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.