PART THREE
THE DANCE OF SYMBOLS

Chapter Twelve
The Civic Ballet: Annual Time and the Festival Cycles

Introduction

To bring Bhaktapur's symbolic order to coordinated life, a temporal system and a patterning of events within the tempos of that system are necessary. There are in Bhaktapur two large classes of symbolic enactments that tie together public space, individuals, social units, deities, and time into a larger assemblage. In these enactments, the various matters that we have dealt with in earlier chapters become elements in a civic performance . Social roles, significant space, the complexes of meaning represented by deities, priests, and modes of worship emerge and become realized m these performances, which, like their constituent aspects, follow traditional patterns. The first class of these civically significant enactments are the rites of passage, the samskara s (app. 6), whose sequence is determined—often with considerable leeway in their exact timing—by the stages of the life cycle, fine-tuned through astrological considerations. In Bhaktapur these rites entail references beyond the individual and household to the patrilineal extended family, the phuki , and beyond that to some larger civic units (primarily the twa : and the mandalic^[*] area pitha ). But the samskara s’ central importance is in defining the individual in relation to household, extended family, and, with marriage, to an allied kin group within his or her status level. Their relation to the larger city is secondary, and for the most part simply emphasizes the phuki ’s relation to neighborhood and Mandalic^[*] Segment, as all phuki worship does. It is the second class of temporally

coordinated ritual enactments that are the true civic enactments. That group is primarily constituted by those activities that take place in the city following the dictates of the calendar. These include practices that are appropriate—in many cases necessary—for particular days of the week, of the lunar fortnights or of the solar month. However, at the center of our concern in this study are those events whose occurrence depends on the annual cycle itself. This particular temporal set, the yearly events, has special urban emphases and uses in contrast to the smaller and larger cycles.^[1]

Many of these annual events are associated with feasts encompassing one or another social unit, and are designated as nakha cakha (Kathmandu Newari, nakha: cakha: ), literally "to feed and associated activities."^[2] "Nakha cakha " may be glossed with appropriateness by "festival," with that word's connections to "feast" and "festive." The term "festival" also works well for some of the other major and public events of the year, particularly if "festival" is extended to include some restrained, minor, or routine "celebrations." However, there are other significant annual events—a day for the protective rubbing of bodies with oil, a day on which the moon should not be viewed, and so on—for which the term is inappropriate. Hindu calendrically determined events include two sorts of events that, although distinguished by classical terminology, are blurred in actual usage. These are vrata events and utsava events. "Vrata " implies a "religious duty," and is used often in Bhaktapur in the strong sense of "religious or ascetic observance taken upon oneself, austerity, vow, rule, holy work such as fasting and continence" (Macdonell 1974, 304). The other term, "utsava, " indicates, traditionally, "festival or holiday." Gnanambal, in a report on surveys of Indian "festivals," notes that the term "vrata " has a wider usage in many parts of India to include "festivals," especially where fasting is a necessary element (Gnanambal 1967). There is, nevertheless, in usage, he adds, a "faint distinction" of vrata and utsava as evidenced by the presence of the two terms in many parts of India. Kane (1968-1977, vol. V, p. 57) also remarks on the difficulty of using the termino-logical distinction for discriminating actual events.

The annual events we will consider contain among them elements of vrata and utsava and sometimes of neither, and we will use various glosses for them, all meaning no more than "calendrically determined event of general civic importance." During the course of the year in Bhaktapur there are some seventy-nine of these, and as on some days there are more than one and as, in contrast, a few last for two days,

there are a total of seventy-four days each year during which some part or all of the city is involved in one or another such event. This is in addition to weekly and monthly activities during the course of the year, as well as the pilgrimages and mela s or "fairs," taking place elsewhere in the Valley (or beyond) every year or every few years in which people in Bhaktapur may participate.^[3] These gross enumerations are, however, misleading as our discussions in later chapters and a more refined enumeration in chapter 16 will indicate. Later chapters will provide a clearer view of the types and density of calendrical events in Bhaktapur.

The calendrical events, derived from South Asian tradition and the Kathmandu Valley's long history, are, like the supernatural members of the city's pantheon, of interest to us primarily not as a collection of witnesses to that history but as aspects of an ongoing, meaningful contemporary urban life. We will say something, if only in passing, about each calendrical event, but we will treat certain events at much greater length, and among these we will be most particularly concerned with what we call the "Devi cycle" and its climaxes in Mohani, the Autumn Harvest festival sequence, and in the related performances throughout nine months of the year of the Nine Durgas troupe. The events we emphasize are, evidently, those we take to be of particular integrative importance.

The Calendar

Bhaktapur, typically of South Asia, has both a solar annual calendar and a lunar one.^[4] While the great majority of festivals are determined by the lunar calendar, there is one major festival sequence (Biska:, the solar New Year sequence) and one other annual event which are determined by the solar cycle. The lunar year is normally divided into twelve lunar months. The lunar month begins on the day following the new or dark moon, which ends the previous month.^[5] The Newar lunar month is divided into a first "bright" half, corresponding to the waxing of the moon, and ending with the full moon; and a second "dark" half, corresponding to the waning phase of the moon and ending with the new moon. The bright fortnight is called tumla ; the dark fortnight, khimla .^[6] To designate individual lunar fortnights, terms for the dark half and light half of the lunar month—ga and thwa , respectively—are added to the name for the particular month. The name of the month is itself a compound including the morpheme la , meaning lunar month. Thus the

first lunar fortnight of the lunar year, Kachalathwa, means the bright or waxing fortnight (thwa ) of the lunar month (la ) of Kacha, which is followed by Kachalalaga, the dark fortnight (ga ) of the month of Kacha. Table 2 lists Bhaktapur's lunar fortnights, the Sanskritic equivalent months, and the approximate correspondences of the fortnights to the Western year. The table does not include the intercalary period, which has to be added every third year to adjust the lunar to the solar year, and which does not usually affect the ritual calendar.

The full-moon day, which ends the bright lunar fortnight (the first half of the month), is called punhi , and the dark or new-moon day, which ends the dark fortnight is called amai^[7] The other days of each lunar fortnight are given ordinal numeric Sanskritic names, with the

exception of the fourteenth day of the dark fortnight, whose Sanskrit name, caturdasi , is usually replaced by the Newari term "ca:re ". The lunar days are called tithi . Although they vary in length (from about 21.5 to 26 hours), they are, for most purposes, made to correspond to ordinary solar days.

The solar year, which is of very much lesser importance for the ritual cycle, contains twelve months. The names of these months are the same as for the Lunar months,^[8] although there is, perhaps, a tendency to use the Sanskritic forms more for them. The days of the solar year, gate , begin at sunrise. They are arranged in a seven-day week deriving, as the solar calendar in general does, from the same sources thus sharing some of the same astral references as the Western days of the week. The occasional necessity of relating the solar and lunar years requires a complicated set of rectifying conventions that are not relevant here.

Approaches to Meaning

In the next three chapters (chaps. 13 to 15) we will describe the annual calendrical events. We will look for aspects of form and thematic content, and for similarities and contrasts that contribute to the meaning-fulness of clusters of and subcycles of calendrical events, as well as of the entire annual collection. We will introduce here some of the issues and approaches that will concern us in our detailed presentation of the festival year.

Cycles

There are many ways of sorting Bhaktapur's calendrical events. Our first rough sorting has been into events of the solar year and of the lunar year, and then a further division of the lunar year into one set that constitutes a clearly interrelated and extremely important group, the "Devi cycle," and another, residual, lunar group. The solar calendar has only one important festival sequence, Biska:. The lunar cycle as a whole (as opposed to the clearly integrated Devi cycle) seems on the surface at least to be a mixture of miscellaneous events. We will, however, be concerned with its deeper patterns insofar as they may—or may not—exist.

Marc Gaborieau (1982) has proposed a "structure" for the Indo-Nepalese calendar that, although problematic for the Newars at least,

provides a useful point of departure for a discussion of the meaning of the overall lunar cycle. He notes that some writings on Hindu time (he cites Mus [1932-1934] and Zimmer [1951]) represent it as having the following properties: (1) each of the different divisions of time (days, years, cosmic periods, etc.) is arranged in a cycle; (2) these cycles are formally similar; (3) each cycle has a beginning and an end; (4) each cycle has a movement from order toward disorder and culminates in a state of chaos that precedes the regeneration, which will mark the beginning of a new cycle; and (5) the stages of chaos and regeneration are not considered parts of the temporal cycle, but temporary escapes from time. They represent the "axis which communicates with eternity."

Gaborieau argues that this schema is reflected in the Indo-Nepalese festival cycle. For the Indo-Nepalis, he writes, the four-month period beginning with the summer solstice—the period of the monsoon and the major work prior to the rice harvest—are considered inauspicious months, but it is also the period for the majority of the year's festivals. The period begins with the festival of Hari Sayani, the time when Visnu^[*] goes to sleep for a period of four months "leaving the earth to the demons." In Gaborieau's speculation, those months are out-of-ordinary secular time. The first two months correspond to the period of disorder, the second to the period of "regeneration." The festivals during this period "manifest radical disorders and reversals followed by profound restorations of order" (1982, 16). In contrast, he argues, the eight-month period beginning with the first winter month (Marga in November/December) is an auspicious period where life follows its normal course, and household ceremonies for good luck, and prosperity, and the like, take place as do lineage ceremonies. He further argues that those inauspicious events, the disorders and reversals, that do take place during this period primarily concern the lower castes. The "cyclical mystery" of the year as expressed in its festivals is the privileged experience of the upper, twice born castes.

How far this schema is adequate for the sorting of the Indo-Nepalese festival calendar is for others to judge; the involution of festival practices, the relative secularization of most of the Indo-Nepalese groups, will make an anthropological critique difficult. In its details, this schema does not work for Bhaktapur's calendar, but for certain aspects of that calendar and with different timings, it will provide (in chap. 16) a useful point of departure for an analysis of the possible implications of the arrangement of all the components of the annual cycle within that cycle.

Whatever the internal structure of the overall annual calendar of events may be, there is the partially related question of how the meanings of the events might be affected by external cyclical events of a different order. Is there any relation of the meanings of festival events to the phases of the moon and to the sun's course and seasons beyond their clock-like uses in coordinating the cycle? The kinds of data we deal with show only scanty echoes of these cosmic events. But when we consider still another external cycle (in turn, dependent on the seasons), the rice agricultural cycle, particularly in its relation to the Devi cycle, the connections are of central importance.

Selection from the Hindu Set of Festivals

Although most of the elements of Newar symbolic life are taken from the inventions and developments of South Asian history—supplemented by some significant bur quantitatively minor Newar and Himalayan forms—there is, as we have seen in relation to the urban pantheon, a necessary selection among these elements. There are quantitative considerations—only a certain number of elements can be understood and put to use in the civic system. There are also considerations of propriety; some forms do not fit in, or are redundant, have their places filled, as it were, by other symbolic elements. As is the case with all inventories of South Asian possibilities, the list of calendrically anchored events noted in the classical literature and religious texts is very large. Kane has what is presumably an almost exhaustive list of calendrical vratas and utsava containing well over one thousand events throughout India's vast history and extent (1968-1977, vol. V, pp. 253-462). These vary in their general importance and occurrence through out historic time, space, or class of devotees.^[9]

Bhaktapur's calendar selects and rejects from this group, and invents—or often pieces together from existing fragments—its own festivals. The most salient contrast of the Bhaktapur calendar for Bhaktapur's citizens is with other Newar calendars and with Indo-Nepalese calendars. Not only does the presence or absence of calendrical events in Bhaktapur reflect an active selective in relation to other calendars, but so, and often more significantly, does their local importance. Thus a festival of general South Asian importance may be present in Bhaktapur, but only in some residual and unimportant manifestation. We will consider the questions of selection and emphasis in the following chapters.

Aspects of the Analysis of Calendrical Events

When we narrow our horizon to look at Bhaktapur's various calendrical events in themselves and in their similarities and contrasts to each other, we must seek appropriate and relevant aspects for analysis and contrast. We must attend to the social and spatial units involved. What are the static and dynamic uses of those units? Which deities are made use of? Is the deity or deities moved; do people move? Where? To what purpose? Who are the human actors and audiences? What are the different sorts of actions? What are the themes and narratives portrayed and recounted? Are there narrative "plots," with conflicts, tensions, climaxes, resolutions? What kinds of symbolic forms and rhetoric are used to contribute to meaning? What kinds of themes are there in various events? What problems seem to be dealt with? How do participants seem not only to act in but also to respond to particular calendrical events? How are various city units tied together—through "parallel" devices (with various units doing the same sorts of things at the same time) or through "serial" or "interactive" devices, with some sort of meaningful movements and encounters systematically interrelating different kinds of actors and social units in the course of the event?

Such questions are in the background of our considerations of calendrical events, but we have not dealt with these issues explicitly in relation to all the calendrical events noted in the following chapters, for many minor festivals many of them are irrelevant. These various elements of festival meaning become fully relevant only in the more developed festivals, those that are more important to Bhaktapur by various criteria, which we will present in the following chapters.

A catalogue of their potential resources for generating and expressing order and meaning, in fact, is liable to make the annual events seem more exhaustively integrative and constitutive of the city's symbolic system than they really are. That task falls on selected ones. The question of which potential resources are, in fact, used or neglected by particular individual events and throughout the course of the annual cycle is an empirical one.

We will see that the events vary in importance from "trivial" to what we call "focal" events, events of central importance to the city,^[10] and we will make an estimate of the relative importance of the various calendrical events as being of minor, moderate, or major importance. In the next three chapters we will lose ourselves among the trees of the annual cycle. In chapter 16 we will return to the view of the forest, and

the consideration of its differential contributions to urban order. What do these annual events do for Bhaktapur and its people? How do they do whatever it is that they do?

The Inclusion and Sequential Numbering of Calendrically Determined Events

Some arbitrary decisions regarding two issues were necessary. First, when is a day of the year that is given a particular name really to be considered an event of some civic importance and thus to be listed? In some cases, for example, a particular full-moon day, the day may be given a special differentiating name, but the activities characterizing it are no different than for other such days, the day being an unexceptional member of the, for the most part, internally undifferentiated set of twelve full-moon days. A particular day may have some special differentiating feature of very minor present importance, or be of interest in only a personal and optional way to some few individuals or households, or to some particular thar . It has been optional in some few cases whether to include or exclude an event; we have usually (but not consistently) excluded it unless there is some clear suggestion of civic importance according to our criteria. The minor processions of certain deities that we include and list among the "minor" festivals are also of very marginal importance, in this case because they have little or no present following or attendance—but they are clearly public urban events dictated by the calendar, echoes sometimes of events of some past importance and possible nuclei, in some interesting cases, for some future efflorescence.

A second problem is how to distinguish separate events for enumeration within some larger festival sequential complex, such as the autumn Mohani festival or the solar Biska:. We have dealt with this in somewhat different ways in those two cases, in large part following local conventions.

In should be noted that the sequential numbers that we use to designate festivals in the following chapters are derived from the sequence of the entire group of annual festivals starting with the lunar New Year's Day. Thus the numbering of the events in the three individual cycles indicate their position in the overall annual collection of events. (The annual festival calendar is given in summary form in app. 5.)

Chapter Thirteen
The Events of the Lunar Year

Introduction

The great majority of the annual events in Bhaktapur's yearly collection of calendrically determined events are determined by the lunar calendar. The sequence of these events constitutes a cycle in the dictionary sense of "a period in which a certain round of events or phenomena is completed, recurring in the same order in equal succeeding periods." So defined, the solar events form a cycle of their own, as their position within the lunar sequence varies from year to year. Do the events of the lunar year form a cycle in the literary sense of a group of poems, myths, tales, and the like with a common theme and, perhaps, some integrated structure? Quests for an overall structure of the events of the lunar year—such as Gaborieau's (1952), which we discussed in the previous chapter—suppose that they do form a cycle in this latter sense. One group of lunar events—which we call the "Devi cycle"—is of major and central importance to Bhaktapur precisely as a clearly integrated annual thematic cycle, taking much of its meaning and tempo from the cycle of rice agriculture, and carrying some of the most powerful "messages" in support (as we shall argue) of the symbolic integration of the city, and we have isolated it for extensive treatment in a later chapter. In the present chapter we will note when the events of the Devi cycle take place, but will defer their discussion. We may expect that some of the residual events of the lunar cycle with their historically determined calendrical position may have relatively isolated signifi-

cance. Others are related to each other and the larger cycle as smaller thematic groupings or, more significantly, in terms of formal similarities and contrasts, expressing some kind of structure or rhythm within the year.

In the chapters on calendrical events we face the problem of what to present about particular events. Any major calendrical event would in itself require special studies and a volume to describe and interpret it in something like full detail. We will present in this and the following two chapters the details necessary for the purposes of our arguments about Bhaktapur's civic religion, swollen by occasional additional ethnographic description, particularly in those events that are either unique to Bhaktapur or of special importance there.

The numbers given in brackets following the names of individual events in the next three chapters indicate the sequence of the events in the entire annual calendar. The solar events are numbered according to their position within the lunar calendar of 1973/76. Although this chapter discusses only those events of the lunar year aside from the Devi cycle, all lunar and solar events are noted in this chapter to take account of the overall collection of events (see also app. 5).

Swanti and the Lunar New Year [77, 78, 79, 1, 2]

It is the lunar New Year's Day^[1] that begins the fundamental year—the sequence of lunar months, the basic calendar within which the solar events are variously located from year to year. As P. V. Kane writes, the lunar New Year "in ancient times . . . began in different months in different countries [in South Asia] and for different purposes" (1968-1977, vol. V, p. 569). At present the lunar year begins in India, for the most part, in Caitra (March/April) or Kartika (October/November). The Indo-Nepalese year begins in Caitra. The Newar lunar year begins in Kartika, a time which, in its contrast to the Indo-Nepalese New Year, is considered in Bhaktapur to be a distinctively Newar practice, and with an event, Mha Puja [1], which is considered to be a uniquely Newar event. The New Year's Day falls on the fourth day of a five-day set of events called "Swanti."

Although "Swanti" refers to the five-day sequence, it is said to be derived from swanhi , "three days," that is, the last three days of the sequence—the day before the new year, the New Year's Day and the

succeeding day.^[2] Alternative scholarly names, such as Pa(n)carata, referring to the entire five days, are much less used. The festival is related to and derived from the South Asian Laksmi festival, Divali or Dipavali (the "Festival of lights"), a festival that is also associated with the lunar New Year in some other parts of South Asia such as Gujarat, where the lunar New Year is "inseparable from and part of the Diva1i celebrations" (Gnanambal 1967, 6).

The five days of Swanti are characterized by a unity of themes and significant forms. They emphasize in both form and in theme the existence and importance of relations within the household. The core reference is to the feminine—sisterly, wifely, maternal—centrality in the emotional and physical life and the economic management of the household. The supportive role of women is related to the benign goddess Laksmi, and placed in opposition to a destruction represented by the personification of death as Yama and his messengers. The Newars begin their month, and thus their new lunar year, with the bright, waxing lunar fortnight. Therefore, Swanti's first three days are at the end of the dark fortnight, ending in the dark, new moon, and the New Year's Day events of Mha Puja come at the first day of the waxing lunar fortnight of Kachalathwa.

During the weeks preceding and following Swanti there are activities in most households which set some of the context for the Swanti ceremonies. Oil lamps are placed on the ka:si , the open porch on an upper floor, which is also the principal site of the worship on the first two days of the Swanti sequence. In some households the pikha lakhu , the deified stone marking the boundary of the house, has also been worshiped during the preceding weeks as it will be in the course of the Swanti ceremonies. Family members go to the ka:si to worship swarga , "heaven." Children are expected to take important parts in this worship. In some houses during this period the individual rooms of the house are worshiped and offerings are made. Oil lamps are placed, often by children, on the pikha lakhu , in the various rooms of the house, and on the ka:si . Children, house, household, and the boundaries of the household with an encircling world are emphasized. The world encircling the household—in contrast, as we will see later, to the Devi cycle's world encircling the city—is a moral world.

These preliminary activities are echoed in the events of Swanti itself. The first two days of the sequence, which are the last two days of the lunar year, are respectively, Kwa (sometimes alternatively spelled Ko ) Puja [77] and Khica Puja [78], namely, "Crow Puja" and "Dog Puja."

Both of these creatures are understood here as "messengers" or agents of Yama, the ruler of the realm of death, as they are similarly conceived in the course of rituals following death. On the day of Crow Puja an offering is made on the ka:si . Flowers, oil-lamp wicks, incense, uncooked unhusked rice, ceremonial threads, and bits of cooked vegetarian food are placed within a mandala^[*] that is drawn on the floor of the ka:si . Crows frequently come to carry off some of the food. There are no worship activities outside of the house. Kwa Puja, like all the events of Swanti, is related to the city in parallel fashion; similar units, households, are doing very much the same things everywhere throughout the city at about the same time.

On this first day of Swanti gambling begins, traditionally by casting cowrie shells and now also with card games.^[3] During this period the whole city gambles. Men gamble among groups of friends^[4] and fellow phuki members, and men, women, and children gamble in the household. In religious interpretation the gambling of this period is a sort of puja directed to Laksmi, the goddess of household wealth. If a gambler loses money it is an offering to Laksmi, which she will later return. If the gambler wins it is a kind of prasada , an offering to the deity that has been received and returned, a sharing in the deity's substance that affirms a dependent relationship—and a consequent protective responsibility for the now parental deity. This theme is repeated in the offering of money to Laksmi during household worship on the third day of Swanti. The festive gambling is also said to be distracting and pleasing to the messengers of Yama Raja, so that they forbear to carry off any victims, a theme that will surface again during a later day of Swanti. Gambling as a reversal of household economic order is also an "anti-structural" element of a kind that we find in several other annual events.

Khica Puja, "Dog Puja," on the second day of Swanti, is observed like the Crow Puja, except that the mandala^[*] and offering are placed in front of the ground or cheli level of the house, and usually eaten by stray dogs.

On the following day, the last, the new-moon day of the waning fortnight of Kaulaga, the old lunar year ends with Laksmi Puja [79].^[5] Dipavali elsewhere in South Asia is (as indicated in its name), a festival of lights. Oil lamps and wicks have been important offerings on the earlier days. On this day in Bhaktapur householders place oil lamps at each window (at least two to each side of the window) two at the main door of the house, two lamps at the door of every room, two lamps on

the ka:si , and one at the pikha lakhu . In addition, lamps are put at the door to the dukhu :, the storeroom for valuable items, which will be the site for the household puja that is performed on this day, during which offerings of light will be made to Laksmi.

The puja on Laksmi Puja, Day is a kind of apasa(n) cwanegu , a relatively simple non-Brahman-assisted household puja (app. 4). Among the offerings made to Laksmi there is a prominent offering of money. This is related to the idea of gambling as an offering. The worship of Laksmi in the dukhu : is associated with the hope of wealth and good fortune for the household in the coming year.

On the day of Laksmi Puja some members of the household will first go, as they do preceding all important household puja s, to the local neighborhood Ganesa^[*] temple, to ensure effectiveness for the later worship. Upper-status families send a portion of the offerings of the household puja to their Aga(n) God, and, for those who have Taleju as an auxiliary lineage deity, to Taleju.^[6] Aside from these minimal procedures, which are followed in all important household ceremonies, there is not—on this nor the other days of Swanti—any activities outside the boundaries of the household. There may be a special household dinner on this evening; it does not include the women who have married out of the household. They will return for a feast on the fifth day of the Swanti sequence.

Laksmi Puja is the first of the three main days of Swanti. On these three days the area between the pikha lakhu and the main doorway to the house is purified with cow dung. This represents a pathway for benevolent and protective deities to enter the house.

The fourth day of the five-day sequence, and the middle day of the focal final three days, is the lunar New Year's Day itself, the first day of the waxing fortnight Kachalathwa. This is Mha Puja [1], the one unit in the Swanti sequence that the Newars consider to be specific and special to themselves, not shared with other Nepalis. The term "Mha " (Kathmandu Newari, mha ), means "body," here representing the physical "seat" of each of the individuals living in the household. Essentially Mha Puja is the worshiping of each member of the household by the naki(n) , the senior active woman of the household.^[7] In preparation for this ceremony, a mandala^[*] is first drawn on a purified surface of the floor for each of the attending members of the household, as well as for any temporarily absent members who will be worshiped in absentia . Some households make mandalas^[*] for pets living in the house, such as turtles and pet dogs. The mandalas^[*] represent the human or animal body. Five

piles of unhusked rice are placed on each mandala^[*] . They represent the five mahabhuta , "great (or major) elements." This refers to the Hindu conception of "the gross elements, earth, water, fire, air, ether; of which the body is supposed to be composed and into which it is dissolved" (Macdonnell 1974, 208). A covering of leaves is placed over these piles, and various offerings are placed on it, such as beaten rice, water, ceremonial threads, flowers, incense, and lamp wicks.^[8] The naki(n) worships each member of the household, first males, then females, in order of descending age, in the same way in which the benign deities are worshiped. She repeats the same sequence for each household member. She begins by putting some swaga(n) (a mixture of husked rice, curds, and pigment; see app. 4) on his or her forehead, and then presents offerings of threads, flowers, garlands, sweets, and fruits. Next the naki(n) pours the contents of a rice measuring pot, in which have been placed husked rice, popped rice, flowers, and pieces of fruit, spilling it in three successive portions over the person's head. Next the naki(n) offers the meat and fish containing mixture, samhae . This is striking as a small sacrificial gesture to the body as deity, which is at this phase treated (albeit in a minimal fashion) as a dangerous deity. The mandala^[*] , which had been drawn in colored rice powder, is swept up, sometimes before, sometimes after the samhae is given, depending on the family custom. After the puja there is a feast for members of the household. The Mha Puja is interpreted as helping to ensure long life and good fortune for the household members.

The final day of the Swanti sequence is Kija Puja [2], literally "younger brother puja ." Once again the sequence follows a general Nepalese and South Asian pattern. It is on this day in Swanti that the women who have been married out of the patrilineal household return to their natal homes. The puja is, as in many places, related to a tale about a sister who was able to protect her younger brother from death. She asked death's messenger if he would delay taking her brother until she had finished worshiping him, and until the flowers and fruits that she would present as offerings to her brother had wilted, faded, and spoiled. The messenger accepted her pious request. Through her prolonged puja , and through the presentation of special kinds of flowers and fruits that did not wilt, fade, or spoil, the sister was able to prevent Yama from taking her brother's life. Although the story and the name of the puja specify a sister's relation to a younger brother, and emphasizes her protective, "maternal" behavior, all the sisters in or related to a household worship both their elder and younger brothers.^[9] During the

Kija Puja all men in the household are worshiped by their sisters, if necessary by classificatory "sisters" from the mother's brother's (paju ) family. A mandala^[*] is made in front of each man, and on it are placed a number of foods and flowers that resist decay and fading. These are presented to the men by the women present, who worship them in the apasa(n) cwanegu fashion (app. 4). After the puja , brothers give sisters presents of saris and money. There is a movement of married women throughout the city, as they try to return to their natal home during this day. Sometimes, for example, for those women whose husbands live in the Terai, long journeys are necessary. For the majority of women, however, their natal homes are elsewhere in Bhaktapur, and the older women will try to return again from their natal homes to their husbands' homes at some time during the day to intercept and see their own visiting daughters. The day, and thus Swanti as a whole, ends with a feast at each house, with the returned married-out daughters participating.

The old lunar year comes to an end, and the new lunar year and its festival cycle begins with a set of calendrically specified events that center about Bhaktapur's smallest corporate unit, the household. In contrast to the extended patrilineal phuki unit with its dangerous lineage deity worshiped by Tantric and sacrificial rites, the household worship of Swanti, reflecting the focus of almost all household pujas on benign deities, becomes focused on the benign deity Laksmi, the ideal figure of the good housekeeper, and the deified members of the household, who are worshiped as benign deities—with the minor, but interesting exception of a minimal meat offering to the bodies of the household individuals. The unit emphasized throughout is the household and its members. The space is the house. The boundaries of the house and its component units are repeatedly marked during the course of Swanti. Exterior pujas are minimal—worship at the neighborhood Ganesa^[*] shrine, necessary before all major household worship, and a gesture to the Aga(n) Deity in upper-status households.

The realm that is emphasized is the moral realm, the ordinary civic world of social relations. The rewards in this world and the ideal conditions for its activities are physical well-being, wealth, and security. The ultimate opposition that is emphasized to this world is here not the outside world of the demonic forces and dangerous deities beyond the borders who are the symbols of the outside in many other events (above

all, those of the Devi cycle), but death as personified by Yama and his messengers and agents. Yama, the king of the realm of death, is a moral agent. Souls of the dead go first to his realm, where the reckoning is made as to whether they will proceed to heaven, a rebirth, or hell. The emphasis in relation to death here is on the movement of soul, not as it is in the dangers of the Devi cycle on the destruction of the body—quite a different kind of problem and threat. There are other symbols of destruction in Bhaktapur's festivals—they have to do with impersonal forces external to the human moral realm. However, Yama as death is an important part of that realm. He can be resisted by affection and solidarity; he and his agents have human characteristics—they can be fooled, and distracted by gambling. When he does prevail in time, the dead individual must leave the household but continues in his identity in a way that has been determined by his moral and dharmic activities. The temporary overcoming of Yama is through the emotional solidarity of the household, and this solidarity is represented by sororal emotional support and by the exchange of gifts. This is in contrast to the ideas, symbols, and emotions relating to the solidarity of the phuki group, guthis , and larger corporate units where impersonal power in relation to dangerous deities is most central to their representation and protection.

Swanti also illustrates a symbolic movement. There is a flowing into the household of the protective power of the benign deity, and a return of the women the household had generated and who had left it. While the elementary unit of solidarity is the household there is the secondary solidarity of a parallelism of similar units. All households in Bhaktapur are going through the same sequences, and while most of this sequence is known to be Hindu, and more saliently Nepalese, one segment, Mha Puja, the day of the new year, is thought to be uniquely Newar, an event that, typically of Newar specialties, has Tantric and Yogic references added to the interpersonal emphases of Swanti, albeit in very attenuated form.

The Swanti sequence is of major importance in Bhaktapur as a "focal" household festival.

Miscellaneous Events [3-7]

The lunar year contains many individual events of varying importance that are thematically independent units, in contrast, for example, to the

thematic integration of Swanti. Their patterning and relations with other events in the cycle, if any, involves more abstractly structured relations, which we will consider in the appropriate places.

Jugari Na:Mi [3]

The ninth day of the bright fortnight Kachalathwa is in October/ November. This is an event in commemoration of Visnu-Narayana's^[*] victory—in the form of his avatar Vamana—over an Asura king. It is a time for a pilgrimage to shrines of Visnu^[*] , ideally to the four major shrines of Visnu^[*] in the Kathmandu Valley, although this is now limited to a visit to one of them and often, even more conveniently, to one of the two major Visnu^[*] temples within Bhaktapur. The visits may be made by a group of family members or by one person representing the family. This special day is in the context of two fortnights (Kachalaga and Kachalathwa) specially dedicated to Visnu^[*] . During this period, people who wish to may worship him daily at one of the Visnu^[*] temples.

People who go to the valley shrines of Visnu^[*] do this along with non-Newar Nepalese, joining them in a mela . In keeping with the theme of Vamana's outwitting of the Asura, people may pray at the shrine for protection against demons, evil spirits, earthquakes, destructive rains, and the like—the nonmoral dangers that are, in the system most properly centered on and localized to Bhaktapur, the concern of the dangerous deities. From the perspective of Bhaktapur's civic religion this is an event of moderate importance.

Hari Bodhini [4]

This, like Jugari Na:mi, which it follows by two days, is a valley-wide festival dedicated to Visnu^[*] , celebrated in visits to his four Kathmandu Valley shrines. This day commemorates Visnu's^[*] awakening after his four-month cosmic sleep, and is celebrated throughout South Asia. It is the last day of the four-month Caturmasa Vrata (see section entitled "Ya Marhi Punhi [9]"). The Valley's activities are described in some detail by Mary Anderson (1971, chap. 20). Thousands of people from Bhaktapur usually participate in these pilgrimages, as they participate in mela s in general, for the fair-like excitement of the event. The visit is given a less frivolous justification as a fulfillment of some pledge to Visnu^[*] , or in order to gain some religious merit.

Gaborieau (1982) has, as we have noted, argued that for the Indo-Nepalese, Hari Bodhini and the waking of Visnu^[*] marks the end of the four-month inauspicious period in which ordinary time is mythically held in abeyance. We will return to this suggestion in chapter 16, but may note here that, in contrast with other events, it is of no internal significance to Bhaktapur, and does not mark any immediate shift in festival events. (Moderate.)^[l0]

Saki Mana Punhi [5]

The day and night of all full-moon days or punhi s, that is, the last day of the bright fortnight, is the regular monthly occasion for special activities in Bhaktapur. Some individual full-moon days are differentiated in some way, as are some other monthly occasions—such as the new-moon day, the fourteenth day of the dark fortnight, and the first day of the solar month.^[11] Only some of these specially named punhi s are listed in the written annual calendars; some are specially noted only because they precede an important calendrical event in the following fortnight. It is often arbitrary as to whether such relatively insignificant differentiated days should be considered as a special annual event. We have listed only those specially named full-moon days that seem associated with some activity or symbolism of more than routine differentiated importance. One of these is Saki Mana Punhi. "Saki mana" refers to the edible boiled root of a certain flower. Participation in the associated events of the day is optional. There are groups of men who go on the evening of all punhi s to various temples to play music as a religious offering. On this particular punhi evening they bring mixed grain and uncooked beans to the particular temple where they customarily play and construct an elaborate picture of the temple out of the grain and beans. This is the last day of the two fortnights dedicated to Visnu/Narayana^[*] . Many people go from one shrine and temple to another, listening to music and inspecting the pictures, but the two major Narayana^[*] temples are particular foci for visits and offerings. As this is a punhi evening, people also worship the moon at home, as they do on all punhi s. After the Visnu^[*] and moon puja s many households eat special foods—as they do on many calendrical occasions. On this day it is saki mana , the boiled root that gives the punhi its name, and sweet potatoes. On this day, in which the household is emphasized as well as the benign deity Visnu^[*] and the astral deity, the moon, there is a parallel participation of

households, not only in similar pujas , but in the eating of the same food. The movement out of the household is in a stroll to various nearby temples, which individuals, household groups, and close friends may decide to visit. There is no larger interactional civic form given to the day's events. (Moderate.)

Gopinatha Jatra [6]

This event is the first in the bright fortnight Kachalaga in November. While many calendrical events are associated with movement of people to one or another temple or pilgrimage site in a more or less haphazard manner some calendrical events are characterized by systematic and formalized movements through some unit of space. Sometimes a deity is moved through space, sometimes and more rarely devotees move to a temple or shrine, or to a series of them, in some prescribed order. Both the carrying of the deity and the more formalized movements of worshipers through the city is called, as it is elsewhere in South Asia, a jatra (from the Sanskrit, yatra , "journey, festive train, procession, pilgrimage"). These processions—most typically lead by special jatra images^[12] of the focal deity carried in the arms of a priest or in a palanquin, or sometimes in an enormous chariot—move over prescribed routes. The route is often the main festival route of the city, the pradaksinapatha^[*] , but for many festivals it is one of the less extensive routes within some other significant unit of the city (chap. 7). The paths by which the image and the major participants move from a temple to join the festival route are themselves conventionally prescribed. It should be noted that the extensiveness of the jatra route is no necessary indication of the importance of the festival. Minor jatras may follow the main pradaksinapatha^[*] , while important ones that become foci of interest for the entire city may occasionally move only through a local area.

Gopinatha Jatra is an example of a minor jatra that follows the main city route. "Gopinatha" is an appellation of Krsna^[*] . The organization of the procession is the responsibility of the temple priest, the pujari , of the Krsna^[*] temple in Laeku Square. Some men of the Jyapu Rajcal (also called "Kala") thar , members of families that had been granted tenancy of land in exchange for this service, accompany the image playing flutes, drums, and cymbals. Observers are usually casual bypassers who often must ask who the deity being carried is. Bypassers often give coins as offerings to the deity, and the members of the procession give them flowers as prasada in return. (Minor.)

Bala, Ca:Re [7]

Ca:re , the fourteenth day of the dark lunar fortnight, is always special to the Dangerous Goddess. On this particular ca:re members of families who have lost someone through death during the year join other Nepalese at the great Valley shrine and temple complex of Pasupatinatha (Anderson 1971, chap. 24). The various procedures on the day—bathing, visits to temples of Siva, Bhairava, and the goddess (at her Devi pitha as Guhyesvari), all associated with various traditional and local tales—are interpreted as protecting the dead person from trouble in the afterlife of the first year, and as aiding his or her entrance into heaven.^[13] Most people in Bhaktapur who have had a bereavement during the previous year try to join in this pilgrimage, which is a kind of mela . Those people who are unable to go to Pasupatinatha on that day may go to the equivalent temples and shrines of the "royal center" (see chap. 8, section entitled "Pilgrimage Gods of the Royal Center") on Bhaktapur's Laeku Square. This is one of the days within the lunar year with a central or secondary reference to "normal" death.

On Bala Ca:re a member of the Jugi thar begins to perform in Bhaktapur as Mahadeva, Siva as the "great god," performances that will continue until the beginning of the solar New Year sequence [20].

The day's major event concerns only some of Bhaktapur's people in any given year, but through their lifetimes as they become bereaved most people will take part in it. (Moderate.)

Sukhu(n) Bhisi(n)dya: Jatra [8]

This jatra begins on the fourteenth day of the waning lunar fortnight Kaulaga and ends on the last day, the fifteenth, the day of the new moon. It is special to Bhaktapur, and honors Bhimasena (in Newari, Bhisi[n] God), the special protective deity of Bhaktapur's tradesmen and shopkeepers. An image of the deity taken from the main Bhimasena temple in Dattatreya Square is carried part way around the city on the main festival route, the pradaksinapatha^[*] . During the jatra procession straw mats—sukhu(n )—and piles of straw are burned along the route "to keep Bhisi(n)dya: warm." There are various legends about Bhimasena, one of the heroes of the Mahabharata epic, which are used to explain this and other details of the festival. The image is left in a protected shrine along the side of the festival route during the first night, and the procession proceeds around the remainder of the route the fol-

lowing morning. Shopkeepers and tradesmen perform sacrifices (most often of a male goat) to Bhimasena on these days and have bhwae , formal feasts, at their homes. These are nakha cakha , which include phuki members in addition to the household members, and the phuki ’s married-out women are invited. This jatra , then, is special to Bhaktapur, uses the main festival route, and involves all of Bhaktapur as a spatial unit, but concerns only one of its social components, the "sahu ," tradesmen and shopkeepers. It is the first of the year's important annual festivals taking place within the city to focus on a dangerous deity, and to entail blood sacrifice. It is the first important festival of the year to make use of—in its jatra aspect—the public civic space. (Moderate.)

Ya: Marhi Punhi [9]

Calendrical events are distributed throughout the year in clumps. The first two fortnights of the lunar year has a relatively high density of festivals. Now commencing with Thi(n)lathwa in November/December Bhaktapur has four lunar fortnights with only two very slightly differentiated full-moon days and a minor solar festival—a specially differentiated first day of a solar month. With the third fortnight of this period a month-long vrata , a period of special devotion important to all the Valley women, begins.

Ya: Marhi Punhi [9] is one of the differentiated punhi , or full-moon days. This particular one is related to the agricultural cycle, and is the first of a number of such festivals. Most of the other festivals connected with the agricultural cycle (this one being a significant exception) are tied together in the stories and actions of the "Devi cycle," which we will consider as a unit below. Ya: Marhi Punhi takes place at the end of the rice harvest (whose beginning was signaled in the major autumnal festival of Mohani [67-77]). At this time the rice harvest is usually entirely completed. During this day in most households a mixture of husked and unhusked rice is worshiped in the room used for storing grain. The purpose of the prayer is said to be that as the grain is used up the worshipers hope that the storeroom will be filled up again. The rice mixture is taken to represent Laksmi. A specially kind of sweetcake, ya: marhi , is presented as an offering to the deified rice, and after being left in the store room for four days, is eaten as prasada from Laksmi. Three of the cakes had been formed into images of Ganesa^[*] , Laksmi, and Kubera, a quasi-deity who has little other reference in Bhaktapur and is

never worshiped at any other time, and who has as one of his legends the custodianship of wealth (Mani 1975, 435).^[14] This is the traditional day for the giving by a tenant farmer of a share of the rice harvest to the owner of the land—although the share may now, in fact, be paid before or after this time. In the evening of this festival there is a nakhatya , and married-out women are invited to their natal homes for a feast in which various kinds of food special to the occasion are added to the ordinary feast menu. This is a household centered feast, and the household is reconstructed in the invitation to the married-out daughters. The deities are benign ones. The emphasis here—in contrast to the agricultural meanings of the Devi cycle—is not on the growth of the grain but in its location in the household as part of the household's prosperity. This is a significant illustration of the difference between the relations of the Dangerous Goddess (and her Devi cycle) to fertility and the benign one, Laksmi, to household management and well-being. Ya: Marhi Punhi is considered to be an exclusively Newar festival. (Moderate.)

Miscellaneous Events [10-11]

Ghya: Caku Sa(n)lhu [10] is a festival in the solar cycle that fell on the thirteenth day of Pohelathwa—late December in 1974/75. It always falls within a few days of this lunar date, and is noteworthy in that it is associated with the winter solstice and the beginning of the "ascending half" of the solar year, the six-month period during which the days progressively lengthen. It will be discussed in the next chapter. (Moderate.)

Chyala Punhi [11] is an ordinary punhi , with the addition that it is customary on this day to discard clay kitchen pots that are unusable on the neighborhood chwasa . Chyala is "a curry made from bamboo shoots, potatoes, peas and other vegetables" (Manandhar 1976, 136) which it was presumably customary to prepare on this punhi . It is an arbitrary decision as to whether to include such minimally differentiated monthly occasions in a list of annual events. (Minor.)

The Month of the Swasthani Vrata

As we have noted in the last chapter, the term "vrata " is often used in South Asia for any calendrically prescribed religious activity, but it has a stronger sense of "religious or ascetic observance taken upon oneself, austerity, vow, rule, holy work, such as fasting and continence" (Mac-

donnell 1974, 304). Noting that Nepalese calendrical events can be sorted into jatra s, mela s, and vrata s in this stronger sense, Bouillier (1982) has noted that among upper-caste Indo-Nepalese while participation m jatra s and mela s is "collective," vrata s may be individual, and done at home. She notes that those calendrical events special to women are vrata s "performed for the most part discretely within the family group" (1982, 91). Traditionally in South Asia vrata s, in contrast to many other forms of worship, were proper to persons of all caste levels as well as to women (Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 51), but Kane notes that the Puranas^[*] and digests of ritual procedures prescribe several vrata s that were specifically to be performed by women. Although there are differences in the participation of Newar and Indo-Nepalese women in festivals, Bouillier's remarks have some relevance for Bhaktapur. Thus, while men do participate in vrata s in Bhaktapur, the city's major special annual event special to women is a vrata , the Swasthani (Sanskrit, svasthani ) Vrata.

Pohelathwa and Sillathwa, the two lunar fortnights in January and February that begin on the day following Chyala Punhi, constitute one of a number of two-fortnight periods in Bhaktapur's annual calendar devoted as a whole to some special theme and activities. Within such periods some specific calendrical events may be connected to the theme, but others that occur may be independent of it. These four weeks are the period of the Swasthani Vrata. This is an important festival month for the women of the Kathmandu Valley of various ethnic groups. It has been studied at length by Linda Iltis with a focus on participation by Newar women (1985) and by Lynn Bennett as an aspect of her study of Chetri women in the Valley (1977, 1983). The vrata is based on a group of legends (Swasthani Vrata Katha : See B. M. P. Sharma [1955]),^[15] which combines various traditional stories about Siva, Sati, and Parvati. The oldest known manuscript of this collection is in Newari (Iltis 1985, 8):

The Sri Swasthani Vrata Katha text is a compilation of 29-33 stones, some of which are unique versions of Puranic^[*] stones popular in Hindu communities throughout South Asia, as well as others which are unique local legends which concern people and places m the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, and explain the origins and benefits in rituals honoring the Goddess Swasthani.

Rooted in Newar language and culture, the worship of Swasthani has spread to other ethnic groups and cultures in Nepal via the trade networks of the Newars, and primarily through Newar scribes. . . . The Sri Swasthani

Vrata Katha text has been translated into Nepali, Hindi and perhaps Maithili.

The text is read aloud in successive portions, one each evening, in households in Bhaktapur in its Newari version. It is read traditionally by men, but its message, as Lynn Bennett emphasizes for the Chetris, is directed to women. Before turning to the actions of the Swasthani Vrata, something should be said of the text which is summarized in Bennett (1983, 274-306). The text deals with themes and especially conflicts of romantic love and arranged marriage; of sexuality and marriage; of sexual passion, jealousy, faithfulness, and duty; and of the transformation of a man, in this case Siva, from self-absorption to social usefulness through marriage. In the course of the stories, Parvati, the central human-like protagonist, must deal with these conflicts. She is able to get Siva, the man she loves, as husband through devotion and works (vrata ) dedicated to Swasthani (an appellation of the transcendent form of the Goddess), but it is her proper social behaviour, "her attention to the details of the ritual, her distribution of alms, and above all, her religious devotion [which are] stressed along with her asceticism" (Bennett 1983, 224). Bennett sums up the significance of Parvati in the Swasthani stories and their associated rituals (and in general) (ibid., 272f.):

The many contradictory elements which go into the Devi's role as perfect wife and mother are [now] apparent: she must be both sensual and ascetic: flirtatious and faithful; fertile and yet utterly pure. In the myths about her gentle aspects—most notably as Parvati—the goddess is all these things. She represents an ideal, a blending of opposing qualities which actual village women can never fully achieve. . . . In Hindu mythology [Parvati] . . . is the impossibly perfect model, embodying the contradictory values of Hinduism particularly as they affect women in Hindu patrilineal social structure. This, I maintain, is why the gentle side of the goddess is especially important to village women.

Like Durga, of course, Parvati is worshiped and greatly revered by both men and women. But, lust as men are largely responsible for the worship of Durga and more conversant than women with the texts about her, women are more involved with the rituals and texts concerning Parvati and the other gentle forms of the goddess.

Although Swasthani is the Goddess as full creative deity, in accordance with the emphasis on Parvati as the ideal woman centrally located in the social and moral world the festival is devoted to the ordinary deities, and in the stories and in the symbolic enactments, it is Parvati's

conventional relations to the benign male deities Siva and Visnu^[*] that are emphasized. The events of this month are not part of the Devi cycle. We may note here that among other valley Hindu groups there is another very important women's festival connected with the Swasthani stories, Tij, which is not observed by the women of Bhaktapur (see section on miscellaneous minor events [52-58], below).

During this month the general Valley pattern is followed. Successive sections of the Swasthani Vrata Katha are read in the household each evening during the month. Girls and women past the Ihi ceremony, and, for those who had had a "social marriage" whose husbands are still living,^[16] will take part in the other ceremonies, the vrata s themselves. These "married" girls and women (in some, but not all thar s) may wear red sari s, the color of marriage sari s, during this period. Some of them fast by not eating meat. They worship Siva, usually as a linga^[*] ,^[17] both at home and at various designated tirthas at the riverside. While a majority, perhaps, of women remain in Bhaktapur and do not participate in the major valley pilgrimages of the period, many women do participate in the valley-wide mela (described in detail in Iltis [1985]). The motives for womens' religious activities during the period are said to be ones similar to those Bennett (1983, 276) has noted for valley Chetri women—for example, for married women, to protect their households and their husbands; for unmarried girls, to help ensure a good husband in the future.^[18]

Men in Bhaktapur also participate in the festival, but what was reported as having previously been daily participation had diminished greatly by the time of this study. The foci of the men's worship were Visnu^[*] and Siva, important actors in the Swasthani story. On each day of the month men would go in groups, following a leader, to bathe in the river and then on to the city's main Visnu^[*] and Siva temples to do puja . The leader of the group would call out the names of Visnu^[*] and his avatar s and the various names of Siva, and the men in the group, carrying banners, would chant "Hari Madya:" ("Hari" is one of the appellations of Visnu/Narayana^[*] and "Madya:," that is, Mahadya:, the Great God, a major appellation of Siva.) The activities of the Swastani month end on the full-moon day, with the Madya: Jatra [14], which we will discuss below.

Sarasvati Festivals [12, 13]

Sarasvati Jatra [12] takes place on the night of the fourth day of the fortnight, and is part of a unit or sequence that includes the events of

the following day ([13], below). On the day of Sarasvati Jatra students, for whom Sarasvati is a patron deity, go to her main temple, and massage the legs of her jatra image. It is said that she has just returned from a long journey from Lhasa in Tibet, and her legs are tired.^[19] In the course of the day the image, on this day referred to as "Sarasvati who has returned from Lhasa" is carried around the main festival route, in a small procession, or jatra . (Minor.)

Sri Pa(n)chami [13], which occurs the next day, continues the special worship of Sarasvati or (an alternate appellation) Sri, in common with other Nepalese Hindus. This is again primarily a festival for students and their households. The students fast by not eating meat on this day. They go to the main Sarasvati temple to pray for success in their studies. Prasada from the deity is brought back to the household to be shared. Men and women Jyapus also go on this day to the temple and pray to Sarasvati for aid in the weaving of cloth and in farmwork. People from other groups may worship her at her temple on that day, particularly those who, like the students, have or wish to have skills that require study and memory.

Jyapu bhajana groups play music at the Sarasvati temple on this day. They play special music called "Basanta" or "spring music"—although Basanta, starting in Caitra (Caulathwa), is still two months away, for this day is the traditional lunar event associated with the early part of the "ascending half" of the year, which had begun some three weeks earlier.

Sri Pa(n)chami is important to essential members of the city's society and is thus in our scale of "moderate" importance for the city.

Madya: Jatra [14] End of Swasthani Vrata

This jatra comes on the final day, the full-moon day, of Sillathwa. This day is also the last day of the four weeks of the Swasthani Vrata. This full-moon day is called "Swasthani Punhi" or "Si Punhi." The day is said to be an important event—but many of the activities previously associated with it have been discontinued. A procession honoring Siva begins at the riverside at the Khware ghat^[*] and proceeds to the nearby Ga:hiti Square, where it joins the main festival route, and then proceeds around it. The procession stops temporarily at the two main Narayana^[*] temples, one in the upper half of the city and the other in the lower half, then continuing its circumambulation of the festival route returns to

Ga:hiti Square, and then to the river, where it disbands.^[20] This jatra takes place during the day. Previously in the evening children and adults dressed as Siva and Parvati were carried around the city in palanquins, accompanied by torches and music. Still now on this day people often perform special puja s to Siva as "Madya:" (Mahadya:, the "Great God") in their homes and to his representations as linga^[*] s at the riverside. These activities are an extension of the worship of Siva lingas^[*] during the course of the Svasthani month. In the evening there are household suppers in which various sweets, including special forms of sweetcakes dedicated to Mahadya:, are eaten. Traditionally 108 of these tiny cakes were presented to wives, who would then eat one hundred of them, and present the remaining eight to her husband.^[21]

The themes of the previous month are summed up with this act of wifely household devotion in the context of worship of the benign deities. What is added here is a jatra that emphasizes the integration of the city through its visits to the two Visnu^[*] temples, and the circumambulation of the main festival route.

The procession is a relatively small one now. Most people do not join it but go about their ordinary activities during the day. (Moderate.)

Sila Ca:re (Sivaratri) [15]

The following waning fortnight, Sillaga (in February) has only one festival event, of moderate importance for Bhaktapur as a city—although of major importance for all Shaivite Hindus.

This ca:re , the fourteenth day of the dark fortnight, is—like all ca:re —special to the Goddess, and there are as on other ca:re s special ceremonies for the Aga(n) Gods and at the temples of the Tantric deities. This particular ca:re is also devoted to Siva.^[22] On this day the major valley shrine complex of Pasupatinatha becomes a center for Shaivite pilgrims from India and Nepal. Bhaktapur's Dattatreya temple is a secondary pilgrimage center at this time. Many Shaivite pilgrims from India and elsewhere in Nepal—both "householders" and sadhu s—come to Bhaktapur at this time. Some of the sadhu s are housed at one or another of the city's matha^[*] s, "monasteries," for wandering Hindu renouncers, built as acts of piety by Malla kings. As we have noted, neither Dattatreya temple nor the matha s have "Newar" priests. These pilgrims (and others during the course of the year) come to Bhaktapur in a sort of benign invasion of interest to its citizens, but they are not, as such, part of the Newars' own city-centered symbolic life.

People in Bhaktapur may go themselves to the Dattatreya temple,

and, as pilgrims themselves, to the fair-like mela at Pasupatinatha. Within Bhaktapur in the evening fires are made along the roadside and in the main neighborhood squares. Many men—from thar s throughout Bhaktapur's social structure (except the untouchables)—sit by the fires all night chanting the name of Siva, some of them smoking cannabis, which is commonly smoked by Shaivite pilgrims during the festival, and which was, at the time of this study, sold by stall keepers at Pasupatinatha during the mela . The legends told to explain the fires are variants of a widespread Hindu tale associated with the day (cf. Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 255). In summary, the legends recount that once upon a time a hunter caught in the woods at night sat shivering under the particular kind of tree whose wood is supposed to be burnt for the fires made that night. Siva, hearing the sounds "sh, sh" made by the shivering man, thought that the man was calling his name, and manifested himself to offer the hunter a boon. The hunter requested that he be able to stay forever with Siva in his heaven, and Siva granted his wish. The salvation of the shivering hunter under his tree, is said by some to be associated with the approach of spring when trees are beginning to bud again and that Siva who periodically destroys and recreates the world is bringing it to life again in its annual cycle of death and rebirth. There are no feasts or special household activities on this day.

This is one of the calendrical events in which the borders of the domestic moral realm is represented by means of the ideas and images associated with the benign deities. Siva responds, in his absentminded but recognizably human way, to the needs of the hunter. That response is produced by a misunderstanding, a kind of trickery, for the hunter^[23] has done nothing in the dharmic moral realm to earn it. The legend, the fires in the public spaces in whose warmth some men spend the night, the smoking of cannabis, the references to and mimicking of the absent-minded and yogic Siva probes at the human outer boundaries of the moral realm.

In the day's explorations of the "benign margins" of the moral realm, neither the household nor the integrated city are directly referred to but are present as that which is being, for the moment, escaped. (Moderate.)

The Minor Festivals of Krsna^[*] (Holi) [16, 17]

Cillathwa, the bright fortnight of the following month (February/ March) includes a period—from the eighth day until the full-moon

day—which in the other Newar cities of the Valley as in South Asia in general is a time for major activities devoted to Krsna^[*] . In Bhaktapur the activities of the period are comparatively quite minor. The first day, the eighth, is called "Cir Swaegu" [16], which means "to erect a cir ," that is, a bamboo pole to which a banner of varicolored cloths has been attached. The practice, which gives its name to the day is, significantly, not done in Bhaktapur now (although it was, on the evidence of the name, probably done sometime in the past), although it is still done in Kathmandu (Anderson 1971, 250). In Bhaktapur the day simply introduces the week, but has no special activities of its own. In both Kathmandu and, even more so, in Patan Krsna^[*] is associated with major festivals. In Bhaktapur some of these are ignored, others given only minor importance. This is an example of the selection of deities and emphases that are open to each community.

In the period between the Cir Swaegu day and the full-moon day, called "Holi Punhi," some people go in processions around the city, and throw abhir , a red powder (app. 4). The men in these processions, few in number compared to the numbers participating in the city's major jatra s, are mostly from the Jyapu thar s. Their throwing of the powder is restrained in that they are, it is said, "afraid" to throw the abhir at men of superior thar status. This is in contrast to Anderson's account for elsewhere in the Valley that "the erection of the cir pole gives eight-day license to one and all to drench almost anyone he meets, including cows and dogs, with powder of the most brilliant vermilion" (1971, 251). She reports that the traditional license of the period was being brought under control in Kathmandu because it was becoming a public nuisance.

As we have argued previously in our discussion of Krsna^[*] and Rama as objects of bhakti , personal devotion, bhakti religion is antithetical to the traditional community organization that Bhaktapur's Hinduism helps constitute and support. Gopal Singh Nepali found some evidence in the phrasing of a folk song about it, that Holi (as the week-long period is called elsewhere) is a "culture trait introduced from outside [Nepal]" (1965, 338). Its popularity in Kathmandu and Patan, along with that of other Krsna^[*] festivals, may attest to a relative breaking away from traditional priestly Hindu civic organization at the time of its introduction in contrast to the more conservative and traditional Bhaktapur.

On the last day of the period, Holi Punhi, [17], or, as it is also called, Krsna^[*] Jatra, in Bhaktapur an image of Krsna^[*] that is kept in the Taleju

temple^[24] is carried around the city's main festival route. Not many people go out of their way to watch the procession. There are no other special activities on that day. (Both [16] and [17] are comparatively minor events in Bhaktapur.)

The Approach of the Season of Anxiety [18, 19]

The waning fortnight Sillaga (March) has no special events, with the exception of Pasa Ca:re [18], the fourteenth day, one of the ca:re s with special features. "Pasa " means "friend." In Bhaktapur the day is also called Pisac Ca:re, a pisaca being a ghoul-like evil spirit. In Kathmandu, where the day was traditionally the occasion for more elaborate celebrations than in Bhaktapur, the day is called "Paha(n) Ca:re," that is, "Guest Ca:re." In Bhaktapur there are special emphases on the day in the Tantric worship of tutelary goddesses required on all ca:re . Thus, in the Taleju temple it is necessary to offer an animal sacrifice to Taleju, while on most other ca:re the meat-containing mixture, samhae , is sufficient. In Aga(n) puja s people add references to the pisaca and ask for protection. Many farmers' guthis perform blood sacrifices to dangerous deities. Those people who have protective pollution-consuming deified stones, "Luku Mahadya:," in their courtyards (chap. 8), clean them on this day. The main idea on this day, is protection from vague evil forces. Anderson remarks that this ca:re comes at a time "when typhoid, dysentery, cholera and smallpox flourish with the advent of hot weather, prior to cleansing monsoon rains. It is a time of uneasiness" (1971, 264). The anxieties symbolized by spirits and the special worship of the dangerous tutelary gods, are thematically balanced by feasts in households, to which married-out women and friends are invited—hence the names "Pasa" and "Paha(n)." As Anderson puts it, "traditionally on this day homes and courtyards are thoroughly cleaned and decorated to welcome relatives and acquaintances in the hope that such a display of goodwill, generosity and mutual love will dispel evil thoughts and harmful spirits. Especially it is important to invite married daughters back to paternal homes for family feasts, that sisters may meet in good fellowship" (1971, 265).^[25] (Moderate.)

Two days later, on the first day of the following fortnight, the bright fortnight Caulathwa (March/April), is the day of Cika(n) Buyegu [19], the "oil-rubbing" day. For the upper thar s, the Chathariya and above, there are no special activities on this day, but the farming thar s and

some thar s below them in Bhaktapur and in other Newar communities rub mustard-seed oil, cika(n) , on their own and their children's bodies. It is thought that this will protect them from sickness during the following year.^[26] This is followed by a special household supper. (Minor.)

The themes of dangerous spirits and illness and of protection against them, which are introduced here, are the first anticipatory references in the lunar cycle to a time of the year in which a long season of disease and the critical early stages of the main agricultural cycle, the rice cycle, bringing major risks for individual and civic well-being, are approaching. These anxious themes become represented in later calendrical events (mostly within the Devi cycle) with increasing density and interrelation.

Biska:, The Solar New Year [20-29]

In 1975/76 the solar New Year sequence began on the eleventh day of the waxing lunar fortnight Caulathwa, during April. This sequence lasts for nine days, and includes several component events. We will present these in the following chapter in conjunction with the other events of the solar calendar. The sequence as a whole is of focal importance for Bhaktapur, in ways that we will specify. It centers around the dangerous deities, and is concerned with the integration of city units in the face of the passions that can destroy that unity.

The Dewali Period, the Worship of the Digu Lineage Deities [30]

The period starting on the first day of the dark fortnight, Caulaga (April) and ending some fifty days later on the day before Sithi Nakha [36], is the span during which the worship of each phuki ’s externally situated lineage deity, the Digu Dya:, must take place. Each phuki has a particular day within the Dewali period when it customarily does its Dewali puja . We have discussed the events of this period in chapter 9. The Dewali worship is to a dangerous deity through meat and alcoholic offerings. It is the most important ritual marker of the phuki (Major.)

The Minor Dasai(n) of Rama [31, 32]

In our consideration of the Krsna^[*] ceremonies of Holi we had examples of ceremonial days in Bhaktapur's calendar which are of interest be-

cause they are unimportant in comparison with the way they are treated in other South Asian or Nepalese communities. While such comparative emphases may be due to factors that are tangential to the concerns of our study, certain examples of relative neglect or emphasis may be related to Bhaktapur's particular kind of symbolic organization. This seems to be the case in celebrations of Visnu's^[*] avatar s, whose cult elsewhere in South Asia is a response to special needs and conditions that have not characterized traditional Bhaktapur. This is true not only of Krsna^[*] but also of Rama, whose cult is important elsewhere throughout South Asia. Two calendrical events in the fortnight of Caulaga associated with Rama are of considerable importance elsewhere but of relatively minor importance in Bhaktapur's calendar of festivals.

The eighth day of the fortnight is called "Cait Dasai(n)" [31]. The name refers to a nine-day period observed elsewhere in South Asia, beginning on the first day of the fortnight and ending the following day, Rama Navami, a period during which portions of the Ramayana epic are read. The worship of this spring festival lasts m Bhaktapur for only one day. In Bhaktapur's Devi-centered interpretation, the importance of this day is said to be that on it Rama worshiped the Goddess for help in his battle against Ravana^[*] . This gives it a thematic connection with Bhaktapur's major Dasai(n), Mohani [67-77], the autumn harvest festival. In accord with its reference to the Dangerous Goddess, many households sacrifice animals and have feasts, and there are sacrifices to the Aga(n) deities, to Taleju, and to other Tantric deities at temples. In contrast to the autumnal Mohani, animal sacrifice is optional. Although the Dangerous Goddess is a focus of worship, this festival is not integrated into the Devi cycle. (Moderate.)

The following day, the ninth day of the fortnight, is Rama Navami [32]. This, the birthday of Rama, was traditionally a very minor day in Bhaktapur, only commemorated by the temple priests of the Rama temples in their own worship at the temples. In recent years some followers of a new bhakti cult of Rama go in groups to pray at his temples on this day. (Minor.)

Honoring Mothers [33]

The last day of the dark fortnight, the new-moon day, is called Ma(n) ya khwa: swaegu [33], literally "looking at mother's face." This, like a

later parallel day for fathers [51], involves all Kathmandu Valley Hindus and Buddhists. People whose mother has died more than one year previously and who are thus beyond the first year's period of mourning and commemorative ceremonies go, if at all possible, to join other Nepalese at a pilgrimage site, Mata Tirtha, which is two adjoining ponds about six miles to the southwest of Kathmandu.^[27] They do a commemorative ceremony, a sofa sraddha^[*] , with, for well-to-do farming and upper-level thar s, assistance from their family priest. An offering of food is given to their family Brahman as a special offering, a dana , for the mother. If unable to go to Mata Tirtha, people will bathe and make their offerings at a tirtha at the river in Bhaktapur itself.

Those whose mothers are living return to their mother's home,^[28] to "see their mother's face." The mother is worshiped as a deity. Men and women, boys and girls, bow their heads to their mother's feet, then wash them, and place offerings of small coins on them. In some thar s the worshipers take some of the water that has been used to wash the feet and drink it as prasada , which, as we have noted in our discussion of cipa , polluted food (chap. 11), dramatically symbolizes the worshiper's dependent and incorporated relationship to the mother and thus her continuing responsibility to them. Children who have left home try to return on this day, bringing with them offerings of sweet-cakes, curds, eggs, and swaga(n) . The mother returns some of these offerings to her children as prasada . If their mother is not living people on this day may offer beaten rice and sweetcakes to the wife of their family purohita . After a series of festivals devoted to dangerous deities this day returns to the household, with its benign deity—here the deified mother. The emphasis again is on the inside of the household, and the reaffirmation of its internal relations against an opposing theme of loss and death. (Moderate.)

Aksaya^[*] Trtiya^[*] [34]

The third day, the Trtiya^[*] of the waxing fortnight Bachalathwa (April/ May), is a very minor holiday in Bhaktapur, but is of interest in at least one other Newar community. In Hindu tradition it is an ancient vrata , "one of the 3 and 1/2 days popularly believed to be most auspicious in the year" (Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 89). In Bhaktapur on this day Siva is worshiped in many homes with a special offering of a sugar and water syrup. The day has the peculiarity—a residual of its traditional auspiciousness—that marriages and other rites of passages can be done

on it without the necessity of determining astrologically the proper sait , the exact propitious day and time for the ceremony, which would otherwise be necessary.

According to Toffin, in the Newar town of Panauti, Aksaya^[*] Trtiya^[*] is the day on which the Ihi , the mock-marriage of young girls, is annually performed (1984, 403). (Minor.)

Candesvari^[*] Jatra [35]

On the last day of the fortnight there occurs one of the year's several local twa: jatras . Although they center in one particular neighborhood or twa :, they are listed in the annual calendar and are often of general city-wide interest. This one takes place in the Tibukche(n) twa : and is devoted to Candesvari^[*] , a form of the Goddess, who has no other civic significance in Bhaktapur. The jatra image is carried around the twa : on that day, and there are, characteristically of such twa: jatra s, feasts, nakhatya , in many houses in the festival area in which not only relations but friends from other parts of the city are invited. (In comparison with certain other of the twa: jatra s, it is a minor event.)

Buddha Jaya(n)ti and a Note on "Buddhist" Festivals in Bhaktapur

In previous chapters we discussed the relations between the Hindu and Buddhist aspects of the Newar society and religion of Bhaktapur. For some purposes, as we emphasized, they can be considered separate components, while for others they blend or overlap. The case is similar with festivals. There are some that can be said to be Hindu, some Buddhist,^[30] some (the great majority) common to both, although in the latter case the interpretations may vary. These differentiations are, in any detail, beyond the scope of this study. There are a few festivals in Bhaktapur that are mostly of concern to the city's "Buddhists" (as we have defined them in chap. 5). In other festivals the same festival image will be defined differently by Buddhists and Hindus so that the jatra is relevant to both groups. An example is the predominantly Buddhist festival centering on images of the Five Dhyani Buddhas, which are identified by Hindus as the Five Pandava Brothers (see section on Gunhi Punhi, below).

This day, Buddha Jaya(n)ti, takes place on the full-moon day of Bachalathwa, the same day as the Candesvari^[*] Jatra. It commemorates

the day that the historic Buddha was born, received enlightenment, and died—all having occurred on the same day of the year. An image of the Buddha is carried around the city's main festival route. While high-status Hindus say that this jatra has no significance for them, other Bhaktapur Hindus may view the jatra , make small offerings to the deity, and receive prasada .^[31] This is typical of all such "Buddhist" festivals in Bhaktapur.

Sithi Nakha [36]

The festival calendar has no events in the waning fortnight of Bachalaga in May. However, the following fortnight, the bright fortnight Tachalathwa, includes on its sixth day an event, Sithi Nakha, which signals the preparation for the ending of the year's relatively uneventful phase and introduces an anticipatory period of about one month until Bhagasti [40], when with the annual death of Bhaktapur's major protective goddesses, the Nine Durgas, a new phase of Bhaktapur's festival year will begin.

The seven-week Dewali period, the period within which the phuki lineage gods, the Digu Gods, are worshiped, is terminated on the evening of the day before Sithi Nakha.

Sithi Nakha [36] is the first occurrence within the lunar year of the Devi cycle, a set of closely interrelated annual events ([36], [40], [45], [67-76] and the Nine Durgas' performances) during a nine-month period, which reflect important stages of the rice agricultural cycle and whose imagery centers on the forms and activities of the dangerous goddess. We will devote a chapter to that cycle, but in this chapter will simply list and briefly characterize those events to indicate their position in the overall cycle. Sithi Nakha is the day by which the annual performances of the Nine Durgas must be completed. It is the day on which wells and ponds are traditionally to be cleaned in anticipation of the coming rains which will make that annual activity impossible. It is the day which anticipates the last weeks of the dry season and the time at which the planting of seed rice must begin. (Moderate.)

Candi^[*] Bhagavati Jatra [37]

On the same day as Sithi Nakha Day, a local twa: jatra , that of Candi^[*] Bhagavati, an appellation of Bhagavati, is held in the Kwache(n) twa :. A locally housed image of the goddesses is carried around the twa : fes-

tival route. This is a typical local twa: jatra of minor civic importance (compare Candesvari^[*] Jatra [35]).

Dasa Hara [38]

This calendrical event of minor importance for Bhaktapur is common to all Hindus. It is on the tenth day, dasa (Sanskrit dasa ), of the month. In its traditional Indian version it was a day for removing "sins," through bathing in the Ganges, and later in other large rivers (Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 90f.). In Bhaktapur the custom persists with, it would seem, an emphasis rather on protection from external misfortunes. People in Bhaktapur go to bathe in the river at the Kware ghat^[*] , considering their ritual bath as worship to the river Ganges, and present certain vegetables—cucumber, red pepper, and an edible root, phakha(n) , to the river. This bathing and presentation is supposed to remove "bad luck" from the bathers. On this day there may be small family dinners in special commemoration of the day. Otherwise there are no special activities. (Minor.)

Panauti Jatra [39]

This annual event on the last, the full-moon day of Tachalathwa, is listed in Bhaktapur's annual lunar calendar. This is an occasion for a mela , starting with a pilgrimage out of the city to Panauti, a town to the east of Bhaktapur, which had been part of the hinterland state of Bhaktapur in the Malla period. Thousands of people from Bhaktapur join throngs of people from elsewhere in the valley to bathe in the river at Panauti and to worship at a hill-top shrine there.^[32] There are no ritual events in Bhaktapur on this day (apart from the regular full-moon worship). (Moderate.)

Bhagasti [40], the Death of the nine Durgas (Devi Cycle)

The eighth day, the astami^[*] , of the following month, the waning month Tachalaga (June), is Bhagavati's astami^[*] , or Bhagasti. In the weeks following this day as the rains start the young rice plants are transplanted into the muddy paddy fields. On this day the masks of the Nine Durgas are "cremated" and those deities die, to be reborn in the course of the Mohani festival, some three-and-one-half months later. (Moderate.)

Minor Festivals of Visnu^[*] [41-43] and the Beginning of the Caturmasa Vrata

The bright fortnight Dillathwa (June/July) includes three events related to Visnu^[*] . On the second day of the month is the Jagana God Jatra [41]. Jagana (Jagannatha) is an avatar of Visnu^[*] , usually thought of as a form of Krsna^[*] . For Bhaktapur this is a very minor city jatra The jatra image of Jagana God from the temple of Jagannatha near the Durbar Square is carried around the city by a small group of people, and the pujari of the temple must perform special worship on that day. (Minor.)

The eleventh day of Dillathwa, the ekadasi —which is in all fortnights special to Visnu^[*] —is of differentiated importance in this fortnight. it is called, as everywhere in South Asia, "Hari Sayani [42]," Visnu's^[*] sleeping." It is on this day that Visnu^[*] begins his four-month cosmic sleep, from which he will awaken on the ekadasi of Kachalathwa four months later, on the day of Hari Bodhini [4], "Visnu's^[*] awakening," in the following lunar year. This ekadasi marks the beginning of a four-month vrata called "Caturmasa," the "four months." Gaborieau (1982), who gives this period critical importance in his account of the structure of the Indo-Nepalese calendar, remarks that for Hindus the Caturmasa is considered an inauspicious period within which, for example, initiation and marriages, and worship for the protection of the village and lineage cannot take place.

For Bhaktapur the special status of this period of Visnu's^[*] sleep is not salient in the annual festival cycle. Other major deities in Hindu tradition leave the world to sleep at various times, also typically for four months. For Bhaktapur the annual departure of the Nine Durgas at Bhagasti seems to be a more critical marker of transition, as are the events in the autumnal harvest festival that lead to their rebirth. The Caturmasa period is, however, of Sanskritic importance to people of the upper thar s. Individuals may decide to perform a vrata during the period, as is the case in all vrata s in fulfillment of a vow or in hope of some good result. Typically people may alter their diets—renouncing meat or salt, eating once a day, or eating from special leaves rather than dishes for the period of the vrata . They may do special worship, including elaborate puja s, to Visnu^[*] during the period. During Caturmasa Brahman storytellers tell stories about Visnu^[*] in the public squares.^[33]

The twelfth day of the fortnight, also devoted to Visnu/Narayana^[*] , is Tulasi Piye Day [43], the day of the planting (piyegu ) of the tulasi plant. Tulasi , a variety of basil, is a plant that has various mythic meanings in Hindu tradition, but which here has its major meaning as representing

Visnu^[*] . On this day people everywhere in the city plant tulasi seedlings in small clay pots, using one pot for each person in the household. If the plant dies during the next month, that is a sign that the individual whom it represents may experience some misfortune. During this period people pray to the plant as Visnu/Narayana^[*] , and after watering it take back a bit of water from one of the leaves and drink it as prasada . Some upper-status people put a bit of gold in the holes in which the seedlings are placed as part of the offering. Although it is only the duration of the first month that is significant as an omen, the plants are kept alive as long as possible. After they die, the leaves are kept for use in death ceremonies, where the leaves represent Visnu^[*] as "Tulasi Narayana^[*] ." They are joined with pindas^[*] , representations of deceased ancestors, during the ceremonies. The day in itself is a minor event.

Guru Puja [44]

The last day in this fortnight, the full-moon day, is the day of Guru Puja, when people are supposed to worship their gurus . Although the day is included in local calendrical lists, it is observed—otherwise than as an ordinary full-moon day—by only a relatively few families in Bhaktapur. It is considered to be generally a Partya, a non-Newar Nepalese Hindu tradition. (Minor.)

Gatha Muga: Ca:re [45] (Devi Cycle)

This is the only festival in the waning fortnight of Dillaga, in July. It takes place on the fourteenth, the ca:re , and it is a major event in the phase of the Devi cycle characterized by the absence from Bhaktapur of the protective Nine^[*] Durgas. Gatha Muga: Ca:re takes place when the rice plants have, ideally, been transplanted into the paddy fields. It is the culmination of a period of conventional shouting of obscenities, culminating in the chasing of effigies of demons out of the city where they are cremated. It is the last event in the Devi cycle before the focal Mohani harvest festival [67-76]. (Major.)

Naga Pa(n)cami [46]

The entire duration of the tenth lunar month, Gu(n)la (July/August), is of special importance to Newar Buddhists throughout the valley (Lewis 1984, 349ff.; Anderson 1971, chap. 7), and there are daily processions and other special events involving the Buddhist population of the city.

But in Bhaktapur's Hindu calendar the first half of the month, the bright fortnight Gu(n)lathwa, contains only two annual events: Naga Pa(n)cami, of moderate importance; and Gunhi Punhi [47], on the last day of the fortnight, introducting a sequence of focal importance. The fifth day, the pa(n)cami of the waxing fortnight Gu(n)lathwa, is Naga Pa(n)cami [46]. On this day the supernatural serpent, the naga , is worshipped, as it is in various ways on this day throughout South Asia. In Bhaktapur, drawings on paper of naga s are placed at the main doorway of each house, and at the entrance of each room of the house. The paintings are worshiped and offered a special mixture of grasses, rice, beans, and cow dung. This is said to help protect people from poisonous snakes, which have become more numerous at this season, and from the equivocally malevolent naga itself, who is often asked to refrain from troubling the house. (Moderate.)

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

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

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.)

Saparu [48], the Cow Festivalof the Dead of the Previous Year, and the Annual Carnival

The first day of the waning fortnight Gu(n)laga (August) is the time for a major festival (see fig. 22) commemorating those who have died in Bhaktapur during the previous year. The festival includes two elements in an intimate mixture, commemorations of death and carnival. The day's events and the inaugural procession of the previous afternoon introduce a period of related activities lasting until the eighth day of the fortnight. The day is called "Saparu" (sometimes "Saparu") or "Saya" in Newari, and Gai Jatra in Nepali. "Sa " means cow, and paru (according to Manandhar [1975, 577]) may derive from parewa , the name of the first day of the lunar fortnight. In local speculation the word derives from sapa , "cow mask," with the ya of Saya supposedly deriving from jatra or yatra , "procession." All these terms refer more specifically to one of the day's elements (which gives the day its name) a procession of real and symbolic cows. The carnival that is mixed with this procession, but which is a distinguishable aspect, will be discussed below.

There are various stories that relate the cow, death and this particular day (Anderson 1971, chap. 10; Nepali 1965, 353ff.).^[37] The consensus is vague and the details vary but it is on this day that the "Cow Goddess" can help the wandering spirits of the dead who had died during the previous year to cross the river Vaitarani into death's realm.^[38] Once the spirit enters death's kingdom, Yama's realm, it can, in traditional doctrine, be "judged" and then transformed into its proper next stage. Much more usual in Bhaktapur seems to be the idea that it is on this day with the help of the Cow Goddess that the wandering spirits will enter "heaven," the idea of judgment in Yama's realm being ignored or suppressed.

Figure 22.
The Saparu festival. An image in the form of the Cow Goddess
Vaitarani representing someone who has died during the previous year.

Some of the other annual calendrical commemorative ceremonies for the dead, namely, those devoted to mothers [33] and fathers [51] apply only to those who have been dead for more than one year, that is, after the first year's period of mourning has been completed. However, the Saparu festival, as its legend indicates, concerns those who have died within the past year, with the exception of the period just prior to the festivals, in which case the first sequence of death rites is still being performed and the members of the household and the phuki are still impure. Members of all thar s except the untouchables take part.

Although the cow jatra , thought to be a specifically Newar festival, exists in other Newar communities, in Bhaktapur it is highly elaborated, and many Newars and other Nepalese come to Bhaktapur from other places to watch it.

The procession is made up of constructions in the form of the Cow Goddess and, rarely, actual cows representing her, each of which represents a particular dead person. Each cow figure is preceded by a carnival group made up of friends or phuki of the household to which the dead person belonged.^[39] The groups vary in number, but in the case of important or particularly popular people they may include hundreds of participants. The symbolic cows may be either "long" or "short" ones, the long ones representing adults, the short ones children.^[40] Other aspects of their decoration indicate whether they were male or female. It is commonly said that in the Malla period officials standing at the palace—which the procession must pass on the festival route—could, by counting the figures, tell how many men, women, boys, and girls had died in Bhaktapur during the previous year. In the few cases now where living cows are used, they are not differentially marked. The long images have a mask of a cow mounted toward the top end of an elaborately decorated long pole. The pole, which requires four men to carry it, is carried in the procession by representatives of the family. The short cow is simply a basket with a mask on it, which is worn over the head of the family representative. Traditionally for the upper thar s these representations were carried or worn by farmers who farmed portions of the deceased person's family's land and performed various services for the family. Those of the middle and lower thar s were carried by phuki members.

Each family supervises the production of the figure that will represent them in the jatra . They are assisted by phuki members, friends, and neighbors. The day before the jatra the household members undergo a major purification. On the day of the festival the cow figure is wor-

shiped by all family members, male and female, as the Cow Goddess, in a puja that is referred to as tarae yagu , literally "crossing a bridge or river," in keeping with the legend explaining the day's events. The cow figure is asked to help the dead person get into Vaikunta^[*] , Visnu/Narayana's^[*] special heaven. Participation in the Saparu procession and the related worship is considered a necessary part of the long sequence of rituals done after the death of any individual (app. 6). In keeping with the legend associated with the festival, it is believed that the dead person will remain as a preta if this participation is neglected, as would also be the case if the various other essential death rituals were neglected.^[41] Most upper-status participating households have also on this day and prior to the procession, a gau dan , a special memorial ritual requiring a Brahman purohita ’s assistance, with the main ritual mourner, the kriya putra (ideally the eldest son) as the central worshiper. The Brahmans themselves, will—in contrast—have their gau dan following the termination of the procession.

The cow jatra procession moves around the city's main festival route. Each symbolic cow, preceded by revelers, enters the festival procession at a point on the pradaksinapatha^[*] jatra route near each family's home. The group makes a circuit of the route, which takes roughly two hours, and then leaves the procession when they are back at the same point at which they entered it. Family members, consisting of the chief mourner, his brothers, and some pbuki members, close affinal relatives and friends, will walk as mourners behind the cow. This group consists of men and children of both sexes. Women watch from the sidelines of the procession. Each group enters the procession at its end as it passes their entrance point, but the result, because of the mixed social constitution of most twa :s, is that the various twa :s are represented in the line of the procession in more or less random social order.

When people from all other neighborhoods have entered the procession the people from the large Lakulache(n) sub-twa : in the Ta:marhi main twa : enter it. They then arrange themselves differently than the participants of the previous twa :s, in a way that makes an impressive visual climax to the procession. For this group all the carnival dancers and maskers representing all the participating households in that neighborhood enter the procession as one group. This group of carnival dancers is joined by anyone in Bhaktapur who wishes to join in the carnival whether or not they are connected to any bereaved household. The dancers are followed, in turn, by a large group of musicians playing the special dance and processional music associated with the jatra .

Behind the musicians men carry a tall image constructed of bamboo and rice straw in shape resembling the long cow images but painted and dressed to represent Bhairava rather than the Cow Goddess. Behind the Bhairava image all the cow images from the Lakulache(n) Twa: households are carried one after the other in a dense mass of images and followed by the household mourners. This large group constitutes the end of the procession. When it gets to Laeku Square, it circumambulates the statue of the Newar King Bhupatindra^[*] Malla, which is located there, three times and then disbands.

Except for the Brahmans, who still have to do their gau dan puja , the day's religious activities are finished. People return to their houses, and the cow images are taken to the river and thrown into it. Household feasts are held m the bereaved households for all who have worked with the household on the image and/or accompanied it in the procession. The married-out household women are expected to return to the household for this feast.

Although the aspect of the Saparu jatra to which we have referred as "carnival" is, as we have seen, an integral part of the day's events, it is convenient to discuss it separately. It is often terminologically distinguished from the remainder of the jatra by referring to it as "Ghe(n)ta(n) Ghesi(n)^[42] Mhetegu." The term "Ghe(n)ta(n) Ghesi(n)" is said to refer onomatopoeically to the sound of a particular kind of drum beat. Mhetegu means to play, as to play at a game. The activities referred to by the term take place only at this time, beginning with the preliminary performances on Gunhi Punhi evening, which we have noted above. Traditionally only farmer thar s and above (including, it may be noted, young Brahmans) participated, but now people from lower groups, with the exception of the untouchables, do. Traditionally, and still, only men take part. This is an "antistructural" festival, but as always in Bhaktapur within strict limits.

On the Saparu day people are free to choose their costumes and their dance performances. Sometimes a subgroup of those preceding a cow image may work together as a thematic unit, but often individuals have their own individual theme. The "free choices," however, usually are among a conventional set of forms, which can be illustrated from the examples we have seen:

1. A popular group of costumes and performances portrays Jyapu activities, and is done both by Jyapus themselves and by upper-level

participants. Many of these are derived from traditional Jyapu dances. People may mimic breaking the soil with a hoe, or cutting grain stalks. Frequently the dance represents a Jyapu couple, with one man taking the man's part, and another the woman's.^[43] It is important to remark that these dances are not lampoons but serious and graceful dance forms.

2. A variant portrayal of Jyapu life shows a Jyapu and Jyapuni, represented by either dancers or puppets carried on the tops of poles by masked dancers. The farmer and his wife often carry sticks, and the couple performs a burlesque fight something like a Western Punch and Judy performance.

3. In addition to dancing Jyapunis, men may sometimes dress and dance as pretty girls of undetermined social status (see fig. 23). Sometimes they perform as a mother, cradling a doll baby (see fig. 24). Such dances, like the Jyapu-Jyapuni dances, are not done satirically but, often, with considerable grace, beauty, and seriousness.

4. There are gross and obscene sexual references in some portrayals, of a kind that would be publicly unacceptable otherwise except during the Devi cycle's Gatha Muga: Ca:re [45] celebrations. In these dances, for example, two men will dance as a heterosexual couple, embracing and moving their hips in coital movements. Others may construct a large model penis and vagina, banging them together in mimicry of sexual intercourse in time to the music of the festival musicians who accompany each group of mourner-revelers. Other men may add mock genitalia, such as a banana and two globular fruits or vegetables to their costumes.^[44]

5. Some dances mimic drunkenness, the performer pretending to drink from a container, and staggering.

6. Another popular group is animals and supernatural forest creatures—bears, tigers, monkeys, Yetis, demons of various types, and so forth.c:\t

7. Participants frequently dress as sadhu s and other types of holy "renouncers."

8. Men dress as various deities, both male and female. These include most prominently Siva (who is perhaps the most frequent deity chosen) and Parvati, Krsna^[*] and Radha, and Rama and Sita.

9. Performers often dress as Moghul Rajas, with turbans and robes.

Figure 23.
Saparu carnival. Man dancing as a woman.

Figure 24.
Saparu carnival. Young man dancing as a mother and carrying a doll child.

10. Sometimes the costumes and decorations are purely abstract and decorative, such as a face painted half black and half white.

There is another category of role-taking that we have saved until last because it has been emphasized in some of the literature on this festival^[45] but seems, at least in Bhaktapur in the period of this study and the years preceding it, to be a minor and muted one. This is the category of satire with some possible political implication. There are some examples of this. People may carry a placard with a caricature of some unpopular figure in the government, sometimes as part of a mock-funeral procession. Most often the satire is more veiled. In one procession, for example, a man danced as a particular rhesus monkey that lived near (and often on) the Bhaktapur royal palace, which now houses some central government administrative offices. It was clear to the onlookers with a little coaching that this represented the chief administrative officer of the district at the time. But the political satire is carefully guarded, and really important figures would be represented, if at all, in most veiled, ambiguous, and—it is hoped—safe forms. Other upper-status figures are represented, but gently—Brahmans dressed in dhotis , public storytellers (who are traditionally Brahmans) represented as telling obscene stories, tourists complete with Western garb (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and mock cameras hung over their shoulders. Although these representations are both muted and rare at present, one can imagine conditions in which they might become dominant.

The carnival performances of Saparu play with the constraints of Bhaktapur's social structure. Satire is only one small component of this. On this day the participants can express things that are usually difficult to express in ordinary civic life. Constraints of gender, role, decent behavior, and (more carefully) respect for hierarchy are overcome, within the usual limits that Bhaktapur imposes on such Dionysian behavior. It is said by older people that on Saparu anyone can be king; anyone can be anything he wants. In fact, however, social criticism and political criticism, is limited; women and the lowest-level thar s cannot take part; among those who do take part, upper thar s usually represent lower ones, and the reverse is less frequent. This latter constraint, however, indicates perhaps something more than some limit on lower-status people escaping the system even in fantasy. The lower-level thar s represent for the upper thar s not only the negative aspects of lower status but also a greater freedom from constraints, including the sexual constraints

whose fantasized overcoming is represented in many of the carnival performances. Upper thar s in Bhaktapur, conversely, represent greater constraints of propriety and self-control for people in the lower thar s looking up. Motives of satire and resentment aside, it would be contrary to the spirit of escape symbolized by the carnival to change ones role for what is, in a certain sense, a still more socially constrained one.

In its involvement of the entire city in public space, the procession on the pradaksinapatha^[*] ; in its concern with the deaths that took place in the city during the preceding year; in its differentiated representation of those deaths by age, sex, and area; and in its carnival expression of the kind of fantasy that reveals something of the structure of the city's life through the freedom and constraints of its "antistructural" play, Saparu is a major festival of focal importance for Bhaktapur. However, its concern with ritual assistance for the preta s of its recently dead to enter heaven—based essentially on the individual work of each bereaved household and reflecting no social differentiation of any significance to the city beyond maturity and gender—as well as the antistructural play of its carnival, puts Saparu in marked contrast to the greatly more elaborate focal festivals of structure , Biska: and Mohani, that we will consider in later chapters. Saparu may be labeled as an "anti-structural focal festival."

The week following Saparu, coming to an end on the eighth day of the fortnight, is a period in which many pyakha(n) s, or "dance dramas," are presented throughout the city. These are of different kinds. One group is of particular interest in that the unmarried girls in a household may join in it, this being the only time in which women in Bhaktapur dance publicly now, although, as we have noted above, women and girls in some thar s must have danced at some time in the past. These particular dances, often called for some reason "Ramayana," usually danced to the music of the Indian instruments, tabla (small drums) and harmonium, accompany songs written by family members to commemorate a person in their family who has died during the year. Family groups, with their singers, dancers, and musicians, walk around the city festival route. Friends and relatives intercept them at various points and invite them to their houses where the group performs their pyakha(n) in the public space in front of the friend or relative's house watched by neighborhoods and bypassers.

Other pyakha(n) s are performed by various groups during this week.

Some of these are traditional stories, some newly created ones, some serious and sentimental, others comic, satirical, or farcical. This is one of the two periods during the year when such pyakha(n) s, are presented. The other is during the eight days of the Indra Jatra sequence [59-65] in the following lunar fortnight. Many of the pyakha(n) s done during the Indra Jatra period are the same or similar to those done following Saparu, but comic dances are done only in the Saparu period, extending the carnival emphasis as the "Ramayana" pyakha(n) s extend the commemoration of the year's deaths.

Miscellaneous Events: Krsna^[*] Janmastami [49] and Sitala Puja [50]

On the eighth day of the month there is a small festival of Krsna^[*] . A Krsna^[*] image is taken from its god-house and carried around the festival route, and there is worship of Krsna^[*] in some homes and by some devotees at the city's Krsna^[*] shrines, which the devotees visit in turn in a procession. This jatra had, reportedly, been introduced into Bhaktapur only some eight to ten years before the study. The devotees were said to be the same people who had become bhakti devotees of Rama (compare Rama Navami [32] above). As is always the case with Bhaktapur's festivals for these avatars of Visnu^[*] , the contrast with other parts of India is striking. Thus Janmastami is "probably the most important vrata and utsava celebrated throughout the whole of India" (Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 128). (Minor.)

On the ninth day of the fortnight, the day of Sitala Puja [50], people, women for the most part, used to go to the statue at Hanuman Ghat^[*] of Sitala, the goddess who represents and protects against smallpox, to ask for protection for the family. This calendrical event is thought to he specific to Bhaktapur. In recent years with the disappearance of smallpox these visits are rare. (Minor.)

On the fourteenth day of the fortnight, Pa(n)cara(n) Ca:re, there is an important Buddhist festival, that of the five Dipankara Buddhas. Five giant and dramatic images of these Buddhas (supported by and enclosing the body of a dancer) march through the city, each coming from a different direction to a central point. These images are associated by local Newar Hindus with the Five Pandava brothers of the Mahabharata epic. Hindus make respect gestures to the images as they are moved through the streets and take prasada from their attendants.

Gokarna^[*] Au(n)si [51], Honoring Fathers

Exactly four months after the new-moon day on which mothers are honored and commemorated [33], on the new-moon day^[46] closing the waning fortnight of Gu(n)laga there is an equivalent symmetrical event honoring and commemorating fathers. People whose fathers have died more than one year previously try to join other Nepalis in a mela at the village of Gokarna^[*] about five miles northeast of Kathmandu, at a spot on the Gokarna^[*] River adjacent to a Siva linga^[*] shrine.^[47] The pilgrims bathe in the river and perform a commemorative puja for their fathers and all their male deceased ancestors. People who cannot go to Gokarna^[*] nevertheless bathe and make the offerings at one of the tirtha s at the river in Bhaktapur.

Those people whose father is living worship him at home, married-out daughters and sons separated from the household returning for this purpose if possible. In the evening there is a feast in the house. (Moderate.)

Miscellaneous Minor Events [52-58]: a Note on Tij, a Festival Which the Newars do not Have

The waxing fortnight of Ya(n)lathwa (August/September) contains eleven festival events, in some cases two different festivals taking place in the same day. In the latter part of the fortnight the complex festival set of events, Indra Jatra [59-65] begins. We will note here first those miscellaneous festivals that precede the beginning of the Indra Jatra. On the second day of the fortnight is the Surya Vinayaka Jatra [52]. The jatra image of the Surya Vinayaka Ganesa^[*] (chap. 8) is carried around the city's main processional route, followed by its devotees. Most of these participants are people from the village, just outside of the city, where the god's shrine is located, but others, as is the case in all minor jatra s, but particularly for those of Narayana^[*] and Ganesa^[*] , are people who have taken the god as a "private god" for some period of time. The festival is held only in Bhaktapur. (Minor.)

On the same day is the Varahi Jatra [53], commemorating Varahi as the mandalic^[*] goddess of her particular section of the city. Local people take the jatra image from the god-house and, accompanied by musicians, carry it around the city's main festival route. This is one of the few jatra s in which both married and unmarried women, dressed in

their better clothes, traditionally join men in their phuki group in following the deity. This festival is only held in Bhaktapur.

The third day of the fortnight also has two festivals. The first of these is the Dattatreya Jatra, [54]. This is primarily a local twa: jatra , but in the course of the day an image of Dattatreya, whose temple is located in the Tachapal twa :, is carried around the city's main festival route. The other festival of the day is a Bhairava Jatra [55]. An image of Bhairava from the main Bhairava temple^[48] is, in its turn, carried around the main festival route. These are minor jatra s, as are the others of this period.

The people of Bhaktapur define themselves differentially in part not only by the customs and festivals they emphasize, but by those followed by others, particularly those that are of great importance to others, which they do not observe. One such festival is Tij, which the Indo-Nepalese (and Hindus in general; see Kane [1968-1977, vol. V, p. 144f.) celebrate on the third day of the fortnight, and which the Newars ignore.^[49] The Tij events contribute to a ritual complex that is the-matically completed on the fifth day of the fortnight, Rsi^[*] Pa(n)cami, according to Lynn Bennett's analysis (1983, 222f.). Some of the themes of Tij are present in attenuated form in Bhaktapur's Rsi^[*] Pa(n)cami [58]; for example, women pray to be spared painful difficulties with menstruation, but other of the themes are not represented.

According to Bennett for the Chetri villagers she studied, "Tij is meant to ensure the long life of one's husband, while Rsi^[*] Pa(n)cami is meant to purify women from the possible sin of having touched a man during their menstrual period. . .. In my view . . . the two are conceptually related" (1983, 222). Bennett (ibid., 225) emphasizes women's erotic activity during Tij, characterized by behavior that is a "virtual seduction of Siva" (the legendary reference is to the relations of Parvati and Siva, as set forth in the Swasthani Vrata Katha ):

The laughing, singing, and dancing at Tij . . . represents a complete reversal of the Hindu ideal of womanly behavior. To say that a girl is shy, embarrassed . . . is to prasise her highly. On Tij the high spirits, the flirtatiousness, the sexuality which women must ordinarily suppress are released en masse at Siva's temple. However, this display of the erotic side of female nature is only permissible because, on Tij, it is held in check by the strict purifying fast which the women are undergoing for the welfare of their husbands. On the morning after Tij, women must perform a puja and make offerings to a Brahman priest dedicating the merit of their fast to their husband (present, future, or in the next life) before they can break the fast. The dangers of

female sexuality are thus firmly bracketed by the mutually reinforcing ascetic and patrilineal ideals.

The Chetri women go as a group to the riverside on Rsi^[*] Pa(n)cami for an elaborate purification ceremony that removes the impurities associated with menstrual blood so that they "may be pure enough to touch men" (Bennett 1983, 225). The bathing is followed by a ceremony (which has a reference to the Rsi^[*] , who give the day its name) in which in Bennett's interpretation "women are purifying their own sexuality. They are channeling it in the only direction acceptable to Hindu patrilineal ideology—toward their own husbands" (ibid., 230). In the light of this discussion, the Newar nonadoption of Tij and the very minor echo of the Chetri women's procedures of Rsi^[*] Pa(n)cami (below) is consonant with one of the main contrasts between the Newar Hindus and the non-Newar Hindus, the social position of their women. The relative freedom of the Newar women, centrally represented in the mock-marriage and their relations to their natal homes, makes for a context in which the carefully bounded ritual expression of women's sexuality and its subsequent restoration to patriarchal control, which is (following Bennett) the meaning of Tij, is much less significant. As a remnant, perhaps, of their northern Himalayan heritage, these tensions are structured, expressed and controlled among the Newars in, comparatively more diffuse and less oppressive ways.

The fourth day of the fortnight is the pan-Hindu Catha Ganesa^[*] day [56]. "Catha" derives from the Sanskrit, Caturthi, the fourth day of the lunar month. This is the occasion in most households for a special puja to Ganesa^[*] , and offerings of the foods that are supposed to be his favorites. The day is associated with stories associating Ganesa^[*] and this fortnight's waxing crescent moon which is supposed to be dangerous if seen on this day. It is said that there are at least some people, at all social levels in Bhaktapur, who try to avoid seeing it. They reportedly go to less length than do those noted in Anderson (1971, 124) and Nepali (1965, 404) who seal the windows of their house and remain inside on this day in order to avoid seeing the moon. (Minor.)

The last event in this miscellaneous group is on the fifth day, the pa(n)cami , of the fortnight, Rsi^[*] Pa(n)cami [57]. The Rsis^[*] are worshiped in some households, particularly in upper-status ones, with a dhala(n) danegu puja (app. 4). On this day some women worship the Rsis^[*]

for, it is said, good health, including protection against menstrual difficulties and for protection of the house and children in what is, apparently, an echo of the theme of the Chetri practice described by Bennett (1983), in that they are both derived from traditional Hindu vratas of the day.^[50] However, the Newar practices are individually performed in the household not in groups of women; they are minor pujas and not elaborate purification ceremonies, and they are not in the dramatic context of the Tij ceremonies, as are the Chetri women's practices of the day. (Minor.)

On the seventh day of the fortnight, the day of Uma/Mahesvara [58], in many households, but especially in Jyapu houses, there is special worship of Parvati and Siva in their manifestation as Uma/Mahesvara represented as an affectionate conjugal couple. Women present ceremonial threads to the idealized couple, and then take one back as prasada and tie it around their husband's wrist. (Minor.)

Events During the Period of Indra Jatra [59-65]: the Transformation of Festival Themes and Events in Different Newar Cities and Towns

From the twelfth day of Ya(n)lathwa to the fourth day of the following waning fortnight of Ya(n)laga is the eight-day period of Indra Jatra, which in some other Newar communities, most notably in Kathmandu, maintains aspects of an ancient Indian calendrical festival (V. S. Agrawala 1970, 55). In Kathmandu Indra Jatra is a thematically integrated sequence that is one of the focal festival events of that city's annual calendar. Each of the Newar cities and towns have one or more such festival events or sequences that are specially developed in the community and which attract people from other communities as spectators. Conversely, a festival cycle that is highly developed in one community appears, by contrast, to be relatively (and sometimes completely) ignored in another. Indra Jatra is an example of a festival that is comparatively ignored in Bhaktapur. The group of calendrical events that we are including together here as taking place during the span of Indra Jatra contain some events [59, 61, 65], which are clearly represented in Kathmandu as integrated by certain local legends about Indra, and are understood to be related to these stories by some people in Bhaktapur. For many or perhaps most people in Bhaktapur, however, they are simply independent events, of the same disconnected

kind as the other miscellaneous calendrical events that happen to fall within these eight days.

The equivocally component days of the Indra Jatra (i.e., days that have thematic connections with the integrated sequence as it has been described for Kathmandu) are Yama Dya: Thanigu [59], Indrani^[*] Jatra [61], Yau Dya: Punhi [62], and Pulu Kisi Haigu [65].

In Kathmandu Indra Jatra is a major eight-day festival consisting of a number of dramatic and climactic events. Some of these events in Kathmandu are related to a legend of Indra's personal relation to that city. Others center on the dangerous deity Akas Bhairava (represented by huge dramatic masks), on Bhagavati, on the living goddess Kumari, and on other comparatively minor supernatural figures (Nepali 1965, 358-369; Anderson 1971, chap. 15).

We have suggested that some of the similar events of this period in Bhaktapur are transformed in meaning because they are not put in the context of a major integrative festival. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that some of the elements in Kathmandu's focal Indra Jatra are moved in Bhaktapur to other times of the year and, for the most part, amalgamated into Bhaktapur's own major and focal festivals. Thus, for example, the Kathmandu Indra Jatra festival is inaugurated and ends with the raising and then, eight days later, lowering of a forty-foot pole, the trunk of a particular kind of tree. The same kind of tree, gathered in the same place by members of Bhaktapur's branch of the same thar (the Sa:mi), is erected and lowered as one of the central symbolic foci in Bhaktapur's Biska: festival. During Kathmandu's Indra Jatra a procession (associated there with a group of legends about Indra and "Indra's mother") for the salvation of those who had died during the previous years is in some ways a transformation of Bhaktapur's Saparu procession. Indra Jatra in Kathmandu is the period in which the living goddess, Kumari, makes her main public appearance, and establishes her relationship to the Gorkha king. In Bhaktapur this happens, with Bhaktapur's own Kumari, during Mohani. Kathmandu's Indra Jatra period is the major time for the appearance of masked dancers representing demon-like gods who fight on the side of dharma against the Asuras and other antagonistic supernatual beings. One representation of this is the killing by the Kathmandu dancers of a buffalo representing an Asura king. All this is represented in Bhaktapur during the Mohani festival and in the subsequent nine-month cycle of the Nine Durgas dancers.

Many people in Bhaktapur seem to know some local version of the

Indra story. Here is a brief sketch of one of Bhaktapur's versions: Indra's mother sent him to get some white flowers of a special kind from a particular garden on earth. A demon caught Indra taking the flowers, accused him of stealing them, and captured him. "Indra's mother," who is not otherwise named in the tale, not knowing where Indra was, sent Indra's vehicle, an elephant, to earth to find him. The elephant found Indra and reported his whereabouts to Indra's mother, who came to earth to rescue him. The demon released Indra when his mother came, and she gave the demon clouds and fog as a reward, the clouds and fog necessary for protecting the rice, which is still growing at this period of the year. When Indra and his Mother returned to heaven, people on earth wanted to follow them and so some of them left a trail of grain on the gods' path so that the humans could later find their way there.

The twelfth day of the fortnight, the beginning of the Indra Jatra, period in Kathmandu, is called in Bhaktapur the "Yama Dya: Thanigu" day [59], the day of the erecting of the Yama God. In Kathmandu the raising of a pole made from a tall tree trunk in a central square signals the beginning of the festival there and marks a focal spatial point. In many of Bhaktapur's twa :s, tree poles are erected.^[51] They are said to represent the ruler of the kingdom of death, Yama. These local poles are left up, as is the Kathmandu central one, for the entire eight-day period. Flowers are placed at the top of the pole, and twa : people do daily pujas to it during the eight days. It is thought that this will help protect the local twa : people from death. (Moderate.)

On the fourteenth day of the fortnight—and with no reference to the Indra cycle—is the Ananta Narayana^[*] Puja [60]. This is a local representation of a traditional South Asian Hindu event in honor of Visnu/Narayana^[*] . Many people go to one of the Visnu^[*] temples on this day, as they did on the other city-wide Visnu^[*] festival, Tulasi Piye [43]. Some Chathariya families follow the traditional Hindu custom of pledging to do a Brahman-assisted household puja to Visnu^[*] each year on this day for a period of fourteen years. (Minor.)

On the fourteenth day (the same day as Narayana^[*] Puja) and continuing on the fifteenth and final day, the full-moon day, of the fortnight is Indrani^[*] Jatra [61]. Additional events of the fifteenth day are designated as the festival of that full-moon day, Yau Dya: Punhi [62], but they also represent the completion of the two-day Indrani^[*] Jatra. The Indrani^[*]jatra image is taken from her local god-house and carried in a procession around the entire city, followed by people from the local

mandalic^[*] area Indrani^[*] is thought of, by some at least, on this occasion not as, or only as, the Indrani^[*] of the Astamatrkas^[*] group, but as Indra's consort. The image is carried to one of the artificial ponds in the city, the Ta Pukhu, and left there in an open building, a phalca , overnight. (Moderate.)

The next day is the full-moon day, called "Yau Dya: Punhi" [62]. The name "Yau Dya:," the Yau God, seems to come from a set of three torches called Ya matta (or Swarga ["heaven"] Ya matta ), which are carried around the city on a long stick by a member of the Sa:mi thar on the three days following this punhi . They are considered to be a manifestation of a god, and people try to see the lights, a view that is said to enable them to enter Swarga , heaven, at some time during the period. This reflects the Indra Jatra's legend's theme of the following of Indra and his mother into their heaven. On this day people come from surrounding villages and towns (particularly from the large town of Thimi) and from other parts of Bhaktapur for ritual baths in the Ta Pukhu and to worship the image of Indrani^[*] . The day is, thus, a mela . In the afternoon the image is carried around the city festival route and then returned to its god-house. (Moderate.)

The span of Indra Jatra continues into the next fortnight, the waning fortnight Ya(n)laga (September). On the second day of the fortnight a man from a nearby village, paid by the central government's Guthi Samsthan, comes to Bhaktapur to begin three days of performance. He represents a demon called "Mu Patra," wears a metal crown (which is at other times kept in the Taleju temple), and dresses in the old Malla-period Moghul-style royal costume. He is accompanied by two demon attendants, called "Dhicas." He visits during these three days the poles that had been set up in the different twa :s on the Yama Dya: Thanigu day [59] representing Yama. He circumambulates each pole three times, hitting it with a traditional Malla period sword. People now are uncertain about the meaning of all this, although it seems to have been related both to the period's Indra legend and to another supernatural creature, the Pulu Kisi, who appears on the last day [65] of the period's set of events. G. S. Nepali wrote (of Bhaktapur) that the Mu Patra represented the demon enemy of Indra, and that the poles that he strikes thus represent Indra. According to Nepali, care is taken that Mu Patra does not encounter the Pulu Kisi, which "is the riding animal of Indra . . . [which] has come in search of its master. . .. In the event of their facing each other, there ensues a fight between the two, involving their respective supporters" (1965, 364). In fact, in recent memory they have

not met, and the significance and possibility of their encounter seems no longer an issue. The violence that, as we shall see, does sometimes occur in relation to the Pulu Kisi—whose relation to Indra is now vague—is not related to the Mu Patra, who is a symbolic form that has now lost much of its meaning and power.

On the third day of the fortnight there is a small local jatra , Chuma(n) Gandya: Jatra [63], in one of the city's main twa :s, Coche(n) twa: . It is noteworthy and peculiar in that it is a minor version of a more important event with the same name, the same associated legend, and in the same location that takes place on the eighth day of the solar New Year festival, Biska:. That event will be described in the next chapter. The one listed here is minor.

On the fourth day of the fortnight, the last day of the Indra Jatra span, there are two festivals. The first, Smasana^[*] Bhailadya: Jatra, is not associated with the themes of the Indra story, although it reflects references to King Yama and to death. The second, Pulu Kisi Haigu, which ends this set of events, contains some reflections of the Indra story and some correspondences to its closing sequences in Kathmandu.

Smasana^[*] Bhailadya: Jatra [64], refers to the Bhairava who inhabits the Mu Dip cremation grounds (see chap. 8). "Smasana^[*] " means cremation grounds in Sanskrit and Nepali. An image representing this Bhairava is painted on a pulu , a reed mat, by a properly initiated member of the Pu(n) thar , the mask makers, and painters of religious images. Pulus are the mats used for covering dead bodies while they are being carried in funeral processions to cremation grounds. If the head priest of the Taleju temple has died during the previous year, his pulu is taken from his corpse, saved, and used in this procession; otherwise, it is a new and unused one. It is said that during the time of the Malla kings their pulus were kept after their death. The pulu of a deceased king would be used every year in this annual procession until replaced by the next king's pulu following the death of that king. On this day now the pulu is hung in front of the main Bhairava temple. People either passing by or coming to the temple for the purpose, make respectful gestures to the pulu . People who encounter it fear it and, as is the case generally for dangerous deities, fear that if they neglect to worship it or show it formal respect they will be harmed in some way. At a designated time during the day a goat is sacrificed in the square adjoining the temple. The pulu is then taken and carried by a member of the Dwi(n) thar (level XII; see chap. 5) in a procession around the main city festival route until the

Bhairava temple is once again reached and the pulu is once again hung on the wall for the remainder of the day. (Moderate.)

On the same day as the Smasana^[*] Bhailadya: Jatra there is another event that makes for a kind of climax to the loosely grouped set of events of the eight-day period. This event is called "Pulu Kisi Haigu" [65]. (Pulu is the funeral mat, kisi means elephant, and haigu means to bring, thus the name means the bringing of the "Pulu Kisi.") The Pulu Kisi is an image of an elephant constructed of reed mats. The image is carried around the city, starting in the Lakulache(n) neighborhood, and is carried and attended by local people. The elephant has a bell around its neck, which is rung by the attendants during the procession. During this time other bells in the city are not to be rung. When the image passes by, bystanders, both men and women, must uncover their heads as a gesture of respect. If they do not the attendants of the elephant, often carrying the elephant with them, may charge into the crowd, and forcibly uncover the offender's head, removing the hat or shawl. The elephant also is occasionally made to charge into the crowd of bystanders even if there is no show of disrespect. This is frequently the occasion for a general fight between attendants and crowd, sometimes extending to and dividing groups or individuals within the crowd. This day is one of the times when people traditionally drink, and the attendants of the elephant and many in the crowd are drunk. When the elephant, in its movement around the city's festival route, now followed by crowds of people, approaches Dattatreya Square in the northern part of the city, it leaves the route to "drink at a well" where Indra's elephant once drank. This is often the occasion for fairly serious fights, characteristically between members of the upper and lower halves of the city. These are sometimes precipitated by someone from the upper city ringing a temple bell in the square in contravention of the custom of the day.

The Pulu Kisi refers now secondarily to Indra,^[52] but more clearly to death (the funeral mats, and its association with the Smasana^[*] Bhailadya: Jatra of the same day), to danger, and to threat. Its attacks on the crowd randomly or for not showing respect have parallels in the Nine Durga pyakha(n)s during the Devi cycle. Its connection to intra-city fighting is an echo of the events of the Biska: sequence. However, the similar themes in those two focal festival groups are coherently related to themes not only of ritual conflict but also the symbolic resolution of that conflict. In contrast with such festival events, and as we have noted, in contrast with the simultaneous events in Kathmandu, the events of

the Indra Jatra period in Bhaktapur are not integrated. They seem in a sense to be fragments of what may have been once in Bhaktapur—and that is now elsewhere—a coherent set. In spite of its drama, its significance and the size of its audience probably are "moderate" in comparison to other more important events.

During these eight days pyakha(n) s, resembling some of those performed after Saparu, are given in some parts of the city. The period closes after the Pulu Kisi Haigu procession with the removal of the Indra/Yama poles in the twa :s

The Remainder of the Yearly Calendrical Cycle [66-79]

There is one more calendrical event during this fortnight. This is Dhala(n) Sala(n) [66], which may optionally be observed on either the ninth day of the fortnight or the fifteenth, the new-moon day. This is a day for one of the ceremonies in the long sequence following death (app. 6). The ceremony is for the "pitr s^[*] ," in this case all deceased ancestors of a phuki group who have been dead for more than two years, and the ceremonies are performed ideally at the riverside by large groups of associated phuki members. Occasionally phuki members conduct a continuous series of sraddha^[*] procedures on sixteen consecutive days, starting with the day on which they do the Dhala(n) Sala(n) ceremony. (Moderate.)

The first ten days of the next fortnight, the waxing fortnight of Kaulathwa (September/October), is the period of the focal autumnal rice harvest festival Mohani [67-76], which will be discussed in the presentation of the Devi cycle in chapter 16. During the last three days of the final fortnight of the lunar year, Kaulaga, three events take place which are the three introductory days of the Swanti sequence [77, 78, 79], which culminate and begin anew the lunar year, and which were described at the beginning of this chapter.

Chapter Fourteen
The Events of the Solar Cycle

Introduction

The vast majority of the annual events in Bhaktapur, as elsewhere in Hindu South Asia, are organized by the lunar calendrical cycle. Bhaktapur has a very few fortnightly and annual events whose timing is determined by the solar calendar. One set of these events, Biska:, however, is one of Bhaktapur's focal festivals, rivaled in its sheer quantity of activities, complexity, integration, and urban importance by only the Mohani festival [67-77].

Ghya: Caku Sa(n)lhu [10]

"Sa(n)lhu " is the old Newari for the first day of a solar month. The Nepali Sanskritic term sankranti^[*][1] is used in ordinary references to this day. This sankranti^[*] , Ghya: Caku Sa(n)lhu [10],^[2] comes in the second week of January (in 1974/75 on the thirteenth day of Pohelathwa, in the Nepali month of Pausa^[*] ). It was of special importance in traditional South Asia as Makara-Sankranti^[*] (Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 211ff.) in that it marked the winter solstice, and the beginning of the udagayana , the "ascending," brightening half of the year. Like other sankranti^[*] in Bhaktapur, the day is special to Visnu^[*] , but on this day there are some extra activities related to the story of Visnu's^[*] dwarf avatar Vamana, in which form Visnu^[*] recaptures heaven and the earth from the Asura Mahabali. On this day an offering is given by every middle-status and

upper-status household to its Brahman purohita , or family priest.^[3] The offering consists of jaki (unhusked, uncooked rice), vegetables, uncooked pulses, and ghya: caku , a mixture of clarified butter (ghya :, or ghee) and molasses (caku ), for which the day is named. The offering, at least according to Brahman and Chathariya informants, signifies that the Brahmans as heirs to Visnu/Narayana^[*] were once the owners of all the land, an ownership that in some versions of the Vamana story, (e.g., Stutley and Stutley 1977, 321) was contested by the Asura, Mahabali, and restored through Visnu's^[*]avatar . In the morning of this day there are offerings of ghya: caku to the household deities. People eat ghya: caku during the day, and it is served at the household feasts that take place during the evening. Friends and affinal family, as well as phuki , are invited to these feasts, called nakhatya . A peculiarity of these feasts is that on this occasion alone boiled rice is served rather than the beaten rice that is always otherwise served at feasts. Ghya: caku is poured over the boiled rice. This is a striking and to contemporary people in Bhaktapur a mysterious and unexplained reversal of the customary practice. The ghya: caku is also made into sweetmeats that (as well as a certain kind of wild yam) are also traditionally eaten on this day.^[4] (Moderate.)

Biska: [20-29]: The Solar New Year Festival

Three months after the winter solstice period of Ghya: Caku Sa(n)lhu, the sankranti^[*] at the approximate time of the vernal equinox marks the beginning of the solar New Year. The solar New Year comes in the course of a nine-day festival, Biska: (also sometimes written "Biska") (see fig. 25). The New Year's Day, which in 1975/76 fell on the fourteenth day of the waxing lunar fortnight of Caulathwa (Caitra, in March/April), is the fifth, the midday, of the nine-day sequence. Biska:, which draws spectators from all over the valley, is unique to Bhaktapur,^[5] and one of the four annual festivals of focal importance for the city. The beginning of the solar New Year is signaled on the fifth, the central day of the sequence, with the pulling down of a great tree-trunk pole, the yasi(n) —also locally called lya:si(n)^[6] —which had been erected on the previous day. In the course of the nine days themes of division, conflict, and reintegration are represented and enacted. Images of sexuality and images (and realities) of physical struggle embody these themes, which ultimately have as their reference the city as a whole. The themes are expressed through a pattern of interlocking im-

Figure 25.
Biska:. The struggle to pull the Bhairava chariot into the upper or
lower city.

ages, stories, and actions with three main foci: (1) the city's major space-protecting deities, (2) the adventures of two of Bhaktapur's dangerous deities (Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] ) who are dominant during the festival, and (3) the "Yasi(n) God" whose actions mark the end of one year and the beginning of the next.

The chronicles have references to the supposed historical introduction of the Biska:^[7] festival into Bhaktapur (Wright [1877] 1972, 191):

[Jagajjyotir Malla, in the early seventeenth century] introduced at Bhatgaon [Bhaktapur] the custom of holding the rath-jatra [a chariot procession] of Adi-Bhairava on the anniversary of the Mesh [Mesa^[*] ] Sankranti when a tall pole was erected in his honor as a flagstaff. . .. Having on one occasion suspected that the Bhairava of Bhatgaon had improper desires regarding a certain Sakti or female deity, he punished him by bringing the rath [chariot] of Kali into violent collision with the Bhairava's rath.

In the two large complex festival sequences, Biska: and Mohani, there is some arbitrariness in deciding which of the several component events should be listed as elements in themselves for the purposes of a catalogue of annual events. For Mohani (chap. 15) we were able to follow the conventional local festival calendar in listing component events. For Biska:, however, that calendar indicates only the central portions of the nine-day sequence, the raising [21] and lowering [24] of the Yasi(n) God to signal the ending of the old and the start of the new solar year. As the description of the sequence that follows indicates, there are approximately ten major component events,^[8] and many minor ones in the course of the sequence. One of these "events," the Bhairava/Bhadrakali Jatra, takes place intermittently m a set of component phases throughout most of the nine days of the Biska: sequence.

There is a further difficulty in comparing the components of the complex focal sequences (and the components of the Devi cycle) with the relatively disconnected events of the remainder of the annual cycle; this is in the evaluation of the importance of individual component events. Components of larger sequences are of varying importance in two ways—in themselves, in some sense, and in the extent and nature of their contribution to the meaning and significance of the larger sequence. For our purposes of providing an approximation of the quantity and significance of calendrical events we are conventionally designating the components of focal events as of "major" importance.

In our descriptions of the "structural focal sequences," here Biska:, and in the next chapter Mohani and its associated Nine Durgas performances, we are faced with the descriptive problems produced by a

change of the scale that is now of importance to us. In earlier chapters we have tried to filter out unnecessary details, sometimes placing them in appendixes, for the sake of keeping a narrative or an argument relatively clear. However, these focal festivals are not only relatively massive and complex, but their details are particularly meaningful in relation to the organization of the city at its own level. While the preceding chapters were able to build to a large extent on what had gone before, the reader who wishes to follow the meaningful patterning of the focal sequences of this and the next chapter must be faced with large quantities of fairly minute descriptive detail out of which the festivals' meanings slowly arise.

The Preliminary Preparations

1. The yasi(n).

A few days prior to the start of the sequence a group of men from the Sa:mi thar^[9] go to a forest in the hills, about a two hours walk east of Bhaktapur.^[10] They select a tree for the large yasi(n) by releasing a goat and waiting to see which tree it rubs its head against. The goat is then sacrificed to the tree, and the tree is cut down. The trunk is cleared, except for selected branches at the top that will represent the Yasi(n) God's hair. A second smaller tree is also selected for a secondary yasi(n) , and its limbs are cut off. Ropes are attached to the shorn trees and they are then dragged along the river bed toward Bhaktapur by men chanting a rhythmic work chant to coordinate their efforts. Each evening at sundown the trees are left, the men returning the next day to begin dragging them again. They will finally, after two or three days, be dragged into Bhaktapur, respectively to the field, the Yasi(n) Khya:, where the large yasi(n) will be raised, and to the location in the potters' quarter where the smaller one will be raised.

2. Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] .

Eight days prior to the solar New Year's Day, and thus three days before the festival sequence is to begin, the jatra image of the dangerous goddess Bhadrakali^[*] is taken from the inner room of her god-house and brought to a front room where non-initiates may enter. The god-house of Bhadrakali^[*] is the house that also houses the mandalic^[*] goddess Vaisnavi^[*] , and it is only during the Biska: festival that the goddess of this location is exclusively thought of as Bhadrakali^[*] ,^[11] who is in her form, legend and consort quite distinct from the other goddess.^[12] Vaisnavi^[*] , although a dangerous deity, is a beautiful form of the Goddess. For this particular festival she is trans-

formed into the terrible form of the Goddess as Bhadrakali^[*] , and the jatra image represents this form, with its frightening face, fangs, and multiple arms. Our informants do not know why Bhadrakali^[*] is associated with Vaisnavi^[*] rather than another deity. The image of her coprotagonist, Bhairava, is also brought down from its ordinary hiding place in the main Bhairava temple into the public area of the temple, on the first day of the sequence.

During the days prior to the festival the chariot that will carry the public jatra image of Bhairava will have been refurbished.^[13] This is the responsibility of several craft guthis , including those of the painters, carpenters, and the Sa:mi, the traditional oil pressers, who have several important support functions in this festival.

3. The representation of Royalty.

On the day before the beginning of the festival an official of the central government's Guthi Samsthan comes to Bhaktapur from Kathmandu. Accompanied by musicians, he walks around the city festival route carrying an ancient sword representing "the king,"^[14] which will be used in later stages of the festivals.

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

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]

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

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.

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

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-

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 Second Day

The chariots are where they had been left on the previous night. The deities are in the special jatra god-houses. This is a quiet day after the late-night events of the previous night, an interlude before the crowded days that are to follow. People go about their ordinary activities, although many may go to one or both god-houses and offer minor sacrifices.

The Third Day

The third day of sequence is the occasion for a feast, a bhwae , the first feast of Biska:, with meat eating and the drinking of alcohol. The day is

popularly called syakwa tya , a word of uncertain meaning now, but thought to have reference to the eating of large and thus stomach-disturbing quantities of food.^[24]

There is an important secret puja in the Taleju temple on this day, during which several goats and a buffalo are sacrificed to one of the esoteric forms of the goddess contained in the temple.

The Fourth Day

Preliminaries

The events of the fourth day fall into three events or clusters of events, which occur sequentially. The first is the raising of the secondary yasi(n) . The second is the raising of the primary yasi(n) , one of the pivotal events of the Biska: sequence. The third is the "taking out" of certain god images, in preparation for the local areal jatras that will follow on succeeding days.

During the morning of the fourth day a yasi(n) , the shorter of the two tree trunks that had previously been dragged to Bhaktapur by the Sa:mi, is erected in the Talakwa area of the Bolache(n) twa: . Talakwa is the larger of the city's two potters' quarters. This yasi(n) is popularly known as the "Yasi(n) God without arms," in contrast to the main yasi(n) , which has a transverse crossbar toward its top representing, among other things, arms. The armless Yasi(n) God will remain standing until the final ninth day of the sequence. After the Armless Yasi(n) God is pulled into upright position by means of ropes and pushing, a local man acting as a priest quickly leads the god through the dasakarma , the ten basic samskaras or rites of passage, to bring it to its "mature" form.^[25]

Meanwhile the Bhairava chariot has been moved into the proper position for Bhairava's next journey. It is arranged with its front end facing south toward the Yasi(n) Khya, the field where the main Yasi(n) is to be erected. Once again with the same processions and ceremonies as on the first day the king, his Guru-Purohit, and the rest of the chariot crew assemble and wait by the Bhairava chariot. Bhairava is brought from his jatra god-house to the chariot and placed in it and is followed into it by all the riders who take their positions as on the first day. The Bhadrakali^[*] image is then brought from the special jatra Bhadrakali^[*] god-house and placed in her chariot, which is also facing toward the Yasi(n) Khya. Now the Bhairava chariot, with the Bhadrakali^[*] chariot following it, is pulled down the road to the upper end of the Yasi(n) Khya (map 5), "so that the two deities can watch the erection of the main Yasi(n)

God." This brings together the Bhairava/Bhadrakali pair and the Yasi(n) God, the deities around whom most of the stories, ideas and action of the festival are gathered.

The Raising Up of the Main Yasi(n) God—The Ending of the Old Year

The erection of the Yasi(n) God pole^[26] is one of the foci of the festival sequence (see fig. 26). The yasi(n) draws to itself, as we will see, diverse legends and meanings. These are, superficially at least, almost entirely separate from the Bhairava/Bhadrakali story, although there is a very tangential reference in some of the yasi(n) stories to Bhairava. The falling of the yasi(n) will indicate the coming to an end of the old year, and the beginning of the new. It marks a focal point not only in time, but in space for people throughout the city who, if at all possible, come to witness its raising and its bringing down.

In contrast to other points that are given a focal and central meaning in other events—such as the palace area, Ta:marhi Square, and the Tripurasundari pitha —Yasi(n) Field is in a vaguely defined boundary area. Not far to its east is the area where the Po(n) untouchables live in an area that is clearly outside of the symbolic city (map 4). The position of Yasi(n) Field; the peculiarity of the second Yasi(n) in the potters' area, which seems disconnected from other events and whose existence has no present doctrinal^[27] or legendary explanation; the presence of additional, secondary god-houses for Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] ; and, for some observers, the struggle between the upper and lower city halves, have led to some attempts at historical rather than structural and functional explanations for these phenomena (e.g., Kölver 1980, 168; Guts-chow 1984). Such explanation takes these features as indications of residues of old, separate, and antagonistic communities, and witnesses of the locations of now forgotten centers of ancient once unamalgamated towns.^[28]

As we have noted, the very tall tree, perhaps forty feet in height, which will be the Yasi(n) God has been divested of all its limbs, except for the branches at the summit, which represent the god's hair. A straight segment of another tree is attached at right angles some feet below the top of the trunk, giving it a cruciate form. This is said to be the yasi(n) 's arms, which, it will be recalled, differentiate it terminologically from the smaller yasi(n) . Some small branches and leaves are attached to the ends of the crosspiece to represent the god's hands and fingers. The yasi(n) 's form, then, is given an anthropomorphic inter-

Figure 26.
Biska:. A stage in the raising of the Yasi(n) God to mark the solar
New Year.

pretation, in keeping with its designation as a deity, the Yasi(n) God. Toward the juncture of the crossbranch and the main trunk two long strips of cloth are tied, one at each side. These are pata , banners,^[29] of the sort that are sometimes tied to the pinnacles of religious structures and which, like many other aspects of the Yasi(n) God, are given more than one interpretation. Thus, in an echo of the later developments in the Bhairava/Bhadrakali plot, they are said to represent Siva and Sakti, and when they move in the wind, this represents their sexual intercourse. The two banners are also related to a legend about the saving of Bhaktapur from two snakes by a Tantric magician who came to a bad end through the weakness of his wife, a story that we will recount below. Sometimes the banners are said to represent the snakes; sometimes the Tantric Acaju and his wife. A bundle of eight ropes is also tied onto the upper part of the trunk. In one interpretation the eight ropes represent the eight Matrkas at Bhaktapur's borders, and the yasi(n) represents Bhairava. When the ropes flutter in the wind, this represents the intercourse between Bhairava and the Matrka^[*] .^[30]

The stories about the snakes come in different versions, borrowing freely and heavily from widespread and well-known Hindu folk tales. Some versions are quite long and detailed, and are popular local stories recounted by traditional Brahman storytellers in the city. We will paraphrase (and shorten) the two major variants of the stories.

The first version is in itself a cluster of unrelated stories, which rather clumsily gives a legendary warrant to miscellaneous aspects of Biska:. In the first version of the story, it happened that a long time ago there was a king in Bhaktapur whose daughter married. On her wedding night she and her groom went to their room, "had a friendly talk," and then had sexual intercourse. After that they slept deeply. As they were sleeping a pair of snakes came out of the princess's nose.^[31] The snakes grew bigger and bigger. They then bit the prince, who died. The snakes, shrinking to their original size, crawled back into the princess's nose. The princess, who was unaware of the snakes that she harbored, awoke and was distressed to see her dead husband. The king was also sad, and arranged for a funeral procession and cremation. This occurrence was repeated with many new husbands over the years.^[32] The local people, therefore, had to arrange for many expensive royal funeral processions and cremations, and they formed a special guthi to take care of them.

One day a prince came to a forest. He met an old woman there, at a river that flowed among the trees. He asked her what she was doing there, and she said that she had come to meet him to advise him to marry the princess. He asked what he should do and whether he would

have a happy marriage with the princess. The old woman told him about the snakes, and told him to stay awake and kill them with his sword. "Then you will have a beautiful wife, wealth, and a kingdom." She told him to go to the eastern part of the forest and that he would find a sword at a place where three rivers met. The story then recounts his meeting and marriage with the princess. "After the marriage they went to sleep in their room. The young man had great courage. It was a very difficult thing to do. They had a good conversation, then they had sexual intercourse and the princess went to sleep, but the young man did not sleep. He was very cautious. He remembered what the old woman had said." When the snakes appeared, he killed them. But before they died, the snakes said to him "You are a lucky and a great man. We have killed many princes and now we are going to die. That may be good or it may be bad. Please do a memorial for us every year." The story recounts the surprise and happiness in the city the next day at the prince's survival.

The prince established a festival on the last day of the solar month of Caitra. He erected a yasi(n) ), and attached the two patas to it to represent the two supernatural snakes or nagas . The festival is called bisket (the Nepali language version of the name), bi meaning "snake," and syat meaning "he killed." The old woman whom the prince met in the forest was really Bhadrakali^[*] , which is why the festival is dedicated to her. In the forest where they met there were many tall trees and it is a tree taken every year from this forest which incarnates the Yasi(n) God. The tirtha , the place where the prince found the sword, is at the river Hanumante just at the Bhadrakali^[*] (Vaisnavi^[*] ) pitha . Because it was Bhadrakali^[*] who helped the prince, it was decided to erect the pole in sight of Bhadrakali's pitha , which is just to the south of Yasi(n) Field.

Now the appearance of Bhadrakali^[*] allows another piece of the story to be attached. One day, after the Bhadrakali^[*] Jatra had been established, Bhairava came from Kasi (Benares) to see it. This particular Bhairava was called "Kasi Bhairavanatha," the chief of the Bhairavas. A local Tantric practitioner recognized Bhairava in the crowd and tried to trap him by means of a powerful mantra . But Bhairava tried to escape by sinking into the ground. When all of his body except his head had disappeared below the ground, Bhadrakali^[*] recognized him and said, "That is my husband, we must keep him here. At least cut off and keep his head." That was done. The head was placed in the Bhairava temple in Ta:marhi Square, and the body was returned to Benares (where there is an important headless representation of Bhairava).

Thus, in memory of the meeting of Bhadrakali^[*] and Bhairava, temples throughout Bhaktapur organized jatras for their gods and goddesses.^[33]

There is another and different tale told about the Yasi(n) God. This one contains a theme that is echoed in the legends about the origin of the Nine Durgas (chap. 15). This theme concerns a man of great magical power whose power is lost through some error of his wife's, an error that is a sign of her weakness of character. If the story of the prince and the snakes is taken to mean in part that women are dangerous for domesticity until their dangerous "phallic" attributes have been brought under control by male action, then this story suggests that that control is always precarious. In a popular local version^[34] told by Brahman storytellers, the protagonist in a long story is Sesar^[*] Acaju, a Karmacarya priest with exceptional Tantric powers, who was the guru of a Licchavi king of Bhaktapur, Siva Deva.^[35] The story tells how the priest protected Bhaktapur from an attack by the Kiratas by turning himself into one thousand tigers and chasing off the Kirati army. "But after I have chased off the Kiratas, I will return to you in the form of a tiger," said Sesar^[*] Acaju to the king. "Don't be afraid. You must throw rice on me, and I will become a man again. The acaju gave the king some grains of husked rice to which the proper Tantric power had been added. He chased away the Kiratas, returned to the king, and was turned back into a man. The king welcomed him gratefully to his palace. The tale continues:

Sesar^[*] Acaju returned to his own house. His wife was very happy to see him, she respected and loved him very much. One day Sesar^[*] Acaju talked with his wife of his feats. His wife said, "Can you turn yourself into a python (aji[n]gar )?" Sesar^[*] said, "Yes, I can." His wife said, "I am very curious to see you as a python." Sesar^[*] Acaju agreed with her wish, and said "I will show you myself as a python, but don't be afraid." He gave her some magical polished rice (kiga: ) [given special power by a mantra] and said "I am going to become a python. You can see me as a python for as long as you like, but then you must throw the rice at me and I will become a man again." He showed himself to her as a python but she became frightened and forgot about the rice. She ran away. The python followed her in order to get the rice. While his wife, Nararupa, was running away in her fear she put her hand to her mouth and happening to swallow some of the rice she was carrying she also turned into a python.

The story goes on to say how the two great snakes moved through

Bhaktapur trying to find the proper kiga: to change them back into human form. They went to a Tantric temple in the hope that people with Tantric knowledge there could help them, but they had no luck. They then went to the palace in the hope that the king might help. The king did not know who they were, but he announced to the people that the two serpents (referred to at this point as naga and nagini , as supernatural serpents) had come for asylum, and therefore should not be harmed. But the snakes, not understanding this, were in despair and so commited suicide in front of the palace. And now a great famine came to Bhaktapur. The people consulted an astrologer, a Josi, who told them that the death of the naga and nagini was its cause. The king wished to do something to overcome the difficulties and went to seek Sesar^[*] Acaju. But his house was empty and the door was unlocked. The king found the trail of naga there, and he followed it to the place where the naga and nagini had killed themselves. He thus finally came to understand the true nature of Sesar^[*] and Nararupa's suicides. The king felt great sorrow. He remembered Sesar's^[*] good qualities. He wanted the people to know about and remember Sesar^[*] Acaju's great contributions to the city. Therefore the king organized the jatra of Sesar^[*] and his wife Nararupa, which is called "Biska:." The two patas on the yasi(n) represent the two nagas .

The yasi(n) has been prepared and is lying in Yasi(n) Field. Earlier in the day ceremonies for installing divinity or "life" into it took place, and an Acaju administered to it as a newborn (or reborn) deity the entire set of samskaras , or life-cycle rites, necessary to bring the newborn god to his maturity. The arrival of the two chariots, that of Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] , signals the time when people may begin the attempt to raise the yasi(n) . At the point where the yasi(n) will be erected there is a permanent hole, surrounded by a wall about five feet high, with an opening to the west. The pole is first put through the opening, and maneuvered into the hole. After the pole is raised, the edges of the hole and the wall will support it.^[36] The yasi(n) is very difficult to manipulate and raise. Scores of people come to cooperate in its raising, pulling on the ropes and pushing with their hands and with long poles. When, on the next day, the erect yasi(n) is rocked back and forth in preparation for its lowering as a sign of the beginning of the new solar year, it is said that the god is being rocked to sleep, as he is very tired from having stood up all year. The erection of the yasi(n) is to represent that old year—and it is only its taking down that marks a sharply transitional time. Now, at the approach of the transitional

point between two solar years, the Yasi(n) Field and the Yasi(n) God have become the focus of attention of the whole city, which has participated in and watched the erection of the pole in a coordinated cooperative act.^[37] When the Yasi(n) God has been raised, young men climb the ropes attached to it representing the Astamatrkas^[*] , and present an offering of small coins at the knots where the ropes are attached to the pole.

Now the two chariots are pulled in front of the standing Yasi(n) God. In Yasi(n) Field there is a temple, the Cyasi Ma(n)dap, which is only used during this phase of Biska:, that has a small window in its north side. The Bhairava chariot, facing east, is placed parallel to the Cyasi Ma(n)dap, and aligned so that the window of the Ma(n)dap is at its right side and exactly in line with the side opening of the chariot. This exact ordering is said to facilitate the movement of the Bhairava image, which is always placed into the chariot from its left side, and removed from its right side. The Bhadrakali^[*] chariot is placed at the other side, the southeastern side of the field, and lined up with similar precision alongside the Bhadrakali^[*]pitha . Now most of the riders of the Bhairava chariot, who had remained there during the raising of the yasi(n) , descend and circumambulate the Bhairava chariot, and take a flower as prasada . They then circumambulate the Bhadrakali^[*] chariot and take prasada there. Finally they circumambulate the Yasi(n) and the Cyasi Ma(n)dap at the same time. Then this group, including the king and his Guru-Purohit and most of the officials, return with music, sukunda , and umbrella first to Ga:hiti and then, after the others leave them there, the king, Guru-Purohit, and the two Maha(n) charioteers return to Laeku and the Taleju temple.

Certain priests and officials attached to the Bhairava temple, an Acaju and some assistants, had remained on the Bhairava chariot. Now they descend and take the jatra Bhairava and bring him to the Cyasi Ma(n)dap, where he joins the "true" Bhairava image and the Jaki Gwa that had been brought there on the first day of the sequence. Now there are offerings and sacrifices by many people at the temple to the jatra image, and to the enwrapped Jaki Gwa. The true image remains hidden from sight.

The Bhadrakali^[*]jatra image is removed from her chariot by her priest. She is brought to an open building, a phalca , near the Bhadrakali^[*]pitha , which adjoins Yasi(n) Field, where she will be kept during the night. Up until this point the two dangerous deities have been near each other, but there has been no direct contact.

That evening there are large feasts in people's houses, and guests and extended family are invited.

Taking Out the Gods: The VarahiJatra After the Yasi(n) God has been raised, the jatra images of certain deities throughout the city are taken from their god-houses and special rooms in temples and placed either on the cheli , the open ground floors of the god-houses, or on nearby phalca , open rest houses, each conventionally associated with a particular god-house. They will be left outside of their god-houses and temples for the next four days, to be brought in again on the eighth day of the cycle. The deities so brought out include all the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses (except Vaisnavi^[*] , who is represented by Bhadrakali^[*] ), other dangerous goddess figures—particularly the ones identified as Bhagavati, some minor Bhairavas, and the major Ganesas^[*] . These are, in short, the major dangerous city deities, and Ganesa^[*] , who is as much of a Tantric god as he is an ordinary one.^[38] Blood sacrifices are routinely offered to these deities during this period, certain of whom become the foci for important local areal jatras that are considered major events, and which draw people from all over the city. Varahi is the focus for this night. The next day, the fifth, will belong again to Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] . The sixth and seventh days, which echo some of the activities of the fifth day, have Mahakali and Mahalaksmi^[*] as the central actors (on the sixth day) and Brahmani and Mahesvari (on the seventh). The eighth day centers around a form of Ganesa^[*] , Chuma(n) Ganesa^[*] . Seven of the nine Mandalic^[*] Goddesses (if we take Bhadrakali^[*] to represent Vaisnavi^[*] ) are foci of jatras of city-wide interest (even though their movements are restricted to some limited area of the city), the remaining two, Kumari and Tripurasundari, have festivals in their own mandalic^[*] areas at the same time as the mass of other deities who have been brought out of their god-houses and are not otherwise emphasized.^[39]

The remainder of the deities who have been taken outside have small jatras of only local and sometimes very limited importance.^[40] On the evening of this day many people make sacrifices at their local Ganesa^[*] shrines and at one or another local temple or shrine of a dangerous deity. Over the next four days the areas in which the various local areal jatras take place are sites for household feasts and sacrifices to the particular local deity who has been "brought outside."

Although there are now, as we have noted, activities at many Tantric temples and shrines, the city's focus is now at the god-house of the Mandalic^[*] Goddess, Varahi. After the yasi(n) has been raised, a procession of some thirty or forty people who are members of the Varahi mandalic^[*] area, and who belong to the Varahi guthi (which supervises and arranges Varahi ceremonies) or the Varahi bhajana , or music group, bring clumps of dry reeds, called ti or ti(n)pwa , to the cheli of the

Varahi god-house where her jatra image had been placed. Taking some fire from a votive oil lamp that had been set in front of the image, the reeds are set afire as an offering to Varahi. Then the image of Varahi, placed in a palanquin, is carried, followed by many hundreds of people, across the river to the Varahi pitha . As the procession moves toward the river through the mandalic^[*] area it stops many times in front of houses, and householders make animal sacrifices to the goddess in front of their houses. When the procession reaches the river it stops and the Varahi Acaju touches the palanquin with river water, and then offers some water to the jatra image. The people accompanying the jatra drink river water, wash their faces with it, and splash each other with it. This water is prasada from Varahi. Now the procession continues to the Varahi pitha , where the jatra image is placed on the pitha stone.^[41] The goddess is worshiped by means of an animal sacrifice. Now the procession takes her back to the open cheli of her god-house.

The Fifth Day: Taking Down the Yasi(n) God—Beginning of the Solar New Year

The fifth day of Biska:, the central day of the sequence, is a sankranti^[*] , the first day of the solar month, the day that begins the new solar year. Its ceremonial beginning will be at the fall of the yasi(n) in the late afternoon toward sunset.

On the morning of this fifth day everyone who can—that is, many thousands of people—go to the Hanumante River at the Cupi(n) Ga, which is the location of the tirtha associated with Bhadrakali^[*] . There, in what is a kind of mela , people enter the river for a ritual bath.

During the course of this New Year's Day there are a number of esoteric activities in the Taleju temple. Among these is the worship by the "king" and his Guru-Purohit of the dangerous deity Dui(n) Maju, a deity said by some to be Taleju's own pitha goddess, and a deity of special historical interest (chap. 8). She is worshiped on this day as a "sister of Indrani^[*] ," a deity to whom this day makes special reference. On this day, also, those Jugis who during the year play their special instruments at the Taleju temple come to the temple and are offered food on which the king throws masala (a mixture of betel nut, nuts, cinnamon, raisins, etc.), as a token of gratitude for their work.^[42]

This is the day of the Indrani^[*] Jatra,^[43] which involves, exactly like the Varahi Jatra of the previous day, the taking of the deity from its outside resting place to its external pitha . In addition, in the course of this jatra

the procession brings the Indrani^[*] image to the front outer gate of the Taleju temple, opening on Laeku Square, where she is met by the king and the Guru-Purohit and worshiped by them.^[44]

Now the king, carrying the royal sword, the Guru-Purohit, and the two Maha(n) charioteers, accompanied by musicians, the royal umbrella, and the ornamental sukunda , return to Yasi(n) Field, and meet the remainder of the chariot passengers there. All seat themselves on seats to the north side of the Cyasi Ma(n)dap. Meanwhile the Bhairava chariot has been turned around to face the west.^[45]

The leader of the Bhairava guthi makes an offering of yellow pigment to the Yasi(n) God, and then gives some of it as prasada to bystanders. Now the Bhairava jatra image is placed in the chariot. All the passengers and the charioteers mount the chariot and take their proper positions in relation to the Bhairava image. Meanwhile the Bhadrakali^[*] chariot has been readied near her pitha and her image put into it, and the riders of her chariot have mounted and entered the chariot. The secret Bhariava image and the Jaki Gwa had earlier been returned to the Bhairava jatra god-house (where the jatra image of Bhairava will later join them) by the same group of men running in the same order who had brought the two images down to Yasi(n) Field on the first day.

Now it is the time for bringing the Yasi(n) God down. First the Yasi(n) is rocked back and forth in an east-west direction, in a motion called "rocking to sleep." The god is said, as we have noted, to be tired for "he has been standing up all year." At the time of the rocking the eight ropes representing the Astamatrkas^[*] and the two patas representing the Tantric guru and his wife move, and this is interpreted by religious specialists as representing the sexual intercourse of the Astamatrkas^[*] and the Yasi(n) as Bhairava, and of the two nagas with each other. The pole is slowly rocked back and forth, and finally, after perhaps ten minutes to half an hour of swaying, eased down to the west so that it falls outward through the opening of its retaining wall. People who wish a son try to pull one of the leaves from the yasi(n) or its crossbar, and if they get one they will not only have a son, but he will be an important man. When the pole falls, the new year begins.

When the Yasi(n) God is down, the Bhairava Acaju and guthi leader decorate the Bhairava image again with yellow pigment, bhuismba(n) , which is then given as prasada to the other chariot riders. Now there is the beginning of a unique episode—the Po(n) untouchables become integrally involved with the sequence. The Bhairava Acaju and guthi leader, standing on the chariot, place some yellow pigment as prasada

taken from the Bhairava image, on the foreheads of Po(n)s who crowd around the chariot to receive it.^[46] At any other time this contact would be greatly contaminating to these two men, but at this one time in the year it is not.^[47] Now some of the Po(n)s take hold of the ropes at the back of the chariot, and other men, mostly Jyapus,^[48] take hold of the ropes at the front. Again a tug of war begins to determine the direction in which the chariot will move. The Jyapus are trying to pull the chariot back toward the city, while the Po(n)s are trying to keep the deity in Yasi(n) Field, which adjoins the "Po(n) twa: ," the area where they live, just outside of the symbolic boundaries of the city. This struggle does not (at least in the memory and expectation of present informants) lead to fights, and gradually the more numerous Jyapus with the advantage of the two extra ropes at the front of the chariot prevail. At the top of Yasi(n) Field, where the road to Ga:hiti enters it, the Po(n)s let go of the ropes, and return to their own area. The turning back of the Po(n)s indicates that the chariot is now within the symbolic boundaries of the city. The Bhadrakali^[*] chariot, pulled only from the front, is drawn up after the Bhairava chariot is on its way. The chariots are hauled up the road that they had descended at the beginning of the sequence in the direction of Ta:marhi Square. But when they reach Ga:hiti there is an essential episode, a further interruption to Bhairava's civic journey.

The chariots are arranged in Ga:hiti Square, with the Bhairava chariot facing north toward Ta:marhi Square and the Bhadrakali^[*] chariot moved in front of him blocking his path and facing south, in the direction from which they had just come. They are placed near the stone deity Swatuña Bhairava, which represents (among other things; see chap. 8) the body of Bhairava, at the place where Bhadrakali^[*] first recognized him, where he sank into the ground in an attempt to escape, and where Bhadrakali^[*] ordered that his head be cut off.^[49] Now the two chariots, with their passengers aboard, are pushed toward each other. Most of the movement is by the Bhadrakali^[*] chariot, which is crashed into the comparatively immobile Bhairava chariot. This is in keeping with Bhadrakali's meaning as a Sakti, for the banging together represents sexual intercourse, and the Sakti is the active partner. Each time the chariots crash together the people in and on them throw flowers out into the crowd, and people rush to gather them as important prasada . The chariots are banged together three times. There is a certain hesitation in the interpretation of the meaning of this banging together between sexual intercourse and aggression. It is said by upper-status informants that the esoteric meaning is sexual intercourse. Although, such informants

say, lower-status people often understand this meaning, they also may be unaware of this, and may misinterpret it as the two gods fighting. The banging together is, in fact, called lwakegu , from a verb meaning "to fight, to quarrel" as well as "to collide, or to hit against each other."^[50] Even among those who hold the "correct" interpretation of sexual intercourse, however, it is believed that at the time of the sexual banging together Bhadrakali^[*] becomes angry with Bhairava for reasons that are unclear to present informants. Perhaps, it is believed, her anger is for someting that Bhairava has done wrong—for he will later try to atone for this and quiet her by means of a gift.^[51] Now Bhadrakali^[*] "returns in her anger to her home"; that is, her chariot is removed first from Ga:hiti to an area near Bhadrakali's jatra god-house where she will remain in angry seclusion until the seventh day of the sequence, when Bhairava will have to send her a present to placate her.

The Bhairava jatra image is now taken to its jatra god-house in Lakulache(n). His chariot is left in Ga:hiti, where it will remain until the ninth day. The evening of this New Year's Day, following the banging together of the chariots, is the occasion of major feasts in most households, with guests from other cities and towns who have come to watch the festival.

The Sixth Day: The Mahakali/Mahalaksmi Jatra

The previous day had continued the themes of struggle and still problematic unification, portrayed in ambiguous sexual and aggressive images. The events of the next two days echo these themes in an imagery which is said to show the "cooperation and friendship" of adjoining mandalic^[*] sectors of the city.

The sixth day is the day for the special jatras of two of the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses, Mahakali and Mahalaksmi^[*] . In the morning of the day there are two important jatras in two nearby towns that are visited by many people from Bhaktapur. These are at Thimi, where there is a Ganesa^[*] festival in which thirty-six chariots are paraded, and Bode, where there is an important Mahalaksmi^[*]jatra . In Bhaktapur, in the afternoon, the jatra images of the two Mandalic^[*] goddesses, Mahalaksmi^[*] and Mahakali, who protect the two adjacent mandalic^[*] zones of the north and northeast, are taken from the "outside" placements where all the Tantric deities had been brought on the fourth day of the cycle and taken on a jatra to their respective pithas . Their jatras resemble the Varahi and Indrani^[*] Jatras, which we have described above, with an important addi-

tional feature. The Mahalaksmi^[*] image is taken on the usual traditional path between her god-house and her pitha , but the Mahakali image is taken out of its usual path so that she encounters the Mahalaksmi^[*] image just before they reach the border of the city. On their meeting the palanquins bearing the two deities are bumped together three times. This, it is said, is not considered a fighting, but a mating, signifying the bringing together or unification of the two zones. There is no doctrine as to which of the two goddesses is male or female during their intercourse.^[52] The goddesses then part, and continue on their respective jatras . That evening there are feasts in the households within these goddesses' mandalic^[*] zones.

The Seventh Day: The Brahmani/Mahesvari^[*] Jatra

During the afternoon of this day, the previous day's encounter of two neighboring Mandalic^[*] Goddesses is repeated in exactly the same manner, including the encounter and the bumping together of the palanquins, but this time with the goddesses Brahmani and Mahesvari, of the adjacent eastern and southeastern mandalic^[*] zones as the loci. That evening there are feasts in those two zones.

Earlier in the day, a member of the Bhairava temple staff has brought a sari to Bhadrakali^[*] in her jatra god-house as a present from Bhairava—an offering to make peace with her and to appease her anger. On the evening of this day the jatra image of Bhadrakali^[*] is brought to a special phalca , an open shed, adjacent to the western side of the Natapwa(n)la temple in Ta:marhi Square.^[53]

Although the Bhairava jatra image is still in the jatra god-house in Lakulache(n), the main secret portable image, the "true" jatra image of Bhairava, is now in his temple in Ta:marhi Square, where it had been returned on the fifth day. The bringing of the Bhadrakali^[*] image, now tranquil, to Ta:marhi Square represents, it is said, the visit of Bhadrakali^[*] to her "husband's"^[54] home, and a brief, but in the flow of Biska:'s imagery significant, movement toward peaceful domesticity.

The Eighth Day. Feasting the Gods—Chuma(n) Gandya: Jatra

On the morning of this day, crowds of people dressed in some of their best clothes and often accompanied by neighborhood music groups,

visit the places adjoining those god-houses and temples throughout the city where deities had been taken out to public view on the fourth day of the Biska: sequence. As most of these places are on or near the main city festival route, the pradaksinapatha^[*] , people are able to follow this route for the most part,^[55] moving along it in the auspicious clockwise direction. At each place people present symbolic "feasts" to the deity. They offer eggs, swaga(n) (a mixture of husked rice, curds, and pigment),^[56] sweets, alcoholic spirits, and beer.

One of the many local jatras of the Biska: period serves as a focus for the city on this day. This is the jatra of the local Ganesa^[*] of the main Coche(n) twa: . This particular Ganesa^[*] (or Gandya: in Newari) is called "Chuma(n) Gandya:, "Rat Ganesa^[*] ."^[57] The jatra image of this deity is carried on the afternoon of the eighth day in several processions around the twa: , and many people come from all over the city to watch. The importance of this Ganesa^[*] is suggested by his surviving legends, which seem to reflect important aspects of the city's history. We will sketch two versions known to contemporary storytellers.

A long time ago the Malla king Ananda Malla (referring probably to the early-fourteenth-century ruler, Anandadeva Malla) wanted to make Bhaktapur into a larger city by extending its boundaries. It was only a small town then. He walked around the various places outside of the town. He reached a place in a forest, which is the location of the present-day Bhadrakali^[*] . There he saw a very thin old woman who resembled a skeleton. Ananda Malla was very frightened when he saw her. Nevertheless, he approached her and asked, "Who are you, old woman? Why are you alone in this forest?" "I came here because I wanted to give you advice about making a city," she replied. "If you go north from this place, then you will see a wonderful scene, something which you have never seen before. Then [after seeing this sight] you must go on, and you will see Ganesa^[*] . You must worship Ganesa^[*] , and then you will be successful." The goddess revealed herself to him, and then disappeared. She was Bhadrakali^[*] .

The king followed the old woman's directions and went to the north. There he saw a wonderful scene. A cat and a rat [or mouse] were fighting. The rat finally defeated the cat, and ran off, carrying the cat in its mouth. The king followed the rat. It ran up into a tree with the cat in its mouth and then disappeared. Ananda Malla was full of wonder. How did the rat take the cat up into the tree? This was surprising. He went to look but could not find it. But then he saw Ganesa^[*] there. The

king remembered what Bhadrakali^[*] had said. He thus served [worshiped and respected] Ganesa^[*] , and was given effectiveness [siddhi ] in many things. The place where the cat and the rat fought is called Bholache(n). The place where the rat ran up the tree is in Coche(n). [These are adjoining twa :s in the northern part of the city (see map 11)]. Ananda Malla built a temple for the rat in that place [where the rat climbed the tree]. Ananda Malla then divided the city into twenty-four twa:s, and he constructed the Astamatrka^[*] pithas and god-houses. He established a festival [Biska:] for Bhadrakali^[*] .

In another version of the story, Ananda Malla was hunting in a forest at the north of present-day Bhaktapur. There he saw a cat and a rat fighting. The rat vanquished the cat and then ran up a tree. The king went to find the animals, but could not find them. Both the cat and the rat had disappeared. The king thought the rat must be the vehicle of Ganesa^[*] , otherwise he would not have been able to win the fight. The king, therefore, prayed to Ganesa^[*] . Then Ganesa^[*] showed himself to the king and said to him, "Go south from this place. There you will see an old woman. She is my mother [i.e., Parvati, but in the form of Bhadrakali^[*] ]. When you see her, bow down to her and say that Ganesa^[*] sent you. My mother will be pleased. We [Ganesa^[*] and his mother] represent the north and the south. You should build a city between us [that is, the positions where the king encounters them] and we will help you." So Ananda Malla received help from Ganesa^[*] and Bhadrakali^[*] . He then built the enlarged city of Bhaktapur.

On the evening of the eighth day all deities are returned back into their god-houses, except the Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] images, which are still, respectively, at the Bhairava jatra god-house, and the phalca in Ta:marhi Square. In the evening households throughout the city have feasts, often preceded by animal sacrifices.

The Ninth Day: Taking Down the Small Yasi(n) God—Final Phases of the Bhairava/Bhadrakali Jatra

In the morning of the ninth day the small Yasi(n) God in the potter's quarter, Talakwa, is pulled down with no special ceremony by the people of the area.

In the afternoon of the day the empty Bhairava chariot, which has been in Ga:hiti Square, is aligned so that it is facing west, with its left

side facing in the direction of Bhairava Jatra god-house, in preparation for the placing of the image into the chariot at its left side. The Bhadrakali^[*] chariot has been left in Ta:marhi Square, where it had brought Bhadrakali^[*] on the seventh day. Now, exactly as on the first day, the king, Guru-Purohit, attendants, and chariot crew meet at Ga:hiti and circumambulate and enter the Bhairava chariot. At the same time, in Ta:marhi Square, the Bhadrakali^[*] image is taken from the phalca , and placed in her nearby chariot.

The people from the upper and lower city grasp the ropes at the Bhairava chariot's two ends, as they had on the first day of the festival. This time, though, the men from the upper city are at the front end of the chariot and those from the lower city, at the back. Again, as on the first day but this time because of the slope of the land in Ga:hiti, it is easier for the chariot to be pulled into the lower city, and this is compensated for by the fewer ropes on the lower city end of the chariot. The entire procedure of the first day is repeated, and, again, if all goes well, the struggle supposedly ceases at the exits to the two squares—that is, of Ga:hiti if the chariot is being successfully pulled into the lower city, and of Ta:marhi if it is being successfully pulled into the upper city. It is then pulled first toward the traditional far point in the victorious half, then brought to the end point in the other half, as it was on the first day. Then, for the last time, it is cooperatively pulled back to Ta:marhi Square, where the Bhadrakali^[*] chariot has been waiting.

But, as on the first day, all this may not go smoothly. Many people have been drinking on this day, and there may be resentments smoldering from the conflicts and violence of the first day. There is always anxiety that the tug of war may not follow its conventional script and might turn into a fight.

When the chariot is returned to Ta:marhi Square, after Bhairava has been to the upper and lower cities once again and shown himself again in darsana , the chariot is pulled up to the north side of the Bhairava temple and the jatra image is taken from the right side of the chariot and returned to its dwelling within the temple. The Bhadrakali^[*] image, which has been waiting at the Ta:marhi Square phalca , is taken in its chariot to its ordinary god-house, the Vaisnavi^[*] god-house, where it will be kept for the remainder of the year. The two gods are welcomed into their homes with the laskusa ceremony, the traditionally welcoming and sanctifying ceremony for moving a focal participant into a sacred area. While the two gods are being taken back into their homes, by-

standers and the Acaju priest, who greets them in front of the temple to perform the lasakusa ceremony, tease them about their recent romantic and sexual adventures.

And now, finally, the passengers and crew of the Bhairava chariot descend. The king, carrying his sword, the king's Guru-Purohit, and the two charioteers, joined by the musicians, the carrier of the umbrella, and the carrier of the sukunda , take leave of the others, and, followed by representatives of the central government's Guthi Samsthan, return to the Taleju temple, where the king, becoming a Brahman once more, returns the sword to one of the Guthi's representatives, who will take it back to Kathmandu.

This final night is an occasion for feasts throughout the city.

Approaches to Meaning

Biska: is a complex symbolic enactment. A cast of human and divine actors moves through meaningful city space, in endlessly repeated annual performances in concert with the city's symbolically ordered and ordering time, in a context of legends and traditional interpretations. Against this background the actors do certain things; they enact dramas or, if all the events of the period are considered to have some possible overall pattern, they enact a single theatrical performance, albeit one whose dramatic unity is rather Shakespearian. Biska:'s significant contexts include the year's other festival enactments. When considered in relation to the entire group of festivals (chap. 16) or in comparison with particular other ones—say, the other great structural focal festival, Mohani, or the lunar New Year sequence, Swanti—certain of its peculiarities and relations within the larger cycle are highlighted. We can at this point approach the question of its meaning—that is, the meanings bearing on civic integration with which we are concerned—under some general rubrics that can be applied for comparison to still other annual events.

1. Biska: as a solar festival.

One of our questions is whether cyclical events that are "outside" the annual festival cycle affect that cycle. With the exception of the minor event Ghya: Caku Sa(n)lhu [10] and the minor observances of the first days of each solar month, "the events of the solar cycle" (as this chapter is entitled) really means the Biska: cycle. Biska: has, of course, some direct "solar" references. It takes place at the vernal equinox and begin a new year at the moment of the

balance between daylight and dark. The raising and lowering of the yasi(n) to mark the transition to the new year in an east-west direction has, perhaps, some now forgotten connection with the sun's direction. Otherwise, there is no evident direct reference to the sun and the seasons. In Biska:'s contrast with the lunar and agricultural Mohani sequence there is, however, an intriguing, if perhaps fortuitous, contrast, which relates Biska: to the modes of astral religious action, whose presiding figure is the deified sun. Biska:'s central narrative (although not all of its subsidiary legends) reflects the kinds of passive and self-adjustive relations that worshipers have with the astral deities and the transcendent macrocosm, rather than the active and manipulative interactions they have in some other annual events with the realms represented by the dangerous and ordinary civic deities. Thus, in Mohani the king and his Guru-Purohit actively participate in the struggle of the Goddess against forces of disorder, but in Biska: both king and deities are passive, moved by the forces of convention, affected only by a ripple of urban disorder, a thesis of disorder that tends to clarify the subsequent resolution of order. The king and his entourage and the god Bhairava are moved by immemorial ritual order, as the sun moves through the year. Even the tug of war that threatens to disrupt the movement of the chariot and that determines which half of the city it will move to first is in the realm of luck and chance, the neutral non-moral realm of the astral deities.

There are also marked contrasts in the emphases of Swanti, the lunar New Year's sequence, and Biska:. However, to anticipate chapter 16, the contrasts are internal to the entire annual cycle, and not in any obvious way semantically urged by the contrasts of the solar and lunar cycles, except perhaps in a contrast in personal effort in Swanti and passive witness in Biska:. Swanti's emphasis is on the affirmation of the family in the household, Biska:'s is on the integration of the city as a whole and in its relation to annual time.

2. Biska: as a structural focal sequence.

The Biska: sequence, as we have described it, differs sharply from the majority of miscellaneous annual events in ways that lead us to characterize it as of focal importance for Bhaktapur. The first evident difference is quantitative. It has more events and more deities and consumes more time than do the events we presented in the last chapter; the closest being the Saparu events. Biska:'s mass of events is not just a disconnected collection, however; its actions and themes are woven together and related in var-

ious ways. This adds formal complexity to quantity. In contrast to many other events, the entire city is represented, not just an area, and there is a representative range of actors from king to untouchable, not just some one or some few social segments. Furthermore, the themes and actions of the sequence make use of those representative actors and spaces to make general and basic statements about the city in itself , and not about just one element of life in the city, a shared anxiety, for example, about disease. We call such elaborated festivals "focal." While Saparu with its emphasis on death and carnival may be thought of as an antistructural focal festival, Biska:, like Mohani (in its own and different way), emphasizes urban order, and thus is a "structural focal festival."

3. Interactive versus parallel features: bases for solidarity.

The complex pattern of Biska: means that to the "parallel" relations of simpler festivals, where many of the city's units are doing the same sorts of things at the same time,^[58] there is added interactive or "syntagmatic" relations at the city level . In the major focal structural festivals—Biska: and Mohani—there is a central emphasis on interrelated actions on the public civic level, while parallel actions, such as household feasts and neighborhood jatras , are secondary. This is in contrast with, say, an important major festival sequence like Swanti, in which the major civic significance is in the parallel performance of the events within all households (events that may be interactive within the unit itself).

In contrast to parallel events—which have static structural significance—interactive events are dynamic, and can express relations, conflicts, dilemmas, resolutions and their failures; in short, they have the quality of narrative and drama. Actors, space, time, and plot combine to say something—if the proper rhetorical devices can be found to capture and hold the attention of the narrative's audience.

4. Human actors.

In Biska:'s parallel events individuals throughout the city participate as members of households, of mandalic^[*] sections, and (less systematically) as members of twa :s and neighborhoods. At the level of the public urban performance, the city's central interactive narrative, The Adventures of Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] , we have as our cast the Newar king, the chief Brahman, and representatives of the Josi, Acaju, Bha, Jugi, Po(n), Maha(n), Sa:mi, Ka:mi, and various Jyapu groups. Many of these personages are gathered into the Bhairava chariot, which is pulled and tugged at by men of various clean thars —

subdivided, however, at the chariot's two ends into representatives of the upper city and the lower city. The selection of thar s in the interactive public performances effectively samples and represents the city's traditional macrostructural, ritual, and productive structure. The two city halves represent by summation its entire space, but this particular way of representing it (rather than, say, by the sum of the mandalic^[*] sections that represent the space of the city in Mohani) has special implications.

In Biska:'s action the king, priests, and thar representatives do not, in fact, act. They are passively moved. They are moved through the city on fixed routes, at fixed times, at the mercy of the tugs of war that represent the tensions in the city underneath the order that the chariot riders represent. They represent order, but they are not the active agents of that order. In Mohani they act, and the power of the Ksatriya^[*] and of the Brahman as a Tantric practitioner are explored. While in Biska: the passive adventures of king, Brahman, and their company are in the public routes and spaces of the city, in Mohani, their actions are for the most part confined to the sacred and royal enclosure of the Taleju temple.

5. Divine actors.

The central deities in this festival are the powerful dangerous deities Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] . The Mandalic^[*] Goddesses and the remainder of the city's important dangerous deities are foci of important but secondary parallel activities. The Yasi(n) God has no independent existence in Bhaktapur aside from this special festival use and is rather a focal sacralized collection of important images, signs, and ideas, a kind of ad hoc deified object. While other deities contribute meaning because their identities transcend Biska: (although Biska:, in turn, contributes to their meanings), the Yasi(n) God is no more than a component, albeit an important one, in the festival sequence.

As in Mohani and in the Devi cycle the divine actors in Biska: are dangerous, not ordinary, gods. As we have repeatedly argued, they represent—in their contrast to the benign, personal, and familial moral and dharmic deities—forces that threaten the moral order on the one hand, but that can be captured through power and made to protect it on the other. In Biska: the male dangerous deities—Bhairava and the Yasi(n) God)—predominate. In Mohani the female deities are central. In keeping with the balance of male and female deities, which distinguishes the benign from the dangerous deities (chap. 8)—although here unusually represented within the realm of dangerous deities—Biska:'s

deities are portrayed as powerful but limited beings, rather like humans in the social world, in their irritations, ineffectual attempts to escape, and passivity. Instead of the complex rites that will bring the dangerous goddesses of Mohani into some useful relation to the city, Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] and the Yasi(n) God are, like the chariot's representative social microcosm, simply manipulated and moved through space like puppets. The "deities" at issue here, far below the surface and beyond anthropomorphic gods, are order and chaos.

6. Space.

Throughout Biska: city space is carefully made use of to represent the city itself and the narrative movement of the festival sequence. Space, it is important to recall, is only one of the possible ways of representing Bhaktapur—or any community. A community can be represented, for example, by the sum of its citizens, or (as in Swanti) its family units. Furthermore, when spatial units are used in representation, Bhaktapur has various options for demarcating the whole city. In Biska:'s narrative aspect it is the city halves, areas whose antagonistic potentials are traditionally emphasized, which are used to represent the city. The "neutral" points between them (Ta:marhi Square and Ga:hiti Square and Yasi[n] Field), and the neutral axis connecting them is played against an axis of struggle between the upper and lower halves of the city defined by that axis. The neutral points and axis are "liminal," out of ordinary space and time. It is here that the adventures of the nonordinary deities Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] unfold, and here that the Yasi(n) God waits to start the next year.

Independent of the central narrative other spaces are used starting, for the most part, on the fourth day of the sequence. The goddesses of the mandalic^[*] sections are brought beyond the borders of the sectors to their pitha seats, enacting the essential meaning of these goddesses—their relation to the dangerous, amoral outside of the city. And throughout the city the major dangerous deities are, in a unique movement, taken outside of their "houses" and seated in the public city space. The city is represented through the parallel movement of all these deities, although the movements of two neighboring pairs of the goddesses include an echo of Bhairava and Bhadrakali's ambiguous enactment of unity and disunity. In another enactment of unification the city's people move on the eighth day in a jatra along the pradaksinapatha^[*] to worship all the dangerous deities. This movement, like the movements of the chariot, is within the city boundaries in contrast to a similar sequential summating movement to the pithas of the Mandalic^[*]

Goddesses to the bordering outside of the city, during Mohani. In the private realm, households—which can be considered either as social units or spaces—are having their feasts on the same designated days throughout the city's larger space and social hierarchy.

In the legend of the Chuma(n) Ganedya: the legitimate location and extent of the city itself is emphasized and given a divine charter. In keeping with the resolutions of the festival action itself, this legend is a supernatural warrant for civic unity—a warrant that serves to suppress the autonomy and divisive strife of preexisting and/or persisting smaller communities and segments.

In contrast with Mohani, the spatial emphasis is primarily on the internal integration of the spatial components of the city. In Mohani—and in the Devi cycle generally—the emphasis is on the city's defining and unifying contrasts and transactions with its environing outside.

7. Narrative content.

The festival sequence talks about, so to say, social order and disorder. So do all the major festivals, but with significant differences in the aspect of order and disorder at issue, and in the sources of disorder and the means of rectification portrayed.

The central public enactment is the movement of the king, priests, charioteer-warriors, Jyapu and craftsmen, and Bhairava in one chariot and Bhadrakali^[*] and her attendants in another. The two chariots allow for an expression of one opposition. The movements of the first, the largest and most important chariot, makes use of the two halves of the city for another opposition directly representing the city and its divisions. The main actors in the hierarchical macrosocial system—including important representatives of the large middle-level and lower-middle-level groups—are gathered into the main chariot as a static unit and moved passively, in conjunction with Bhairava, in a movement along an interstitial axis from one "central" point to another. In the course of this journey they deviate to "show themselves" to the real space (existing in the everyday civic world, in contrast to the transcendent axis and points) of the two halves. This realization is accompanied by struggles between the halves which threaten disruption and danger. Disorder must be enacted so that the processes and forces that overcome it may, in their turn, be dramatically prepared for and meaningful. It must be remembered that in the chariot are real kings (at least they were in the Newar autonomous past), real chief Taleju Brahmans, and real representative citizens all exposed to real discomforts and dangers, to real risks. In the middle of their journey, that is, in the middle

of the festival sequence itself, they—in unison with the Bhadrakali^[*] chariot—are brought into contact with the other main symbolic cluster of the sequence, the Yasi(n) God, at the moment when cooperative efforts raise, again with some risk, and then, at the interstitial moment between two years, lower it to mark the beginning once again of a new solar year and the recommencement of annual time.

Biska: in its central public enactment represents the order that is automatically and ineluctably imposed on the possibility of civic disorder in the ritually ordered movement of traditional forms through time. The chariot does not move through any activity of the king and priests. Mild disorder and reestablishment of order, with the latter emphasized, happen to those witnesses.

The achievement of unity is pervasively represented in Biska: through sexual intercourse, with its reminder of the division that the two sexes represent. This action, in the case of Bhadrakali^[*] and Bhairava, reflects underlying anxieties, for it is not sure whether the encounter is in sexual union or in battle.

Although the male deity Bhairava takes precedence in the action of the festival, with Bhadrakali^[*] a faint presence in his shadow, the legends associated with Biska: make her the dominant figure. She is responsible for the site of the city, and Biska: is in some accounts her festival. She must capture Bhairava—or the part of him that was unable to escape—to keep him in the city. In contrast to the major dramatic enactments of the Devi cycle where the dominant female dangerous deities are on center stage, Biska: relegates the Goddess to the legends describing the state of things prior to the establishment of the ordered city. She is here a potentially ominous shadow at the edges of social order as the king and Bhairava survey their socially ordered city, a reminder that Bhaktapur's social order is only a precarious clearing in a larger, different space.

The stories gathered around the Yasi(n) God explore the danger to men and the society they are taken centrally to constitute of women—both as sexual beings and as inadequately controlled wives. The domestication of the princess^[59] is accomplished by a man, a prince, but through the absolutely necessary aid of Bhadrakali^[*] , who in the ambivalent use of dangerous deities both represents the same sorts of dangers as does the princess and can—and must—be used to bring them under control. But the transformation of the princess into an ordinary wife is—the fatal problems caused to the Tantric expert Sesar^[*] Acaju by his wife remind Bhaktapurians—a problem that will never be fully solved, no more than the unity of the city will be. But in the moments of resolu-

tion in the Biska: sequence, at the achievement of the lowering of the Yasi(n) God and the final momentary reconciliation of Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] , the problems somehow seem to be resolved. It will all need to be repeated yet again in each revolving year.

The emphasis in the stories that inform Biska: is on the legendary realm where the supernatural once made contact with Bhaktapur—at a particular moment of real historical time and at a point of earthly space—for the purposes of locating or ordering that city. The events of the legends happened only once, although they must be repeatedly memorialized. In Mohani the explanatory stories of the central narrative take place within a thoroughly transcendent and timeless mythic realm—with no relation to terrestrial time and space—where a battle is taking place in which the city must actively and magically participate each year, over and over again. The presence and force of the "supernatural" is quite different in the two structural focal festivals.

8. Rhetoric.

We are concerned everywhere in this study with those aspects of symbolic form in Bhaktapur that are presumably significant to its citizens. It is not enough for such forms to be meaningful, they must also be engaging . For this a sort of rhetoric of symbolic form is necessary. We have noted some miscellaneous engaging devices: the advertised mystery of the Jaki Gwa and the whereabouts of the "true" Bhairava jatra image, the ambiguity and psychic resonances stirred by the princess whose nose (or vagina) hides snakes, the hesitation between sex and aggression in the ambiguous banging together of Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] , and the fascination of watching the major figures in the hierarchical order symbolized by themselves. To jeopardize the symbol of a king is one thing; to jeopardize the king himself is something more.

One of the sources of the fascination of Biska: for the participants and, often the onlookers, is that it involves real risk. In its symbolization of conflict a movement can always occur, a breakdown, into real physical and social danger. Here marked symbolism is m danger of collapsing into real life.

9. The message.

It is possible to tease out of the drama or dramas of the city's various complex symbolic enactments, a task simplified somewhat when they are compared with each other, something like a central import or message, a message that is simple and redundantly presented. For Biska: this seems to be something like this: admire and

celebrate the civic order. That order may momentarily and frighteningly sway and lurch, but when the city works together—or refrains, really, from not working together, for the task is not difficult—and accepts the traditional directives of the mesocosmic order, it will all hold together; the space and personnel of the city will remain unified both in itself and in relation to the pulse of annual cyclical time. The main danger to civic order, in Biska:'s main narrative, and in contrast to other narratives, is civic strife, the danger of something going awry in the balance of those human forces that constitute the city.

Other aspects of disorder, those beyond the moral sphere of the city, are alluded to in Biska:'s legends. But Biska: in itself is not centrally concerned with them. That is the concern of the Devi cycle.

Chapter Fifteen
The Devi Cycle

Introduction

In our presentation of the miscellaneous calendrical events of the lunar year we set aside a group of events distributed throughout the year for special treatment. This group, closely related to the rice agricultural cycle, makes up a thematically interrelated set in which the meaning of each unit is dependent on the entire group. While the meaning of the other events of the lunar cycle is often affected by their structural similarities and contrasts with other events in the cycle, the events in the Devi cycle are related by a central thread. This thread is a narrative of the states and activities of one group of supernatural beings, the "Nine Durgas," a group of dangerous deities thought locally to be uniquely associated with Bhaktapur (see fig. 27).

The Nine Durgas are, in part, manifestations of Devi, the Goddess. In the course of Mohani at the time of the climactic harvest of the rice cycle Devi is portrayed in all her complexity. Mohani brings her transcendent exploits as the conquering Mahisasuramardini in the mythic realm into concrete representation in Bhaktapur's mesocosm and, in so doing, brings the mythic Devi into empowering contact with the local legendary Nine Durgas.

In our listings of the annual calendrical events of the lunar cycle we were able to use the lunar New Year's Day as a place to enter it and to begin it. The Devi cycle has no conventional beginning, and there is more than one place where a descriptive beginning might be justified.

Figure 27.
The Nine Durgas' pyakha(n) . Duma dancing.

One might be with Mohani itself, in which, with the harvest, the presence and protection of the Goddess is returned to and into the city after a vital sojourn outside in the fields and away in other realms. Another entree to the cycle, the one we have chosen, is with the departure from the city of Devi's manifestations, the Nine Durgas. The results of that departure conveys the implications of her absence and thus the meaning of her return. We will preface our description of the cycle itself with a necessarily detailed introduction to the legend, membership, and iconography of the Nine Durgas troupe.^[1] For the Devi cycle, as they were for the focal Biska: festival, details are essential.

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

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

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.

An Introduction to Meaning

In this chapter, because of the interrelated complexities of the Devi cycle, we will interrupt its description from time to time for essays or remarks on its meaning as introduced or most clearly demonstrated by particular aspects of the cycle. We may start with some comments on these accounts of the introduction of the Nine Durgas into Bhaktapur.

These stories or legends relate the Nine Durgas to a particular period of time and to specific events in the history of Bhaktapur and to particular places in Bhaktapur's space. This quasi-historicity contrasts with the locally and historically transcendent Puranic^[*] mythlike stories of Devi as Mahisasuramardini, which, while also contributing secondarily to the troupe's meaning, are central to Mohani. The themes in the legend are repeated and modulated throughout the Devi cycle. We may well begin with the now familiar distinction of outside and inside. This is in its major emphasis a distinction between outside and inside the city itself with the ritual boundaries of the city being understood as the significant border—thus the Nine Durgas are captured outside of the city and brought into it. But once inside they are still "outside" the city in a sense, for they are in the Acaju's or Brahman's inner secret room, and still separated from the public space of the city. That inner room is in

this sense outside of the house (where wife and family are), as the house itself (with its own secrets guarded from its surrounding neighborhood) is outside of the public space of the city itself. The Nine Durgas move from forest to secret room to the house and then, finally, to the public urban space of Bhaktapur. Both the outside of the city beyond its ritual boundaries and the nested, successively more private realms inside a household or inside a corporate group, are in different ways "outside" the city as a public realm.

The Nine Durgas live outside the city in a forest. They have many of the characteristics of predatory beasts which are reflected in the iconic details of their masks. Like such beasts, they are dangerous in that they kill and eat people. it is essential to note that they kill people not because of their "sins" or violations of the dharma , but simply because of accidental encounters. Sunanda Acaju simply chanced upon them. The Nine Durgas are threats to the bodies of those who happen to encounter them. They are not related to people's souls , to their moral behavior, and the manipulation of karma as are the ordinary gods of the inside of the city. In fact, as we have noted in our discussion of sacrifice, the death of the body in such encounters because it represents a sacrifice to a deity results—as does an animal sacrifice for that animal—in a great reward to the soul, phrased sometimes as mukti or moksa^[*] , that is, salvation. The Nine Durgas, like all dangerous deities, are brought under control not through ordinary moral action nor the kind of devotion that influences ordinary deities but by an act of power, the Tantric mantra of a particularly skillful practitioner. Ordinary people, as we will see, can control them only through blood sacrifice.

In the legends, the Tantric control of the wild divinities of the outside is first used for the private and secret enjoyment of the Tantrikas. The action is still outside the city in the sense that it is hidden from the public realm and of no consequence to it. This private pleasure is disrupted through the prying of a wife who is pejoratively characterized as curious and small-minded and who in one version is even punished by death. Her violation of her husband's authority, of his injunction "do not look in this room," caused the escape of the dangerous forces and her immediate punishment. Through the wife's meddling an essential transformation takes place, however—the powerful amoral gods move from the private personal realm of the Tantric Brahman to the public space of the city for the use and good of the city as a whole.^[4] This legendary transformation reflects the way that Bhaktapur has turned Tantra into a Brahmanically controlled or at least supervised civic reli-

Mahakali H. 46 cm., W. 38 cm.

Bhairava H. 46 cm., W. 38 cm.

Kumari H. 42 cm., W. 24 cm.

Sero Bhairava H. 22 cm.,W. 27 cm.

Siva H. 33 cm., W. 22 cm.

Sima H. 40 cm., W. 34 cm.

Duma H. 40 cm., W. 34 cm.

Varahi H.40 cm.,W. 34 cm.

Ganesa^[*] H. 43 cm., W. 36 cm.

Mahesvari H. 42 cm., W. 24 cm.

Indrani^[*] H. 42 cm., W.24 cm.

Vaisnavi^[*] H. 42 cm., W. 24 cm.

Brahmani H. 42 cm., W.24 cm.

gion, although a religion that continues to represent the exterior forces which surround, threaten, and sustain the interior moral and civic life of the city.

There is another story told to explain why the Nine Durgas ate the pig. This second story illuminates an important aspect of meaning of the Tantric gods in general and the Nine Durgas in particular—that is that the Tantric and dangerous deities represent a power that transcends purity and impurity. This power can absorb and neutralize problematic quantities and placements of impurity and thus help to maintain and restore that segment of social order that is differentiated by purity and which is the concern of the ordinary gods who partake of the ordering dependent on purity.

The story goes that in a past age the people of the earth had been polluting the earth with urination and defecation. Everywhere the world was dirty and everywhere there were bad smells. The gods consulted with Visnu^[*] and asked him, as he had so often done, to come to the help of the world. The gods did not want to do anything to get rid of the feces themselves for fear of contaminating themselves. Finally Visnu^[*] agreed to incarnate himself as a pig and to eat the feces. "But," he said to the gods, "if I do this I will become polluted, and it will be difficult for me to again escape from the world." The Nine Durgas said to him that they would agree to take and eat the pig as a sacrifice, and thus through the sacrifice of that pig make it possible for it (and the incarnate Visnu^[*] ) to gain salvation.

The Nine Durgas—The Cast of Characters and Their Iconic Representation

We have followed the legends in referring to the group of the Nine Durgas without saying anything about the membership of that group. Whatever meanings that troupe as a whole draws from its legend, its membership and position in Bhaktapur's civic pantheon, and its position and activities in the annual cycle, the Nine Durgas give their local performances as a differentiated cast of characters. (We will discuss the local performances given by the troupe throughout the city during the nine months of each annual cycle, when the Nine Durgas are actively protecting the city, at length at the end of this chapter). Like the conventional characters in the European commedia dell'arte , the individual

members of the Nine Durgas troupe indicate their significance and relationship in large part by their appearance and their contrasts.

How many Durgas are there in the Nine Durgas group? This is a characteristic civic mystery. There are only seven goddesses or "Durgas" represented by the masks worn by the Gatha as the Nine Durgas. These goddesses are represented in the Puranic^[*] text, the Devi Mahatmya, which is one of the mythic bases for the Mohani sequence, among the benign male deities' Saktis who join the fully powerful cosmic deity Devi in her battles against the order threatening Asuras (chap. 8). These seven Durgas are also represented in Bhaktapur as seven of the eight boundary-guarding pitha goddesses of Bhaktapur's borders, the Astamatrkas^[*] . The eighth of Bhaktapur's boundary goddesses, Mahalaksmi^[*] , is, as we have noted, not derived from the Devi Mahatmya, although she has other Puranic^[*] representation as one of the "mothers." For the Nine Durgas she is present not as a member of the performing group, but as the Nine Durgas' "own god." She is represented at a shrine carried with the troupe where she is generally known because of her decoration with that plant, as the "oleander deity" or Siphadya:, and she is also represented by an image in the Nine Durgas' god-house. Mahalaksmi^[*] is generally understood to be the eighth of the Durgas. But who is the ninth? At the center of the city's eight bounding "mothers" or Matrkas is a ninth goddess (Tripurasundari) who is not a Matrka^[*] , nor a god's Sakti, but who represents the Tantric goddess in her full cosmic and creative form. The "nine" in reference to the Nine Durgas presumably refers to such a mandalic^[*] schema (which is reflected in the city's nine Mandalic^[*] Goddesses), but it is unclear as to just who the ninth Durga is. There are various proposals. Some Gatha believe that she is represented by their musical instruments, which they take to represent Tripurasundari. Others say that the ninth Durga is Bhairavi, the Sakti of Bhairava, but who is not represented in the masks or the drama.^[5] Like many Tantric secrets, it is probably not known definitely by anyone now, assuming that it was ever clearly known in the past. Everyone assumes that there must be someone who knows the real truth but, as is often the case, it is likely that no such person exists.

The goddesses represented by masks in the Nine Durgas troupe are Mahakali, Vaisnavi^[*] , Brahmani, Indrani^[*] , Mahesvari, Kumari, and Varahi. These masks are worn as part of the costume of the Gatha performers who will incarnate the deities. The troupe also includes five other masked dancers, Bhairava, Ganesa^[*] , Seto Bhairava, Sima, and Duma, and is further supplemented by a mask of Siva, which is carried, but not

worn. Thus we have now seven performing Durgas, and five other performing deities, all of whom will be incarnated in Gatha performers, a total of twelve perfomers in the troupe. These are supplemented by two other nonperforming representations, Siva and Mahalaksmi^[*] , and perhaps by some esoteric hidden deity, who is added to Mahalaksi^[*] as a Ninth Durga.

The masks are loaded with iconographic details that allow them to be grouped and contrasted in several different ways (see color plates). Many of these details and the possible categorizations deriving from them are peripheral to their performance meanings. An example is the rotated third eye, which is prominently displayed on the foreheads of Siva, Mahakali, Bhairava, Ganesa^[*] , Mahesvari (all thus marked as closely related to Siva) and also, curiously, the Vaisnavite deity Varahi. (On the other hand, the protagonist of the pyakha[n]s that are given in the city's neighborhoods, Seto Bhairava, who is conceptually related to Siva, and is in fact a copy of the mask of Siva with certain significant transformations, does not have such a third eye.)

The neighborhood dance-drama divides the twelve mask-wearing performers into principal performers and a remainder who act as a kind of chorus and who are restricted to formal geometric dances performed as a group. The masks of the major and individual performers all have jeweled bindus at the bases of their noses. The minor performers (Vaisnavi^[*] , Brahmani, Indrani^[*] , and Mahesvari) do not. Varahi, who does have a jeweled bindu at the base of her nose, is not a major performer in the dance-drama, but in contrast to the other members of the "chorus" she does perform an independent dance. Ganesa^[*] , who also has a bindu at the base of his nose, this one painted as part of his harness, like Varahi does independent dances.

Within the group of major performers two masks dominate by their larger size, by their intensely saturated dark colors, and by the presence of prominent fangs. One of these is the dark blue Bhairava, the main actor in the ceremonies that are the immediate context of the dance-drama, and the other is the dark clotted-blood-red Mahakali, who is represented with emaciated flesh, deep-set eyes, and facial bones protruding in a cadaverous way through her skin. Mahakali is the main antagonistic figure of the dance-drama itself.

Kumari is visually clearly a transitional figure, and this is consistent with the role she plays. She is the same size and shape as the benign goddesses of the "chorus" (Mahesvari, Indrani^[*] , Brahmani and Vaisnavi^[*] ), and she shares with them the rounded features of a young woman in

full sexual attractiveness. Although she is smaller than Mahakali and full-fleshed rather than emaciated, she is painted in the same deep clotted-blood-red as Mahakali and has fangs that the other benign goddesses do not have. While Mahakali is emaciated and skeletal, Kumari is not—but Kumari's mask has the same exaggerated frontal protuberances (in anatomical terminology, the "mental tubercles" of the mandible) as does Mahakali's jaw, which signify and call attention to the underlying skeleton. It is much easier to see at a glance than it is to put it into words that Kumari is in a marginal position between the maximally frightening representation of the Tantric goddess and her exaggeratedly beautiful manifestations.

Two other masks whose features are very closely related to each other are those of Siva and Seto Bhairava. Many of their features are identical and do not occur on any other mask. They are represented as young men, with firm full flesh, identical stylized eyebrows, mustaches, and tiny beards. They differ in that the Siva mask is of a pastel orange color resembling the purely decorative colors of the secondary goddesses of the chorus. Seto Bhairava, as his name implies (seto , "white"), is white, and the contrast of his white with the blue-black and clotted-blood-reds of the Bhairava and Mahakali and Kumari masks reflects the color contrasts (male versus female, minimal power versus maximal power) of Tantric symbolism. Seto Bhairava lacks Siva's third eye icon on his forehead. His other obvious differences from the troupe's representation of Siva in his mask (a representation of Siva that is locally sometimes said to represent Siva in his aspect as a "young bachelor") is that Seto Bhairava his small fangs that associate him (even, as we shall see, in a comparatively ineffective manner) with the dangerous aspect of the Tantric gods. The Siva mask, which is small in size compared to the other masks, has no eyeholes and is not worn. During processions it is carried attached to the costume of the dancer who incarnates Ganesa^[*] , and during the local performances the Siva mask is hung on the Oleander God's portable shrine. This peripheral reference to Siva is congruent with Siva's significant but peripheral relationship to the Tantric component of Bhaktapur's religion (chap. 9). Seto Bhairava, as a representation and transformation of the young Siva, is the protagonist of the neighborhood drama. He is the person who by his social awkwardness causes the drama to unfold as he stumbles into an encounter with Mahakali and the trouble he gets into and his efforts to get out of it all again provide the main thread of the plot around which the drama develops. Seto Bhairava is the focus for the audience's identification during that part of the drama concerning his conflict with Mahakali. The

things that happen to him also happen vicariously to the audience. The mask's general benignity encourages this identification in the way that, say, the mask of Bhairava strongly discourages it. But Seto Bhairava has another dramatic function in the drama. As Mahakali is to him, he is to the boys and young men in the audience during one phase of the proceedings. The fangs in his otherwise benign face serve to remind us of his danger to those who are even weaker than he is.

The remaining two divine actors are two masks that are identical except in the color of their faces (one white, the other a reddish-orange), respectively, in Newari, "Sima" and "Duma"—also known in popular speech as "Si(n)ba" and "Du(n)ba." These are said to be popular names for "Si(n)hini" and "Vyaghrini^[*] " (variously pronounced). People know that they represent a lion and a tiger, but it is generally not known which is which, nor which mask goes with which name. They are sometimes said to be two goddesses, but sometimes they are thought of as a couple, with the white-faced Sima as the male. Sometimes they are said to be messengers of Yama Raja, the ruler of the Kingdom of the Dead. Their headbands of skulls identifty them as dangerous Tantric figures, as do their open mouths and sharp teeth. However, their decorative colors and relatively smaller size suggest, as does their action in the dance drama, that they represent a much less serious danger than the maximally frightening masks.

The Annual Cycle

The activities of the Nine Durgas are woven into the larger Devi cycle, providing one of the main plots that ties that cycle together. They also have a subcycle of their own, a cycle of performances that takes place during the nine months of their annual life, which we will present in a later section of this chapter. We must now turn to the annual Devi cycle arranged on the thread provided by the Nine Durgas' annual life and death. We may begin after their last annual performance, shortly before they disappear.

Sithi Nakha [36]

Sithi Nakha^[6] falls on the sixth day of the waxing fortnight Tachalathwa (May/June). The Nine Durgas have to perform their last dance drama^[7] on either the Sunday or the Thursday prior to Sithi Nakha, depending on the day of the week that Sithi Nakha will fall. Sithi Nakha, like all the annual calendrical events of the Devi cycle, has a significant connec-

tion to the events of the rice producing agricultural cycle, all being related either to the rice planting and harvesting activities themselves or to the phases of the rainy season on which they are dependent. Sithi Nakha marks the expected end of the dry season, the day when wells and ponds and roads are to be cleaned in preparation for the coming rains.^[8] Anderson notes that "Chronicles tell how the city of Bhadgaon [Bhaktapur] was once surrounded by a thick fortifying wall and moat, the maintenance, renovation, and cleaning of which were the responsibility of every citizen of the town, regardless of caste. Any person who failed to complete his assigned section by Sithi Nakha Day was duly punished" (1971, 70). This day also marks the beginning of the period during which rice seeds are to be planted to produce the rice paddy plants that will be transplanted in the next stage of the rice production. For farmers, this day anticipates the beginning of a long period of hard work and anxiety and traditionally was the (the only , it is sometimes said) day in the year when farmers bathed their bodies completely, as a kind of purifying preparation for the period to come. The evening before Sithi Nakha marks the termination of the seven-week Dewali [30] period during which, on their particular days, various phukis worship their lineage deities as Digu Gods.

Like most calendrical events, the day has a miscellaneous additional set of references and activities, some being derivations of its wider areal and historical uses. This day elsewhere in South Asia and Nepal commemorates the day on which the god Kumara was born,^[9] but this connection is largely lost for Bhaktapur. On this day a mandala^[*] containing a six-petal design is made in the Taleju temple and in the homes of the Brahmans associated with Taleju. Although such a mandala^[*] is in some other Nepalese communities thought of as representing Kumara, it is locally interpreted as the Goddess Prthivi^[*] , that is, the earth, a reference that is closer to the agricultural implications of the Devi cycle.^[10] In Bhaktapur Prthivi^[*] is thought of quite concretely as the actual earth, the soil in the fields and beneath human constructions. Pujas to Prthivi^[*] are held in many homes on this day. In the evening many households have special dinners.

Sithi Nakha is a threshold day, the ending of some of the year's activities and a preparation for something new. What is being prepared for with the anticipation of the seasonal rains is an encounter with nature vital to agriculturally based Bhaktapur, an encounter full of risks. This "nature" is the environing and supporting realm of Bhaktapur's public moral, civic life.

Bhagasti [40]

Bhagasti, short for Bhagavati Astami^[*] , "Bhagavati's eighth day," falls on the eighth day of the waning fortnight, Tachalaga, that is, in June, seventeen days after Sithi Nakha. In the period between Sithi Nakha and Bhagasti the seed rice is being planted and time rains are anticipated. During this time many people go to the god-house of the Nine Durgas to do pujas and to offer sacrifices. This is a respectful gesture of farewell. Soon the Nine Durgas will be disappearing.

The disappearance of the gods is signaled by the "cremation" of the masks that had represented them during the previous year. On the Sunday or Thursday Before Bhagasti (whichever is the closest) the Gathas go to each of the major and minor twa: s throughout the city where they had performed throughout the course of the year (map 14, below). They wear their masks turned to the side of their heads and thus not covering their faces, as they had done during their previous performances. They visit the twa: s by walking around the city's main jatra route, and proceeding to them in the order in which they lie on that route not in the formally prescribed order in which they had visited them during the course of the previous nine months.

When in the course of their procession around the city they reach the Taleju temple, they enter it. A secret ceremony is performed there, indicating that they have completed their work for the year. In the minds of the Gatha performers and of people in general (cf. Teilhet 1978, 95) it is thought that this represents the withdrawal of some of the power from the masks, a power that had been given to them at the beginning of the yearly cycle, but this is not the understanding of the priests who administer the ceremony. The ceremony is called the "Sija Nakegu," that is, "feeding the 'death rice'"^[11] , The exact meaning of this is not clear now to the priests, but seems to refer to the approaching death of the Nine Durgas. When the Nine Durgas troupe leaves the Taleju temple they continue on the jatra route and finally return to their god-house. When they reach there, in a significant contrast to what had always happened on the occasions of their return after performing earlier in the year, they are not met by their Naki(n), the senior Gatha woman ceremonially attached to the group, who would have led them into the god-house with a purifying and welcoming ceremony, the du kaegu , but they simply and unceremoniously enter the house.^[12]

On the evening of Bhagasti the masks are secretly cremated at the Brahmani pitha , a pitha that has a particular importance in the ten-day

Mohani sequence and in the beginnings of the Nine Durgas' activities at the end of that sequence. Jehanne Teilhet (1978), on the basis of observations of the mask-making process and of interviews with the Pu(n) mask maker who was in charge of making the Nine Durgas masks each year, recorded many details and interpretations concerning the masks.^[13] According to Teilhet's informant, the ashes of the masks are collected and stored in a copper vessel that is placed in a secret spot on the river floor near the pitha (Teilhet 1978, 96f.).^[14] This is the "going into the water" of the Gods, dya: jale bijata . The vessel is left in the river until a month before Mohani, when it will be withdrawn and the ashes then used in the creation of new masks. According to the mask maker, the Nine Durgas "leave their masks and their Gathas [i.e., their vehicles] to go into the water because the water is necessary for the planting of rice; they help increase the water for the rice crops" (Teilhet 1978, 97). Their disappearance out of the city and back into "nature" underlines one of the important themes of the larger cycle.^[15]

The idea of deities going into the earth for a four-month's sleep is a general one in Hindu South Asia (e.g., Stevenson 1920, 59; Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, pp. 110f., 158). Devi herself is traditionally thought to begin her sleep on the eighth day of the bright half of Asadha, that is, the eighth day of the Newar Dillathwa, which has no corresponding annual event in Bhaktapur's calendar. As she appears again only three months later in the autumnal harvest festival she must, in some local versions of that festival, be awakened (Kane 1968-1977, vol. V, p. 158; Shastri 1949, 259). The Nine Durgas' "sleep" or death or going into the waters precedes their reappearance in Mohani by only three-and-a-half months, and although their life will be renewed at that time, there is no overt reference to awakening, bodhana , as there is elsewhere in South Asia for Devi, or, as there is, for example, in Bhaktapur for Visnu^[*] on Hari Bodhini [4]. Sithi Nakha [36] is, in fact, the event that precedes the reappearance of the Nine Durgas by four months, but this span does not seem related, now at least, to the general idea of a divine sleep of exactly one quarter of the year.

The Period Between Bhagasti [40] and Gatha Muga: Ca:Re [45], Human Sacrifice

Bhagasti is the time when the first rains of the summer monsoon are expected. The Nine Durgas are dormant. Now if the city is lucky, the rains will come, the rice fields will be flooded, and the rice seedlings will be replanted into the mud of the paddy fields to begin their growth into

mature plants. This is a period of risks—the danger of too much or too little water and of violent storms that may disrupt the planting. It is also a time of illness, particularly the gastrointestinal diseases that are common during the summer. It is said that because of the absence of the Nine Durgas, evil spirits freely enter into the city and are responsible for disease and troubles.^[16] Some nine weeks after Bhagasti the spirits will be driven from the city during the vivid and dramatic festival of Gatha Muga: Ca:re at which time the rice transplanting from the seed beds into the paddy fields is ideally completed—although it often may last for some more weeks depending on the weather conditions.

During the period between Bhagasti and Gatha Muga: Ca:re is the time when the Gathas who will later once again incarnate the Nine Durgas are believed to capture the human skullcaps or calvaria that they use as drinking vessels (patra ). They need three such skullcaps each year, one for their god-house, one for their dance performance, and one as an extra reserve "in case one of the others break." They take these skullcaps from living men by means of mantras. They are significantly never taken from women. Furthermore, the men from whom they take them must show auspicious signs, similar to the signs that were said to have characterized people who were taken for human sacrifice in earlier periods. When a man's skullcap has been removed by the Gatha's magic, the person dies within six months. This echoes the legends' Nine Durgas' random murderous activities before they were transformed into servants of the city; the tenuousness of this transformation is, as we will see later, an essential part of their civic use. In one sense, because the Nine Durgas are out of the city and no longer protecting it, the inside of the city develops, during this unprotected period, some of the qualities and dangers of the outside. Yet, these dangers of disease and disorder are the sorts of dangers that the Nine Durgas symbolize as well as protect against, and the Nine Durgas persist as shadowy representatives of dangers in the fantasized magical murderous activities of the Gathas at this time—who could have such powers only in some still active association with the now "dormant" Durgas.

These magical human sacrifices may very well be an echo of something else. Hamilton, in the early ninteenth century, reported information that he had obtained from a Gatha informant. According to his informant (Hamilton [1891] 1971, 35 [original parentheses]):^[17]

From those who come to worship at the temple, the Got [Gatha] that represent these deities [the Nine Durgas] accept of spirituous liquors, which they drink out of human skulls until they become elevated, and dance in a furious manner, which is supposed to proceed from inspiration. In the same manner,

they drink the blood of animals which are offered as sacrifices. In these temples the priests (Pujaris) are Achars, who at the sacrifices read the forms of prayer (Mantras) proper for the occasion, but retire when the animal is about to be killed by the Got who represents Bhairavi. The shrine, in which the images of the gods are kept, is always shut, and no person is allowed to enter but the priest (Pujari) and the Gots, who personate in masks these deities. Once in twelve years the Raja offers a solemn sacrifice. It consists of two men, of such a rank that they wear a thread; of two buffaloes, two goats, two rams, two cocks, two ducks, and two fishes. The lower animals are first sacrificed in the outer part of the temple, and in the presence of the multitude their blood is drunk by the masked Gots. After this, the human victims are intoxicated, and carried into the shrine, where the masks representing Bhairavi cuts their throats, and sprinkles their blood on the idols. Their skulls are then formed into cups, which serve the masks for drinking in their horrid rites.

Hamilton then goes on to report that other informants denied that such human sacrifices took place. Newars in Bhaktapur do believe that human sacrifices were performed in the past, and may still be performed on certain occasions in remote Newar towns and villages. Whatever Hamilton's story has to do with a possible historical reality (and his other details are quite accurate), they point to the important psychological reality that the Tantric control of the Nine Durgas by no means meant the end of their threat to innocent humans, and that behind the animal sacrifices that are of central importance throughout the Devi cycle is, as we have argued in chapter 9, an essential reference to human sacrifice. We will return to this in our summary discussions of the meanings of the Devi cycle and the Nine Durgas.

During the period beginning after Bhagasti and coming to a climax at Gatha Muga: Ca:re, obscenity is extensively and publicly licensed and used. Obscenities are called out loudly by male farmers working in the fields and in public areas of the city, and by young men and boys of various social statuses. The remarks are grossly sexual, and at any other time of the year they would be considered (particularly for people of middle and upper status) extremely bad behavior. Obscene remarks are made loudly to others at a distance so that they can be heard by an audience, thus indicating the essential public significance of the behavior. The remarks are made mostly by young men, from roughly sixteen to forty, and only very rarely by a girl or woman, who would be considered to be particularly brazen and uncaring of her status. Like all of Bhaktapur's other ritualized behavior of the special sort that collapses and disturbs ordinary social order and conventions (such as the

public role switching that occurs during Saparu [48] and the otherwise forbidden activities represented and licensed in Tantric rituals), there are strict limits to the license exhibited. While the obscene remarks are addressed by young men to young women, they would not properly address them to an older woman, a high-status woman, or an acquaintance. Above all, they would not address these remarks to any girl from their immediate or extended family. Within the limits of propriety for obscenities they say such things as "Hello, you girl over there who is holding my penis in your hand" or "A penis put into you is going to make you pregnant and then you will eat a lot of beaten rice (a food that is thought to have special value for pregnancy) and that will give you diarrhea." Sometimes the remarks are directed by young men and boys to other young men and boys (again within the limits of propriety), and they would say such things as "go lick a vagina" or "go lick your mother's vagina," although the latter may be considered too strong, and may well offend the recipient of the insult. There is, then, a "safe" area of conventional obscenities, a forbidden area that would represent a violation of proper behavior, and a risky borderline area where differences in individual daring and judgment operate. There are many more such phrases, and they are usually followed by a conventional phrase "pae hwa, " which forms a kind of refrain and which is derived from the very strong and shocking term "paegu " for the act of intercourse and "hwa, " which means a hole.

What is being expressed during this period is not only erotic sexuality but also, in the use of obscenity, a violation of status restraints that in other contexts would be extremely aggressive and insulting. This all has a special force in view of Bhaktapur's extensive (in comparative perspective) controls on sexual talk outside of its proper limited familial forms—above all, in public arenas where family ijjat or reputation is crucially at issue.

The period of obscenity comes to a climax and conclusion in the events of Gatha Muga: Ca:re, the day by which the Gathas' searching for human victims also ceases.

Gatha Muga: Ca:Re [45]

On the ca:re , the fourteenth day of the waning fortnight of Dillaga in July, a little less than five weeks after Bhagasti, the events of Gatha Muga: Ca:re (see fig. 28) bring the events of the intermediate period to a climax and to a close. By this day the transplanting of the plants that

Figure 28.
The demon Gatha Muga:.

have been grown from the rice seed into the—if all has gone well—rain-flooded paddy fields has ideally been completed.^[18]

Although the Nine Durgas themselves have departed, the Gathas whom they will possess again at Mohani continue their esoteric preparatory activities. On this day, according to some accounts, the Gathas take some black clay soil from the river bank and make a linga^[*] representing Siva from it. Some of this soil will later be added to the new Nine Durgas' masks to be made by the mask maker before the reappearance of the Nine Durgas during Mohani (Teilhet 1978, 86).^[19]

The main public activities of this day are related to the expulsion of the dangerous spirits, vaguely characterized as "bhut-pret " (chap. 8), which are conceived to have accumulated in the city and paddy fields at this time, and which can now be chased out of the city and fields and destroyed. The expulsion of the spirits—represented by a particular dangerous being, Gatha Muga:—comes at the time in the cycle when the complex events of nature necessary for the rice cycle have usually allowed for the firm establishment of the rice plants in the irrigated fields. Now some of the disorder associated with relinquishing control to the dangerous generative forces of the outside can be overcome in the humanly orchestrated expulsion of the demons and in the consequent cessation of the obscenity that mimics those generative and disorderly forces. There will continue to be risk from the weather until the rice harvest is completed, however, and a season of sometimes devastating gastrointestinal diseases is now at its height. In the language of the Devi cycle, the city still lacks the protection of the Nine Durgas. It will not be until Mohani and their reappearance—at the tension-reducing time of the rice harvest itself—that the danger will be once more fully under control. On this day, Gatha Muga: Ca:re, most households drive iron nails into the main doorway of their houses to protect them from bhut-prets , and some people put on iron finger rings^[20] and keep them on for days to protect their bodies.

The central imagery and legendary references of the day have to do with the giant demonic figure, Gatha Muga:, whose appearance and story overlap with that of a South Asian Raksasa^[*] , a giant fairy tale type of ogre, named Ghantakarna. Gatha Muga:^[21] was a dangerous predatory being variously described in different accounts. According to Anderson, "he was so corrupt that he vilified the gods themselves, defiled and destroyed homes and fields, roaming the land, stealing children, maiming the weak, killing and devouring his captives. His

depraved sexual orgies and unspeakable excesses with his countless wives horrified the pious people" (1971, 72).^[22]

There are, in addition, more human accounts of Gatha Muga: in Bhaktapur, which suggest its Newar urban complexity. In a story widely known in Bhaktapur, "Gatha Muga: was a man who believed in karma , and not in the power of the gods."^[23] The story continues, "he loved the poor people. He sat at the crossroads where he took money from the rich to give to the poor.^[24] If rich people refused to give money to him for this purpose, he would kill them. He also lived without concern about pollution. As he lay dying he hung bells on his ears, so as not to hear the gods' names called out.^[25] After his death [because of his failure to conform to traditional religion] no one was willing to cremate him, and his body was left at a crossroads. But then [ordinary] people joined together to donate money for his cremation, and they called a low caste man to perform it. Many people followed this procession because he had always protected the ordinary people." This legend throws an oblique light on a number of tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes in Bhaktapur's systems of moral control. For our present purposes, however, the story refers to aspects of the actions of the day, and illustrates an ambivalence, an attraction and repulsion, in what is symbolized by Gatha Muga:.

The events of the Gatha Muga: day, as well as the salient legends, differ somewhat in different Newar communities.^[26] In Bhaktapur each neighborhood area constructs representations for Gatha Muga:, interpreted in the neighborhoods as demons who once inhabited the local area. These vary in size, complexity, and elegance from vaguely anthropomorphic bundles of straw to elaborately masked, painted, and dressed figures (see fig. 28). The more elaborate figures have faces with fangs and often with bells at their ears, in reflection of the legends. Most of these figures are larger than life size; some have legs and will be carried, others are hollow papier-mâché constructed over wicker frames that are placed over a man who dances the demon. Some of these figures when carried or worn reach a height of eight or nine feet. Some are given crowns, mustaches, and beards, military jackets with epaulets, and rows of medals. This adds the imagery of a recent (in Bhaktapur's perspective) and alien authority to the demon's complex meanings. Whatever the variations in the figures, all are equipped with very prominent phalluses, often some two feet in length, and a pair of large globular fruits representing testicles. Sometimes red powder and strings of red beads are placed at the end of the phallus to represent ejaculated sperm.

In each neighborhood bundles of wheat straw are prepared which will later be used as torches in the processions chasing the demons, represented by the Gatha Muga:s, out of the city and, finally, for fire for their cremations. Throughout the city groups of small boys block various roads, in an echo of the legend, and demand coins from passersby before they are allowed to proceed along the road (see fig. 29). In the late afternoon and evening music is played in various neighborhoods, often by Jyapu music groups, and the giant figures are made to dance. Finally the time comes when the bhut-prets are to be expelled from the city. Processions form in each neighborhood and men and boys, holding torches in their hands, and shouting the sexual insults that they had been using since Bhagasti, chase the demons out of the city.^[27] The processions are called bha kayegu , which refers to processions accompanied by shouting of conventionalized phrases, but this is a travesty of such processions in which the phrase is often "victory" or the like. The figures are taken beyond the boundaries of the city and set on fire. In contrast to other major processions very few women watch the procession from the roadside or other public areas. They go into their houses "to avoid being insulted" and watch through the windows.^[28] After the cremation some people wash their faces and eyes in the river as a perfunctory purification. Then the members of the processions and the onlookers drift back to their homes. There are feasts in many households during the evening.

Gatha Muga: Ca:re culminates in a partial restoration of civic order. Obscenity, which had reached a crescendo on this day, will now cease. The Gatha Muga: figure in its form and legends combines in itself unsocialized sexual power, wanton destructiveness, and a mockery of authority. But all this is ambivalently viewed. He and his behavior are demonic and dangerous but fun, shameworthy and demonic but praiseworthy, rebellious against the gods and the rich but a support of "poor people" who love him in turn. He is driven from the city and his ashes returned to the bordering outside where the rice plants are growing and where the Nine Durgas had generatively gone to die and to sleep the month before.^[29]

Not only does Gatha Muga: represent various kinds of threats to Bhaktapur's social and cultural structure in his legends; such antistructural emphases are reflected in the day's actions. The day dispenses with deities and with priests, and with references to any of the city's hierarchical roles. The only references to authority are the crowns and

Figure 29.
Gatha Muga: Ca:re. Children holding a phallic representation of
Gatha Muga: block the streets and demand money for passage.

the medals, and military mustaches of Gatha Muga: himself—and he is destroyed. The city is represented, not in the kind of integrative events characteristic of structuring festivals such as Biska:, but in the parallel activities of the neighborhoods. But these are only loosely coordinated. Each neighborhood constructs Gatha Muga: after its own fashion and follows its own funeral routes out of the city.

The disorder mimed here is not the same kind of social disorder referred to in Biska:. This disorder, like all the disorder of the Devi cycle, has a vitality about it that represents the unruly and generative life—both of individuals and of the environing world—that the moral order must depend on as well as control.

Now for two months, between Gatha Muga: Ca:re and Mohani, the climactic festival sequence of the Devi cycle, during the slow growth of the rice plants to maturity, there are no events in the Devi cycle. Agriculture is left now, so to speak, to its own unfolding. The ordinary lunar cycle, however, is crammed with events. There are twenty-one of them in the intervening sixty days (chap. 13).

Mohani, The Autumnal Festival Sequence of the Rice Harvest [67-76]

The Mohani sequence begins on the first day of the waxing fortnight Kaulathwa (the bright half of Asvina) in late September. By this time the monsoon rains should have finished^[30] and the rice harvest been completed (see fig. 30). As with other complex festivals, it is somewhat arbitrary as to how many discrete calendrical units it may be said to contain. Calendars used by local Brahmans simply list each of the ten days of the festival, each named for its particular focal Mandalic^[*] Goddess. We will follow this for our enumeration of festival events although there are more than ten major component elements in the sequence.

Within the Devi cycle the ten days of Mohani is the time for a concentrated and complex sequence that is the focal point and climax of many of the themes of the annual cycle as well as a summation of the relations and meanings of Bhaktapur's dangerous goddesses. It is also the period during which the Nine Durgas are given a new birth and launched on their annual careers. "Mohani"^[31] is the Newari name for the local version of the widespread South Asian harvest festival dedicated to Devi, which in Nepali and generally elsewhere in South Asia is called "Dasai(n)." It is, by all our criteria, one of the city's major focal sequences.

Figure 30.
Standing on the ka:sis, the open roof porches of houses, men fly kites during Mohani, said to be reminders to the
deifies to bring the monsoon rains to an end.

Bhaktapur, as it usually does in its relation to its South Asian context, selects, builds on, and adds to the materials out of which Dasai(n) is constructed elsewhere. The central thematic thread running through Bhaktapur's Mohani is the dramatization of, and civic participation in, the story recounting how Devi, represented most centrally as Bhagavati/Mahisasuramardini^[*] , the conqueror of the great enemy of the gods, the Asura Mahisa^[*] came into her full strength and achieved her victory,^[32] how that strength is amalgamated with the power of Bhaktapur's political goddess, Taleju, in the course of the festival, and then, finally, transferred by Taleju to the Nine Durgas, who will use it to protect Bhaktapur during the following nine months.

Each of the first nine days of the festival begins and ends with visits to the pitha of one of the nine Mandalic^[*] Goddesses, starting with Brahmani in the east, and proceeding in the auspicious clockwise direction day by day around the periphery of Bhaktapur,^[33] ending on the ninth day at the pitha of the central goddess, Tripurasundari. On the tenth, the final day of the festival, a day of transition to a new phase, the Brahmani pitha once again becomes the focus, with an emphasis now on the newly emerged Nine Durgas.

Mohani: The First Day

On the first day of the festival, as they will again on each succeeding day, people from all over the city go at dawn to the pitha of the day's Mandalic^[*] Goddess. On this day, as they will on each day, people dressed in their better clothes (see fig. 31) walk together in groups, often accompanied by musicians, from the city's neighborhoods to the Brahmani pitha , the protective goddess of the east. People move on this day, as they will on all the subsequent ones. That is, they join the main jatra route, the pradaksinapatha^[*] , at a point convenient to their homes, and take it in either direction until they reach the god-house of the day's particular Mandalic^[*] Goddess (map 2). They then follow the conventional route from the god-house to the pitha . On their way from god-house to pitha they go via the tirtha , the sacred spot at pond or river associated with the day's goddess. At the tirtha they sprinkle water on themselves in a ritual bath. They then proceed on to the pitha , which is always close to the tirtha , and hold a brief puja , offering coins, grains of rice, flowers, incense, and the like. They bow to the goddess, circumambulate the pitha , and quickly move on to accommodate the crowds behind them. Most people then go on to the Taleju temple, and circumambulate the inner courtyard, as they will on their return from the pithas of the goddesses of the following days.

Figure 31.
Mohani. A group of Jyapu women going on the twice-daily visit to the day's mandalic^[*] pitha.

On this first day it is the god-house, tirtha and pitha of Brahmani to which the townspeople go.

In most houses, usually on the middle floor of the house, and also in each Tantric temple and god-house, a room or area is selected to be a locus of worship to Bhagavati (referred to in this setting sometimes simply as the "Mohani Dya:," the "Mohani God") during the Mohani sequence. During Mohani this room is called the "Na:la swa(n) " room, or simply "Na:la room.^[34] A layer of soil that has been gathered at one of the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses' tirtha s is spread on an area of the floor of the room. Barley grains are to be planted in this soil in the course of an important puja later in the day. For the upper thars , Chathariya, Pa(n)cthariya, Brahmans, and those Jyapu thars that have some special relation to Taleju, the barley will include grains given to them at the Taleju temple on this day, mixed with other barley grains. A connection between the goddess Taleju and Devi as the warrior goddess Bhagavati is thus established for them at the start.

After the barley has been distributed at the Taleju temple, the Taleju priests gather in that temple's Na:la swa(n) area, which is in one of the temple's inner courtyards or cukas , the Kumari Courtyard, to begin chanting the verses of the Puranic^[*] text the Devi Mahatmya in Sanskrit. The Devi Mahatmya will be read in successive divisions on each of the ten days of Mohani and completed on the final day. That text, as we have noted in chapter 8, provides many of the images and conceptions on which the forms, meanings, and arrangements of the dangerous goddesses in Bhaktapur are based. The sequences and images of Mohani follow it particularly closely. During and just prior to Mohani the stories of the Devi Mahatmya are told in Newari by storytellers in the public squares, and read out and recounted throughout the city by elders in many individual homes to assembled family members.

After the reading of the first portion of the Devi Mahatmya at the Taleju temple, barley will be planted in the soil in Taleju's Na:la swa(n) area in the course of a puja to Bhagavati. The planting must be done within a sait , a proper and auspicious span of time whose beginning and end are based on astrological considerations as determined by the Royal Astrologer of the central government in Kathmandu. The Na:la swa(n) planting in the Taleju temples of all three of the old Malla royal cities, Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur, will take place during this centrally determined span. There will be other such centrally determined saits on the seventh and the tenth days of Mohani.

There are common features in the contents and procedures in the Na:la swa(n) rooms in the Taleju temple, in the other temples and god-houses, and in private homes. We have noted the area of soil in which barley grains are planted on this first day. In the worship of the first day, prior to the time of the planting of the barley, it is also necessary to "establish" (sthapana ) the image that will represent Bhagavati most focally in the Na:la swa(n) room during the first phases of Mohani. Throughout most of Mohani Bhagavati is represented there by a particular kind of metal pot, a kalasa , or by a clay pot, thought of during Mohani as a kalasa , on which an image of Bhagavati as Mahisasuramardini has been painted on one side with, frequently, a pair of eyes painted on the other. On the eighth day of Mohani other images of Bhagavati will be added, usually a painted image on paper, and sometimes a metal image of the deity. As the barley sprouts the blades of the young plants will be a third reference to the warrior goddess. On this first day sacred water is poured into the kalasa and a small clay dish holding rice grains is placed as a cover over it. The kalasa is set on a bed of leaves of five different plants.^[35]

Before the puja to be held in the Na:la swa(n) room to the properly established deity, people, as they always do prior to important household worship, go to their local Ganesa^[*] shrine. Some people, in a reflection of the importance of the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses during Mohani, also go for prelimimary worship at the local mandalic^[*] areal pitha . The details of the home Na:la swa(n) puja vary for different thars and at different status levels. In general, the sequence has the following steps. The puja equipment and materials other than the kalasa have been gathered in an area in front of the patch of soil.

1. The sukunda , the oil lamp that contains representations of Ganesa^[*] , Siva, and of Sakti, is first worshiped.

2. Then the kalasa , representing Bhagavati, which had been placed on the soil and arranged as noted above, is worshiped.

3. Now the barley is spread on the soil and worked into it.

4. The soil is worshiped.

5. The kalasa and the soil are then worshiped together by means of offerings of the light of an oil-soaked wick and with the smell of incense.

6. As is appropriate in the worship of dangerous deities, and introducing the theme of sacrifice, which is a dominant theme of Mohani and of the Nine Durgas, the meat-containing mixture samhae , as well as

sweetcakes, fruits, and flowers are offered to these combined representations of the Goddess—the kalasa and the mixture of soil and barley grains. There will be no actual blood sacrifice until the climactic ninth day.

7. The family takes back some of the offerings as prasada .

In contrast to Chetri women who, according to Lynn Bennett (1983, 138), are forbidden entrance into their equivalent of the Na:la swa(n) room until the tenth day of Dasai(n), Newar women take part in this worship.^[36]

We may note here that the focus of worship is Devi, and not the Tantric Siva/Sakti relationship (although those upper-status families with Tantric initiations will, as in most pujas , add some reference to this relationship in a more or less peripheral fashion). The relation of the autonomous Goddess to the earth and to the processes of germination is established from the beginning.

The day introduces an activity that will reach a crescendo on the tenth day. Men, usually young men, from the mandalic^[*] area of the first day's Mandalic^[*] Goddess, Brahmani, who have made vows to that deity to perform a vrata on her special day during Mohani, perform a mata beigu , "a presentation of lights" at the Brahmani pitha . There are two varieties of this vrata . In one the man will sit on an armchair, with his forearms supported on the chair's arms. He wears a loincloth, a turban, and sunglasses (the latter two articles generally thought to suggest royalty). Seven oil lamps, small terracotta dishes with wicks floating in them, will be placed on his body,^[37] supported by an asana , a "seat" or base of cow dung mixed with mud. The lamps are lit and then kept full of oil by friends and family members. The devotee will sit relatively immobile for at least two or three, and sometimes as long as seven or eight, hours (see fig. 35). In the other major kind of mata beigu the devotee will lie covered with a thick mixture of mud and cow dung, on which 108 oil lamps have been placed. The man, also dressed in loin-cloth and sunglasses (although his position prevents his wearing a turban) will usually lie there for the full eight-hour period. This practice is both more expensive^[38] and more strenuous than the simpler mata beigu , and thus a greater offering.^[39] Both of these vratas are performed adjacent to the Brahmani pitha . On each successive day of Mohani, people of the particular mandalic^[*] area that is the focus of the day have their turn to fulfill pledges to perform a mata beigu vrata at their area's

pitha . On the tenth, the final day, men from all over the city as well as from hinterland villages outside it, do these kinds of vratas —and also, as we shall see, much more dramatic ones—en masse at the Brahmani pitha , which is once again on the final day the focus of an important part of the day's activities.

In the evening the stone that represents the goddess and its framing arch or torana^[*] , which together constitute the Brahmani pitha , are elaborately decorated with flowers, in patterns that are thought to resemble a flight of stairs. Thus the act of decoration is called swa(n) taki tanegu , "erecting a flower stairway." This form does not seem, at least to contemporary knowledge, to have any special significance aside from being a traditional decorative form. These decorations are made by local mandalic^[*] area groups, including areal guthis and groups of musicians, in honor of the goddess. Once again in the evening, as they had in the early morning, masses of people, accompanied by music, walk from their neighborhoods in groups to the Brahmani pitha following the same routes. They now emphasize flowers in their presentations to the Brahmani pitha . In contrast to the morning's procession, in the evening they do not bathe at the goddess' tirtha but go directly to the pitha . The routes they take through Brahmani's^[*] area had been previously cleaned by the local people in preparation for this day, and now lamps and decorations have been placed on shrines, open sheds, and various buildings along the routes. Arriving at the pitha , people quickly present their flowers and other offerings. Their offerings are part of the swa(n) taki tanegu . They then return to their homes.

The special events in the Taleju temple on this day begin a period of dense activity for that temple, much of which involves the "Malla king" as represented by the chief Taleju Brahman. The king is responsible for the ceremonial management of many temple activities. He is the central worshiper in the temple's Na:la swa(n) worship of this day, and will be important for the later activities that center in the Taleju temple,^[40] which also represents, as always when the Malla king is recreated, his palace. These activities require the assistance of representatives of many thars who perform what were their traditional specialities and responsibilities at the time of the Malla court.^[41] Mohani is the time in the annual festival cycle that the segment of Bhaktapur's society centering about the king, palace, and court is ceremonially reconstructed. This is done in large part within the Taleju temple as the "royal palace," and is hidden from the larger city. This represents, as so much symbolic

activity in Bhaktapur does, the reconstruction or maintenance of one of the city's cellular components, in this case one whose output was once essential to the traditional organization of the city.

The Second Day through the Sixth Day

On each of the next five days of Mohani the morning and evening processions and worship of the first day are exactly repeated, but on each day a new Mandalic^[*] Goddess and her pitha is the goal of the worship. The sequence continues in its daily movement around the periphery of the city in the clockwise circle of the compass points represented by the pithas . The mandalic^[*] pithas of these next five days are, in sequence, those of Mahesvari, Kumari, Vaisnavi^[*] , Varahi, and Indrani^[*] , that is, the pithas of the southeast, south, southwest, west, and northwest. On each day, following the morning visits, people return to their household Na:la swa(n) rooms to worship Bhagavati. Then, during the rest of the day they go about their ordinary affairs. In the evening they will once again go to the day's pitha , this time, again as on the first day, with the emphasis on flower offerings to augment the flower "stairway" constructed there by the people of the day's mandalic^[*] area. On each day the focal pitha is a focus for mata beigu vratas for people from the local mandalic^[*] area.

On the fifth day, the day of Varahi—the goddess in the form of a tusked wild boar—the bladed shoots of the barley planted in the Na:la swa(n) room usually begin to appear. The blades, which will eventually be taken to symbolize the sword of the conquering Bhagavati, are said to symbolize Varahi's tusks on this day.

The Seventh Day: Taking Down the Goddess Taleju

The systematic daily visits to the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses continue on this day with processions to the northern boundary pitha , that of Mahakali, as the focal point. But on the seventh day a new phase of the festival sequence begins with events at the Taleju temple in preparation for the special events of the following, the eighth, day. The preparations begin with the "taking down" of the goddess Taleju. Many people go to the outer courtyards of the Taleju temple, which become tightly packed with viewers. Within the limits of the astrologically determined proper time span, the sait , determined—like the sait on the first day for the proper planting of the barley grains in the Na:la swa(n) room in the Taleju temple—by the central government's Royal Astrologer in Kathmandu, an image of the goddess Taleju, wrapped in cloth decorated with gold and jewels in order to conceal it, is brought down from the room where

it is usually kept on the second floor of the temple. It is carried in a procession led by the chief Taleju Brahman, representing both the king and his Guru-Purohit,^[42] who carries the wrapped image, followed by a Josi and three Acajus from the Taleju staff. They are accompanied by musicians, and seven sword bearers. All these officials are dressed in the costumes of the Malla period. The concealment of the image, leading to speculation among the spectators as to whether the concealed image is the "true image" representing, or more accurately embodying the goddess, or a decoy, and if not, where in the procession that image might be, is part of the use of secrecy and mystery which we have discussed in chapter 9 and which is an important part of the Taleju component of Mohani. Yet, somewhere in the procession, whether it be the wrapped image or not, is, in fact, the "true" Taleju, the embodying and living form that for the people of Bhaktapur began its career as Indra's personal deity, and was, as recounted in Taleju's legendary history (chap. 8), eventually brought to Bhaktapur by Harisimhadeva^[*] . This procession, the taking down of Taleju, is thus considered a very powerful darsana , the showing herself to her devotees by the deity. Also included somewhere in the procession is Taleju's jatra image, which will be carried in a procession outside of the temple on the tenth and final day.^[43]

The procession enters the Taleju temple's main internal courtyard, the Mucuka ("main courtyard") at its inner end through the inner "Golden Gate," which has access to the upper parts of the temple.^[44] It then proceeds into the Kumari courtyard, which adjoins the main courtyard to the west, where the two Taleju images will be left. As the procession moves through the inner courtyard, the man who is at the head of the procession turns at three points, and the others follow. These turns signify yantras , diagrams of esoteric significance and power, traced out by the movements of the deities in the procession. The Kumari courtyard is closed off by a door from the main courtyard, and it is there the Na:la swa(n) worship has been taking place. Now, therefore, the goddess Taleju has been brought together at the Taleju temple with the kalasa representing the goddess Bhagavati and with the symbolism of the Na:la swa(n) room.^[45] Taleju will be left there until the tenth, the final day.

After the procession has brought the images to the Na:la swa(n) room, Taleju is worshiped there by the Taleju priests, and, in an introduction to the great number of blood sacrifices of the following day, a number of male goats are sacrificed to her. These are said to give her strength in preparation for the battles of the next day, and suggest Tale-

ju's identification now with the warrior Devi of the Devi Mahatmya myth. The throat of the first goat must be cut by the chief Brahman himself, while the others are then sacrificed by Josis. The Brahman completes the sacrifice of the first goat by decapitating it. One reason given for this initial sacrifice by the Brahman is his representation here of the Malla king, who is now making a sacrifice to Taleju as his own lineage god. As we have noted, people should, if they have the proper initiation, do their own sacrificing to their Aga(n) gods, and not delegate it to an Acaju. In addition to this representation, the Taleju Josis and Brahmans make sacrifices to Taleju during Mohani in their own right, as they believe their thar forbears did during the Malla period. During these sacrifices, the "Malla king" makes a daksina^[*] offering of gold coins to Taleju, as he will also do during subsequent sacrifices to her. The decapitated heads of these goats will be left in the Kumari court, along with the Taleju images, the kalasa , and the rest of the Na:la swa(n) room materials.

We have noted that the saits for certain Taleju activities during Mohani in each of the former Newar royal cities are set by the central government, that is, by the Saha king's astrologer, following a policy of the Saha kings from the time of the Valley's first one, Prthvi^[*] Narayana^[*] Saha, to maintain and support Newar festivals in the understanding that reference to royalty in them would now represent the new dynasty. During the "taking down" of the goddess Taleju at the proper sait , central government representatives who have come to Bhaktapur for this purpose and the staffs of the central government bureaus located (for local administrative purposes) in Bhaktapur are in attendance in the inner courtyard. This attendance is mandatory, and a roll call is taken to check their presence by a government official.

On this seventh day of Dasai(n) in Kathmandu, the seat of the central government, there is a procession honoring an image that is said to represent the lineage deity of the Saha kings^[46] (Anderson 1971, 146ff.; G. S. Nepali 1965, 406).^[47] This deity is said in Kathmandu to also represent Taleju who has become one of the Saha king's several protective deities. The procession there brings the image to the old royal palace, where it is placed in a Na:la swa(n) room, in the same way as is Bhaktapur's Taleju on this day.

The Eighth Day: Kalaratri

The Mandalic^[*] Goddess of this day is Mahalaksmi^[*] , at the northeast, and her pitha is the focus of the day's morning and

evening processions. But now additional activities are added to the continuing daily processions to the mandalic^[*]pithas . On this and the following day in the Na:la swa(n) rooms in individual homes and at the Taleju temple the climactic mythic events will take place which reflect the two days of battle and the eventual cosmic victory of the Goddess over Mahisasura^[*] , as recounted in the Devi Mahatmya .^[48] And on the final tenth day this victory, now completed, will be celebrated.

On this day in most of the Na:la swa(n) rooms in the city an image of Bhagavati in the form of Mahisasuramardi^[*] , the warrior goddess of the Devi Mahatmya, raised sword in hand, foot on the body of the defeated Asura in his water buffalo form, is introduced into the room. This warrior image is thus brought together in the same room with the kalasa , representing Devi. The Bhagavati image, usually a painting on paper, often supplemented by a second metal image, is placed not on but in front of the area of earth in which the barley is growing and on which the kalasa had been placed. The Bhagavati image will be offered a blood sacrifice on this day in temples and Aga(n) houses, and on the next, the ninth day, in homes—and blood cannot be spilled on the soil. At this time Devi as the full creator deity seems in the barley shoots and kalasa on the soil to represent fertility, while her partial manifestation as Bhagavati represents her ferocious warrior form who protects the gods and the city against their enemies.

If possible one or more swords are also put into the Na:la swa(n) room, and Bhagavati is decorated with tiny flags. Bhagavati is preparing for her great battle against the Asuras which will begin during the approaching night. In addition to the worship that has been repeated daily in the Na:la swa(n) room since the first day, the newly introduced Bhagavati image and the swords are worshiped with an offering of the meat-containing samhae . In the Tantric temples and Aga(n) Houses, in contrast to homes, preliminary blood sacrifices are offered on this day. In these Tantric settings blood sacrifices are routinely made and the sacrifice on this day does not have the special meaning that the unusual—and, for many households, unique—domestic blood sacrifice will have in private homes on the following day.

In the course of the evening of this eighth day, fitted in among the evening's other events, large feasts are held in people's homes. This is the first^[49] of three major household feasts, which take place on this and the following two evenings. In the feasts on these three days, there is much drinking. People who are drunk sometimes joke that they have become the warrior goddess through their intoxication.

On the approach of the night between the eighth and ninth days the focus of events moves to the Taleju temple. Large numbers of goats and buffaloes are to be sacrificed. A flock of some thirty goats^[50] is first brought to the temple. The lead goat, called "Nikhudugu,"^[51] must be of an unbroken black color and without physical defects.

A male water buffalo, called "Nikhuthu,"^[52] which like the lead goat, the Nikhudugu, must be all black and without blemish or defects, has been kept in a special shelter in the Byasi area of the Kwache(n) twa: . On this day the buffalo is given alcoholic spirits to drink, and is made drunk.^[53] In the Byasi area local women station themselves along the main road holding lit sukundas , whose oil has been taken from the Taleju temple. At Laeku Square, a Taleju Brahman dressed in traditional Newar clothes and carrying a sword and who represents the Malla king seats himself at the outer Golden Gate of the Taleju temple. It is now evening, perhaps seven or eight o'clock. The king sends three members of the Taleju staff, one of whom is a Nae, or butcher, the traditional sacrificers of water buffaloes, to fetch the buffalo and conduct it to him. When the envoys arrive at the house where Nikhuthu has been kept, his Jyapu keeper worships him and flicking sacred water on his body, asks him for assent to what is to follow, which will lead to his sacrifice and death. The buffalo signals his assent by shaking his body (which is the buffalo's usual response to being splattered with water). Then the staggering buffalo, accompanied by these functionaries and large crowds of people, is run through the streets to Laeku Square. Twenty-four other water buffalo bulls have also been brought to the square, and the Nikhuthu joins them. Now a formalized dialogue takes place between the king and the Nae, in which the Nae, on being queried by the king, swears six times to the identity and proper condition of the Nikhuthu.^[54] The lead buffalo is now brought into the temple. Now, one by one, twenty-four other buffaloes are brought by the Nae to the king. These are said to represent the twenty-four twa: s that are believed to have traditionally constituted Bhaktapur.^[55] Some of these buffalo are given the names of particular twa: s; others are not named. The Nae is queried by the king about each buffalo in turn, and each time the Nae swears, six times, to its proper condition. The formula used for Nikhuthu is repeated for each. The lead buffalo, Nikhuthu, represents the Asura king, Mahisasura^[*] . Each of the other buffaloes is said to represent one akshauhini^[*] , or army, of Asuras.

The sacrifice of the goats begins in the Taleju temple on the afternoon of this eighth day. The goats are sacrificed in the various areas of

the temple where its host of Tantric deities are located and represented. A major site for goat sacrifices is the Na:la swa(n) area of the Kumari courtyard, where the true Taleju image is—and where the heads of the goats sacrificed on the previous day had been left. Some goats are sacrificed in the Mucuka, the main inner courtyard where the principal buffalo sacrifice will later be held. These goat sacrifices are said to provide strength for Bhagavati in her continuing battle. The buffaloes, meanwhile, are tied to stakes in the main courtyard.

Now the inner courtyard of the Taleju temple begins to fill up as people come to witness the climactic events of Kalaratri. These begin before midnight of this eighth day and last until dawn, thus spanning the ending of the eighth day and the beginning of the ninth day. They represent the two-day battle described in the Devi Mahatmya . The preparation for battle starts with the sacrificing of two goats at the threshold of the now open inner Golden Gate that separates the main courtyard from the inner, central and most sacred parts of the temple. After asking for (and receiving a sign of) their permission to be sacrificed, and after then worshiping them and dedicating them to Taleju, the throats of the sacrificial goats are cut and their blood sprayed on, that is, offered to, the jatra image of Taleju. These sacrifices, like the previous ones, represent the strengthening of the Goddess in preparation for her battles, and thus Taleju is here conjoined with Bhagavati. After each goat dies it is decapitated.^[56]

At about this same time throughout the city in the upper thars ' Aga(n) houses one member of each phuki , or an Acaju (if there is no one with the proper initiation among the phuki ) sacrifices a male goat as an offering to the lineage deity. The phuki's Aga(n) Goddess is here, like Taleju, identified with Bhagavati, who herself is identified more and more clearly with Mahisasuramardini as Mohani proceeds.

Now in the Kumari courtyard, first the Nikhudugu, and then the remainder of the goats are being sacrificed. They must be killed by a Brahman or Josi, and not by an Acaju surrogate. The sacrifice of the goats takes several hours, the puja prior to the sacrifice of the Nikhudugu lasting, perhaps, some two hours. Each goat in turn must be asked permission to be sacrificed, and then be dedicated to Taleju and worshiped and then sacrificed with the proper ritual. The preparatory puja for the first sacrifice is considered to be the true beginning of the Kalaratri, the black night, in which in the mythic time of the Devi Mahatmya the goddess battles the Asuras.

In the main courtyard it is now time for the sacrifice of the buffaloes.

Two men from the Maha(n) Jyapu thars (which had provided the charioteers of Biska:), dressed only in short, apron-like loincloths and with their bodies rubbed with oil, stand on the elevated ledge that adjoins the two sides of the inner Golden Gate. These men are called the Hipha : men, the "receivers of blood."^[57] When these men are performing their ritual actions, they are called the "Hipha: gods." As Gods the two men represent a dangerous goddess and her consort whose names are esoteric secrets. (This goddess is represented elsewhere in Mohani as a member of the Gana^[*] Kumari and also as a form of the goddess in Taleju's Na:la swa[n] area.) They also represent the "right and left hands" of the Malla king and of Taleju. In their hands each holds a kalasa .

The same procedure will now be followed with each of the twenty-five buffaloes, starting with the Nikhuthu. The Brahman-king is the offerer of the sacrifice, but now the killing is done by the low-status Nae. This is a public sacrifice and as we have noted in chapter 9, blood sacrifice is only done by Brahmans (and Josis) in nonpublic settings.^[58] The king must ask the assent of the buffalo to the sacrifice.^[59] The king throws uncooked husked rice, flowers, and sacred water on their heads and bodies, which usually produces the shaking motion that signals assent. If this does not work, a flower is placed in the buffalo's ear, which invariably causes the necessary motion. The sacrifices begin with the sacrifice of the Nikhuthu. He is led to the open gate leading to the inner temple. The jatra image of Taleju is in front of him, just behind the open gateway. The two Hipha: Gods stand facing the buffalo, at each side of the gate. The buffalo's throat is cut by the Nae. His blood is sprayed first on the Taleju jatra image, and then into the kalasas of the two Hipha: Gods,^[60] who become splattered with blood. The Nae then decapitates the animal. Now, in turn, one by one, the remaining twenty-four buffaloes are sacrificed in the same way.

The sequence of sacrifices and their accompanying ceremonies last until dawn. After the last buffalo has been killed,^[61] people leave the Taleju temple. The sacrificial area and adjoining parts of the courtyard are now soaked with blood. The purification and cleaning of the temple that now follows is considered to be deeply secret. It is said that if unauthorized people were to see this it would be extremely dangerous to them, that they would die. The Hipha: men go to bathe in a bathing place in an inner courtyard of the temple, said to be a pond associated with the goddess Dui Maju.^[62] Taleju representatives from several different thars (particularly from among the Jyapus) come to do the traditional cleaning up. Also at this time a Po(n) untouchable comes to the

temple and "does something" that facilitates purification by transferring some of the impurity onto himself This is the only time during the year that a Po(n) can enter the inner parts of the Taleju temple.

Now the jatra image of Taleju is just inside the inner Golden Gate, which has now been closed, surrounded by twenty-five water buffalo heads and by two goat heads. The true Taleju image is in the Kumari court surrounded by more than twenty goat heads, from some of the goats that had been brought in a flock to the temple, plus other ones that had been offered and sacrificed by Taleju priests and by Chathar families descended from Malla kings. All the buffaloes are now considered to be representative of the Asuras, which have now been thoroughly vanquished in the setting of the Taleju temple, although the battle is still to be resolved later in the day elsewhere in the city.

Continuation of the Ninth Day: The Living Goddess Kumari and Emergence of the Nine Durgas

The ninth day of Mohani, which had been introduced with the events of the previous night, is the climax to the events of the first eight days. On this day the sequence of daily processions to the pithas of the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses reaches its central focus; the work at the Na:la swa(n) rooms comes to a climax; the living goddess Kumari makes her first major public appearance;^[63] and the Nine Durgas reappear, entering once again into the annual cycle, and preparing to carry forward the powerful meanings of Mohani.

The Mandalic^[*] Goddess of this day is the civic mandala's^[*] central goddess Tripurasundari. As we have discussed in chapter 8, she is not one of the host of goddesses of the Devi Mahatmya . In contrast to the peripheral Mandalic^[*] Goddesses who are, in their Devi Mahatmya versions at least (although not, necessarily, in other Puranic^[*] treatments), partial and limited goddesses, Tripurasundari represents the goddess as the full creator deity. Thus, as we have noted, she is not only a local areal Mandalic^[*] Goddess in her own right, but as the center of the mandala^[*] she concentrates and contains the partial forces of the peripheral goddesses in the same way that the Devi of the Devi Mahatmya does in that vivid narrative expression of this fundamental South Asian conception. In its focus on Tripurasundari the ninth day represents a completion of one important aspect of the cycle, while the tenth day, which returns once more to the first peripheral goddess Brahmani, is an opening out into the succeeding phase. The morning and evening processions to and worship of the Tripurasundari pitha is exactly like the worship

of the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses of the prior eight days. There is a morning procession to her tirtha (which is at the river at Khware),^[64] followed by worship at her pitha . In the evening great masses of people walk to the pitha again with flower offerings. After the evening pilgrimage people will go to view the new masks of the Nine Durgas, which are the first public signs of their reappearance after their long sleep.

On returning home in the morning from their visit to the Tripurasundari pitha , people go to worship in their Na:la swa(n) rooms. This is the one time in the year in which all Hindu Newars in Bhaktapur are expected to perform a blood sacrifice. For the very poorest people it may be the presentation of only an egg; others will offer a chicken or a duck, but, for those who can afford it, the ideal sacrificial animal is a male goat.^[65] The sacrificial animal's head is kept and will be presented as siu , the hierarchically distributed parts of the head (chap. 9), during the family feast, which will be held on the tenth and final day.

While these sacrifices are going on in households throughout the city there is a sacrifice of a number of goats and buffaloes on Bhaktapur's Laeku Square. This is done by members of the Nepalese army, with accompanying rituals performed by non-Newar Brahmans.^[66] These public ceremonies are considered to have been introduced after the time of the Malla kings. Although the Taleju sacrifices of the Kalaratri and, in fact, of the Mohani period^[67] had previously come to an end, the Na:la swa(n) room sacrifices, and Laeku Square sacrifices, are considered to be representations of the ongoing mythic battle.

Associated with the Na:la swa(n) worship of this day is the worship of household members' tools and implements of trade. Some of these may be brought into the Na:la swa(n) room, but the larger implements are worshiped at their usual locations. Potters worship their wheels, women their looms, farmers and dyers their special tools, truck drivers their trucks, and so forth. The implements are thought of sometimes as Devi, sometimes as Visvakarma, whom the Puranas^[*] describe as "the inventor of innumerable kinds of handicrafts, the architect of the gods, maker of all kinds of ornaments, and the most famous sculptor" (Mani 1975, 869). Blood sacrifices are generally made to the tools.^[68]

As we have noted (chap. 8), Bhaktapur gives the same name to, and in part condenses,^[69] Kaumari, the Mandalic^[*] Goddess derived from the Devi Mahatmya and other lists of Matrkas, and Kumari, the maiden goddess. Worship of the latter form is commonly associated with the

South Asian Dasai(n) Festival. The Devi Bhagavata Purana^[*] , for example, specifies that young girls (in this case at two years of age) should be worshiped during the Navaratri puja . Traditionally for South Asia—and reflected in the events of the day in Bhaktapur—"there are no hard and fast rules as to how many Kumaris should be worshiped and as to the manner and method of the worship. . .. Age alone does not render [a] Kumari suitable for worship. They should be absolutely free from [skin] ulcers, leprosy, ugliness, squint-eyes, dwarfishness, lameness, bad odor, stigma of low birth, etc." (Mani 1975, 439). Chakravarty, however, writing of Kumari worship, emphasizes the unimportance of the "stigma of low birth." "Maidens of all castes not exceeding sixteen years in age may be worshipped without making any distinction of caste" (1972, 81). He adds that in contrast to the sometimes "hidden ritualistic orgies" that sometimes accompany the Tantric tradition of the worship of adult women "as forms of the Mother Goddess," the worship of the child Kumari is "quite sober."

Kumari worship, as the worship of girls who become princess-like "living Kumaris,"^[70] is highly developed in the three old Newar royal cities, and has been a subject of scholarly as well as popular interest.^[71] The various major "living Kumaris" of the Kathmandu Valley are really a heterogeneous group, Bhaktapur's main one differing, for example, in status and conditions of her life from the major Kathmandu Kumari.

On the morning of this ninth day, after completing the blood sacrifice and worship in the Na:la swa(n) room, most families at some other location in the house worship the young, premenstrual girls in the family. They may worship one girl alone as Kumari,^[72] and, sometimes, if there is more than one girl, as some set of goddesses. Thus three girls may represent the set of goddesses Mahalaksmi^[*] , Mahakali, and Mahasarasvati, or nine girls, the Nine Mandalic^[*] Goddesses. However the family girls worshiped, whatever their symbolism as a group, are thought of individually as Kumari. It is said that the motive of these pujas on this day is not to honor the girls, but to use them as vehicles to bring the Goddess into the home.

Kumari as a "living goddess" is worshiped in two representations at the Taleju Temple during the course of the day. In the first and less elaborate representation she is one member of the Gana^[*] Kumari,^[73] the "retinue" of Kumari. This troupe consists of eleven young children of the high-status Buddhist Bare thar , the same thar that provides the main Kumari.^[74] These children are selected each year (a child may be reselected in succeeding years) by the Bare themselves and will have no

further ceremonial role to play, at least in the Hindu life of the city, aside from on this day. Two of them are boys representing, respectively Ganesa^[*] and Bhairava.^[75] The nine girls in the group represent the nine Mandalic^[*] Goddesses, with the exception that the girl who represents the ninth goddess is not Tripurasundari, but a goddess of esoteric importance in the Taleju temple, Ugracandi. In the course of their preparation and dressing by the Bare, monhi (the pigment derived from lamp black, and which is of Tantric importance for facilitating possession by a deity), which has been sent from the Taleju temple, is placed on the foreheads of the children. Members of the Taleju staff go to the Dipankara vihara , a Buddhist religious and social community in the northeastern part of the city, to conduct the Gana^[*] Kumari to the Taleju temple. The king waits at an intermediate place along the processional route in the Sukuldhoka neighborhood and joins Kumari and his envoys there for the return to the Taleju temple. The details of this procession and its membership and procedures are generally the same as the one that will fetch the main Kumari, the Ekanta Kumari, later in the day, and will be described below. But in contrast with procedures for the selection of the Ekanta Kumari, the members of the Gana^[*] Kumari group are selected and inspected for the proper physical state (whose characteristics we will note in connection with the main Kumari) by members of the Bare thar without having to have any additional examination and confirmation by Taleju priests.

The children are greeted at a special Kumari god-house in the Kwache(n) twa: by the delegation. Each one of them is taken and carried by a Jyapu woman (of one of the Jyapu groups traditionally associated with the Taleju temple) who carries them in her arms in a procession. They are first brought to the outside courtyard of the Taleju temple, and then with a greeting and purifying ceremony, the lasakusa , led into the main inner courtyard. The king welcomes them there and washes their feet, as he would visiting deities. The children are then led to a room within the temple on the northeast part of its upper floor, where they are worshiped by the king and the Taleju priests, and by members of the Malla and Pradhananga^[*]thars . These are descendants of the Malla kings, whose lineage goddess is, thus, Taleju.^[76] In the course of the worship these living deities are asked to destroy the power of the Asura enemies of the king and the city. The king is considered the main worshiper, and the worship is for his protection as ruler and for the protection of the city. In contrast with the main Kumari, there is no legendary explanation of this group known to us (although, as we have

noted, such groupings of deities are elsewhere in South Asia associated with Dasai[n]), but the gathering of these representatives of the Mandalic^[*] Matrkas into the Taleju Temple signifies not only the gathering together of the areal forces but also their association with and (as the subsequent Kumari worship indicates more clearly) their incorporation into the power and centrality of Taleju herself.

As they will with the main Kumari later in the day, the priests watch the behavior of the child deities for omens—messages from the deities. While the later omens from the main Kumari will be messages for the king himself concerning his own fate, these are considered messages for the people, for the city in general. That is, this group of Mandalic^[*] Goddesses, plus Ganesa^[*] and Bhairava, speak to and about the city, while the lone Kumari, who, as we will see later, is a manifestation of Taleju herself, speaks to the king, as the personification of traditional political power. It is the function of the main Taleju Josi to interpret the signs. In contrast to the main Kumari, who tends to act seriously in her role as goddess, the child deities of this group usually act like a group of children. They laugh, sometimes fight, tell the priests that they want to go to the toilet or want to go home. The omens are fairly generalized and simple to interpret. If the children fight or cry, it is a bad sign. If they laugh too much or act foolishly, it is also unpropitious, as it would be if they refused food offerings made to them or if they accept them but then eat them too hungrily or with evident greed. The ideal portent, in short, is if they behave properly as guests at a feast.

In contrast to the Gana^[*] Kumari, the main living Kumari (see fig. 32) has her local legends. She is sometimes called the "Ekanta Kumari," the lone or solitary Kumari, to distinguish her from other forms,^[77] but more usually just Kumari. For local informants "Ekanta" implies, in reference to Kumari, that she is the "sole goddess," that is, the Goddess in her full and complete form, as is Taleju, whom she represents.

The Malla kings of Bhaktapur, the story goes, used to talk freely with the goddess Taleju, who often appeared to them in her divine form. One day the goddess saw the king watching her in the way a spy does when trying to discover something about someone without their knowing about it, something that they may wish to hide. Because of this Taleju became angry at the king, and said she would not return anymore. He pleaded with her to come again to him. She said, "Because of what you did I will never appear to you again. But I will talk to you now in the body of a candala^[*] , an untouchable girl." There are other versions of the

Figure 32.
The living goddess Kumari. People are making offerings and receiv-
ing prasada.

story, but they differ principally in the reason given for the anger of Taleju. Thus, in another telling, the king had a diamond that he cherished. Taleju advised him to keep that diamond secret from everyone. But one day the king's daughter somehow saw the diamond. Taleju became angry and the rest of the story followed.^[78] These stories go on to say that when the king told the Brahmans what had happened, they said, "We cannot bring a Po(n) girl (Bhaktapur's equivalent of a candala^[*] ) here into the temple, but we can choose a Bare's daughter." Thus the water-unacceptable Bare became, according to these Hindu legends,^[79] a compromise substitute for the truly unclean girl with which the angry Taleju—and the Tantric tradition—threatened priestly Bhaktapur.

The child who is the Ekanta Kumari always comes from the same Bare lineage group. She is selected by members of that group among the girls of their phuki . She is usually about six or seven years of age (and thus premenarche) and must not yet have had her Ihi , mock-marriage, ceremony. She must not have lost any teeth (which is one reason that seven is a critical age), nor have any obvious physical defects or blemishes. In contrast to the living Kumaris of Patan and Kathmandu, who maintain their role as goddess for several years and who will find themselves in a permanently altered and disadvantaged state after their tenure as goddess (for they will be unable to marry), the Bhaktapur Kumari plays her part for only a year or two, and lives an ordinary Newar life after it is finished. Furthermore, her only function for the city as a whole is on this and the following day of Mohani, although she is an occasional focus of worship from time to time in her local area, where she and her family will inhabit the nearby special god-house of the living Kumari, in a place called "Casukhel," during her tenure.^[80] Even during this period, however, when not at the center of local worship she can play with other children and go to school.

In contrast with the children of the Gana^[*] Kumari, whose physical propriety was not checked by the Taleju staff, the Ekanta Kumari is checked three times prior to the ninth day. Three days before the beginning of Mohani and again on the fourth and sixth day of the Mohani cycle, a Taleju Brahman—representing the king and the Brahmans—and a Josi and an Acaju from the temple go to the Dipankara vihara to inspect her. They check to see if she has the required physical characteristics. If not, another girl must be substituted. They do not, as a matter of fact, check her completely. She is clothed, and they examine only her face, teeth, and extremities. They ask the responsible Vajracarya

Buddhist priest to swear an oath that her entire state is proper for her to be Kumari, which he does on each of the three occasions.^[81]

By now the children of the Gana^[*] Kumari have finished their time at the Taleju temple, and have been carried back to the living Kumari's god-house in Casukhel. Now once again, the Brahman-king, the Josi, and the Acaju proceed from the Taleju temple to the Sukuldhoka area, to a position along the southern circumference of the city's main processional route as it enters the upper city and wait there. Now members of the Jyapu Kalu thar , thought to have been traditionally messengers for the Malla kings, go, accompanied by musicians, to the living Kumari god-house, where the girl is now staying. She is now elaborately dressed and decorated to represent the goddess, and her forehead has been marked with monhi . The messengers bring her back to the waiting king and priests. The king now takes her in his arms and carries her, accompanied by the other members of the procession, back along the processional route to the Taleju temple. When they arrive there she is met at the entrance to the temple's inner courtyard by another set of priests who welcome her and by means of a laskusa ceremony lead her to the door leading into the Kumari court. Now the king washes her feet, as the feet of the Gana^[*] Kumari gods had earlier been washed, and bows down to her. He then lifts her again and carries her into the Kumari court. In that court is the Na:la swa(n) area, the true image of the goddess Taleju, and the decapitated goat heads from the preceding day.^[82] The blood, however, has been cleaned from the floor, making the scene less horrible, and the heads have been neatly arranged.^[83] Now Kumari becomes the focus of worship, with the king as the chief worshiper. During the worship, which takes perhaps two hours, the girl's behavior is carefully watched. This is the time of the annual darsana , or manifestation of Taleju in the form of the living Kumari to the king. The staff, under the leadership of the Josi, will later interpret her actions as a sign of future events, as they had interpreted the actions of the Gana^[*] Kumari. The staff looks for two different things. First they look for some sign in the girl's behavior, something in her action that seems more knowing or mature than the ordinary behavior of a six-year-old girl that will confirm to them that the goddess is present. This is for their own satisfaction, for however the child acts, that action is taken as a manifestation of Taleju, and as a sign. More important (at least it was in the Malla times) is their search for omens. As with the Gana^[*] Kumari, the child's measured acceptance of food and offerings, neither rejection nor gluttony are good signs, as is the quiet, good-natured acceptance of

the worship, manifesting neither silliness, tears, nor a desire to go home as soon as possible. Proper or improper behaviors are interpreted as giving some very general indication of the sort of year that is in store for the king. In the days of the Malla kings, it is said, the Kumari's behavior actually affected the kings' policy. Now if, and only if, there is some particularly dramatic or portentous occurrence, the Saha king's priest in Kathmandu is informed of it. Although the Ekanta Kumari, like the members of the Gana^[*] Kumari, is a vehicle for a god, the deity does not possess her in the same way as it will the members of the Nine Durgas troupe, who become the deities in an uncanny transformation. She is a child through whose ordinary behavior the goddess manifests herself.

At the end of the worship the priests take prasada from the child goddess, and she is brought out of the Kumari courtyard into the main inner courtyard. Now the king calls for music, and musicians, who are in adjoining courtyards, begin to play. People, who have come in large numbers and now pack the inner courtyard, bow to her and take prasada from her if they can. In the main courtyard the priests transfer her to her Vajracarya priest, who conducts her back to her god-house along the main jatra route, where multitudes of people wait to see her and receive prasada from her (see fig. 32).

On the evening of this ninth day and on the following day there are a number of public events that signal the imminent return of the Nine Durgas to Bhaktapur. During the weeks before Mohani members of that family among the Pu(n) thar which has the hereditary right and responsibility to prepare the masks of the Nine Durgas troupe have been making the masks with the proper and traditional ritual and technical procedures (Teilhet 1978). The masks include among their ingredients a mixture of a specially gathered and prepared clay mixed with some of the ashes saved from the cremation of the previous year's masks. Also during this period the members of the Gatha thar who will perform and become the Nine Durgas are engaged in the secret activities that will ensure the successful and proper public effectiveness of their representation of the Nine Durgas.

On their return from their evening procession to the Tripurasundari pitha many people pass through the courtyard of a special house in the Yache(n) twa: , where the thirteen masks that will be used by the Gatha are arranged side by side on a platform. Many of them then wait along the route on which the Gathas will chase a bull water buffalo, in an echo of the running of the Nikhuthu to the Taleju temple on the previous day. This buffalo is called the "Kha(n) Me:." Me : means "water buffa-

lo," and Kha(n) is a term of uncertain meaning here, although the same term is used as one name of the Na:la swa(n) room, where it is locally interpreted to mean "sword." The Kha(n) Me: has been kept in a special room on the cheil , the ground floor, of the Nine Durgas' god-house. It has been made drunk, as had the Nikhuthu, and now staggering and lurching toward the bystanders, is chased by the Gathas—who are in their ordinary clothes and are not yet the Nine Durgas—from the god-house down to Dattatreya Square, where great crowds of people are waiting to watch it, and then on to the Brahmani pitha , which will be a focus of secret activities for the Gatha during the night, and one of the centers of the next, the tenth, day's activities. The Kha(n) Me:, like Nikhuthu, represents the great Asura, Mahisasura^[*] . This echo of the previous days' events represents, with the involvement of the low-status, marginally clean Gatha, a movement of the Devi myth out of the Royal and aristocratic Taleju temple, and into the demotic realm of the city.

Later in the night, when people are asleep, the Gatha go to "steal" the masks. Those who happen to be abroad in the city during the night avoid the areas on the route from the house where the masks were displayed to the Brahmani pitha where the next Gatha activities will take place, because they fear that to see these things will cause death. The Kha(n) Me: will be secretly sacrificed at the Brahmani pitha by the Gatha during the night. The sacrifice follows the procedures for the Nine Durgas' sacrifices, which we will describe below. The Gathas as the Nine Durgas are at the same time the sacrificers and the deities to whom the sacrifices are offered, and they will drink some of the blood of the Kha(n) Me:. The drinking of this blood, the "life blood," is appropriate to dangerous deities but would be fatal to humans. This thus signals that the Gatha have become the Nine Durgas. It is said that at the Brahmani pitha on this night the Gatha, wearing their costumes as gods, do their first dances as deities for the new cycle. They have not yet, however, attained their full power. This is a preliminary stage during which their slowly waxing powers derive from their sacrifice and from their worship of Brahmani. They will attain their full siddhi , or supernatural effectiveness, from Taleju in the course of the events of the final, the tenth day of Mohani.

The Tenth Day: The Taleju Jatra, and the Transfer of Power to the Nine Durgas

On the morning of this day people dress in their best clothes, the women if possible wearing one of their most beautiful saris , and go

for the last time from their neighborhoods along the jatra route, joining in a great mass of people to visit one of the protective Mandalic^[*] Goddesses of the city. This time they go once more, as they did on the first day of Mohani, to the eastern pitha , that of Brahmani, stopping as they had on the first day to wash or sprinkle themselves with water at her tirtha . Even people who might not have gone previously join in on this day, and large numbers of people from surrounding villages and towns also join in,^[84] so that many thousands of people converge. Seated near the pitha are scores of music groups, playing—each group its own music—at the same time. At the pitha the corpse of the Kha(n) Me: is lying. The Gatha, dressed in their Nine Durgas costumes, which are now splattered with blood, stand close to the buffalo's corpse. Their masks, which have been marked with monhi and other sacred pigments lie on the ground. As people file by the pitha they worship not only Brahmani as they did on the first day but also the Nine Durgas group, represented by the masks. Each person is given a bit of meat from the buffalo carcass, which they eat as prasada , thus sharing in the killing of the buffalo, and in Devi's victory over Mahisasura^[*] .

This morning is the major time for the fulfillment of the pledges for the "offering of lights" vrata (see fig. 33). This is the sitting or lying supine of young men for many hours on end, supporting burning oil lamps, which we described in our discussion of the first day. On this tenth day another, a much more strenuous way of fulfilling such pledges is also done. The devotee will move starting from his home, and then join and proceed along the city jatra route to the Brahmani pitha in one of two ways. He may move forward by lying on the ground, and then alternately rolling himself up into a ball, then extending his body forward, and then rolling it up again by bringing his legs up toward his head while keeping his most forward position, slowly proceed along the jatra route. Another way of proceeding is by alternatively kneeling, prostrating himself, moving his knees forward, rising on his knees, making a gesture of respect, standing up, and then kneeling again. In this latter method a friend or family member may help support a burning oil lamp on his head as he proceeds. These vratas are performed for the same kinds of purposes as we have described for the much more ordinary offerings of lights, but are usually motivated by more severe problems. The devotees, dressed in loincloths, and wearing turbans, have their knees and elbows heavily bandaged to protect them from injury.^[85]

Figure 33.
A vrata, an offering of light at the Brahmani pitha on the tenth day
of the Mohani festival.

As people leave the Brahmani pitha and enter the main city festival route again, many of them proceed to the Taleju temple. When they pass Sukuldhoka on their way to that Temple they encounter the living goddess, the Ekanta Kumari, seated there at the side of the road. People stop and worship her and give her small offerings and take prasada from her (see fig. 32). When they reach the temple they enter the main courtyard. The fifteen buffalo heads have been arranged in three rows of five each just in front of the closed inner Golden Gate behind which is the jatra image of Taleju. The head in the center of the row just adjoining the gate is considered to be the Nikhuthu. People circumambulate the buffalo heads, walking along the raised ledge just in front of the inner gate in order to do so. The people will now return to their homes for their final activities in the household Na:la swa(n) rooms.

At Taleju the true Taleju image has been in the temple's Na:la swa(n) area, the Kumari court. The activities that will take place there must take place during the proper astrologically determined sait , one of three such saits that are important to the temple's activities during this tenth day. Two of these saits are locally determined by the Taleju Josis; one of them, the taking up of the true Taleju image is, like the two earlier saits of the Mohani period, determined by the central government's astrologer. The first event is a visarjan , a "taking leave" ceremony. During the proper sait the Taleju priests will now complete their reading of the Devi Mahatmya , and do a final puja to the combined Taleju-Bhagavati in the Kumari courtyard. At the end of the worship the goat heads are removed. They will be distributed to members of the Taleju staff, to be cooked and distributed as siu in their next household feast.^[86] All the other objects in the room are left in place until the second of the day's saits , the "tika sait ." This may come immediately after the "taking leave" worship, or may be some hours later. At this time the king gives a tika (a pigmented mixture that is placed on the image or specifically on the forehead if the offering is to an anthropomorphic representation or to a person) to Taleju. He also presents her with barley shoots brought from the Na:la swa(n) rooms in the homes of each of the Taleju priests. These shoots, conceived of now in part as swords, represent Devi's great victory. Then each of the priests takes back some of the tika mixture and barley shoots from the Taleju image. They are now prasada . Each priest then gives tika and some of the barley shoots to each of the others. The barley shoots in the temple's own Na:la swa(n) room are left undisturbed for the time being. During this tika sait the non-priest members of the Taleju staff and members of their families, as well

as the families of the priests, wait in the Taleju main courtyard, outside of the Kumari courtyard. The Taleju priests then leave the Kumari courtyard and give Taleju prasada to them.

Meanwhile the people who have returned from the Brahmani pitha , perhaps via Taleju, go to their Na:la swa(n) room for the final worship there. A puja is held for the representations of Devi, that is, for the kalasa and the Bhagavati image. During the course of this last puja the worshipers do something that is usually restricted to Tantric worship. Using a special oil lamp, often in the shape of a reclining skeleton with the lamp bowl over its genitals, they prepare the lamp-black pigment, monhi , which the worshipers then apply to their foreheads in a straight vertical black line. In esoteric Tantric practices, that monhi mark is used to facilitate the entrance of a deity into the worshiper's body, but here it is a routine ritual gesture. People take pieces of red cloth, which had been brought into the room on the eighth day, and tie them around their necks in another sign of Devi's victory. The blades of barley are now pulled out of the soil and offered to the Devi images, and then some of them are taken back by the worshipers who decorate themselves with them. On the eighth day a pumpkin-like gourd, a bhuiphasi ,^[87] had been placed in the Na:la swa(n) room to represent the Asura. Now the men and young boys in the household take the bhuiphasi out of the Na:la swa(n) room, along with one or more of the swords that had been kept there, and "kill" it by giving it three slashing cuts. They jokingly brandish the swords, pretending to be Ksatriya^[*] warriors. This little domestic victory parade is a forerunner of the goddess Taleju's public victory jatra that will take place later in the evening. Now the men and boys, carrying the swords, return to the Na:la swa(n) room, and they and the other family members take prasada from the goddesses. The bhuiphasi will then be cut up and distributed to all people in the household to eat and once again to share in the killing and the victory.

The Na:la swa(n) worship, which has lasted throughout Mohani, is now over. The remnants of the barley plants are placed on the household pikha lakhu . The soil, the special kalasa , and the Bhagavati painting are left in the room until the fifth day following the end of Mohani, that is, until the next full-moon day. Then the soil is sent to be thrown into the river, the painting hung on a wall, the kalasa stored, and any metal Bhagavati image that might have been used returned to the household puja area.

On this or one of the immediately following nights many households

hold feasts. Married-out household women and their families are invited to the house for these feasts and offered various prasada items from the household Na:la swa(n) room.

Meanwhile in the Taleju temple the priests await the third sait of the day, which will be the proper time for Taleju's jatra . This consists of an internal jatra first within the temple, and a subsequent external one that moves out through the city. In both of these the details of the movements of the goddess Taleju are determined by the position of the moon at the time of the sait . She must be carried in such a way that the moon is either in front of her or at her right in the first movements of her procession.

Just before this sait an esoteric form of Devi^[88] in her warrior manifestation, which had been placed on the soil before the barley seeds were planted, is removed and taken to her quarters in the temple, and the remaining barley shoots are taken up. People have come to the Taleju temple and wait in the inner courtyard to watch the "taking up" of Taleju, the internal jatra . At the proper time a procession leaves the Kumari court. This includes seven people carrying swords, and three others carrying secret objects wrapped in cloth, and covered with flowers, jewels, and barley shoots. Among them is the true Taleju image. The procession goes through the main court and enters the inner Golden Gate. It is led by the king carrying one of the bundles in his hand. He again stops at three points within the main courtyard and turns in a movement that designates a yantra . The exact movements are determined by the position of the moon. The procession then proceeds to carry the true Taleju goddess upstairs again to her room, where she will remain until the next year's Mohani.

The final phase of Mohani is a literal and symbolic moving outward, both into the city and into the new cycle, which begins at this time of harvest. This is enacted in the public victory procession of the goddess Taleju, and is called "Paya(n) Nhyakegu." Nhyakegu means to "cause to move," "to be put into motion." The word "paya(n) " is now used only in this context in Bhaktapur, and its meaning is unknown to our informants.^[89]

The procession assembles in the main courtyard of the Taleju temple. The Taleju jatra image is taken from behind the inner Golden Gate, where it had been left since the previous night. The king takes the jatra image, covered with cloths and ornaments, and goes to an external

courtyard of the temple, the Bekwa (or "zigzag") courtyard. He stands there holding the goddess, and now there begins a conventionalized little drama which takes its context from the legend of the origin and movements of the goddess Taleju, which we have presented in chapter 8. The king, "played" by the chief Taleju Brahman, now represents Harisimhadeva^[*] , the exile from Kanauj who—according to local history—became king in Bhaktapur and established his lineage deity Taleju, whom he had brought with him, as the city's protective "political" deity. The king is met in the courtyard by a Jyapu who plays the part of a merchant visiting from the Indian city of Simraun Gadh^[*] , the city from which Harisimhadeva^[*] had come. The merchant has a carrying pole over his shoulder with baskets at either end, which is identified as "the Newar style" of carrying loads. The king asks the merchant where he comes from. The merchant tells him that he has been sent from Simraun Gadh^[*] by the king Nandideva, who sends his respects and good wishes to the king of Bhaktapur and the goddess Taleju. Now in what is to all local people including the actors an incomprehensible part of the sequence, one that is believed to be a comic interlude, the king asks the merchant whether one can still buy nine pathi of rice for a one-dan coin in Simraun Gadh^[*] . The messenger answers that one still can. The king then asks, "Everything is still cheap and untroubled there?" The Merchant answers affirmatively. He answers with a farcical double-meaning phrase. "Everything is fine; things are well up into other things," a sexual reference that makes the king and bystanders laugh. The king then asks him whether he brought anything with him from Nandideva in Simraun Gadh^[*] . The merchant says he has, and then shows and presents some ta:syi fruits, a kind of citron, to the king and to Taleju. The little drama is then over. This episode, although vaguely naturalized into Bhaktapur's legendary history, is a mystery to the people of Bhaktapur.^[90]

The Taleju jatra procession forms in front of the temple. First in order are two Jyapus, who will walk abreast carrying representations of Bhairava. Next comes a Pa(n)cthariya who carries a sword. He is followed by the two other high-status sword bearers, the second a member of the Chathar Ta:cabhari thar , and the third a Brahman. Each of the three sword bearers represents an esoteric warrior form of Devi. At the center of the procession is the Taleju jatra image carried by the king, and followed by a white horse, Taleju's vehicle. And, now, at the end of the procession come the Gatha, dressed as the Nine Durgas. The Nine Durgas have their own order in the procession. The portable shrine of

their own deity the Siphadya:, identified with Mahalaksmi^[*] , is carried first. It is followed, in order, by Bhairava and Mahakali, the group's dominant deities, and they, in turn, by Varahi. The next group comes in the order of the sequence (in both their position around the city and their respective days during Mohani) of the peripheral Mandalic^[*] Goddesses (except for Mahakali and Varahi, who have already appeared). This sequence is Brahmani, Mahesvari, Kumari, Vaisnavi^[*] , and Indrani^[*] . These goddesses are followed in turn by Sima, Duma, Seto Bhairava, and finally Ganesa^[*] .

The direction that the procession will take was determined by the sait , which also determined the way in which the true Taleju image was carried within the temple. In this case the procession will go to either the upper or the lower part of the city depending on the position of the moon so that, as in the earlier procession within the temple, the moon will in the first out-moving phase of the procession, be either at Taleju's right or in front of her.^[91]

Whichever route the procession takes, it loops back via Ga:hiti Square, the spatial focus of much of the Biska: festival. Here the focal point is the stone deity Swtuña Bhairava. When the procession reaches the stone, the entire procession circumambulates it. The Brahman carrying Taleju then stops at a designated point at the right side of a Siva temple^[92] in the square. It is at this point that the Nine Durgas will demonstrate their submission to Taleju. The members of the group, in the same order in which they have marched in the procession, come to "say farewell" to Taleju. They come to the wrapped image, bow and embrace it twice. In esoteric understanding it is through these embraces the power of the Nine Durgas is raised, each one in its turn, to their full power.^[93] Now the Nine Durgas, having said farewell, leave the procession and return to their god-house, stopping to perform formal dances at certain places along the route. Taleju, her work for this elaborate festival being completed for another year with the empowering of the Nine Durgas, returns directly to her temple. On their return there Taleju and her entourage are met just inside the external Golden Gate by a Brahman who had remained behind. He performs a welcoming and purifying laskusa ceremony, and leads the image back into her room in the inner temple, where it will be kept until the next Mohani.

While Taleju is being returned to her inner chamber, her white horse vehicle, which had left the procession at the entrance to Laeku Square and had been met there by a Taleju Acaju, is decorated with an offering of swaga(n) . Then it is led by the Acaju—who runs while leading it by a

rope—in three movements, first to the Golden Gate, then back to the entrance to the square, and then, finally, back to the Golden Gate, where it is taken into the temple.

Now the Devi cycle, insofar as it is a set of events within the annual lunar calendar, is finished. The cycle is continued now in the wanderings of the Nine Durgas over the next nine months, as they move throughout the entire city and many of its hinterland communities.

Mohani: Approaches to Meaning

The Mohani sequence is the complex climax of the Devi cycle. We must pause to discuss it before presenting the succeeding activities of the Nine Durgas regenerated in its course. We will follow the arrangement of issues we used in our discussion of Biska:'s meaning in chapter 15; the similarities and contrasts in the two focal festivals are often illuminating.

1. Mohani and the rice agricultural cycle.

One of our questions about annual calendrical events is their possible relations to cyclical events outside of the festival cycle itself. Such external relations are of paramount importance in the Devi cycle, both in the timing of its events and in a give and take of meaning. The events of the Devi cycle echo the planting of rice seeds and the transplanting of seedlings; the phases of growth of the seeds and of the replanted shoots; the anticipation, onset, and ceasing of the annual monsoon rains; and the cycles of disappearance, latency, and regeneration of the crops. At the successful climax of all this is the harvest, and that is where Mohani is situated. With the harvest the Nine Durgas are returned to the city to "protect" it yet once again, until they must disappear back into the wilds they originally inhabited as the earth prepares for its next cycle of regeneration.

In a metaphorical flow, symbols that express the relations of agriculture and weather to the city's inner order are extended to the quite similar relations of other vital realms—individuals' passions, the protective and destructive force of Ksatriyas^[*] —to the city's moral order.

2. Mohani as a structural focal sequence.

In all the aspects that constitute festival events—time and resources used, extent of participation, extent of the city space that is ritually marked, quantity of symbolic resources put into use, and complexity and importance of the festival themes to the life of the community—Mohani is clearly of predominant importance in Bhaktapur's collection of calendrical events. Only Biska:

approaches it in these aspects. Like Biska:, Mohani has much to do with the representation and ordering of Bhaktapur as a city—but it does it with a signicantly different emphasis. The primary emphasis in Biska: is the ordering of the internal, the contained, structures of the city; the primary emphasis in Mohani is the relations of the city to its sustaining and threatening external environment—the city being delineated by its transactions, contrasts, and boundaries with that external environment. As we noted in our discussion of the legendary origins of the Nine Durgas, the bordering realms external to the orderly public realm of the city are not only in the forest wilderness outside the city boundaries but also in the secret reaches of houses, or (as the obscenities associated with Gatha Muga: suggest, and the neighborhood performances of the Nine Durgas, which we will discuss below clearly indicate) in the asocial or antisocial areas of the minds and passions of Bhaktapur's citizens.

3. Interactive versus parallel features.

In Biska: the dramas of disunity and unification take place in the public space of the city, and are only secondarily augmented by "parallel" household and neighborhood events throughout the city. Mohani's primary emphasis is also on the public civic dramas, but there is an important additional feature in Mohani. In addition to its public interactive narrative using socially defined actors, deities, time, and space for a complex dramatic performance, and its parallel household feasts, and its repetition of events on successive days in one internal mandalic^[*] segment after another, each individual household also participates throughout the nine days of Mohani in its own complex and vivid drama echoing the larger civic drama. Thus, individuals busily participate in a drama that takes place in their homes, and again in the larger city, and still again in mythic space and time as the vivid cosmic battle of Devi and the Asura enemies of the gods. In Mohani individuals do not only watch the performances of other civic actors; they do not only interact with deities in their homes and at temples and along the paths of jatras in relations of honor, respect, and submission and the reaffirmation of vital relationships. In Mohani ordinary people, like the Taleju priests and the king, participate in the work of Devi. They kill with her, they work with her to produce life in their Na:la swa(n) rooms; they become Devi.

4. Human actors.

The human actors of Biska: passively represent Bhaktapur's hierarchical social order. Their main location is in a chariot moved through the city's public space and brought to rest at significant points. The king and his Brahman Guru-Purohit appear in Biska:

from the off-stage Taleju temple and royal palace complex to become passive doll-like figures joined with other representatives of the social hierarchy as static symbols and witnesses of Biska:'s events. There is very little human action in Biska: aside from the struggle of the city halves—an action produced by the nameless representatives of those halves—the remainder of the action is an automatic unfolding. In Mohani people must, as we have noted of the participation of ordinary citizens in household dramas, actively help in the unfolding of the festival's drama. In this the king now conflated into one figure with Taleju's chief Brahman has a central role.

The main arena of their action is the Taleju temple, the temple of the Royal Palace. That action takes place in the inner, often hidden, chambers and courts of that temple. Around the king and the Taleju priests the old Malla court life is recreated in the ceremonial attendance of the councilors, suppliers, and servants of that court.

The king is now an active figure in the encounter with the deities— trying to recreate an intimacy that he once had, but lost—and participating within their realm, or more specifically Devi's realm, through ritual and through blood sacrifices, in mimicry of Devi's battles and her slaughter of the enemies of the heavenly order. The priests, above all Taleju's chief priest, is, insofar as Tantric Brahman and king are differentiated, his ally in all this. This is another striking contrast with Biska:. The priests in Biska: are simply representatives of civic order. Here they are Tantric practitioners, joining with royalty in blood sacrifice. A complex of themes—king, court, warrior, Ksatriya^[*] , Brahman as Tantric practitioner, human activity beyond social action and relationships—are amalgamated with those of the agricultural cycle and are explored in Mohani. They are all themes of power.

5. Divine actors.

In Biska: the main public deities are Bhairava and the vaguely deified Yasi(n) God, both masculine figures. Bhadrakali^[*] is a very secondary figure in Biska:'s action—although in the legends associated with that festival sequence she stands in the shadows as a much more powerful figure than Bhairava. The Goddess must await Mohani to come from her shadowy presence in the wings to center stage. Both Bhairava and the Yasi(n) God are, like the human actors in Biska:, passive figures who are manipulated in space and time and, aside from whatever active participation Bhairava may possibly be thought to have in his sexual-aggressive encounter with Bhadrakali^[*] , represent much but do little.

The deities in the public narrative of Mohani are Devi and her man-

ifestations and emanations. These forms are very active, indeed. They battle the Asura forces of disorder, cause the rice and barley to grow, inhabit the children of the Gana^[*] Kumari and the Ekanta Kumari in order to bring oracles to king and city, and eventually embody themselves as the Nine Durgas. Bringing Devi and her forms into useful contact with the city requires the powerful ritual of Tantra, rather than the devotional ritual more or less appropriate to the comparatively tamed Bhairava of Biska:. Mohani is about the capturing of "natural" forces represented by Devi for civic use; Biska:, about the deployment of these already captured forms.

The Devi Mahatmya , tells of the alternating gathering together of components of the Goddess into her forms of maximum power, and their subsequent emanation and differentiation in order to do specialized tasks. In the sequence of Mohani the nine Mandalic^[*] Goddesses of the city, Bhagavati, Kumari, several esoteric goddesses, the tutelary lineage Aga(n) Goddesses, and Taleju are repeatedly joined as one goddess, Devi, and then differentiated as special manifestations.

While the Devi Mahatmya 's Devi is the focus of Mohani's mythic realm, in the course of the events of the sequence it is Taleju who becomes progressively established as the central reference point for the gathering in and centralization of forces, and it is through Taleju that the momentum of the festival is handed over—from her point of view, delegated—to the Nine Durgas at its end. Taleju is the Malla king's lineage deity; her home is the united palace/temple complex. The in-gathering of powers on the completion of the harvest is a validation and renewal of the power of the king.

Biska:'s passive Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] are powerful but limited, resembling socially limited humans in their irritations and ambivalences, their ineffectual attempts to escape, and their susceptibility to teasing. The goddesses of Mohani are quite different. They are uncanny and powerful beings, whose transformations and powers belong to some other than ordinary social world. In Hinduism's view of Royalty in its transcendence of the ordinary dharma (chap. 9) the king and these goddesses are natural allies.

Devi as the focal deity of Mohani is not the Sakti of Siva-Sakti theory, whose symbolism and manipulations are central to Bhaktapur's ordinary Tantric religion. Siva is here, as he is among the Nine Durgas, a faint, peripheral figure. This Devi, the full, creative Goddess, is in this harvest context the supreme, the only significant deity.

6. Space.

The public drama of Biska: moved through and took much of its meaning from the public space of the city. That movement centered on an axis and on points that, in their centrality, transcended and represented the divided components of the city. In Biska:'s main movement of masses of people—the visits to the dangerous deities of the city on the eighth day of that sequence—the procession moves within the city along the pradaksinapatha^[*] . In Mohani the major spatial emphases are within the Taleju complex, within houses, and—in the mass movement of people to the pithas of the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses—to the external borders of the city's boundaries and to the city's mandalic^[*] center. These areas are all outside of the public spaces of the city and of its public society. In Mohani, and generally throughout the Devi cycle, the space of the public city is delineated by its edges, its inner and outer boundaries, its hidden cells—households and royal enclave. While Biska: emphasizes units of city space—city, city halves, mandalic^[*] areas, twa: s—in themselves and in their relations to each other within the city, Mohani's main emphasis is on the boundaries of units and refers to what is beyond those boundaries—putting outside and inside in relation and opposition.

It is only at the end, the last day of Mohani, that there is a movement out of such peripheral spaces. The goddess Taleju, that is, her jatra image, is taken out of her temple into the city streets for her one yearly darsana . The representative of the Buffalo Asura is taken out of each house's Na:la swa(n) room in a little victory procession to be destroyed. And now the Nine Durgas prepare to move out into the city's neighborhoods and into the ordinary time of the next nine months.

7. The narrative.

Within the complex movements and events of Mohani we have suggested the presence of a central theme and narrative, clarified by its context in the Devi cycle and its contrasts with other festival narratives, particularly that of Biska:. Throughout Mohani the relation of the city and the outside is explored, and is represented in a coherent way.

The sequence begins with the processions, which continue each morning and evening throughout the sequence, to the pithas of the border-protecting goddesses, culminating in the sequence's climactic ninth day at their central representative, and then, on the morning following that climactic day, returning once again to the goddess of the first day, where the mass of moving people encounter the Nine Durgas. Throughout Mohani this motif—which we first encountered in the

Nine Durgas' legend—is repeatedly represented: a gathering in of external bordering forces to a climactic concentration in a ritually bounded space, and then, in a coda, their socially controlled moving out again into the public city's space and time. On a larger scale the movements of the processions are echoed in the movements of the Devi cycle, with its progressive concentration of the powers of soil, weather, and seed in the generation of the rice, which is now about to be gathered into the city and distributed within it. And in the largest scale of all they are represented in Devi's myth where the gods of the heavenly city generate her to share in the nature of the Asuras at their borders, and thus to conquer them and restore cosmic order. As the Devi Mahatmya puts it, after the final victorious battle "favorable winds began to blow; the sun shone with perfect brilliance, the sacred fire burnt in a tranquil manner; and the strange sounds that had filled the quarters of space also disappeared" (X, 27; Agrawala 1963, 127).

In their cumulative movements the twice daily processions mark the outer boundaries of the city and the central point where the protective forces at and just beyond the boundaries are concentrated. The people of Bhaktapur move en masse to the pithas nineteen times during the course of the sequence. They are active participants as they will be throughout. In the course of their daily processions they include the Taleju temple, the ultimate center for the in-gathering of forces for the city as a whole, in a movement that allies king, court, and temple with the forces of the bordering outside—and with the successful harvesting of their recalcitrant potentiality.

From the first day the agricultural resonances of the festival are made concrete in every household, Tantric temple, and god-house. Earth is placed in them and grain is planted. The Goddess in her aspect as the cosmic creator and here specifically as the genetrix of agricultural life both presides over the earth and grain and is represented in the plants themselves as they develop.^[94] But this generative goddess, as the sequence makes increasingly clear, is a warrior goddess, she is Bhagavati/Mahisasuramardini^[*] , the bloody warrior goddess of the Devi Mahatmya . The success of the agricultural cycle, the generative powers of earth, seed, and weather are now allied with the force of the warrior, ksatra^[*] , in the battle against the forces of disorder at the boundaries of the heavenly city of the moral gods. The use of Taleju's barley by the upper thars is a further reminder of the connection of ksatra^[*] , Taleju, and Bhaktapur's traditional monarchy.

The central package of symbols is in place by the first day—the con-

flation of agricultural and warrior power, and the relation of that power to the inside of the city, to the moral city. The mata beigu vratas , which begin on the first day, introduces a further active way in which people will participate in and control these forces, that is, through sacrifice, through self-sacrifice and, above all, through the city-wide mass slaughter of represenative and surrogate animals. This sacrifice not only is a mimesis of the death and regeneration of the agricultural cycle but also has as one of its implications (as we will argue in our discussion of the activities of the Nine Durgas later in this chapter) the forceful binding of individuals—who represent another fertile and dangerous outside—to the city's social and cultural order.

Slowly at first and then gaining momentum throughout the sequence the forces of the outside are moved under the direction of traditional enactments and rituals into bounded areas of the city. The barley grain begins to grow in the houses and temples; the processions, after finally visiting all the bounding goddesses in their proper sequence, will move to the mandalic^[*] center; and at the Taleju temple the Goddess herself —uniquely, not a jatra image—is manifest (albeit under wraps) to the spectators, and then brought together with Bhagavati and the growing grain. For the city as a whole all the forces now begin to amalgamate themselves to Taleju—agricultural growth, Bhagavati, and the cosmic warrior Devi, soon to be joined by representatives of the Mandalic^[*] Goddesses as the Gana^[*] Kumari, by Kumari herself, and eventually by the Nine Durgas.

All this comes to a climax in the Kalaratri, the "black night," between the eighth and ninth days, when Taleju/Bhagavati/Devi and the king and his priests participate vividly in the bloody cosmic mythic war of Devi against the disordering Asuras. That battle is replicated in each household on the following day with animal sacrifice. The city's citizens are not just witnesses; they continue to be active participants.

For the court and Taleju there is a further in-gathering. The Devi cycle tells of the moving out of the city of the deities and, then, of their return along with the harvest for the inner uses of the city. The tale of Kumari tells of how Taleju herself has fled the direct presence of the king, but now with the Gana^[*] Kumari and the Ekanta Kumari she makes her annual return, once more to advise him.

Taleju's urban hegemony has now been established, but it is a hegemony in alliance with a peculiar collection of forces, the forces that are the concern of king and Tantric expert and farmer and craftsman—the worship of whose tools is an important part of the sequence. These are

not the forces, the arena, of concern to the Brahman as Brahman and to his auxiliary and covert priests (with the exception of his Tantric surrogate, the Acaju). Mohani is a celebration of the forces that are the support of the moral order, not of that order in itself.

The final episode in the story is the moving out of the concentrated forces from households and palace once again into the city. On the morning of the last day people once again go to the peripheral Bramani^[*]pitha whence they had started on the first day, but now they find the Nine Durgas there, who have killed a buffalo in their mimesis of Mahisasuramardini's^[*] battle, and are preparing for their full return to the city. In the households boys and men carrying swords storm out of the Na:la swa(n) rooms in a mini victory procession to kill the bhuiphasi gourd. And finally—the true Taleju having been returned to the recesses of her temple-palace—the jatra Taleju image, carried by the king, is brought out in a victory procession into the public city where Taleju delegates power to the Nine Durgas so that the manifestation and uses of the powers of Devi may be carried throughout the city for the next nine months until once again they must be returned to their proper and necessary places in the outside order.

8.Rhetoric and participation.

In our discussion of Biska:'s meanings we noted some of the rhetorical resources that are used in that festival sequence in attempts to ensure the engagement of people with its meaningful forms. Mohani uses some of the same ones. It uses mystery, pageantry, and the revelation of wonders as deities become manifestly embodied in living forms. However, Mohani's emphasis on participation shifts the problem of engagement from the engagement of an audience—the traditional problem to which rhetoric is devoted—to the engagement of the performers themselves. People become participants in the drama—in a participation with "magical" implications. Centrally in the Taleju temple, and throughout the city in the Na:la swa(n) rooms, they participate in the transformation of seeds into "weapons," and through the one annual blood sacrifice expected of all the city's citizens, in Devi's conquest of the antigods. They share in the killing—and eating—of the sacrifice, privately in the household sacrifice and publicly in the eating of the Kha(n) Me: Buffalo, sacrificed by the Nine Durgas at the festival's final day.

In Mohani, deities, king, priests, and householders all participate in Devi's battle, and in so doing partake in Devi's victorious—and necessary—power. As is everywhere evident in the worship of the dangerous deities, but above all in the Devi cycle, they achieve a limited

influence or control over that power by being like the gods. In a manner reminiscent of ancient Indian sacrifice, this participation in the restoration of cosmic order involves a necessary, active, and effective solidarity in action with the gods.

Through their active participation in Devi's battles people become , in a sense, Devi. In other festivals, or in other parts of Mohani itself they may relate themselves to a deity by visiting it, by watching a procession, following it, taking prasada , worshiping the deity through gestures or more elaborate pujas . Participating in the work of a deity, becoming in a sense that deity, has quite different social and personal implications than simply observing it, worshiping it, respecting it, interacting with it, fearing it, worrying about the values implied by it, and in part, identifying with it. It is the difference between (in the first case) participating in the protective and environing forces surrounding, protecting, threatening, and sustaining the moral civic order and (in the second case) acting properly within that order. It is the difference between the realms of Ksatriya^[*] and of Brahman.

The Performances of the Nine Durgas

We have been concerned in the earlier sections of this chapter with the legend and membership of the Nine Durgas and with the Devi cycle within which they are a major component as well as a thread binding the individual calendrical events of that cycle into a larger thematic unit. Now with Mohani the Nine Durgas have emerged again to carry Devi's power and significance out into the city throughout the succeeding nine months of their annual life cycle until their disappearance once again at the following Bhagasti. We may now turn to a consideration of their performances throughout the city.

The dance drama, or pyakha(n) , which the Nine Durgas troupe performs throughout the city, comes to each of the neighborhoods in which it is performed as a kind of invasion. The troupe appears in each neighborhood in an order determined by a traditional annual sequence (map 14, p. 223). Local people must prepare for a visit that is beyond their control. Before turning to those systematic, sequential pyakha(n) s, however, we must consider another setting and form in which individuals encounter the Nine Durgas.

During much of the period when the Nine Durgas are active they

may be invited by a family, a group of extended-family members, or a larger neighborhood group, to come and dance for the "protection of the area," which is how the Nine Durgas" function is usually phrased. This invitation is often in fulfillment of some vow. In the case of these invited performances a messenger is sent from the Nine Durgas to the hosts to say that the Nine Durgas are ready to go to their quarter. Thereupon the men responsible for the invitation and the expenses of the performance go to the Nine Durgas" god-house to conduct the gods to the place where the ceremony will be held. This is in significant contrast with the formal systematic neighborhood sequence when the gods will come by themselves, uninvited and unconducted. In the course of their being worshiped in the local area, usually in the courtyard of a house, a domestic pig, called in this context amu vaha(n) , or "main offering," is given as an offering to the Nine Durgas. This pig represents the strategic pig of the Nine Durgas' legend.

The pig is killed by Bhairava, who is the only one of the Nine Durgas who performs blood sacrifice, with the important exception of the killing of a cock by Mahakali during the formal neighborhood dance-drama. He does this by splitting the skin of the young pig's foreleg with his fingernail (in a relatively thin area at the inner part of a joint) and separating the skin until he reaches the thoracic cage. He then forces his hand between two ribs and pulls out the heart and offers it to the Oleander shrine goddess, the Siphadya:. Now first Bhairava and then all the other gods (including demonic skeletal figures representing attendants of the Nine Durgas incarnated by Gatha children) take blood from the pig's open chest and drink it. The gods now begin to tremble. This is said to be in response to the "force" in the blood, and to be a sign of the Gathas" possession by the gods, but also to be a kind of intoxication. This image of the goddesses intoxicated with the blood of their Asura enemies, sometimes dancing as a result, is salient in the Devi Mahatmya . Now Bhairava gives a mixture of beaten rice and curds, dhaka baji , to each god to eat. He then offers dhaka baji as prasada to the onlookers, with a particular emphasis on the children, and among the children, especially the boys. It is thought that this offering will protect children from disease. Bhairava's hands are still contaminated with the blood of the pig, and the audience thus share in this sacrifice. (Brahman boys after initiation and adult Brahmans are not allowed to accept this prasada .) Following the sacrifice, the group of Durgas do formal dances. These dances describe certain geometric patterns and are said to be mystical diagrams or yantras that protect the locality through

supernatural power. Then the Nine Durgas troupe, taking the body of the pig with them, returns to its god-house accompanied by the important people of the inviting group. At the god-house the Gatha¡ dancers are said to cook and eat the pig.^[95] Occasionally for particularly important offerings the Nine Durgas are offered five kinds of male animals for a major sacrifice called a pa(n)ca bali .

In the course of their nine months of life the Nine Durgas troupe dances at twenty-one public squares (map 14) throughout Bhaktapur and in nineteen villages outside of the city (Gutschow and Basukala 1987). These villages are generally with a few exceptions within the boundaries of the old Malla kingdom of Bhaktapur.^[95] The pattern traced by the sequence of dances both outside and within the city are considered to form protective yantras , in the same way as the detailed patterns of the dance performances within each local area mark out a local protected space. Aside from the Gatha performers themselves, only a few specialists in the city are aware of the places and sequences in the larger cycle. All that the vast majority of the spectators to the local performance know is that somehow this local performance weaves their locality into a larger pattern of temporal and spatial relationships reiterated during each annual cycle, a pattern whose center is Bhaktapur.

In presenting the local performance, we must make the same choices we have made throughout this study. We will select out of the complex traditional performances, whose detailed description and elucidation would justify a volume in itself, those aspects that are presumptively meaningful in the particular and limited sense of this study. Thus we are here concerned with the "message" delivered by the performance to the neighborhood people and the purposes the performance serve in the symbolic organization of the city.

The relative position in the annual sequence of the visit to each neighborhood and village is fixed, but the Gatha performers make use of various calculations known to themselves to determine the exact day in which they will come, so that the local people are never sure exactly when to expect them, although the performances always take place on either a Sunday or a Thursday. As we have noted, in contrast to the invited performances the Nine Durgas thus enter the area as a kind of invasion beyond the determination of the local people. These sequential local performances are often referred as the "Na^[*] lakegu" pyakha(n) , the "going fishing" pyakha(n) , using a reference to one element in the performance to stand for the whole. On the afternoon before the

pyakha(n) the group of Gatha—performers, musicians, and attendants—go to the twa : or neighborood area in which they will perform. Gutschow and Basukala (1987, 152ff.) have described this movement to the performance area in detail, and we will follow their description for the phases prior to the pyakha(n) itself. According to Gutschow and Basukala, on the occasion of one of the sequential visits the masks are brought from their hidden room in the Nine Durgas' god-house to the courtyard of that house, where the three frightening masks—Bhairava, Mahakali, and Varahi—are separated from the others, and hung facing west. These are the same three deities who preceded the other Nine Durgas in the Taleju procession of the tenth day of Mohani. Although the troupe itself may take several hours to reach their destination, the palanquin on which the Siphadya: will be placed is first brought directly to the square where the public performance of the following day is to be held. As Gutshow and Basukula write, "it [the arrival of the palanquin] is the first sign of the procession of the night . . . [as] the people are never sure when the gods [will] come" (1987, 152). The Gatha troupe leave the god-house at twilight. First comes a man carrying a human skullcap as a drinking cup^[97] in his left hand and a small drum, a damaru^[*] , in the right. Next comes the man who carries the Siphadya:, accompained by another carrying a ceremonial umbrella to protect and honor that god. Then come three boys who at this point represent the deities Sima, Duma, and Kumari. They are followed by the masked men who incarnate Bhairava, Mahakali and Varahi. The goddesses of the "chorus" follow next—Brahmani, Mahesvari, Vaisnavi^[*] , and Indrani^[*] . Finally comes Ganesa^[*] , wearing at his waist the mask of Siva.

On each occasion the group begins its procession in the same way. It goes first to worship at a shrine of Ganesa^[*] , Sala(n) Ganesa^[*] , in the upper city. Mahakali does a formal dance there. Now the procession proceeds to the Wa(n)laeku Taleju shrine near Dattatreya Square. Mahakali bows to the shrine, and is lifted twice into the air by an attendant. The procession proceeds along a main road that "serves as a kind of backbone from which the individual places are reached," and makes five further stops at various shrines, temples, and god-houses, where the Nine Durgas perform brief formal dances.

When they reach the particular quarter that is the goal of the day's procession, some of their activities are differentially determined according to the particular quarter. On their way to its main square they make from three to nine stops. The naki(n) , the senior woman of the troupe,

seats herself at each stop with some baskets and pots to receive offerings of food and drink. Often the troupe is invited into individual houses and given offerings.

In eleven of the twenty-one neighborhoods in which they perform there is an additional sequence, the chasing of a pig, as they had done in the legend to protect themselves from recapture by the Brahman Tantric practitioner. This is done, according to Gutschow, in areas peripheral to the various performance squares in the direction of the borders of the city. The pig that is intended for sacrifice to Mahalaksmi^[*] by Bhairava is, instead, stolen by groups of young men and boys. "The youngsters run around carrying the squeaking pig under their jackets and passing it quickly from one to the other. The gods are obviously teased and asked to come and fight for the pig. . .. This kind of teasing may last for an hour or two" (Gutschow and Basukala 1987, 156). Finally the pig is released and Bhairava grabs it and carries it back to the main square where he tears its heart out and throws it to the Siphadya:, that is, to the goddess Mahalaksmi^[*] . This teasing ending in a blood sacrifice anticipates the themes of the next day.

These preliminary activities take from two to six hours, when, finally, toward midnight, the troupe reaches the square where they will perform.^[98] It is said that the Gathas do secret dances and rituals on the square. Non-Gathas do not know what these are—it would be very dangerous to see them—but it is believed that they increase the power and effectiveness of the goddesses in preparation for their next morning's performances.

The next day's sessions are a mixture of formal dances (conceived as yantras ) and worship, interspersed with dance-dramas or pyakha(n) s.^[99] Following the first formal dances in the morning, there is a performance by the lion and tiger deities Sima and Duma (see fig. 27). Although generally conceived as goddesses, and derived from the goddesses Si(n)hini and Vyaghrini^[*] , Duma is here considered as a woman and Sima as a man, her husband.^[100] Duma has a cup out of which she will drink beer, but at some point Sima steals it. During this sequence the younger boys among the spectators laugh and make mocking noises directed to Sima and Duma. Sima now begins to chase the children, occasionally catching one and holding him for a short time. If he catches the child he may bring the child to the shrine of the Sipha: God. If a child is caught, people may say this is the result of adverse planetary influences and his family may worship the Nine Durgas to remove the bad effect. This chase occurs several times during the course of the morning. These

Sima-Duma sequences are considered to be comic, more concerned with younger children, and less serious than the pyakha(n) that is to follow in the afternoon.

This afternoon pyakha(n) focuses and conveys much of the meaning of the Nine Durgas and of the Devi cycle, and systematically delivers the message of that cycle to localities and their people. It derives its force and significance from all that has preceded it, and also from certain background experiences and interpretations of its audience in relation to animal sacrifice (chap. 9).

The afternoon performance has as its principal characters Seto Bhairava, the small white-faced young man with a mustache and tiny fangs who is the protagonist; Mahakali, the largest and most frightening goddess, who is his antagonist; and Kumari who is, as we have noted, a transitional form between the benign-appearing goddesses of the chorus and Mahakali, acting as a mediator. These characters are augmented by Sima and Duma as comic figures.

The pyakha(n) begins with Mahakali doing a formal dance. Seto Bhairava seats himself on a woven straw mat, which he will later use to "go fishing." While Mahakali is dancing, Seto Bhairava smears himself with a white pigment (a mixture of oil and white powder that is used otherwise in marriage ceremonies as a cosmetic for the bride). He has been given this as well as ghya : (clarified butter), brown sugar, and a white shawl by one of the members of the local area who is responsible for local supplies and arrangements. Seto Bhairava puts the white pigment on his face and hands and puts on his mask. He then puts the shawl over his head, approaches the place where Mahakali is dancing and, seating himself with head still covered, slowly moves his head about in a fashion that is interpreted as a kind of mocking or making fun of the dancing Mahakali. Keeping one's head covered in this fashion in front of a deity (or in this case a superior deity) is to show disrespect. Mahakali becomes enraged and shakes her head in a quivering motion, indicating her great anger. She suddenly seizes the shawl from Seto Bhairava's head and holds it in her hand. Seto Bhairava wants to get his shawl back and the next part of the sequence has to do with his attempt to recover it. First he makes a gesture of respect to Mahakali, but she ignores it and turns her head away. This attempt having failed, Seto Bhairava turns to the onlookers and begs for small coins. Some people in the crowd give coins to him. Seto Bhairava now offers the money to Mahakali, asking her to take the coins as an offering. (His words now

and in later parts of the pyakha[n] are spoken for him by one of the musicians.) Mahakali takes the money from him, but does not return the shawl. All this ineffectiveness is amusing to the spectators. Now this part of the drama comes to a climax. Seto Bhairava takes a cock, which one of the onlookers hands to him, and offers it to Mahakali. At first she is angry; she keeps her head turned away and will not take it. Then suddenly she grabs the cock, and with an angry gesture throws the shawl back into Seto Bhairava's face. Now Mahakali bites the head off the living cock and drinks its gushing blood.

The pyakha(n) comes to an intermission. Now the twa : representatives do pujas to Kumari, Bhairava, Mahakali, Varahi, Seto Bhairava, Sima, and Duma and to the Oleander Goddess, the Sipha: god. The background deities of the chorus are not worshiped at this time. Thus the gods that are worshiped are all frightening forms, with fangs, tusks, or sharp teeth. Now the masks are placed in a specially designated place and only Seto Bhairava remains masked. He takes his mat, which is now to serve as a fishing net. This mat is a rectangle about two or three feet long, with seven or eight tiny dried fish placed in openings of the net. He will use this net to "go fishing," as his chasing of older boys and young men which is about to occur is called. The chase by Sima in the morning is also called "going fishing," although he does not use a symbolic fishing net. As we have noted, the performances of the day with their various scenes and elements are, in fact, often named as a unit in reference to these episodes, and referred to as the "fishing," or "Na^[*] lakegu pyakha(n) ," suggesting the central significance of this element. Seto Bhairava now does a formal dance (see frontispiece), as Mahakali had been doing when Seto Bhairava showed disrespect to her. As he performs, the young men and older boys in the crowd begin to mock and taunt him by clapping their hands together and making sounds, rhythmically covering and uncovering their mouths with their hands to make a wavering noise. These young men are usually youths between fourteen and twenty, and include members of the clean thars , even Brahmans. This is considered to be a brave and daring thing to do, and people are said to admire them for it. Now Seto Bhairava "goes fishing," angrily chasing the offending boys and young men. Sometimes during the course of his chase he will stop and be invited into a nearby house, where he is given an offering of food, including meat and alcoholic spirits. The young men will wait outside and continue their mocking when he comes out. If he manages to catch one of them, Seto Bhairava will drag him toward the Oleander God's shrine, but if he is far away

from the shrine, he may let him go after dragging him for a while. This is considered bad luck for the boys and young men, and sometimes the younger ones cry with fear when they are caught. Seto Bhairava then returns to the shrine, and resumes his formal dance, only to be interrupted once more by the taunts and mockery of the boys and young men. The sequence of dancing and chasing occurs three times.

Now a new phase of the pyakha(n) begins, a comic phase. Seto Bhairava's stomach begins to hurt him. He is said to have an upset stomach from "eating fish," the boys and young men whom he has been chasing being those fish. He lies down on the mat and begins to rub his stomach. Sima and Duma, now danced by boys instead of men, come to feel his abdomen "to see where the pain is." Seto Bhairava wriggles around because this tickles him. He is still in pain, however, and he calls for Kumari (with one of the musicians again speaking for him). Kumari, now also danced by a boy, comes with a handful of parched beaten rice and holding it first to Seto Bhairava's head, chest, and stomach, throws it to the right and to the left.^[101] During these scenes in the dance-drama, Kumari (as she is danced in this scene by a child, she is now sometimes called Balakumari, the "child Kumari") is considered to be the wife of Seto Bhairava. As Kumari throws the parched beaten rice to the right and to the left, she throws it into the faces of Sima and Duma, who have been standing and looking on at either side of Seto Bhairava, and they react with gestures of discomfort. Now Seto Bhairava is cured of his affliction. He gets up and embraces the reluctant Kumari, which usually provokes much laughter. Now Seto Bhairava gives his shawl to Duma, asking her (through the Gatha musician who speaks for him) to wash it for him saying, "It is a little dirty, please wash it." Duma throws it down on the ground. Seto Bhairava says, "I should hit you," and makes a fighting gesture. He then picks up the shawl and goes through the same sequence, with the other member of the pair—Sima—and with the same results. Finally he picks up the shawl, which Sima has thrown down, and washes it himself in pantomime. He then walks away. The dance-drama segment is now finished. All the gods, except Sima and Duma and Seto Bhairava, perform a set of formal dances. This is the only time that the benign and beautiful forms of the goddesses also dance, and now Ganesa^[*] also dances with the group for the first time during this day's proceedings.

Now the true Bhairava, as Bhairava is usually conceived in Bhaktapur, the large blue-black dangerous-looking male figure, comes to the fore.^[102] As in the informal invited ceremonies described above, Bhai-

rava is offered a pig to be sacrificed and returns beaten rice with his blood-stained hands as prasada to be eaten by the onlookers, who thus become participants in the sacrifice.

Now the dance-drama is over and the gods making music return to their god-house, now accompanied in their return procession by people from the locality. The locality has been protected.

The Significance of the Nine Durgas" Pyakha(n): Some Speculations on How The Nine Durgas Protect Bhaktapur

In Bhaktapur's characteristic "religious" language the Nine Durgas are said to be of major importance in the protection of the city. In our analytic language this is, indeed, what they are doing in their neighborhood pyakha(n) s through the significance of their performances to the people of the local neighborhoods. They protect the city by helping to assure the proper relation of individuals to the city's society.

As always, we are concerned with the significance of the Nine Durgas" performance for Bhaktapur's symbolic ordering, that is, with its impact on Bhaktapur's people. Much of the form of the Nine Durgas has no direct significance in this sense—although it would be significant analytically to, say, historians of South Asian culture. We must note, however, that many aspects of the Nine Durgas" form and action are indirectly significant in our limited sense even if the meaning of those forms and actions is, in some sense, unknown to most or all of the Newars who witness and engage in the performances. These aspects are significant in part precisely because their meaning is unknown. It is sufficient that the spectators have the conviction that there is meaning even if they do not know what it is. Thus the spectators to the Nine Durgas" pyakha(n) do not know what the overall sequence of visits by the Nine Durgas is in the spatial mandala^[*] they create over nine months, but they do know that the visit to their neighborhood is an essential part of this pattern. They do not know what many of the iconic details of the masks signify, nor which of the minor goddesses is which. They do not know what the mask makers or the Gatha actually do to give proper siddhi to the performances. They do not know what the formal yantra dances of the Nine Durgas signify. Such unknown matters are in contrast with the very accessible and direct implications of other aspects of the masks, sacrifice, pyakha(n) , and so on. But the things they do not understand

have their own meaningful implications, they contribute to the performance's special sacred force.^[103]

Although the great majority of the spectators to the local pyakha(n) may not understand such matters, they know that they are correct and necessary. The dances, masks, and procedures represent an order that is organized and guaranteed by something beyond ordinary contingent local human action, improvisation, and decision. This helps give the performance, in spite of its sometimes comic style, a deep seriousness and relates it to the sacred realm of Hinduism—a seemingly eternal and transcendent realm beyond the here and now. The forms that spectators do not understand, to a certain degree just because they are not understood, evoke—as do the transcendent ritual and ceremonial forms and sequences and their contexts—this other mysterious world. All that the spectator has to know or believe is that something is being done properly, that it is generated out of a sacred tradition, where it is rooted in myths and legends, and that it is properly passed down from generation to generation of priests, mask makers, and dancers through proper initiation, teaching, and mantras . The audience sees a performance that is a manifestation of something beyond the ordinary, something organized in some other order beyond the whims of the Gathas. These properties of the performance, allied to references to ultimate macrocosmic realms of order, powerfully evoke ideas and emotions characteristic of encounters with the "sacred."

Yet, within this larger frame is the pyakha(n) 's drama and the game-like "fishing" episodes of the pursuit of the mocking boys and young men by the gods. The messages here are direct and specific, completely dependent on peoples' understanding of the pyakha(n) 's symbolic forms. The dramas and fishing chases have a central theme or motif, which is elaborated in various ways. This theme is the violation of hierarchy, shown concretely through the violation of proper respect toward a superior. The young boys mime this to Sima and Duma, the older boys to Seto Bhairava, and Seto Bhairava to Mahakali. This violation of hierarchy and the response to that violation illustrated in the drama and fishing pursuit does not concern ordinary violations of the moral law, the dharma of civic life, any more than the struggle between the gods and the Asuras in the Devi Mahatmya concerns ordinary moral relations among deities. Ordinary moral violations, the arena of shame, loss of face, and the generation of bad karma , have their own symbols and myths, their own spatial location, their own religious modes and divinities. This pyakha(n) and its context

does not concern the moral problems of human beings with each other. In its offending of superior dangerous gods it concerns the violation by humans of the very order that makes the moral realm possible, and it shows the consequences of such a disruption.

Hierarchy, the central principle of social order in traditional Hindu societies, is, as we have shown in chapters 5 and 6, greatly elaborated in Bhaktapur's complex urban organization. The violation of the conventions of hierarchical relationship, therefore, strikes at the central organizing principle of Bhaktapur's society. Thus the Nine Durgas" pyakha(n) can be interpreted as being about the struggle between disorder and order, about what happens to individuals who violate order, and, finally, about what has to be done to restore that order. The contextual meaning of the Nine Durgas in the larger Devi cycle indicates that although this disorder is dangerous both to the ordinary moral gods and to humans as social beings it is at the same time a source of fertility and energy. Thus the boys and young men who mock the gods are admired for their courage and Seto Bhairava is a sympathetic Chaplinesque figure with whom one must empathize as he struggles against the terrifying Mahakali. Similarly, the boys and young men who called out order-threatening and immoral obscenities at the proper phase of the annual cycle were also doing something positive, amusing, and vital. The children and young men are pursued by the gods whom they mock and are sometimes caught without particularly serious consequences, but the potential consequences for the acts of rebellion that they have mimed are shown graphically in Seto Bhairava's encounter with Mahakali. He fails to show respect for the superior deity, who becomes enraged. He tries to restore relationships with her by the kinds of exchanges that are effective with the ordinary, the non-Tantric gods— gestures of respect, the offering of money or daksina^[*] . But only an offering of blood sacrifice appeases this kind of a deity. The biting off of the head of the cock and the drinking of its blood signifies to the onlookers that it was Seto Bhairava who was to be killed, or at the very least castrated, if it were not for this convenient substitution. The sacrifice enables the return of the shawl and some social dignity to Seto Bhairava and atones for his violation of hierarchy.

The Nine Durgas are dangerous deities, and Mahakali is the dangerous goddess in her most frightening representation. As we have argued throughout, such deities have a special position in the maintenance of order in Bhaktapur, where Tantra and the worship of dangerous deities (as is widely the case in the history of South Asia) has been captured and

put to use by the social order as the legend of the origin of the Nine Durgas attests, rather than representing attempts by renouncers, magicians, and peripheral social groups to escape from that order. Like the traditional Hindu ruler in his ideal relationship to the priest, the dangerous deities are responsible for the protection of the traditional ritual and moral life, although they are beyond morality themselves. They are ambivalently made use of when that moral order is being threatened either by some internal force or by some external danger. Seto Bhairava's rebellion threatens the hierarchical basis of urban order, and a dangerous deity becomes activated.

The way Mahakali's threat is both manifested and avoided is in the blood sacrifice of the cock. This is in the context of the massive blood sacrifices of Mohani, the blood sacrifices by the Nine Durgas at other times, the legend of the Nine Durgas" murder and eating of humans before they were captured by Tantric priests, and the accounts of human sacrifices performed by the Gathas in the past. We have noted (chap. 9) that animal sacrifices are for some informants, at least, consciously and with deep emotion associated with vivid memories from their boyhoods when they felt that the sacrifices were in fact selfishly motivated murder, that they might be directed toward them if the adults became angry at them, and that the animals were somehow equivalent to themselves. "I could feel the knife on my own throat," as one man said in reminiscence.

The pyakha(n) thus makes use of a particularly powerful and complex local constellation of meanings. Its message is directed directly at males.^[104] Men are the critical actors in the public social organization of Hindu communities, and the largest component of the civic symbolic system is devoted to the expression and control of their problems, emotions, and orientations in the performance of their social roles. It is striking in view of this male prominence in the public life of the city, that that force which is represented as external to the city but vital to it, both as the energy of nature and as the force that both threatens and which, if properly placated and controlled, will protect the city against disruption, is represented primarily by the nonsocial, dream-like "Mother Goddess" and the images, concepts, and emotions associated with that powerful symbol.

Sacrifice is not only a powerful symbol of a threat, a potential punishment for violation of hierarchy, but as we have argued in chapter 9, an important motivation for accepting the social order, for identifying with and becoming one of the sacrificers, to escape the fate of being

one of the creatures that are sacrificed. This acceptance of order under the pressure of sacrifice is manifested in the acceptance, the "understanding," of the particular ideologies and dogmas of the group that would be hypocritical, problematic, and perhaps nonsensical to an innocent eye. Such items requiring faith are vividly represented in the mystifying dogmas about sacrifice itself.

The pyakha(n) plays with the theme of the vital impulses of the city's citizens that are socially disruptive and, making use of blood sacrifice, one of the very most powerful symbolic resources for restoring and maintaining individual assent to Bhaktapur's culture and society, restores order both within the drama, and, ideally, in the minds of its spectators. Seto Bhairava is not only the ineffectual protagonist who blunders into trouble with Mahakali and is saved only through a substitution of a sacrificial animal; in another phase of the pyakha(n) , the "going fishing," after which the whole event is significantly named, he is the one who is mocked by his inferiors and becomes, in turn, the agent of punishment. Similarly, the people of Bhaktapur are not only the passive objects of potential destruction in the face of violations of order. They themselves offer the sacrifice, perform them themselves on other occasions, share in the blood by feasting on the sacrificial animal, and, during the course of the Nine Durgas' performances, eating the bloodstained prasada . The people identify, then, not only with the victim but also with the dangerous deities, both in their wildness on the one hand, and as collaborators in slaughter for the sake of social order on the other, which results in a sense of community that psychoanalytically inclined observers might argue not only represents the mastery of switching from a passive to an active role and an identification with the punitive forces but also has something to do with a sense of shared guilt.

The last part of the drama may be thought of as a kind of moving downward from a more cosmic scale to a more domestic one, thus providing another bridge to the audience.^[105] Here Seto Bhairava is healed through his wife in a common magical healing procedure known to all people. The grain that he throws in the face of Sima and Duma has perhaps an added bit of meaning insofar as those two personages are also thought to represent Death's messengers. But in this little episode of healing domesticity, of Seto Bhairava having to turn to his wife for help, the wife, Kumari, is herself merely an attenuated form of that violent natural force, Mahakali. This reminder of the danger that persists even in domesticated women, the Kali that is said to dwell within

all women, crops up as we have seen, from time to time in Bhaktapur's stories, as a subdued and faintly comic counterpoint to the grand theme of the cosmic Devi. But with the help of Kumari Seto Bhairava is cured. Like Somara, the Tantric Brahman in the Nine Durgas legend, after the escape of the Nine Durgas brought about by the interference of his wife, Seto Bhairava is returned to ordinary civic life. He is safe, but as his inability to get Sima or Duma to wash his shawl for him reminds the audience, he is without power to alter the conventional order of things, and thus without, in fact, much power at all.

Chapter Sixteen
The Patterns and Meanings of the Festival Year

The state is concentric, man is eccentric. Thence arises an eternal struggle.
—James Joyce, conversation cited in James Joyce, by Richard Ellmann, 1982, p. 446.

Introduction

In our discussions of Bhaktapur's focal festivals, of the Devi cycle, and of the performances of the Nine Durgas, we have illustrated various ways in which social units, space, actual history and legendary history, gods, and time are woven together in an eternally returning annual cycle. The major festivals are surrounded by a mass of lesser calendrical events whose symbols and activities are more limited, often seemingly unrelated to other annual events or to the larger city order. Our task in this chapter is to examine the entire collection of annual events in a quest for possible order of one kind or another among them.

To facilitate such an overall view we have summarized the year's events, added comments on different phases within the yearly cycle, and placed events and comments in the context of the annual lunar calendar in appendix 5.

Distinctions and Enumerations and Their Implications

We can make a first approach to the year's collection of annual events by summarizing and enumerating, where possible, some of their distinguishing features.

1. In the course of a year there are seventy-nine named annual events, occasionally grouped so that there are more than one in a day, and with

one event lasting two days. The seventy-nine events thus occupy to some greater or lesser extent seventy-four days.^[1]

2. These seventy-nine annual events are of greatly differing importance. On the basis of the comparative amounts of city personnel, space, resources, and time devoted to them, as well as our opinion of their significance to Bhaktapur as a city, we have sorted the annual events into those of major, moderate, and minor importance. It is fairly easy to discern at the two extremes major events and the often very trivial minor ones, but the inclusion of an event in the middle category, "moderate importance," is often somewhat arbitrary. At any rate, our sorting gives us twenty-five major events (many of which we grouped into "focal" festival sequences), twenty-eight events of moderate importance, and twenty-six events of minor importance among the year's seventy-nine annual events. Thus we have some fifty-three events that we take to be of some more than minor annual importance to the city.

3. If we sort the annual events by the social-spatial unit, which is emphasized, we find that only two such events are primarily occasions for individual activities, that is, vratas ([42] and [43]). Twenty of the seventy-nine annual events are of primary concern to the household —although many other events entail household activities that are secondary to some activity in the public city. In contrast to household-centered events (and in contrast to a predominant emphasis in rites of passage), only two events may be said to be directed primarily to the phuki , but one of these is the fundamental phuki -defining Dewali [30].^[2] The majority of annual events are those fifty festivals of various kinds located primarily in public city space . Four annual events have their loci out of the city , and there are an additional two such events attended by those whose loss of a parent makes them unable to worship a father or mother in the two annual household ceremonies devoted to their worship. Finally there are two events ([18] and [34]) whose spatial location is ambiguous for this classification, the latter case—not exactly an "event" in the same sense as other days—concerning both the household and the phuki .

The "primary" annual household events, in contrast to the household phases of rites of passage and to those household pujas motivated by some specific familial problem, are generally observed by all city households on the same day, and are in this sense "city-wide" events. Thus, almost all the annual events are either such parallel household

events or take place in the public city space, and may be amalgamated together into a class of civic events emphasizing the public city and households as units of that city. On closer inspection, as we shall see, these household events and events in public city space are differently related to civic life.

The primary household events insofar as they take place in parallel throughout the city are civic events, but in another distinction they take place below the level of the public city. In such a view, certain annual events—and segments of particular events—are occasionally above the city level, many more are below it, but most are at the level of the city, the fifty events located in public space being, by definition, at that level. Above the city level are the melas where individuals from Bhaktapur join with individuals from other cities and from other ethnic groups in pilgrimages to one or another Valley shrine, all, significantly, located out of the major Valley cities. In melas Bhaktapur's participants escape their city and its particular order. Individuals join in a larger human community, refracting themselves against another context than the city's public order, the city being reflected only in its absence. The characteristic annual events below the level of the public city are the calendrically determined household events, centered, for the most part, on the moral life of the household and its benign deities.

One important difference between household and public events requires a repeated comment. Competent members of a household must (as an index of that competence) participate in its ceremonies, as phuki members must participate in rites of passage and other phuki ceremonies. But participation in public ceremonies is, for the most part, voluntary for the mass of observers (although not for the central actors). Thus public ceremonies must have their own special ways of motivating attendance.^[3] We have discussed some of the sources of the attraction of the important performances in previous chapters. These include their aesthetic qualities, their mystery, their intriguing complexity, their sacred and supernatural auras and, in some cases, the thrill of their dangers. The vivid presence of a deity in human form, its living manifestation in the Kumari maiden or the Nine Durgas, is an almost irresistible attraction. Many of the stories, dramas, and symbolic forms of the festivals engage and fascinate because they have compelling psychodynamic interest and resonate with the personal psychological forms out of which the public citizen is constructed. The tales of the phallic snakes issuing from the princess's nose and the banging together of the chariots of Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] in Biska:, the blood sac-

rifices of Mohani, and the echoes of human sacrifice in the Nine Durgas' pyakha(n) are vivid examples.^[4]

4. The deities who are foci of the various annual events include all of the major members of the city pantheon, a few quasi-deities or supernatural figures who exist only for the purpose of a particular festival, and some social categories—e.g., father, mother—treated as deities. For the benign deities there are eight events devoted to Visnu/Narayana^[*] (including here Dattatreya), four devoted to Krsna^[*] , and one each to Jagana and Rama. There are four devoted to Siva—one as Pasupatinatha, two as Mahadeva, and one (his only primary appearance in a household event) as Mahesvara in conjunction with his consort Uma. Ganesa^[*] is the focus of four festivals, Laksmi and Sarasvati of two each. Yama or his representatives have three; nagas , one; the Rsis^[*] , one; the deified river, one; and the cow deity, Vaitarani, one. Family members are worshiped as quasi-deities in four events. The family priest is worshiped on one occasion as purohita , on another as guru .

The dangerous goddess Devi in one form or another is the focus of about twenty-two occasions of which ten are in the Devi cycle. (Three of the events in the Devi cycle do not refer directly to Devi but are essential components of that cycle.) Bhairava—in himself and not as the consort of Devi—is the focus of two festivals and in tandem with his consort, Bhadrakali^[*] , at the center of the Biska: sequence, which lasts ten days. The dangerous deity Bhisi(n), who is conceptually isolated from the Devi-Bhairava group, is the central deity of one event.

All the city's major deities are thus the subject of one or more festivals during the year; they are all duly honored. But the extent and nature of the festival use of the various deities and types of deities are quite different. The dangerous deities are never the focus of primary household annual events,^[5] but they are the center of more than half of the events in the public city, and of all the urban structural focal sequences. The remaining minority of the public festivals, those of the benign deities, are divided among those deities, with Visnu^[*] having the largest number, eight—or sixteen if his avatars are amalgamated to him. Siva, the putatively predominant deity of the Shaivite Hindu Newars, is, typically, hardly represented at all for the purposes of the on-the-ground concrete work of the festivals. His major festival Sila Ca:re (Sivaratri [15]) taking place, for the most part, at a pilgrimage site elsewhere in the valley.

While the festivals in the public city of the benign deities, whose

exemplary figure is Visnu^[*] , are often said to be "in honor of" those morally representative figures, the public festivals of the dangerous deities not only honor and display those figures, but in contrast to the festivals of the benign deities, do something more. These are the public urban festivals, which are sometimes said to be not just for the gods but "for the people." These festivals make use of the special metamoral force of the dangerous deities as guarantors of order.

Not every event has a focal deity—some half dozen events are simply annual occasions for doing something or have some reference to a demonic or legendary figure (e.g., [45] and [65]) with references to major deities only in the far background.

5. Some annual calendrical events are of particular concern to certain categories of people in Bhaktapur—students, women, farmers, upper-level thars , merchants, Brahmans, people who have been bereaved during the previous year. The vast majority of the events concern all of Bhakatapur's people, however, with the traditional exception of the most polluting thars . A different question, however, is the representation of the city's various hierarchical macrosocial roles in the cast of characters of the festival enactments. In most cases the human actors on the public stage are simply the pujari attendants of the focal deities and the musicians (usually from one of the Jyapu thars ) who may accompany the deity in its procession. Thus the vast majority of public festivals do not represent the divisions of the city's elaborate differentiated macrostatus system. It is only in the year's two major festival sequences, Biska: and Mohani, that there is some complex and differentiated representation of Bhaktapur's macrosocial status system. Yet, even here the representation is sketchy. The king and his chief Brahman are given some centrality, and the court, other priests, farmers, and polluting thars are represented, but for the most part these actors are simply used as a clumped and static resume^[*] of the city's ranks. The focal festivals do not, with one or two trivial exceptions, show any dramatic relations among actors characterized by their social statuses. Whatever the dilemmas, paradoxes, conflicts, and problems that are explored in the annual festivals, the components of Bhaktapur's social system are privileged and taken for granted. The levels and the other components of the macrostatus system are not used to provide agonists in the drama, not used to illustrate conflict and its possible resolutions. In the midst of all the drama of annual events the hierarchical system of social statuses is protected, represented only as a unified actor, an actor who

Figure 34.
Spectators seated on the steps of the Natapwa(n)la temple in Ta:marhi Square to watch the struggle to pull the
Bhairava chariot.

is, sometimes, as is the case pervasively throughout city symbolism, put in contrast with an "external" and oppositional social actor, the untouchable. The potential drama of the interplay and conflicts of macro-statuses is deflected and played out elsewhere—not in the symbolic enactments of the annual events, whose surfaces and middle depths, at least, speak of other dramas.^[6]

It has been said of some of the festivals of the Hellenic pagan cities of the second and third centuries A.D. that they "showed off the city in its social hierarchy: people processed in a specified order of social rank, the magistrates, priests and councillors and even the city's athletic victors, if any" (Fox 1986, 80). Those festivals seem to have not only represented the city's statuses but also celebrated the particular citizens who temporarily captured roles in the hierarchy. The particular individuals who occupy the roles in Bhaktapur's largely ascribed—not achieved—status system do not need to be supported by such public advertisement. If Bhaktapur's social system is represented only in its unity, the individuals who happen to hold these statuses are completely dissolved in the immemorial roles they play in the annual festivals.

In summary, most (some 63%) of Bhaktapur's annual events are in the city's public space, with the calendrically coordinated household festivals following in quantity (25%). Almost, but not quite, all of the annual events have direct reference to deities, the annual calendar being largely a "religious calendar." The dangerous deities only appear when the primary or only locus of the event is in public space, but they are then dominant. And, in contrast to the minutely detailed dramatic interactions of various city spaces, of spatially located social units, of deities and times, the macrosocial system is portrayed only as a unified presence in the dramas of the yearly calendar.

A Note on Moving Deities Within the City

When the city's spaces and what they represent are tied together or contrasted in a serial, interactive manner rather than in a parallel summative way, the characteristic device used is the jatra . The deity is either moved systematically so that masses of people may be brought into contact with it, or else—less commonly—masses of people move systematically to encounter a deity or a sequential set of deities. These movements, jatra s, follow traditional routes, variously tying together

units of the city and, often, the city as a whole. They explore central points, axes, and boundaries, as people move or as focal deities are carried through space and time. In so doing the procession of people or of the deity is often brought into an encounter with other kinds of dramatic enactments.

By far the most common movement is that of those jatra s that move the deities themselves. Such movements would seem to be a utilization of an unremarkable resource for the enactment of symbols, for putting symbolic forms into effective relations with space and community. Yet, an observation by Walter Burkert suggests that such jatra s are, in fact, problematic in comparative perspective. Burkert writes of ancient Greece that "processions with images of gods—which play a major role in the Ancient Near East—are [in Greece] an exception. . .. Such a moving of the immovable is an uncanny breaking up of order " (1985, 92 [emphasis added]). Bhaktapur's gods leave their temples and their fixed positions, and although they do not wander at will in the course of the annual events, their order is a mobile order. The contrast with Greece suggests that the movement of Bhaktapur's gods—or at least of the jatra images they inhabit—out into the city from their fixed bases in the city are invasions, albeit controlled and not chaotic ones, of what in Greece was becoming a safely secular space.

Patterns in the Year

What happens if we reassemble the three cycles that we separated from each other in previous chapters and attempt to examine the narrative movement of the annual cycle as a whole (see app. 5)?^[7] We must now look for disjunctions suggesting phases and movements in the year's course, for frontiers indicating some difference in the festivals that precede and follow them. Let us begin by making a cut into the annual cycle after the ending of Mohani in early October. Although the successful rice harvest had been compellingly represented in the themes of Mohani, the actual harvesting continues. The work of Devi has now been given over to the Nine Durgas. Taleju returns to the secret inner recesses of her temple, and there will be no more festivals of the Goddess nor of any other dangerous deity (except for the merchants' Bhisi[n] festival)^[8] for a span of six lunar months, when the solar festival, Biska: will reintroduce the Dangerous Goddess and her consort Bhairava. Then, beginning with Biska:, will come the six months during which all the public festivals of Devi and her various forms and associates and

those few of the unaccompanied Bhairava will occur, as well as, in fact, the great majority of the year's festivals. The ending of Mohani, the symbolic culmination of the cycle of rice agriculture, then, returns Devi to the city in the form of the wandering Nine Durgas, but marks the end of her public presence in the annual calendrical events for the next six months.

The first annual event after Mohani is the lunar new year sequence, Swanti [77-2]. When considered in its contrast to the year's other events, Swanti begins the lunar calendrical year with a turning in and centering on the household and its members. Swanti's interactive solidarity is internal to the household, with a secondary parallel solidarity relating each household to all Hindu (and with Mha Puja to all Newar) households as well as to the households of Bhaktapur itself. The Swanti sequence uses as the antistructure that serves to define the household, not the city in which the household is embedded, but still another realm beyond the household, that of death personified as Yama, at the threshold of an afterlife determined by an individual's moral and ritual activities. The environing city is irrelevant to this opposition and to the resulting dialogue between household and Yama. The lunar New Year thus constitutes still another sort of annual frontier, beginning the voyage through the year that follows it with the positioning of individuals in the basic moral cell of the city, the household.

Swanti is followed first by a pilgrimage and mela at a Visnu^[*] shrine out of the city [3] and then—nine days after the end of Swanti, and ten days after the New Year's Day itself—by Hari Bodhini [4], the day of Visnu's^[*] awakening from his four month's cosmic sleep, which is celebrated by still another out of the city mela . Gaborieau (1982 [summarized above in chap. 12]) had proposed the falling off to sleep and awakening of Visnu^[*] as marking off an annual period of four months, dividing off from the rest of the year a special segment, an out of the ordinary time, a period beginning with profound disorder and culminating in regeneration. In Bhaktapur Hari Bodhini in itself does not mark a shift in the year's activities from the extradordinary to the ordinary—Mohani did that. Nor does the day of the onset of Visnu's^[*] sleep, Hari Sayani [42]. Yet, aside from its exact timing and duration, Gaborieau's proposals about the year's phases have some relevance to Bhaktapur and we will return to them.

From the end of Mohani in Kaulathwa through the lunar New Year some two weeks later and then on through the succeeding nine fortnights there are relatively few annual events, all of them, except for the

Suku(n) Bhisi(n) God Jatra, focused on the city's benign moral deities. This changes with Pasa, Ca:re on the fourteenth day of Cillaga (March), when, with an emphasis on protection from evil spirits, the first animal sacrifices since Mohani—again with the exception of those made by merchants to Sukhu(n) Bisi(n) God—are made to Taleju in the Taleju temple and to some Aga(n) Deities, initiating a "period of anxiety" that will last through the remainder of the year until the end of the following Mohani. In this period the festivals of the dangerous deities will take place. Thus Pasa Ca:re is or anticipates still another frontier for the year. That frontier is more clearly signaled in the elaborate public festivals of the Biska: sequence, which comes (depending on the relation of lunar and solar calendars) some twelve days later. Biska:, which comes about six months after the end of Mohani, is the first of the public urban festivals that after the six intervening months center once again around the dangerous deities. Biska:, the solar New Year festival, contrasts sharply with the lunar New Year sequence. While Swanti emphasizes the household and the relations of individuals in the household, and is characterized by a sort of withdrawal from the city into the household, the solar New Year festival—with its themes of urban division and reunification and of the sacred legitimization of the city's space—emphasizes the city itself. In the solar New Year the household is secondary. The deities emphasized in the lunar New Year's sequence are the benign moral gods—Laksmi and quasi-deified family members in the interior of the family and at its exterior and, in fact, continuation, death as Yama, the judge and executor of each individual's morally created and deserved fate. In Biska:, in contrast, the deities are the amoral dangerous one. In contrast to Swanti, what is contrasted with the household and given primacy in Biska: is the larger nested set of urban units that surround the household and enable its survival as an element in Bhaktapur's society. Thus, Biska: begins a six-month phase of the year when the ordering of the household's sustaining "lateral" environment,^[9] the public city and its environment is explored. This exploration has, in turn, two phases.

In the weeks following Biska: there are a few heterogeneous events of varying importance—worship of mothers in the household, jatra s of forms of Devi, and one especially auspicious day. Three fortnights after the end of Biska: comes Sithi Nakha [36], the first event with a reference to the annual rains and the rice growing cycle. Sithi Nakha is preparatory; it will be the second event in the Devi cycle, Bhagasti [40] in June, which marks the beginning of rice planting, and which is another im-

portant transition in the year. The annual festivals of dangerous deities had begun again with Biska:. Now on Bhagasti, Devi's agents in the city, the Nine Durgas who had begun their cycle nine months earlier with the last of the Devi festivals, the focal Mohani, disappear—in some versions go into the ground—for seven fortnights.^[10] With the disappearance of the Nine Durgas there is a shift of concern among the important "anxious festivals" of the period from the internal dangers to the integration of the city to the external environing dangers so clearly represented in the successes and failures of the monsoon rains and the rice cycle. These concerns with the city's external and supporting realms will endure for three-and-a-half months, during a period of an increasing density of annual events, until the end of Mohani. Bhagasti is followed by a five-week period of licensed obscenity, culminating in Gatha Muga: Ca:re [45]. During this period there is a minor jatra of an avatar of Visnu's^[*] and then Hari Sayani [42], the beginning of Visnu's^[*] four-month cosmic sleep. Like his awakening on Hari Bodhini, this is not in itself a transitional event in the annual cycle. Hari Sayani is followed by a minor event, Tulasi Piye [43], related to Visnu^[*] (which gives an omen about the length of a worshiper's life), a minor household puja (Guru Puja [44]), and then by Gatha Muga: Ca:re [45], marking the ideal completion of the transplanting of rice to the flooded paddy fields.

Gatha Muga: Ca:re is followed by a fortnight with only one event. That one, Naga Pa(n)cami [41], is intended for the protection of houses and households from dangerous nagas . Then the next four lunar fortnights become filled with events; they contain thirty-one of the year's seventy-nine festivals and thus constitute the most concentrated festival span of the year. This period contains a mixture of types of events—public and household, devoted to both benign and dangerous deities. However, within this diverse group there are two major events. First comes Saparu, with its active support of the progression of the spirits of the recently dead into King Yama's realm and its accompanying "anti-structural" carnival. Second is the focal structural Mohani, culminating the year, celebrating and miming the power of Devi in Bhaktapur's supporting world, and drawing her into the city's center of royal power.

The festival cycle as a whole does, then, seem to have some overall patterning. One of its most striking aspects is the division of the year so that in the six months from Mohani until some twelve days before Biska: there are relatively few events (twenty of the year's seventy-nine). These are with one exception—the generally anomalous Sukhu(n) Bhi-

si(n) God Jatra [8]—devoted only to benign deities and lack the anxious themes of many of the annual events that will follow. Then, after an anticipation in events with reference to dangerous spirits and protection of the body (Pasa Ca:re [18] and Cika[n] Buyegu [19]), Biska: introduces the long season of the festivals of the dangerous deities, of the Devi cycle, and of events with primary and central references to protection and to death. Aside from the festivals of the Devi cycle, there are some fifteen additonal such events during this period. Mixed in with these events exclusively characterizing these six months are thirteen "ordinary" festivals, primarily minor ones "in honor of the gods" of the sort found throughout the other half of the year.

Within the span of six anxious months between Biska: and Mohani, the death and disappearance of the Nine Durgas during Bhagasti some two months after Biska: marks a shift in the emphasis on the dangerous deities, primarily Devi, from their roles as the representatives and protectors of urban spatial units (epitomized in Biska:) to their use in the representation of—and the mediation with—the noncivic encircling en-viroment. In this perspective there is a movement from household in Swanti to the public city in Biska:, and then to the city's vital environment after Biska:, this final shift having its resolution in Mohani.

To return finally to Gaborieau's specific suggestions about the structure of the Indo-Nepalese festival year (see chap. 12), the shifts within the six-month Biska:-Mohani, period, starting with Bhagasti and ending with the end of Mohani, three-and-a-half months later, correspond roughly, that is, within a few weeks, to the period of Visnu's^[*] cosmic sleep. Visnu's^[*] sleep and awakening do not in themselves delineate any shift, however, nor is the period of that sleep (Caturmasa) of the same significance in Bhaktapur as an "inauspicious period" as it is, reportedly, elsewhere. The span from Bhagasti to Mohani can, nevertheless, certainly be characterized (as Gaborieau does for the period of Visnu's^[*] sleep) as a time when "the earth is left to the demons." In addition (further paralleling Gaborieau), there are major festivals of "reversal" early in the period (the five weeks between Bhagasti [40] and Gatha Muga: Ca:re [45], Gatha Muga: Ca:re itself, and the carnival phase of Saparu [48]) and a major festival of "regeneration" (Mohani itself) toward its end. The span does not divide neatly into a "reversal" half and a "regenerative" half, however, being full of a miscellaneous variety of festivals. It is really only certain events that are clearly (the first ones) reversals and (the last) regenerative. What Bhaktapur seems to show, in

contrast to Gaborieau's proposal of an Indo-Nepalese "normal" period of eight months followed by an "out of time" period of four, is an addition to the "normal" festival cycle that had held undisturbed for the prior six months of something more in the remaining six, an addition first of the urban ordering festivals of the dangerous deities, and then of a span that is "out of time" in the sense that attention turns to the exterior of the city, and its actors and its order. The last move seems prodded by the obsessions of the rice growing cycle and to be related to that cycle, as much as to the kind of abstract structural considerations argued by Gaborieau.

External Influences on the Annual Cycle

There are many possible external cyclical features beside the rice agricultural cycle that might have influenced the content and forms of the year's various annual events. These are the various aspects of the yearly solar cycle, the monthly lunar cycle with its phases of the moon and its bright and dark fortnights, and the various yearly patterns of weather and agriculture. The annual solar cycle, with its solar year, its seasons, its equinoxes and solstices, its "ascending" and "descending" halves, is almost unreflected in Bhaktapur's annual calendar. The great exception is Biska:, the focal solar New Year sequence centering on the vernal equinox.^[11] In Biska:'s symbolism, as we have discussed, the possible references to the sun's behavior and to the solar year are minimal or equivocal.^[12] There is only one other annual festival in the solar cycle—Ghya: Caku Sa(n)lhu [10]. It comes at a time which once elsewhere in South Asia traditionally marked the winter solstice and the beginning of the ascending half of the year, but such connections are entirely lost in the events of the day. Aside from a reference to "spring music" in anticipation of a spring still several weeks away in the course of the lunar event Sri Pa(n)cami [13] there are no other annual events which respond to, symbolize or express the solar year.

The lunar cycle provides, of course, the basic month and the basic structure of Bhaktapur's calendar. For the most part the days of the lunar month simply provide a counting device with no further meaning. Within each month the phases of the moon provide additional materials for possible symbolic elaboration. The full moon and the new moon (to a much lesser degree) are occasions for differentiated events as well as

regular monthly ones. Yet, once again these differentiated events seem to have no salient present symbolic reference to the light or the dark of the fortnight's culminating phase of the moon.

The phases of the moon allow, however, for a further differentiation of each month into waxing (or bright) and waning (or dark) fortnights. There is a marked difference in the quantity of events in the two kinds of fortnights. Thwa , the waxing fortnights, have throughout the year twice as many annual events as ga , the waning fortnights. The waning fortnights all contain a special day, the fourteenth or ca:re dedicated to Devi. This and the difference in quantities of events would suggest the possibility of some contrast of ordinary versus dangerous, or auspicious versus inauspicious between the two types of fortnights. Ancient Hindu South Asia was explicit regarding differences in the two half-months (paksa^[*] ). . "The general rule is that the sukla paksa^[*] [bright half] is recommended for rites in honor of gods and rites for prosperity; while the dark half is recommended for rites for deceased ancestors and for magic rites meant for a malevolent purpose" (Kane 1968-1977, vol. 5, p. 335). Bhaktapur's festivals do not sort neatly in such a way. There are festivals of the benign deities, of the dangerous deities and twa:s , and melas in both. Worship of living mothers and fathers is in the dark half, the Biska: sequence spans light and dark fortnights, and so does the Swanti sequence. Yet, the major festivals with reference to death, to the loss of order, and to "antistructure" are, in fact, found in dark fortnights, where they represent a large segment of those fortnights' relatively few events. These include Bala Ca:re [7], Sila Ca:re [15], Pasa Ca:re [18], Bhagasti [4], Gatha Muga: Ca:re [45], Saparu [52], Smasana^[*] Bhailadya: Jatra [64], Pulu Kisi Haigu [65], Dhala(n) Sala(n) [66], Kwa Puja [77], and Kica Puja [78]. The events with reference to death in the bright fortnights are either secondary to the celebration of the household (as on the fifth day of Swanti),^[13] or very minor (as in Yama: Dya: Thaigu [59] and Yau Dya: Punhi [62]).

The patterning of festival events by light and dark fortnights is not discursively salient. That is, although this patterning presumably gives a sense of meaningful order to the year, can be recognized by people when pointed out, and is probably known to some scholarly citizens, it must be pried out for the most part by an inspection of the distribution of annual events. The rice agricultural cycle and its enabling conditions, in contrast, is a salient and overt influence on the annual cycle. It not

only influences the distribution and sequence of various events (as the bright and dark fortnights do) but also enters into the content, stories, and symbolism of those events in direct and obvious way. Images of fertility and generation, of cyclical appearance and disappearance, of protection and destruction in an equivocal balance, and of capricious vital forces just beyond the urban order and just beyond the social selves of its citizens—all this expresses, responds to, and builds on the implications of the rice and monsoon cycle and their phases.

The annual rice agricultural cycle has reflections elsewhere in the calendar beside in the Devi cycle itself. One event, Ya: Marhi Punhi [9], comes when the annual consumption of the newly gathered rice harvest is about to begin. The benign goddess Laksmi is asked on this day to ensure that the rice consumed by the household will eventually be replaced. With the successful gathering in of the harvest, the emphasis has moved from the dangerous goddess of fertility to the benign goddess of the household stores. A major reflection of the agricultural cycle is in the shift that we have discussed at length in the kinds of events that occur in the segment of the year between the beginning of the rains at Bhagasti [40] and the symbolic end of the harvest at Mohani. The concentration of all kinds of events during this period in a sort of crescendo of symbolic effort and the large number of events related to death and antistructure are congruent with the problematic nature of this period of the year.

A View of the Annual Events With the Citizen at Their Center

The symbolic forms, events, sequences, narratives, and structures of narratives of the year's cycle comprise a substantial library of South Asian forms and ideas transformed and modulated so as to place Bhaktapur at their center. Yet, the yearly events from their humblest members to their most developed sequences of interrelated events speak to each of Bhaktapur's people not only of the universe as refracted and centered in Bhaktapur but also of the auditor-actor himself or herself in an attempt, so to speak, to deal with their eccentricity. The annual events, along with the city's other symbolic enactments, speak of being a "person" in Bhaktapur, a socially defined and placed and judged to be competent individual, a proper citizen. The annual cycle talks to the person of his or her relation to the household and its contained family,

to the extended family, to the city and its significant components, to a moral world beyond the city, and to still another world, an amoral or meta-moral world, beyond that.

The household within its arena, the physical house, is represented in the contrasting perspectives of the mass of annual events as the place of affectionate solidarity. Relations with supportive, affectionate women (mothers, sisters, wives)—absent from the symbolism of the public city—are emphasized. Other primary household festivals are occasions for worshiping mothers and fathers and the benign deities, loci of human ideals, affection, and identifications—Laksmi as guardian of the storeroom, Siva and his benign consort, Ganesa^[*] , Visnu^[*] , the Rsis^[*] . In the movement of women among households, the household and its persons are related to a particular larger network of households, those of the "mother's brothers," of the women's tha: che(n) s, their "own homes." This network, as we have discussed in chapter 6, is a nexus of warm personal support when seen in contrast to the austere patriarchal network, the phuki , which must ensure proper lineage, thar , and civic behavior. When the household in this thematic mode of affectionate relationship spills beyond its boundaries, it is primarily into the neighborhood, the twa :, with its neighborhood Ganesa^[*] shrine, which acts as a kind of fringe of family-like relationships around the household.

The household person lives in a sort of tube within the walls of the household, a tube that is open at both ends into time. One is born into the household from some previous incarnation—a vague idea that is not represented in the festivals. One will finally leave it to move on, keeping much of one's household self, into Yama's realm and to a pleasant rebirth or social heaven beyond. Death—ordinary death^[14] within the household—is the threshold within this open-ended tube of personhood to a next moral stage, the stage where the person's morally earned soterial rewards or punishments will affect the conditions of his or her new life. Annual events comment on this threshold. They explore ways of holding on to household existence for as long as possible in the face of a humanized god of death, Yama, who honors his promises and whose messengers can be distracted and deceived. Household events also ensure the remembrance of the household's personal dead (not the distant unknown patrilineal "fathers" of the rites of passage) and, in conjunction with the public Saparu festival, ease their passage into Yama's realm. Thus the annual household events represent the career of the individual in his or her intimate personhood through a span of time encompassing both sides of death.

The household is a place of familiar refuge at the center of the systematic displacements an individual experiences in the course of the annual cycle. It is the here and now position within the "tube" of person-hood extending from distant past into the postmortem future. The annual events also explore the limits and the phases of the person in another direction, "laterally," through the walls of ordinary household personhood. They probe downward into the person's body, outward into the city, and beyond. The lunar new year begins on Mha Puja [1] with the worship of the "mha "—a word indicating both body and self—of each individual. In the course of its worship the mha 's elements, the mahabhuta , "of which the body is supposed to he composed and into which it is dissolved" (chap. 13), are represented. The body is given a meat-containing offering, and thus treated as if it were a meat-eating dangerous deity. This offering is not to the benign "indwelling god," usually thought of as Visnu^[*] , who is or who inhabits an individual's soul, a soul habited somewhere in the body. This offering is to a deified something else, the supporting matrix that houses the soul, a matrix that exists everywhere beyond the bounds of the person and the household, and which represents everywhere in Bhaktapur's symbolism the threatening and sustaining amoral forces at the boundaries of the moral world.

Another move away from the household and household personhood, that from household to phuki , is little represented in annual festivals, although it is an aspect of all rites of passage and of all Tantric worship of upper-status lineage deities. There is a radical shift when an individual moves from household to phuki , as there is when he or she moves from the self to its bodily support. The move is from the affectionate moral order of household relations supported and represented by the benign deities to an order whose more burdensome morality is sternly enforced by means of the fear-inducing meanings, emotions, and practices associated with the dangerous deities and their sacrificial religion. Phuki worship makes use of symbolic resources similar to those used in urban festival integration, but in the annual cycle it is not represented so much as a nested unit of the city but as a kind of parallel to it. The locus of its main annual ceremony is not the Aga(n) House within the city, but the Digu God shrine beyond the city's boundaries. The phuki and the city are both in their own, different, ways at the perimeter of the household and share the same kinds of order-ensuring forces. It is in the rites of passage that the phuki 's force over the household is centrally emphasized, and in those rites the phuki 's relation to the orga-

nization of the larger city is also not particularly emphasized, but only sketched in movements to the mandalic^[*]pithas .

Outside of the household people are reminded that the family-based moral order, the order of love and respect and of the forms of valid shame and guilt based on intimate family experience, is shared throughout the city where it is written large in support of king, Brahman and the social hierarchy as members of a great family. The festivals of the benign deities—primarily in the jatra processions along the main city festival route, the pradaksinapatha^[*] , and secondarily in visit to temples of benign deities—display and honor these moral values. In this group of civic enactments the ordinary person of the houehold extends his or her imagery of the household to the larger city.

But this extension of household imagery is a minor move in Bhaktapur's festivals. For the most part the festivals in public space deal with something else, paralleling the shift in the move from household to phuki . The festivals which use dangerous deities to designate civic areas and their relations make use of forces and images different from those used by the household and its extensions. Here imagery and implications played down or hidden in the annual cycle's imagery of household and household person are brought forth, elaborated, shaped, distorted, and given a social placement in the representation of the fertile, dangerous, and enforcing borderlands of social order and personhood.

When people move still further out of the household, beyond the borders of the city, they encounter a new realm of a quite different kind. There are eight events ([3], [4], [7], [15], [33], [39], [46], and [51]) during the annual cycle where a shrine far outside of the city (as opposed to just outside of its borders) is the focus, sometimes for all who choose to go, or (in three cases) for those who have had a death in their family within some designated period of time. Women also may make pilgrimages to valley shrines during the period of the Swathani Vrata. The principal deities of these pilgrimage sites are, with one only apparent exception,^[15] once again benign deities. These out-of-the-city events bring people from Bhaktapur into crowds of Nepalis and, sometimes, North Indians from many different ethnic groups. They are movements out of Bhaktapur's particular order into a larger, less differentiated humanity. In these far out-of-the-city activities, Bhaktapur is represented negatively, as it were, in leaving it. What is found "out there" is a larger community of fully human beings—albeit on vacation from various kinds of local social orders—in a context of references to

moral orders beyond Bhaktapur's civic order, the cosmic realms of Visnu^[*] and Siva, their heavenly cities and the realms of the remembered and beloved dead. Similar in meaning to the melas , and associated, as several of the annual melts are, with the fate of the souls of Bhaktapur's recent dead, is the Saparu carnival.

Melas and carnival are thoroughly within the moral realm. Here, in a familiar anthropological phrasing (Victor Turner 1969), there is a movement toward a generalized human "communitas " that is substituted for local division and categories of social ordering. In Bhaktapur's example of carnival , a characteristic universal genre for an escape from ordinary civic order, the carnival associated with Saparu [48], some privileged men playfully divest themselves of their roles and take on other familiar roles. Presumably in the process of shedding one role and pretending another—including some nonhuman ones—they enjoy for a few hours the brotherly excitement of shared being and omnipotentiality rather than the restrained pleasures of the security of social order. However, this escape from structure in Bhaktapur remains for the most part carefully within the bounds of the deeper categories of social order. Men switch roles, but do not reject the reality of role itself, nor, for the most part, of familiar culturally designated roles. Even in the farthest reaches of communitas the social category of "humanity" and its varieties is still kept. As Turner (1969, 131f.) puts it, suggesting the horizon of communitas , but going far beyond what Bhaktapur's melas , carnival, and other annual moral antistructural moves achieve:

Essentially, communitas is a relationship between concrete, historical, idiosyncratic individuals. These individuals are not segmentalized into roles and statuses but confront one another rather in the manner of Martin Buber's "I and Thou." Along with this direct, immediate, and total confrontation of human identities, there tends to go a model of society as a homogeneous, unstructured communitas, whose boundaries are ideally conterminous with those of the human species.

Some of the pleasures of the Saparu carnival are quite different from the escape from society into an unsegmented pan-human I-Thouness. There is also a darker possibility seen in some few of its images—those of demons and powerful beasts—of a more radical escape, this time from human identity itself. "Communitas " versus "social-structural order" is a tension, as the quotation from Turner points out, within "the social," a tension between "models of society," of aspects of "human identities." The tension here is between two moral orders , a "social-structural" one and a "communal" one. This particular dichot-

omy of "structural" and "antistructural" within the human realm is contained and represented in Bhaktapur in the terms of individuals' relations to the moral deities and to morally ordered death. In myth its prototypical mediating figure is Siva, who is a marginal moral actor within the realm of the gods and who is easily duped into giving morally unmerited rewards, familiar from many traditional stories, rewards that are misused by the unworthy recipients. Thus, during Sila Ca:re [15] people mimic a legendary "accident" in which a preoccupied Siva was deceived into taking someone directly and totally undeservedly into his heaven. Playing with chance and luck in festival gambling [Swanti] and the use of deceits and manipulations that distract and delay Yama's death-announcing messengers during the same sequence are examples of other human practices rehearsed in the course of the annual cycle that allow people to get around the heavy moral pressures of Bhaktapur's structured world.

Turner's 1969 treatment of structure and antistructure has a second antistructural option besides communitas , the Hobbesian "war of all against all" (1969, 131). Bhaktapur's festivals and symbolic resources also explore another kind of opposition to "structure" than communitas , bringing a subsidiary theme of carnival—its demons and beasts—to the fore. This opposition places yet another world in opposition to the realm shared by both communitas and social structure; it opposes a meta-moral or amoral world to a moral one. This is the nonsocial world around the city and within the individual, a realm in which communitas is irrelevant as the very categories of community and human are themselves dissolved. For Bhaktapur, however, this realm is not Hobbes's antisocial world. Life for humans within Bhaktapur's amoral realms might indeed have been conceived as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"—or even worse, for the predatory dangers portrayed in Bhaktapur's civic environs are perhaps more ingeniously terrrible even than Hobbes's "nature." But Bhaktapur's antisocial realm is not the near chaos Hobbes feared if the then recently achieved balance between newly individualized citizens freed from a restraining medieval world view and the equally new nation-states were to be disturbed. The realm of the amoral in Bhaktapur—neither social-structural nor communitas —is extensively represented and encountered as consisting of underlying and environing forms and forces that have their own kind of mysterious, vital, often demonic order out of which the moral order draws its energies, whose forces the moral order depends on and uses to protect itself, against which it provides its own peculiar kind of order. This

balancing and restorative tension is clearly represented in the stories of the Devi Mahatmya and the festivals of the Devi cycle. The internal tension and oscillations between the benign (moral) and dangerous (amoral) deities is at the service of a larger order, which in its moments of exact balance is congenial to gods and humans, if not to that larger order's enemies, the Asuras. When the moral order and its context are in proper balance, as they become periodically as the result of Devi's bloody victories against the Asuras, then, as the Devi Mahatmya puts it, "favorable winds began to blow; the sun shone with perfect brilliance, the sacred fire burnt in a tranquil manner; and the strange sounds that had filled the quarters of space also disappeared" (X, 27; Agrawala 1963, 127). As represented in the imagery of the annual cycle, Bhaktapur's moral world and amoral worlds together assure, ultimately, a higher ordering. The "Asuras" are vague notations for still another, more radical, antiorder set against this balanced system, notations for some Nibelungian revolution that would plunge both gods and humans into chaos for the alien purposes of some other class of beings. And even this is only chaos from the limited point of view of gods and men.^[16]

The annual cycle of events systematically defines certain aspects of their city and their personhood to individuals, but it does not celebrate a unified "individuality."^[17] In their relation to individuals, the different kinds of events in the cycle have to do with the different aspects of the person that are realized in the various arenas that are the concern of the annual cycle. The individual is portrayed as a dynamic and delicate interface, as constructed of constituent elements that can dissolve into something else, as shifting according to (and thus as being dependent on) his or her relation to different civic arenas, as located in, generated out of, and defended against the environing amoral worlds found outside of the various urban units and, in their internal relation to an individual's body and mind, beyond the inner boundaries of the individual's self.

In the course of the annual cycle individuals rehearse their membership in most of the nested units that define their complex citizenship in Bhaktapur—the cities beyond, the city itself, the city half, the mandalic^[*] section, the twa :,^[18] the phuki and the household family. For the most part they do this directly, not via representatives. The use of representative actors to indicate the hierarchy is exceptional. In the course of the annual cycle Bhaktapur moves each of its citizens into each of the

arenas that are the essential units and varieties of their social experience and of phases of their selves. Positioned successively in each arena, citizens find the appropriate forms of the city's symbolic world rotating around them, engaging them in contemplation and action.

Bhaktapur's other symbolic enactments, driven by other tempos than the annual cycle, have other centers than the city itself, and from the points of view of their participants are local and private affairs. They concern the cellular components of the city that the larger public order of the city presupposes and with which it must deal, components whose outputs are necessary for the order of the larger city.^[19] It is the annual cycle that describes and, in part, makes the integrated civic order of city and citizen in which these smaller symbolic enactments find their place.

Chapter Seventeen
What Is Bhaktapur that a Newar May Know It?^[1]

Theseus. And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing A local habitation and a name.
—Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Structures of the Imagination

We have been most centrally concerned in this book with one particular aspect of Bhaktapur's communal life, its poetic imagination, and we have emphasized, for the most part, only one of the subjects of that imagination, the city itself. Bhaktapur's imagination has worked over a span of several centuries, making use of the opportunities and constraints of its history and its context in the building of a world. As its citizens, at the same time poets and audience, strove to build a coherent civic world out of the opportunities provided by history, tradition, and accident, they became progressively enveloped in and shaped by what they were building.

Shakespeare's Theseus discovered a midsummer night's dream that he found "more strange than true," in contrast with the unstrange truths of Athens. Yet, as Puck reminds us at the end, Theseus, his dream and his truth, all is our dream. We have been concerned for the most part with Bhaktapur's dream within a dream—those particular aspects of Bhaktapur's order that were "marked," that is, precisely, made strange to Bhaktapurians, although as Hindus and not Athenians Bhaktapurians find them to be members of an order that is both strange and , in some sense, true. That order, the "religious realm," which is where most of Bhaktapur's marked symbols are situated, is there generally sharply distinguished from the "ordinary," the unstrange. As we characterized the marked realm (for the sake of considering its margins in

chap. 11) its "proper spaces are the temple or shrine, the purified, bounded and isolated puja areas in houses, the ideal spaces of the city carved out through the positions and festival movements of the deities; its expert workers are the priests; its time is the calendrically determined eternally recurring times of festival or that of rites of passage or of crisis-generated or prophylactic ad hoc worship; its proper action is in ritual and the traditionally specified actions of the festivals."

Bhaktapur's referral of most of its marked symbolic forms and enactments—myth, legend, drama, literature, poetry, and music—to the realm of the gods is one of the city's most striking features to a secularized Westerner. It is the city's way of making all these forms both strange and true, and thus giving them great seriousness and force. Not as is sometimes said of religious matters, "ultimate" seriousness and force, for there is in some of Bhaktapur's thought, particularly in the implications of its Tantrism, something else more profound beyond the realm and reality of the city's gods. But it is that system of deities that puts Bhaktapur at the center of a cosmos and that provides the characteristic emblems of the realm of strange symbols.

Alongside the strange world of marked symbols Bhaktapur has also constructed, as all communities do—sometimes yielding to, sometimes molding, sometimes denying recalcitrant "physical facts"—a world of self-serving common sense, a world meaningful in its "embedded symbolism." This world, illustrated in this book in our discussions of the city's larger and smaller social orders and by the ideas, feelings, and actions of the "purity complex," is the kind of order that Theseus confidently set as truth against dream. The strange and the ordinary are united in Bhaktapur's urban mesocosm in a common world mediating between the microcosm of each of its citizens and the macrocosm.^[2]

We have been occupied throughout with details of that mesocosm. We wish now, in summary, to consider some of the most general aspects of Bhaktapur's order, the arrangements that give some overall coherence and characteristic style to Bhaktapur's multilayered and segmented world. We will make a working distinction between two interrelated issues. First we will consider some very general aspects of the city's symbolic forms that contribute to the particular meaningfulness , the particular coherence, of Bhaktapur's life. Then we will consider some of the arrangements of symbolic forms that serve to make, under Bhaktapur's special circumstances, potentially meaningful forms intelligible , and thus, ultimately, significant . Both are aspects of our orienting question, "What is Bhaktapur that a Newar may know it?"

"Meaningfulness" and "intelligibility" are really proposals toward an explanation for why, once many other features are in place, Bhaktapur is the way it is. We will in the final section of this chapter make some further probes at distinguishing the necessary from the contingent in Bhaktapur's order in a search for that city's typological and explainable features.

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.

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

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

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

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-

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-

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.

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

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.

Resources for Making Meaning Intelligible

We have reviewed here, and throughout this volume, some of the arrangements of forms that contribute to the style of Bhaktapur's symbolic organization and make it seem familiar, coherent, engaging, meaningful, and important to many, most probably to most, of its people. Still more is required, however; that organization must be apprehensible. The mass of symbolic forms must be organized so that people can grasp and remember and understand something about them and find their way about in them. We introduced the problem of intelligibility in our discussion (in chap. 8) of the city's pantheon as an organized "system of signs." The pantheon is sorted into classes of supernaturals distinguished by simple oppositions, oppositions that are not arbitrary but are semantically related to the meaning of the class. Those oppositions distinguish the classes with the same sort of didactic efficiency as the opposition of the dangerous and forbidding, fiery and bloody red to the encouraging living green of traffic signals. The contrasts that distinguished the classes are further arranged in the form of a successively branching tree, leading step by step ultimately to the closest and most familiar class of deities, the benign deities. Within each class of supernaturals members are distinguished by family differences based on a complex variety of differentiated features requiring a concrete familiarity with the class, for some classes a specialist's knowledge, in order to distinguish one member from another.

These particular features of the city pantheon can be thought of as attempted solutions to Bhaktapur's considerable problem of the intelligibility of its hypertrophied symbolic world. Let us recall—and comment further on—some of the resources for intelligibility we have emphasized in our discussions of Bhaktapur's complexity, bearing in mind that these prevalent resources have implications in themselves not only for intelligibility but also for meaning.

1. Levels.

We have repeatedly encountered hierarchical arrangements of classes of forms—for example, among thar s, supernaturals,

spaces, systems of behavioral control, and aspects of "the person," into discontinuous, successively more inclusive, "higher" levels. Bhaktapur uses levels extensively for distinguishing and ordering classes (and, often, subgroupings within classes) of phenomena and ideas. The levels have both formal and semantic implications. Higher levels, by definition more inclusive, are also usually less specialized, have more potential and generative (in contrast to concrete, specialized, and applied) power, are corrective of the errors and problems of the next lower level, and thus are activated when the low level's autonomous self-controls do not work or are insufficient for that lower level's own purposes. But the higher levels have purposes of their own and are thus ambivalently viewed. Sometimes they are helpful and their resources are sought; sometimes they are punitively corrective or simply destructive, and they must be avoided.

In an exemplary contrast that we have repeatedly emphasized, the dangerous deities are related to the benign ones as being more powerful, as being on the outside, as actuated when the powers of the benign deities are insufficient, as being further away than the benign deifies from the concrete, human, and ordinary. We have usually called them "amoral," but they are more precisely "meta-moral," related to but "above" the urban system of morals. They protect it while being alien to it; that is, in a way typical of successive levels, they are intimately related to lower levels without sharing their characteristic qualities.^[9]

Within the moral realm the behaviors and categories related to purity and the avoidance of shame and loss of face are similarly discontinuous from those related to power and the avoidance of danger, punishment, sin, guilt, and fear. This latter complex of moral forces is at a different, higher level, insofar as those forces come into operation when the controls of the purity system are not sufficient or are breached. These dangerous forces are closely related to the world of magic and of meta-moral power that lies at the edges of the ordinary world. In a way charactertistic of adjoining levels, the moral world organized through adherence to the dharma and through concerns with purity and proper behavior is a bulwark against these other forces and in the normal run of things prevents them from emerging.

There are hierarchical characteristics differentiating the stories told of deities in their existence in transcendent space and time, "myths," on the one hand from their appearances in the ordinary world, "legends," on the other. We have had many examples of both throughout the book. The myths are for the most part standard and ancient South

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.

Asian forms. They are often formally told or read at some given point in a traditional formal religious sequence where they relate some ritual action to transcendent time and space. Legends, in contrast, usually have to do with the specific history, space, and social arrangements of Bhaktapur. They are often informally told by professional storytellers in the city's public space or by elders in households. Legends recount encounters between deities and high status humans who are citizens of Bhaktapur or else people of essential importance in its history, and they portray events of great importance not for the cosmos, as in myths, but for Bhaktapur. Legends border on another group of stories, "wonder tales" (the story of the princess and the snakes has qualities of both), that are more purely "recreational," but legends recount events that are supposed to have taken place in real time and real space, a time and space that take their importance from—and that are central to—Bhaktapur's special history, space, and location. Myths, in contrast, are concerned with events equidistant from all times and places. The essential movement in Bhaktapur's legends is the transition from an uncanny encounter with deities on the ground—a marginal and fleeting event belonging to neither the order of the transcendent world nor to the civic world—to a stable new state in which the events of the legend have come under civic control. While people may temporarily participate in a myth (as in Mohani), this is a kind of celebration of a juncture of two orders, civic and cosmic, and that celebration must be cyclically repeated in a continuing renewal. The events of legend produce a once and for all transformation into ordinary time, space, and order. Rarely, notably in the complex story of Taleju's origin and history, a story begins in a mythic mode and then modulates into a legend.

The unstable situations portrayed in legends are resolved by the overcoming of the uncanny transitional state through the actions of high-status figures—Bhaktapur's ambivalently viewed version of the hero—resulting in the transformation and civic "capturing" of the forces portrayed in the legend. The resolution of the legend thus explains and fortifies both city order and traditional high status. The high status justified in legends is always a status of power, a prince, king or Tantric practitioner, and not the high moral status of the Brahman as Brahman. Legends are thus related to the protection of the moral order rather than its internal operation.

There is thus a movement from a most abstract and general level in myth, to a more concrete and local mode in legend, and then a further descent into the present concrete symbolic enactments of the city. In that final move there is a passage from a "mere" recounting of events to

a fuller symbolic enactment in which much more than speech is involved, a participation through complex action as well as through listening and imagining.^[10] The deities are transformed as they move from myth to legend to their embodiment in plastic forms and their controlled engagement in the symbolic enactments of the city.^[11] Thus myth-legend-symbolic enactment represent, in many aspects, successively descending levels—cosmic, transitional, and civic.

The shared implications of steps in hierarchical classification allow for cross-cutting metaphorical bridges among particular classes in either the same or different hierarchies that can be made to seem to be at the same level. We noted in our discussion of the genealogies of various goddesses that forms considered to have the same level of abstraction, inclusiveness, and, thus., potential power, could be seen as in some sense equivalent, as being "sisters." King and total city and the full goddesses and behavioral controls related to power are all tied together through the shared implications of the equivalent level of each item in its particular hierarchy, and one can find other bridges both at humbler and at still higher levels.^[12]

2. Redundancy and filtering.

We have commented, especially in chapter 16, on the redundant portrayal of a limited set of particularly significant statements throughout the myriad forms of symbols and symbolic enactments. Repetition in a sense creates the significant statements that are being repeated by filtering out through comparison and contrast a selected and simplified sample of the very complex cluster of meanings attached to many of the city's symbolic forms.

Siva in himself is, as we discussed in chapter 8, an enormously complex figure, but his position in any particular domain or context of Bhaktapur's gods selects and simplifies, for the purposes of that domain, his impact. The Nine Durgas' pyakha(n) is a very complicated performance, dense with meaning, full of historical and areal residues and of psychological resonances, but its psychosocial significance is much simpler when considered in comparion and contrast with the city's other symbolic enactments. The multitude of other meanings carried by the pyakha(n) contributes to its ability to fascinate and to engage a heterogeneous variety of community members, but this is another aspect of effectiveness of symbolic forms than their specific contribution to the construction of an urban order. In a Western analogy, returning once again to our simplistic traffic light, if we are concerned with the particular integrative relation of such lights to the urban order we are concerned solely or primarly with that particular aspect of the

redness of a light that means generally and powerfully "Stop!" in its contrast to that aspect of greenness that means "Go!"

3. Discrete categories.

Redundancy and filtering produce relatively simple and effective symbolic elements. Those symplified elements are for the most part "discrete" or "digital." For the purposes of the public order a Brahman is or is not a Brahman, a deity is Siva or not Siva. Thus they can be unambiguously recognized and do their work, and be placed in the domains and hierarchies that amplify and transform their meaning. The "more or less" and "sort of" calculations of the private realm are not adequate here.

It is this digital definition of elements in the public realm that is achieved through rites of passage, iconic criteria for icons, rituals of bringing effective life into statues, and by the emphasis on purity in the public realm of humans as social types. A polluted Brahman is not a Brahman in the dynamics of the public social realm whatever he may be known as concretely to family, friends, and neighbors.

4. Membership in a domain.

The discrete units of Bhaktapur's public system are, like all units of meaning, largely meaningful in their relationships and not in themselves. But those relationships are not the limitless shifting contexts of private experience, they are rather a matter of membership in clearly delineated domains and hierarchies whose other members are also discrete units. In Bhaktapur it is taken for granted that meaning accrues from such relationships. There is no attempt to escape from context dependency through doctrines of individuality and essence. Thus when the context changes a unit changes in meaning and may ultimately loose all its public meaning. A great deal of effort in Bhaktapur is devoted to maintaining the contexts of definition, particularly the definition of public social actors who are what they are not so much because of their private history nor of some inherited biological essence, but because of their ongoing contexts.

In those cases where a unit may belong to different domains or levels, its different positions and, thus, meanings are always clearly designated by some "context marker" that signifies whether, for example, killing an animal is murder or a sacrifice.

5. Boundaries.

Bhaktapur's proliferation of discrete categories, domains, and levels in the construction of an intelligible symbolically ordered public world requires the construction and maintenance of var-

ious different kinds of boundaries. We have been much concerned with boundaries throughout this study. The maintenance and breaching of boundaries relates many different ideas—purity, contagion, the carefully encircled realm of sacred power, the power of gods and powerful men to cross boundaries, secrets, initiation, magic, and so on. What is peculiar about Bhaktapur is the sheer quantity of such boundaries, the richness of the conceptions, emotions and operations associated with them and their particualr problematics. For not only are there many of them, not only are they problematically anchored in the more fixed qualities of perceivable nature, not only are objects and events located in shifting classes and hierarchies, but there is, as we have discussed above, a traditional and frequently used emphasis on their openness under certain conditions and on their illusoriness to a higher knowledge. Bhaktapur as a symbolically constituted social order must always strive through action to keep these boundaries and the categories they bound from dissolving, to protect through constant vigilant action an order that is not otherwise guaranteed in seemingly hard reality or in codes of laws.

6. Systematic ordering.

A further way that Bhaktapur's mesocosm responds to the demands of intelligibility is through attempts to fit as many symbolic bits and pieces as possible into larger and larger patterns of coherence, to strive to construct an aesthetic and philosophical unity, a Wagnerian multidimensional artwork. The few disconnected pieces (such as the little drama in the course of the tenth day of Mohani between the king and the merchant from Simraun Gadh^[*] discussed in chap. 15) are striking in their very disconnectedness.

Insofar as a community's representations are coherently organized those phenomena that are represented but that do not fit easily into that order stand out against it. It is in such orders that paradoxes and mysteries—rather than just chaos—are able to appear. Such paradoxes and mysteries, any unexpected disconnectedness, motivate further elaborations of ideas and symbolic forms in attempts to save coherence. The striving for coherence in itself necessarily generates rococo elaboration.

Bhaktapur's Order, Stability, And Stasis

Bhaktapur has emphasized a certain way, one way among others, in which a community tries to hold flux, tries to make it seem meaningful

and knowable. In an essay on the relations of History and Anthropology Bernard Cohn (1980, 218) wrote:

We write of an event as being unique, something that happens only once; yet every culture has a means to convert the uniqueness into a general and transcendent meaningfulness through the language members of the society speak. To classify phenomena at a "commonsense" level is to recognize categories of events coded by the cultural system. An event becomes a marker within the cultural system. All societies have such markers, which can be public or private. The death of a ruler may be mourned by rituals which turn the biographic fact of a death into a public statement relating not only to a particular ruler but to rulership per se. In many societies ritual transforms uniqueness into structure.

Bhaktapur's system of marked symbols, its mesocosm, has been a powerful device for turning accident and history into structure, for trying to escape the contingencies and consequences of history, for trying to capture change, to make change seem illusory within an enduring order.

The very attempt to capture change, to deny a meandering history, to deny the effects of political will is—like the city's striving for coherence—in itself a fertile source of intellectual problems. Contact with a modern world is bringing problems of another order, much more difficult—and finally impossible—for Bhaktapur to absorb within its traditional order. For the implication of the ideas and the economic imperatives of that new world denies the city's central orienting value of birth-determined and fixed social hierarchy, assigns power and rewards by new principles, defines and values individuals in new and different ways, and treats a religiously anchored marked symbolism and its enactments as radically alien to a new and valued mobile secular

order.

Why Is Bhaktapur the Way It Is?

Why is Bhaktapur the way it is? Much that exists in Bhaktapur is a result of its long history and its location in a South Asia whose areal forms are the products of several millennia of creation and reaction. Thus one explanation of much that exists and goes on in Bhaktapur is historical and diffusionist. Yet, as we have emphasized repeatedly, throughout its history Bhaktapur selected among and shaped to its own purposes the offerings of history and the inventions of its neighbors. Its growth and its day-to-day life were determined by its internal struc-

tures, tensions, and requirements, internal forces that influenced the city's response to history and environment. From the city's own point of view, "history" was only a disturbance for better or worse of its natural order, only a contingency to be dealt with until its effects became rejected or else transformed and worked out within the order of the city. When we consider the city's inner order it becomes possible to discern not only the effects of Bhaktapur's historical and areal character as a "South Asian" or "Hindu" city, but also its characteristics—in a different sort of classification—as one of a limited number of possible forms of human community, in this case an "archaic city."

The settlements that became Bhaktapur and the conditions of its Valley context were propitious—"preadapted" in particular ways for the formation and efflorescence of Bhaktapur's peculiar order. Bhaktapur, in a mnemonic shorthand, ascribes its ordering to a particular transformative time and to the efforts of a particular heroic man, Jyasthiti Malla. What facilitated and made possible the transformation that the city ascribes to him was an enabling partial destruction of a previous haphazard spatial order, a destruction which at the same time spared the Valley's great wealth and its Newar culture and society—that relatively homogeneous areal "folk tradition" where, in the phrasing of Redfield and Singer (1954, 57 [quoted in chap. 2]) a long established local culture or civilization could be carried forward, developed, and elaborated. Yet—it is necessary to add to Redfield and Singer's schema—not all local cultures are able to facilitate such developments. There was something peculiar and fortuitous about the Kathmandu Valley's "folk culture." It was derived in large part from a medieval Hinduism that, as a result of its own historical genesis, was remarkably suitable for the purposes of the construction of Bhaktapur's order and, equally important, able to fortify it against the disorganizing stimulation of foreigners, who were, literally, put in their places and enveloped in an isolating pollution rather than welcomed into the transformative dialogues of Redfield and Singer's secular, heterogeneous cities where under the stimulus of competing and initially disconnected ideas "new states of mind [arise] . . . indifferent to . . . states of mind associated with local cultures and ancient civilizations" (1954, 57).^[13]

It was also critical for what Bhaktapur was to become, that rather than develop, like many other cities, in concert with the control of a very large area whose administrative or imperial center it was, it expanded, essentially, in place. Bhaktapur's significant space could be walked and directly experienced and made use of in ways impossible in

such very large areas, and the city did not need to develop the modes of integration, such as force and abstract law, necessary for the management of states, nations, and empires controlled from a central city, modes of integration that might have flowed back to affect the inner life of the city itself.

It became possible, with all this, to construct an urban order in which naked force was secondary (or superordinate) to other systems of controls, secondary to the ordering force of a symbolic urban order—in a context in which the external uses of force and law for control of a heterogeneous large state, nation, or empire were minimal. The symbolic order was compelling in itself, and was much more than a mystifying support for and mask of another, somehow more basic, coercive power. It is emblematic of this order that within the civic arena the king was secondary to the priest.

In such an order there is a peculiar and necessary tension between the dominant sphere of symbolically constituted order and the sphere of more direct force. The king and the other technicians of power must look to an empirical reality which is resistant to symbolic manipulation if they are to adapt to changing conditions. They must understand this aspect of the world, and they must try to do what is necessary to deal with it. The priests worry about the moral implications of the power technicians' transcendence of the city's order, while those technicians sense that the priests and their allies are unpleasantly tangled up in something that they, the power technicians, have difficulty defining, something which clings to and encumbers the priests, something that is not quite clean. A balance is necessary. If the closed order of the constitutive symbolic system paralyzes the corrective perceptions and operations necessary for the proper uses of power, the city becomes vulnerable to decadence and decay. But if, on the contrary, pragmatism defeats the forces of the constitutive symbolic system, or alters it so that such symbolism becomes no more than a mobile mystifying ideology, then the old order collapses. For the city to be viable both systems have to work in difficult concert, a task for which Hinduism has exhibited considerable genius.

Let us recall Hinduism's fateful encounter with a differently constructed order, an order with its own and different necessities. It was, of course, Islam that was the particular variant of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world revolution which made the first great iconoclastic invasion into South Asia, one of its furthest raids touching Bhaktapur itself in the fourteenth century. These invaders, unlike earlier ones, did not become

Ksatriyas^[*] and fit themselves into a preexisting hierarchy and society—one of the classic ways in which South Asian kingdoms repeatedly changed accident and history into structure—but struggled to build a new and quite another kind of imperial and urban order.

Their iconoclasm was fundamental to their vision. The "idols" that they destroyed, that they sensed they had to destroy, were the seats of those immanent gods who, dancing civic order as Siva danced the universe itself, anchored each South Asian royal city at the center of the universe—thus generating innumerable local universes. In irreconcilable contrast, however, "the basic objective in the expansion of Islam was to acquire political control over an area and to set up the symbols of the Islamic sovereignty" (Halil Inalcik in an unpublished paper on the transformation of Constantinople into Islamic Istanbul [1984, p. 10]). Within this expanding and universal Islam, the Islamic world view "determined the physical and social landscape of the city. The city was supposed to become a space where the prescriptions of the Islamic religion could be performed fully and appropriately" (ibid., 9). Instead of the city being a center transcending secular history and geography in order to center itself in a mythic history and space, it became an off-center marker in a universal and presumptively objective and real grid of mundane space and history whose presiding god was incorrigibly transcendent. The tasks of symbols—and thus their form and nature—in such a transformed city are altered. They become thinned out, more universal, easier to read by the various kinds of people who were to belong more to a universal Islam than to a particular city. Law, standardized Islamic law interpreted and enforced by a bureaucracy, became central to the regulation of such cities, a law that "included not only those things related to ritual, social relationships and conduct, but also food, habitation and environment" (ibid., 18). Local symbolic forms—including local spatial constructions—had to be made to represent an abstract, rational, and universal political, social and ethical order. As far as possible local mesocosms had to be dissolved.

Bhaktapur seems to us to be representative of the kinds of places Islam tried to transform in India, having held out for still a few more centuries against the new kind of world that Islam represented. In one of the "conceits" that we entertained in chapter 2, we imagined that Bhaktapur and the kind of Hinduism it represents belonged to an untransformed "preaxial" world in its use of a mesocosmic construction in the service of social and personal order, a construction with pro-

found implications for individuality, for change, for the meaning of history itself.

Thus, a kind of an answer to "why is Bhaktapur the way it is," the problem of its particular form in comparison with other communities, is that when its economy and agricultural surplus and situation permitted, it grew into a city by making use of and transforming what it had at hand in the local settlements of the time. It was natural for its builders to assume that a community is a collection of people who share and are rooted in a coherent local world, and it was natural for them to make extended use of the powerful and relatively easy to craft marked symbols that small communities use for more restricted purposes. Bhaktapur—like the other Newar cities—following Indian models, elaborated a long-established local culture, converting it into its civilized dimension in the simplest and most self-evident way. in this conversion to a city and a civilization marked religious symbols became elaborated for the special tasks of the burgeoning community. It worked for a long time.

Most of its precursors in type were long gone when Bhaktapur was founded. The kind of wealth that made them possible attracted barbarians and empire builders, and thus they contained the seductions to their own often violent transformations. South Asian communities held out longer than most. As they, finally, under long and intense pressures began their transformations, accidents of location and history and, eventually, of national Nepalese policy allowed Bhaktapur to drift on for a while, a witness.