Typological Conceits: Hinduism As An Archaic Kind of Symbol System And Bhaktapur As A Hindu Climax Community

Bhaktapur, the argument goes, can be considered to have interesting typological analogies with archaic cities insofar as it represents a community elaborately organized on a spatial base through a system of marked symbolism. The particular symbolic system made use of is a variant of Hinduism. When contrasted with Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism (other than its Vajrayana and Tantric varieties),^[9] Hinduism is a peculiar contemporary religion. Ahistorical (without a heroic, that is, transcending, founder, and without a future to be obtained through some progressive struggle of faith, wisdom, or rectitude); rooted in local space, a local population, and a local inheritance; distributive of its godhead into a pantheon of meaningful and immanent gods—essential resources for the organization of space, time, and community; insisting on the inclusion of social order and social behavior within the sacred realm; insisting on the presence of the sacred in

the here and now, and not restricted and banished to eschatological beginnings and endings and distant heavens—Hinduism is in many of its features, which contrast with the "world historical religions," a system for and of what we have called "archaic urban order."

Louis Dumont remarks, in a section of his study of Hindu caste treating "the territorial framework: the little kingdom," that "contemporary anthropological literature frequently stresses the fact that actual caste systems are—or rather, were—contained within a territorial setting of rather small scale. Here social anthropologists found what they were at the same time mistakenly seeking at the level of the village a social whole of limited extent, established within a definite territory, and self-sufficient" (Dumont 1980, 154). Dumont noted the periodic absorption of these "little kingdoms" into larger political states and argued that "the compartmentalization of the little kingdom must have been at its height at periods of instability and political disintegration" (ibid., 156). That instability and disintegration characterized the larger territory, but it was a stimulus to and opportunity for the ordering of the Hindu city-states—a royal city and its hinterland—within that territory.

Whatever the shifting historical relation between caste and territorial units might have been, the conditions that allowed for the formation and development of little kingdoms allowed for the fulfillment of Hinduism's potentials for ordering a community. Such little kingdoms seem to have represented, to borrow a term from ecology, "climax communities" of Hinduism, where it reached the full development of its potentials for systematic complexity, and with it a temporary stability, an illusion of being a middle world, a mesocosm , mediating between its citizens and the cosmos, a mesocosm out of time.