, will be only modestly
transformed. People in Bhaktapur, like many South Asians, have various
elaborate and inconsistent ideas about their fate after death. They
believe, in one or another context, that it depends on their moral
behavior during life (this life and previous ones), on their ritual
activities and general actions at the time of dying, and on the proper
ceremonies being performed by their family (particularly by their oldest
son) after their death—especially during the first several days.
Personal fate after death is also variously conceived. One joins the
"fathers," the pitrs[*] . One wanders
around somewhere for a period forming a spiritual body, and then goes to
be judged by Yama, the King of the Dead, in his kingdom, whereupon one
may be reincarnated or one may go to one of several heavens. Whatever mukti or nirban
means to the people of Bhaktapur and to the Nirban initiate practicing
meditation for "salvation," it does not mean that "highest [stage] . . .
when the soul is absorbed in the Paramatman [the supreme soul] as the
river is lost in the sea . . . [and where] there is no persistence of
personality . . . and there is nothing left to do, or to attain to, or
to gain" (Stevenson 1920, 187f.).[26] Whatever the highest theological speculations about the dissolving of the self as salvation, mukti
, for those people with whom we have discussed this (and in their
understanding of what others believe), this is neither what they believe
nor what they want mukti to entail. It seems to mean, rather, the avoidance
― 318 ―
of
painful new lives, and the chance to remain in some heavenly place,
usually the particular heaven of the most unproblematic of the city's
moral deities, Visnu-Narayana[*] . This implies,
for many, being surrounded by their family and remmbering their present
life. The main focus of Nirban studies is the preparation for the time
of dying, the maran kal (Sanskrit, marana[*] kala ) the appointed time for "destruction." Tantric discipline leads to a control of mind which can be helpful at the maran kal
in two ways. At the time of death, the spirit resists leaving the body
easily, the dying person will suffer for a long time. If he uses the
proper mantra s and meditates on the god Narayana[*]
(never on a Tantric deity), however, the soul leaves the body more
easily and the adept has a quicker and less painful death. Tantric
education, sadhana , helps in this meditation. The other problematic aspect of dying is that bad thoughts during the maran kal
—worries about money, angry or vengeful thoughts, a wish for alcoholic
spirits, and the like, will cause a punitive distressing reincarnation.
Tantric discipline allows the maintenance of a peaceful mind and thus
prevents a bad rebirth, and ideally any rebirth less comfortable than in
"Narayana's[*] heaven."
However
trivialized these practices and goals may seem from the point of view
of Tantrism's highest philosophical ideals, and however woven into
larger social practices, the underlying direction is familiar—a
detachment from the realities, concerns, and passions of social
inter-relatedness, a detachment that will allow the practitioner to
avoid, if only at the moment of death, becoming entangled in Bhaktapur's
enveloping world.
Techniques learned during the Tantric dekha s are used in the phuki worship we discussed above. These include special mantra
s, hand gestures, and meditative practices. An important technique
taught in these initiations is the visualization as a clear
image—following some canonical description—of the deity to be worshiped
and, eventually, the ability to mentally place this image within the
body or within a mandala[*] drawn on a purified area on the floor. The ability to perform a puja
to a mental image, to be able to dispense with a material external
image, is considered to be one of the essential achievements of advanced
Tantric practice in Bhaktapur, and one of the factors separating
Tantrism from the externally somewhat similar worshiping of the
dangerous deities through the sacrificial offerings of noninitiates.
In the remainder of his life after his initiation, the Nirban initiate practices his cakra meditation during daily worship, which usually
― 319 ―
takes place in the morning during, roughly, one hour in the Aga(n) Room on the back half of the civata
floor of the house. This daily worship is to the Aga(n) God—(whose,
most often, subsidiary image is in the Aga(n) Room)—and to the household
gods, who will be represented there by secondary images.[27]
In the course of his worship through one or another meditative
procedure, he is supposed to put himself in the state of concentration
and ability to create an image called (both in Bhaktapur and in Tantric
theory) dhyana . The imagined image has a specified form, color,
number of arms, objects in its hands, significant gestures of some of
its hands, a special vehicle, and so forth. Dhyana , here, is not a dissolution of consciousness, but a kind of control or concentration of it.[28] The initiate may also come to the Aga(n) Room for silent meditation when he wishes to. He may now use japa meditation or some form of cakra meditation. Here the meditation in itself, the practice of sadhana in itself, is his goal.
Symbolic Complexes: Sacrifice
The
dangerous deities are usually distinguished from the ordinary ones in
that their proper worship (as the legend of Taleju, for example,
emphasized) requires that they be offered alcoholic spirits and animal
flesh, (see, for example, fig. 19) which would be forbidden and sinful
as offerings to the ordinary gods. The use of animal sacrifice in
contrast to vegetarian offerings to mark a division and contrast among
gods and types of ritual did not apparently exist in Vedic religion,
where (contrary to what most nonscholarly Newar Hindus seem now to
believe) there were both animal and vegetable offerings. "Ultimately,"
as Madeleine Biardeau put it, "the 'putting to death' of cereals or
plants was scarcely less violent than the murder of animal victims"
(Biardeau and Malamoud 1976, 139 [our translation]). The Laws of Manu
(V, 40 [i.e., section V, verse 40]) includes plants in its attempt to
justify the "murder" of various creatures. "Herbs, trees, cattle, birds,
and (other) animals that have been destroyed for sacrifices, receive
[in rebirth] higher existences" (Bühler 1969, 175). Biardeau points out
that the Smrti[*] texts illustrate, however, a
particular "embarrassment" in relation to the animal sacrifices, for
animals were not to be eaten m non-sacrificial
― 324 ―
Figure 19.
Sacrifice of a young male goat to the goddess Bhagavati.
Sacrifice of a young male goat to the goddess Bhagavati.
― 325 ―
forms. Thus, according to Manu , (parentheses are Bühler's; Bühler 1969, p. 174; Manu V, 31, 32, 33):
"The consumption of meat (is befitting) for sacrifices," that is declared to be a rule made by the gods; but to persist (in using it) on other (occasions) is said to be a proceeding worthy of Rakshasas [malevolent demons].
He who eats meat when he honors the gods and . . . [ancestral spirits], commits no sin, whether he has bought it, or himself has killed (the animal). . . . A twice-born man who knows the law, must not eat meat except in conformity with the law; for if he has eaten it unlawfully, he will, unable to save himself, be eaten after death by his (victims).
Significantly,
Brahmans are included among the meat eaters. "A Brahman must never eat
animals unhallowed by Mantras; but obedient to the primeval law, he may
eat it consecrated with Vedic text." Yet, with all these (and various
other) attempts to distinguish sacrifice from murder duly made, the Laws
state, "a man who, being duly engaged (to officiate or to dine at a
sacred rite), refuses to eat meat, becomes after death an animal during twenty-one existences" (Manu V, 35, 36; Buhler[*] 1969, 174f. [emphasis added]). Sanctions were sometimes needed to force people to participate in the animal sacrifice. These ancient issues have persisted in full force in Bhaktapur.
Biardeau
notes that the division between animal and vegetarian sacrifice has in
recent millennia become associated with a hierarchy of lower and higher
practices, deities, and priests. As we noted in descriptions of other
South Asian communities (chap. 8 and above) the vegetarian gods there
are higher than the meat eating ones, and their priests, Brahmans, are,
in turn, vegetarian and superior to the priests of the flesh-eating
gods, whose priests typically belong to lower and nonvegetarian castes
(Biardeau and Malamoud 1976, 140). Bhaktapur, of course, has suppressed
the hierarchy of the dangerous and benign gods, and hesitates, in fact,
to decide which might be higher.[34] The
suppression is an uneasy one. Newar Brahmans, as they did in the times
reflected in Manu's laws, participate in blood sacrifice and eat
sacrificially prepared meat. For them and for all the upper thar s, however, sacrifice and meat eating takes its meaning from the various violations of the ordinary dharma that they represent.
Animal
sacrifice or an equivalent meat offering is the proper offering to
dangerous gods—which in most cases means a goddess—and is required in
upper-status Tantric worship to the Aga(n) God and to other Tantric
deities. Sacrificial worship of the dangerous gods is optional for those
without Tantric initiation, with one essential exception. Every
― 326 ―
household in the city must
offer a yearly animal sacrifice or meat offering to Bhagavati during
the course of the household ceremonies during the harvest festival,
Mohani. Most households, if they can afford to at all, perform
sacrifices several times during the course of the year. This is done
during important rites of passage, during the ad hoc occasions
when a worship of a dangerous deity may seem advisable, and during
certain of the annual festivals that are occasions for large,
semiritualized family feasts.
The kind of animal
sacrificed is optional. An egg is considered a minimal but proper
sacrifice to a dangerous deity, and it is offered often by very poor
families, using the same terminology for the offering as is applied to
other animal sacrifice. The offering of the egg is in fact sometimes
called khe(n) syaegu , "killing the egg." A poor family may restrict itself to using a mixture, samhae , which is also used by upper-status families in the course of Tantric puja s in addition to the actual climactic killing of an animal. Samhae
is a mixture of black soybeans, ginger, beaten and fried rice, "puffed"
or "popped" roasted rice, dried fish, and pieces of water buffalo meat.
The dried fish are purchased in shops that also sell grain; the buffalo
meat is obtained from the Nae butchers whose thar profession is
the ritual killing of water buffaloes. The water buffalo was
traditionally the only animal that the butcher killed and sold as the
only alternative kind of meat to an animal sacrificed in a family puja
. These buffaloes are always killed by the butcher in the course of a
perfunctory ritual sacrifice, and this makes the eating of their meat by
others the taking of what is gesturally at least a consecrated prasada .
Samhae
or eggs may also be used by families at any social and economic level
for perfunctory worship of one or another dangerous deity. However, the
animal most commonly sacrificed in important household or Aga(n) House puja
s by people who can possibly afford one is the male goat. Poorer people
may use a rooster on the occasion when a goat would otherwise be
sacrificed. Other animals are sacrificed in special occasions and
settings. Water buffalo are the focus of sacrifice at the Taleju temple
and by the Nine Durgas group, where they symbolize the buffalo demon
vanquished by Devi in the Devi Mahatmya . At certain sacrificial ceremonies, pa(n)ca bali
, five kinds of animals are sacrificed: water buffaloes, goats,
roosters, drakes, and rams. A sixth kind of animal, the pig, is
sacrificed in special and limited contexts by the men who incarnate the
Nine Durga deities. A castrated male goat, called a khasi , sometimes regarded as a unique type of animal, is consid-
― 327 ―
ered the ideal animal for sacrifice to Ganesa[*] . Sacrificial animals are almost always male animals.[35]
There are some astrologically caused problems when the sacrifice of a
female animal is required upon the advice of a Josi (astrologer), and
there are Newar festivals in other communities in which female animals
are reportedly sometimes sacrificed, but almost all sacrifice in
Bhaktapur is of male animals.
The most generally used term for an animal sacrifice is bali , (from Sanskrit, meaning tax, tribute, offering) and in some contexts, bau , which is said to be a Newari derivation of bali . ("Bali " and "bau
" are also used for nonmeat offerings in one restricted context, death
ceremonies, where rice offerings to ancestors and to crows and dogs as
representatives of Yama are so named. Daily offerings of rice to the
deceased ancestors of a household are also called bali offerings.) The sacrificial animal is also sometimes referred to as a baha(n) (from Sanskrit vahana , the—most usually—animal vehicle of a god), and thus a sacrifice may be called a baha(n) puja.
As part of the attempt to distinguish sacrifice from murder ("Slaughtering for sacrifices is not slaughtering" [Manu
V, 39]), the animal must indicate his assent to the sacrifice, so that
he may (again echoing Manu) "receive a higher existence," and be freed
of the bad karma that has caused him to be born as an animal.[36] The sign is the shaking of the animal's head or body in certain ways.[37]
During the course of the dedication of the animal to the deity ritually
pure water is sprinkled on it, often getting into the ear, which helps
ensure the proper movement. Extremely rarely there are animals who are
thought not to have assented and they are turned free to wander in the
city, and must not be harmed. Throat cutting and death through the
resulting exsanguination is considered the specifically Newar way of
sacrificing. Rajopadhyaya Brahmans explain that the animal should have
life in him to witness the sacrifice he is making as his gift to the
deity, and this is not possible in sacrifice through decapitation.
Non-Newar Nepalis who perform sacrifices do so by decapitating animals,
and this is often referred to as one of the salient contrasts between
Newars and others.[38] Fowl are decapitated by
the Newars, but in keeping with the way mammals are decapitated, with
the cut starting at the throat rather than at the back of the neck. The
stream of blood from the severed carotid arteries of the sacrificial
animal is sprayed on the image of the deity.
The sacrifice of the animal, most typically a male goat, comes (as we have seen in the description of the Tantric puja ) in the course of a puja sequence, and at one of the major climaxes of the sequence. The animal
― 328 ―
itself is worshiped. Colored pigments and flowers are put on its head; people make gestures of respect to it; a special pasu mantra, a "beast" mantra
, is said for it. The goat is told by the presiding priest or family
worshiper that if it agrees it will be able to go to heaven. Sacred
water, uncooked rice, and flowers are thrown on its body and head.
People then wait for the sign of assent from the animal. A chicken,
duck, or water buffalo (when killed by a butcher) must shake its head; a
goat must shake its entire body as a sign of acceptance. A buffalo of
special ritual importance (that is, all except those routinely but
sacrificially killed to be sold as meat by butchers) must, like the
goat, shake its body as a sign of acceptance. Although, as we have
noted, the animal almost always eventually gives the assent sign, people
must sometimes wait a while for it. Once the sign of assent ms given,
the animal may now be killed. After the throat is slit and the blood
allowed to spray over the god image "to give drink to the deity," the
head of the animal is cut off and placed on a metal plate, a puja bha:
, which is placed in front of the deity as a food offering. Flowers and
colored pigment are taken from the deity and placed on the puja bha:
which will, bearing the head, be brought to the feast that always
follows the animal sacrifice. Parts of this head will be distributed to
the senior members of the phuki in a formal hierarchical pattern
as we will recount below. At the time of the sacrifice the various
offerings made to the god image previously, flowers, colored pigment,
and food offerings become splattered with blood. Some of them are taken
and distributed among the worshipers as prasada , and among these the food offerings taken back as prasada
are eaten by the worshipers. In a goat sacrifice the abdomen may be
opened and a length of intestine taken out, then knotted at one end and
blown into to inflate it. The other end is tied, and the image of the
deity is now garlanded with this intestinal balloon.
The
body of the animal is now prepared for butchering. Its hair may be
singed. This is considered necessary in some contexts, in pitha puja
s, for example, but optional in others where instead the skin may be
treated with boiling water to facilitate the removal of hair. The animal
is now to be butchered, usually at or near the place of its sacrifice
in preparation for a feast.
Who does the actual
killing? This question illustrates the tension between slaughter as a
sin and sacrifice as a religious duty. The two thar s whose traditional responsibilities include the killing of animals for food—(and, traditionally, in the case of untouchable Po(n) also the execution of criminals)—are among the very lowest in Bhaktapur.[39]
― 329 ―
Fishing, the traditional source of the dried fish used in the samhae
offerings, is one of the duties exclusively assigned to the Po(n)s, the
untouchables. The Nae who kill the water buffaloes are also close to
the bottom of the status system.
The ideal is for the chief worshiper to kill the sacrificial animal himself. For Aga(n) God puja s in the household or Aga(n) House the acting head of the household or representative of the phuki
, whether he is king—or his contemporary Brahman surrogate in Taleju,
the king's Aga(n) House—Brahman, or Josi, or any member of the upper thar
s, must cut the throat of the sacrificial animals himself. In these
cases it is not proper to delegate the sacrificial act to the Acaju,
although that is done, as we have noted, in cases where no one in a
group has the initiation, or is available to perform the sacrifice. In
public settings, however, attended by people beyond the circle of
initiates, the Acaju or one of the lowest thar s[40]
may do the killing, protecting the highest groups in the public arena
from the possible stigma of slaughter. Middle and lower groups also do
their own killing in family puja s, although the middle groups may use a member of the Jyapu Acaju, or "farmer Acaju" thar s on important or public occasions.
― 345 ―
Preliminaries: Kinds of Priests and Priestly Functions
The
priests of Bhaktapur's civic moral realm have a central concern with
correct moral behavior and the structuring efficacy of purity and
pollution; the priests of the extramoral realm deal with a more direct
power, a power that transcends morality as well as purity and pollution.
The extramoral religion dealing with powers which transcend that civic
moral realm, while at the same time ensuring its protection, is the
special religion of Bhaktapur's version of the Ksatriyas[*] as Ksatriyas[*] , but has its echoes and uses throughout the city.
The
Newar Brahman, the Rajopadhyaya Brahman, is at the summit of both these
religious realms. Within the realm of civic ordering he is allied with a
whole set of manipulators of purity, and thus of social order and of
salvation-producing dharmic order. These allies are auxiliary
priests and what we will call "para-priests," as well as various
pollution-manipulating priest-like functionaries—purifiers such as
barbers and collectors of impurity such as, above all, the untouchables.
In
his role as Tantric guru and priest the Rajopadhyaya Brahman presides
over that other world in which purity is not an issue, where the priests
and practitioners of the world of the dangerous deities manipulate
through those deities the extramoral world of physical events—a world of
rain and drought, disease and cure, earthquake and war. Such priests
manipulate the deities through devices of power, and the deities, in
turn, manipulate the nonmoral world. The Rajopadhyaya Brahman's
essential priestly ally in this realm is the Acaju, the priest who
performs in public those actions that the Brahman can do only in secret.
The two sorts of religion—the socially constructive dharmic religion and the religion of power—converge once again, as they had in the Rajopahyaya[*]
Brahmans, on the untouchable Po(n), and the near-untouchable Jugi.
These are the ultimate collectors of impurity, facilitating the purity
of all above them. Yet, their ability to do this, whatever the enormous
stigma to their social status may be, is a sign of a power to transcend
some, at least, of the implications of that impurity. This is clearest
in the ascription of Tantric knowledge to the Jugi, but is also a latent
aspect of the meaning of the Po(n).
We have been
proceeding as if the term "priest" in itself were unproblematic. It was
not problematic in the discussion of the priest's contrasts with the
king insofar as the "priest" has been the idealized
― 346 ―
figure
of the Brahman. The Brahman in such discussions is subsumed comfortably
under summary characterizations of "priests"—where the problem in
characterization is usually to delineate the "priest" in contrast to
other mediators with the "supernatural"—shamans, diviners, magicians,
and prophets. Among these the "priest" is someone who "has a special and
sometimes secret knowledge of the techniques of worship, including
incantations, prayers, sacrificial acts, songs, and other acts that are
believed to bridge the separation between the divine or sacred and the
profane realms. . .. Because the priest gains his special knowledge from
a school for priests, he is differentiated from other religious and
cultic leaders . . . who obtain their positions by means of individual
efforts. . .. As a member of the institution [the priesthood] that
regulates the relationship between the divine or sacred and the profane
realms through ritual, the priest is the accepted religious and
spiritual leader in his society" (E. O. James 1974, 1007). Such an
account emphasizes the social centrality and "routinization" of the
institutionalized priesthood in making the priest the accepted
"spiritual leader" of the community. In the terms of such a definition,
we can discriminate among the functionaries who mediate between the
sacred and profane and who belong to the central institutionalized civic
order, certain "priests" who help the Brahman in conducting rituals or
who act in lieu of Brahmans in rituals or who work for clients where
Brahmans can or will not officiate. These are auxiliary priests .
We are now left with one further distinction. In chapter 11 we will
discuss activities, most particularly purification, that are "at the
margins of the sacred." These activities are for the purpose of putting
individuals in a proper state to enter into the sacred realm, the realm
where priests operate, and do not in themselves entail "techniques of
worship." The experts who perform these activities are not properly
priests themselves. This is clear in the case of the vitally important
purificatory work of the Nau, the "barber." The same claim may be made
regarding the astrologers, the Josis. We will call those whose functions
are to prepare people for their encounters with the sacred para-priests .
Bhaktapur's Brahmans
The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans
In
the general perspective of modern Nepal the "Newar" Brahmans of
Bhaktapur are a problematic group of Brahmans, in some sense second-
― 347 ―
ary
to those Brahmans associated with the ruling Gorkhali dynasty. In
Bhaktapur, as in other Newar communities, the dominant Brahmans, who
share the surname "Rajopadhyaya," must differentiate themselves not only
from the Partya: or Khae(n), that is, the Indo-Nepalese Brahman, but
also from two other kinds of "non-Newar" Brahmans—the Bhatta[*]
and the Jha Brahmans—who live and work in Bhaktapur. For the most part
they identify themselves in contrast to other Brahmans by their thar name, Rajopadhyaya,[2] which identifies their connection with the Malla dynasty as the "king's counselor" (see fig. 20).
In
their own legendary history the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans came from the
great ancient Indian political, religious, and cultural center, Kanauj
(also called Kanyakubja), in North India, the same city that they
believe to have been the earlier seat of what became the Malla dynasty.
Kanauj was in the area of India from which successive Muslim invasions
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries drove many Hindus into nearby
Nepal.
The Rajopadhyaya's historical legend tells
how in the distant past two Brahman brothers came to Nepal from
Kanyakubja. Their names were "Alias Raj" and "Ullas Raj." Ullas Raj
settled in the mountains, while Alias Raj settled in the Kathmandu
Valley. Ullas Raj became a Partya: (literally, a "hill dweller") because
he settled in the mountains. Alias Raj became a Newar because he
settled in the Valley. Ullas Raj mixed with the Partya: people. As he
had done farming in Kanyakubja he remained in the hills, where his
descendants continue to be farmers.[3] His
children spoke the Partya: language (Nepali). Alias Raj mixed with the
Newar people, and thus his children spoke Nepal Bhasa[*]
(Newari). Alias Raj and Ullas Raj had no more relations with each other
because they now had different languages and customs. They did not keep
up their family relations. After a few generations their descendants
did not even know each other. When Harisimhadeva[*] came to Bhaktapur he brought new Kanyakubja Brahmans with him. Harisimhadeva[*] gave those Kanyakubja Brahmans who had been in Bhaktapur prior to his arrival a "substitute house,"[4] which is now still used by the Rajopadhyayas[*] . As the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans who came with Harisimhadeva[*]
from Kanyakubja and the Rajopadhyaya descendants of Allas Raj were the
"same kinds" of Brahmans, they mixed very easily with each other. They
both became Rajopadhyaya Brahmans.
However, the account continues, Harisimhadeva[*] also brought other
Brahmans with him, these were Maithili Brahmans from the nearby area of
Mithila whose descendants are the Jha Brahmans (one group
― 348 ―
Figure 20.
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans in a purification ceremony at the river.
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans in a purification ceremony at the river.
― 349 ―
of Bhaktapur's "non-Newar" Brahmans). He brought them "because they came from a place close to his town of Simraun Gadh[*]
," but his own royal priests were the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans from
Kanyakubja. As the Kanyakubja Brahmans did not have enough Kanyakubja
Brahman families to marry with in "Nepal" (that is, the Kathmandu
Valley),[5] Harisimhadeva[*]
repeatedly brought in new Brahmans from Kanyakubja. Even now, this
particular account concludes, the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans have a barely
adequately sized group for marriages.
The legend
that we have paraphrased reflects some historical reality. It seems
generally accepted by historians that the Rajopadhyaya are of Kanyakubja
origin, that they were associated with the Malla court, that they were
dominant in that court among other Brahmans, and that they were
centrally associated with the worship of the royal tutelary goddess
Taleju. As a result of the integration of the new Malla dynasty with the
preexisting society of the city into the historical synthesis that
Bhaktapur looks back on as "Newar," this group of Brahmans were to
become the Newar Brahmans, the only one of the various kinds of
Valley Brahmans to become the focal Brahmans of the integrated Newar
caste system.[6]
From the
earliest records of the Kathmandu Valley communities who were to become
the Newars, there have been reports of Brahmans. Thus in the seventh
century A.D. , the Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang wrote that the Licchavi Valley society was ruled by a Ksatriya[*]
dynasty, and that it had so many Brahman priests that he was unable to
ascertain their exact number (D. R. Regmi 1969, 271). Inscriptions from
Licchavi times refer to the "leadership" or eminent position of Brahmans
(ibid., 272). What happened to these earlier Brahmans on the advent of
the Kanyakubja Rajopadhyaya Brahmans? It is tempting to think of them as
having become some of the lower-status auxiliary priests of Malla
Nepal, but our own materials are silent on this.
Bhaktapur's Rajopadhyaya Brahmans consider themselves to belong to one exogamous lineage.[7]
There are two major groupings of this lineage within Bhaktapur, named
in accordance with the areas in and close to which they live or, in the
case of now scattered households, once lived. These are the Ipache(n)
and the Cucache(n) branches. The Ipache(n) group are those who live in
proximity to the Laeku or Durbar Square, and thus to the Taleju temple
(map 6; above). Both of these sections contain certain families who have
the hereditary rights to be Taleju priests. These "Taleju families"
also are the ones whose jajaman s include those upper-level Chathariya families traditionally associated with the royal administration.[8]
― 350 ―
The
city's two geographically based groups of Rajopadhyaya Brahmans are
partially separated lineage groups. They worship at the same Digu god
shrine but at a different time. They have two different Aga(n) Houses
for many purposes (but on some occasions make use of the same one).
Their separation implies that they are not affected by each others phuki
birth and death pollution, but the degree of relations they do have
means that they cannot intermarry. Because there are no local
Rajopadhyaya families into which they can marry, all Bhaktapur
Rajopadhyaya men have to find their wives elsewhere, usually among the
Rajopadhyaya women of Patan or Kathmandu. Similarly, all the Bhaktapur
Rajopadhyaya girls have to leave Bhaktapur for marriages in Patan or
Kathmandu.
At the time of this study almost all of
the adult male Rajopadhyaya Brahmans of Bhaktapur did traditional
Brahmanical work, in contrast to Brahmans elsewhere, whom they
characterized as often being "only Brahmans through their descent."[9]
The Brahmans' internal religion is a variant of orthodox Brahmanical
practices. In contrast to "Sanskritized" Brahmans elsewhere, the
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans do eat certain meat, that of the goat and duck,
but other kinds of meat and certain foods (such as garlic or mushrooms)
are improper for them. They deviate from such Sanskritized Brahmans most
markedly because of their participation in the Tantric aspects of
Bhaktapur's religion, as we have described in chapter 9. Within their
own group the Brahmans must provide their own priests, a situation they
share with the lowest thar s in Bhaktapur, those below the level
that one or another kind of external priest will serve. A Rajopadhyaya
Brahman's family priest or purohita must be someone who is not a
patrilineally linked member of the family, and thus he must be linked
through marriage to one of the family's men, with the important
exception that the paju , the mother's brothers, or their sons are also not acceptable.
Rajopadhyaya
Brahman boys learn Sanskrit, the reading and chanting of the Vedas,
traditional philosophical and scriptural aspects of Hinduism, and how to
conduct ceremonies and the like from their fathers and uncles,
beginning with a three-month orientation instruction at the time of
their Upanayana initiation to full Brahman status. Until about
fifteen years before this study, there was also a special school in
Bhaktapur where the Brahman students received extra training in Sanskrit
and the Vedas from scholarly teachers. Much of their training came more
informally from observations, instructions, and discussion—first on the
practice and meaning of the worship that took
― 351 ―
place in their own houses, and later, after their Upanayana initiation, while accompanying and helping their fathers and uncles as they performed ceremonies for others.
The
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans have various functions as priests in Bhaktapur.
Some are narrowly related to specific client families; others to the
religious and symbolic life of the larger civic system. They act as
domestic priests, purohita s, to a wide span of unequivocally "clean" thar s; one definition of being fully "clean" is precisely that a Brahman will serve as the thar' s family priest. Those thar s whom the Brahmans will serve as purohita
are generally those at and above the status level X, in our listing of
social levels m chapter 5, that is, from the lowest levels of the Jyapu thar s and above. In another socially circumscibed function, they serve the Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya thar s, as well as other families within the Brahman group, as guru s in the transmission of Tantric knowledge and in the conducting of some kinds of Tantric worship.
In
addition to these services for client families, the Rajopadhyaya
Brahmans have public functions. These include their essential
representative position in the city at the summit of the purity-ranked
aspect of the status system. In the terms of this system they represent
the exemplary highest position. They help define, by means of contrast,
king, aristocrats, and technicians of the ordinary, physical world in
one kind of opposition, and the maximally impure, the untouchables, in
another.
In the course of the public symbolic
enactments of the annual festival calendar two major "focal" festivals
(as we will call them) have as one central reference the royal palace in
association with its temple complex, the king's tutelary goddess
Taleju, the Malla king himself (represented by Taleju's chief Brahman),
and the king's Rajopadhyaya "Guru-Purhohita. " The Taleju
Brahmans are focal actors in these two major festival sequences Mohani
and Biska:. In Mohani Taleju's chief Brahman presides over the
sacrifices and the rites that bring the Goddess to her full power at the
time of the agricultural harvest for "the protection of the city." In
the Brahman's association here with king, palace, and Taleju, he is a
focus of attention for the whole city. This royal context of power in a
sense protects and isolates him as he represents publicly his role as a
priest of the dangerous deities, a role that, as we saw in chapter 9, he
usually performs in private arenas.
Some Rajopadhyaya Brahmans work as temple priests, pujari
s, a function that, as we will note below, they share with other kinds
of priests. Some also earn part of their living as public storytellers,
re-
― 352 ―
counting
the stories of the Hindu tradition that form an important interpretive
background for many of the city's ritual and festival activities.
In
his central roles the Rajopadhyaya Brahman is a complex priest. On the
one hand he is the exemplary pure figure of a "Brahmanical religion"; on
the other he is the powerful priest of an extramoral religion of power.
Lakhae Brahmans
There are three or four families in Bhaktapur who have the thar
name "Rajopadhyaya," but are considered to be of a separate and
somewhat lower category. They are referred to as "Lakhae Brahmans," and
do not seem to exist in other Newar communities (see chap. 5). They are
interpreted in the way that intermediate-level thar s are usually
interpreted as being the descendants of improper marriages, in this
case of a Rajopadhyaya Brahman man to a Rajopadhyaya widow (these widows
are not supposed to remarry) or to a previously married but separated
Rajopadhyaya woman. The Lakhae cannot marry with the Rajopadhyaya proper
and must find wives, with some difficulty, among village Brahman
families. Their own priests are the ordinary high-status Rajopadhyayas[*] . They themselves are family priests for certain of the thar s at and just above marginally clean status—the Dwi(n), Nau, Gatha, and Kau.
Bhaktapur's Non-Newar Brahmans
As we have noted the Malla kings were said to have brought other Brahmans from India in addition to the Rajopadhyayas[*]
. Since the Malla period there have been two such groups of Brahmans in
Bhaktapur, who have lived there in separation from both the Newar Hindu
and Buddhist community life. In this they resemble other such cultural
isolates in Bhaktapur—the Muslims and the Matha[*]
priests (chap. 5). These two groups of Brahmans do not consider
themselves to be either Newars or Newar priests. They are the Jha
Brahmans (whose family name is "Misra") and the Bhatta[*] Brahmans. Some Jha Brahmans work as temple pujari
s and public storytellers in Bhaktapur, but most of them are
professional workers in the modern political and economic sector of
Bhaktapur and Kathmandu.
The Bhatta[*] Brahmans, whose origins were in Maharastra[*] , are found
― 353 ―
in
many Newar towns and villages. In Bhaktapur most of them are teachers
and professionals, while members of some families are temple priests.
Some work as purohita s for other Bhatta[*] families. Members of two Bhatta[*]
Brahman families, however, have a closer, and in some respects curious,
relation to Bhaktapur's Newar Hindu community life. They act as
auxiliary priests to one group of families, a section of the Chathariya
Kayasta[*]thar called "Nakanda." In certain Brahman-conducted puja
s held to cure illness or misfortune thought to be due to bad planetary
influences, a mixture of different kinds of grain are held to the head
of the sufferer. The families in this group then have the option of
sending the grain to a Po(n) untouchable so that he may absorb the
misfortune (which is what families other than those in this particular
group would do) or else to send it along with valuable gifts to a Bhatta[*] Brahman as an offering, a dana . Although the transaction may be phrased as a gift, a dana , it resembles in nature and function the offerings to lowest-status thar s, offerings that signal the inferiority and dependence of those thar s, and which serve to transfer pollution, as is suggested in the option of choosing either a Bhatta[*] or Po(n) here.[10]
This equivalence of Po(n) and Bhatta[*]
Brahman here suggests the polluting implications of many priestly
services, and is typical of the situation of the "auxiliary priests," to
whom we will now turn.
Overt Auxiliary Priests and Para-Priests
Rajopadhyaya
Brahmans in Bhaktapur in discussions of "religious work" identify a
group of "Karmacari," that is, "workers" or in this context "religious
workers," whom we will group as "overt auxiliary priests and
para-priests." These make up an important segment of traditional Newar
society. Their services as a group are to all the clean or marginally
clean segments of that society. They perform services necessary in the
performance of various religious rites, and usually do these services
for hereditary patrons, jajaman s, as the Brahmans themselves do. The various types of Karmacari listed are all members of thar
s whose distinguishing traditional and hereditary function are these
services even though many of their members now do other things. They
perform either priestly functions during the course of rituals, or in
the case of the Nau and the Josi (in their major functions), activities
that are preparatory and prerequisite to participation in rituals. The
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans often describe those auxiliary priests who
― 354 ―
perform
ritual work (as opposed to the preparatory functions of the
"para-priests") as "kinds of Brahmans," and often claim that their
powers are, or were originally, passed on to them through Rajopadhyaya
Brahmans as the guru s who provided esoteric teaching and mantra
s. This group of workers assist the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans in three
ways: (1) the preparation for rituals, (2) assistance in doing rituals,
and (3) the performance of rituals or aspects of rituals that would be
polluting to the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, and which would compromise their
ideal status. We will call this group of religious workers overt auxiliary priests, in distinction to the very low polluting thar s, whose essential priestly function is relatively covert
and submerged and obscured by the more salient symbolic meanings and
actualities of their traditional roles. We also find it useful to
distinguish "para-priests" whose functions, in the terminology of the
next chapter, are at the margins of the sacred.
Josi
There are presently in Bhaktapur two thar s whose name indicates that their members' traditional professions were astrology. The thar s and thus their members' surnames are "Josi" (often written in Newari as "Josi"), a name derived from "astrology," jyotisa[*] in Sanskrit. One of these thar s is in the highest segment of the Chathariya group. The other is at the Pa(n)cthariya level. As is true of most upper-level thar
s, with the exception of the Brahmans, most members no longer follow
traditional occupations. There are, however, a few families at each
level, some of whose members perform astrological work for individuals,
and who transmit professional knowledge about jyotisa[*]
to new generations within their family. Some families in the Chathariya
group have members who traditionally serve the Taleju temple, working
there not specifically as astrologers, but for the most part as
assistant priests.[11] As astrologers, the Josis serve middle-status and upper-status people.[12] They prepare a written record (jata :) of the time of the birth of children, an indication of their relation to the Nine graha , or "Planets," at their birth. The jata : in later life will be used by Josis in the determination of the proper sait
, or astrologically proper time span, within which important activities
should be initiated or avoided. The Josi's advice based on his
interpretation of an individual's jata : is of particular importance in the determination of saits for rites of passage and also contributes to judgments regarding proper marriage partners. The Josi can also advise
― 355 ―
on
procedures for mitigating the ill effects of astrological conditions,
and can help supervise the proper ameliorative worship. Finally, Josis
help in determining the proper positioning and timing in propitiating
the disturbed local forces when a home, temple, or other building is to
be constructed.
Bhaktapur's Josis make their predictions and decisions for individual clients by comparing the information on an individual's jata : with a patra
, an annually published astrological calendar. This generalized
calendar, used throughout Nepal, is a reminder, in fact, that the Josi
is concerned with worlds that are beyond Bhaktapur's civic mesocosmic
system. He is concerned with the macrocosm represented by the graha
s and with the individual microcosm. His function is to adjust those
two realms so that the individual starting from his idiosyncratic
position is able to periodically realign himself with the macrocosmic
forces. In so doing he can then successfully fit into the ongoing moral,
social, and religious patterns of Bhaktapur, the middle world properly
presided over by the Brahman. The Brahman explains unfortunate events in
terms of improper relations to the city's deities, or to bad karma caused by some moral error in this life or a previous one. The Josi ascribes unfortunate events most characteristically to a dasa , an astrological condition that can produce good or bad "luck," usually the latter.[13] This luck, being astrologically produced, does not derive immediately from moral sources as bad karma usually does,[14] nor does it derive from relations to the civic deities.
In
his function as an astrologer the Josi is not, properly speaking, a
priest. He puts individuals into a proper relation with a macrocosmic
world whose divine representatives, the "astral deities" (chap. 8), have
the most minimal meaning as "gods," being rather impersonal forces, and
he characteristically does this through advice on timing and choices,
which is not "worship" in any sense, not an attempt to influence the
divine. He advises corrections and adjustments that allow people to get
on with their ordinary lives, one aspect of which is the timing of puja
s and ceremonies, the realm of the true priests. In his rectifying and
enabling activities, he is like another "para-priest," the barber, who
"mechanically" purifies people in a nonsacred procedure and prepares
them for worship. As astrologers, the Josis do have second ary
priestly functions. When bad fortune, or the possibility of bad fortune,
is produced by a violation of order of certain types—those having to do
with some reference to an astral deity, or, in the construction of a
house, with the preexisting order of the space around and
― 356 ―
under the house (symbolized as a disturbance of the supernatural serpents, naga
s), the Josis advise on and often lead special restituting worship.
They also act as auxiliary priests in some elaborate Brahman-led
ceremonies, such as ceremonies for the cure of illness of high-status
clients, and they participate as auxiliary priests to the Brahmans in
the major Taleju ceremonies. In such helping roles they are not
astrologers, but simply assistant priests.
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans claim that Brahmans could
do astrological work (as they do in many parts of South Asia), but that
they "have given this right to the Josis." Josis are considered by
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans to have been derived by some sort of downfall from
the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans.[15] It is pointed out that they belong to the same gotra as the Rajopadhyayas[*] , the Bharadvaja gotra
. This puts them into a more intimate relation with the Brahmans than
some of the other priests who are distinguished as "a kind of Brahman"
in terms of their function but not in terms of their descent. The theme
of fall in status, for the Josis from Brahmanical status, recurs in a
variety of ways, as we will see, in regard to other auxiliary priests.
Acajus
There are in Bhaktapur two thar s with the that name Karmacarya, one among the Pa(n)cthar[16] and the other among the Jyapu. The traditional profession of the men of these thar s is as a kind of priest called "Acaju" in Newari (from the Sanskrit Acarya , "spiritual guide or teacher," plus the Newari honorific particle ju
). D. R. Regmi, in a discussion of the Josis and Acajus in Malla Nepal,
gives a useful orienting account of their still persisting functions
(1965-1966, part II, p. 715):
The Acaju functioned as an inferior priest in all Brahman led households. They accepted daksina[*] (gifts m money) as well as food m their host's house. . . . But they could not chant the Vedic mantras and also could not conduct the [Vedic] rituals. These were done by the Brahmans alone. The Acajus and Josi, however, were indispensable for any ritual. The Josi was concerned with the task of finding out an auspicious time for any kind of rites to be performed. The Acaju helped to arrange methodically the requirements of the ritual performance. He prepared the ground work for the actual rite. It was left for the Brahman priest to use them.
As
the Josis, in addition to being assistants to the Brahmans, have their
independent function as astrologers, the Acajus also have an independent
function. The Acaju are Tantric priests in public settings. This
― 357 ―
has
lead to an impression in certain accounts of the Newars that only the
Acajus work as Tantric priests and that the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans never
do. Like many of the auxiliary priestly performers, they undertake tasks
that would be improper for the Brahmans, at some cost in status for
themselves. However, in this case it is not the function itself from
which the Brahmans are protected, but, as we have discussed in chapter 9
in the Tantric context, its public performance. The Acajus also
serve as surrogates for members of upper-status households in Tantric
rituals in those cases where household members do not have the proper
initiation or, sometimes in recent years, the available time to perform
them. They also conduct ordinary Tantric puja s for their
clients. In elaborate rituals with Tantric and sacrificial components
(for example, the major rites of passage and rituals for the
establishment of a new house), the Acaju is required, for well-to-do
upper-status and middle-status families, at least, as one of the priests
in the ceremony. Here he is not only an assistant to the Brahman priest
but also (in keeping with the public nature of the sacrifice) the
performer of the sacrificial part of the ritual.
Among
the Pa(n)cthariya Karmacaryas there are approximately eight groups, who
are differentiated in part according to where in the city they live and
according to the particular kind of traditional work that they do. The
Jyapu Karmacaryas are unique in the Jyapu group in that they, alone,
have the right both to wear the sacred thread and to have Tantric
initiations and practices. In spite of this they are not ranked in the
upper levels of the Jyapus, and the thar s that are in those
levels (and cannot wear the sacred thread) will not marry them. When
people in the lower levels of the status system were asked to rank
Bhaktapur's thar s, they usually placed Brahmans, Josi, and
Karmacarya, in that order, at the top, because of their priestly status.
In fact, among their peers the Pa(n)cthariya and Jyapu Karmacarya both
have what would seem to be a more depressed status than their priestly
status accords them in the point of view of those well below them.
Like
many other kinds of priests, including the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans,
members of the Karmacarya families also work as temple priests at many
of the city's temples and shrines.
Tini
In Bhaktapur's status hierarchy there is one thar placed below the Pa(n)cthariya level and above the great mass of Jyapu or farming thar s.
― 358 ―
This is the Sivacarya ("Acariya of Siva") thar
, whose members are priests, in Brahmanical phrasing, "a kind of lower
Brahman." The priests of these families (and their members in general)
are called "Tini."[17] It is said that the Tini
exist only in Bhaktapur and in some surrounding villages. In the other
Newar clues their special functions are performed by Karmacaryas.[18]
In Bhaktapur a Tini priest is required during two important rites of
passage. He is necessary for the performance of a purificatory fire
ceremony, the gha:su: jagye ceremony, among middle and upper thar s, performed (depending on the particular thar 's customs) on the eleventh or twelfth day after a death (app. 6). The Tini priest makes a fire on the cheli
of the house. Offerings to the fire are considered as offerings to Siva
(which is sometimes given in partial explanation of the thar name of the Tini, "Sivacarya"). In the course of this fire ceremony the Tini makes a meat-containing offering of samhae
to the fire. It is believed that the smoke of the fire will penetrate
the house and drive out the evil influences of illness and death.[19] Members of the family and at least one representative from each household of the extended phuki
(who have shared in the death pollution) hold their hands over this
fire to purify themselves and the members of the households whom they
represent. In the course of the gha:su: jagye ceremony the Tinis
have (in contrast to Karmacarya priests) the right to read verses from
the Veda, which they possess in a simplified version in manuscripts
passed on in their families. They also have the right to transmit, know,
and use Vedic mantra s. The other important general community
use of the Tini is as one of the necessary assistant priests to the
Brahman (the others being Acajus and Josis) during the mock-marriage
ceremony, the Ihi ceremony (app. 6).
The Tinis are the purohita s, the family priests, of the families of the Bha thar , a thar
of borderline clean status, whose members have, as we will see below,
their own contaminating priest-like function. In terms of their right to
know Vedic mantra s and read the Veda, their status, by
traditional criteria, would approximate the Brahmans. Tinis are
explained as being a "kind of Brahman" probably "fallen" because of some
irregular marriage, although in contrast to the Josis with their Taleju
functions, the connection to the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans themselves seems
much vaguer. In contrast to the work of the Josis as astrologers, which
Brahmans say that they could do but delegate to others, Brahmans say that they themselves could not perform the gha:su: jagye ceremony without losing their Brahman status. This is because that ceremony has to do with the removing of pollution, a pro-
― 359 ―
cedure
that always depresses the status of those who do it. This illuminates
both the anomalously low status of the Tinis—they are lower than any of
the other upper-status sections—Brahmans, Chathariya, and
Pa(n)cthariya—and their protective or surrogate function for the
high-status Rajopadhyaya Brahmans.
The Bha
The Bha, or Bha(n), have the thar name "Karanjit." In the course of death rituals for upper-status thar s, during the first ten days following death a Bha acts as an instructor and assistant to the chief mourner (the kriya putra , usually the oldest son) in a bereaved client household, and constructs some of the objects used during this period (app. 6).[22]
On
the tenth day, the final day of the mourning period, the family makes a
presentation of substantial gifts to the attending Bha for the special
work he must now do on that day. During the ten days after death the
spirit of the dead person, which has been in the dangerous and marginal
form of a preta , has been forming its "spiritual body" piece by
piece in a definite sequence, and by the tenth day that body is
completely formed (app. 6). The relation of the Bha to this formation,
and one of the reasons be is given substantial gifts on this day is not
discussed publicly, in part to protect the public reputation of
contemporary members of the thar and thus to ensure that the custom will continue.[23]
Chattopadhyay (1923, 468) quotes from Brian Hodgson's early
nineteenth-century descriptions of the functions of the various Newar thar s that
The Bhat [Bha:] are also connected with funerals; they accept the death gifts made on the eleventh [now, for Bhaktapur's upper thar s, at least, the tenth] day after the funeral of Newars of any caste (excluding outcastes) [now in Bhaktapur only for Pa(n)cthariya and above]. In the case of the Ksatriyas[*]
― 361 ―
[Pa(n)cthariya and Chathariya] it is mentioned that a piece of the brain of the deceased is kept covered with sweetmeats, the rest of the body being burnt, and this is eaten by the Bhat on the eleventh day as he accepts the death gifts.
The death gifts that
the Bha is now given include such substantial items as clothes, shoes,
hats, mattresses, kitchen pots, drinking vessels, and substantial
quantities of food. The Bha, it is said, is now often given a bit of
ordinary food to eat, rather than a part of the dead body, but this
"ordinary food" may, in at least some, perhaps in most, high-status
cases, be boiled rice previously touched to a fragment of one of the
corpse's bones. This ingestion by the Bha is said to ensure the preta
's eventual reincarnation in a human rather than an animal form.
Another possible function (and alternate explanation for the Bha's
action) may be to ensure that the spirit itself has completed its change
from preta to human-like form (app. 6).[24]
Brahmans
say that if a Brahman were to go to the house of a mourner on the tenth
day and were to eat anything, or to accept any offering, he would lose
his status as a Brahman. In other parts of South Asia, similar ingestion
is or was done by a Brahman himself on the death of people of very high
status. The Brahman was then very highly compensated, but had then to
live in exile outside of the community.[25] The Bhas relieve the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans of such unpleasant responsibilities. The Bhas are said by Rajopadhyayas[*] to be a fallen Brahman group, and they are, in fact, referred to in some texts as Mahabrahmana[*] , "Great Brahmans."[26]
Hindu Use of Buddhist Priests
The
Newar Buddhist Vajracarya priests have sometimes been referred to as
"Buddhist Brahmans" (e.g., Greenwold 1974), but this is misleading. The
roles they play within the Newar Buddhist community itself differs from
that of the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans for the Hindu community in important
respects. The Vajracaryas perform many of the functions (astrology,
Tantric sacrifice, aspects of death ritual, etc.) that the non-Brahman
priests and para-priests do in the Newar Hindu system, and they also
perform healing procedures done in Hindu Bhaktapur by special thar
s of healers. The fact that the Vajracaryas can perform these functions
without compromising their status indicates an important difference
between the Hindu Newar system and the "Hinduized" Buddhist Newar
system. The Hindu Newar opposition and interplay between the traditional
system of purity, headed and symbolized by the Brahman in his protected
public image on the one hand and the "nonmoral" supernatural
transactions, particularly those of the Tantric system, on the other, is
blurred in the Newar Buddhist system, altering, among other things, the
comparative significance of Newar Buddhist Tantra and of the Newar
Buddhist high priests.[27]
There are various ways in which the Vajracarya participate in the Hindu-centered system. People in the middle and lower thar
s may use Vajracaryas as astrologers or healers. Toffin (1984, 230) has
reported of Newar communities elsewhere in the Kathmandu Valley that
some thar s use Vajracarya priests in the purifying (and contaminating) gha:su jagye ceremony to remove the contamination of a death from a house, a ceremony that is performed by Tints in Bhaktapur. Some thar s in Bhak-
― 363 ―
tapur (chap. 5) use Vajracaryas as family priests, either exclusively, or, in the case of middle-level thar s, in some combination with a Brahman purohita . These clients include both the more properly "Buddhist" thar s and marginally clean thar s. Some marginally clean thar
s are served by the Vajracayas as family priests, as others are by Tini
and Lakhae Brahmans. This service is, perhaps, in large part, an
opportunistic profiting from an economic opportunity left open to
Vajracaryas and these other priestly thar s by the purity constraints preventing the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans from working with families below the Jyapu level.
We
must include one residual service of Buddhist priests to Hindu
Bhaktapur. An important segment of one of Bhaktapur's major Hindu
festivals, the climactic festival of Mohani, centers around the "living
goddess" Kumari, incarnated in an upper-status Buddhist girl (chap. 15).
Certain Vajracarya priests play a part in the selection and maintenance
of that child deity.
Temple and Shrine Priests
At
the time of this study there were approximately 119 temples and shrines
in active use in the Newar Hindu system throughout the city.[40] Thirty-five of these had no attending priests. The others had priestly attendants, pujari
s, whose duty, for the most part, is to worship the deity twice a day,
in the morning and the evening. Those temples whose deity may be the
focus of an annual festival (chaps. 12-16) will have an additional
image, a jatra image, which may be carried in a festival procession or otherwise shown to the public by the pujari . In the larger temples, above all in the Taleju temple, there may be a staff of priests with more elaborate responsibilities.
At the time of the study the pujari s included twenty-four Ra-
― 372 ―
jopadhyaya Brahmans, one Lakhae Brahman, twenty-one Jha Brahmans, two Bhatta[*] Brahmans, thirty-six Karmacaryas, and one Shaivite ascetic.[41] The Karmacaryas are pujari s at those temples where blood sacrifice is required—the temples of Ganesa[*] , and the temples and god-houses of the dangerous deities. The other pujari
s serve the temples and shrines of the various benign deities in a
seemingly random way as far as their relations to particular deities are
concerned. The relations of particular priests to particular temples is
a matter of the history of each temple—who built it, and for what
purposes, and what happened subsequently. Shrines and temples built by
the Mallas or Chathariya often have Rajopadhyaya pujari s, even if they are now of minor use. Some temples reportedly had Rajopadhyaya pujari
s in the past, but as relations with patrons and the economic
desirability of the position changed, were given over to one of the
other groups. Some other temples were built by farming-level thar s, notably the Kumha:, the potters, and had Jha pujari s from the time of their establishment. Most of the temples with Jha pujari s are minor ones whose deities do not have jatra
s. The most important temple they officiate at is the Dattatreya
Temple, whose major importance is as a pilgrimage site for non-Newar
Hindu pilgrims. The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, although they serve many
presently unimportant temples of the benign deities, still also serve
most of the important ones—important in terms of either the status of
their builders or their ongoing city-wide importance.
Some Remarks on the Status Of The Rajopadhyaya Brahman In Bhaktapur
For Newar Hindu Bhaktapur, the Rajopadhyaya Brahman is the
Brahman. Other priests, including other kinds of Brahmans, serve to
enable his functions in one way or another, and to protect his status.
Most of these other priests and priest-like figures protect the
Brahman's status by performing necessary services for the management of
pollution and thus the restoration or protection of "ritual purity"
(chap. 11). One priest, the Tantric Acaju, also protects the Brahman's
status, but in this case not directly from pollution itself, but rather
from the publicly visible performance of the morally equivocal act of
blood sacrifice, an act that is permissible in esoteric Tantric contexts
but not in public contexts where the Brahman must be the exemplary
priest of the ordinary, purity-based dharmic civic system.
― 373 ―
The
civic elaboration of auxiliary and para-priests, both overt and covert
ones, is derived in part from the Brahman's vulnerability to impurity.
This vulnerability is reflected in an ambiguity and ambivalence
regarding the Brahman's status both in his own view and the views of
others, particularly upper-status people.
Lynn
Bennett makes an observation about Indo-Nepalese Brahmans, which
describes what is also a widespread South Asian pattern. When
Indo-Nepalese Brahmans become economically and politically powerful,
they "tend to give up their priestly work. They expressed the view that
accepting dana and daksina[*] [as purohita s] was somehow demeaning, like accepting charity" (1983, 251n.). It has been argued (and debated) that the acceptance of dana , a gift, is more demeaning or problematic than the acceptance of the ritually prescribed routine "offering" of daksina[*] (see discussion and references in Fuller [1984, chap. 3]). Whatever the problems of the purohita
, the salaried temple priest had, in other parts of South Asia, even
lower status among Brahmans themselves. As Stevenson wrote of Kathiawar[*]
, although a temple priest in a big temple might become a wealthy man,
"because he takes pay, he is not held in high esteem by other Brahmans"
(1920, 377).
The reason why the dana or daksina[*]
may somehow compromise the Brahman is variously explained. Receiving
payment for a service implies servitude. And what the Brahman may be
paid for may be thought of as including the removal from the client of
some substance-like sin and impurity, as well as simply guiding the
client in that removal. This implication is clear in similar gifts
elsewhere within the Brahman's realm. Why the Brahman is, or should be,
somehow impervious to this is the subject of much Hindu apologetics.
All
this has been taken to be problematic for statements that associate the
Brahmans, "supreme rank" with their priestly function[42]
"For Brahmans themselves, as well as in the Brahmanical tradition as
elaborated in the classical texts, the general notion is that priestly
Brahman subcastes rank below non-priestly Brahman subcastes, and that
Brahman individuals or families engaged in the priesthood are considered
demeaned or degraded by their caste-fellows who are not" (Fuller 1984,
49). The argument (summarized in Fuller [1984, 62ff.]) is that Brahmans
represent an ideal of purity that is, in fact, compromised by their priesthood, that the Brahman as priest is in a paradoxical position.
In
Bhaktapur the Brahman cannot escape his priestly functions. The
Rajopadhyaya Brahman, proud of his aristocratic historical alliance with
royal power, boasts of his commitment and restriction to priestly
― 374 ―
work in contrast to non-Newar Brahmans. In a traditional community such as Bhaktapur the Brahman must
fulfill his priestly responsibilities, although when conditions change,
motivated by the contradictions in his role he may try to escape them.
But within that traditional context, in Bhaktapur's version of a climax
Hindu community, the ambiguities and paradoxes in the Brahman's role
help generate an elaborate system of social roles and of complex
actions, ideas, evaluations, and symbols that are the very stuff of
traditional Hinduism.
Gunhi Punhi [47], Beginning of the Densest Festival Season
The
four lunar fortnights starting with the last day of Gu(n)lathwa in
August and ending with the last day of the elaborate autumn harvest
festival, Mohani, on the tenth day of Kachalathwa (September/ October)
contain thirty-one of the year's seventy-nine annual calendrical events,
and thus constitute the year's densest season of such events. This is
the quiet segment of the agricultural rice cycle. The rice planting has
been completed at its beginning, and major harvesting will begin only at
its end. The great farming segment of Bhaktapur's community has only
routine maintenance work to do during this season, and is not fully
engaged in the fields.
The full-moon day of Gu(n)lathwa, Gunhi (or, sometimes Guni)[34]
Punhi [47], is the time for a group of events m Bhaktapur. Two among
them are of special interest. One of these is a variation of a pan-Hindu
set of procedures customary on the day (Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 127)
that in Bhaktapur emphasizes the purification and rededication of
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans. The other is the introduction of an annual
carnival and festival of the dead, a festival that is specially
elaborated in Bhaktapur. On the day before the full-moon day, that is,
on the fourteenth day of the fortnight, Brahmans and some "orthodox"
Chathariya shave their heads (as always, with the exception of the
queue),[35] and supervise the purification of
their houses with cow dung. On the morning of the full-moon day the
Chathariyas go to the river at Kware to
― 441 ―
bathe and change their jona
s, or sacred threads. Then, at a later time, all the Rajopadhyaya
Brahman males who had their initiations as Brahmans go to the river at
the same spot for a ritual bath. No one else is supposed to enter or
cross the river when the Brahmans are in it. After bathing the Brahmans
replace their jona s, while passages from the Vedas are being
recited. They mark their foreheads with vertical and then horizontal
triple parallel lines, and put small pieces of cow dung above their
eyes, all of which is said to represent the Trisul and other symbols of
Siva, and marks their vocation as Shaivite priests. The seven eldest
Brahmans present represent the seven Rsis[*] , and the other Brahmans pray to them and to their pitr[*]
s, their patrilineal ancestors, and make offerings. These proceedings
are considered by the Brahmans as a reestablishment of their sacred
authority through purification and rededication to the seven Rsis[*] from one or another of whom all Brahmans claim descent.
There
are also symbolic actions of exchange and solidarity at this time. Each
Brahman brings with him many yellow threads and small cloth bags
containing a mixture of dried white flowers and two kinds of seeds.
These represent the household from which the Brahman, or most often a
group of Brahmans, come. The threads and bags are put in the purified
area in which the Rsi[*]puja is to take place. Then, at the end of the puja
, one of the Brahman leaders, fastens bags from all households on each
of the Brahmans, tying them to their left wrists by means of the yellow
threads. Then each Brahman takes threads and bags from his household,
and ties one in turn onto the wrists of each of the other Brahmans.[36]
There
are a miscellany of other customary activities during the day of Gunhi
Punhi. Many people from Bhaktapur, including Hindus, go to the important
valley Buddhist religious center, the great stupa Svayambhunatha, on
this day. There are special ceremonies among farmers in Bhaktapur,
including the worship of frogs (whom farmers inadvertently kill while
working in the fields), who help protect those fields from malevolent
spirits. On this day people traditionally eat a kind of soup prepared
from nine varieties of beans, which is said to protect them from
intestinal ailments.
On the late afternoon of the
day there is an event that acts as a preamble to the focal festival,
which will begin the following day. On the night of Gunhi Punhi there is
a minor procession that is supported by funds from the Guthi Samsthan,
the Central Government Committee which now provides the centralized and
bureaucratically controlled
― 442 ―
support
of many cultural events. The participants, who receive funds from the
committee for their costume and incidental expenses, are members of one
of the Jyapu thar s, from a group of families living near Laeku
Square. Some six or eight men from these families, wearing traditional
Jyapu costumes and taking the roles of both men and women, perform
traditional farmers' dances accompanied by thar musicians. This small group dances around the pradaksinapatha[*]
in the late afternoon. Masses of people go to watch them. The
procession is a preamble to the events of the next day, when similar but
greatly more elaborate dances are elements in that day's festival.
(Moderate.)
The First Day Start of the Bhairava/Bhadrakali Jatra [20]; The Struggle Between the Upper and Lower Halves of the City
On
the first day of the Biska: sequence, four days before the solar New
Year's Day proper, some of the festival's central topics are
introduced—two of its main actors, Bhairava and Bhadrakali[*]
; the representation and involvement in the festival of important
segments of the city's macrostatus system; and the themes of division
and struggle.
For this festival (and in Bhaktapur, only in this festival) chariots are used for the jatra procession. There are two of them, one for Bhairava and his high-status attendants, and another, a smaller one, for Bhadrakali[*] , and her lesser attendants. These chariots, kha :s,[15] are of great size; the larger one, that of Bhairava, is about twenty-four feet in height.[16]
The
larger of the two, that of Bhairava, is placed in Ta:marhi Square. This
square is just "below" (i.e., to the southwest of) the line dividing
the upper from the lower city, and at about the central point on that
line (for the movements of the chariots see map 5, above, chap. 7).
During Biska: it is considered to belong to neither the upper nor lower
city and, thus, to he a neutral and central point. It is one of the
central reference points in the festival sequence, and marks the
starting point from which
― 469 ―
Bhairava and Bhadrakali[*]
will be displaced and to which, finally, after many adventures and
dangers they will return on the ninth day of the festival sequence. The
smaller chariot, that of Bhadrakali[*] , is placed in front of her god-house (the structure usually referred to as the "Vaisnavi[*] god-house" [see map 2]) in the western part of the city.
During the early part of the day the chariots are completed, decorated, and prepared for the jatra . An image of Bhairava's vahana or "vehicle," Betadya: ("Beta God"), is attached to the front of Bhairava's chariot by a member of the Sa:mi thar , and its face is painted by a member of the Chathar Dhaubhari thar , who worships the image at this time. Crowds of people come to the square to watch the preparations of the chariot. The jatra images of Bhairava and Bhadrakali[*] meanwhile are still in their god-houses.
The
representative of the central government's Guthi Samsthan goes to the
Taleju temple and presents the royal sword to Taleju's chief
Rajopadhyaya Brahman priest. This priest represents—or rather
becomes—the king for the remainder of the festival. He is, in
traditional local perspective, the Newar's Malla king. It is said that
in the past, when the Malla kings still reigned, it was the Malla king
himself and not a surrogate who rode in the Bhairava chariot during
Biska:, as his Brahman representative now prepares to do. Another Taleju
Brahman will accompany the "king" throughout the many occasions in the
festival sequence when the Bhairava chariot is in use, as the king's
special priest, his "Guru-Purohit."
The king, as we
will henceforth call him—dressed like all the others who will join him
in the chariot in what is now understood in Bhaktapur to be the
traditional clothes of the Malla period—and his priest, his
Guru-Purohit, go from their royal palace and Taleju temple area, Laeku,
to Ta:marhi Square by a traditional route. Throughout the day, and
whenever they take part in the later festival, the king and the
Guru-Purohit are always side by side, the king to the right, the
Guru-Purohit to the left. They are accompanied by music, and shaded by a
large ornate ceremonial umbrella. One attendant also carries a large
and ornate ceremonial oil lamp, a sukunda .[17] When the king arrives at the chariot at Ta:marhi Square, he orders that the jatra
image of Bhairava be brought from its temple, and he and his party wait
in the square. Messengers go to the Bhairava temple to ask the god's
attendants that he be taken out.
At the time the
Bhairava image is ready to be taken from the Bhairava temple another
group leaves it on an ostentatious "secret mission."[18]
― 470 ―
These
are men from families at the Jyapu level that traditionally perform
services for the Bhairava temple. One man precedes the group to clear
onlookers out of the way. He carries a heavy iron chain that he swings
in front of him as he walks. He is silent during the procession, but he
has a bell hung on his back that sounds as he walks and swings the
chain. The bell's sound and the dangerous chain are warnings to
bystanders to stay out of the way of the group. The first man is
followed by another man carrying a large oval object wrapped in cloths,
called a "Jaki Gwa," a term whose literal meaning is a "ball of uncooked
husked rice." This man is surrounded by other men who are conceived of
as guards for the Jaki Gwa. The group moves through the crowd on their
way to the Bhairava god-house—used only during Biska:—near the Ga:hiti
(map 5) area to which the two gods in their chariots will eventually be
brought. These three sites, Ta:marhi Square, Ga:hiti (and its adjacent
Bhairava god-house), and the field just beyond Ga:hiti in which the
Yasi(n) God will be eventually erected form the main spatial axis for
the festival events. It is generally known to the onlookers that the
group is carrying the "secret god," of which jatra image is a
less powerful public representation. It is popularly believed by most
bystanders that the major image is wrapped in the attention grabbing
Jaki Gwa itself, which, it is believed, contains the head of Bhairava.[19]
Some few bystanders suspect that one of the other men in the group,
probably the one who follows the man carrying the Jaki Gwa, is carrying
what is perhaps the "true" secret image, that is, an image duplicating
the form in which Bhairava is represented in his temple's inner and
hidden sanctum.
Meanwhile the jatra image of Bhairava is brought from the Bhairava temple out into the adjoining Ta:marhi Square. This is the beginning of his kwaphaegu
, his "being taken down"—the term used for the movement of the god out
of his temple and "down" from Ta:marhi Square to the more southerly and
peripheral Ga:hiti. This foreshadows the taking out of dangerous deities
from temples and god-houses throughout the city, which will take place
on the fourth day at the approach of the new year. Now the procession
that had left Laeku, including the king, Guru-Purohit, umbrella,
ceremonial sukunda , musicians, and attendants—who had been
informally awaiting the arrival of the chariot—is reconstituted and now
circumambulates the chariot. The Bhairava image is placed in the chariot
facing toward its front. The king, doing a brief puja to the
image and carrying the sword that had been brought to him by the
representative of the Guthi Samsthan, enters the chariot, seating
― 471 ―
himself
to the right of the Bhairava image. The Guru-Purohit seats himself to
the image's left. Now the representatives of other crafts and
professions station themselves on the chariot in their proper stations.
Four carpenters, representatives of the builders and repairers of the
chariot, stand at the four corners. Two non-Brahman Taleju priests (a
Josi and an Acaju), the Acaju pujari from the Bhairava temple, the leader of the Bhairava guthi , and a member of the Bhairava bhajana
group (a group of Jyapu who play music as worship to the Bhairava of
the main temple) sit to the rear of the king. Also seated behind the
king is a Jyapu, the representative of the group of farming families who
farm the granted land, a portion of whose revenues help support the
expenses of the Bhairava jatra segments of the Biska: sequence. At both the front and at the rear of the chariot stands a member of one of the Maha(n) thars , representing both charioteers and royal guards.[20]
All these personages, like the king and his attendants, are dressed, as
we have noted, in what are taken to be the traditional costumes of the
Malla period. The chariot is facing south, in the direction in which it
must eventually move so that Bhairava, the king, and the other riders of
the chariot may witness the fall of the Yasi(n) God and the beginning
of the new year.
Now the Bhadrakali[*] chariot, in which the Bhadrakali[*]jatra image, taken from its god-house, has been placed, is brought to Ta:marhi Square from in front of the Bhadrakali/Vaisnavi[*] god-house. The pujari
of the god-house, who is a Jyapu Acaju, accompanies the image in her
chariot, and another Jyapu sits on the front of the chariot, to call out
the rhythmic chant that coordinates the joyful efforts of children who
have come to the god-house to pull the chariot by means of long ropes
attached to its front. When the Bhadrakali[*]
chariot is brought to Ta:marhi Square, it is placed to the right side of
the Bhairava chariot (a reversal of the ordinary relative positions of
Tantric couples). It is said that Bhairava has now been able to get a
glimpse of Bhadrakali[*] , and this introduces their later unfolding relations.
In contrast to the Bhadrakali[*]
chariot, the Bhairava chariot has ropes attached both to its front and
its back ends. Traditionally, it is said, there were eight ropes
attached to the front of the chariot and only six ropes at the back. In
more recent years, perhaps because fewer haulers took part, this had
been reduced to six at the front, and four in back. The tug of war that
will ensue as people pull the unequal number of ropes is thus biased
toward the forward direction. This compensates in part for the
comparative difficulties of the terrain in the two directions of the tug
of war.
― 472 ―
The Bhadrakali[*]
chariot is pulled out of Ta:marhi Square in the direction of the
Ga:hiti Square, in whose vicinity it will make an intermediate stop
toward its ultimate destination in the "Yasi(n) Field" (map 5). The
Bhairava chariot is also to be pulled to that square—but first there
will be a major diversion often called the "playing" of Bhairava. The
king tells the two Maha(n) charioteers to start, and after asking the
king for a confirmation, the Maha(n)s, one at each end of the chariot,
call out to the men who have come from the crowd of bystanders to take
hold of the ropes at the two ends and begin to pull. (These men, usually
young men, may come from any of the thars including the
Brahmans except the untouchables and the groups just above them.) Men
from the lower city take the ropes at the front of the chariot; men from
the upper city, at the back. This is congruent with the direction—front
to south—in which the chariot is facing. It is now the late afternoon
or early evening of the first day. Ta:marhi Square is full of thousands
of spectators, massed shoulder to shoulder in all the available spaces,
including the stairs and terraces of the great temples adjoining the
Square.
Now a tug of war begins to determine to
which half of the city the chariot will go first. It is considered that
the presence of the chariot represents a darsana , a
manifestation or "showing himself" of the deity Bhairava to that city
half. The men from the lower half of the city try to pull the chariot
out of Ta:marhi Square into and along the Bazaar street to the south and
then west as far as the Tekhaco twa: . The people from the upper
city try to pull it out of the square along the Bazaar street to the
north and east into their half of the city as far as Dattatreya Square.
These two terminal goals are roughly equidistant from the central point
(map 5). Access from the square to the southern route is much more
obstructed and winding than the upper route and this gives the people
from the upper city an advantage that balances their fewer ropes and
participants. Ideally the main struggle is within Ta:marhi Square
itself, which is the main arena and theater for the struggle, and once
the chariot has reached the exit of the square leading to either the
upper or lower city, the struggle should become perfunctory. Again
ideally, when the chariot reaches its goal in either the upper or lower
city, even the perfunctory struggle should be over. Then, when all goes
well, the people from the losing half of the city either quit the
struggle or join the people from the temporarily winning half, who now
pull the chariot back through Ta:marhi Square into the other half of the city as far as the jatra 's traditional furthest point in that half for a darsana for the
― 473 ―
losing
half of the city. When the chariot has been to both halves of the city,
all join together on the ropes at the front of it, and pull it back to
its proper destination, Ga:hiti Square, which ideally should be reached
during the course of the first night. During all this the king, the
Guru-Purohit, and the other officials and representatives in the chariot
are submitted to a long, tiring, bumpy, swaying, vertiginous, and
dangerous ride, which at best takes several hours. Although, as we have
noted, ideally the chariot should reach Ga:hiti during the first night,
this often does not happen, the chariot is delayed. Whatever happens,
however, the chariot and its god and riders must reach Ga:hiti Square before the time of the raising of the Yasi(n) on the fourth day of the sequence, the sankranti[*] , which marks the beginning of the solar New Year.
In
chapter 7 in our discussion of Bhaktapur's city halves we noted
references to serious conflicts, sometimes bloody ones, in other Newar
cities beginning with some ritual event that eventually pitted one half
of the city against the other. We argued that ritually organized
antagonisms between the upper and lower city halves served to deflect
antagonisms from within smaller local areas, particularly between the
groups of economically and socially interrelated thars in such
areas, antagonisms whose overt manifestations would have been
considerably more serious in their consequences. The struggle with the
chariot is the major manifestation in Bhaktapur's annual calendar of
this conflict.[21] We have emphasized the ideal
timing and action of the movements of the Bhairava chariot. But the
idealized struggle is liable to turn into a ritually uncontrolled one,
and other accidents may also delay the movements of the chariot. In the
course of the tug of war, fights sometimes break out. These are usually
fights between individuals or small groups from the opposing halves of
the city. Sometimes these fights may escalate, larger groups may become
involved, stones may be thrown. In such cases the bystanders may flee to
their homes, and the jatra may be temporarily discontinued. In
the years preceding this study the outbreak of fighting was unusual. It
is estimated that there were perhaps four or five occasions in the
twenty years before this study in which fights broke out, but they did
not interfere with the completion of the jatra .[22]
But the ever-present possibility of the eruption of dangerous conflict
gives this phase of the festival a particular tone of anxiety for
observers and participants, particularly for the entrapped riders in the
chariot. On the occasions when a fight does break up the tug of war, or
if the chariot becomes stuck in the narrow streets, requiring a long
complicated pro-
― 474 ―
cess
of extrication, the chariot may be left, its riders returning to their
homes for the remainder of the night, leaving behind only the deity and
its pujari attendants. In such cases the chariot will be pulled
directly to Ga:hiti on the next day, and the excursion into the city
halves will be aborted.
Yet, ideally and almost
always, in fact, the Bhairava chariot arrives at Ga:hiti on the evening
of this first day of the festival sequence. Earlier the Bhadrakali[*]
chariot had been pulled first to Ga:hiti, and then down the road toward
the field where the Yasi(n) was to be erected on the fourth day. It was
left at a point about half way along this road, where there is a
special Bhadrakali[*] god-house used only during Biska:. Ga:hiti[23] is an irregularly shaped square into which four crossroads enter. It is a part of the Lakulache(n) twa: , which adjoins the Ta:marhi twa: . It is bordered by shops and religious structures and contains some temples.
On
the arrival of the Bhairava chariot at Ga:hiti the king and
Guru-Purohit, followed by the other officials and crew of the chariot,
take flowers from the Bhairava image as prasada and descend from the chariot. They circumambulate the Bhairava chariot and then walk on in a procession to the Bhadrakali[*] chariot, take flower prasada from her image, and circumambulate that chariot. Now shaded by the ceremonial umbrella, accompanied by the ceremonial sukunda
, musicians, guards, and attendants, the king, bearing the royal sword,
returns to the Taleju temple, the site of the Malla palace.
Now the god images are taken from their chariots with music and procession each to their respective special jatra god-houses, Bhairava's being some forty yards to the west of Bhadrakali's.
The Legend of the Nine Durgas
There
are a number of variants of the tale or legend of how the Nine Durgas
came to be introduced into Bhaktapur. A familiar version goes as
follows: A long time ago during the reign of the Malla king Guna[*] Kamana Deva[2] the Nine Durgas troupe inhabited a forest called Jwala (to the northeast of Bhaktapur).[3]
They used to catch people who happened to pass by, and they killed
them and drank their blood as sacrifices to themselves. One day an Acaju
whose name was Sunanda was walking through the forest and was captured
by the Nine Durgas, who prepared to kill him. Sunanda Acaju told the
deities that if they wished to take him as a living sacrificial
offering, they should allow him to worship them first. They agreed.
Now it happened that Sunanda Acaju was not just an ordinary Acaju; he was a great expert in Tantric knowledge and mantras . So he was able to say a powerful mantra
that bound the Durgas so that they were unable to move. The Nine Durgas
were very ashamed. They asked him to forgive them and to release them
from their immobility. They gave him their word that they would not
sacrifice him. But Sunanda Acaju, shrinking them in size, put them in
his carrying basket and brought them into his house in Bhaktapur. He
kept them in his room in a secure chest and periodically looked at them
and worshiped them.
After a certain period of time
(which varies in different accounts from the short period of this
account to two or three generations in others) Sunanda Acaju's guru
, a Rajopadhyaya Brahman with deep Tantric knowledge who lived in the
Palisache(n) neighborhood, came to Sunanda Acaju and told him that he
(the Acaju) was unable to worship the Nine Durgas properly, but that he
(the Brahman) could, and therefore he took them in their chest to his
own house and hid them in a
― 504 ―
room. Then the Brahman, Somara Rajopadhyaya, worshiped the Nine Durgas in great secrecy with Tantric bidya
, or "secret arts," and made sacrifices to them. He made the Nine
Durgas dance, telling stories through movements of their hands. (In
other versions the Brahman also plays various games of skill with them.)
At some point in the stories the Nine Durgas had warned the Brahman, or
sometimes the Acaju before him, that they could only he kept under the
spell if no one else saw them. Somara Rajopadhyaya had warned his wife
that she must never look into this particular room. (In some versions he
had given her the keys to all the rooms except this one, which was not
to be unlocked.) One day he was absent (in some versions having gone by
means of his Tantric powers through the air to Benares to bathe in the
Ganges), and his wife (as it is significantly phrased in one version,
"being a woman and having a small mind") either opened the door or
looked through a hole in the door and saw the Nine Durgas, who in some
versions were dancing. As the stories emphasize, Somara had spent most
of his time in that forbidden room, and his wife was very curious to
know what was going on. In some versions the Nine Durgas kill Somara's
wife at this point as a sacrificial offering "because she had done wrong
and Somara Rajopadhyaya did not keep his oath." In other versions she
is only severely scolded by her husband.
Because
the conditions of their entrapment and control have now been violated,
the Nine Durgas escape the Brahman's house. The stories now give various
details that "explain" aspects of the Nine Durgas' present ceremonial
activities in Bhaktapur. On escaping from the Brahman's house the band
of deities capture, sacrifice, and eat a pig at a place called "Bha:
Dhwakha," which will prevent the Brahman from taking the now polluted
gods back into his house. Then, the story continues, Somara returned to
his house and finding the Nine Durgas missing pursues them intending to
entrap them again through his Tantric power. He pursues them with mantras
and the beating of a small drum, and causes them to freeze in their
flight. He finds them in the upper part of the city at Swa(n)ga
Lwaha(n).
Now, the story goes on, Somara
Rajopadhyaya begged the Nine Durgas to return to his house. He says,
"Where are you going now in leaving me? Do not leave me." He cried very
much. The Nine Durgas were pleased to hear him but said, we have taken a
pig as sacrifice. The pig is polluting, and therefore we cannot go back
to your house because you are a Brahman. But you can make a dance-drama
(a pyakha[n] ), and we will enter into the performers. Then everyone will be able to see
― 505 ―
us and worship us. The Brahman then established a god-house for the Nine Durgas, and gave members of the Gatha thar the authority and duty to perform each year as the Nine Durgas and to embody them.
In
a variant of the story, Somara Rajopadhyaya having heard on his return
that the Nine Durgas had eaten a pig, and realizing that he could not
take them back into his house, instructed one of his faithful students
in the proper spells, and delegated the student, an Acaju, to capture
them. This he did after some difficulty, and he put them in accordance
with the Brahman's direction in a god-house in Ga:che(n), the area where
the Gatha live. The Gatha, whose special thar vocation was
growing flowers for worship, came to present flowers to the Nine Durgas.
Then Somara Rajopadhyaya came and told the Gatha that he would be
grateful to them if they would care for the Nine Durgas and would learn
their dances. Somara Rajopadhyaya said he would teach them everything
they needed to know about the Nine Durgas and about other necessary
Tantric procedures as he had taught the Acaju.
And thus, still following these directions, the Gatha and the Acaju still perform their duties for the Nine Durgas.
Spheres, Structures, and Oppositions
If
it seems unproblematic to characterize Bhaktapur's strange order as
mostly "religious," the symmetrical characterization of its ordinary,
everyday order as "secular" is problematic. Louis Dumont
approached this asymmetry by characterizing for Hindu societies one
particular component of our strange order as a religious sphere within a larger religious universe , a universe that also encompasses a "secular" sphere.
Dumont
was specifically trying to distinguish the functions of the king and
the Brahman. He thus proposed (1970, 68) that Hindu religious universes
were characterized by a royal, secular, political sphere of the king, a sphere characterized by power or force, opposed to a religious sphere
of the Brahman, a realm of "values and norms." We argued in chapter 10
that this particular phrasing was problematic and even misleading for
Bhaktapur.
We have in the course of this book
encountered many contrasting terms, emphasizing some and touching on
others. Among them are dangerous deities and benign deities; Tantric
religion and ordinary religion; "secular" and "religious"; conventional
and ritual; king (and court, merchants, farmers, craftsmen) and Brahman
(and other kinds of priests, and polluting thars ); worldly power
and other-worldly force; unclean (epitomized by the Po[n]) and clean
(epitomized by the Brahman); orders where purity is irrelevant and
orders where purity is central; amoral realms and moral realms; the
bordering outside of the city (and of each of its component units) and
the inside of the city (and of each of its component units); life stages
for males prior to the Kaeta Puja ceremony and subsequent life
stages. Among these heterogeneous oppositions, for any particular
contrast the right hand term is that of the ordinary dharma and/or of
one of the functions of the Rajopadhyaya Brahman as highlighted by the
contrast. The collection of contrasts and oppositions to "Brahman" are
not as a whole unified, at least not in their surface characteristics.
Taken together, however, they help anatomize Bhaktapur's larger
traditional ordering of meaning.
― 602 ―
That order is more complex than a secular royalty versus a sphere of Brahmanical religiosity expressing the dharmic
world of values and norms. Let us review some of the aspects of that
order which are in some ways peculiar to Bhaktapur and South Asian
places that are or were like it.
1. As we have
noted in chapters 8 and 9, in many Hindu communities in South Asia the
religion of the dangerous deities is thought by the upper-status Hindus
in those communities (and by many modern Indians) as an inferior,
illegitimate, superstitious folk religion, alien to true Hinduism and
its Aryan roots. The legitimate religion of such communities is held by
these elites to be the moral Brahmanical religion concerned with benign
deities, representatives of an ideal patriarchal social order. In
Bhaktapur, in contrast, the dangerous deities are fully legitimate, and
not only legitimate but at the focus of aristocratic and royal Tantrism.
Bhaktapur thus has two equally legitimate religious spheres within its
religious universe, a religion of moral order (ordinary Brahmanical
religion) and a religion of power (the cult of the dangerous deities
both as Tantrism and as the practices of noninitiates). The religion of
power variously supports, evades, and transcends the moral order.
We
have repeatdly characterized the dangerous deities and their religion
as representing the environing forces that both threaten and sustain the
moral religion of the city. So viewed, the dangerous deities are at a
systematically "higher" level than the benign ones in the sense that
they provide the context for the moral religion, respond to problems
that the moral system cannot deal with, and in so doing protect the
moral realm. The polytheistic separation and discrimination of deities
makes such a two-tiered representation possible, this being one aspect
of the complex ordering of the city's pantheon into a fundamentally
useful system of signs (chap. 8).[3]
2. Bhaktapur's splitting of religious spheres within the religious universe makes untenable a simple opposition of a religious
sphere concerned with values and a secular, political sphere, that of
the king, concerned with power. For there is a special religious
precinct concerned with power and those who use it within the "secular"
sphere. That secular power in Bhaktapur's world view includes much more
than the political power of the king and ksatriya[*] ; it includes all direct operations
― 603 ―
on the world that are not fully produced by the assent to the system of dharmic values. The religion of power is the proper religion of kings, ksatriyas[*] , merchants, farmers, and craftsmen—not as individuals who must follow the dharma , must worry about rebirths, and whose priest, serving them as generalized individuals is the Brahman as purohita
—but in their particular functions as specialists in the "direct"
manipulation of the world, through what Dumont calls "force" and places
in opposition to the ordering of "values and norms."
3.
The use of force in this sense thus characterizes not only the king's
activities but also the activities of a large segment of the city's
hierarchy cutting through from its top almost to its bottom. This
vertical segment of Bhaktapur's social system is defined against a large
group of what we have called (in chap. 10) "priests," "auxiliary
priests," and "covert priests," who are united most saliently as
manipulators of purity. The manipulation of purity characterizes this
latter segment of Bhaktapur's organization, as the manipulation of force
characterizes the former.
Tantric priests and
Brahmans in their particular functions as Tantric priests (and, for
different reasons, the Josi astrologers) do not belong with the group of
purity manipulators and thus to the religion of "values and norms," but
to the sphere of the manipulators of power. They deal with power in the
universe through attempts at understanding, alliance, avoidance, and
forceful coercion in close metaphorical alliance with the city's other
technicians of power.
It is the Brahman as Brahman
and the various sorts of purity manipulators who derive from him and
support him who deal with that segment of Bhaktapur's life which is
constituted through definitions of what persons and systems of persons
are and should be. They manipulate that particular system of symbols
that is effective because it shapes and helps constitute the arena of
definition and value. They are primarily technicians of those symbolic
forms that constitute actors and community in Bhaktapur.
The
contrasting segment of Bhaktapur also makes use of symbols to represent
and support their functions. But their primary functions, no matter how
important their symbolic component, work directly on the world in a
different way—through direct manipulation of materials and physical
forces and of those psychological forces that make political threats and
promises effective. They are thus allied with the priests of Tantrism
who in local conception use power and who, viewed from
― 604 ―
outside
the phrasings of Hinduism, make use of mental forces beyond the self
and the social person constituted with the aid of the religion of the
benign gods to serve, sustain, control, or dissolve that person.
4.
The symbolic forms and enactments of both the religion of power and the
religion of norms and values are within the realm of the extraordinary.
The roots of each in the ordinary are different. The moral religion
augments, resonates with, and puts to social use images of ideal and
tolerable social behavior; the religion of the dangerous deities
augments, resonates with, and transforms for social purposes forms that
are suppressed in ordinary awareness, that are unnamed and unspoken in
ordinary discourse with others and within the self, that are relegated
to and express the non-social aspects of the mind, alien to the person
and to the proper logic and categories of everyday life.
This
suppressed realm is represented with suitable transformations within
the realm of dangerous religion, where its forces are tentatively
captured for the purposes of social order itself. The original nature
and dangers of these forces and their capturing and social
transformation into tentatively domesticated forms are vividly portrayed
in Bhaktapur's myths and, most concretely, in its legends,[4] as well as in the city's symbolic enactments.
Legends
bring together dangerous deities and heroic figures in a realm of the
marvelous. They suggest that even the secularized sphere of power has,
in fact, a certain uncanny quality, for it represents—as does the
associated order of the dangerous deities—a violation and transcendence
of the central dharmic moral order. Techniques of power, political
force, magic, Tantra, wish and dream, dangerous deities, and demonic
forces all inhabit—from the viewpoint of the morally organized city
life—one metaphorically unified sphere. That sphere is not exactly what
the modern world wishes to mean by the secular.
Yet,
in Bhaktapur's world of shifting viewpoints the Brahman's religious
sphere, at least as exemplified by the Brahman himself, is not always
seen as an unproblematic heightening of the banal and ordinary. From
some viewpoints the entanglement in the manipulation of the system of
purity and impurity of the Brahman and his allies has something suspect
about it, something encumbering and unpleasant, something that is not
represented in contrast but, rather, directly by the state of the
untouchable. The sphere of the Brahman's operations has in such
perspectives, where the "secular" is privileged, a displacement from the
― 605 ―
banal quite different from the displacement, from another viewpoint, of the realm of power.
5.
It is not only the "sphere of power" that uses force. The realm of
norms and values and its religion has, of course, characteristic
"forces" at its disposal. These are the familiar forces that sustain the
unity of any moral community—a great miscellaneous variety of
agreements on what is real and what is sane, of definitions,
identifications, values, goals, concerns for face and reputation and
being loved or admired, and the wish to avoid guilt and shame and
ostracism.
These forces are internal to the
community. They help constitute it and keep it going from moment to
moment. They are made, to a considerable degree, to seem ordinary and
naturalized forces. This naturalization, generating the force of the
taken for granted, is, as we have asserted in chapter 2, much more
difficult to achieve in Bhaktapur than in some other simpler
communities, and people often become potentially subversive skeptics who
must be kept in line by the emergence of the superordinate forces of
the marked realm.
6. Bhaktapur places most of its
marked symbols in the religious sphere, which is the realm of the gods, a
bounded domain of a still larger Hindu religious universe, a great mind
in which gods along with all living, sentient things participate, out
of which they are generated, whose immutable moral laws they are subject
to, and whose ultimate nature they can come to glimpse. Other complex
civilizations whose citizens shared the "symbol hunger" (chap. 2) of
Bhaktapur's citizens have elaborated realms of marked symbols, but came
to place them elsewhere. Thus, in the West, secular drama, literature
and art, are marked as extraordinary—by setting, cadence, presentation,
and other devices—but have come to represent a class of communication
that is in some sense "imaginary," "only symbolic," not to be
taken literally. Until its contemporary transformations most of
Bhaktapur's extraordinary statements have not called themselves
imaginary, but as belonging to another sort of reality, the reality of
the gods' divine sphere. In a different bounding than the Western one,
both Bhaktapur's everyday reality and the reality of the gods can be
seen as imaginary, as maya , when grasped by the highest
intuitions of religious awareness. But, for the most part, gods and
Bhaktapurians are content to remain in their divine illusions and by
putting the imagination of the extra-
― 606 ―
ordinary
in a religious subsphere to give it and its representations the
strongest possible position in the life of the community and its
citizen's minds.[5]
7. The
ordinary masquerades as simple reality. Bhaktapur sometimes attempts to
make problematic things natural by forcefully anchoring them in the
sensually perceived world. The lives of the Po(n)s, in a vivid example,
are manipulated so that their connection with real feces and the taking
of life and their degraded living conditions become the perceptually
based evidence for the reality of the system of pollution and purity and
of the effects of bad (and thus, in contrast, good) karma . It is the problematic aspects of karmic
and pollution theory, debatable and rethinkable in the terms of the
other doctrines and viewpoints common in Bhaktapur, that makes such
anchoring in the apparently objective useful.
8.
Bhaktapur's sphere of the religious and of the ordinary have boundaries,
boundaries of a peculiar permeability (see fig. 35). We have commented
on the crossing of boundaries—the movements of the gods in their
processions out of their temples into a carefully designated city space,
and of the Nine Durgas in their somewhat more chaotic forays into the
city's neighborhoods. These moves cross the boundaries of sacred
enclosures and allow the usually isolated marked realm to spill, within
some limits, over into the ordinary. The closeness to the ordinary of
Bhaktapur's religious sphere—in contrast to the self-banishment of the
Judeo-Christian-Islamic transcendent deity—as well as the air of
autonomy and reality of those deities in their on-the-ground
manifestations in comparison with the "imaginary" and "conventional"
status of latter-day Western art and literature, give the boundaries
between the ordinary and the strange realms a special and problematic
permeability and make urgent the problem of defining places for the
gods, keeping them in those places if possible, and dealing with them if
they leave them. For Hindu deities, at least in Bhaktapur, do not need
the force of a Western miracle to enter the secular realm.
9.
Not only do symbolic constructions occasionally cross boundaries to
invade the realm of the ordinary but, in another direction, the "real"
may be thought of as occasionally crossing what in the West is often
taken as an inviolable boundary into the symbolic. Westerners, as
represented by Freud, expect the "overt" content of a symbol of emo-
― 607 ―
Figure 35.
Problems on the boundary between the ordinary and the extraordi-
nary. The living goddess Kumari has her running nose wiped by her attendant.
Problems on the boundary between the ordinary and the extraordi-
nary. The living goddess Kumari has her running nose wiped by her attendant.
― 608 ―
tional
importance ideally to be a disguised transformation of some powerfully
disruptive complex of ideas and emotions that is its latent meaning or
reference. A censor holds the two kinds of meaning apart and helps
accomplish the bowdlerization of the overt form. If the symbolic form
seems to stand for itself, especially if it is as fearsome and
unpalatable as the raw unconscious form is thought to be, then
Westerners sense a problem, something has collapsed, some reference has
disappeared.[6] Bhaktapur uses many "symbolic
forms" that are directly in themselves powerfully meaningful,
representing exactly the sorts of things that are—or were—presumably
relegated to Western unconsciousness. In one dramatic example, human
sacrifice, Bhaktapur once used the actual murder/sacrifice of its
citizens to "represent" murder/ sacrifice. It has had to give up this
resource and the actual sexual intercourse of nonspouses in Tantrism,
but it still uses direct and powerful images of sexual arousal (e.g.,
Tantric images of Bhairava with an erect penis, a wild look and a
flaming halo [see fig. 17, above]), of sexual intercourse (for example
in temple images and in the banging together of the chariots in Biska:),
of cannibalistic women, of women who change from images of sexual
desire to images of death, of murder and dismemberment of human bodies.
It uses these images not so much to represent or symbolize something, as to do something.
Bhaktapur's
symbols of this sort do not take their power from their references and
latent meanings, they are directly meaningful in themselves. Their
disguise is not in a transformation of form—sword or umbrella for
penis—so much as in an isolation of such powerful forms from their
experiential bases, above all their bases in the life of the family,[7] and a new placement in the religious sphere.
10.
As we noted in chapter 16, some matters of what might seem to be of
great potential interest in Bhaktapur are ignored in the city's symbolic
enactments. We have commented in previous chapters on the privileged
status of certain solidarities—the family, the phuki , the internal membership of the twa :, and the hierarchically ranked thar
s—whose members are not represented as antagonists in the year's many
representations of conflict and antagonism. In this light, conflict and
antagonism within these essential units is "not thought about" in the
annual enactments, and is displaced to safer realms. Intrafamilial
conflict is illustrated in some of the pyakha(n) s of Saparu,
typically where two men represent a farmer and his wife fighting, and is
amply and presumably safely represented in tales about unfaithful and
dangerous
― 609 ―
wives, wicked stepmothers, and weak kings usually set in a magical, fairy tale mode.[8]
These relatively permissive realms are more playful, less real, than
the religious spheres of the city. They are only stories; in them
fantasy may be taken to be just fantasy.
― 611 ―
Figure 36.
Rites of passage. A young mother, her first son, and the family's Brahman purohita at the child's Maca Ja(n)ko,
the "rice feeding" samskara.
Rites of passage. A young mother, her first son, and the family's Brahman purohita at the child's Maca Ja(n)ko,
the "rice feeding" samskara.
― 625 ―
Appendix Two
Bhaktapur's Newar Hindu Thars Ranked By Macrosocial Status
We list here Bhaktapur's New Hindu thar s by the names usually used by others in reference to those thar s. In some cases members of a thar
may use a different form of the reference name or a completely
different name, or set of names, as surnames. Where we have some
information about variant surnames, we have listed them in parentheses.
Sometimes differences in surnames may indicate different sections of a
particular thar , sometimes simply optional alternative names. Many thar s use Sanskrit or North Indian spelling for names of Indian derivation, even though the pronunciation has been changed.
Part 1. Thars Listed By Status Levels
I. Newar Brahmans
a. Brahman (Rajopadhyaya) (group 1)
b. Lakhae Brahman (Rajopadhyaya) (group 2)
II. Chathar
Josi; Malla; Pradhananga[*] ; Hada; Hoda[*] ; Amatya (also called "Mahaju"); Bhau (Bhaju); Kasaju (Kayasta[*] ); Ta:cabhari (Talcabhadel[*] ); Muna(n)karmi; Mulepati; Bhari (Rajbhandari[*] ); Ujha(n)thache(n); Jo(n)che(n);[1] Go(n)ga:; Sa(n)gami; Dhaubhari (Dhaubhadel[*] ); Pakwa(n); Timla; Sae(n)ju; Kongasyo[*] ; Khe(n)dhaumaku; Baidhya (Rajbaidhya); Raya[*] ; Palikhel; Khaeguli (Khayargoli); Kapa:ta:go; Piya; Khwakhali; Basi; Pula(n)che(n)
Josi; Malla; Pradhananga[*] ; Hada; Hoda[*] ; Amatya (also called "Mahaju"); Bhau (Bhaju); Kasaju (Kayasta[*] ); Ta:cabhari (Talcabhadel[*] ); Muna(n)karmi; Mulepati; Bhari (Rajbhandari[*] ); Ujha(n)thache(n); Jo(n)che(n);[1] Go(n)ga:; Sa(n)gami; Dhaubhari (Dhaubhadel[*] ); Pakwa(n); Timla; Sae(n)ju; Kongasyo[*] ; Khe(n)dhaumaku; Baidhya (Rajbaidhya); Raya[*] ; Palikhel; Khaeguli (Khayargoli); Kapa:ta:go; Piya; Khwakhali; Basi; Pula(n)che(n)
III. Pa(n)cthar
a. The "Carthar" section
Maka:; Bramhalawat; Anu; Boche(n); Batas; Jaekama; Khumjajy; Jhanga; Ulak:; Sacinya; Bhadra; Badiya[*] ; Pasakala
Maka:; Bramhalawat; Anu; Boche(n); Batas; Jaekama; Khumjajy; Jhanga; Ulak:; Sacinya; Bhadra; Badiya[*] ; Pasakala
― 626 ―
b. The remainder
Acaju (Karmacarya); Maske; Baidhya; Madhika:mi (Madhikarmi[*] ); Banepali; Bhari (Ca[n]gubhari, Pujabhandari[*] , Bhandari[*] ); Naeju; Phaiju; Dristi; Josi; Bhaju; Hoda[*] ; Bijukche(n); Go(n)ga:; Hyeju; Tapol; Yauca; Kachipati; Piya; Rajba(n)si; Mulmi
Acaju (Karmacarya); Maske; Baidhya; Madhika:mi (Madhikarmi[*] ); Banepali; Bhari (Ca[n]gubhari, Pujabhandari[*] , Bhandari[*] ); Naeju; Phaiju; Dristi; Josi; Bhaju; Hoda[*] ; Bijukche(n); Go(n)ga:; Hyeju; Tapol; Yauca; Kachipati; Piya; Rajba(n)si; Mulmi
IV. Tini (Sivacarya)
V. Jyapu (group 1)
Suwal; Basukala; Koju; Dholaju; Lawa; Lageju; Dumaru; Twati; Acaju; Bya(n)ju; Bake; Kharbuja; Dhukhwa; Chuka(n); Maka:; Cawa: (Cawal); Gusai; Colekhwa:; Khaemali; Lakha; Twaena; Kawa(n); Kusi; Gwacha; Desemaru; Lasiwa; Laghuju; Nagaju; Khatakho; Nhinaenaemasa[*] ; Yakami; Khoteja; Dho(n)ju; Khaeguli; Duwal; Dhaugwara; Dela; Dupo(n)la; Gya(n)maru; Hya(n)goju; Hyau(n)mikha; Jyakhwa; Kibanayo; Kisi; Khinao; Ku(n)paka; Khusu; Khorja; Macamasi; Makhasya; Nhisutu; Nhuche(n); Nhemaphuki; Pau(n); Phasikeba; Pya(n)tago; Sitikhu; Simatwa; Sujakhu; Tacamoga; Talasi; Tadyoya; Tagora; Thike; Twanabasu; Twi(n)twi(n) Tyata; Wasaba(n)jar; Wa(n)gaeyo; Yakaduwa; Dekana; Do(n)ju; Chusyabaga; Colekhwa
Suwal; Basukala; Koju; Dholaju; Lawa; Lageju; Dumaru; Twati; Acaju; Bya(n)ju; Bake; Kharbuja; Dhukhwa; Chuka(n); Maka:; Cawa: (Cawal); Gusai; Colekhwa:; Khaemali; Lakha; Twaena; Kawa(n); Kusi; Gwacha; Desemaru; Lasiwa; Laghuju; Nagaju; Khatakho; Nhinaenaemasa[*] ; Yakami; Khoteja; Dho(n)ju; Khaeguli; Duwal; Dhaugwara; Dela; Dupo(n)la; Gya(n)maru; Hya(n)goju; Hyau(n)mikha; Jyakhwa; Kibanayo; Kisi; Khinao; Ku(n)paka; Khusu; Khorja; Macamasi; Makhasya; Nhisutu; Nhuche(n); Nhemaphuki; Pau(n); Phasikeba; Pya(n)tago; Sitikhu; Simatwa; Sujakhu; Tacamoga; Talasi; Tadyoya; Tagora; Thike; Twanabasu; Twi(n)twi(n) Tyata; Wasaba(n)jar; Wa(n)gaeyo; Yakaduwa; Dekana; Do(n)ju; Chusyabaga; Colekhwa
VI. Tama: (Tamrakar)
VII. Kumha: (Prajapati); Awa: (Awal); Malekar (Malkaju, Nepali)
VIII. Jyapu (group 2)[2]
Rajacal;[3] Caguthi[*] ;[4] Muguthi[*] ;[5] Dhauba(n)jar; Da(n)degulu; Galaju; Khaitu; Kutuwa:ju; Phelu; Khwalepala; Da(n)dekhya; Pachiju; Hyau(n)wa; Ka:mi (Silpakar); Kutuwa; Kusatha; Chu(n)ju; Pahi; Khitibaku; Kasula; Goja; Dhusu; Kulluju; Bajiko(n); Bakhadyo; Kaiti; Datheputhe; Mika; Twaena; Bidya; Loha(n)ka:mi (Lo[n]hala); Bakanani; Dhatucha; Machi; Bodel[*] ; Dwara; Jha(n)galthaku; Pampu; Baga:; Basuju; Bhilla; Bhele; Bhaiju; Bhuyo; Biao; Cho(n)ju; Daiju; Dhalapamaga; Dhampo; Dhobwa; Dhi(n)griju; Gasuca; Ganapati[*] ; Gaisi; Gharu; Gopi; Gopa; Gathe[*] ; Gorkhali; Guche(n); Gwae(n)maru; Gwae(n)masyu; Jugiju; Hamo; Ha(n)ju; Haleyojosi; Hamonayo; Ha(n)chethu; Jatadhari; Jaidaju; Jha(n)ga; Joharju; Joti; Jotisuwal; Ka(n)pa; Khaju; Khaiju; Khi(n)ju; Khwaiju; Khuju; Kila(n)bu; Kisa(n)kari; Ko(n)da; Kusma; Lakhemaru; Lachimasya; Libi; Ligiligi; Lu(n)ba(n)ja:; Mata(n); Marikhu(n); Malakasi; Mathya; Mogaju; Nakhetri; Naila; Naramuni; Naemasaphu(n); Ne(n)che(n); Paka; Pa(n)ca; Pa(n)ka; Pakha(n)ju; Pa(n)gulu; Phitiju; Puwa; Pyatha; Sa(n)dha; Si(n)kedathe; Si(n)kemani; Sibahari; Si(n)khwa; Si(n)ba(n)jar; Syama; Sulu; Sukhupayo; Swa(n)gamikha; Swanapa; Takra; Tahamati; Tajala; Tamakhu; Talache(n); Thakulawat[*] ; Thakuba(n)jar; Thuyaju; Tusibakhyo; Twa(n)ju; Tyochi(n)a; Wata(n)kachi; We(n)ju; Bhenatwa(n); Dubche(n); Da(n)dekhu; Cokami; Chusyakhi; Cho(n)ju; Che(n)gutala; Cakumani; Bakhu(n)che(n); Bweju; Bhola(n)dyo; Bhokhaju; Gora; Hakuduwa; Tuladhar
Rajacal;[3] Caguthi[*] ;[4] Muguthi[*] ;[5] Dhauba(n)jar; Da(n)degulu; Galaju; Khaitu; Kutuwa:ju; Phelu; Khwalepala; Da(n)dekhya; Pachiju; Hyau(n)wa; Ka:mi (Silpakar); Kutuwa; Kusatha; Chu(n)ju; Pahi; Khitibaku; Kasula; Goja; Dhusu; Kulluju; Bajiko(n); Bakhadyo; Kaiti; Datheputhe; Mika; Twaena; Bidya; Loha(n)ka:mi (Lo[n]hala); Bakanani; Dhatucha; Machi; Bodel[*] ; Dwara; Jha(n)galthaku; Pampu; Baga:; Basuju; Bhilla; Bhele; Bhaiju; Bhuyo; Biao; Cho(n)ju; Daiju; Dhalapamaga; Dhampo; Dhobwa; Dhi(n)griju; Gasuca; Ganapati[*] ; Gaisi; Gharu; Gopi; Gopa; Gathe[*] ; Gorkhali; Guche(n); Gwae(n)maru; Gwae(n)masyu; Jugiju; Hamo; Ha(n)ju; Haleyojosi; Hamonayo; Ha(n)chethu; Jatadhari; Jaidaju; Jha(n)ga; Joharju; Joti; Jotisuwal; Ka(n)pa; Khaju; Khaiju; Khi(n)ju; Khwaiju; Khuju; Kila(n)bu; Kisa(n)kari; Ko(n)da; Kusma; Lakhemaru; Lachimasya; Libi; Ligiligi; Lu(n)ba(n)ja:; Mata(n); Marikhu(n); Malakasi; Mathya; Mogaju; Nakhetri; Naila; Naramuni; Naemasaphu(n); Ne(n)che(n); Paka; Pa(n)ca; Pa(n)ka; Pakha(n)ju; Pa(n)gulu; Phitiju; Puwa; Pyatha; Sa(n)dha; Si(n)kedathe; Si(n)kemani; Sibahari; Si(n)khwa; Si(n)ba(n)jar; Syama; Sulu; Sukhupayo; Swa(n)gamikha; Swanapa; Takra; Tahamati; Tajala; Tamakhu; Talache(n); Thakulawat[*] ; Thakuba(n)jar; Thuyaju; Tusibakhyo; Twa(n)ju; Tyochi(n)a; Wata(n)kachi; We(n)ju; Bhenatwa(n); Dubche(n); Da(n)dekhu; Cokami; Chusyakhi; Cho(n)ju; Che(n)gutala; Cakumani; Bakhu(n)che(n); Bweju; Bhola(n)dyo; Bhokhaju; Gora; Hakuduwa; Tuladhar
― 627 ―
IX. Jyapu (group 3)
Kasti; Dhanachwa; Gane, Pha(n)ju; Hya(n)goju; Paluba(n)ja:; Khicaju; Kuchumani; Lakhe; Mata(n)gulu; Nalami; Nakhusi[*] ; Bathu; Gulmi
Kasti; Dhanachwa; Gane, Pha(n)ju; Hya(n)goju; Paluba(n)ja:; Khicaju; Kuchumani; Lakhe; Mata(n)gulu; Nalami; Nakhusi[*] ; Bathu; Gulmi
X. a. Chipi (Srestha[*] ; Sakha:karmi; Balla; Bhuju; Naebha; Dyoju)
b. Debabhandari; Khawaju
XI. Cyo (Phusikawa[n])
XII. Dwi(n)
XIII.[6] a. Gatha (Banamala)
b. Bha (Karanjit)
c. Kata: (Sudhdakar)
d. Cala(n) (Diwakar)
e. Khusa:
f. Nau (Napit)
g. Kau (Nakarmi)
h. Pu(n) (Citrakari)
i. Sa:mi (Manandhar, Sahu)
j. Chipa (Ranjitkar)
XIII. Pasi
XIV. Nae (Kasai, Sahi, Khadgi[*] )
XV. a. Jugi (Darsandhari[*] , Kapali, Kusle)
b. Danya[7]
XVI. Do(n)
XVII. Kulu
XVIII. Po(n) (or Pode[*] or Pore) (Matangi[*] )
XIX. Cyamakhala:
XX. Halahulu
Part 2. Newar Hindu Thars In Bhaktapur Listed Alphabetically
Acaju (Karmacarya) [IIIb];[8] Acaju [V]; Amatya (also called "Mahaju") [II]; Anu [IIIa]; Awa: (Awal) [VII]; Badiya[*]
[IIIa]; Baga: [VIII]; Baidhya [IIIb]; Baidhya (Rajbaidhya) [II];
Bajiko(n) [VIII]; Bakanani [VIII]; Bake [V]; Bakhadyo [VIII];
Bakhu(n)che(n) [VIII]; Balla [Xa]; Banepali [IIIb]; Basi [II]; Basuju
[VIII]; Basukala [V]; Batas [IIIa]; Bathu [IX]; Bha (Karanjit) [XIII];
Bhadra [IIIa]; Bhaiju [VIII]; Bhaju [IIIb]; Bhari (Rajbhandari[*] ) [II]; Bhari (Ca[n]gubhari, Pujabhandari[*] , Bhandari[*]
) [IIIb]; Bhau (Bhaju) [II]; Bhele [VIII]; Bhenatwa(n) [VIII]; Bhilla
[VIII]; Bhokhaju [VIII]; Bhola(n)dyo [VIII]; Bhuju [Xa]; Bhuyo [VIII];
Biao [VIII]; Bidya [VIII]; Bijukche(n) [IIIb]; Boche(n) [IIIa]; Bodel[*] [VIII]; Bramhalawat [IIIa]; Brahman (Rajopadhyaya) [Ia]; Bweju [VIII]; Bya(n)ju [V]; Caguthi[*] [VIII]; Cakumani [VIII]; Cala(n) (Diwakar) [XIII]; Cawa:
― 628 ―
(Cawal)
[V]; Che(n)gutala [VIII]; Chipa (Ranjitkar) [XIII]; Cho(n)ju [VIII];
Cho(n)ju [VIII]; Chu(n)ju [VIII]; Chuka(n) [V]; Chusyabaga [V];
Chusyakhi [VIII]; Cokami [VIII]; Colekhwa [V]; Cyamakhala: [XIX]; Cyo
(Phusikawa[n]) [XII]; Daiju [VIII]; Da(n)degulu [VIII]; Da(n)dekhu
[VIII]; Da(n)dekhya [VIII]; Danya [XVb]; Datheputhe [VIII]; Debabhandari
[Xb]; Dekana [V]; Dela [V]; Desemaru [V]; Dhalapamaga [VIII]; Dhampo
[VIII]; Dhanachwa [IX]; Dhatucha [VIII]; Dhauba(n)jar [VIII]; Dhaubhari
(Dhaubhadel[*] ) [II]; Dhaugwara [V]; Dhi(n)griju
[VIII]; Dhobi [XVII]; Dhobwa [VIII]; Dho(n)ju [V]; Dholaju [V]; Dhukhwa
[V]; Dhusu [VIII]; Do(n) [XVI]; Do(n)ju [V]; Dristi [IIIb]; Dubche(n)
[VIII]; Dumaru [V]; Dupo(n)la [V]; Duwal [V]; Dwara [VIII]; Dwi(n)
[XII]; Dyoju [Xa]; Gaisi [VIII]; Galaju [VIII]; Ganapati[*] [VIII]; Gane [IX]; Gasuca [VIII]; Gatha (Banamala) [XIII]; Gathe[*]
[VIII]; Gharu [VIII]; Go(n)ga: [II]; Go(n)ga: [IIIb]; Goja [VIII]; Gopa
[VIII]; Gopi [VIII]; Gora [VIII]; Gorkhali [VIII]; Guche(n) [VIII];
Gulmi [IX]; Gusai [V]; Gwae(n)maru [VIII]; Gwae(n)masyu [VIII]; Gwacha
[V]; Gya(n)maru [V]; Hada [II]; Hakuduwa [VIII]; Halahulu [XX];
Haleyojosi [VIII]; Hamo [VIII]; Hamonayo [VIII]; Ha(n)chethu [VIII];
Ha(n)ju [VIII]; Hoda[*] [II]; Hoda[*]
[IIIb]; Hya(n)goju [V]; Hya(n)goju [IX]; Hyau(n)mikha [V]; Hyau(n)wa
[VIII]; Hyeju [IIIb]; Jaidaju [VIII]; Jatadhari [VIII]; Jaekama [IIIa];
Jhanga [IIIa]; Jha(n)ga [VIII]; Jha(n)galthaku [VIII]; Jo(n)che(n) [II];
Joharju [VIII]; Josi [II]; Josi [IIIb]; Joti [VIII]; Jotisuwal [VIII];
Jugi (Darsandhari[*] , Kapali, Kusle) [XVa];
Jugiju [VIII]; Jyakhwa [V]; Kachipati [IIIb]; Kaiti [VIII]; Ka:mi
(Silpakar) [VIII]; Ka(n)pa [VIII]; Kapa: ta:go [II]; Kasaju (Kayasta[*]
) [II]; Kasula [VIII]; Kasti [IX]; Kata: (Sudhdakar) [XIII]; Kau
(Nakarmi) [XIII]; Kawa(n) [V]; Khaiju [VIII]; Khaitu [VIII]; Khaju
[VIII]; Kharbuja [V]; Khatakho [V]; Khawaju [Xb]; Khaeguli (Khayargoli)
[II]; Khaeguli [V]; Khaemadli [V]; Khe(n)dhaumaku [II]; Khi(n)ju [VIII];
Khicaju [IX]; Khinao [V]; Khitibaku [VIII]; Khorja [V]; Khoteja [V];
Khuju [VIII]; Khumjajy [IIIa]; Khusa: [XIII]; Khusu [V]; Khwaiju [VIII];
Khwakhali [II]; Khwalepala [VIII]; Kibanayo [V]; Kila(n)bu [VIII];
Kisa(n)kari [VIII]; Kisi [V]; Koju [V]; Ko(n)da [VIII]; Kongasyo[*]
[II]; Kuchumani [IX]; Kulluju [VIII]; Kulu [XVII]; Kumha: (Prajapati)
[VII]; Ku(n)paka [V]; Kusatha [VIII]; Kusi [V]; Kusma [VIII]; Kutuwa
[VIII]; Kutuwa:ju [VIII]; Lachimasya [VIII]; Lageju [V]; Laghuju [V];
Lakha [V]; Lakhe [IX]; Lakhe Brahman (Rajopadhyaya) [Ib]; Lakhemaru
[VIII]; Lasiwa [V]; Lawa [V]; Libi [VIII]; Ligiligi [VIII]; Loha(n)ka:mi
(Lo[n]hala) [VIII]; Lu(n)ba(n)ja: [VIII]; Macamasi [V]; Machi [VIII];
Madhika:mi (Madhikarmi[*] ) [IIIb]; Maka: [IIIa];
Maka: [V]; Maka: [VIII]; Makhasya [V]; Malakasi [VIII]; Malekar
(Malkaju, Nepali) [VII]; Malla [II]; Marikhu(n) [VIII]; Maske [IIIb];
Mata(n) [VIII]; Mata(n)gulu [IX]; Mathya [VIII]; Mogaju [VIII]; Muguthi[*] [VIII]; Mulepati [II]; Mulmi [IIIb]; Muna(n)karmi [II]; Nagaju [V]; Naila [VIII]; Nakhetri [VIII]; Nakhusi[*] [IX]; Nalami [IX]; Naramuni [VIII]; Nau (Napit) [XIII]; Nae. (Kasai, Sahi, Khadgi[*] ) [XIV]; Naebha [Xa]; Naeju [IIIb]; Naemasaphu(n) [VIII]; Ne(n)che(n) [VIII]; Nhemaphuki [V]; Nhinaenaemasa[*]
[V]; Nhisutu [V]; Nhuche(n) [V]; Pachiju [VIII]; Paka [VIII];
Pakha(n)ju [VIII]; Pakwa(n) [II]; Palikhel [II]; Paluba(n)ja: [IX];
Pampu [VIII]; Pa(n)ca [VIII]; Pa(n)gulu [VIII]; Pha(n)ju [IX]; Pa(n)ka
[VIII]; Pasakala [IIIa]; Pasi [XIII ?] Pau(n) IV]; Phaiju [IIIb];
Phasikeba [V]; Phelu [VIII]; Phitiju [VIII]; Piya [II]; Piya [IIIb];
Po(n) [or Pode[*] or Pore] (Matangi[*] )
― 629 ―
[XVIII]; Pradhananga[*]
[II]; Pula(n)che(n) [II]; Pu(n) (Citrakari) [XIII]; Puwa [VIII]; Pyatha
[VIII]; Pya(n)tago [V]; Rajacal [VIII]; Rajba(n)si [IIIb]; Raya[*]
[II]; Sacinya [IIIa]; Sakha:karmi [Xa]; Sa:mi (Manandhar, Sahu) [XIII];
Sa(n)dha [VIII]; Sa(n)gami [II]; Sae(n)ju [II]; Sibahari [VIII];
Simatwa [V]; Si(n)ba(n)jar [VIII]; Si(n)kedathe [VIII]; Si(n)kemani
[VIII]; Si(n)khwa [VIII]; Sitikhu [V]; Srestha[*]
[Xa]; Sujakhu [V]; Sukhupayo [VIII]; Sulu [VIII]; Suwal [V]; Swanapa
[VIII]; Swa(n)gamikha [VIII]; Syama [VIII]; Ta:cabhari (Talcabhadel[*]
) [II]; Tacamoga [V]; Tadyoya [V]; Tagora [V]; Tahamati [VIII]; Tajala
[VIII]; Takra [VIII]; Talache(n) [VIII]; Talasi [V]; Tama: (Tamrakar)
[VI]; Tamakhu [VIII]; Tapol [IIIb]; Thakuba(n)jar [VIII]; Thakulawat[*]
[VIII]; Thike [V]; Thuyaju [VIII]; Timla [II]; Tini (Sivacarya) [IV];
Tuladhar [VIII]; Tusibakhyo [VIII]; Twanabasu [V]; Twa(n)ju [VIII];
Twati [V]; Twaena [V]; Twaena [VIII]; Twi(n)twi(n) [V]; Tyata [V];
Tyochi(n)a [VIII]; Ujha(n)thache(n) [II]; Ulak: [IIIa]; Wa(n)gaeyo [V];
Wasaba(n)jar [V]; Wata(n)kachi [VIII]; We(n)ju [VIII]; Yakaduwa [V];
Yakami [V]; Yauca [IIIb]
― 630 ―
Appendix Four
Types of Worship and Materials Used in Worship
We
have said something of the worship of the dangerous deities in chapter 9
but have not discussed personal and household acts of worship directed
to benign deities.
"Worship" in its most general sense is often phrased as sewa yagu
, "to serve," a term used to designate service to a superior, an
employer, or a king as well as a deity. Specific, relatively formal, and
circumscribed acts of worship are called, as generally m Hinduism, pujas . In formal pujas
and in most of the more informal gestures of worship, the worshiper
acts out respect, subordination, hospitality, and honor to the
deity—implicitly giving the deity, in turn, responsibilities to the
worshiper. Various kinds of daily worship are considered to be a duty,
part of following the dharma , a way of maintaining relations with the deities. Many special acts of worship and special kinds of pujas are required or advisable or available options in various circumstances.
In addition to the daily pujas performed in households without the aid of Brahman purohitas (family priests), and the minor optional household and personal pujas that are also done without the assistance of Brahmans, Rajopadhyaya Brahman purohitas are able to list more than seventy specifically named pujas that they perform for their middle- and upper-status employers under various circumstances.
The offering of pure and unbroken husked rice, kiga :, is considered an elementary puja . People knowing that they will pass some favorite temple or shrine may carry some kiga : with them to offer to the deity. Other pujas add to and elaborate on this offering. Within more complex pujas there is often a climactic offering of kiga : in a component act that is specifically called (as is the larger sequence of which it is a part) puja yagu , "doing a puja ."
We will sketch some different pujas
in a summary and incomplete way, using local terms for some materials
and implements that will be defined and described in later sections of
this appendix.
― 636 ―
Materials and Equipment
The equipment and supplies used in pujas in Bhaktapur are collectively called puja jola(n) . There are some thirty items of equipment used in addition to the murtis
or god images. With the exception of two conch shells (one used as a
container for water, the other as a trumpet) the other items are made of
metal—of copper, iron, brass, "bell metal" or kae(n) , and other alloys.[5]
Most items must be made from the proper specific type (or a selection
among limited specific types) of metal. Most of the thirty items come
from the standard Hindu inventory of ritual equipment, but some of them
are locally considered specifically Newar, which is to say that they are
not used by the Indo-Nepalese Hindus. The equipment includes bowls and
dishes of various sizes and shapes, spoons, containers for water or
other fluids (some with spouts for pouring, some without), a funnel,
tripods, oil lamps, containers for colored pigments, bells, a mirror, a
conch shell container, and a conch shell trumpet. About half these items
are used in ordinary pujas , the remainder in various types of specialized pujas . Ordinary Brahman-assisted household pujas use about ten items; ordinary Tantric pujas use some sixteen pieces of equipment.
Nine items are locally considered to be specifically Newar. The most prominent of these is an oil lamp, sukunda (a variant shape with the same usage is called mukunda
). This is an elaborate lamp of complex symbolism, much of it
representing the various relations of Siva and Sakti. We have discussed
it in chapter 9. The other special Newar items are the salai , a metal dish; the nya(n)thala , and the thapi(n)ca , flasks; the dhaupatu , a cup; the sinhamu, a container with a removable top used to hold one kind of pigment (bhus sin-ha[n] ); and the arghapatra , a container in the shape of a human skullcap.
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans list more than 200 materials that are necessary for various pujas . These include cleaning materials, leaves and grasses, pigments for decorating the deities and the puja
equipment and other pigments for marking out the worship area with
elaborate diagrams, flowers, various forms of rice, foodstuffs of many
kinds (including sweetcakes of various shapes and ingre-
― 640 ―
dients), alcoholic spirits and sacrificial animals (for Tantric puja
s), products of the cow, threads of various sorts, oil-lamp wicks,
cosmetic kits as gifts to the goddesses, small unglazed clay dishes, and
other disposable pieces of equipment. Such materials are used in the
preparation of the puja and in its course as offerings to various deities and to the officiating priests.
Some of the materials that are referred to in this volume warrant some special comment.
5. Boy's hair shaving: Busakha.
The Busakha , or hair-shaving ceremony, like the following (and often intimately associated) rite for boys, the Kaeta Puja
, not only moves the boy from one "Newar" or Hindu stage to the next
but also, in so doing, differentiates him from the people of other thar s and, much more saliently, other status levels. At the same time it differentiates him from females.
― 663 ―
Not only do girls not have these two ceremonies, but there are emphases on the boy's maleness within them.[8] The Busakha represents the beginning of a boy's moral responsibility for the dharma of his thar , a responsibility that, however, is most clearly and fully introduced in the next samskara , the Kaeta Puja .
The Busakha and the Kaeta Puja are often associated conceptually and among many thar s are approximated m time. The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans separate the two widely. Among them the Busakha is often done when boys are five years of age; the Kaeta Puja (associated for the Brahmans with the traditional Upanayana initiation) comes much later, at eleven or thirteen years of age. For those other thar s who do the Busakha as well as the Kaeta Puja ,[9] however, the Busakha may be done only three days prior to the Kaeta Puja —as is often the case with the Chathariyas and Pa(n)cthariyas—or immediately prior to the Kaeta Puja , on the same day, in a combined ceremony (as is the case with the Jyapus). The Busakha and the Kaeta Puja must be done when a boy is at an odd-numbered age, and is usually done at the ages of five, seven, or nine.[10]
The core act in this samskara
is the shaving of the boy's head with, as is the traditional custom of
"twice-born" Hindu men, the exception of an occipital queue of hair,
called in Newari the angsa .[11] Boys do not have their hair cut before this ceremony, and it is said that after the Busakha
the boy, because he has had his hair cut, no longer looks like a girl.
In the course of the elaborate ceremony the key moment of transition
comes when the paju at the proper astrological sait shaves
four patches of hair on the boy's head, representing, in sequence,
east, south, north, and west, conventionally the front, right, left, and
rear of his head, respectively. The paju will also much the boy's right and left earlobes with needles, to symbolize ear piercing, another traditional Hindu samskara that is done m Bhaktapur along with the hair shaving. A Nau, a member of the barber thar
, does the full shaving of the head and the actual piercing of the
ears. After the barber's work the boy is stripped naked in front of the
onlookers and helped by family members in bathing.
In the course of the day representatives of the phuki go to worship at the mandalic[*] pitha as they will, starting with this samskara , at the time of all subsequent auspicious ones.
Ideally the Busakha
is the first of the rites that ceremonially mark an increasing social
responsibility—the others, for a boy or young man, being the Kaeta Puja and marriage. Traditionally in the course of South Asian samskara s "after the Cudakarana[*]
or tonsure when the child grew into a boy, his duties were prescribed
and his responsibilities explained . . . without encumbering his mind
and body with book-knowledge and school discipline" (Pandey 1969, 33).
Those disciplines were to follow later.
For most thar s it is the Kaeta Puja that almost immediately follows the Busahkha (and that in the lower thar s may be done without a Busakha ), which is the samskara most clearly associated with a change m the behavior expected of the boy, a change defined with Kaeta Puja as the boy's new status as a fully privileged and responsible member of his thar . Among the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans and the upper-status priestly thar s who emulate them (Josi, Tini, and Acariya) where there is a separation of some years between the two samskara s,
― 664 ―
a boy after his Busakha
is expected to begin to be cautious and responsible about polluting
contacts in his play and other activities outside the family. It is said
that he should now begin to represent the Brahmans and to act like one
outside the family.[12]
.
7. Mock-marriage: Ihi.
The Newar samskara s in Bhaktapur are for the most part closely modeled on the traditional Hindu samskara s. The most dramatic exception is the Ihi , the mock marriage ceremony for girls.[19] The implications of the Ihi require major changes in traditional menarche rites, and some changes m the traditional "true" marriage.[20]Ihi and the related modified menarche and marriage rites were traditionally not done by the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans,[21] nor, for different reasons, by the unclean thar s from level XIV, that is, the Nae, and below. "Ihi " is an old Newari word for marriage, but it is now used only for the mock-marriage, not the "true" marriage, the Byaha .[22] The Ihi samskara
must be done before the onset of menstruation, and can take place at
any time between, approximately, five and eleven years of age. At the
core of the Ihi is a traditional Hindu ceremony of marriage, but the spouse is
― 666 ―
Visnu/Narayana[*] .[23]
The premenstrual virgin girl is given in marriage to the deity as a
gift or offering in the traditional Hindu marriage act called kanya dana , "the giving of a virgin daughter." Because of this prior gift in the Newar mock-marriage, the kanya dana
segment of the marriage ceremony is, in contrast to traditional South
Asian practice, omitted in Bhaktapur's true marriage ceremony.
The legends told to explain the Ihi
ceremony emphasize one of its central implications. Parvati was the
daughter of Himavan, the deity of the Himalayas. When she was to be
married to Siva, Himavan gave Nepal (that is, the present Kathmandu
Valley) to her as her dowry. One day as Parvati was walking through the
Valley she heard an old woman crying. Parvati asked her why she was
crying. "My husband is dead. A husband is necessary for a woman; without
a husband a woman's life is terrible." Parvati pitied her and asked
Siva for a boon. "Can you do something for the women of my natal home so
that they will not become widows?" Siva answered, "Narayana[*] and I will arrange it so that there will no longer be any widows in Nepal." Thus the Newars were given the Ihi ceremony. Narayana[*] was the groom, and Siva the witness.
The
legend not only emphasizes a maneuver for avoiding the ritual
disabilities of widowhood but places the scene in the setting of
Parvati's natal home, her tha: che(n) , the setting where a woman
is a relatively indulged child and daughter, rather than being in the
greatly contrasting condition of wife and mother in the home of her
husband's family and m the circle of his phuki . The women of "Nepal," that is, the Newar women of the Kathmandu Valley, are Parvati's sisters, not her sisters-in-law.
The Ihi
ceremony is, as a marriage had to be in Hindu tradition, a premenarche
marriage. This means that the second marriage, the one to a mortal, can
be delayed as all second marriages can, until after menarche—often long
after it. Thus both the necessity of child marriage[24] and the full force of widow disability are ameliorated by the invention of this Newar samskara . The Ihi
ceremony is, as we shall see, in some aspects of its form as well as in
its legendary intent, somewhat subversive of the Hindu patriarchal and
hierarchical principles that are central to other samskara s.
Ihi ceremonies involve a group of girls, often a large group. There are several Ihi
ceremonies in Bhaktapur during the course of a year. Each is sponsored
by a well-to-do man who has a (biological or classificatory) daughter,
granddaughter, or younger sister to be given the samskara .[25]
The sponsor will gain religious merit and social prestige through his
sponsorship. Traditionally sponsors were Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya,
but in recent years Brahmans and Jyapus (the latter made relatively
wealthy through land reforms and beginning to follow upper-status
religious practices) have also become sponsors. The exact range of thar s taking part in a particular ceremony is determined m part by the status level of the sponsor; thus the lower-level clean thar s are more likely to be found at a Jyapu-sponsored ceremony than at a Brahman-sponsored one.
In the days preceding the Ihi ceremony each girl who is to take part receives invitations from her tha:thiti (the kin acquired through out-marriages of the phuki women) and from her paju 's (mother's brother) households in
― 667 ―
Bhaktapur—and sometimes in nearby towns—to visit them. She spends several days in these visits and is offered swaga(n) and food in each household. On the day before the main Ihi
ceremony there are various preliminary activities. During the day the
main Acaju priest who will loin with other priests in the ceremonies
sacrifices a goat at the sponsor's local areal Ganesa[*] shrine, and then visits each of the city's nine mandalic[*]pitha s to make offerings of samhae
and alcoholic spirits to the goddesses. He begins, as is always the
case in such sequential visits, with Brahmani to the east, ending after a
circuit of the periphery in a clockwise direction with Tripurasundari
at the center. He worships, making the proper sacrificial offerings, at
each pitha in turn. While there are visits to the particular mandalic areal pitha of phuki groups in the course of most of that phuki 's samskara s, this movement to all the pitha s reflects the amalgamation of the Ihi girls into a spatially and socially heterogeneous and at the same time integrated group.
During this preliminary day—as they would before any major samskara
—the members of each involved household will have preparatory
purification ceremonies, and those families with Aga(n) deities will
make offerings of samhae to them. In the latter part of the day
before the ceremony the sponsoring household, the one where the ceremony
is to take place, performs a Duso (or Duswa ), "a looking
in" ceremony, that is, a preparation for the visit of the deity. This
is thought of as a notice and "invitation" to the deity to attend the
ceremonies. This ceremony is done by Brahmans for all their own major
auspicious samskara s, but by other thar s only m this preparation by the sponsor of the Ihi ceremony. The Duso begins when the main Brahman purohita
(there are usually two or three Brahmans involved in the ceremony), and
the two auxiliary priests (a Tini and a Josi), the sponsor of the Ihi
, and, often, other senior males of his household, go in a procession
accompanied by musicians to a location near the Jyatha Ganesa[*] shrine in the potter's quarter, where a purified puja area is prepared. A member of the Kumha: (potter) thar
, accompanied by members of the procession, brings black clay to the
ritual area. The black clay is formed into a ball, the "All(n) God,"
said to represent "Siva and all the (benign) gods." The Ali(n) God is
now worshiped along with a clay pot, a Brahmakalasa , on which there is an image of Brahma, representing the trimurti —Brahma, Siva, and Visnu[*] . Another piece of black clay is set aside to represent Ganesa[*] in the next day's ceremony.[26] Carrying the Ali(n) God, the Brahmakalasa, and the clay that will represent Ganesa[*] , the group returns to the house of the sponsor in a procession and is met at the house's pikha lakhu by the wife of the main purohita . She now performs a laskusa
—a formal ceremony greeting the deities and the members of the
procession and chasing off evil influences in a formal exorcism,
followed by her leading the central participants into a sacred area, in
this case the area in the house where the formal ceremonies will take
place.[27] Now the main purohita goes through the proceedings for ritually "establishing" (sthapana ) the Ali(n) God.
The
girls who are to have the ceremony the next day are waiting at the
house, and are each attended by at least one representive, (either male
or female) of their phuki . The Ihi girls, are dressed in red, sometimes in a special red-and-yellow Ihi dress resembling a traditional marriage dress. One girl—
― 668 ―
usually the sponsor's daughter, or perhaps niece or granddaughter—is chosen as the naki(n)
, the "leader of the brides." A complex series of events follows, many
of which mimic procedures from Brahmanical marriage ceremonies, which
indicate in various ways the binding together of each girl with her
divine groom and the divine witness.
These ceremonies are followed by a feast for the Ihi girls at the sponsor's house in which boiled rice, here called duso Ja prepared by the wives of the Brahman purohita s who are officiating at the ceremony, is eaten. This partaking by a group of mixed phuki s, thars, and macrostatus levels of boiled rice is unique. In other feasts where there are representatives of non-phuki groups, and above all, members of other thar s it is essential that boiled rice not be served—baji
, beaten fried rice being served instead. Nevertheless, this apparent
opposition to ordinary proper procedures is limited. First, the girls
are not yet full members of their thar s. Second, the girls are
separated into "eating groups" by floor space—so that some group
separation is maintained. As in all ritual feasts, the leftover food is
taken to the areal crossroads deity, the chwasa , and discarded.
At the end of the ceremony the girls return to their homes. They are now
considered to be in a state of purity. They must now fast until the
next day.
The main events occur on the next day in
an elaborate sequence requiring the services of Brahman, Josi, Tini, and
Acaju priests. In the events of the day, as in those on the preliminary
day, the Ihi mirrors many of the elements of South Asian
upper-status traditional true marriage ceremonies, as well as having its
unique aspects. The ceremony has three astrologically determined sait s, indicating the core transformative elements. This is the time for the preparatory purification by a nauni ;[28] for the application of bhuisinha(n) , orange-red pigment, to the parting of the girl's hair;[29] and for the presentation of the girls as gifts of a virgin, a kanya dana , to the deity.
In the course of the day's preparatory phases the Acaju does a puja called desa bali ,[30] which is an offering to the gods of all the Tantric temples in the city, represented in the puja by grains of polished rice. There is nothing like this in ordinary samskara s.
The main images at the wedding—provided separately for each girl—are the bya (in Nepali, bel ) which is the fruit of the Bel plant (Aegle marmelos ), and a small gold image (or flat piece of gold with an image engraved on it). The bya represents Siva; the image represents Visnu/Narayana[*]
. Each girl is accompanied by her father (or, if he is not available,
an elder brother or one of her father's brothers). He will offer her as a
kanya dana to Visnu/Narayana[*] . At the proper sait for the kanya dana
each girl stands with her hand linked to her male donor's and the
girl's mother (or, if necessary, a surrogate) pours ritually pure water
and milk over their Joined hands. The donor says his name and (in the
case of the upper-level thar s) the name of his gotra ,
his daughter's name, and the name of his father and grandfather. The
daughter is to be presented "in the name of" these lineage members. At
the exact astrological time—called out by a Josi—the donor gives his
daughter to the god as manifested by pressing her thumb against the
golden image. The image is held against the bya representing Siva
as the witness to the marriage. The focal marriage is followed by a
sequence of closing ceremonies, and ends with a supper of rich, sweet
foods.
― 669 ―
Many girls customarily establish bonds of fictive kinship with other girls during the Ihi ceremony by exchanging sinha(n) pigment and kisali
, small pots containing husked rice grains. The pots and the rice are
then used in offerings to a ceremonial sacrificial fire that had been
made and worshiped at the beginning of the Ihi sequence by the attending priests. The bond friend or fictive sister is called a twae (chap. 6). During later life two young women may make themselves twae s in special ceremonies as men do, but the Ihi
is the setting in which young girls characteristically form these
bonds. It is noteworthy that in congruence with other implications of
the Ihi ceremony, twae relations extend kinship beyond the phuki , and frequently beyond the thar , and, sometimes, even beyond the two girls' status levels.
The Ihi ceremony stands in a coherent contrast to the other city samskara
s—all others (except the old-age ceremonies) variants of traditional
Hindu rites of passage. In its main import it rationalizes an avoidance
of premenarche marriages and of certain aspects, at least, of the
stigmatization and disabling of widows in a society where, in consonance
with its Himalayan roots, the status of women had long been relatively
less constrained than m Indo-Nepalese and Indian Hindu societies. In
keeping with its legendary reference to the Newar's homeland as
Parvati's natal home and to Parvati as its tutelary goddess, the Ihi
ceremony in itself has elements suggesting social integration blurring
the central patriarchal order and differentiation of the phuki and its satellite alliances—an order emphasized or taken for granted in other samskara s. Such gestures of blurring of patriarchal order are the joining together m one ceremony of members of different phuki s, thar s, and status levels, the worship of all the city Tantric shrines and all the mandalic[*]pitha
s in concert—in a representation of, among other things, all the city's
lineages—and the creation of trans-familial, and sometimes
trans-status-level fictive sororal bonds. These gestures are made within
the context of a traditional Hindu marriage ceremony. in Michael
Allen's epitome, "the mock marriages may be said to constitute a formal
show of commitment to orthodoxy in Brahman dominated communities within
which key values are still strongly unorthodox—especially as regards the
status of women and female sexuality and reproductivity" (1982, 203).
It is usually said that a Hindu boys' transition to full adult "ritual" status begins after Upanayana —which means in Bhaktapur his Kaeta Puja
—while a girl's transition begins after her marriage. Thus, for
example, in traditional South Asia "the death of a boy after his Upanayana
entails full fledged defilement, but a girl before her marriage is
still regarded as a child and her death causes defilement for a period
of three days only" (Pandey 1969, 258). The transformation made by
marriage in a Newar girl's ritual life stage is more complex, for she
has two marriages. After the first one, the Ihi , she is still a
full member of her natal family, while the second one, her "real"
marriage, brings membership in a new, a conjugal family.
In some ways the Ihi ceremony does have the same implications for a girl that the KaetaPuja has for a boy. After her Ihi ceremony, the girl would receive full adult death rites if she were to die. She is now said to belong fully to her thar
― 670 ―
and to be responsible for not becoming polluted by sharing vulnerable foods with children of lower thar s and for purificatory cleaning before eating. For middle-level thar s after Ihi a girl is presented to her phuki lineage deity, the Digu God, as a sort of initiation into the phuki at a special ceremony of initiation held at the time of the following Dewali Digu Puja[31] (chap. 9).
While girls are notionally said to be fully responsible after the Ihi
, many of them are still very young, and in fact it is at the time of
their menarche ceremony that they are really expected to be able to
understand and follow the thar rules for separation and purity, and it is that samskara that signals a girl's passing beyond some aspects, at least, of childish lack of responsibility.
8. Menarche ceremonies: Barha taegu and Barha cwa(n)gu.
The menarche rite differs significantly between those thar s who perform the Ihi
ceremony and the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, who traditionally did not. The
contrast illustrates the influence of the mock-marriage on the Newar
menarche samskara .
For the Brahmans,
marriages were until a few years prior to this study necessarily
completed ceremonially before the bride's first menstruation. Although
the child bride continued to live in her natal home until after
menarche, sometimes well after it, she was brought—usually temporarily,
returning to her own home after the rite—to her husband's house in
anticipation of the onset of her first menses so that her menarche rite
would be held at her husband's home. If menses started unanticipatedly
at her natal home. she was immediately brought to her husband's home,
her head and face covered with a shawl. For the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans it
was in accordance with standard Hindu traditions considered to be a
serious violation of the dharma if (1) a girl was not married
before menarche and (2) once so married, the married girl's first
menstruation took place in her own home. In the Brahmanical (and
traditional Hindu) case the menarche samskara , a ceremony lasting for twelve days, took place not only in the husband's home but at the time of actual menstruation.
For all the other thar s, those whose girls had Ihi marriages and who were thus "married" before menarche but who did not have a human husband's home to be brought to, the samskara takes place in the girl's natal household—or in a related phuki household. These ceremonies can be performed at the actual time of a girl's first menstruation—in which case they are called Barha cwa(n)gu , or prior to, often long before, menstruation, as a mock-menarche samskara , the procedure in these latter cases being called Barha taegu .[32] There are various combinations of Barha taegu and Barha cwa(n)gu procedures. Upper-status thar s usually do a Barha cwa(n)gu , that is, a ceremony at the time of menarche, although this may be a relatively recent change from earlier Barha taegu , premenarche, practices.[33] Traditionally middle-level thar s, that is, for the most part Jyapus, would link a group of premenarche girls in what was for those girls a Barha taegu to the Barha cwa(n)gu ceremonies for an actually menstruating girl. In recent times, among such middle-level thar
s, the connection to actual menstruation has been often ignored and
often only premenarche girls participate in a group ceremony. All these
arrangements are considered effective menarche ceremonies, in that girls
who have a premenarche Barha
― 671 ―
taegu samskara will have no further ceremony at the time of their eventual first menstruation.
Traditionally the girls who were to have their Barha taegu had completed their Ihi
marriage, and were perhaps seven or eight years of age, although now,
it is said, there is some tendency at least for some of the girls to be
older. While the Barha cwa(n)gu must be done at the time of actual menstruation, the optional range of timing of the Barha taegu calls for an astrological decision as to the auspicious timing. In contrast to other samskara s, the decision does not determine the sait
for some focal action within the ceremony but, in this case, the proper
lunar fortnight in which the twelve-day rite should take place.
The menstruating girl, or the group of premenstrual girls (who are usually sisters or girls of the same phuki ) are to be isolated for twelve days in a room in which the windows are covered so that no sunlight will enter.[34] The Barha taegu girls are dealt with as if they were actually undergoing their first menstruation, that is, as if they were Barha cwa(n)gu
girls. During this time the "menstruating girls" must not be seen by
males (as the girls are within the house, this taboo primarily concerns
male kin and, perhaps, their friends) who are beyond their Kaeta Puja samskara
. The sight of the girls is said to be somehow dangerous to them. It
was, reportedly, traditionally said that men would turn to ashes and die
if they glimpsed the girls, and it is still said that it would, at the
least, bring some sort of misfortune to a man who happened to see them.
After twelve days of seclusion the girls are brought to the upper open
porch, the ka:si , of the house to see and be seen by the sun.
It is said that the girls are still full of power at this time, and that
only the sun can resist their force, although it is said that, if the
day is cloudy, even the sun resists seeing them. The isolation, then, is
said to protect men and the sun from seeing the girls—not to protect
the girls. During the girls' isolation from men household women enter
the girls' room, and girl friends and young female relatives from other
houses visit the girls. These visits, during which the girls play and
laugh, are particularly important in the Barha cwa(n)gu , as the single girl would otherwise be relatively isolated. The visiting women and girls who are not phuki members are not polluted by these visits—in contrast to the household and phuki members, both male and female, who may share group impurity during this period (see below).
During the first four days the Barha girls have a restricted diet. On the fourth day they have the first of the two ceremonial purifications associated with the samskara . The girls go to the ka:si or cheli
(chap. 7) of the house and bathe in a minor purification procedure.
This marks the traditional end of actual menstruation. They then return
to the room. Now, and for the remaining days, the girls are given rich
foods to eat, including milk, meat, and beaten rice. On the fourth day
in all thars served by Brahman purohitas the families of the girls send traditional substances—twelve betel nuts, twelve cloves, bhuisiha(n) pigment, rice powder, and mustard oil[35] —to the family purohita . This is said to be a notification to the purohita that the girl has completed her first menstruation.[36]
On the twelfth day the confinement ends with the Barha pikaegu , "the taking outside," which is a ceremonial climax of the samskara . On this day, in
― 672 ―
preparation, the Nau and Nauni come before sunrise to purify the girls in a house courtyard or on the cheli . Household members are also purified before sunrise but separately from the girls.[37]
After dawn the purohita does a Kalasa Puja
on or near the open porch. The girls, their heads and faces covered
with a cloth, are brought by household women to the edge of the puja area, where the purohita sprinkles sacred water and other purifying substances that had been used in the puja on them. The girls are then brought to the ka:si
, where the cloths covering their heads are removed so that they can
see—and be seen by—the sun (or, on a cloudy day, the sky). The girls'
special power/contamination[38] is now considered to be removed. The girls worship the sun with kiga : m an elementary puja (app. 4). They then do a second puja , this time a formal and elaborate one, to the sun with the help of the purohita , during which they worship the "twelve suns" of the twelve solar months. In the course of this puja
the girls make offerings using a conch shell for the first time and
will now be able to do so in subsequent worship on other occasions.
After the puja to the sun the household senior woman, the naki(n)
, does a ceremonial act that anticipates a similar act occurring toward
the end of the sequence of ceremonies in the "true" marriage sequence,
and which on that occasion is said to signify that sexual intercourse
has begun. This is the sa(n) pyakegu , the hair-parting ceremony. The naki(n)
, as will the husband in the marriage ceremony, places a ceremonial
cosmetic mixture (rice flour and oil) in the supine hands of each girl.
The girls then rub the cosmetic mixture on their faces. The naki(n) then combs each gifts hair and braids it into three plaits, which are then woven together. Then for each girl in turn, the naki(n) places black pigment on the girl's eyelids and puts a spot of decorative bhuisinha(n) pigment on her forehead. Now the naki(n)
holds up a mirror so that the girl may see herself, a gesture that has
added force in that during the twelve days of seclusion the girls were
forbidden to look at their reflections m a mirror.
The sa(n) pyakegu is followed by other pujas and offerings. In contrast to other auspicious samskaras , there is no worship of the mandalic[*] areal pitha . The ceremony is followed by a small feast for close phuki , affinal, and feminal kin, but there is no large feast for the larger phuki group as there is in many other samskara s. The phuki group in some thars has been polluted during the twelve days. That pollution is lifted at the time of the Barha Pikaegu , without any need for major purification procedures.
This samskara , as the sa(n) pyakegu
makes clear, alludes to the traditional implication of the menarche
ceremony as a married girl's transition to active sexuality. The delayed
true marriage and, also, the inclusion of the Barha taegu
preadolescent girls alters this meaning. But the implication of
incipient sexual passions, if not active sexuality, is still there.
The Barha Pikaegu
, the ceremonial exit from seclusion, represents the reintegration
after a period of "liminal" isolation (during which the major danger is
to the household males) of the now actually or notionally sexually
mature girl with religious and social forms and controls. In the
traditional context this all takes place within a girl's husband's
family, and represents a significant addi-
― 673 ―
tion
to her role as the family's daughter-in-law to now also being her
husband's sexual partner. All these implications of the menarche
ceremony have been transformed for the Newars by the introduction of the
Ihi mock-marriage.
Chapter Five The Distribution of Roles: The Macrostatus System
1. There is frequently a difference between the name that members of a
thar
use to refer to and to identify themselves, and the name by which
outsiders refer to it. When it differs, the name used by outsiders may
refer to a professional or occupational category, or it may be a name
that has some pejorative connotation in the judgment of the
thar
members themselves. In the presence of membets of a
thar
outsiders may often use a third, an honorific, name. For the most part
in this work we use the ordinary names used by outsiders m references to
a
thar
.
2. In Bhaktapur, in contrast to its common use in Kathmandu and other cities, Srestha[
*]
is used by only one traditionally low group, the Cipi, whose
traditional status is below the farming groups, but who are now engaged
mostly in upper-level socioeconomic activities.
3. Fürer-Haimendorf also notes that Chetri
thars
are not unilineal descent groups "in the narrow sense of the term. All
members of the Bista clan [for example] no doubt consider each other as
linked in an undefined way, but the fact that those who are of different
lineage are not debarred from intermarriage excludes a fiction of
patrilineal descent from a common ancestor" (1966, 30).
4. Different
thars
may have internal differences in details of their religious practices,
styles of life, and internal political organization, which in part
derive from the
thar's
origins and history and m part, for many of them, from the effects of
the position and functions forced on them by their position in the
macrostatus system.
5. Dumont (1964) had suggested that by his own criteria for caste
structure, the Newars do not have a true caste system. This was probably
based on limited information on the Newars. Greenwold, using Dumont's
criteria, has argued that "the Newars in fact possess a caste structure
that conforms most stringently to Dumont's definition" (1978, 487).
Toffin also argues m the face of Dumont's statement that the Newars at
least in the larger towns and the cities do have a "caste system" in
Dumont's terms. "en ce sens qu'elles sont fondles sur un module
religieux qui donne à la société une grande cohérence et qui lui sert de
fondement intellectuel" (1984, 222). We will return to Dumont's
conception of the caste system in chapter 11 in conjunction with a
discussion of Newar uses of purity and impurity in social hierarchy.
6. "A
jati
is an endogamous, hereditary social group that has a name and a combination of attributes. All members of a
jati
are expected to act according to their
jati
attributes, and each member shares his
jati's
status m the social hierarchy of a village locality in India" (Mandlebaum 1970, 14). For the
jati
members themselves, Mandlebaum notes, the
jati
has a position in a ranked hierarchy of groups. A "
jati
cluster" is a set of separate
jatis
, classed together under one name, whose members are treated by
others
as having the same general status (ibid., 19).
7. The designation "
sahu
" or "
jyapu
" may indicate either the groups of
thars
and status levels whose members usually engage in these professions, or
in other contexts it may designate all those who actually engage m the
profession, irrespective of
thar
or status level.
8. At a more abstract level there is, as we will touch on again below and discuss in later chapters, a
vertical
division of groups into two hierarchies, those whose members are
"technicians of marked symbolism" and those who deal with other kinds of
power and production.
9. These distinctions have, however (as we shall note), one significant structural usage in Bhaktapur, in the separating of the
thars
grouped as a unity elsewhere among the Newars as ''srestha[
*]
'' or "sesya:," into two strata, Chathar and Pa(n)chthar, distinguished as being "ksatriya[
*]
" and "vaisya[
*]
," respectively.
10. Starting in the midnineteenth century the Ghorkali, state, following
the Malla practice of written legal codes, began efforts to codify the
entire heterogeneous population of the new multiethnic state into a
traditional hierarchical system in a document called the
Muluki Ain
, "the law of the country." This intriguing imperial expansion of the
Hindu ordering of small states underwent a number of stages and versions
and was considered as "official" until the 1960s (Höfer 1979).
11. The many status lists for Bhaktapur in the chronicles and other
Malla documents (some of which are in the Hodgson collection at the
India Office Library in London) and reports by later foreign visitors
also provide an invaluable basis for an understanding of the historical
changes that the system has undergone under various historical,
economic, and demographic pressures. A very valuable attempt at
collation of reports for Newar Nepal is Chattopadhyay (1923).
12. Endogamy must be outside of the extended patrilineal kin group, the
phuki
(chap. 6). For the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans the lack of non-
phuki
kin in Bhaktapur requires that they marry Rajopadhyayas[
*]
from one of the other major Valley Newar cities.
13. The Lakhe do not, apparently, exist m other Newar cities. Early
accounts have noted similar lower-status Newar Brahman priests such as
the "Lawerju" mentioned by Oldfield ([1880] (1974), vol. 1, p. 177).
14. The term "
srestha[
*]
" is from the Sanskrit
srestha[
*]
. In classical Sanskrit its meanings included "best," "chief," "first," "best among," "oldest, senior," and in the form
Srestin[
*]
, "a distinguished man, a person of rank or authority" (Monier-Williams [1899] n.d., 1102). "
Syesya
:" derives, according to Manandhar (1976), from an old Newari term "
sista
," "a king's man" which may, in turn, be derived from "
srestha[
*]
."
15. Although the Brahmans are not "renouncers," this terminology may
suggest an idea of a contrast between the worldly professions and
situation of the Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya and an "other-worldly"
profession of Brahmans and other priests. Most of the city's
thar
-specified activities can be sorted into one or the other of these
"worlds," the realm of the "ordinary" on the one hand and of marked
symbolism on the other.
16. "
Thariya
" means member or members of a
thar
. Thus Chathariya are members of the Chathar level. We will use this form frequently.
17. The Nepali coding of statuses, the
Muluki Ain
of 1854, divides the
Srestha[
*]
into two levels, "cord wearers" and "non-enslavable alcohol drinkers"
(Höfer 1979, 137f.). Höfer speculates that these two divisions may be
equivalent to Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya.
18. Early accounts of Newar
thars
note groups written "
jaisi
" or "
jausi
." In some accounts (e.g., Hamilton [1819] 1971) and those derived from
some of the chronicles (e.g., Basnet 1981; Lévi 1905) the
jaisi
are described as a high mixed group "derived from a Brahman by a Newar
woman," who have subsections variously doing divination, astrology,
medicine, and some priestly work. Hamilton ranks them above "Shresta[
*]
" (i.e., Chathariya) as some middle- and low-ranked people still do.
19. Some early accounts (e.g., Oldfield [1880] 1974; Hodgson n.d.)
similarly report "classes" of Jyapu (three [Oldfield] or six [Hodgson]
in number), which, however, in contrast to the present status-level
"classes," were said to intermarry.
20. "
Jya
" means "work," or "task'' in a very general sense. "
Jyapu
" (female ''
Jyapuni
") means one who farms. It is used in two different ways. One is for anyone who belongs to a traditional farming
thar
, even if that person has some other profession. The other usage
specifies "farmworker" and can also be used for someone from a
nonfarming
thar
who does farmwork, although it would not usually be said that they
are
Jyapu, but rather that they "do Jyapu work." Even though farming is
permissible to a large range of middle-level and upper-level
thars
it is not, in fact, done by upper-level ones and was traditionally forbidden to the lower "unclean" ones. Thus "
Jyapu
" also has implications of both "class" and a certain level of purity.
21. The Chipi consider themselves to be of a higher status. It is said
that there was a court case during the Rana period on the question of
their ranking when their present low status was confirmed or determined.
Our informants did not know why they have low status.
22. Chattopadhyay (1923, 525) collates some of the early accounts of the
Dwi(n). He notes that they were described as having originally been
hunters and fowlers who worshiped both Siva and Buddha. They were said
to have been elevated to the pure castes because they saved
Prthvinarayana Saha's life. Chattopadhyay speculates that the Dwi(n)
were originally a "more or less wild" jungle tribe. Niels Gutschow has
interviewed the only Dwi(n) in Bhaktapur who follows the traditional
thar
activities, and notes that he has some special tasks during two annual
festivals, Biska: and Pasa Ca:re (personal communication).
23. Our reasons for qualifying such uses of "ritual" are discussed in chapter 11.
24. It is said that under the Rana regime the Sa:mi, whose
thar
name is Manandhar, petitioned the Rana regime for a reclassification
and were subsequently classified as being "water-acceptable" for the
higher levels. This reclassification was "not accepted" in Bhaktapur
(cf. Nepali 1965, 171). Oil pressing is generally associated in South
Asia with low status. "The pressing of seeds . . . is stigmatized as a
degrading occupation in the Code of Manu because it destroys life by
crushing the seed" (Hutton 1961, 89).
25. Several of the earliest accounts of Nepal, summarized in
Chattopadhyay (1923), include a "caste" of Newar "washermen" variously
given as "sanghar," "songat," "sangat," "sughang," and "pasi." Aside
from Pasi (which we have placed at level XIII), these or similar names
are not known now. These washer-men were listed in some accounts as
being at the bottom of the status hierarchy, below "sweepers."
26. According to Hodgson (n.d.), all these
thars
(with the exception of Cala[n], which he does not list) were "a class
of Newars called Ekthureea [Ekthariya] or outcaste, or 'single body,'
distinguished by their profession or trade." As Chattopadhyay (1923,
534) points out in a comment on this passage, they were certainly not
"outcastes" but were placed just above the clearly polluting levels.
Earle, in the 1901 Census of India (cited in Chattopadhyay [1923]),
includes Cala(n) in the list and lists the group as a whole as
"intermediate castes." Earle's and Hodgson's lists both have some
additional
thar
s at this level not known m contemporary Bhaktapur. Lévi (1905, vol. 1,
p. 242) writes of this group that they "only form a group by opposition
to the previous groups, and are subdivided into true castes." The
polluting status of this group in earlier accounts is somewhat
ambiguous. Hamilton writes, "All the castes yet enumerated are
considered as pure, and Hindus of any rank may drink the water which
they have drawn from a well; but the following castes [our level XIII]
are impure, and
a person of any considerable dignity will be defiled by their touch
(Hamilton [1819] 1971, 36 [emphasis added]). This comment corresponds w
Hodgson's ''outcastes." Oldfield, however, includes them among the
''heterodox Buddhists" and says that "from their hands any Hindu will,
or may, drink water" ([1880], 1974, vol. 1, p. 187). Nepali (1965,
168ff.) includes them among the clean
thar
s. These differences, and the consequent differences in reports about
them by differently placed informants, suggest their marginal status.
27. The Nae slaughter only the water buffalo. Other animals whose flesh
is eaten in Bhaktapur are slaughtered by the households and other groups
who will subsequently eat them as sacrifices to one of the "dangerous"
deities (see chap. 9).
28. The Do(n)s may be related to the Doms of Kumaon (Srivastava 1966,
194). According to Niels Gutschow, the remaining traditionally active
Do(n) in Bhaktapur play a drum during certain festivals and other
occasions (personal communication).
29. They are often referred to as "Po(n)," and refer to themselves as "Pore" (which is probably an older Newari form).
30. In 1974 Niels Gutschow interviewed a Halahulu who lived in Bhaktapur
at that time, and who later moved to the nearby town of Timi.
31. On Newar Buddhism, see Lewis (1984), Snellgrove (1957, 1961
a
), Locke (1976), Lévi (1905), and Greenwold (1973, 1978).
32. David Snellgrove expresses the same opinion with an evaluative turn,
"Whereas in India Buddhism was ruthlessly destroyed, in Nepal it has to
be forced into conformity with other traditions, which represent the
negation of all its higher striving, so that it has died of atrophy,
leaving outward forms that have long ceased to be Buddhist in anything
but the name" (1957, 106).
33. The "Urae caste," according to Colin Rosser, was "a composite caste
of merchants and craftsmen of generally high economic status through
their predominance in the trade with Tibet, and of all Newar castes the
one which is by far the strongest in devotion to Buddhist beliefs and
practices according to the Tibetan model, largely, of course, through
their close and continuing association with Tibetans in the course of
trade" (1966, 106). For a study of a Urae group in Kathmandu, the
Tuladhars, see Lewis (1984).
34. The Urae were, as Hodgson (n.d.) put it, "traders and foreign merchants," and could draw their members from different
thar
s. Associated with the Urae by various authors are both trading and craft
thars
, including Tuladhar, Loha(n)ka-mi Sika:mi, Tamrakar, Awa:, Kumha:,
Madhika:mi, and "Kassar" or "Kasa" (workers in bell metal alloy).
Hodgson (n.d.) also lists carpenters associated with the Matsyendranath
festival in Patan, "red lead makers," and doorkeepers.
35. For a study on the Muslims in Nepal, see Gaborieau (1977). The Malla
courts, influenced by Indian Mughal court styles, invited Muslims to
settle in the valley as manufacturers of perfume and bangles and as
court musicians from at least the early eighteenth century. See also
Slusser (1982, vol. 1, p. 68f.).
36. There is a section on the Gaine and their music in Hoerburger
(1975). According to Niels Gutschow, the Gaine play music throughout
Bhaktapur in the weeks before Mohani (chap. 15) according to a fixed
schedule, each family having the right to play m certain quarters
(personal communication).
37. Priestly and para-priestly roles are often
covertly
stigmatizing (chap. 10).
38. It is worth noting that the estimates made by our informants were
usually very close, sometimes identical to Gutschow and Kölver's survey
findings.
39. In general, there seems to be some correspondence between the
numbers of households needed for many of the city functions and the
actual numbers of households, although this does go wrong and provide
problems in some cases. It would be of importance to attempt a study of
the adjustive mechanisms involved.
40. This varies from the census figure of 6,484 because of distortions in rounding numbers in the adjusted table.
41. One can get a rough idea of the number of
individuals
who are members of different classes of
thar
s by multiplying the number of households by the mean number of
individuals per household for the city, which is six. The number of
individuals per household, however, varies significantly by status level
(chap. 6).
42. Thus the total number of households in the group of occupational
thar
s is misleading because of the large numbers of Kumha: households that are engaged only in farming and not in the traditional
thar
craft of pottery-making. Similarly, the number of households in the group of
thar
s associated with Taleju is artificially enlarged by the inclusion of
the large number of Suwal households, only a few of which have
traditional Taleju functions.
43. We will use the term "boiled rice," as the Newars do themselves, to denote both boiled rice and boiled pulses.
44. "Each jati closes its boundaries to lower jatis, refusing them the
privilege of intermarriage and other contacts defined as polluting to
the higher jati. Each jati, in turn, is excluded by the jatis ranking
above it in a local caste hierarchy. Thus, differences in degree of
pollution create closed segments, as each segment tries to preserve its
own degree of purity from contamination by lower castes" (Kolenda 1978,
66; derived from Dumont 1980 [1966]).
45. Not only were "pure" levels forbidden to take water from "impure"
levels, but traditionally and to a considerable degree now, members of
the water-unacceptable levels did not take water from what they
considered to be still lower levels, and this was sometimes true of
thar
s
within
a water-unacceptable level. As Höfer has noted, the
Muluki Ain
of 1854 formally forbade "pure castes" as a group from taking water
from "impure castes" as a group, and no "impure caste" was allowed to
take water from a still lower ranking ''impure caste" (1979, 56). That
is, the first sorting of ''pure" and "impure" on the city level was
replicated within successive divisions of "impure castes." However,
these further divisions were of no importance, or of a different sort of
importance, for the larger city organization.
46. D. R. Regmi (1965, vol. II, p. 696), remarking that the conception
of two types of polluting groups is found in the classical Dharmasastras[
*]
attributed to Manu and other writers, stated that the two classes,
those who were water-unacceptable but not polluting by touch and those
who could not be touched, were probably present in Malla Nepal. These
two levels, "Impure but touchable" and "untouchable," are present m the
official codification of the caste Hierarchy of Nepal, of 1854, the
Muluki Ain
, which codified existing social regulations (Höfer 1979, 45). Rosser
(1966, 88f.) divided status levels among the Newars into a simple
opposition, water-acceptable and water-unacceptable, equivalent to
"pure" and "impure," "dominant" and "subordinate," respectively. His
separation begins with the Jugi and does suggest the strong symbolic
emphasis on the special polluting status of
thar
s at this level and below. It does not, however, correspond directly to
the actual categories of purity and impurity. The water-unacceptable
group begins for upper-level people above the Jugi, and the separation
between simple water-unacceptability and untouchability cuts through his
"subordinate" group. Stephen Greenwold (1978, 458f.), in a study of
Newar castes in Kathmandu, tries to incorporate both the Hindu and
Buddhist
thar
s there into one system. He divides the resulting combined status levels
into two ranked groups with a "great divide" between them--those who
have
either
Brahmans or Vajracarya Buddhist priests as household priests, and those
who do not. By so doing, he incorporates our level XIII
thar
s into this upper division. He then further separates the households in
his "clean" category served by priests into two ranked subgroups, whose
purificatory services are done in the upper section by the barber
thar
(Nau) and whose lower section is purified by the low-level butcher
thar
, the Nae. The designation of a lower section of the status hierarchy
which has purificatory services, specifically nail cutting, done by
women of the butcher
thar
is reported in some of the chronicles of early Nepal (see D. R. Regmi, part I, p. 642). In Bhaktapur the barber
thar
does purification only for those levels above XIII (and for themselves), and some of the other
thar
s do have certain ritual purification performed by women of the butcher
thar
. Greenwold's "lower-clean" division represents those who are
water-unacceptable (but not untouchable) in the Hindu system, and who
are not served by Brahmans, even though they are served by Vajracaryas
and other auxiliary priests. In the Hindu system of Bhaktapur the first
separation in terms of cleanliness comes between level XIII and those
above it. Greenwold's system works from the Vajracarya priest's point of
view in which all the levels that he serves are necessarily "clean,"
but not from the point of view of upper-level Hindus.
47. Newar Brahmans do eat mutton and goat meat.
48. As Dumont has argued, in order to clarify the significance of
"caste" endogamy in Hindu marriage, "the first marriage must be
distinguished from subsequent freer marriages and,
a fortion
, from illegitimate unions" (1980, 113). Newar marriage, as we shall see
later, has special features because the woman's first marriage is not
precisely (in Dumont's terminology) a
primary
marriage, as she was previously married to the god Narayana[
*]
in a ritual mock-marriage.
49. In contrast to Indo-Nepalese marriages Newar primary marriages are
not optionally hypergamous, nor do they have hypergamous implications
(see chap. 6).
50. Höfer notes that in the
Muluki Ain
"a hypergamous union is prohibited only if it implies a transgression
of the demarcation lines (a) either between pure and impure castes or
(b) between touchable and untouchable castes within the category of the
impure castes" (1979, 81).
51. In the
Muluki Ain
of 1854 the Bare are listed below the Chathariya with a middle group of castes (Höfer 1979, 137f.).
52. Now, as in Nepali, the term "Bhote" is used for Tibetans and
distinguishes them from the Sae(n) hill peoples of northern origin.
53. The equivalent Nepali term is "
Parbate
" or "
Parbatiya:.
" Some informants tend to use the Nepal, term to include both Sae(n) and Partya.
54. The Sae(n)/Khae(n) contrast has a dubious relation to the historical
origins of the Khas group, which may well have had Mongoloid, as well
as North Indian, components (K. B. Bista 1972, 13).
55. According to Slusser's summary of scholarly opinion, the Muslim
conquests of North India at the end of the twelfth century which caused
orthodox Brahmans from Mitila and Buddhists from Bihar to flee into the
Kathmandu Valley also forced other refugees into the western hills of
Nepal: "The latter belonged to well-defined Hindu castes, particularly
the Brahman priesthood, the Ksatriya[
*]
military aristocracy (known as "Chetris" in Nepal), and, at the bottom
of the social scale, occupational castes such as tailors, shoemakers,
and blacksmiths. . . . This influx fortified other Indian immigrants who
had long filtered northward, and had mixed in various measure with the
established local population. The latter essentially issued from two
streams: the Khasa, Indo-Aryans who spoke a Sanskritic language
ancestral to Nepali, and who for centuries had drifted eastward through
the Himalayan foothills; and the Mongoloid tribes, particularly the
Magar and Gurung. . . . By the sixteenth century, an ethnically mixed
military aristocracy, who often claimed Rajput descent and emulated the
latter's preoccupation with military chivalry and the purity of Hindu
religion, had carved out numerous petty hill states. Gorkha, immediately
west of the Valley was one of these" (1982, 8).
Chapter Six Inside the Thars
1. "Sixty percent of all Bhaktapur households lived in multi-unit
structures, thirty-six percent occupied single-family houses, three
percent lived in commercial buildings and a smaller number were in
temporary quarters" (Nepal Rastra[
*]
Bank 1974
a
).
2. This distribution is very similar to that found in the other valley
cities, Kathmandu and Patan, studied in the same survey. There Is a
somewhat larger percentage of the largest-sized households in Bhaktapur.
3. See Mandlebaum (1970, vol. l, part II) for a summary of studies on
family, family roles, and the family cycle in Indian societies.
4. The male/female sex ratio for Bhaktapur is 102.6 males per 100
females in 1971. The figures for Nepal as a whole--with its mix of
Himalayan and Indo-Nepalese communities--were about the same.
5. The relationship is symbolized in an annual Newar ceremony, the
Kija Puja
(chap. 13), a variant of a widespread Hindu ceremony in which sisters worship their brothers.
6. In the lower
thar
s, whether the wife returns to her natal home and the length of the stay
is limited by the need for the woman to return to help in household and
other economic tasks. Among the Jugi, for example, the wife returns to
her parents' house only if there are other women in her conjugal
household to help with household tasks, and among the Po(n) sweeper
families the wife does not return to her natal home at all.
7. The
nakhatyas
generally take place after the main day or days of the festival or rite
of passage. On the main days there may be feasts for the patrilineal
kin, the
phuki
.
8. A similar system of precedence characterizes the hierarchical sharing
of the head of a sacrificial animal among wider male kin groups (chap.
9).
9. In some farming families in Bhaktapur, a father will stop accepting a daughter's
cipa
once she has been married out of the family, a practice that has been
reported elsewhere in South Asia. Thus, in the central provinces of
India, "some castes will not take food from their own daughters once
these daughters are married, even to men of their own caste (Hutton
1961, 73; citing Russell and Lal [1916] 1975, vol. 1, p. 179).
10. The great majority of
thar
s marry within Bhaktapur.
11. Newar girls are kept out of the sun during their menarche ceremonies (app. 6).
12. In contrast to its reported use elsewhere in South Asia, menstrual
blood is not reportedly used in esoteric Tantric rituals in Bhaktapur.
13. See the discussion of menarche rites in appendix 6.
14. During the course of a wedding, at the end of the first phase
representing the separation of the bride from her parental household, it
is not her brother but her own maternal uncle,
her paju
, who plays a key transitional role. He physically carries her out of
her natal house and hands her over to the groom's representatives.
15. It may also be referred to in relation to the child, simply, as
grandfather's or grandmother's house while those kin are alive, but it
will always be the
paju
's house.
16. A young husband wishing to give his wife a present, say, cloth for a
sari
, without it appearing that the money was withheld from the common household pool, may sometimes claim that the
sari
is a gift to his wife from his
paju
, with some assurance that the lie is plausible and, furthermore, that the
paju
will back him up.
17. As there has been some liberalization of marriage rules in recent
decades, particularly a prohibition of child marriage, among all
Nepalis, the Newars now are not as different from other Nepali Hindus as
they formerly were in these particular aspects of marriage.
18. Among the Newar Brahmans after the marriage of a girl of perhaps
nine or ten to a Brahman boy of perhaps twelve to fifteen (or sometimes
older), the girl would go to her husband's household for important
household ceremonies. She was also brought to her husband's household in
anticipation of her first menstruation and its associated rite of
passage which should take place there, but she would then return to her
natal home and not return to live at her husband's house until sometime
after menarche--In some cases not, in fact, until she was seventeen or
eighteen.
19. A younger wife may also, it is said, be flighty and may run off, either back to her home or to another man.
20. There are some rough statistics on actual ages of first marriage for
other Newar communities at a period some fifteen years before this
study. In 1957 and 1958 Gopal Singh Nepali surveyed 206 Newar families
in Kathmandu and fifty-one in the village of Panga. He reported that
about 35 percent of the women in his Kathmandu sample married at less
than fifteen (the majority were thirteen or fourteen years of age).
About 41 percent of the women roamed when they were between fifteen and
eighteen years of age, and another 15 percent married between nineteen
and twenty years of age. The remaining 9 percent married at more than
twenty years of age. For the men, some 12 percent married below the age
of fifteen years, 39 percent between fifteen and eighteen years, 30
percent between nineteen and twenty-four, and the rest, about 19
percent, above age twenty-four. Most girls, he concluded, married
between thirteen and twenty years of age and most boys between fifteen
and twenty-four. The village statistics showed slightly earlier ages for
the marriage of girls m Panga. He attributed this to the high value of
labor among the farmers of Panga but commented that in contrast to some
agricultural villages in India none of the Panga girls were below ten at
the age of marrigae (Nepali 1965, 201ff.).
21. G. S. Nepali found that because, he was told, of a comparative
scarcity of brides, people had "started marrying a woman from the third
or fourth generation, if the relationship is traced through the female
links only" (1965, 205). This is probably true now for many of the
thar
s of Bhaktapur who are faced with similar scarcities. Nepali and others
have written that the patrilineal restriction is limited to seven
generations. For many, perhaps the majority of Bhaktapur's
thar
s, however, it applies as long as common membership in a
kul
is recognized, whatever the number of generations.
22. There are a few groups, such as the Brahmans, who consider all Bhaktapur Rajopadhyaya to belong to the same
kul
, who must marry outside the city. In recent years there seems to have
been a tendency for some of the wealthier, more educated people involved
m business or trade to take wives from a larger area.
23. Although it is possible to object to a particular arranged marriage, it is greatly harder for either to reject marriage
altogether
. Girls, for example, are told, "All right, you do not have to marry
this man, but remember you are going to have to marry someone."
24.
Hilabula
marriages are not uncommon among Brahman families because of the restriction of available brides to a relatively few families.
25. That the girl is married to the Bel fruit is a frequently repeated error. See appendix 6 under discussion of the
Ihi
ceremony.
26. G. S. Nepali (1965, 239) quotes the 1911
Census of India
in a reference to the Newar custom of placing betel nuts on the bed to
signify divorce. Nepali writes that it still persisted at the time of
his study, but was confined to the "Udas [Urae] and Manandhar castes." I
[R. L.] did not hear of its use in Bhaktapur, although it may be
practiced by some
thar
s. Nepali also quotes the 1911 Census of India to the effect that a
Newar woman "could undo her marriage bond by placing two betel-nuts on
the chest of a dying husband." He found cases of this practice among
some women who were young and without children. This removed from the
young widow obligations for a prolonged mourning period, and for the
deceased husband's family it removed the widow's claims to a share of
his property.
27. These statistics are derived from Nepali's tables I and II, not from
his discussion, which seems to be in error in regard to the extent of
divorce and separation among his own sample.
28. Failure to produce children would be an important contributing
reason, but this, as we will see, may lead to a multiple marriage (or,
very rarely, adoption) rather than separation if the wife's relation to
the household is otherwise satisfactory.
29. According to Brahmans, a woman who left a previous marriage with a divorce
could
by customary law have a full marriage ceremony, but it is not done because of "social (
samajik
) custom." On the other hand, they say that a woman who leaves her
husband without a divorce is not entitled to a major marriage ceremony,
which requires the participation of Brahmans. Nevertheless, a minor
ceremony--
gwe
(
n
)
kaegu
--which does not require the participation of a Brahman, gives the new
wife full ritual as well as social membership in the family, and she may
subsequently participate in the other Brahman-led rituals of her new
conjugal family.
30. "Misa," the Newari term for "woman," is used for ''wife" in Bhaktapur. "
Kala
'' is used in other Newar towns for "wife," and as an elegant usage in Bhaktapur.
31. In this case the second marriage, in fact,
permits
the first wife to be kept m the husband's home. Otherwise, there would be a necessary separation.
32. Having more than two wives m a multiple marriage is reportedly
extremely unusual m Bhaktapur, Nepali's discussion suggests that each of
the eight cases in his sample involved only one additional wife.
33. For a theoretical interpretation of Newar isogamy, and a review of
often conflicting statements about Newar marriage patterns in relation
to status, see Quigley (1986).
34. See also Gray (1980) on Chetri hypergamy. Among Chetris, status
differences "are created during, and do not exist prior to, the marriage
ceremony. As a result of the performance of a Vedic wedding, the
affinal rule becomes relevant to and structures the relationships
between the members of the households newly linked by marriage [with
the] . . . superiority of the wife-taking household and the inferiority
of the wife-giving household. . . . Through kinship contagion, these
status attributes emergent in marriage become part of the substance of
all members of the giving and taking households" (Gray 1980, 27).
35. The Newar avoidance of adoption IS in marked contrast to the
situation in Polynesian and Micronesian societies where adoption is
extremely frequent (Carroll 1970), and is an index of structural
differences affecting, among much else, the experience and education of
children.
36. For the neighboring Indo-Nepalese Brahmans and Chetri an important maximal indicator of lineage is the
gotra
, which relates individuals to one of the seven mythical Vedic Rsis[
*]
or "seers." Among them a concept of
gotra
exogamy creates an exogamous group much larger than the patrilineal kinship involved in
kul
exogamy. See Bennett (1977, 38ff.) and K. B. Bista (n.d.). Bista claims
(p. 39) that notions of endogamy and exogamy among the Chetri are
fundamentally based on
gotra
exogamy. Only upper-level Newars know their
gotras
, which they must specify in the course of certain rituals. All Rajopadhyaya Brahmans may use the alternative
thar
name Subedi, which indicates, they say, that they belong to the Bharadvaja
gotra
. Most Chathariya are said to belong to the Kasyapa
gotra
. For the Newars the
gotra
has no special ceremonial entailment, aside from identifying oneself
ritually, and has no exogamous entailment at all, even the Brahmans
intermarrying within the same
gotra
.
37. As has been noted above, nonpatrilineal marriage restrictions that apply to
tha:thiti
become annulled after several generations.
38. Toffin (1978) found these "clans" in the Newar town of Pyangon. The unit there was named
gwoha
(
n
), a designation apparently not used among Newars elsewhere. As in Bhaktapur the
phuki
in Pyangon was a subunit of the "clan."
39. For decisions affecting a larger section of the
thar
or the entire
thar
, for example, the Brahmans' decision as a group to abandon child marriage, a matter of litigation over a
thar
's proper status, or a decision about ostracizing a member from a
thar
, the heads of various
phuki
s may meet in a council. The council may or may not represent one
kul
, depending on the constitution of the
thar
.
40. Steven Parish found an average of 4.5 familes per
phuki
among Bhaktapur's Jyapu Suwal
thar
(1987, 86).
41. "
Thakaki
," "elder," "
naya
:," ''leader," and "
naki
(
n
),'' "eldest or leading woman," are used as fides in various kinds of groups. Thus, there is both a household
naki
(
n
) and a
phuki naki
(
n
).
42. For a sketch of
phuki
organization in the Sa:mi (Kathmandu Newari Saemi)
thar
, see Fürer-Haimendorf (1956).
43. This term may derive from
tha
:, "one's own," and "
thiti,
" from the Sanskrit
sthiti
, "rule, regulation, decree," thus meaning related through ritual arrangement (e.g., marriage) in contrast to descent.
44. The daughter of the
phuki
who marries out is in herself not a member of an individual's
tha:thiti
, although her husband, children, and husband's own
phuki
members and their spouses are. She has, as we will see in connection
with lineage rituals and rites of passage, ritual and social connections
with both her
kul
and her husband's
kul
, as she has continuing social relations with her natal and affinal households.
45. "
Bhata
" is a term used by a woman to refer to members of her husband's family (e.g.,
kija bhata
, a husband's younger brother). It was not clear to Bhaktapur informants
why this term is used, but it might conceivably derive from the context
in which girls traditionally form
twae
relationships, which is while both girls are part of a group of girls being given in mock-marriage to the god Narayana[
*]
. Each would be to the other a
twae
from her divine husband's family. It is also possible that historically
cowives in real marriages at times formed these ritual relations.
46. Most people only have one
twae
. A businessman or trader with connections in several communities may have several
twaes
representing his interests or major connections in various communities.
47. For an extensive discussion of
guthi
land tenure, see Mahesh C. Regmi (1971, 1976, 1978).
48. Most of the important temples and larger festivals (chaps. 12 to 15)
are now funded from a centralized bureau of the Nepalese government
that controls major
guthi
funds. There are still, however, many smaller temples and festivals supported by local
guthis
.
49. When the
guthi
has a professional membership, it seems to echo the traditional South Asian professional guild, the
sreni
.
50. For an extensive discussion of Newar guthis, see Toffin (1975
b
).
Chapter Eight Bhaktapur's Pantheon
1. For Newar religious and art history in relation to representations of
divinities, see Pal (1970, 1974, 1975, 1978), Pal and Bhattacharyya
(1969), Slusser (1982), M. Singh (1968), Macdonald and Stahl (1979), and
Ray (1973).
2. Compare the discussion of Visnu's[
*]
avatars below.
3. There is some correspondence between the shape of the main body of
the temple—square, rectangle, circular, octagonal—and its particular
deity (Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p. 142).
4. This unemphasized reference to Brahma is one of the very few rimes where this divinity is represented in Bhaktapur.
5. For Indian Vaishnavites,
salagramas
are a particular species of fossilized mollusk thought to embody Visnu's[
*]
presence.
6. This is of particular interest in regard to Krsna[
*]
. His cult is of great importance in India and elsewhere in Nepal, but
it has not developed in Bhaktapur's traditional religion. This probably
is related to the conflict that the personal
bhakti
religion centering around Krsna[
*]
represents in relation to the civic priestly religion of Bhaktapur. Krsna[
*]
devotion is beginning in certain groups in Bhaktapur and represents a
transformation and "modernization" of Bhaktapur's religious
organization.
7. Varahi is generally conceived as one of the forms of the Tantric
goddesses derived from Siva. She is also the Sakti of Varaha, however,
the boar
avatar
of Visnu[
*]
, and this gives her a connecting thread to Rama, another
avatar
of Visnu[
*]
.
8. See Pal (1970). Some of these representations represent the Vaishnavite emphases of earlier Newar dynasties.
9. "Some works differentiate the divine essence in the several human incarnations thus: Krsna[
*]
, full incarnation; Rama, half; Bharata, Rama's Brother, one quarter;
Rama's two other brothers, one-eighth; and other holy men, various
appreciable atoms" (Atkinson 1974, 709).
10. In spite of their marked contrasts to the imagery and uses of the
dangerous deities, particularly the Goddess (below), some of Visnu's[
*]
avatars
share with the Goddess her ability to overcome the Asuras, and people
may occasionally pray at their shrines for protection against exterior
dangers such as earthquakes, evil spirits, and destructive weather as
they would, and most usually do, to the Goddess. These
avatars
represent a "semantic" potential use that is not important m Bhaktapur
because, in a sense, the dangerous goddesses fill the need.
11. Siva is in a different way a bridge to the Tantric gods but he is worshiped as an "ordinary" deity.
12. The ambivalent nature of Ganesa[
*]
is sometimes signaled elsewhere in South Asia by the position of his
trunk to the right or left. "The trunk . . . may turn either to the
right or to the left, and it is most important to notice in which
direction it is turned, for Ganesa[
*]
with his trunk turned to his own right hand is a dangerous god to
worship. Only a Brahman in a state of the utmost ceremonial purity dare
attempt it. . . . The god with his trunk turned toward his left hand,
however, is in quite a different mood; even a Sudra dare approach him,
and he can be worshiped quite informally, and even though his worshiper
be not ceremonially pure" (Stevenson 1920 [1971], 292-293).
13. In Bhaktapur (and generally for the Newars) Ganesa's[
*]
vehicle is a shrew,
techu(n)
, (Kathmandu Newari
tichu[n]
) rather than his usual South Asian vehicle, a mouse or rat. He is only rarely represented in Bhaktapur in his one tusk,
ekadanta
, form.
14. "The idol of Ganapati[
*]
is installed at the gateways of villages and forts, under the fig tree,
at the entrance of temples, and at the southwestern corner of Siva
temples" (Mani 1974, 273). This last placement is also represented in
Bhaktapur, when Ganesa[
*]
is placed along with Visnu[
*]
, Surya, and Bhagavati, as one of the four protectors at temples of Siva as the supreme god.
15. "Inar" derives from the Sanskrit Ina, one of the names for the sun and the sun god, (Surya is another). Worship,
puja
, to Ganesa[
*]
is called
ma puja
in Newari. There is a legend regarding the founding of the Inar Dya:
temple in which the dead son of a Brahman is brought back to life
through the agency of Ganesa[
*]
, who had previously taken the boy's life out of jealousy because of the excessive love of Ganesa's[
*]
father Siva for Nepal. The boy's life was restored at a spot in a
forest where the first rays of sunlight at dawn touched the ground,
which thus became the site of the present shrine.
16. Niels Gutschow and his associates were shown a complex drawing of Bhaktapur as a
mandala[
*]
showing concentric arrangements of various deities (Kö1ver 1976; Auer
and Gutschow n.d., 38). They have designated this as a "ritual map" and
made attempts to locate the divinities in Bhaktapur's actual space. The
deities include eight Ganesa[
*]
locations, ten Mahavidyas, eight Bhairavas, and eight "Mothers" (Astamatrkas[
*]
). The painting was made in the 1920s, and provides considerable
difficulties in its evaluation and interpretation in relation to the
present and past realities of Bhaktapur's religious practices and
existing shrines. The location and function of the Astamatrkas[
*]
is clear in relation to present practices, the rest problematic. The eight Ganesas[
*]
, ten Mahavidyas, and eight Bhairavas located in the "ritual map" have
no clear location or representation in Bhaktapur's present religious
life, with the possible exception of certain Tantric initiations where
their location and function may, perhaps, be referred to in a trace of
some traditional esoteric knowledge.
17. Brahma has no important representation nor significance in religious
action in Bhaktapur. He is represented, as we have noted, as one of the
three gods, the Trimurti, represented in the Dattatreya temple, which
has its major importance as a Shaivite pilgrimage site for non-Newars
during the annual Sivaratri festival. As Slusser writes, "In the
Kathmandu Valley there are no temples of Brahma, his images are few, and
his role in Nepalese affairs minor" (1982, 263f.). Slusser, while
noting that Sarasvati, like Laksmi, is an independent goddess, says that
she may be considered as having a relation to Durga, the Tantric
goddess. She notes early Newar representations where she is "Durga's
daughter, and one of Visnu's[
*]
consorts," and is the "Kumari aspect of Durga herself" (1982, 320f.).
Such interweavings are sometimes significant in Tantric esoteric
doctrine, but for her meaning and action in Bhaktapur's city
organization, Sarasvati, like Laksmi (who has similar esoteric
connections), is an independent and benign divinity.
18. There is a month-long period of devotion to Parvati (the Swasthani
Vrata; see chap. 13) which is important to all Valley Hindu women. For
Bhaktapur's women the spatial foci of this devotion are the household
and together with other Hindu women in
melas
, mass pilgrimages at out of the city Valley sites.
19. This reflects a traditional South Asian distinction in the
form
that a particular deity as well as kinds of deities may take between "peaceful" forms and (in the conventional Sanskrit terms)
ugra
"mighty, violent, grim, terrible" or
krodha
, "angry," forms.
20. It is possible to offer an "ordinary"
puja
to the dangerous gods, but it is not the properly effective
puja
required for most of the purposes that their worship serves. The legend
of Taleju, discussed below, indicates the importance of the "proper"
worship of such deities through meat and alcoholic offerings.
21. Fustel de Coulanges long ago suggested that the "
pater
" and "
mater
" as used in relation to the classic Mediterranean gods had more to do
with titles of respect and authority rather than of ordinary
(biological) parenthood, which was expressed in terms such as "
genitor
" and ''
genitrix
" (1965, 89f.). Sanskrit also has these two contrasting Indo-European terms for mother,
Matr[
*]
and
Nanitr[
*]
(the latter, related to the term for "birth''), which are cognate with "
mater
" and "
genitrix
."
22. Each of the Mandalic[
*]
Goddesses was sometimes popularly referred to as "Ajima," the respect
title for grandmother, preceded by a differentiating term. Indrani[
*]
, for example, was called "Ili Ajima," and Vaisnavi[
*]
was called "Naki(n)ju Ajima." These names seem to be going out of ordinary usage.
23. The
pithas
of the Mandalic[
*]
Goddesses are worshiped m the same order by an Acaju priest during the course of the mass mock-marriage ceremony, the
Ihi
(app. 6).
24. Bhaktapur, like the Newars generally (Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p.
322n.), has given this name to two historically distinct forms. One of
these is the Matrka[
*]
, proper (Kaumari in Sanskrit), considered as the Sakti of the god
Kumara. The other historically different goddess given this name is the
Goddess as a young virgin (Sanskrit Kumari). While the Mandalic[
*]
"Kumari" is derived from Kaumari, Bhaktapur's "living goddess" Kumari
is partially derived from the virgin Kumari, and her representations as
young daughters in households during Mohani is entirely derived from
that virgin form. Other Bhaktapur Kumaris, preeminently the Kumari of
the Nine Durgas, combines
both
precursors in one figure.
25. The order of the Astamatrkas[
*]
at Bhaktapur's periphery seems to reflect another cosmic sequence. Pal
and Bhattacharyya (1969, 39) give a diagram taken from the Pujavidhi
chapter of the Agni Purana[
*]
. This diagram presents the Astamatrkas[
*]
with the same membership and in the same order as they are arranged in
Bhaktapur, beginning again with Brahmani. But here the Matrkas are
associated with corresponding heavenly bodies or
grahas
. Seven of the
grahas
are associated, m a tradition shared with the west, with particular days of the week. With one exception, that of Vaisnavi[
*]
associated with the sun and hence Sunday, who appears in the fourth and
central position, the other deities in the list as they are arranged in
Bhaktapur are exactly in order of the days of the week; Brahmani, for
example, is associated with the moon, and thus Monday, and so on in
order. The goddess m the eighth position, Mahalaksmi[
*]
is associated with a
graha
, Rahu, which does not preside over a day of the week. Mahalaksmi[
*]
is the deity who does not occur in the
Devi mahatmya
list either, and is from the point of view of both correspondences added to the seven basic Matrkas to yield an eighth.
26. Guhyesvari is primarily represented in Bhaktapur in a hidden and
restricted shrine within the Taleju temple. A second representation is a
hole in the ground in the western part of the city, next to a rest
shelter, where people entering Bhaktapur in that direction from a
pilgrimage were customarily met by their family priest and family
members and where they would stop and pray.
27. This is in contradiction to the belief held by some in the Valley
that it was Sati's anus that fell to earth at the place marked by the
Guhyesvari shrine (G. S. Nepali 1965, 307; Slusser 1982, vol. I, p.
326).
28. The eighth Durga is the Sipha goddess, or Mahalaksmi[
*]
. We will discuss the "mystery" of the ninth Durga in chapter 15.
29. These forms are historically related to the Nepalese tiger- and lion-headed goddesses Vyaghrini[
*]
and Simhini[
*]
(D. R. Regmi 1965-1966, part II, p. 590; Hamilton [1819] 1971, 34.)
Slusser writes of them that they derive from "the lion-headed
Simhavaktra[
*]
and her tiger-headed companion, Vyagravaktra, Buddhist
dakinis[
*]
who are the fearful psychosexual partners of yogins" (1982, 326).
30. There have been a number of architectural studies of the Kathmandu
Valley Malla palaces (Nippon Institute of Technology 1981, 1983; Sanday
1974; Korn 1976). Korn (1976, 59) and Slusser (1982, vol. II, fig. 3)
present sketches of the ground plan of the Bhaktapur palace and its
adjoining temples. See also Slusser (1982, vol. I, chap. 8).
31. Some of the inner structures' sculptures and frescoes, superb
examples of Newar art of the Malla period, have been photographed and
reproduced in Singh (1968, 192-193, 198-199).
32. "In
A.D.
1097, Nanyadeva, a chief from the Karnataka[
*]
country (the western part of southern India) proclaimed himself King of
Mithila and established a new capital at Simaramapura, referred to in
Nepali sources as Simraongarh [Simraun gadh[
*]
]" (Slusser 1982, vol. I, p. 46).
33. This buffalo sacrifice amalgamates Taleju in Bhaktapur with the warrior goddess Bhagavati as Mahisasuramardini (below).
34. In contrast to other sacrificial animals, which are supposed to be
killed by the person who offers the sacrifice whatever his status, the
killing of water buffaloes including the major sacrifices to Taleju is
the special function of the low Nae, or "butcher"
thar
. This part of the legend is connected with this.
35. At present the Taleju temple still has esoteric ritual relations with the Indrani[
*]
pitha
. The Taleju temple is within Indrani's[
*]
mandalic[
*]
section.
36. Slusser has made the suggestion that Taleju was associated with and
eventually absorbed the cult of the ancient Licchavi tutelary goddess
Manesvari (1982, vol. 1, p. 317). In Bhaktapur there is a stone within
the Taleju temple which is worshiped as Manesvari.
37. D. R. Regmi states that in the Kathmandu Taleju temple, "There is no
image of Taleju at the main shrine, only a finial with certain symbolic
marks engraved in a plate of bronze stands in its place as is the case
with similar patterns in other temples of the type in Nepal."
(1965-1966, part II, p. 593). The "finial" is a metal ritual waterpot,
the
kalas
.
38. A Brahman, a Tantric priest (Acaju), and an astrologer (Josi) are
necessary for all of Taleju's internal rituals. At the time of this
study the Taleju staff had four Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, six Acajus, and
three Josis. Among the Brahmans one is considered Taleju's chief priest.
This is a title and function that is inherited within one segment of
the Rajopadhyaya
thar
. It is noteworthy that in contrast to both Malla royal inheritance (D.
R. Regmi 1965-1966, part I, p. 485; part II, p. 394) and current
Nepalese law, where succession to title is by primogeniture, the Taleju
chief priest fide passes on the death of a holder to his next oldest
brother, even if the eldest son of the deceased title holder is elder
than the next eldest brother. However, this principle is limited to
brothers dwelling in the deceased title holder's extended household. If
the brothers bye in a separate household, the title will usually pass to
the deceased title holder's eldest son if he is of age.
39. These rituals are perfunctory. The priests read an oath in Sanskrit,
which is translated into Newari. The person being initiated takes the
oath while making an offering of a mixture of rice, nuts, and corns to
the goddess.
40. It is said that there is only one group in Bhaktapur's civic
religion whose Tantric initiation does not depend ultimately on Taleju
mantras, namely, the Jugis.
41. Only a failure to consider the esoteric and structural aspects of
her role or perhaps an emphasis on the comparatively fragmented
religious system of Kathmandu may explain Slusser's remark that "today,
except for a brief annual resuscitation at Dasai(n) [Mohani], the
Taleju—Mahesvari temples are closed and her cult is virtually extinct"
(Slusser 1982, vol. I, p. 319).
42. As Slusser remarks, Bhagavati "is the name most commonly invoked to
identify any image that is iconographically puzzling to the Nepalese,
particularly gods or goddesses that remind them of the familiar
multiarmed Durga" (1982, vol. I, p. 310).
43. Dui Maju has another entirely different legend in another context.
On the fifth day of the Biska: festival sequence (chap. 14) she is
worshiped as the "younger sister" of the Mandalic[
*]
Goddess Indrani[
*]
. According to the legend told about this day's worship the Goddess Devi
had gone in the form of a low-caste Dwi(n) maiden to the market where
she was recognized and captured by a Malla king with Tantric power and
placed in the Taleju temple. This story may have been generated entirely
by the resemblance m sound of Dui and Dwi(n).
44. Bacchala's temple image is variously described as an anthropomorphic
image in the embrace of Siva as the Lord of the Dance, and as a
yantra
on a Kalasa. Her temple is next to a temple of Siva as Pasupatinatha and seems to represent his consort.
45. The story goes that a Malla king of Patan, jealous of the king of Bhaktapur, sent a merchant to sell Ku Laksmi's[
*]
image (and thus the goddess herself) to the Malla king of Bhaktapur,
who was famous for accepting all new things offered to him. The king
bought her and placed her near his palace with the result that she drove
out the other protective goddesses, who did not want to be associated
with her. So she was moved to a different area, and people went there to
worship her.
46. The practice of going on the twelfth day meant that most of the
children who might die from smallpox had already died, thus protecting
the goddess's reputation.
47. The
Devi Mahatmya
is an independent text that was once a part (chaps. 81-93) of the Markandeya Purana[
*]
. According to Vasudeva Agrawala, that Purana[
*]
was a product of the Gupta Age and its final version was completed by
the time of Chandragupta Vikramaditya at the end of the fourth century
A.D.
(1963, p. iv).
48. The version of the
Devi Mahatmya
we are using here is a translation of a thirteenth-century Nepalese palm-leaf manuscript (Agrawala, 1963, p. xiii).
49. In Bhaktapur, Taleju, Bhagavati, and the Devi of the
Devi Mahatmya
are sometimes addressed as "Bhavani," a title that would be
inappropriate for lesser Tantric goddesses, or for ordinary goddesses
such as Laksmi. Bhavani, "the popular name of Devi in the Sakti cult"
(Stutley and Stutley 1977, 44), connects the goddess for Shaivite
purposes to Bhava, a title of Siva, a title stressing his creator
functions. According to Bhaktapur Brahman informants, Parvati is not
properly called "Bhavani" until she becomes transformed into Parvati
Devi, or Bhagavati, that is to say, the fully powerful manifest goddess.
Bhavani sometimes is held to mean Siva's consort, stressing the
Shaivite connection, but sometimes to mean the "
naki(n)
" of ''mistress'' of existence, which emphasizes the goddess as the supreme creator.
50. Bhisi(n) is only one of the protective deities choosen by Newar
trades-men and shopkeepers in other places. In other Newar communities
Laksmi is said to be the most popular of their deities. Bhisi(n)'s
central status for them in Bhaktapur is special to that city.
51. As Toffin notes Nasa Dya: and some other figures m the Newar
pantheon "clearly have non-Indian roots. These autochthonous elements
represent that part of the religious heritage that is authentically
Newar. . . . Unfortunately our knowledge of the pre-Indian substrate is
too limited to determine precisely its role in contemporary Newar
religious life" (1984, 422 [our translation]).
52. Akasa Bhairava, in Bhaktapur a severed head, is described m Puranic[
*]
accounts as having cut off the head of Brahma who had enraged Siva. In
some of the versions Bhairava was forced to continue to carry Brahma's
severed head with him because of his great sin. He was finally able to
purify himself and get rid of Brahma's head (which m some versions had
become stuck to his palm) in Benares, at a place that is still
commemorated (Mani 1975, 115; Sahai 1975, 119, O'Flaherty 1973, 124).
53. These eight Bhairavas (for their names, see Kölver [1976, 69-71])
are those eight forms traditionally designated as the "leaders" of the
eight major groups of Bhairavas, each group containing, in turn, eight
lesser Bhairavas (Sahai 1975, 121).
54. The slits in the walls of houses, which allow supernatural serpents,
Nagas (and other vague spirits), to enter and, more importantly, to
leave the house, are sometimes identified with Bhairava. These slits are
called "Dya: la(n)," or god paths, and are also identified with a
dangerous form of Hanuman as Hanuman Bhairava, and variously called
"Hanuman," "Bhaila Dya:," "Nasa Dya:," or "Naga" holes.
55. Among the non-Newar Hindu Chetri the lineage gods are also
represented by stones generally found outside the village (K. B. Bista
1972, 66).
56.
Toranas[
*]
, which commonly are placed behind or over figures of divinity, are in
Bhaktapur often carved with a demonic protective figure at their apex.
This figure, Che(n)pha: God, represented with a lion's head, sometimes
with horns, is said to be the brother of Garuda[
*]
, to whom he is related in local legends. He is iconographically related
to the demon-like South Asian form Kirtimukha. Some arches have Garuda[
*]
himself as the protective figure at the apex.
57. Niels Gutschow remarks (personal communication) that there are some particular stones in the city that represent (or are)
naga
s and that can be worshiped and placated.
58. According to Toffin (1984, 488), the
chwasa
is identified in some Newar communities "by women" as the goddess
Ajima. "Ajima" is a respect title for "grandmother" and is used in
Bhaktapur with additional qualifying terms, as we have noted, to refer
to various major dangerous goddesses.
59. According to Manandhar (1976, 37), Buddhist priests similarly believe that the
chwasa
is "the location of an image of Siva."
60. For the Biska: festival Swatuna Bhairawa represents the place where
Bhairava descended into the ground in an attempt to escape his angry
consort Bhadrakali[
*]
. The attempt was only partially successful in that she seized his head
and cut it off; the headless body escaped. This movement is consonant
with the idea of the stone deities as transitions to the underground.
61. These are the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and
Saturn, plus two more (Rahu and Ketu) representing the ascending and
descending nodes of the moon where it crosses the ecliptic and, thus,
the "dangerous" points where eclipses may occur.
62. The various particular kinds of influence—neutral, auspicious, and
inauspicious—of each of the Navagraha are also reflected m the
auspiciousness or inauspiciousness of particular days of the week for
various activities, each day of the week having its particular presiding
Graha
.
63. Bhaktapur's shrines of Jagannatha, Ramasvara, Kedarnatha, and
Badrinatha "were conceived as substitutes for four famous Indian
tirtha
s, to which the king's subjects could more easily repair in their own
city square" (Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p. 207). She has some notes on their
construction.
64. "Annapurna[
*]
, 'Giver (or possessor) of food.' A household goddess who is a
beneficent form of Durga. Her worship ensures that the household and the
world shall never lack food" (Stutley and Stutley 1977, 14).
65. In South Asia the persisting
preta
is generally associated with greediness and a hunger and thirst that cannot be assuaged. For example, "to linger as a
preta
is the most dreaded of all states, for a
preta
has a throat as narrow as the eye of a needle, so it can neither drink
water nor breathe, and its shape is such that it can never stand or sit,
but it is for ever flying m the wind." Stevenson, from whom this
quotation is taken (1920, 191), goes on to say that, the
preta
"continues in that terrible state not . . . owing to any bad
karma
it has acquired, but, generally, owing to the way m which its Sraddha[
*]
[death ritual] has been either omitted or bungled. There is, however,
another thing that may hold a spirit in this terrible condition, and
that is the force of its unfulfilled desires."
66. The
bhutalpreta
distinction is vague and varies for different people, and in different
communities. In his Kathmandu Newari dictionary Manandhar (1976, 409)
defines "
bhuta
" as "a ghost, spirit of a dead person." Stevenson (1920, 161) says that the
preta
may become a
bhuta
, "a malignant spirit."
Stutley and Stutley (1977, 47) indicate that
bhuta
were a special class of created malignant beings, who later became
assimilated, in part at least, with the malevolent qualities of
"particular
pretas
such as those who have met with violent deaths, or who have died without the performance of the correct funerary rites."
67. D. R. Regmi believes that the
khya
is derived from the ancient Indian forest spirit the Yaksa[
*]
(1969, 31).
68. The numbers of deities in household pantheons are of the same order, however, as Roberts, Chiao, and Pandey's numbers.
69. As we have seen, differentiations based on "elementary family
groupings" only—and significantly—apply to one component of Bhaktapur's
pantheon, the benign major deities.
70. Some of the historical residues that are represented in a
"religious" object or event may in a global way give it its canonical
validity. They give force to the object or event from the very fact that
they are "traditional" yet not presently understandable. Compare
Rappaport (1979) on the "sacred" implications of traditional invariants
in ritual.
71. The epitome is St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans (i. 20-24). "Ever
since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his
eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that
have been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God
they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became
futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.
Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the
immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or
reptiles . . . they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and
worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator."
72. "Horror stories," as exemplified by
Dracula
, are familiar modern examples. See Levy (1985), which contrasts
horror stories
as explorations of the moral periphery of a community with
tragedy
as portrayals of their moral centers.
73. The iconographic features of Hindu gods are discussed in the books
on Nepalese art history mentioned above and exhaustively for South Asian
icons in Rao (1971), Banerjea (1956), and Sahai (1975).
74. Totagadde's terms for this "
devates
" group includes "
buta
."
75. Both these terms refer to a sort of general deity, which has
successively differentiated concrete forms that add specific attributes
and functions to the general characteristics of the term. Each level of
differentiation is a being, a
deva
in itself. Wadley notes the contrast between what we have called the
"generative powers" of the more abstract beings to the concrete,
embodied powers of the more and more specialized manifestations: "We
move from the least differentiated beings (with the broadest powers) in
the first deity class to the most differentiated beings (the most marked
beings with the most defined powers) in the last class. The more
differentiated, more marked beings are most likely to be found acting in
the world of men or to have derived mythologically from the world of
men. Related to the amount of specification (differentiation) of deities
is the ideas of powers as embodied.
Bhagavan
, only vaguely anthropomorphized, represents largely unembodied powers—and the least differentiated powers" (1975, 145).
Chapter Nine Tantrism and the Worship of the Dangerous Deities
1. They had capured a pig and drunk its blood, thus making it impossible for the Brahman to take them back into his home.
2. One upper-status interview respondent, a noninitiate, described such
uses of Tantrism as "traditional Hindu science," which was falling into
disuse because it was being replaced by Western alternative techniques
of power such as medicines.
3. The low Jugi
thar
, which has some customs and traditions relating it to an historical
yogic sect (chap. 10), has some rudimentary Tantric aspects in its
initiations. Some of the Jugi's public functions, notably their
performances as Siva, are interpreted by upper
thar
s as having some Tantric meaning and power, and members of the upper
thar
s imagine that the Jugis have private Tantric knowledge.
4. There are Tantric elements or references m Bhaktapur's ordinary
pujas
. The
sukunda
(see below) with its references to Siva and Sakti is used in many Newar
pujas
, and aspects of the diagrams on which
puja
equiment is placed, some of the hand gestures used m the
pujas
, and so on, are understood by the priests, although not by uninitiated
participants, to have some Tantric references. This is thought by local
Brahmans to represent a difference between Newar ordinary
pujas
and Indo-Nepalese ones.
5. Beyer (1973) devotes an entire long volume to a detailed description and exegesis of a Tibetan Tantric
puja
. Van Kooij (1972) provides a detailed discussion of Hindu Tantric
worship. For other sources on Tantric procedures, see Gupta, Hoens, and
Goudriaan (1979).
6. "
Aila
" is renamed "
nya(n)
" in Tantric ritual contexts.
7. A "right-handed method" was associated with the "purely internal
worship" of Sakti. Such worshippers "abhorred the use of wine and other
unconventional ritual items. The term Vamacara . . . became established
for the time-honored Sakta use of wine and meat, and perhaps also other
antinomian elements in their ritual" (Gupta et al. 1979, 44).
8. The significance of
mudra
as one of the five
makaras
is generally assumed to be in reference to the supposed aphrodisiacal power of the substances usually used as
mudra
, parched grain and kidney beans (see Stutley and Stutley 1977, p. 195).
They note that m Buddhist Tantrism, the word may be applied to a female
adept. In Gupta et al. (1979), Hoens has a comment on this latter use. "
Mudra
sometimes denotes the
sadhaka
's female partner or [the] wife of a deity but in that sense it is almost exclusively confined to the Buddhist Tantras.
Mudra
is the fourth of the five
makaras
used in Kaula types of Tantric rituals, where in modern times it stands
for parched rice, some other cereal or savory titbit. Nevertheless one
wonders whether originally it did not mean a female partner" (Gupta,
Hoens, and Goudriaan 1979, 117).
9. "Kaula Tantrics always follow the most orthodox form of esoteric
rites involving the practice of drinking alcohol, eating meat and fish,
and having sexual intercourse with a chosen partner during
puja
. The partner is sublimated to the position of the goddess and is called "Sakti. " She is initiated m the sect and, at the time
puja
is consecrated and worshiped. Her face, breasts and sex organ are
specially revered. The Tantric exerts himself to please her with food,
drink and gifts" (Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan 1979, 147n.).
10. As we will see in a later section, there is evidence that human
sacrifice probably once existed m Bhaktapur as part of the worship of
the dangerous deities. The killing would have been a sacred act, having
been done in the correct ritual context, and the victim would have
received liberation, or
mukti
. This is the sort of transformation of what would otherwise be a crime or a "great sin," a
mahapapa
, into a positive religious action that otherwise illicit sexual
practices in a Tantric context would have represented, and suggests a
climate in which they may have been more likely than in recent decades
or perhaps centuries.
11. Gopal Singh Nepali remarked that the Indo-Nepalese Brahmans of Nepal
refused to accept the Newar Brahmans as their equals because they are
priests to the Newars "whose domestic ceremonies are similar to those of
the Sudras. An additional reason is purported to be the influence of
Tantrism on them, involving use of liquor" (1965, 152).
12. A Tantric
puja
may, for example, be required, on the advice of some religious expert,
in response to some offense to a Tantric deity, particularly to the
Aga(n) God itself.
13. Non-Tantric
pujas
are not necessarily less expensive than Tantric ones, and some of the Brahman-assisted
dhala(n) danegu pujas
(app. 4) may be quite expensive.
14. The shift from Tantric to non-Tantric
pujas
seems to be part of the weakening of the
phuki
group and a consequent emphasis on the household, and is allied with
other recent shifts toward a more "modern" type of Hinduism.
15. When the mandalic[
*]
pitha
is a center of worship, people first go to the
twa:
Ganesa[
*]
temple, then to the Aga(n) God to make a perfunctory offering, and finally to the
pitha
for the main
puja
. In the case where Aga(n) House
pujas
are at the center worshipers again go first to the
twa:
Ganesa[
*]
temple, but then to the mandalic[
*]
pitha
to make a perfunctory offering, and finally to the Aga(n) House for the
main worship. An Acaju can be delegated to do the early parts of the
sequence.
16. The comparative meanings and uses of Digu Gods and Aga(n) Gods are
different in Newar villages, which lack the social complexity of
Bhaktapur (cf. Toffin 1984, 76-81).
17. The people who m legend brought Tantric forces into the city, such as Harisimhadeva[
*]
, who brought Taleju, and the Brahman Tantric expert, who introduced the
Nine Durgas, are very high-status people. The presence of Tantric
Aga(n) Gods within the city in the possession of high-status families is
consonant with this association of high status and legitimate Tantric
power.
18. In the case of need a family section of a relatively poor
phuki
sometimes moves into the Aga(n) House, relegating the worship area to an isolated section.
19. The expenses of the Aga(n) House are sometimes supported by the
proceeds from family-owned farmland set apart as a special land grant.
The farmers who farm the land pay rent or give some of the land's yield
to the
phuki
. The famers also have some responsibilities toward the protection and
maintenance of the Aga(n) House. This system of support, like others
based on upper-status land ownership, has begun to disappear because of
land reform and the changes in the famers' socioeconomic status.
20. Some texts on the Newars refer to the Aga(n) Room as the "Agama
Room," and the Aga(n) House as the "Agama House." This is said in
Bhaktapur to be a "Nepali" or a "foreign" usage and is not used locally.
The Aga(n) image itself is reportedly sometimes called ''Aga(n)ma,''
said to be a contraction of Aga(n)
maju
, "
maju
" being an honorific appellation of some dangerous goddesses. The term
Aga(n)ma has been confused with the term "Agama", which designates
traditional Tantric and non-Vedic texts.
21. Slusser gives as alternate names "Degu," "Deguli," "Dehuri," "Digu," and "Devali
puja
." "Dugu," meaning "goat," refers to the animal often sacrificed to the
Digu God. It is a common "vulgar" term for the deity in ordinary usage
in Bhaktapur.
22. There are some
thar
s whose members believe they all have a common ancestor and thus must marry into other
thar
s at the same status level. Such a
thar
may have only one Digu shrine for the entire
thar
. There are other
thar
s whose members believe that they are in the same
thar
because their ancestors although unrelated shared some common trade or
historical origin. It is for this latter group and for those
thar
s who believe that their common ancestor is now so distant in time as to no longer require
thar
exogamy that the Digu God shrines are significant markers. In
Bhaktapur's cultural mosaic all this is further complicated in that
among some, at least, of the low
thar
s the deity they call their "Digu God" is of a different significance.
The Jugi, for example, say that they all have the same Digu God, but
they have intermarrying sections.
23. Building a new Aga(n) House is an expensive undertaking, and
sometimes the same Aga(n) House may continue to be used for some period
of time by two or more split-
phuki
groups who use it at different times.
24. In some South Asian contexts
istadevata
implies a personal deity m a modern sense, often in the context of Bhakti religion. Thus, the choice a person makes of an
istadevata
"is a radical, ultimate choice, an act of faith involving his total
person and life. It also has the aspect of a 'voluntary association,'
and he enjoys a 'freedom' to make his choice m worshiping a deity,
regardless of group, family, caste, and other ties, including the
kuladevata" (T. K. Venkateswaran 1968, 159). This description is alien
to traditional Bhaktapur, however, where one's
istadevata
is one's family deity.
25. Those Rajopadhyaya Brahmans who are attached to the Taleju temple
usually become initiated into this stage at much younger ages than other
high-status candidates. In addition to the three levels of
dekha
, the Taleju Brahmans must undergo further initiations to understand and participate in Taleju worship. These are not properly
dekha
, but are called "elevations" or
tha taegu
(see chap. 8 on Taleju).
26. This is not to say that there may not be some individuals in
Bhaktapur who may have this belief and who, indeed, may not know more
profound Tantric meditative techniques, and who may not have experienced
the more profound personal experiences that are the ideal goals of the
practice. However, such virtuosi, if they exist, are hardly
representative of what, to all accessible evidence, seems to be
experienced and believed even by advanced Brahman practitioners.
27. Their main images are at the household shrine near the cooking area on the top floor.
28. Goudriaan, in listing the constituents of Tantrism, includes as one
of them the "realization of the supernatural world by specific methods
of meditations (
dhyana
), involving in the first place the creation of mental images or
pictures of gods and goddesses who may be worshiped internally. The
deity thus created may be invoked for social, especially medical, aims"
(Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan 1979, 8).
29. We will consider the royal and aristocratic implications of Tantrism
for Bhaktapur in conjunction with the relation of king and Brahman in
later chapters.
30. The last
chema puja
prior to this study had been some ten years earlier, in 1962, when the astral
grahas
had all been in conjunction, a sign of great danger portending perhaps a
major earthquake. Ceremonies lasted about two weeks throughout the
entire city.
31. The various specialized craftsmen who contribute to the masks and
other images of the Devi cycle and the people who are possessed by and
who perform as the Nine Durgas (chap. 15) are enabled to do this because
of the powerful Tantric
mantras
that are (or were in the past) transmitted to them by high-status, initiated Brahmans.
32. When considered in relation to function the clapper of a bell may be considered as
sakti
in relation to the bell itself; when considered in relation to sexual
imagery, the clapper would be male, Siva, and the enveloping bell itself
would be Sakti.
33. All this is related to the issue of the differences in the relations
between male and female deities among the benign deities and the
dangerous deities, which we discussed m chapter 8.
34. They cannot be ranked by some unifying scale of purity, for the
benign gods are supremely pure, while the dangerous gods belong to a
realm where conditions of purity and impurity are irrelevant.
35. As we will see later, in the public religion of the city most
vividly and clearly in the Nine Durgas performances (chap. 15), much of
the "message" of sacrifice is specifically directed to male citizens of
the city. The preferential sacrifice of male animals was general m South
Asia. Kane quotes the Kalika Purana[
*]
, which after an extensive listing of animals proper to be sacrificed to
Devi (the list including human beings and "blood from one's own body"),
adds that ''females of the species specified . . . were not to be
offered as
bali
and the person who did so would go to hell" (1968-1971, vol. V, p.
164). Whatever additional meanings that Hindu or Newar emphases on male
sacrifice may have, since neolithic times the sacrifice of male rather
than female animals has been everywhere more prevalent m large part
because of the critical relation of the number of female livestock to
the quantity of births and thus new stock.
36. As Kane puts it, "The convenient belief from very ancient rimes has been that a victim offered m sacrifice to gods and
pitrs[
*]
went to heaven. . .. Hemadri quotes verses saying that all the animals
such as the buffalo that are employed for (gratifying) Devi go to heaven
and those that kill them incur no sin" (1968-1977, vol. V, 168).
37. Stevenson reported of Kathiawar[
*]
that when "non-Brahmans are about to offer a goat at Dasera [the
Newars' Mohani] the shaking and quivering of the goat is a clear sign
that it is acceptable" (1920, 122). She implies that this is associated
with an idea of the possession of the goat by the deity.
38. In some Bhaktapur households which are relatively modernized,
secularized and, therefore, closer to general Nepalese culture, animals
that are sacrificed primarily for feasts—and therefore with perfunctory
ritual—are sometimes decapitated.
39. In contrast to the killing of animals for food, the killing of wild "game" for sport by Ksatriyas[
*]
has generally in South Asia been considered a nonstigmatizing
aristocratic activity, like the killing of foes in warfare (compare the
discussion of king and Brahman in chap. 10).
40. The highest-status public sacrificer is the Acaju, who performs the
sacrifice for, "in the name of," the leading client. Sometimes when an
animal is dedicated and offered at a mandalic[
*]
pitha
, or at a local temple of Ganesa[
*]
, the killing may be done by some member of one of the low castes, a
Po(n), Jugi, or Nae, who may be attached to the temple as a "guardian," a
dya: pala
.
41. K. B. Bista notes, without giving details, "festivals of the head"
among at least two non-Newar Chetri groups, in which the head of the
sacrificial animal is shared at a special feast for the leading male
members of the family group (1972, 104, 107).
42. Among the Po(n)s there are occasions, such as following the birth of a child, when a pig sacrifice is made and the
siu
is distributed m hierarchical order among family women only.
43. This and the following quotations are from tape-recorded interviews.
R. L.'s questions in the interviews are given in parentheses.
44. As Kierkegaard put it in relation to Abraham's imminent sacrifice of
Isaac, unless Abraham doubted the meaning of his act and thus suspected
that the sacrifice of his son might possibly be only a common
murder—and of an exceptionally reprehensible sort—his faith had no
significance. "The ethical expression for what Abraham did is, that he
would murder Isaac; the religious expression is, that he would sacrifice
Isaac; but precisely in this contradiction consists the dread which can
well make a man sleepless, and yet Abraham is not what he is without
this dread" (Kierkegaard [1843] 1954, 41). I have previously used this
quotation (1973, 352) to suggest the kind of ethical dilemmas that
Tahitian village society tries to avoid, and is generally able to avoid,
but which, in contrast, proliferate in complex societies such as
Bhaktapur's, giving rise to new problems, solutions, and sensibilities.
45. The secret religion of the cellular groups corresponds to Fustel's
conception of the cellular aspects of family religion in the ancient
Indo-European city. "Each family has its religion, its gods, its
priesthood. Religious isolation is a law with it; its ceremonies are
secret" (Fustel de Coulanges 1956, 113).
46. This cellular privacy also greatly reduces the number of things that
any competent citizen must know about. Thus, aspects of information
management in a complex traditional society are also at issue here.
47. In other kinds of societies and historical conditions full secrecy
may, of course, exist (alongside of groups who will, like the groups in
Bhaktapur, advertise that they have secrets), and its symbolic
implications will be directed entirely toward the members within the
unit which holds the secrets.
48. Of course, the danger is also to the holders of the secret, who,
like the Wizard of Oz, may lose the power of the secret if it becomes
public knowledge. Insofar as this brings about the collapse of the
sociocultural system organized through secrets, however, it is also a
genuine threat to the violator.
49. The loss of the secrets of an urban unit with a resulting loss of
the differentiation of information is analogous m part to the social
uses, conceptions, emotional implications, and metaphorical extensions
of "purity" and "impurity" (chap. 11).
50. As we have discussed, this escape from the constraints of ordinary
logic and fixed social relations and physical forms is an important part
of the legends, classification, appearance, and behavior of the
dangerous deities m contrast to the ordinary ones.
51. Newar Brahmans, because they are both "ordinary" priests and Tantric
gurus
, embody the opposition of being guardians of the moral realm and guides to its proper violation.
Chapter Ten Priests
1. A classic attempt to explore and resolve the moral paradoxes of the king's responsibilities is the Bhagavadgita.
2. Some Rajopadhyaya Brahman individuals or families now use for some
purposes the surname "Subedi" or "Sarma," a generalized Brahman name
that does not distinguish them from other Nepalese Brahmans.
3. The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans contrast themselves with the Partya
Brahmans, among other ways, in that they, the Rajopadhyaya, are engaged
only in proper Brahmanical activities. The Partya Brahmans' farming
indicates for the Newars a fallen status.
4. This displacement of the old Kanyakubja Brahmans and the building of
the "substitute house" is referred to in the legend of the bringing of
Taleju into Bhaktapur (chap. 8).
5. This reference to the shortage of families from which the new
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans could take wives suggests the possibility that the
two groups of Valley Brahmans although supposedly both from Kanyakubja
may have refused to intermarry, and that the earlier Brahmans were in
fact displaced by the later ones.
6. D. R. Regmi, discussing the Brahmans in Malla Newar society, notes
that some of the chronicles state that the Valley Brahmans were divided
into two groups, one made up of "five divisions" of North Indian
Brahmans and the other of "five divisions" of South Indian Brahmans. He
goes on to say, "There is no trace of ... [these] Brahmans [within
organized Newar society] other than those belonging to one branch, those
known as the Kanaujiyas. It was true that some Brahman families came
from South India. There were [also] many families who came also from
Mithila and Bengal. But these never rendered priestly functions to the
community. As such they were kept outside the pale of the Nepalese caste
structure" (1965-1966, part 1, p. 679).
7. There is another inferior group of Brahmans, usually referred to as the "Lakhae Brahmans," who although they use the
that
name "Rajopadhyaya," are at present an entirely different group than
the dominant Rajopadhyaya Brahmans. (See the next section in the text.)
8. These
thar
s are Malla, Hada, Hoda[
*]
, Pradanana[
*]
, Ujha(n)thache(n), Gwa(n)ga, Jo(n)che(n), and Bijukche(n).
9. Pressures of modernization and economics have caused changes in
recent years. Many Rajopadhyaya Brahmans are now seeking some position
in the modernized Kathmandu Valley society commensurate with their
traditional status.
10. The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans are well aware of the stigmatizing implication of
dana
offered them in connection with death and illness in other contexts,
and some say that they do not accept such offerings. We will return to
the implication of payments to Brahmans below.
11. Taleju's focal festival, Mohani, requires three astrologically determined
saits
or proper times, but these, which coordinate the timing of Taleju's
activities in each of the old Newar cities, are made by the central
government's Royal Astrologer, a non-Newar. Only some comparatively
minor astrological determinations are made in relation to Taleju's
activities by the Bhaktapur Temple's own Josis during this festival
(chap. 15).
12. Astrological work for the lower-middle and marginally clean
thar
s is often done by Buddhist Vajracarya priests.
13. The word "
dasa
," when used without a context specifically meaning "good," implies "bad fortune.''
14. It is possible by a secondary use of Karmic theory to say that the
reason that a person has a had relation to the astrological forces is
because of his or her bad
karma
. This is a more abstract, theoretical use of "
karma
."
15. In some early accounts and later chronicles (e.g., Hamilton [1819]
1971; Basnet [1878] 1981; Lévi 1905) the Josi (written "Jaisi" or
"Jausi") are described as a high-status mixed group derived from the
marriage of a Brahman and a non-Brahman Newar woman who had subsections
variously doing divination, astrology, medicine, and priestly work.
Hamilton ranks them above "Shresta," that is, above Chathariya, as some
middle-ranked and low-ranked people still do.
16. In the other Newar cities some, at least, Acaju families are at the Chathar level.
17. Characteristically, the term "Tini" is not used in their presence,
where its use would be considered disrespectful. In their presence they
are referred to as "Sivacarya" and addressed as "Pujari."
18. We only know of one passing reference to the Tim in older lists of Newar status groups (Chattopadhyay 1923, 506).
19. The
gha:su: jagye
ceremony is said to be a shortened version of a fire offering to Bhairava (called a
Bhairavagni
) made once a year in the main Bhairava temple.
20. Members of the Cyo
thar
, which is at level XI, officiate as a "sort of a priest" during one
phase of the ceremonies at the cremation grounds lust prior to the
cremation itself in the death ceremonies of upper-level
thar
s.
21. There are, in fact, still three Pasi families living in Bhaktapur,
but they no longer do this traditional and stigmatizing work.
22. One of these is a
linga[
*]
representing Siva as Hatakeswar[
*]
, "a god who comes from under the earth," made of special clay dug from deep under the surface, a kind of
linga[
*]
that can be properly made only by a Bha.
23. In a very significant contrast to the untouchable and near untouchable
thar
s who have been forced to remain in their traditional positions and to
perform their traditional functions through various social and economic
sanctions, the members of the marginally polluting
thar
s find it much easier to drop the status-depressing, polluting, and embarrassing traditional functions of their
that
for other kinds of work, often in farming or the modern sector of
Bhaktapur's economy. Thus many Bha families have farms, shops, or small
restaurants, and have members who are in government service or are
school teachers.
24. Toffin describes this service by the Bha for the high Hindu
thar
s of Panauti where a bit of bone from the dead persons skull is mixed
with a food offering presented to the Bha. Toffin says that this
practice is for the purpose of evicting the spirit of the dead, of
chasing it from the house by "identifying" it with the Bha (1984, 290).
25. This is said to have been done by a Partya Brahman in connection
with the death ritual of the last king of Nepal. The Brahman is said to
have had to leave Nepal and to have gone to India.
26. Hamilton, in one of the earliest Western accounts of the Newars,
presents a passage that bears on the activities and status of the Tini,
Bhatta[
*]
Brahmans, and Bha, "The Achars [by whom he seems to mean Newar Brahmans
and
auxiliary priests] have among them certain men who perform the
ceremonies necessary to free from sin the souls of those who die on
certain unfortunate days. This ceremony they call Horn. The [non-Newar]
Brahmans perform similar rites, which they call Pushkarasanti. The
Hindus believe that if this ceremony is neglected all the relations of
the deceased will perish. By this ceremony the officiating priest is
supposed to take upon himself the sin of the departed soul; and if, in
its performance, he commits any mistake, he incurs certain destruction
from the wrath of the Deity. The office is therefore shunned by men of
high rank, both as sinful and dangerous. The Achars who perform this
ceremony are calculated Gulcul, and cannot intermarry with those of the
first rank" ([1819] 1971, 31).
27. Todd Lewis, in his study of the Newar Buddhist Tuladhars of
Kathmandu, writes that "most" of them believe that the Newar Brahmans
are at the top of their (the Tuladhars') caste system (1984, 148). A
survey of Bhaktapur's various Buddhist
thar
s on this issue would be of considerable interest. Insofar as Lewis's
findings might hold in general, the elevation of the Brahmans in the
conceptions of nonpriestly Newar Buddhists may reflect an inference by
Buddhist laymen that the status of the Vajracarya unprotected by an
allocation of contaminating functions to others is lower than the
Brahmans, an inference deriving from the logic of the purity-based
status system—which the Newar Buddhists accept.
28. This "permanent attachment" is in many ways problematic, and must be
reinforced by ensuring often through physical and economic force that
the low
thar
s continue to perform clearly polluting functions and live m polluting circumstances.
29. As we have noted in chapter 9, the Ksatriya[
*]
groups could kill (and eat) animals in the course of war-like hunting
and could kill human beings in the course of war without its having a
lowering effect on their status. They were following their special kind
of Ksatriya[
*]
"
meta-dharma
."
30. In popular (and erroneous) folk explanation it refers to "eating the God's meat" (
la
), that is, the offering to the Tantric Astamatrkas[
*]
.
31. According to Niels Gutschow (personal communication), the main
source of temple-caring income for the Po(n)s comes from their
assignment to the Surya Vinayaka temple (chap. 8), which, like the
pithas
, is outside the city's boundaries.
32. The Po(n) have one uniquely nonpolluting role to play in Bhaktapur
on the fifth day of the solar New Year festival Biska: (chap. 14).
33. "Jugi," "Darsandhari[
*]
," and ''Kapali" are terms derived from that group's yogic tradition;
"Kusle" or ''Kusale" is a Nepali term referring to hereditary tailoring
groups, one of the Jugis' professions.
34. D. R. Regmi, however, characterizes the first Jugis in Nepal as
"Nepalese mendicants" of the Gorakhnath school and contrasts them with
the Kanphata[
*]
yogis
themselves who arrived later in Nepal and became associated with the
Valley Matsyendrantha cult, and "who do not belong to Newar society"
(1965-1966, part II, p. 756). Briggs (1938), supporting a possible
origin of those "mendicants" in the yogic order, gives many examples of
descendants of Kanphata[
*]
yogis whose occupations and status resemble those of the present Newar Jugis.
35. In their musical performances they use other instruments—drums and
cymbals—as well, but these instruments are not special or restricted to
them.
36. This is on the fifth day for a Brahman, on the fifth or seventh day for various Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya
thar
, and generally on the seventh day for Jyapu-level
thar
s.
37. The Jugi who goes to a particular
chwasa
may live anywhere m the city. "One Jugi may own rights at five different
chwasas
, and three Jugis may have divided their rights at one
chwasa
. These rights are occasionally sold to others" (Gutschow, personal communication).
38. The Bha: also, in the case of high-status chents, incorporates part
of their body substance. This magical gesture is only tangentially
related to the symbolism of the flow of impurity, and in some cases, as
we have noted, previously required the exile of the Bha:.
39. In fact, as we will discuss elsewhere, this is a matter of very
vestigial forms used in the course of initiations into certain
thar
activities, such as the beginning of the study of the musical instrument, the
mwali
. The Jugi now, in Bhaktapur at least, do not know or use traditional yogic practices, and, in contrast to upper
thar
s with Tantric initiation, do not perform meditation. This is, in fact,
characteristic of even those who remained fully in the Kanphata[
*]
tradition. As Briggs wrote in the early decades of this century, there
seemed to be little knowledge of their texts and only limited practice
of Yoga among them ([1938] 1973, 251).
40. That is, we are excluding here those religious structures that are
Newar Buddhist and whose attending priests are the Vajracarya, and the
Mathas[
*]
, the centers for visiting Shaivite ascetics from elsewhere in South Asia, whose presiding priests, or
mahantas
, are Ja(n)gam, Gin, and Puri of Indian origin.
41. For the three or four temples that had more than one priest, only the major
pujari
is listed.
42. For example, "The Brahmans, being in principle priests, occupy the
supreme rank with respect to the whole set of castes" (Dumont 1980, 47).
Chapter Eleven Purity and Impurity: On the Borders of the Sacred
1. A similar point was made earlier by Gabriel Campbell, who adds the
observation that the transcendence of the categories of purity and
impurity may characterize children as well as ascetics, and thus be
prior to social differentiation. "Children are buried [rather than being
cremated] because they are social and ritual non-entities; they have
not completed the transition into human society . . . although the child
is born in relative impurity, his nakedness and innocence is relative
purity. . .. In the burial [rather than cremation] of saints [that is,
Hindu ascetics] exactly the same structural relation to society holds as
in the burial of children. Thus the saint is also outside of society
both socially and ritually. He is casteless, without a family, and
although m a state of basic purity, really exists outside the system of
purity and pollution as it affects normal householders. . .. Cremation
is necessitated by 'separateness,' by a social and ritual
'individuality'; whereas the relationship of the child and the saint to
Brahman, the pervading Soul, is precisely one of non-separation, or
non-individuality" (1976, 118-119). Burial rather than cremation is done
in Bhaktapur for infants and young children and for Bhaktapur's
historically renouncer group, the Jugi. It should be noted, however,
that infants and young children who would not be cremated if they died
are nonetheless purified in many
thar
s, albeit in a perfunctory manner, following death and birth pollution in the family.
2. As Veena Das remarks, Van Gennep (1909) had in his seminal
Les Rites de Passage
already "emphasized the threatening nature of all
liminalities—intellectual, social, and cosmic. He pointed out that being
unclassifiable, these liminalities have the potential of disrupting the
particular classifications imposed by man on his given reality" (Das
1977, 117).
3. See the discussion of these theorists in Douglas (1968, 336f.).
4. "Even those who have incurred impurity (on death, etc.) are enjoined
to do certain religious acts such as offering water to the deceased"
(Kane 1968-1977, vol. IV, p. 268). We noted in chapter 6 (In the
discussion of menstrual disabilities) that menstruating women—and
polluted men—may worship the Tantric lineage deity and do daily
household worship, but in areas away from the shrines, and by making use
of imagined images of the deities.
5. "Thus the precise rules for the purification of the body have been
declared to you; hear now the decision of the law regarding the
purification of the various inanimate things"
Laws of Manu
V, 110 (Bühler 1969, 188).
6. The radical possibilities of the escape from the Brahmanical
dharma-
supported status system when "inner impurity" is not only taken into
account but given greater significance than "external impurity" is
evident in the way that low castes can and do make use of the altered
emphasis. Barnett and Barnett quote a South Indian untouchable, who
argues "The caste man [a member of the clean castes] says if you touch a
person who is not in the caste system, you will be polluted, but we
deny caste. . . . Bathing is for external cleanliness only. . . . Our
view of bathing and pollution is rational, theirs is traditional. . . .
The caste man is not clean in heart while Adi-Dravidas [untouchables]
are, since [we] . . .do not retaliate after mistreatment, and therefore
surface dirt is irrelevant. . . . Brahmanical culture emphasized cow
worship and sacrifice, not character'' (1974, 387f.; cited in Sara
Dickey 1984).
7. A person may have "impure" or "dirty" thoughts. These are one
particular one sort of disturbed and disturbing thoughts, about which
people feel variously shame or guilt or concern, but these are
distinguished from, and are different sorts of problems than, physical
impurities.
8. The Po(n) and Jugi, like all
thar
s, high and low, have their own necessary purification procedures prior to rituals, and their
own
still lower status, and relatively degraded, eaters of
cipa
and collectors of impurity. In their own conception and action some, at
least, and perhaps all of their own pollution might also be removed.
But, they say, the conditions of their life make it impossible to avoid
contamination as well as to devote themselves properly to religious
activities. They may ascribe their fallen social condition to an act of a
thar
ancestor (the Jugis have an elaborate account of this), but this does
not explain any "indwelling impurity," only the inherited conditions of
life that render each generation and individual impure as a secondary
consequence.
9. Veena Das, emphasizing the relation of symbols of impurity to
liminality, writes that "In the case of the symbolism of impurity, it is
the peripheries of the body which are emphasized. Thus hair and nails,
which figure prominently in this, have a peripheral position in relation
to the body as they can both belong to the body and yet be outside it.
It is significant that both the hair and nails are allowed to grow in a
natural state to symbolize impurity" (1977, 127).
10. There are three ritualized life-cycle events: birth, death, and
menarche, which cause group pollution—which must be removed by
purification at the end of the
samskara
proceedings. However, while the entire
phuki
is polluted by birth and death of its members—the shared pollution being one of the defining characteristics of a
phuki
group—the extent of pollution connected with menarche and menarche
rites (see app. 6) varies according to the custom of individual
thar
s. In some
thars
all the
phuki
members are polluted; in others, only the parents of the girl.
11. Compare the discussion by Veena Das (1977, 128f.) on the many
problems in attempts to identify birth and death pollution with "caste
pollution."
12. The various "purificatory" acts that follow in the days after the
main purification, which ends the official ten-day period of mourning
after death—which is the purification referred to in this statement—can
be seen as purging individuals and various places of dangerous,
nondisgusting influences, that is, of "clean contaminants" (see app. 6).
13. One metaphorical connection between "dirt" and birth and death is
liminality. "The impurity of death marks off the mourners for the period
when they are dealing with the liminal category of the
preta
; similarly, birth impurity marks off the relatives of the new-born,
till the child has been incorporated as a person, within the cosmic
order" (Das 1977, 125).
14. The idea of the effective transfer of a dangerous "substance" is
general in South Asia as it is everywhere in the world. Stevenson noted
that on the birthday of a Brahman boy in Kathiawar[
*]
a "lucky woman" is brought to wave her arms toward him, and then,
cracking her knuckles against her forehead takes on herself his ill
luck" (1920, 26).
15.
Manu
lists various procedures for cleaning inanimate objects according to
their constituent materials, using ashes, earth, water, fire, Kusa
grass, hot water, mustard-seed oil, cow urine, and cow dung (Buhler[
*]
1886, 188ff.).
16. This is part of a general understanding that to
be
impure is a matter of discomfort and possible social embarrassment, but to
cause
someone or something (including oneself) to become polluted is a moral
error, in the sense that it is a matter of personal responsibility.
17. Lower thars, depending on their status and
thar
customs, make use of other personnel and procedures for purification.
18. The Tulsi plant itself, associated with Visnu[
*]
, has various ritual uses.
19.
Nana
is water that must be drawn on the same day it is used from a river,
well, or tap, which must not be touched by a major source of
contamination such as a menstruating woman, member of an unclean
thar
, or unclean animal. It is used for washing the face and hands in the morning, washing before
puja
s, the initial cleaning of
puja
equipment, and so forth. It is the least "powerful," the most ordinary, of the various kinds of pure water (app. 4).
20. In most major purifications now only some nuchal hair is shaved off.
Total shaving of the head (sparing an occipital tuft of hair) is
generally restricted now to the closest male relatives in the
purification following a death in the family. In some elaborate Tantric
or ordinary
puja
s performed for some special purpose, however, both the officiating priests and the sponsor of the
puja
may have their head shaved during the preparatory purification.
21. This may have been in part to prevent their use by a witch, a
boksi
, in "contagious magic." This possibility is known about but is considered a trivial risk.
22. Although the Nau is not an untouchable, the minor
bya(n)kegu
after the Nau procedures may reflect to some degree a response to the
Nau's borderline clean status as well as the completion of purification.
Elsewhere, such as among the Coorgs as reported by Srinivas, "contact
with a barber defiles a Coorg, and every Coorg has to take a
purificatory bath after being shaved by a barber" (1952, 41).
23. Veena Das's remarks cited above regarding the liminality of hair and
nails, which both belong to the body and are at the same time outside
of it, suggest that hair shaving and nail paring serve to delineate anew
the clean boundaries of the body by dealing with the peripheral aspects
of hair and nails as exuviae, first separating them and then distancing
them from the body.
24. Theoretically according to karmic theory the individual who has
he-come polluted would be being punished for some past violation of the
dharma
, but, in fact, such theory is only made use of in special, and usually extreme and rare cases.
25. Marriott and others (e.g., Marriott 1976, 1980; Marriott and Inden
1977) have interpreted some aspects of South Asian thought and behavior
as based on conceptions of "dividuals" as open to a flow of substances
which continually affect and constitute their individuality. These
conceptions are widely represented in Bhaktapurian doctrine and ordinary
discourse about the self.
26. Disgust has something to do with powerful motivations for rejection
of the ingestion of food or food-like substances. Only some kinds of
substances that should not be ingested are disgusting; broken glass, for
example, is not. "Disgusting substances" are organic and have some of
the properties of food and thus represent some potential
temptation
for ingestion. "Disgust" implies a powerful blocking of a temptation
for incorporation. In Bhaktapur the temptation to be "equal to all" has,
for middle-status and upper-status people, a strong implication of
being free to be equal to those
lower
on the scale. Dirtiness, rejection of hierarchical separations from
lower-status people, and rejection of the special restrictive
responsibilities associated with middle and upper status, are strongly
tempting as well as threatening for middle-status and upper-status
people in Bhaktapur for various reasons. Such temptations are
associated, particularly for men, with a long period of freedom of
association and action during childhood before the extensive
differentiation, restrictions, and responsibilities that result from a
sudden transition after initiation into full
thar
membership with the
kaeta Puja
rite of passage. The temptation is countered by obsession with the lowest
thar
's contacts with dirt, particularly with feces, their evident dirtiness, and their "disgusting" moral behavior.
27. An Important element in the marriage ceremonies of many
thar
s that also implies a unification of bodies is the ceremonial sharing by
the bride and groom of food from the same dish, the sharing of each
other's
cipa
(as it is phrased), which symbolizes the unification of the bridal pair. In upper-level
thar
s this is the only time that the husband takes the wife's
cipa
; that is, following this unification, she, by taking his
cipa
, incorporates his and his lineage's substance, but he will not incorporate hers.
28. In practice the persons who are concerned with contamination by
contact with low-status people are mostly men—particularly Brahman men
whose priestly activities would be compromised. Upper-status women's
relatively domestic, household-centered life traditionally limited their
chances of coming into contact with members of low
thar
s.
29. The purification of ritual equipment and settings is, like
individual purification, done through cleaning and washrag with various
pure substances and varies, as does ordinary purification of the body,
from perfunctory to elaborate. The condition to be achieved by such
purification is usually phrased as making the area or equipment
suddha
or (more rarely, and mostly in Brahmanical usage)
pavitra. "Suddha
" means clean or pure in a general sense. "
Pavitra
" adds an additional meaning, it has been glossed as "pure, holy,
sacred, sinless, etc." (Monier-Williams [1899] n.d.). Ritual equipment
and areas not only are pure but also have supernatural power
concentrated within the boundaries delineated by purification—and
concentrated further in other smaller mandalic[
*]
circles drawn within the larger purified
mandala[
*]
in which the supernatural aspects of the
puja
are located. "
Pavitra
," as ''sacred,'' means both pure (i.e., clearly delineated)
and
powerful. Once the area and equipment are purified, the supernatural
power is brought into them through additional procedures such as mantras
and entreaties to the deities.
30. This is complicated in Bhaktapur by the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans'
esoteric functions as Tantric priests and the fact that they can eat
certain meat. But when they are functioning as priests of the ordinary
deities they share the purity and food restrictions which apply to those
deities.
Chapter Twelve The Civic Ballet: Annual Time and the Festival Cycles
1. The events that take place in multiple numbers of years are
mela
s, in which people from Bahktapur join masses of other Nepalis in a
visit to some shrine elsewhere in the Kathmandu Valley or in wider
Nepal. Most
mela
s are annual events that are only tangentially connected with the city
order. There are four prominent nonannual ones, three of these taking
place every twelve years, and one every thirty-three months.
Calendrically determined or encouraged events with monthly, fortnightly,
or weekly cycles are primarily matters of household and individual
worship. Thus, Tuesdays, for example, are proper for Ganesa[
*]
worship, particularly if they fall on the fourth day of a lunar
fortnight. The first day of each lunar fortnight is particularly proper
for the worship of Visnu[
*]
, the full-moon day for worship of the moon, the fourteenth day of the
dark lunar fortnight for worship of the dangerous goddesses, and so on.
2. Manandhar defines "
nakha
:" as "a festival in which the central event involves a feast called
nakhatya
put on at home," and notes in his definition of "
nakhatya
" that it entails an invitation to women married out of the household (1976, 244). There are, in fact, some
nakha cakha
in which married out women are not, properly speaking, "invited" in that they
must
return to their natal homes as an integral part of the ceremony.
3. There are, approximately, seventeen annual
mela
s in which some or many of Bhaktapur's citizens might participate. Among
these six are intimately connected with the annual cycle, and are
listed in the city's annual festival calendars. These are the events
[4], [15], [32], [33], [35], and [51], discussed in the following
chapters. (Please see chap. 13, last paragraph in "Introduction"
section, for an explanation of these bracketed numbers.) Two of these
take place at the same time as events within the city, but are not
particularly connected with them. The remainder of the
mela
s, including those four that take place in multiple numbers of years, are not connected with city events.
4. For an extended description of Nepalese and Hindu calendars and eras,
see Slusser (1982, vol. 1, pp. 381-391). See also D. R. Regmi
(1965-1966, part I, p. 49; part II, p. 793ff.), Gaborieau (1982), Freed
and Freed (1964), and Kane (1968-1977, vol. V).
5. For non-Newar Nepalis of Indian origin, the "Indo-Nepalese," and in
some other parts of South Asia the lunar month begins on the day
following the full moon (Gnanambal 1967, 4).
6. These are, respectively,
timila
and
khimila
in Kathmandu Newari;
mila
, according to Manandhar (1976, 452), deriving from an old Newari term for moon.
7. In practice, the Nepal, term
au(n)si
is usually used for the new-moon day.
8. Traditionally the names of the solar months were those of the
corresponding signs of the zodiac. Basham writes that the solar calendar
was imported with ancient Western astronomy and is known to have been
used since Gupta times onward, "although it did not oust the old
luni-solar calendar until recent years" (1967, 495). He remarks that the
Sanskrit names of the signs of the zodiac from which the names of the
solar months were derived are almost exact translations of the Greek
originals.
9. Gnanambal's report (1967) on Indian "festivals" includes fourteen
festivals (some of which have more than one component part and lasts
more than one day) celebrated generally throughout India, in contrast to
the many festivals restricted to one or to a group of states.
10. The sequences and events of greatest integrative importance are
Swanti, in relation to household organization, Biska:, Mohani, and the
larger Devi cycle—within which the Mohani sequence is an element—in
relation to the structure of the city and its environment, and Saparu as
a central "antistructural" festival.
Chapter Thirteen The Events of the Lunar Year
1. As the Swanti sequence includes the lunar New Year's Day, its numbering contains the last and first days of the annual cycle.
2. The ambiguity of the reference of many terms for this period (e.g.,
Divali, Dipavali, Tihar, Tiwar) as referring to a three-day or five-day
span is more general than in the Newar case. Sometimes the terms
designate a five-day period, sometimes they are applied to a three-day
core period to which two additional days of events are added (e.g., Kane
1968-1977, vol. V, p. 194; see also "Tiwar," R. L. Turner 1965, 286).
3. There are Puranic[
*]
references to gambling during this festival, which in some other parts
of South Asia takes place on the fifth day of the sequence (Kane
1968-1977, vol. V, p. 203). According to Kane's reference, the gambling
is conceived as an omen, forecasting whether the gambler would gain or
loose his wealth during the course of the year.
4. During the Rana period tents were set up in the city where large groups of townspeople could join together in gambling.
5. Laksmi is called "Lachimi" in Bhaktapur, but we are following the
convention for the festivals that we used in our discussion of the
deities of using Sanskrit names for the major pan-Hindu deities.
6. Certain upper-status families most closely derived from the Malla
kings and their priests make a food offering to Taleju before the house
puja
to Laksmi, and they take an oil lamp from the Taleju temple to the
household as one of the lights to be presented to Laksmi during the
course of the household
puja
.
7. The Brahmans and a few high-status Chathariya families who emulate
them are an exception. They use Acajus rather than the household
naki(n)
to perform the worship.
8. In G. S. Nepali's account of this ceremony for another Newar community, he was told that the
mandalas[
*]
represent Yama, the deity of death. This is not the interpretation of
our informants, but the symbolism of Yama is central to the Swanti
sequence. Nepali also reports that the lamp wicks offered were as long
as the height of the person to whom they were presented, and that their
length symbolized the length of the life of the individual (1965, 381).
The wicks offered in Bhaktapur are commonly about a foot in length, but
very much longer than ordinary oil-amp wicks.
9. In some Jyapu families the custom is, in fact, restricted to the
worship of younger brothers by elder sisters. In the traditional Hindu
account of the origin and practice of the
puja
, in India, the sister is primarily a younger sister, modeled on Yama's
younger sister Yamuna (e.g., Kane, 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 2207f.).
10. From here on our estimates of the importance of events for Bhaktapur will be given in a parenthetical note.
11. Many of these days apparently had in the past, different names
throughout the year for each one of their successive occurrences. Only a
few such special names are known now, and even fewer of them now have
any special differentiated current significance.
12. The main temple image, considered the essential one and a form that
is often hidden from the view of all except initiated priests, is never
removed from the temple.
13. Bhaktapur's main annual festival directed to the same purpose is Saparu [48].
14. The local tale goes that Kubera, the god of wealth, came to a house
disguised as a beggar. The householders asked him in and offered him Ya:
Marhi cakes to eat. The god revealed who he was and told his hosts that
on that day henceforth their grain storeroom would always be filled.
15. Iltis (1985) includes a full translation of one version of the collected stories.
16. This is a peculiar combination of Newar and non-Newar traditions. The girls past the
Ihi
ceremony are always married in that they have had a mock-marriage to a
deity. One of the purposes of this is to prevent the traditional Hindu
stigmata of widowhood, as the social marriage is (in a restricted way) a
secondary remarriage. The nonparticipation of Newar widows in the
Swasthani ceremony implies, in this case, the acceptance of the ritual
status of widow.
17. The representation of Siva as a
linga
, or phallus, is a major theme in the Swasthani story, where it is an
object of worship by Parvati, and a dangerous force that had to be
controlled by Visnu[
*]
(Bennett 1983).
18. Iltis, on the basis of discussions with Newar women reported that
the large majority of women, in contrast with Bennett's reports on
Chetri women, said that they did not participate in the
vrata
in order to overcome some particular problem, but rather "for merit and
to help others, as well as to assure a continued good future" (1985,
611). There may well be problems here in the difference between local
conventions about expressing a motive for a religious proceeding and the
generally understood private motives.
19. In connection with the reference to Lhasa it may be noted that
Sarasvati is associated in some versions of this tale with the Vajrayana
Buddhist deity Manjusri.
20. As we will see when we discuss the spatial arrangements of the solar
Biska: Festival, the Khware-Ga:hiti axis is part of the line dividing
the city into lower and upper sections, which are marked and placed into
opposition during that festival. The use of this route here adds to the
sparse evidence for the association of the city's two major
Visnu/Narayana[
*]
temples with city halves.
21. If the woman was a widow she would present the eight cakes to her
son, and if she had no son they were sent to the river and discarded
there.
22. The name of the Ca:re, "Sila," is in folk etymology, at least, associated with
Sila
, stone, which, in turn, is said to stand for Siva's
linga
, usually represented in stone. It is also alternatively said to derive from the name of the month, Silla. All
ca:re
s are in Saivite Hindu tradition associated with Siva. Kane notes that "The 14th
tithi
of the dark half of a month is called Sivaratri" but that this particular one is the Sivaratri,
par excellence
(1974, vol. V, p. 225). The association of the other
ca:re
s with Siva is played down in Bhaktapur's emphasis on the Goddess.
23. Hunting is a Ksatriya[
*]
activity, and the hunter in Kane's version is a king. As we have seen
in the discussion of Tantra, the transcendence or manipulation of the
ordinary
dharmic
realm is a necessary characteristic of Ksatriya[
*]
religion.
24. In Patan, in contrast, the Krsna[
*]
image carried in procession on this day is housed in one of the city's
major and most imposing temples, a temple specially devoted to that
deity.
25. See Anderson (1973, chap. 34) for a description of the events of this day elsewhere in the Kathmandu Valley.
26. In parts of India where the year began with the month of Caitra,
this day was often in honor of Brahma. Kane notes, in passing, in a
description of Caitra New Year events that in their course the worshiper
should anoint his body with oil and take a bath (1968-1977, vol. V, p.
83).
27. The previous day, the fourteenth is called "Matati Ca:re," the
ca:re
of the Mata Tirtha, but there are no special activities in Bhaktapur on this day beyond those of an ordinary
ca:re
. For some of the legends told about the pilgrimage site, see Anderson (1971, 51).
28. As in many calendrical events, this requires planning and
coordination for the movements of a woman who is both a daughter and a
mother.
30. Lewis (1984) has a detailed account of the annual festival calendar
of the Newar Buddhist merchant group, the Tuladhars, in Kathmandu.
31. Although the Buddha can be amalgamated to Hinduism as a minor avatar of Visnu[
*]
, the general doctrine, overt among Brahman theorists, is that
any
form that is believed to be divine by anyone and that is worshiped may be considered as a deity.
32. The four deities of the Panauti Jatra are Bhadrakali[
*]
, Brahmani, Bhairava, and Indresvar Mahadeva. For a description of this
event, "the culminating point of the religious year" at Panauti, see
Toffin (1984, 509-520).
33. The day of Hari Sayani in itself is a minor event.
34.
Gu
means "nine," and the compound
gunhi
means "nine days," referring to the period of special activities
initiated by this day. Manandhar (1976, 87) gives the form "Gunu
Punhi.''
35. In the years subsequent to this study the younger and more modernized Brahmans began to resist this annual hair-shaving.
36. In other Newar cities the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans during the course of
the day also tie such bags with yellow thread around the wrists of
their
jajaman
s. In Bhaktapur, however, the custom is for the non-Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, the Jha and Bhatta[
*]
, to tie the bags on the wrists of men of upper-status and farmer
families who are not otherwise the clients of these "non-Newar"
Brahmans.
37. As is the case with both these sources for many of the festivals we
are describing in these chapters, some of the details and versions of
the stories they report are unfamiliar to us for Bhaktapur.
38. This is a traditional South Asian belief. "Vaitarani. The name of
the foetid river which flows between the earth and the nether regions,
and over which the dead pass to Yama's realm. . . . Vaitarani is also
the name of the cow presented to the priest during the funerary rites,
in the belief that it will carry the dead man safely across the dreaded
river" (Stutley and Stutley 1977, 318).
39. There is, as we shall note, a variation in this ordering in the last segment of the procession.
40. Whatever the situation may have been in the past, there is some
uncertainty as to when the shift from a child to an adult representation
should be made. It is not simply a matter of level of rites of passage
now (i.e.,
Ihi
mock-marriage for a girl,
Kaeta Puja
for a boy), but a decision each family must make within an uncertain
age span. The fact that the large image is considerably more expensive
than the small one influences this decision.
41. In other competing accounts of the fate of the soul after death, one would have long before passed through one's
preta
state.
42. The variants "Ghi(n)ta" for Ghe(n)ta(n) and "Ghisi(n)" for Ghesi(n) are also used.
43. As Newar women do not dance now, with the one exception noted m the
discussion of the period just following the day of Saparu, It is
generally assumed that these dances represent dances once done in the
past at some period when women still danced in public.
44. Although young Brahman men participate in most dance types, they are said never to do obscene dances.
45. Some people "carry placards decrying social ills—real, exaggerated
or entirely imaginary. Local newspapers participate in Gai Jatra satire,
with stories announcing a great increase in salary for the superfluous
masses of government workers. Others tell of the release of all
political prisoners, who are now to be absorbed into the ranks of
officialdom. Again it is reported that the abolished caste system has
been replaced with rank 'according to wealth.' On this day, supposedly,
citizens are free to express themselves without fear of reprisal"
(Anderson 1971, 103).
46. "
Au(n)si
" is the Nepali term for "new-moon day" and is used not only for this
general Nepali festival, but usually for new-moon day in general, rather
than the Newari term
amai
.
47. See Anderson (1971, chap. 12) for the legend associated with this
mela
.
48. There is another Bhairava Jatra of great symbolic importance in the
course of the solar New Year festival, Biska: [20-29]. The
jatra
image used in that festival is a different one from the one used in this festival, although it is housed in the same temple.
49. Compare Toffin (1984, 530). Lewis (1984, 373), remarking that the
Buddhist Newar Tuladhars of Kathmandu, whom he studied, did not observe
Tij, says that "shresthas[
*]
and other Newar Hindu women" do observe it. This may have been a
misreporting by his Newar Buddhist informants. It is also possible that
some Newar groups who have assimilated to Indo-Nepalese culture may have
introduced the practice.
50. In South Asia the
vrata
proper to this day was traditionally practiced mostly by women. According to the Brahmanda[
*]
Purana[
*]
"if a woman performs this
vrata
she enjoys happiness, becomes endowed with good bodily form, beauty and sons and grandsons" (Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 150).
51. According to Niels Gutschow, most of these poles are placed along
the main festival route, but may be located anywhere else in the
twa
:. Certain families, mostly Jyapus, erect the poles year after year.
52. According to Niels Gutschow (personal communication), an image of Indra is painted on the neck of the Kisi.
Chapter Fourteen The Events of the Solar Cycle
1. "
Sankranti[
*]
" refers to the passage of the sun from one sign of the zodiac to the
following one, which constitutes the basis for the sequential
progression of the twelve solar months (Kane 1968-1977) vol. V, p. 210).
2. The numbers in brackets refer to the position of solar events within the sequence of lunar calendrical events in 1975/76.
3. Major offerings to Brahmans were traditionally done in South Asia on all
sankranti[
*]
(Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 212).
4. G. S. Nepali (1965, 386) presents some details on the observations of
the day, presumably among village Jyapu families, which are unfamiliar
to us for Bhaktapur.
5. It is unique, that is, in its particular combination of elements at a
particular time. Some of those elements are reflections of Kathmandu's
Indra Jatra (see festivals [59-65], chap. 14); others are closely
similar to aspects of a festival in the Newar town of Panauti about two
months later (Barré, Berger, Feveile, and Toffin 1981, 45).
6. According to Gautam Vajracharya (personal communication), this is an echo of the form of the term in classical Newari,
yalasi(n)
. "Si" here means "pillar" as well as "tree." Vajracharya glosses the word "
yalasi(n)
'' as "sacrificial pillar." Variants of the term are found in other
religious forms, such as the central pillar of Newar stupas. The poles
that are erected to represent Indra during Kathmandu's Indra Jatra are
also
yasi(n)
.
7. According to D. R. Regmi (1965-1966, vol. II, p. 650), the term
"Biska:" (in its Nepali form, Bisket) derives from Visvaketu, the
"universal flag," which was the name given to banners that are attached
to the "arms" of the
yasi(n)
. Bhaktapur has its own folk etymology, which we will note below.
8. The major components of the Biska: festival sequence in our treatment
are the Bhairava/Bhadrakali Jatra [20] from the first to the ninth day,
the raising of the large Yasi(n) God [21] on the fourth day, the
"taking out" of the Tantric gods [22] on the fourth day, the Varahi
Jatra [23] on the fourth day, the taking down of the Yasi(n) God [24] on
the fifth day, Indrani[
*]
Jatra [25] on the fifth day, Mahakali/Mahalaksmi Jatra [26] on the sixth day, Brahmani/Mahesvari[
*]
Jatra [27] on the seventh day, the procession worhiping the gods that
had previously been taken out [28] on the eighth day, and Chuma(n)
Ganedya: Jatra [29] on the eighth day.
9. According to G. S. Nepali (1965, 344), it was traditionally the responsibility of the Sa:mi (or Manandhar)
thar
to select, cut with the proper ritual, and supervise the dragging of the tree to Bhaktapur. This is the same
thar
whose members in Kathmandu are responsible for selecting and bringing the tree used for the
yasi(n)
in Kathmandu's Indra Jatra.
10. The location where the tree is to be cut is "explained" by one of the legends about the
yasi(n)
,which we will present below.
11. In the course of the Biska: festival Bhadrakali[
*]
is generally referred to by her honorific title, "Naki(n) Ajima," "the
leader of the mothers (or grandmothers)," that is the dangerous
goddesses. Bhadrakali[
*]
is a name occasionally given Sakti in the Tantric tradition. It is used
a very few times as an appellation of the Goddess in the Devi Mahatmya.
12. During the Mohani festival the goddess of the mandalic[
*]
area is sometimes called "Bhadrakali[
*]
" rather than "Vaisnavi[
*]
," but in that case they are simply two names for the goddess of that area.
13. For some notes on this and other Newar ritual chariots, see Gutschow (1979
b
).
14. This sword, carried at this point by a representative of the central
government, is taken by it to represent the contemporary central
authority. When Prthvinarayana Saha conquered the Kathmandu Valley, he
maintained traditional Newar festivals, but for those that had important
political implications, references to the new regime were understood to
have been substituted for references to Malla kings. Although the sword
represents to the political authorities themselves and to other Nepalis
the sign of the superordinate authority of the central regime, to many
local people in Bhaktapur this symbol, and many other such symbols still
represent the traditional Malla kings; hence, the significance of the
carrying and the handing over of the sword m this preliminary event
becomes significantly altered m its local implications.
15. In other
jatra
s images of deities are usually carried in palanquins called
kha:ca
, or 'little chariots."
16. For some detailed photographs of the Bhairava chariot, see Gutschow (1982, 82-85).
17. According to Gutschow's account (1984), the musicians are from the low Jugi
thar
and the man who carries the
sukunda
is from the marginally clean Bha
thar
.
18. This is an important example of the "advertised secrecy" that we discussed in chapter 9.
19. The head of Bhairava separated from his body is an element of one of
the legends associated with the festival, which we will recount below.
20. The Maha(n) constitute a category, now containing two
thar
s (Caguthi and Muguthi) within the middle-status segment of the Jyapus.
According to Manandhar, who has the name Maha:(n), the word derives from
the old Newari term
mahatha
, "a military commander, a very Important military post in Malla days. .
.. From this the term Maharjan was taken as a caste name or surname by a
section of Jyapus to avoid the contempt associated with the name
Jyapu." He notes also that "those who were in military service during
the days of the Malla kings were called
maha:(n)
." (1975, 444). The military commanders (as opposed to the soldiers) have their
thar
descendants, as Manandhar notes, in the Chathar Amatya (alternately called "Mahaju")
thar
.
21. As we noted in the previous chapter, the Pulu Kisi Haigu [65] is
another, but comparatively minor, occasion when conflict between the
city halves is expressed.
22. In the years of social change and breakdown of traditional patterns
just after the study, some of the fights initiated by the tug of war
were very severe, extensive, and difficult to control, and threatened
the performance of the
jatra
itself.
23. A
hiti
is a traditional water fountain. A
ga: hiti
, according to Manandhar, is "the old type of fountain located m a
depression in the earth" (1976, 627). Bhaktapur Newari, like Kathmandu
Newari, has the form "
hiti
," but has a long final "i" for this particular place name.
24. The Kathmandu version of the term (
syaku tyaku
) refers to another occasion "the main day of the Dasain [Mohani]
festival, involving a feast and a visit to the goddess Durga. The word
is popularly reinterpreted. . . [to mean] 'However much you kill you
don't have to repay as retribution; what is killed [and eaten] is for
the goddess and is not for self-interest, thus the killer is exempt from
the blood-guilt of the animals slaughtered'" (Manandhar 1976, 606).
25. The sequence of Das Karma signifies for a deity its birth or more
accurately rebirth, and is characteristic of deities who reappear during
each annual cycle.
26. The erection of a pole, or a pole with banners, on the solar New
Year's Day is (and was) found elsewhere in South Asia (e.g., Underhill,
1921; D. R. Regmi, 1965-1966, part II, p. 650).
27. The
yasi(n)
s are symbolically connected in a very minimal way by saying they are consorts, with the larger central
yasi(n)
being the male, the smaller secondary one the female.
28. A quotation from Gutschow illustrates this historical,
archaeological approach to cultural features. "We do not know the reason
behind the apparent . . . [parallelism] of the two poles [the two
yasi(n)
s]. The clue might again, [as] in so many cases, lie in the spatial
development of the town. We also do not know why Bhairava and Bhadrakali[
*]
'take residence' in temporary 'houses' in Lakulache(n). . . . All these
activities point to a former center with its New Year ritual. With the
unification of a number of villages, the construction of new temples and
the installation of a more elaborate and grander ritual the needs of an
enlarged community was served. Older places of reference were then
incorporated; . . . modification of rituals and a change of the spatial
setting tend to incorporate preceding patterns. The present ritual might
well reflect the existence of a more ancient setting, thus telling us
in a hidden form about the history of the place" (Gutschow 1984, 17).
The legends of the Chuma(n) Ganedya: Jatra (see text below) refer, in
fact, to an enlargement or founding of Bhaktapur in connection with the
establishment of Biska:.
29. It is these banners, as we have noted above, which may have provided Biska: with its name.
30. As we have noted in chapter 8, each of the eight Matrkas
traditionally has a specific Bhairava consort, independent subforms of
that deity. This particular iconic feature of the Yasi(n) God unites the
diverse couples into one.
31. In other Newari and South Asian versions of this tale, only one
snake appears. The extra snake adapts Bhaktapur's version to the two
banners on the
yasi(n)
.
32. Anderson's version of the story (1971, 41f.) has an important
variant. Here the sole and "excessively passionate" daughter of the
Bhaktapur king takes a different
lover
each night, the duty of providing a lover rotating among city
households. Each morning the lover is found dead, until the arrival of
the successful prince puts an end to the danger. It is of interest to
compare different published versions of this story. In the episode of
the snake, D. R. Regmi (1965-1966, part II, p. 650) and Hale and Hale
(1970, 248ff. [a direct transcription of a Newari verbal account])
describe one snake coming out of the princess's nose. Anderson (1971)
tells of two "dark threads" coming one each from the princess's two
nostrils, which "rapidly expanded into monstrous serpents writhing about
in search of their usual victim." The version of the story given by
Punya Ratna Bajracharya, a Newar, in the Nepalese newspaper "Rising
Nepal'' (April 18, 1974) is "as he [the soon to be victorious prince]
kept awake he saw a very tiny snake coming out from the womb [i.e.,
vagina] of his queen and it assumed a terrible form and tried to attack
him, but he took out his sword and slew it." It was only after the
slaying of this serpent, or serpents, that marriage to the princess was
possible.
33. This refers to events that will take place subsequently.
34. D. R. Regmi recounts a similar story (1965-1966, part II, p. 651).
35. There were two Licchavi kings of that name noted in inscriptions who reigned in the sixth and seventh centuries
A.D.
(Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p. 397).
36. Gutschow and others have made the plausible suggestion that as the
yasi(n)
is often interpreted as a
linga[
*]
, the hole must represent a
yoni
, or vagina, and that "the erection of the pole can be understood as a
reenactment of primal procreation" (Gutschow 1984, 16). Although sexual
union is dearly understood in cultural doctrine to be symbolized by
other subsequent aspects of the Biska: cycle, this meaning does not seem
to be overtly associated by religious experts, at least, with the
placing of the
yasi(n)
into its base.
37. If it were to fall, as it sometimes does, it would be not only
dangerous to the people working to lift it but also taken as a sign of
danger for the city.
38. Gutschow has studied this phase of Biska:. He notes that individual
deities may be added (and presumably discontinued) from time to time,
and notes examples of two deities who were added, at least one of which
was brought from a village outside Bhaktapur. In 1983 he counted
twenty-nine imags that were brought out at this time (1984, 20).
39. In the course of their
jatra
s the images of Kumari and Tripurasundari are carried to their
pitha
s outside of the city as are the other Mandalic[
*]
Goddesses whose
jatra
s are emphasized (see below).
40. Gutschow (1984) observes that the movement of these Tantric deities
out of their god-houses and to the outside area where they are exhibited
resembles, in part, the movement of the Mandalic[
*]
Goddesses from their god-houses to their
pitha
s outside of the city in the major
jatra
s of this period.
41. This conjunction of the internal representation of a dangerous deity and its external
pitha
or natural stone representation is also enacted, as we have noted (chap. 9), m lineage deity ceremonies.
42. The Jugi also have another connection with this day. Some
five-and-a-half months previously, on the lunar day of Bala Ca:re [7],
one of their members had begun dances m the city representing Siva as
Mahadeva. On this day, the fifth day of Biska:, with the falling of the
Yasi(n) God, the period proper to this representation comes to an end.
43. Indrani[
*]
and some of the other deities who have
jatra
s during the Biska: period also have
jatra
s during the lunar cycle. These are Indrani[
*]
Jatra [61], Varahi Jatra [53], and Chuma(n) Gandya: Jatra [63].
44. It is not clear why it is Indrani[
*]
who receives this special royal greeting rather than the other
jatra
gods of Biska:. This emphasis is a reminder of the various connections between Biska: and Kathmandu's Indra Jatra.
45. This alignment of the chariot, like the direction in which the
Yasi(n) God will soon be swayed, would seem plausibly to be related to
the sun's east-west path. However, such a connection is not known now to
our informants.
46. On the evening of this day the Po(n)s have feasts in their houses and invite other Po(n)s from other communities.
47. Whatever the significance of the lack of contamination of the two men who touch the untouchables while giving the
prasada
on this day may be, the others on the chariot are protected from
contamination because the chariot is a temple. This protects the riders
of the chariot from pollution in the next phase when the Po(n)s pull at
the ropes at the back of the chariot.
48. It is noteworthy that the upper-status
thar
men, including Brahmans, who participate in the pulling of the chariot
on the first and last days of the cycle, do not do It on this day when
the Po(n)s are also involved.
49. This Bhairava stone also marks the place where during the Mohani
festival Taleju gives full power to the Nine Durgas troupe and takes
leave of them as they begin their annual mission.
50. Manandhar notes that ''this verb requires plural actors and
originally meant 'to meet at one place.' This meaning is still current
in the causative form of the verb [as found in the phrase] dya: lwakala.
'The deities were made to meet at one place' . . . [this] does
not
mean that the deities were made to fight" (1976, 529). However,
whatever its original implication may have been, in the present
generalization of the meaning of the term from its use in other
contexts, it now seems to convey the meaning of fighting, at least m
Bhaktapur.
51. These hesitations between interpretations of sexual intercourse and
aggression represent familiar psychodynamic forms as modified by
Bhaktapur's special ways of dealing with these problematic passions. For
our present purposes it is sufficient to note that these are critical
ambiguities that hold the attention, intellect, and passions of the
spectators and participants, and help make this element of the festival
sequence—like so many others—compelling, significant, and "alive."
52. There are other examples when for some limited purpose one of a pair
of goddesses is interpreted as male so that they can be conceived of as
a husband and wife, or man and woman. One is Brahmani and Mahesvari on
the following day, another is Sima and Duma during the Nine Durgas
performances (chap. 16). In that latter case it is generally agreed that
Sima is male and Duma female, probably as an accident of color
contrasts in their images.
53. The Natapwa(n)la temple contains, as we noted in chapter 8, an
esoteric form of the Goddess that was placed there to act as a
restraining influence on the Bhairava of the main Bhairava temple, also
located in the square, who is also the Bhairava of Biska:.
54. The dangerous deities are not considered to be married in the domestic sense that the benign deities are (see chap. 8).
55. Gutschow (1984, 24) remarks that people must leave the ordinary route to include visits to Bhairava in his
jatra
god-house in Lakulache(n) and at two other places.
56. These offerings are called "giving
Swaga(n)
to the gods."
57.
Chu(n)
means both rat and/or mouse. As we have noted, this same Ganesa[
*]
has another
jatra
[63] during the course of the lunar year. The rat or mouse is the traditional vehicle of Ganesa[
*]
. In Bhaktapur's representations the vehicle is usually a
tichu(n)
, a shrew.
58. Theoretically parallel events may be significantly contrastive. This is the case in the presence or absence among various
thar
s during a festival of the Aga(n) God worship that characterizes upper-level
thar
s. With that exception, however, contrastive parallel events among
otherwise similar units are not salient during Bhaktapur's annual
festivals.
59. The princess is unaware of her destructive nature, and can be
treated as an innocent wife after her indwelling serpents have been
destroyed. This is reminiscent of Parvati's relation to her Durga
emanation as suggested in the
Devi Mahatmya
stories (chap. 8).
Chapter Fifteen The Devi Cycle
1. We use the theatrical term "troupe" to refer to the group of men who
traditionally embody and act the Nine Durgas as well as the group (or
troop) of divinities who become embodied.
2. This probably refers to one of two kings called elsewhere Gunakamadeva[
*]
, who reigned in the tenth and twelfth centuries (Slusser 1982, vol. 1,
p. 45). The "Wright chronicle" puts the events of the legend in the
realm of one "Suvarna Malla" (placed in that chronicle in the early
sixteenth century), who "introduced the dance of the Nava Durga, having
heard that they had been seen dancing at night" ([1877] 1972, p. 189).
3. In some version they just happen to be there; in others they were
forced to stay m the forest through the power of still another Tantric
expert.
4. We have seen variations on this theme in the legend of Sesar[
*]
Acaju's wife in Biska:, whose meddling led, according to one of its
legends, to Biska: as a civic festival (chap. 14). The function of the
Brahman's wife in the Nine Durgas legends has interesting psychological
and mythic resonances elsewhere. Like Eve and Bluebeard's wife she
destroys the paradise of man's childlike, self-absorbed, and selfish
pleasures, but m so doing reroutes forces to the service of
civilization. In the Yasi(n) God legend of the princess inhabited by
snakes and in Puranic[
*]
stories of a benign Parvati inhabited by the Dangerous Goddess, we are
reminded that the woman not only domesticates but also can represent the
very dangers against which domestication protects. Bhaktapur tries, not
always successfully, to isolate and separate these meanings.
5. This Bhairavi is thought by some religious experts to be associated with an esoteric goddess represented in the Gana[
*]
Kumari, in the Hipha: gods of Mohani, and in the Taleju temple (see text below).
6. The numbers m brackets refer to the sequence of calendrical events of the lunar year as presented in chapter 13.
7. This last dance-drama or
pyakha(n)
is of the kind called
na[
*]
lakegu
, or "fishing"
pyakha(n)
. It takes place in the Rajopadhyaya Brahman's neighborhood where they
had danced before beginning their circuit of the city and its environing
communities some nine months before and closes the spatial circle of
the
na[
*]
lakegu
performances by bringing them back.
8. Of course, the relation of these ritual markers of the agriculture
and weather cycle to the actual events of that cycle is variable. In the
case of Sithi Nakha, the day occurs early enough in the year to
probably well precede the rains. Such markers have to be placed so that
they are safely prior to the changes they anticipate and prepare for.
9. For references to Kumara on this day and at other times during the year elsewhere in Nepal, see Anderson (1971, chap. 5).
10. During the Prthivi[
*]
puja
six sweetcakes are offered to the Goddess in the
mandala[
*]
, and six different kinds of pulses are also offered. The name of Kumara is recited during the
puja
, but this is locally thought of as a secondary reference.
11. The rice is prepared at the Taleju temple by members of the high Jyapu
thar
, the Suwal. This is one of the many special duties at the Taleju temple assigned to specific
thar
s, which are often residues of ancient
thar
functions during the Malla period.
12. According to Niels Gutschow (personal communication), one of his
associates reported seeing the Nine Durgas when they reached their
god-house on this day first banging against its closed door, and then
falling to the ground and lying there as if dead.
13. Teilhet's paper has important details on the making of the masks,
their iconography, on other aspects of the Gatha's costumes, and on the
Gatha performers themselves. It reflects, however, the limited
perspective of Teilhet's informants m their speculations on other
aspects of the Nine Durgas' activities other than the ones with which
they were most closely concerned.
14. The practice of putting cremation remains "in a small earthen pot and throw[ing] them into the water" in Puranic[
*]
times is noted in Pandey (1969, 261). Following cremations in Bhaktapur
now, some of the ashes and bone fragments from the head of the cremated
corpse are placed m the soil of the river bed just after the cremation
(app. 6).
15. The Nine Durgas may be thought to increase not only the amount of
water but also its fertile potency. Niels Gutschow remarks that
Bhaktapur's farmers have a strong belief that the Nine Durgas are
present in the water in the rice fields during the summer. They say that
they should not urinate in the flooded fields in order not to offend or
hurt those deities (personal communication).
16. It is important to note for the distinction between the Nine Mandalic[
*]
Goddesses and the Nine Durgas (chap. 8) that the Mandalic[
*]
Goddesses remain actively m their fixed locations throughout the entire
year. However, neither they nor the ordinary moral gods of the city are
fully sufficient to protect the city when the Nine Durgas are dormant.
17. Hamilton writes that the sacrifice was supposed to have taken place
on the eighth day of Asvina, which would have been during the Mohani
sequence. It is Bhairava not Bhairavi who now performs animal
sacrifices—with the exception of the killing of a cock during the
Pyakha(n) (see text below). In Hamilton's list of the Nine Durgas
([1819] 1971, 35) Bhairavi seems to represent the Mahakali of the
present troupe, and Mahakala seems to represent the present Bhairava. If
it were Bhairavi who did, m fact, perform the human sacrifices, this
would be congruent with her later meanings in the Nine Durgas
dance-dramas.
18. When farmers have finished the transplanting they have a purification ceremony on this day called
syina jya byenkegu
, with feasts later in the day. If the transplanting cannot be completed
until after Gatha Muga: Ca:re, the ceremony will be held when the
actual transplanting is completed.
19. It is also said that on this day the Nine Durgas' Ganesa[
*]
appears and will give the Gathas ritual effectiveness,
siddhi
, in their preparation for the new cycle.
20. Iron is widely believed to have the power to repel spirits, and is used for this purpose in certain household rituals.
21. His name has no apparent connection with the Gatha
thar
name.
22. The versions of the legend given by Anderson (1971, 73) and D. R.
Regmi (1965-1966, part II, p. 661) tell of an heroic frog who alerted
the valley people to an attack of the demon and helped trap and thus
destroy him. This part of the legend seems not to be salient in
Bhaktapur.
23. That is to say, a consistent and profound belief in
karma
, the automatic and certain rewards and punishmens for moral activities,
can produce contradictions with other belief systems, such as the power
of devotion or of ritual practices directed to the gods to alter one's
fate. This sort of belief in
karma
would be subversive of the priest-mediated ritual order of traditional Newar cities.
24. This detail is related to one of the customs of the day, as we will see below.
25. This is a transformation of the Ghantakarna legend. That name means "bells [at the] ears," and in a Puranic[
*]
legend refers to an Asura who being an enemy of Visnu[
*]
wore bells at his ears so as not to hear the mention of his name (Mani,
1975, 289). This creature later became a devotee of Visnu[
*]
and an ally of the Gods.
26. One striking difference from some of the descriptions of events in
other Newar communities is that Po(n) untouchables are said elsewhere to
play important roles m representing Gatha Muga:. "The main character in
the festival is a Newar man of the untouchable Pode [Po(n)] caste who
has the dubious honor of impersonating Ghana Karna, his near-naked body
painted with lewd symbols and pictures depicting all types of sexual
depravity (Anderson 1971, 74; see also D. R. Regmi 1965-1966, part II,
p. 661; G. S. Nepali 1965, 378). This use of a Pore or Po(n) is not made
now in Bhaktapur, and we have no information on it having been made
there m the past.
27. This reflects a similar practice described in at least one Puranic[
*]
text for the final day of Dasai(n) (Mohani). "The sending away of Devi
should be made . . . by throwing dust and mud, . . . with indulgence in
words and songs referring to male and female organs and with words
expressive of the sexual act. The Devi becomes angry with him who does
not abuse another and whom others do not abuse and pronounces on him a
terrible curse" (the Kalikapurana[
*]
, quoted in Kane [1968-1977, vol. V, p. 177]). Kane goes on to comment
that the purpose of this was to emphasize that "before Devi the highest
and the lowest were of equal status . . . [and] to show that all men
were equal at least one day in the year."
28. In traditional Newar houses the carved wooden open worked windows
are so constructed that it is possible to look out without being visible
from the outside.
29. Although there would seem to be a strong metaphorical connection of
Gatha Muga: and fertility, there is no local doctrine about this nor of
any relation to the Nine Durgas or Devi who
are
related to fertility in the Devi cycle. Devi is, in doctrine, fully and self-sufficiently generative in herself.
30. The Newars of Bhaktapur, as Nepalis do m general, fly kites at this time. These are usually flown from the
ka:si
s the open porches of the upper stories of houses. One of the several
accounts given of this practice is that it sends messages to the gods to
remind them not to send any more rain.
31. Mohani (in Kathmandu Newari, also Moni or Monhi), according to
Gautam Vajracharya (personal communication), is derived from the
Sanskrit,
mahanavami
, the "ninth great day." The ninth day is one of the climactic days of
the cycle. There are similar words that have close thematic relations to
the term.
Monhi
(
moni
in Kathmandu dialect) is a mark made using the soot from a special oil
lamp that allows for possession by a deity and which is an important
part of the worship of the Mohani period for all worshipers.
Mohani
(Sanskrit,
mohini
), meaning "enchantment," is an important theme and term in the scriptural account, the
Devi Mahatmya
, which is a major source for the imagery of the period. The two latter words are probably connected, the
Monhi
mark inducing
Mohani
or the state of being "enchanted."
32. Our discussion of Mohani refers throughout to aspects and
interpretations of Devi and the dangerous goddesses that are treated at
length in chapter 8.
33. As we have noted in chapter 8, the position of the goddesses around
Bhaktapur and the sequence of their special days during Mohani
corresponds closely to the sequence in which they are introduced in the
Devi Mahatmya
, the Puranic[
*]
text that contains much of the mythological account on which Mohani is based. The
pitha
s are visited during Mohani on each successive day in their exact
circumferential sequence around the periphery of Bhaktapur. Starting
with (1) Brahmani to the east on the first day, the successive days'
focal
pitha
s are (2) Mahesvari to the southeast, (3) Kumari to the south, (4) Vaisnavi[
*]
to the southwest, (5) Varahi to the west, (6) Indrani[
*]
to the northwest, (7) Mahakali to the north, and (8) Mahalaksmi[
*]
to the northeast. On the climactic ninth day the focal
pitha
is Tripurasundari at the mandalic[
*]
center. On the tenth day the focus is once again on the beginning position, Brahmani.
34. Manandhar proposes that "
Na:la
" is derived from the Sanskrit
Nava Ratra
, the "nine nights," the first nine nights of Dasai(n) (1976, 242).
Others think that it has the meaning of "new and delicate." "Swa(n)''
means flower. The Na:la swa(n) is the name given in this context to the
barley plant that is grown in soil placed in the room. This room is also
sometimes called the "
Kha(n)
'' or "sword" room. Swords will be an important symbolic element in the room later in the sequence.
35. G. S. Nepali (1965, 405 ff.) gives details on this and other Mohani
procedures, many of which differ sharply from the common Bhaktapur ones.
36. Girls born into the family take part, as do wives married into it
after their introductory initiation into the household rituals and
deities. In those upper-status houses with Tantric practices some
portions of the
Na:la swa(n)
ceremonies on the eighth, ninth, and tenth days of Mohani require
initiation, and only those women with special Tantric "half-initiation"
take part. Nepali says (1965, 409) that married-out women can no longer
enter the
Na:la swa(n)
rooms of their parental homes. Although this may be true for some
thar
s in Bhaktapur, it is not, reportedly, generally true for most of them.
37. The lamps are placed on his head, his right and left shoulders, his
right and left knees, and the palms of his hands, which are held in a
supine position.
38. The lamps may be filled with the particularly expensive fuel,
clarified butter, but even the more ordinary mustard or sesame oils are
expensive for families in these quantities.
39. In the past there was a more dramatic version of these procedures
during the first nine days. The devotee would wrap cloths around each of
his fingers and, dipping the cloths in oil, set them afire. This
practice has disappeared in recent years. The motives given in
explanation of all these
vrata
s are various, but they typically represent gratitude for help in
overcoming some difficulty, or in hopes that it will be overcome in the
future. In certain extended families the
vrata
had been pledged at some time in the (sometimes distant) past, and various families within the
phuki
take turns m designating one of their members to perform it. These hereditary
vrata
s are sometimes conceived as protection against the flooding of the
phuki's
fields, or against illness in the family. It is mostly members of the farming
thar
s who perform these
vrata
s. This reflects, perhaps, the agricultural emphasis of the Mohani and
the dangers of improper agricultural conditions as well as the special
economic vulnerability of the farming
thar
s in Bhaktapur's traditional economy.
40. The major Taleju activities of Mohani are the daily Na:la swa(n)
worship; various activities concerning the "living goddess" Kumari; the
special activities of the ninth night, the Kalaratri; the moving
("taking up" and "taking down'') of the goddess Taleju within the
temple; and, on the final day, the procession of the goddess Taleju.
41. The lower
thars
(such as the butchers, Jugis, and Po[n]s) still associated with Taleju
have kept their traditional functions there, as they have in the wider
city society, as have the priestly
thar
s. Shifts since Malla times away from their traditional functions are
for the most part among the Pa(n)cthariya and Chathariya (whose
thar
names usually signify their traditional functions in the aristocratic
court-centered segment of Malla society) as well as among a few of the
Jyapu
thars
who previously had some specialized servant or military function (e.g.,
guards, charioteers, cooks) for the court. The particular
thar
s who had traditional Taleju Malla court functions are listed m chapter 5.
42. This is in contrast to Biska:, where the king and the Guru-Purohit are represented by two different Brahmans.
43. The true Taleju image may be moved
within
the temple, but cannot be taken out of it. The
jatra
image, like all such images, is specially designated for processions
outside of the temple. These two images are the only images of Taleju in
the Taleju temple.
44. Taleju temple also has an elaborate external Golden Gate facing on
the Laeku or "Durbar" Square. Access to Taleju's inner courtyard is
forbidden to non-Hindus. The inner Golden Gate and the adjoining areas
in the Mucuka are shown in a color photograph in M. Singh (1968,
192-193). This photograph is of particular importance in that
photographing of the interior areas of the Taleju temple is, in
principle, forbidden.
45. This conjunction of two forms of the Goddess is reflected on the following day, the eighth day, in the other
Na:la swa(n)
rooms throughout the city, where an additional image of Bhagavati—in those cases an anthropomorphic one—is brought into the
Na:la swa(n)
rooms and placed in conjunction with the
kalasa
.
46. As G. S. Nepali dryly remarks, "This is a state event and all
Government officials, even if they are Newars, have to be present m the
procession" (1965, 407).
47. Nepali erroneously places these events on the eighth day of Mohani.
48. There are some references m the literature to Mohani's connections
(particularly the victory celebration of the tenth day) with the
Ramayana's[
*]
account of Rama's victory over the demon king Ravana[
*]
(e.g., D. R. Regmi, 1965-1966, part II, p. 673; Anderson 1971, p. 152).
That story is still told m Bhaktapur, and sometimes informally
associated with Mohani, but is more closely associated in Bhaktapur with
the minor spring festival, Cait dasai(n) [31]. None of the mass of
symbolic events of Bhaktapur's Mohani period seem to refer to the Rama
story.
49. Like many calendrically connected feasts, this one has a humorous name. It is called the "Ku chi," the "one-
ku
" feast. A
ku
is a measure equivalent to about a quart, and the name indicates that
people will eat at least this much beaten rice, along with all the other
foods they will eat at the feast, and that, thus, they will consume
enormous quantities of food.
50. The exact number does not seem to have any traditional significance,
in contrast with the number of sacrificial water buffaloes.
51. "
Dugu
" means goat. "
Nikhu
" is said to mean solidly colored in the sense of an unspotted or unblemished color. The morpheme
ni
in other compound words has the sense of "uncontaminated," which is part of the sense of
nikhu
here.
52. "
Thu
" comes from "
thume
," male water buffalo.
53. This is done by a member of one of the farming
thars
, who lives in the house where the buffalo has been kept, and whose family has this traditional responsibility.
54. The king, seated, asks, "What is this buffalo's name?" The Nae
answers, "Nikhuthu." King: "Is this Nikhuthu proper (i.e., does it have
the required characteristics as a sacrificial offering)?" Nae: "Yes.''
King: ''Do you swear to it?" Nae: "Let there be victory to the king and
to Taleju and destruction to myself (if I am not telling the truth)."
[He repeats this oath three times.] King: [Again.] "Do you swear to it?"
Nae: "Let there be victory to the king and to Taleju and destruction to
myself." [He again repeats this oath three times.]
55. It is said that in the past each
twa
: paid for the buffalo that represented it. Now they are paid for by the central government's, Guthi Samsthan.
56. Animal sacrifice during Mohani is done in the same way as it is at other times during the year (see chap. 9).
57.
Hi
means blood;
pha
comes from
phayegu
, meaning to receive in outtretched supine hands held joined together as a cup, or in a container so held in the hands.
58. Buffaloes, in general, are killed only by Nae butchers in Bhaktapur,
and are not used for ordinary householders' sacrifices. The exception
is the killing of buffaloes by the Nine Durgas during Mohani and later
in their cycle.
59. At this point the buffaloes, like the goats, are soul-bearing
creatures, who are being offered salvation through sacrifice to the
Goddess. Their subsequent meaning as Asuras does not affect this
interpretation.
60. It does not make any difference whether this sacrificial blood is offered first to the right or to the left.
61. The meat from the bodies of the buffaloes and goats will be cut up
and distributed to members of the Taleju staff and to members of the
government's Guthi Samsthan.
62. It is said that anyone who, following this bath, sees blood in the
water at the ancient water fountain and bathing tank associated with
Indrani[
*]
will die within six months. The Indrani[
*]
bathing tank was historically within the old court complex and drew
from the same water supply as the tank where the Hipha: gods bathe, and
this may, in part, account for the belief.
63. Kumari has been seen by people in the northern part of the city
throughout Mohani in a daily procession from her god-house to the nearby
vihara
, from which on this day she will be brought to the Taleju temple.
64. The
tirtha
of Tripurasundari is the only one of the Mandalic[
*]
Goddesses'
tirtha
s that (necessarily, because of her central location) is not close to the corresponding
pitha
.
65. The demand for sacrificial goats is so great at this period that
many people who would be able to afford one are unable to procure one
and must offer a lesser sacrifice.
66. The sacrifice is done in "Nepalese" style, that is, by decapitation
of the animal in one blow from the back of the animal's neck without a
prior cutting of the throat. The Newar Nae does not sacrifice the
buffaloes. The ceremony, furthermore, although taking place on Laeku
Square, is said to have no reference or relevance to Taleju.
67. There will be no sacrifices anywhere in Bhaktapur on the tenth day.
68. It is said, amalgamating these tools with a characteristic of the
dangerous deities, that if a sacrifice is not given them they may cause
an accident, thus taking the sacrifice by themselves.
69. The condensation is, perhaps, most evident in the "Kumari" of the Nine Durgas group.
70. The Newari term for such a deity, is Mwamha Dya:, literally "living deity."
71. The most extensive general survey and detailed accounts of the Newar Kumaris is Michael Allen's
The Cult of Kumari
(1975). See also Allen's article on virgin worship in the Kathmandu Valley (1976).
72. Kumari in Sanskrit means simply "girl, virgin, daughter."
73. This is a form in which Kumari the maiden and Kumari as Kaumari, the Mandalic[
*]
Mother Goddess, are represented together.
74. It is important to note here that for the upper-status Hindu Newars in Bhaktapur, even the high Buddhist
thar
s are not water-acceptable (chap. 5). This is significant here in
connection with the legend of the Ekanta Kumari (see text below) and the
Tantric aspects of Kumari.
75. He is identified by the Taleju priests as Bhairava, but the Bare themselves, it is said, think of him as Kumar.
76. They will not participate in the later main Kumari worship in the
temple. This is restricted to the "Malla king" himself, that is, the
Brahman who represents him.
77. In addition to the Gana[
*]
Kumari, there is still another "Ekanta Kumari," who is selected from the same Bare
phuki
as the main Ekanta Kumari. She is connected with a now minor temple of
Taleju in the Wa(n)laeku area in the northeast of Bhaktapur near
Dattatreya Square. It is thought by some that this temple may have been
the royal Taleju temple at an earlier time when the royal palace may
have been located in that area and that this Kumari may represent some
residue of that situation. At any rate, the temple is now supervised not
by a Brahman but by an Acaju, and its Ekanta Kumari is of significance
only to the local neighborhood.
78. These stories resemble those of Sesar[
*]
Acaju (in connection with Biska:) and Somara Rajopadhyaya (in the Nine
Durgas legend), which we have discussed above—in the loss of direct
contact with a deity and/or the loss of supernatural power through a
minor and almost inevitable human error. In those stories the blame was
put on a weak woman, as it is in the second of these stories. In the
first story it is the king's own fault. The Goddess's realm, like the
realm of all the dangerous deities and the realm of Tantra, is beyond
the civic moral order—and curious prying into this realm, by either the
king or some unauthorized woman, is a particularly dangerous violation.
On the basis of accounts gathered apparently for the most part from
Buddhist Bare informants, Michael Allen writes that "there is always the
implication, which is sometimes made explicit, that the king developed a
strong desire to sexually possess the goddess" (1976, 302).
79. For the quite different Buddhist accounts of the origins of the
practice of using a Bare girl as Kumari see Allen (1975, 1976).
80. According to Niels Gutschow (personal communication), the present
(1989) Kumari lives at her parental home. This may have been true of
some previous Kumaris.
81. Allen (1975, 63) presents a list given him by a Vajracarya informant
of thirty-two ideal characteristics for a Kumari, including, for
example, "blue-black eyes," "skin pores small and not too open," "hair
whorls stiff, turning to the right," and ''long and well-formed toes."
82. The water buffalo heads at this time are within the inner gate of the Taleju temple's main courtyard, along with the Taleju
jatra
image.
83. It is commonly said by people in Bhaktapur and is repeated in many
descriptions of the Ekanta Kumari that she is placed among the
decapitated heads and left alone there to see if she is without fear as a
test of her validity. For Bhaktapur, at least, this is false.
84. Most of them will remain in Bhaktapur to watch the remainder of the day's events.
85. These procedures stand out in Bhaktapur as uniquely extreme and
"Dionysian" procedures. However, they are limited in both extent and
discomfort and in the very minor bodily injuries, if any, that result,
in marked contrast to the much more severe and self-injuring procedures
often found in such
vratas
elsewhere in South Asia.
86. The buffalo heads, which are never used as
siu
, are given to non-Brahman members of the staff who will use them for food in feasts.
87. Manandhar notes of the
bhuiphasi
(which he gives in Kathmandu dialect as
bhuyu: phasi
) that it is "a variety of pumpkin which can be offered in lieu of an
animal as a sacrifice to a deity (used especially by vegetarians who do
not sacrifice animals or eggs)" (1976, 407). This usage is not salient
in Hindu Bhaktapur.
88. This same deity is referred to throughout Mohani. She is included in the Gana[
*]
Kumari, the Hipha: gods are her manifestations, and she represents
Bhagavati, here. She is sometimes taken to be the mysterious Ninth
Durga, as the unrepresented Sakti of the Nine Durgas Bhairava.
89. According to Manandhar, "
paya(n)
" derives from the old Newari word for sword, "
pa
" (1976, 295). There are descriptions of Newar "sword processions"
elsewhere on this day, which differ from Bhaktapur's Taleju-centered
procession (e.g., D. R. Regmi 1965-1966, part II, p. 678; G. S. Nepali
1965, p. 411; Anderson 1971, 153).
90. In her description of the activities of this, the tenth day of the Dasai(n) harvest festival in Kathiawar[
*]
in Gujarat in western India during the early part of the century,
Stevenson reports that toward the end of a ritual centering on the
Rajput princes of Kathiawar[
*]
, the "chief summons four of the leading grain merchants of the State
and asks them what the price of gram is likely to be during the next
twelve months. They give a rough estimate, but, in order not to be held
to it too closely, say: 'It is in God's hands'" (1920, p. 233). The two
episodes, with their references to the price of grain, which is
dependent on the extent of the harvest, must obviously have some common
historical ancestor.
91. When it goes to the lower part of the city, the procession goes in a
counterclockwise loop rather than in the usual auspicious clockwise
one. This is apparently determined by spatial constraints, and is the
unique occasion when this occurs in a city calendrical procession.
92. The temple has no identifying iconic features now. Niels Gutschow
has been told (personal communication) that it is—or was—a temple of
Jagannatha.
93. In some popular accounts it is incorrectly said that a
mantra
is given in a whisper by the Taleju priest to the Durgas at this time.
94. The fertility aspect of the warrior goddess of the
Devi
Mahatmya
is overt in a verse where foretelling an extended period of drought in a future
yuga
she promises "at that time, O Gods, I shall support the whole world
with life sustaining vegetables, born out of my own body, until the
rains set in again" (
Devi Mahatmya
XI, 45; Agrawala 1963, 141).
95. The Gatha do not eat pork except in their ritual capacity as incarnated deities.
96. The reason that some of these locations are outside of the present
Bhaktapur district is unclear to our informants. These must reflect both
boundary changes and special invitations in the years after the
inauguration of the dances in, presumably, the sixteenth century.
97. According to Gutschow and Basukala (1987), this skullcap represents Guhyesvari.
98. Some of the old public squares that were part of the organization of every major
twa:
and every sub-
twa:
neighborhood have been disturbed by patterns of building so that they
have now become inner courtyards and/or reduced in size. New areas have
to be found now in such places for activities attracting large crowds of
local people.
99. Our description of the
pyakha(n)
s is based on observations of segments of it, on descriptions given by
local people, and on observations by Steven Parish, who was doing
research in Bhaktapur at the time this chapter was being revised.
100. The basis for the differentiation is the only feature in which the
two masks differ, their color. Sima's mask is white and Duma's reddish
orange, which reflects a white/red contrast that sometimes designates
male/female in Tantric symbolism.
101. This is the same procedure by which Tantric physicians try to chase
away the spirits that cling to people and cause diseases. This
procedure is also used in other contexts to drive away evil influences.
New brides, for example, entering a household for the first time are
similarly freed of evil influences at the
ptkha lakhu
, the symbolic boundary of the house.
102. This last sacrificial sequence, which is described on the basis of
informants' reports, does not occur in all performances of the
pyakha(n)
. Niels Guts-chow reports that he has never seen it done (personal communication).
103. This idea and its development in the following paragraph is indebted to the work of Roy Rappaport (1979).
104. The form that the sacrifice takes within the
pyakha(n)
, the biting off of a cock's head, adds the imagery of the threat of
castration to the general sacrificial threat of bodily destruction.
105. This also replicates on a smaller scale the narrative movement in
Mohani, where cosmic forces are represented, then gathered together in a
bounded, concentrated and maximized form, and then moved out into the
life, space, and time of the larger city.
Chapter Sixteen The Patterns and Meanings of the Festival Year
1. Recall (see chap. 12) that we have included in our discussions and
enumeration only those particular weekly, fortnightly, or monthly events
that have some important differentiated annual significance. The
remainder are generally of relatively minor civic importance, of concern
only to particular individuals or households. We have also not included
here ten
melas
not associated with the city's annual calendar, and four taking place
in multiple numbers of years. If these events were listed, they would
augment the number of days in any given year that are the occasion for
some sort of calendrically determined event.
2. The other is a memorial service for patrilineal ancestors held at the riverside during Dhala(n) Sala(n) [66].
3. This comparative optionality also means that public festivals are
particularly vulnerable to social change, to alternative forms of
entertainment and new pressures on the use of time and capital.
4. These symbols are good examples of what Victor Turner called
"bipolar" symbols. "At one pole [there is] . . . a set of referents of a
grossly physiological character, relating to general human experience
of an emotional kind . . . at the other . . . a set of references to
moral norms and principles governing the social structure" (1967, 54).
Thus in the Biska: story what is focally celebrated is the prince's
overcoming of the potentially fatal snakes that issue from the
princess's nose in order to establish a royal—or any other kind
of—marriage.
5. We have arbitrarily included optional annual visits [50] to the
dangerous goddess Sitala by household members for protection against
smallpox in our enumeration of "household" rather than "public" events.
Sitala
Puja
does not entail worship within the house, and is not really an
exception to this observation. The annual worship of Bhagavati during
Mohani is a
secondary
participation in and reflection of the public worship of the period. It
is a sort of invasion of the Goddess into the family circle, which is
usually bounded against her.
6. This nonrepresentation is similar to the way potential conflicts of the social groups within a
twa:
are deflected to the less consequential ritualized struggles of the city halves (chap. 7).
7. The summary of the festival year, including its events, themes, and
temporal relations given in appendix 5, should make the following
discussion somewhat easier to follow.
8. Bhisi(n), although a dangerous deity, is uniquely isolated from the other dangerous deities in both concept and use.
9. The term "lateral" environment is meant to suggest a contrast with
the bordering enviroment of the household in a different direction or
plane, that is, the realms just beyond birth and death, beyond
thresholds that individuals cross as they enter and leave the household
in the flow of a lifetime. For individuals and households the city is
"lateral" to this direction.
10. The dormant period of the Nine Durgas is not the usual four-month
absence characteristic of the periods of "sleep" of many other Hindu
deities in South Asian tradition.
11. The lunar harvest festival Mohani, coming about six months after
Biska:, is thus an autumnal festival and the two focal sequences have a
seasonal symmetry, but there is no reference in Mohani to the autumnal
equinox equivalent to Biska:'s reference to the vernal equinox.
12. We have commented on the "astral" qualities of Biska:'s symbolism in contrast to Mohani in chapter 14.
13. Swanti, with the lunar New Year Day at the beginning of a bright
fortnight as the fourth of its five days, thus includes a movement from a
dark fortnight to a light one.
14. Recall that this "ordinary death" contrasts with the violent
destruction of the body at the hands and teeth of the dangerous deities,
a destruction due to accidental encounter or some ritual error, a
destruction which, once initiated, can only be avoided through
instruments of power, not through exemplary social behavior.
15. The exception is the Panauti Jatra, which is a mass visit to a focal
festival of a town that previously was within the Bhaktapur kingdom.
The main deities of that festival are dangerous ones. The
jatra
is a calendrical formalization of the visits to a focal festival of
some nearby community that are common throughout the valley and that
Bhaktapur does less formally to focal festivals of other nearby places
on other occasions.
16. According to the Satapatha Bramana[
*]
, both the gods and Asuras sprang "from the Creator Prajapati, [and]
inherited speech—both true and false, but . . . finally the gods
rejected untruth, whilst the Asuras spurned truth which led to their
downfall Another tradition states that though the gods and Asuras were
equally powerful, their power was divided, the gods exercising it by day
and the Asuras by night. . .. Later the term asura denoted the hostile
native rulers and tribes opposed to Aryan religious and political
expansion" (Stutley and Stutley 1977, 23).
17. The optional
vratas
of Mohani, of the Swasthani period, of Caturmasa and of some other
customary occasions during the year are individual performances, but are
most often regarded, as we have been in our discussion of the
vratas
of Swasthani and Mohani, as being immediately or ultimately for the good of the family. The individual
vratas
thus serve to enable an individual to overcome some obstacle in his or
her full contribution to the family or to some larger unit. Similarly,
the emphasis in acquiring personal skills during the Sarasvati festivals
([12] and [13]) is on the learner's dependence on the deity for
acquiring a socially defined and useful skill, rather than as a quest
for self-sufficiency. Learning in general in Bhaktapur is structured to
emphasize the profound dependency of individuals on family, deities, and
society as the originators and teachers of skills and knowledge
18.
Thar
membership is only differentially signaled in the course of the annual cycle for those particular
thars
, of particular importance in the symbolic order of the city, which have
special ritual symbolic functions in the city (see chap. 5).
19. We deal with the most important of these, the
samskara
s or rites of passage that center on individual, household, and extended
family, at some length in appendix 6. A consideration of the
samskaras
provides a useful perspective on the peculiar features of the urban mesocosmic enactments.
Chapter Seventeen What Is Bhaktapur that a Newar May Know It?1
1. The title of this chapter derives from the title of a lecture by
Warren McCulloch, "What is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man,
that He May Know a Number?" (1965). The second phase of the dialogue—in
the form of "what is a Newar that he or she may know Bhaktapur?"—will
occupy us more centrally elsewhere.
2. It should be noted that the idea of a mediating mesocosm with its own
particular characteristics implies that Bhaktapur's relation to the
great cosmos is not that of, say, a medieval monastery, which was
sometimes conceived of as simply a faithful map of the heavenly city.
3. Polytheism avoids the strains placed on a monotheistic representation
such as Jehovah, who in his symbolically overloaded ineffability must
represent, for example, both ideal human moral qualities, including
compassion for individuals, and at the same time a contradictory set of
para-human disruptive, destructive, protective, and controlling forces.
4. We will consider some formal relations between myth and legend in the next section.
5. The religiosity of Bhaktapur's marked symbolism is perhaps only a
"problem" when looking back on it from later secular perspectives,
perspectives where the sacred, to recall St. Paul (whose pronouncement
we used in a discussion of the "problem of idols" in chap. 8) has been
exiled from the creation to the distant and thus unencumbering realm of
the Creator.
6. For example, from James Joyce's story,
The Dead
, "There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol
of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in
the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of."
7. It should be noted that sexuality in civic symbolism is disconnected
from ideas of family, procreation, love, or the normally erotic—its
symbols are nonhuman and uncanny. This is a sexuality outside of the
realm of the social person.
8. For some vivid examples, see Hale and Hale (1970).
9. The transformations in organization and meanings that
characteristically occur as levels change highlight the peculiarity of
those systemic patterns that are occasionally reiterated at different
levels. A characteristic example in Bhaktapur is the Po(n) untouchables
who mimic the larger macrosocial system in having their own "Brahmans,"
as they sometimes put it, and their own "untouchables."
10. Compare Rappaport (1979) on the central importance of action and
bodily involvement in ritual in an attempt to overcome the limits of
ordinary language—in which lying is possible—for social commitment.
11. The ontological status of deities in these three forms, and the
truth claims of the forms themselves, differ. People may doubt a legend
that, as we noted in the legend of the Yasi(n) God in chapter 14, often
has different and contradictory forms, in a different way than they
might doubt the presence of an embodied deity.
12.
Classification
by levels generates mysteries when a particular entity is placed at
different levels in different hierarchies. Within the class of dangerous
deities females are more inclusive, more powerful, more independent,
and more paradigmatic of the class than are males. This relation is
reversed in the class of the benign deities. Women are differently
ranked in these and still other classification and thus "femaleness"
considered as a united, unsplit, category has a certain peculiarity
about it. The goddess Bhaktapur' condenses as Kumari derives some of her
fascination from being a concrete and differentiated deity, a "maiden,"
in one series, and a relatively full goddess in another. King, Brahman,
and untouchable, in their own different ways, have different positions
in hierarchies of purity on the one hand and of power on the other, and
so become interestingly and generatively paradoxical.
13. We have sketched, in chapter 2, some aspects of what we take to be
the "states of mind" necessarily associated with orders such as
Bhaktapur's. We suggested that they were both induced by experience
within the city and, at the same time, motivated aspects of the city's
order as ways of dealing with those particular states of mind. We hope,
as we stated there, to deal with these topics at length elsewhere.
Appendix Two Bhaktapur's Newar Hindu Thars Ranked By Macrosocial Status
1. This
thar
includes four named subsections: Dho(n), Bajimayo (also called Wo[n]) and Bata.
2. Two of the
thar
s included here among the Jyapus are craft
thar
s—Ka:mi, woodworkers, and Loha(n)ka:mi, stoneworkers. Tuladhar, a
merchant group, is sometimes considered separately from this group, but
at about the same level. We have included it here.
3. This
thar
is also referred to as "Kalu."
4. This
thar
and the following one, Muguthi[
*]
, are grouped together for some purposes as Maha(n), and have important
ceremonial functions. The history and functions of this group are
discussed in connection with the Biska: festival.
5. See note 4, above.
6. This section consists of ten
thar
s, all of which are considered at the same level by the higher
jat
s, but each of which considers itself higher than the other groups in
the section. They do not interdine or intermarry. Pasi is now sometimes
said to belong as an eleventh at this level, but it was lower in the
past.
7. Although considered at the same level as Jugi by many people at
higher levels, Danya is considered by both the Jugi and the Danya
themselves to be at a level lust below the Jugi.
8. After each
thar
name in this list, its macrostatus level is given in square brackets.
Appendix Three Kinship Terminology
1. Examples of a wide range of North Indian systems are presented in
Karve (1968), Berreman (1963), Dumont (1962), Vatuk (1969), and
Fruzzetti and Östör (1976).
2. As Gérard Toffin (1975
a
) has remarked, almost all of the terms used to designate Newar kin
categories are of North Indian origin, and have cognates in Nepali
and/or in other North Indian Sanskritic languages. A few terms (he is
following Benedict [1941] here) seem to be of Tibeto-Burman origin, and
some others having no obvious connection with either Tibeto-Burman or
North Indian vocabulary may be taken to be of local origin. Benedict
lists as terms of Tibeto-Burman origin:
ma
for Mother,
ba
for Father,
ni
for Father's Sister,
ta
for Older Sister, and a somewhat dubious term,
ca
, for Son. Assuming this list to be exhaustive, Toffin is left with some residual terms,
paju, kae
, and
chui
, among others, which he takes to be of local origin. Toffin observes
that the terms of non-North Indian origin are found only among the Newar
terms for consanguineal kin.
3. We follow here the presentation of kinship categories used for other
North Indian systems by Vatuk (1969) and Fruzzetti and Östör (1976).
4. The following conventional abbreviations will be used here: F,
father; M, mother; B, brother; Z, sister; S, son; D, daugther; H,
husband; W, wife; y, younger; and e, elder. Thus, FeBW stands for
"Father's elder Brother's Wife.
5. Newar usage permits the distinction of focal kin from extended kin in
ambiguous contexts by terms such as "true brother", etc. in distinction
to a "
phuki
brother," or a "
tha:thiti
brother," etc.
6. We follow here the convention of using capitalized English kinship
terms as approximate glosses for the Newari terms whose extent and
boundaries usually differ from those English terms.
7. The term
bajya
is used in some other Newari dialects and in Nepali.
8. In some North Indian systems FF and MF have different terms of
reference; in others they have, as in Newari, the same term of
reference.
9.
Tapa
: (or
Tapa
: in some Newari dialects) means "distant."
10. For some speakers
aya: aja
is not used, and members of this generation are included with group 1d. Nepali (1965, 263) cites an "archaic term" for
aya: aja
, "
iya aja
." The source he gives, Wright ([1877] 1972), seems misattributed.
11. The term
bajye
(cognate with the Nepali term
bajei
) is used in some Newari dialects.
12. Referents MM and FM have separate terms in some other North Indian systems.
13. Mother's Husband other than
Abwa
, ego's presumptive biological father, is referred to and addressed as
bwaju. Ju
is an honorific particle.
14. Terms deriving from
ta-
, large, and
ci-
and
ca
-, small, are generally used in Newar kinship terminology to designate
older and younger. The terms have many variants. Father's elder Brother
may, for example, be referred to as
tharhibwa, tarhiba, taribwa, dhwabwa
(from another root), etc. In some forms the particle
mha
, or "person," can be incorporated into the term, giving
tarhimhaabwa
,
tarhikamhaabwa
, etc.
15. In Bhaktapur the wide extension of these terms to a large class of
male kin of the generation senior to ego does not include Father's
Sister's Husband,
jica paju
(see item 4, below, this list), who is classified as
-bwa
in some other Newar communities. In contrast to most other North Indian
systems, but like Nepali, Mother's Sister's Husband is included under
this term and thus classified as a
-bwa
. This is reflected in further Newari extensions, MZHBW, for example, being classified with Father's Sister (
nini
) rather than with Mother's Sister as it is in some other North Indian systems such as Bengali.
16. The elder/younger differentiation of those male kin of the first
ascending generation related through Father is based on their relative
ages in relation to Father's age, those related through Mother are
designated as ''elder" or "younger" in relation to Mother's age.
17. Father and his siblings may be referred to as ranked in an absolute
(rather than relative) order using Nepali ordinals, such as
jethabwa
, "the eldest Father in my Father's household" or
mahilabwa
, the "next eldest." A similar ranking can be used for ego and his or
her same-sex siblings, for ego's Mother and her Sisters, ego's Mother's
Brothers, etc.
18. This term is a compound of
jica
, "bridegroom," implying men married to the out-marrying women of the
phuki
, and
paju
, whose genealogical referent is Mother's Brother. In some Newari dialects FZH is called
bwa
(Toffin 1975
a
). In some North Indian systems FZH is a masculine form of the term for
FZ, and is thus not amalgamated terminologically to either FB or MB.
19.
Mama
is a homophone of the unrelated North Indian and Nepali term for Mother's Brother.
20. These terms are preceded by terms for older or younger:
tarima(n), tarhikhamha, cicarbi-ama(n)
, etc. The qualification is based on whether the Father's Brother to whom alter is married is older or younger than Father.
21. As Toffin (1975
a
) has remarked, in contrast to other North Indian kinship systems the term
maleju
is not simply a feminine form of the term for Mother's Brother but an Independent term.
22. In some North Indian kinship systems one of the extensions of this
term, MZHZ, is said to be grouped, as it is by Newars, with Father's
Sister (e.g., in Uttar Pradesh [Vatuk 1969]). In other North Indian
kinship systems it is said to be grouped with Mother's Sister (e.g., in
Bengal [Fruzzetti and Östör 1976]).
23. This term is a compound of
jica
, "bridegroom," a man married to the out-marrying women of the
phuki
, and
daju
, a term for older Brother used also in Nepali
24. This term is a compound of
jica
and
bhaju
, a term of respect, usually used for an older or higher-status male. In some other Newari dialects
jica bhaju
is
jilaja(n)
.
25.
Tata
is used in some other Newari dialects and by some of the Chathariya in Bhaktapur.
26. From
Tata
, "Elder Sister," plus
-ju
, an honorific suffix.
27. People who are junior to ego are often referred to or addressed by
their given names without any qualifying kin term. People senior to ego
are sometimes referred to or addressed by their given names plus their
kin term (e.g., Kamela
ta:ju
) when it is necessary to differentiate them from other kin in the same category.
28. Variants include
bhaumaca, bhaumasta
, and
bhamaca
. The latter term is usually used to refer to or address a new wife in the household.
29. This term is a compound of
kae
, Son, plus the diminutive particle
-ca
.
30. The use of the terms
kaeca, mhyaeca[
*]
, and
bhe(n)ca
involve significant differences from other North Indian systems, including Nepali. See
Bhe(n)ca
(item 18, below).
31. This term is a compound of
mhyae
plus the diminutive particle
-ca
.
32. The term
bhi(n)ca
is used in some other Newar dialects.
33.
Bhe(n)ca
is the reciprocal term and relation to
paju
and
nini
. The discriminations made by the terms
kaeca
,
mhyaca
, and
bhe(n)ca
among children of ego's cross-sex and same-sex siblings is not made m
most of the other North Indian systems in the sources we have listed.
The other systems make a distinction between Brother's Children and
Sister's Children which is independent of the sex of ego. Thus in Bihari
(Karve 1968) for either a male or female speaker a Brother's Son is
Bhatija
, a Brother's Daughter is
Bhatiji
, a Sister's Son is
Bhanja
, and a Sister's Daughter is
Bhanji
While the Newar terms emphasize the cross-sex relationship, the North
Indian terms emphasize patrilineal versus nonpatrilineal (feminal)
links. In both systems, however, the nonemphasized aspect is made clear
through knowledge of the sex of the speaker.
34. In some other Newari dialects this is
Bha:ta
. Occasionally in farming and lower
thar
s
mija(n)
, "man," is used for Husband rather than
bha:ta
.
36. This must be differentiated from the term for Husband,
bha:ta
.
37. There are some minor alterations in a few kinship terms when combined with
sasa
or
bhata
. Thus HeB, who is
ara
for Husband, becomes
dara
bhata
. Wife's elder Brother, who is referred to as
ara
by the Wife, is
sasa daju
. Certain secondary forms of kinship terms are sometimes conventionally used as primary forms for some of the affinal terms.
38. Toffin (1975
a
) discusses this compound term,
jica paju
, at some length. It "opens a breech in the North Indian or Nepalese
system in which a person cannot be at the same time a consanguineal and
affinal relation; [the term] reflects a rule of marriage with a double
cross-cousin" (ibid., 144). Note that the Pahari system of Sikanda also
uses a single term,
mama
, (elsewhere restricted to Mother's Brother) for both Mother's Brother and Father's Sister's Husband (Berreman 1968, 413).
Appendix Four Types of Worship and Materials Used in Worship
1. We will use "he" throughout for simplicity of description of
puja
procedures. In temple visits and daily worship the worshipers are both men and women. For the more elaborate
pujas
the principal worshiper is almost always male.
2. At this point in the household worship of a dangerous deity a sacrifice would be made (chap. 9).
3. The term "
prasada
" used by itself implies an edible offering taken back from a deity.
Other offerings taken back after being offered to a deity unless their
nature is clear from the context are specified as "flower
prasada
," "
sinha(n) prasada
," etc.
Prasada
is often shared with others who did not perform the ritual themselves, or who may not have been present. The taking of
prasada
is popularly explained as a way of keeping the deity in a continuing presence with an individual.
Prasada
has connections with the idea of
cipa
(chaps. 6 and 11).
4. Manandhar (1976, 230) derives the term from the Sanskrit
dharana[
*]
, ''keeping, maintaining," and defines the term as "fulfilling a vow."
5. The clay dishes and pots that are also used are listed by our informants with the expendable materials noted below.
6. "Unhusked" is used throughout this book to mean "with the husk removed," and not "still in the husk."
7.
Kiga:
is, as we have noted, presented to the deity at the climax of a
puja
. It is regarded not as a food offering, but as the presentation of a pure and valuable material.
Appendix Six Rites of Passage and Death Ceremonies
1. Toffin (1984) and Nepali (1965) deal with Newar
samskara
s in some detail among the communities they studied.
2. The hair-shaving rite, the
Busakha
, was traditionally only done as as an independent rite, that is separate from the following
Kaeta
Puja
rite, by the macrostatus groups I through IV, who also have Tantric
Dekha
, sometimes considered in itself to be a
samskara
. The Jugi do not have the
Busakha
, but they do have the
Dekha
. The macrostatus levels from XIV and below do not do the
Ihi
mock-marriage, nor for other reasons did the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans m the past. The other
samskara
s are said to be performed by all levels. The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans perform, in addition, some extra traditional Brahmanical
samskara
s.
3. The
jata
: will be placed on a person's forehead at the time of cremation, and is supposed to represent the record of the
karma
he or she has accumulated during his or her lifetime.
4. This is done among the Brahmans on the twelfth day after birth.
5. The phrase literally means causing an infant to touch or to be brought in contact with
cipa
(contaminated food, in this case boiled rice) fed to it, and thus
contaminated, by a superior member of the family. For the significance
of this see chapter 11.
6. Most of the
samskara
s (like certain
pujas
) have one or more critical moments that are astrologically calibrated to a definite moment, the
sait
. These
sait
s are indicated by some, often dramatic, emphasis m the ceremony and often represent the instant of some change of status.
7. This phase derives from another traditional
samskara
, the
Niskarmana[
*]
or "first outing," which was traditionally sometimes combined with the
rice feeding ceremony. The use of the mother's brother to take the child
out of the house was one of the traditional procedures (Pandey 1969,
87f.).
8. The girls' special rites of this period are the menarche rites, thus emphasizing
their
differentiated gender characteristics.
9. All
thar
s in Bhaktapur do some version of the
Kaeta
Puja
, but many of the lower
thar
s do not, it is said, do the
Busakha
.
10. In local counting an infant is "one" (or more precisely in his
first
year) at birth, and thus each of these numbered ages represents one
year less than it would be in the Western system. We follow Newari (and
Nepali) usage.
11. "
Angsa
" is said by local Brahmans to mean
aga(n)
sa,
"secret hair." Its ''secrecy" is indicated by keeping the head covered with a cap in ordinary public settings after the
Busakha
. The uncut tuft of hair is said to be a remnant of "birth hair'' and to
represent the lineage and the lineage deity. In this conception the
Buddhist monk (and the monk's derivative m Bhaktapur, the Vajracarya
priest) with his completely shaved head and the Sadhu with his uncut
hair—and thus no distinguishing
angsa
—both negate the image of orderly descent and
phuki
solidarity and, thus, the defining solidarities and oppositions symbolized in the queue. The
angsa
was previously not cut at all, but rather worn long and twisted into a coil. Now it is trimmed and kept short.
12. Following the
Busakha
Brahman boys must now have their heads shaved in each of the subsequent
major purification ceremonies that are required after a birth or death
in the
phuki
.
13. Brahman ceremonies have two additional astrologically determined
saits
in the course of their
Kaeta
Puja
or
Upanayana
. One is for the proper time for cutting the boy's nails. The other is
at the stage of the Brahmanical sequence when a Josi must touch the boy
to release him from his condition of hyper-purity.
14.
Bura(n)
is used in various phrases, for example, in
bura(n)
jya
, ritual activities done by farmers at the proper astrological time in
connection with the rice harvest. Its derivation is not known to our
informants, but is used m phrases suggesting some major and important
traditional work.
Taegu
(sometimes written
tegu
) means to persist m doing something.
15. In recent years wealthy middle-level families had begun to employ Brahman
purohitas
for some of the earlier
samskara
s.
16. For the Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya, who had completed the
Busakha
four days previously, the
Busakha
is given more soctal emphasis than the
Kaeta Puja
itself—the preparations may be more elaborate, it may be attended by more guests, and in contrast to their
Kaeta Puja
celebration, it is followed by a large feast.
17. When the Kaeta Puja is done at an early age, say, five or seven, as it is sometimes by the nonpriestly upper-level
thar
s, the sacred thread is not given, as the boys are considered to be too
young. In these cases the thread is given at a special ceremony, a
Dya: Dekha
, or "God initiation" (the god m question being the family lineage god)
when the boy is eleven or thirteen years of age. Some Chathariya and
Pa(n)cthariya individuals never formally take the sacred thread. This
does not prevent them from having advanced Tantric initiations.
18. The
Kaeta Puja
is often remembered later as an emotionally significant time of
transition, when the freedom of a boy's earlier life is suddenly lost.
He must be careful in his contacts with lower-caste children, cannot
share food with most of them, and cannot touch those of the lowest
ranks. He must now wash ritually before eating, and must become more
involved m family worship. He can now attend cremations and can see some
of the forms of the lineage deities. In some
thar
s with special professions it is now that he may begin to learn the
rituals associated with the profession, and may have more formal
instruction in the profession itself. In discussions and reminiscences,
the association of nakedness now covered by the loincloth and the
growing urgency for control of sexual feelings is salient. Local
Brahmans comment on the traditional and persisting importance of this,
"Now the time for study has arrived. One must not have sexual
intercourse during this time, because if one has become sexually aroused
by a woman one is unable to study." The covering of the genitals with
the loincloth is also associated with the idea of proper modesty and
shame. From this time on being seen naked—as one was during the
Busakha
and
Kaeta Puja
ceremonies—eating improperly, becoming dirty or ritually polluted, are matters of salient shame and embarrassment.
19. Other "Newar
samskara
s" are the old-age rites (see text below).
20. Because of the presence of the mock-marriage, we must differentiate
the later marriage ceremony with a human spouse as "true," "genuine,"
"real," etc., marriage.
21. The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans still include the
kanya dana
, the gift of the premenarche virgin daughter, as part of their true
marriage ceremonies. However, as marriage of premenarche girls is now
legally prohibited and as in orthodox
dharma
the Brahman girls must nevertheless marry before menarche, the Brahmans
now use a simple form of mock-marriage. It is usually called
sinha(n) chaekegu
, "the offering of
sin(ha)
pigment" and, occasionally,
Ihi. Sinha(n)
pigment is applied to the foreheads of a group of young Brahman girls
in the same way as it is given during a true marriage, in conjunction
with a simple
puja
. The girl is then said to be married to the gods.
22. On formal written invitations to true marriage, however, the word "
Ihi
" is used as an anachronistic formal form to refer to the
Byaha
.
23. The divine spouse is often erroneously given both in written and popular accounts as Siva, who, represented as a
bel
fruit, is for Bhaktapur the "witness" to the marriage. Another deity, Suvarna[
*]
Kumara, is referred to m one of the traditional names used elsewhere for the mock-marriage, "Suvarna[
*]
Kumara marriage." This name, also known m Bhaktapur, does not at present reflect any actual reference to that deity in the
Ihi
ceremony itself. One phase of Bhaktapur's ceremony is called a "Suvarna[
*]
Kumara
puja
" but refers primarily to Visnu[
*]
. In relation to the Newar Buddhist
Ihi
ceremonies observed by Michael Allen (1982, 184), Allen was told that Suvarna[
*]
Kumara himself was the divine bridegroom.
24.
Ihi
in itself does not prevent optional marriage of premenarche girls, but
premenarche marriages are and seem to have been for some time at least,
in fact, rare (chap. 6).
25. An exception to this is the occasional sponsorship of the ceremony
by a Brahman whose daughters would not have participated in the
ceremony.
26. This sequence may be related to the traditional Mrdaharana ceremony,
the "bringing of earth or clay. . .. [to be used] for growing sprouts"
[in a pot] performed in South Asian tradition a few days before weddings
(Pandey 1969, 209). Stevenson (1920, 65f.) describes for weddings in
Kathiawar[
*]
clay pots brought by a potter to a temple where they will be used m the
subsequent wedding ceremony. "Some Hindus," she comments, "consider
this a fertility rite, and if the child born of the marriage is
deformed, they say the potter's thumb must have slipped" (ibid., 65).
27. When there are many girls, a purified public area may be used for the ceremonies and the procedures modified slightly.
28. The Nauni, a woman of the barber
thar
, will paint their nails, as she will in subsequent major purifications.
This represents a transition in the girls' purification procedures to
the adult form and corresponds to a similar change for boys at the time
of their
Kaeta Puja
.
29. The placement of the
Bhuismha(n)
is done m the Ihi before the
kanya dana
ceremony signifying the marriage; in the actual Newar marriage this
ceremony is done after the ritual action that signifies the moment of
transformation into the married state.
30.
Desa
means "city" and
bah
, "sacrificial offering."
31. This initiation is not necessary for the upper-status
thar
s who present their children to the family lineage deities m the form of the Aga(n) Deity at the time of the
Namakarana
ceremony on the twelfth day after the birth of a child.
32.
Barha
(Kathmandu Newari,
Barae
or
Barhae
) has the sense of "ritual restrictions."
Cwa(n)gu
means to continue in a state or activity;
taegu
, an auxiliary verb of many uses, also has the sense of continuing an activity, with a somewhat more active nuance than
cwa(n)gu
.
33. G. S. Nepali remarked in his study made in the late 1950s that the
Barha cwa(n)gu
was gradually being adopted among his informants, replacing the premenstrual
Barha taegu
(1965, 113).
34. According to Bennett (1983, 215) Indo-Nepalese women were previously
"hidden in a dark room away from the sun . . . and out of the sight of
all males for the first three days of [all] their periods," and thus not
only for their menarche ceremony. Such subsequent menstrual isolation
is not done by Newars in Bhaktapur now, nor is it known to our
informants as a previous practice.
35. The rice powder and oil represent cosmetics. The girls had applied the mixture as a cosmetic during the
Ihi
ceremony. Now this gift symbolizes that they can wear cosmetics like a married woman.
36. Betel nuts are widely used as messages about changes in ritual status. See the discussion of marriage in the text below.
37. There are three life-cycle events—birth, death, and the menarche
ceremonies—which cause a group pollution. However, while the entire
phuki
is polluted in birth and death—a shared pollution that Is one of the defining characteristics of the
phuki
group—the extent of pollution m
Barha cwa(n)gu
or
Barha taegu
varies according to the custom of the particular
thar
. In some
thar
s all the
phuki
are polluted; in others, only the parents of the girl.
38. The interpretive emphasis on the dangerous power of the girls at
menarche, rather than the dirty contamination that might be assumed to
be associated with menstrual blood, is noteworthy. The emphasis seems to
be (directly for the menstruating girls, and by a metaphorical
extension for the preadolescent girls) on the danger to others of the
girl's nascent sexual feelings and the feelings they may now arouse in
men as (for the true menarche girl) legitimate sexual objects. Compare
the discussion of menstruation in chapter 6.
39. Betel nuts were used traditionally m Bhaktapur on several occasions
as the formal notification sent to others of ritualized changes in
status. They were also used at birth (in different forms for boys and
girls), menarche, marriage (in various ways), divorce, and various death
ceremonies.
40. In the most significant contrast, it is during the
swayambar
in Indo-Nepalese marriages that the
kanya dana
is presented. At the climactic
swayambar
act of marriage (the placing of a garland of flowers around the groom's neck by the bride), the groom places
bhui sinha(n)
pigment on the bride's head in exactly the same fashion as the
naki(n)
does to the girls in the
Ihi
marriage.
41. The ten betel nuts that the prospective bride gives to each
household member may include five specially packaged nuts that had been
sent from the groom's household.
42. Now she is likely to be taken in an automobile waiting at some nearby accessible road.
43. The
naki(n)
holds a handful of
baji phoya(n)
, beaten fried rice which has been soaked in water, and moves it down
the bride's body from top to bottom. After each descending movement she
throws the rice away. She doe this three times to the bride's left, and
then three times to her right.
44. As most marriages in Bhaktapur are from
thar
s at the same level, usually from within the city and often living near
the groom's house, it is likely that the household women know or have
seen the bride, and this and the following "viewing" of the bride may
well be less embarrassing to the bride than is the case in the similar
viewing of the bride in Hindu marriages in other settings where the
bride usually comes from a distant community.
45. The status is that designated by the household
cipa
system (chap. 6).
46. In Jyapu and other middle-level marriages a
purohita
may not be present.
47. In Brahmanical
kanya
marriages one common dish is used.
48. We may note the careful balancing of the exchanges and
activities—and in this case even the discomforts—between the bride's and
groom's sides in all these activites. This is related to the emphasis
on the equality of the giving and receiving families and the lack of an
implied hypergamy, which we discussed in chapter 6.
49. In former times the same person, carrying the marriage
sukunda
, had gone earlier to fetch the groom.
50. A
bura
is an old man: a
buri
, an old woman. "'
Ja(n)ko
" is the same term applied to the infant's rice feeding ceremony.
51. A
ghau
,s one-sixtieth of a day, and a
pala
is one-sixtieth of a
ghau
.
52. This is another example of the relative lack of stigmatization of widows among the Newars.
53. We will sketch the sequence for adults. Girls who die before their
Ihi
ceremony and boys who die before
Kaeta
Puja
have rites similar to those of adults at the time of dying, but are
carried to the cremation grounds m the arms of a man, rather than on a
kuta
: carrier. The mourning ceremony that follows their death is shorter than for ceremonial adults (individuals past their
Ihi
and
Kaeta Puja samskaras
), the
phuki's
purification occurring on the fourth day rather than the eleventh after
the death. Infants who die before the age of three months are not
cremated, but are buried in an area to the north of the city. In the
case of infants, only the immediate household members incur death
impurity. Among upper-level
thar
families following the death of children who die before
Ihi
or
Kaeta Puja
, a ceremony called the "feeding of the
jwa:
" (
jwa
:, "a pair of animate beings," in this usage designates a contemporary
of the dead child) may be held on the fifth or the twenty-first day
after cremation. A Brahman
purohita's
child of the same sex as the deceased child is ceremonially fed and
given presents. It is said that this child now m some sense continues
the life of the dead child. After this ceremony there is no further
special relation between the household and this child.
54. It is considered by some to be more devout to die at the river. Some few people are brought to a
ghat[
*]
at the central Kathmandu Valley shrine of Pasupatinatha. Note that all these places, including the
cheli
, are—as are the cremation grounds—outside of the ordinary ordered space of the house or of the city.
55. For the great majority of people the most desired auspicious fates after death is to go to Visnu's[
*]
special heaven.
56. Compare Tulasi Piya Day [43] (chap. 13). The leaves of the plants
grown starting on this day are kept for use at the time of dying.
57. In the association of the river with death there is, added to the idea of the force of the
tirtha
, an idea of the
flow
of the river, which is said to carry the person along with it to the next world.
58. This introduces a double emphasis reflected in many of the death procedures, a
circulation
of aspects of the dead person, but a circulation that at the same time safely
distances
those aspects by, as here, a movement down the social hierarchy or, as
in some other ceremonial elements, a movement into progressively more
and more distant spatial regions.
59. In some few
thar
s, notably the Jugi, women are members of funeral processions. For the great majority of
thar
s only men and those boys who have undergone
Kaeta Puja
are members of the funeral procession.
60. It is popularly believed that until this moment the mind of the
corpse is still active within the body, and thus that the person is
aware of what is happening and can feel the heat and pain of the fire.
61. Brahmans, for cremations within their own
thar
, perform a separate traditional "Vedic"
yajña
sacrifice at this time.
62. It is said that the women of the upper
thars
do not begin to wail until they approach the house, while women of lower
thars
may begin wailing as they cross the boundary of the city or of the
neighborhood. Women cry out such phrases as "Why did you leave us?,"
"Take me with you," "I did not see your face enough in this life; where
can I go to see you now?"
63. In upper
thar
families, the member of the Cyo
thar
who has accompanied the funeral procession and who helps direct the first phase of the cremation takes a position at the
pikha lakhu
, the stone marking the symbolic front boundary of the house, and swings
a flaming clay oil lamp to chase off evil spirits from the
kriya putra
as he enters the house.
64. The full set of activities are done by Brahmans. Chathariya,
Pa(n)cthariya, and Jyapus have more abbreviated versions. The crucial
activities, done by all
thars
, are those—depending on the particular
thar
—of either the fifth or seventh day.
65. As the Bha, in fact, often does not know the proper worship procedures, he is sometimes accompanied by the
kriya putra'
s family
purohita
, who reads out the instructions from the proper
paddhati
(manual of instructions).
66. This appellation is listed as one of the sixty-eight "Svayambhuva Lingas[
*]
" in Rao (1971, vol. 2, p. 85).
67. It is sometimes said that the
preta
is, like the clay and the deity it represents, now below the surface of
the earth where it is hot, and that this libation cools it. This is
another example of the various parallel versions of the spirit's
whereabouts and conditions referred to in the course of the death
ceremonies.
68. We will use the more familiar Sanskrit term m the following discussion.
69. Compare Pandey, "The dead As regarded as still living m a sense. The
efforts of the survivors are to provide him with food and guide his
footsteps to the paramount abode of the dead. . .. The Sutras . . .
prescribe that a
pinda[
*]
or a 'ball of rice' should be offered to the dead on the first day. The ball was called '
pinda[
*]
' [body, person individual] because it was supposed to constitute the body of the
preta
" (1969, 265).
70. They typically talk of the illness and death of the deceased, and of his or her virtues. They urge the
kriya putra
to continue to do his "death work" well.
71. This is held on the fifth day after the cremation for the Brahmans,
and on either the fifth or the seventh day for Chathariya and
Pa(n)cthariya, and, for the most part, on the seventh day for Jyapu and
lower-ranked
thar
s. For those upper-level
thar
s that identify themselves as descending, like the Brahmans, from one or another particular
gotra
, the day for this ceremony is supposed to depend on the
gotra
to which the
thar
members belong. If they belong to the same
gotra
as the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, it is on the fifth day. Note that in all
such enumerations the day of cremation is counted as the first day.
72. The
pikha lakhu
, where it will be first deposited, is under the front edge of the overhanging eaves of the house.
73.
Sraddha[
*]
is often written
saradha
in Newari.
74. Although the elements of the
sraddha[
*]
exist in the earlier offerings to the spirit as a
preta
, the
sraddha[
*]
in its full form becomes possible with the formation of the spirit's ethereal body on this day.
75. The body is said by local Brahmans to form day by day over ten days
as follows: (1) top of head; (2) eyes and ears; (3) nose; (4) shoulders
and arms; (5) chest and upper abdomen as far as the umbilicus; (6) from
the umbilicus to the thighs; (7) knees, fingernails, and hair; (8) lower
legs; and (9) feet. On the tenth day the body as a whole is able to
eat, drink, and function. "Some of the Puranas[
*]
and medieval digests assert that after a man dies, the soul or spirit assumes what is called an
ativahika
body consisting of three of the five elements (viz, fire, wind, and
akasa
[space, vacuity]) that rise up from the dead body (while two—viz, earth
and water—remain below), that such a body is obtained only by men and
not by other beings, that with the aid of the
pindas[
*]
that are offered to the departed at the time of cremation and during ten days thereafter, the soul secures another body called
bhogadeha
(a body for enjoying the
pindas[
*]
offered) and that at the end of a year when
sapindikarana[
*]
is performed, the soul secures a third body wherewith the spirit
reaches heaven or hell according to the nature of his actions" (Kane
1968-1977, vol. IV, p. 265).
76.
Du
is locally thought to derive from
dukha
, "sorrow, trouble, mourning."
77. During the previous ten days the
kriya putra
and the other
phuki
members were not supposed to look into mirrors.
78. The avoidance of mirrors during the period of impurity and the
worship of the sun at the end of the period as an act of purification
and a sign of transformation echoes some of the sequence of the menarche
rites.
79. Traditionally on this day among higher
thar
s the clothes that were worn by the
kriya putra
during the
dasa kriya
period were sent after the
du bya(n)kegu
to a special group of washermen, members of the Pasi
thar
, to be washed. The few remaining members of this
thar
do not do this now, and the clothes are now given to a member of the Nau, or barber
thar
, for disposal.
80. These may include clothes, mattresses, pillows, kitchen pots for
water and milk, drinking vessels, food offerings, and money. There is an
emphasis on the number eleven. The Bha is given eleven milk pots,
eleven waterpots, and eleven pieces of meat, the latter representing
aspects of the spirit's body.
81. It is said that men of upper
thar
s are not supposed to have sexual intercourse for one year after a parent dies.
82. If the deceased person is the household head, the
naya
:, avoidable
samskara
s should not be performed during one year; for other deaths m the household, they should be deferred for forty-five days.
83. The extended list of anniversaries of death that may require
sraddha
s includes the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth days, the end of the first
month, the forty-fifth day, and all monthly anniversaries during the
first year, as well as extra commemorations at five and one-half months
and eleven and one-half months. There is a
sraddha[
*]
on the first year's anniversary, and then at each yearly anniversary of the death.
84. For some upper-level
thar
s and for all middle-level
thar
s the
sraddha[
*]
performed by Brahmans and some upper-level
thar
s on the twelfth day is done on the forty-fifth day after death.
85. The singleness of this
pindas[
*]
is emphasized in accounts of this event in contrast to the multiple
pindas[
*]
, characteristically three, which are used in other
sraddha
s.
86. It is done on the eleventh day by upper-level
thar
s, who perform a
Vrsotsarga[
*]
ceremony (see text below). if a
Vrsotsarga[
*]
is not done, then the
gha:su yajnña
will be done on the twelfth day after the death.
87.
Gha:su
is thought to derive from the Sanskrit
ghara
or
grha[
*]
sudhi
, the cleaning of a house. The essential cleansing agent is the smoke of a fire, which is suggested m
yajña
(locally spelled and pronounced
jagye
), referring to a Vedic fire sacrifice.
88. In other Newar cities the Tini
thar
does not exist, and the
gha:su yajnña
is done by a
that
at the Pa(n)cthariya level called, in some communities, "Gha:su Acaju."
89. The
thar
name by which the Tini refer to themselves is Sivacarya, "priests of Siva."
90. While the
du bya(n)kegu
purification is a typical act of restoration of "ordinary purity"
following a condition of temporary impurity, these subsequent acts deal
with a wider range of dangerous forces and substances than those central
to the "purity complex" (chap. 11).
91. "
Dutaegu
" means "to keep (something) inside."
92. The day depends on the particular
thar
and its status level. "The ceremony of the
sapindikarana[
*]
'or uniting the
preta
with the
pitaras
' takes place either on the twelfth day after the cremation, at the end
of three fortnights or on the expiry of the year. The first day is
prescribed for those who maintain the sacrificial fire, the second and
the third for the rest" (Pandey 1969, 267).
Sapindikaranas[
*]
at the end of the first year apparently do not take place in Bhaktapur.
93. These
sapinda[
*]
relationships are essential in considerations of marriage prohibitions,
the corporate sharing of birth and death impurity, and inheritance
(Kane 1968-1977, vol. II, p. 452ff.).
94. Exactly whom the three
pindas[
*]
represent varies according to who the principal mourner is in relation to the dead person.
95. People of clean
thar
s can touch other people, including Brahmans, after the
du bya(n)kegu
purification. They are not supposed to touch deities, however, until after the
sapinda[
*]
ceremony of the twelfth or forty-fifth day.
96. There are also optional
sraddhas
on each monthly anniversary of the death and also after five months and
one fortnight and eleven months and one fortnight. The entire series ,s
done by the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans but increasingly rarely by other
upper-level
thar
s.
― 771 ―
GLOSSARY
We
list those Newari and Sanskrit terms that are used frequently
throughout the book. Although many of these terms have wider historical
and contemporary meanings, we gloss them here in the way they are
usually used in Bhaktapur and in this book. The other Newari, Nepali,
and Sanskrit terms used in the book are defined as they are used, or are
made clear by their contexts.
A
― 774 ―
Rajopadhyaya. The family or thar name of Newar Brahmans.
Sadhu . A Hindu ascetic.
ot, 1951.GENERAL INDEX
non-Newar, 76 , 87 , 106 , 352 -353, 539 , 732 n. 14
polarity of untouchables and the, 395 -396, 733 n. 28, 734 n. 30
worship assisted by, 638 -639
See also Priests; Rajopadhyaya thar (Brahmans)
Bride. See Marriage
Brothers. See Paju (mother's brother); Siblings
Buddha Jaya(n)ti, 435 -436
Buddhism of the Himalayas, 205 , 439 , 689 n. 9, 701 n. 32
Newar, 85 -87, 701 n. 31
M
Maca Ja(n)ko. See Ja(n)ko ceremonies
Macrostatus levels, 625 -629
borderline clean thar , 82 -83, 96 , 352 , 359 -360, 363 , 728 n. 23, 732 n. 22
ceremonies involving mixed, 666 , 668 -669
clean thar , 78 -82, 391 , 494 -495
concentric circles distribution of, 174 -182
contaminating segments of the, 84 -85, 363 -371
dominant high, 78 -80, 111 -112, 119 , 625 -626
entailments of, 99 -102, 365 , 377
festivals' nonemphasis of, 581 , 583
lowest, 84 -85, 363 -371, 627
markers of, 103 -105, 120 , 384 -385, 614
occupational/ritual roles and, 67 , 89 -96, 98 , 389 -390, 395 , 696 -697 n. 15, 728 n. 23
previous descriptions of, 83 , 377 -379, 700 -701 n. 26
Rajopadhyaya Brahman status and the, 372 -374
rites of passage differentiation among, 660 , 663 -665
thar demographics and, 63 , 67 , 96 -99
thar s and, 69 -71, 107 -108, 625 -627
NAMES INDEX
― 825 ―
Rajopadhyaya, Kedar Raj, 6 , 7 -8
Rajopadhyaya, Upendra Raj, 7
Rao, T. A. Gopinatha, 206 , 720 n. 73, 784
Rappaport, Roy, 720 n. 70, 754 n. 103, 757 n. 10, 784
Ray, Amita, 784
Redfield, Robert, 22 , 26 , 784
and Milton Singer, 18 , 23 , 31 , 617 , 784
Redman, Charles L., 18 , 784
Regmi, D. R.,
(1965-1966),
39 , 44 , 45 , 47 , 103 , 169 -170, 185 , 254 , 356 , 368 , 692 nn. 17,
20, 693 -694 n. 29, 703 n. 46, 711 n. 18, 716 n. 37, 716 -717 n. 38,
726 -727 n. 6, 729 n. 34, 735 n. 4, 784
(1969), 35 , 144 , 349 , 720 n. 67, 740 n. 7, 742 n. 32, 747 n. 26, 753 n. 89, 784
Regmi, Mahesh C.,
(1971), 709 n. 47, 784
(1976), 63 , 693 n. 27, 696 nn. 12-13, 709 n. 47, 784
(1978), 709 n. 47, 784
Ricoeur, Paul, 26 , 784
Roberts, J., 273 , 720 n. 68, 784
Rose, Leo E., xxi , 694 n. 32, 784
Bhuwan Lal Joshi and, 60 , 694 n. 32, 780
and Margaret Fisher, 60 , 694 n. 32, 784
Rosser, Colin, 86 , 88 , 701 n. 33, 703 n. 46, 784
Russell, R. V., 705 n. 9, 784
Preferred Citation: Levy, Robert I. Mesocosm: Hinduism and the Organization of a Traditional Newar City in Nepal. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6k4007rd/
