Chapter Three
Nepal, the Kathmandu Valley, and Some History

Introduction

Bhaktapur's mesocosm was built out of the materials available to it. In this chapter we will review something of the long history that helped form the present city, and out of whose debris it tried to build a seemingly timeless structure. That history, in turn, was much affected by the setting of the Kathmandu Valley—temperate, relatively disease-free compared to the southern jungles between Nepal and India, isolated and closed in by southern hills and those jungles to the south and by the Himalayas to the north, and with an enormously fertile soil, the essential support for the civilization that came to flourish there.

Nepal

Modern Nepal is a country of extreme geographic and ethnic diversity. At the time of our study (according to the 1971 census) 11.5 million people lived in a rectangular land some 500 miles long on its northeast-southwest axis and averaging some 100 miles in breadth. Totally landlocked, it is wedged in between India and Chinese Tibet "like a gourd between two rocks" as Prthvinarayana Saha, the Gorkhali founder of modern Nepal, put it in a phrase that all Nepalese leaders have always in mind. Nepal rises progressively in height from south to north from the low-lying jungles and plains of the Terai borderlands with India to the giant Himalayan ranges of the northern borders. In its jungles and

valleys and on the mountain slopes live a genetically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse set of peoples. There are by some accounts some seventy mutually unintelligible languages spoken, suggesting the corresponding cultural diversity of the country.^[1]

Among these diverse peoples the Newars are peculiar. For they are themselves the remnants of a sort of nation, an older Nepal whose boundaries were usually the slopes of the hills surrounding the Kathmandu Valley. Hill people in the far reaches of the territory of modern Nepal still speak of the Kathmandu Valley as "Nepal." The Newars were the citizens of this now submerged polity whose arts and traditions still constitute most of "Nepalese Culture" when "Nepal" is represented in museums and in art and religious history as a South Asian High Culture. Modern Nepal began with the submerging of the Kathmandu Valley nation and the amalgamation of "over 50 principalities and tribal organizations" (Gewali 1973) into a much larger unity through the conquests of the western Nepalese Gorkhali hill tribes and their allies under the chief, Prthvinarayana Saha, who after a number of campaigns against the Valley profited from the internal disarray and jealousies of its Newar kingdoms to conquer them in 1768 and 1769.^[2]

Because we are concerned with the Newars, not with "greater Nepal," our focus is on the Kathmandu Valley, which remained even after Newar incorporation into greater Nepal and some Newar dispersal (mostly as traders and businessmen to the developing cities of the new state) the main center of Newar life.

The Kathmandu Valley

The Kathmandu Valley is a rough ellipse measuring about 151/2 miles along its east-west axis and 12 miles at its greatest width, with a base area of some 218 square miles. The Valley is about 4,400 feet above sea level and ringed by hills that rise from 1,000 to 4,000 feet above the level of the Valley. Visible on the horizon to the north of the Valley in clear weather are the ranges of the high Himalayas. The Valley is the bed of an ancient lake. Its alluvial soil contains deposits of peat and of clays with high phosphate content which were traditionally dug and used as fertilizer. Now it is drained by a network of rivers that, almost dry during the dry months, swell during the rains and join in the main course of the Bagmati river, which drains the Valley at its southwestern boundary. Recorded mean monthly temperatures are reported as varying between maximums of 24°C (73.2°F) in June and a minimum of 7°C (44.6°F) in January. The climate is usually temperate, and it is rare

that temperatures dip a degree or two below freezing. The summers are first warm and dry, then more and more humid until the onset of the monsoon rains.

In the years 1967-1969 the Kathmandu Valley had between forty-four and sixty inches of annual rain (Central Bureau of Statistics 1974). Nearly half of the annual rainfall occurs during the monsoons of July and August, while the lowest rainfall, usually less than an inch in all, falls during November, December, and January, when the ground and air become progressively drier and dustier.

Valley farmlands, such as those around Bhaktapur, are in the flat-lands at the base of the hills and on terraces on the hill flanks. The fields are irrigated after the rainy season through a system of connecting ditches that are periodically unblocked to allow water to flow from collection basins in the hills. Various crops—rice, wheat, and a variety of vegetables (see chap. 4)—are successively raised in these fields during the course of the year.

The Kathmandu Valley, particularly the city of Kathmandu, is now the center for national government and administration. Light industry, tourism, and a multitude of commercial activities are centered there. It is estimated that about 5 percent of Nepal's people live in the Kathmandu Valley, some 600,000 people according to the 1971 census. They live^[3] in the three major Valley cities of Kathmandu (150,402), Patan (59,049), and Bhaktapur (40,112),^[4] a large number of secondary towns and villages, and in scattered hamlets and farms. Most of the country's ethnic groups are represented in the Valley. Census data in 1961 suggested that about half the Valley population were Newars.^[5] ,^[6]

Notes On Early Newar History

According to D. R. Regmi (1969, 14), the first written examples of the term "Newar" to denote the people and society of the Kathmandu Valley date from the seventeenth century, but, as he remarks, the term may well have had a long usage before then. Although, as we shall see, contemporary Newars in some contexts limit the "Newars" to the "climax" society that began to form in the time of the "medieval" Malla kings, as the society and culture seems to have developed more or less continuously from its most ancient roots, we can follow Regmi in referring to the Kathmandu Valley society, culture, and language from the earliest days until its capture by the Gorkhalis in the late eighteenth century as Newar.

Local inscriptions and foreign accounts, mainly Chinese, on which a

history of early Valley Nepal can be based date only from the fourth century A.D. In the absence of adequate archaeological studies, which may some day clarify and alter our conceptions of the early history, inferences about early periods are based on Nepalese chronicles and legends and on problematic allusions in Hindu epic literature.^[7] There is still much debate on the interpretation of these sources for histories of political dynasties and events, and even for a correct chronology. But for the purposes of locating Bhaktapur, a provisional history can be sketched out.

The earliest written inscriptions (from the period of the Sanskrit-speaking court of the Licchavi dynasty) show that more than 80 percent of the place names in the Valley were non-Sanskritic. This supports a tradition that non-Sanskritic dynasties ruled early Nepal, perhaps from (at least) as early as the seventh century B.C. This society, referred to as "Kirata," was apparently of Mongoloid origin, speakers of a Tibeto-Burman language.^[8] According to P. R. Sharma (1973, 67f. [spelling standardized]):

Despite the lack of proof, the Kirata tradition in Nepalese history is too deeply rooted to be dismissed easily. The Kiratas are a widely mentioned tribe in ancient Sanskrit literature, especially the Epics. Many references point to the northeastern Himalayan foothills as the home of these people. The Himalayas were still an area outside the sphere of Aryan domination, and the Kiratas therefore seem to differ from them racially. The Rais and Limbus [of contemporary Eastern Nepal] claim to be the Kiratas. The features of these people distinctly betray their Mongoloid origin. The use of the term Kirata in ancient literature seems to have been wide enough to encompass all groups [in Nepal] of Mongoloid stock. . . . The matrix of Nepalese culture in the valley must have been laid by these Kiratas. The modern inhabitants of the valley, the Newars, are believed to be an intermixture of Aryan and Mongoloid strains resulting from the unions between the Kiratas and the Aryans migrating from the plains of India. The early prototype of the Newari language might have struck its first roots also during this time, as the language is considered to be basically of the Tibeto-Burmese group. The liberal assimilation of the Indo-Aryan Sanskrit into the language proceeds only from the time of the Licchavis, who were responsible for introducing Sanskrit into the land.

By the first or second century A.D. , a Sanskrit-using and Prakrit-speaking court, the Licchavis,^[9] had replaced the Kirata court. They were presumably related to the Licchavi rulers of Vaisali in Bihar in North India. This was the beginning of a continuing pattern of Sanskritic courts derived from North India ruling over a Tibeto-Burman-

speaking people.^[10] Gradually the language and customs of the courts and the people were to blend in a Newar synthesis. Always within this synthesis, however, there were certain segments of religion and court life that followed Sanskrit models and some aspects of the life of the people that maintained residues of ancient Himalayan and Northern modes.

Irrigation of the Kathmandu Valley was developed under the Licchavis as many inscriptions attest,^[11] with the construction of tanks and canals enabling farmers to husband and distribute the monsoon rains In concord with the rich soil of the Valley, irrigation led to the kind of agricultural surplus that eventually made extensive urbanization possible.

In the later days of Licchavi rule (from the late sixth century A.D. ) Tibet was developing a unified state, which was eventually to center at Lhasa. Now "Himalayan passes to the north of the Valley were opened. Extensive cultural, trade, and political relations developed across the Himalayas, transforming the Valley from a relatively remote backwater into the major intellectual and commercial center between South and Central Asia" (Rose 1974, 956). Much of the art and religion of the Newars and the Tibetans grew out of shared Indian sources, but also in mutual interchange and stimulation, and thus had many common features.

According to Prayag Raj Sharma (1973, 71):

In the early Licchavi period, Nepal, together with India undertook the cultural colonization of Tibet. Buddhism and its concomitant art spread from Nepal to Tibet in the 7th Century A.D. According to Tibetan tradition the famous Nepali King Amshuvarman^[12] married his daughter to the first historical King of Tibet, Srongtsan-Sgam-po. Brikuti is said to have carried an image of Buddha among other things as her nuptial present to her husband, and during her lifetime in Tibet knowledge of Buddhism spread far and wide. . . . From the Seventh Century to the present days, Nepal's relationship with Tibet has been continuously reaffirmed. Nepalese [that is Newar] artists, especially bronze makers, painters, and architects went to work in Tibetan monasteries and seminaries. Buddhist scriptures were taken to Tibet to be copied or translated. Ranjana, an ornately elaborate Newari script became the divine script in Tibet. . . . The different Tantric schools which overwhelmed Tibet, also found their way from Nepal as well as India.

Nepal and her princess were, of course, only one component of the influences forming seventh-century Tibet, but one of considerable importance.

Nepal during the Licchavi period reflected most of the Indian reli-

gious developments of the times. Early inscriptions and art indicate that there were sects devoted to Visnu^[*] , Siva, and the Buddha and their associated deities. Visnu^[*] and his cult may have been more associated with the courts, and Siva, in this early period, perhaps somewhat more with the non-Ksatriya^[*] classes.^[13]

Some writers, notably the Sanskritist Sylvain Lévi (1905), believed that the major popular Indian religion of Nepal during this early period, the religion of the Tibeto-Burman segment of the people, was Buddhism superimposed on old Himalayan forms, while the religion of the court aristocracy was one or another sect of Hinduism. During this period both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist monasteries were founded.

Lévi (1905, 255 [our translation]) proposed further that the first form of high Indian religion introduced into Nepal had, in fact, been Buddhism:

Buddhism, malleable and accommodating, was able to introduce itself into the organized life of the Newars, without greatly disturbing it; it discretely sowed Indian ideas and doctrines, and let the harvest ripen slowly. But from the moment it was ripe, a brutal adversary came to dispute it. Sacerdotal Brahmanism menaced with death by the triumph of heresies had skillfully searched for refuge in popular cults; it had adopted them, consecrated them, and took up the struggle with rejuvenated gods and a renewed pantheon.

The rejuvenated Hinduism that contested Buddhism was Saivism.

David Snellgrove noted that the earliest Kathmandu Valley monuments are "definitely" Buddhist. "It is likely therefore that Buddhist communities established themselves in this valley well before the beginning of the Christian era" (1957, 93f.), which would mean that the Licchavi dynasty found themselves from the beginning in contact with a Buddhist community, adhering also presumably to local Himalayan religious forms. Whether or not Buddhism preceded "Brahmanical religion," all early evidence shows them operating side by side, Brahmanical religion presumably being that of the "foreign" court and its "foreign" Brahmans and, Buddhism, being that of the "people." These speculations, like those regarding an early courtly Vaisnavism versus a popular Saivism, reflect a scholarly conviction that the Brahmanical ideal of an intimate organic interrelation of Brahman, king, and people was still on a far horizon.

There is also evidence for the Licchavi period of Sakti worship, of the worship of the sun and other astral deities, and some indication of early Tantric forms^[14] that were to become of major importance for the Kathmandu Valley, and for Lhasa beyond it. These latter were the precur-

sors of the massive invasion of Tantrism which was to come later as a result of the dislocations produced by the Islamic invasions of India.

Bhaktapur's Beginnings

By the end of the Licchavi period most of the ingredients were present that were eventually to lead to the climax community of the royal Malla city-states, a community in which various preexisting elements developed fully, flourished, and became, for a time, related to each other in a closely interdependent and stable system.

The Licchavi dynasty fell in the ninth century, and there followed a period of historic and historiographic confusion out of which emerged the Malla dynasty. In this period Newar society and culture were to develop and flourish in its urban centers—Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur—and their dependent hinterlands. The Malla dynasty lasted in one form or another until the late eighteenth-century conquest by the Gorkhalis, which tranformed Nepal and the Newars into something different.

We must now begin to bring Bhaktapur toward the center of the scene, and consider the Malla period from its perspective. From the beginning of the thirteenth century there were a number of contesting ruling families bearing the name "Malla," interspersed with rulers who did not use this name. Eventually one man, Jayasthiti Malla, who married into the royal family of Bhaktapur and who began his reign in 1382, established an order and a dynasty that was to be remembered by the Newars as the Mallas, the Newar kings, their kings. His direct descendants ruled as Malla kings for more than four hundred years until the Gorkhali conquest of the Valley.

Bhaktapur seems to have been founded as a royal city by Ananda Deva,^[15] who is believed to have reigned from 1147 to 1156 A.D. According to two early chronicles (D. R. Regmi 1965-1966, part 1, p. 180), Ananda Deva built a temple and royal palace in Bhaktapur.

According to the Padmagiri Chronicle, which substitutes Ananda Malla for Ananda Deva (Hasrat 1970, 49):^[16]

Having left his throne in charge of his elder brother he [Ananda Malla] went to the western direction where he founded a new city which he called Bhaktapur, in which he erected 12,000 houses of all descriptions. When the city was built, Ananda Malla sent for [the goddess] Annapurna^[*] Devi from Benares and had the goddess settled there in an auspicious hour. . . . Afterward he built a palace in Bhaktapur . . . where he beheld the Nine Durgas whose images he placed in a temple.

The chronicle published by Daniel Wright, known as "Wright's Chronicle,"^[17] adds some details. Ananda Malla "founded a city of 12,000 houses, which he named Bhaktapur and included sixty small villages and seven towns in his territory. He established his court at Bhaktapur, where he built a Durbar; and having one night seen and received instructions from the Navadurga [Nine Durgas],^[18] he set up their images in proper places, to ensure the security and protection of the town both internally and externally" (Wright [1877] 1972, 163).

The chronicles assert that the city was founded and developed as a royal center. There was something there before, however, and the attempts to construct a symbolically rationalized space that were to follow had to account for and work with preexisting structures. The most extensive work on the incorporation of previous structures into the "ordered space" of Bhaktapur is that of Niels Gutschow and his associates (Auer and Gutschow 1974; Gutschow and Kölver 1975; Gutschow 1975, Kö1ver 1980). They believe that the founding of Royal Bhaktapur involved a unification of a number of small villages that had developed in the area from perhaps the third century, following the development of irrigation in the Kathmandu Valley.^[19]

Bhaktapur and the settlement that preceded its official Royal founding, has been referred to by a variety of names. Its early names were all Tibeto-Burman. According to the linguist Kamal Malla, its modern Newari name Khopa is derived from the earlier form khoprn , derived in turn from the Tibeto-Burman terms kho (river) and prn (field). The chronicles and inscriptions also refer to Bhaktapur as Khrpun, Makhoprn, and Khuprimbruma. The first usage of an Indic name, Bhaktagrama, dates from A.D. 1134 (Malla, personal communication). Its modern Nepali names are Bhaktapur, Bhadgaon, or Bhatgaon. Bhaktapur is taken to mean "city of devotees," the other names are said to mean "city of rice."

Bhaktapur, situated on the Hanumante river and bordered by rich farmland, was surrounded by a hinterland traversed by routes to the mountain passes to Tibet. Trade with Tibet became important for the Bhaktapur economy, and was to be of particular advantage during the periods when the Valley was divided into three semiindependent states.^[20]

Bhaktapur eventually became the "metropolis of the Malla dynasty and the nerve-center of its culture and civilization" (Hasrat 1970, xxxix). The steps by which this happened can be only dimly glimpsed in records and monuments. Some historians believed that there was an early period of joint rule by the three Valley cities^[21] which was some-

times peaceful, sometimes contested. But although earlier historians (e.g., D. R. Regmi 1965-1966, part I, p. 256) believed that the eventual hegemony of Bhaktapur in the Valley was not established until the later fourteenth century, later studies suggest that "since [its establishment in] the mid-twelfth century, Bhaktapur had been the capital city, de facto and de jure, and the Kings who titled themselves Malla continued to rule from it" (Slusser 1982, 54).

The fourteenth century marked the expansion of the empire of the Turkish Tughluq dynasty in northern India to and beyond the borders of Nepal. For the Newars the most important consequence was the dispersal of threatened Indian Buddhists and Hindus in the path of the Turks. Many of them came to the Nepal Valley where they greatly reinforced the Tantrism that was beginning to dominate and transform the earlier introduced forms of South Asian religion. The chronicles personify this movement in Harisimhadeva^[*] , a king of Mithila, who was said to have been driven into exile in the Valley, where he became king of Bhaktapur, installing his kul deveta , or lineage goddess, Taleju, in the royal palace (Hasrat 1970, 52f.; Wright 1972, 175-177). Harisimhadeva's^[*] conquest of Bhaktapur is legendary, although it is generally believed in by Bhaktapur literati, and we will hear much of him, but the introduction of the Maithili deity Taleju as the Newar king's royal lineage goddess (chap. 8) along with her associated Tantric cult seems to have clearly been due to the effects of Turkish movements in northern India during this general period.^[22]

Another chronicle, the Gopalarajavamsavali, only recently made generally available, is a unique witness to what seems to have been the actual relation of Harisimhadeva^[*] to Bhaktapur. As its editors note (Vajracharya and Malla 1985, xvi):

Unlike the later chronicles which almost unrecognizably distort the truth by presenting Harisimha^[*] as a conqueror of Nepal and his descendants as legitimate rulers, the Gopalarajavamsavali notes that he was a political fugitive who died on his way to the valley, and his wife and son sought political asylum in Bhaktapur. Although they ultimately managed to rise to power by manipulating the local politics, the Queen and the Prince of Mithila had entered Bhaktapur as refugees.

The Maitili queen and her son, the prince, became involved, apparently, in struggles for power. Eventually a protege of hers, Jayasthiti Malla, whose marriage had been arranged to the queen's granddaughter, was to become ruler of Bhaktapur and the remembered architect of its present order.

Nepal itself suffered an invasion in the mid-fourteenth century when

Shams ud-Din Ilyas raided the Valley from Bengal in 1349.^[23] "The Muslim invasion shook the foundations of the kingdom, the invader having destroyed the city of Patan, laid waste the whole Valley of Nepal. He indulged in an orgy of mass destruction and incendiarism, plundered the towns and sacrileged the temples of Pasupati and Svayambhunath" (Hasrat 1970, p. xli). According to another chronicle, the Gopala Vamsavli (folio 52 [a ], pp. 4-5), in Nepal Samvat 470 on the ninth day of the dark half of the month of Marga (January 1349), Sultan Shams ud-Din burned the city of Bhaktapur during seven continuous days. Petech (1958, 118-119) believed that this invasion was responsible for the disappearance of "all the monuments of ancient Nepalese architecture."^[24]

Bhaktapur was now on the eve of its experiment in the construction of an ideal urban order. The partial destruction of the haphazard forms of a more ancient Nepal must have greatly facilitated and stimulated the undertaking.

Jayasthiti Malla and the Ordering of Bhaktapur

In 1355 A.D. , shortly after the Muslim invasion of Nepal, Jayasthiti Malla, "a figure of obscure lineage and controversy with regard to his status as a sovereign ruler" (Hasrat 1970, xli), married the granddaughter of Rudramalla, a powerful Bhaktapur noble. After a period of shifting rulers and alliances he eventually emerged as the paramount ruler of Nepal, beginning his de jure reign in 1382.^[25] "To Jayasthiti Malla goes the credit of saving the kingdom from the throes of disintegration and confusion. He curbed the activities of the feudal lords, brought the component units of the kingdom into submission, and with a strong hand, restored order" (Hasrat 1970, xlii).

Jayasthiti Malla was credited by some of the later chronicles—and by the present people of Bhaktapur—with the establishment of many of the laws and customs of Bhaktapur, particularly those involving caste regulations, with standardizing weights and measures, with establishing an order. Let us review some of the achievements traditionally ascribed to him. "Each caste [in Bhaktapur now] followed its own customs. To the low castes dwellings, dress and ornaments were assigned, according to certain rules. No sleeves were allowed to the coats of Kasais [butchers].^[26] No caps, coats, shoes, nor gold ornaments were permitted to Podhyas [untouchables]. Kasais, Podhyas, and Kulus were not

allowed to have houses roofed with tiles, and they were obliged to show proper respect to the people of castes higher than their own" ("Wright's chronicle," Wright 1972, 182f.). The chronicles credit Jayasthiti Malla with dividing the people into a large number of "castes" (sixty-four in some accounts, thirty-six in others). "The four highest castes [here varna^[*] is meant; see chap. 5] were prohibited from drinking water from the hands of low caste people, such as Podhyas or Charmakaras. If a woman of a high caste had intercourse with a man of a lower caste, she was degraded to the caste of her seducer" (Wright 1972, 186f.). According to the Padmagiri chronicle, "He constituted a fine for all such persons as follow the profession of others, as if a blacksmith follow the profession of goldsmith, he shall be fined" (Hasrat 1970, 56).

"He ordered that all the four castes of his subjects should attend the dead bodies of the Kings to the burning-ghats, and that the instrumental music of the Dipaka Raga should be performed while the dead bodies were being burned. . . . He constituted for each of the 36 tribes a separate masan or place for burning their dead and the corpses were decreed to be conveyed by four men proceeded by musicians" (Wright 1972, 182). Jyasthithi Malla classified houses and lands and standardized a system of measurement. "To the four principal castes, viz., the Brahman, Kshatri, Vaisya, and Sudra, were given the rules of Bastuprakaran and Asta-barga for building houses" (Wright 1972, 184). He changed the criminal laws. Previously criminals had been punished "with blows and reprimands, but this Raja imposed fines, according to the degree of the crimes" (Wright 1972, 182).

Jayasthiti Malla "made poor wretched people happy by conferring on them lands and houses, according to caste" (Wright 1972, 187). This particular aspect of reordering may explain, in part, reports of one set of laws that seem to run counter to the rigid codifying of social hierarchy and custom generally attributed to him. That is, Jayasthiti Malla "made many laws regarding the rights of property in houses, lands, and birtas^[27] that hereafter became saleable" (Wright 1972, 182). Or as Padmagiri's chronicle has it, "He allowed his subjects to sell or mortgage their hereditary landed property whenever occasion required it." One may assume that this increased negotiability of property rights had something to do with the reforming of the status system and facilitated the economic base of the new regulations.^[28]

A manuscript in the Hodgson Collection (vol. 11, n.d.) collected between 1820 and 1844 entitled "Institutes of Nepal Proper under

the Newars or the Jayasthiti Paddhati" includes detailed regulations for the "four varna^[*] s and thirty-six jat s" on rites of passage, and detailed regulations on such matters as payments to various specialists. It includes fines and punishments of various kinds, including those for illicit sexual intercourse. It prescribes the functions and some of the internal regulations (particularly the periods of pollution for birth and death, and whether they must purify themselves or be purified by a 'barber") of various groups, beginning with the lowest and ascending through the hierarchy.

Moreover, along with all this, it is said of Jayasthiti Malla in the chronicles that he built and repaired, established and consecrated temples and images of the gods. As the Wright Chronicle sums it up, "Thus Raja Jayasthiti Malla divided the people into castes and made regulations for them. He also made laws about houses and lands, and fostered the Hindu religion in Nepal, thereby making himself famous" (Wright 1972, 187).

Jayasthiti Malla came to represent to Newars the Hindu ordering of Bhaktapur, an order built on an ancient plan. "In making laws about houses, lands, castes, and dead bodies, he was assisted by his five pandits. . . . Such laws were formerly in existence, but having fallen into disuse through lapse of time, they were again compiled from Shastras and brought into use" (Wright 1972, 183f.). Certainly, as D. R. Regmi argues (1965-1966, part I, p. 367), he built on preexisting hierarchical structures of some kind and on preexisting principles and forms of Hindu and Newar order. As Slusser notes, already during the Licchavi period "society [had been] hierarchically stratified by caste, and occupations were not only caste-determined but enforced through a special office." (1982, 38). During Jayasthiti Malla's reign (Slusser 1982, 59):

New concepts of administration, nascent in the early Malla years, became clearly established. . . . But he cannot be credited with introducing the caste system into Nepal, nor with single-handedly infusing hierarchy into Nepalese society, two deeds on which his fame popularly rests. The Indian caste system was in effect in the Nepal Valley from at least the beginning of the Licchavi Period, as inscriptions attest. Similarly, the complex system of subcastes that ordain Valley social behavior must be viewed as the product of centuries, of gradual accretion, not a sudden imposition by law. Significantly, Sthitimalla's own annals make no mention of these undertakings. . . . Nonetheless, Sthitimalla may well have codified the particular social patterns that had developed by his time, and thus given established local custom the force of law.

Jayasthiti Malla revivified, extended, and codified an order that built on preexisting forms and forced them into Hindu ideals of the proper form for a little kingdom, a city-state. Subsequent developments of this order must have been retrospectively credited to him, validated by his name. This order was the mesocosmic order of the Newar cities, which was to last in Bhaktapur for some 600 years.

From Jayasthiti Malla to the Fall of the Newar Polity

Jayasthiti Malla died in 1395. There followed almost 400 years of complex and shifting relations between the three major Valley cities and their hinterland "states." "His weak and inefficient successors discovered the formulae of collegial rule and remained joint sovereigns without the division of the kingdom until 1428 A.D. But the adoption of this extraordinary mode of rule by common consent proved a dismal failure; it tended to create administrative chaos, irresponsibility and encouraged intrigue and partisanship in the councils of the government" (Hasrat 1970, xliii). The period of joint rule and, apparently, decentralization and the beginning of fragmentation, lasted some twenty years, until the rule of Yaksa Malla, the grandson of Jayasthiti Malla. Reigning from Bhaktapur he reunified the Valley and continued the special development of Bhaktapur. It was he, according to the Wright Chronicle, who began to build a moated wall around the city.^[29] The inscription placed on one of its gates was said to have asserted "Yaksa Malla . . . made this fortification and ditch and a high citadel, in which to keep troops and ammunition. In building this fortification the people of the four castes willingly bore loads of bricks and earth." In part, this was for defense, but it also effected a further bounding and containment of the city at whose boundaries Ananda Malla had long before placed protective goddesses.

At this stage Bhaktapur was the central seat of a larger Valley government; Yaksa Malla was also paramount ruler of the other major Valley cities. But when in the time of his sons the three city-states became divided, Bhaktapur, like the other Newar cities, would become in the face of growing Valley conflict even more concentrated and isolated within its boundaries.

Yaksa Malla ruled for fifty-three years. His reign, as D. R. Regmi (1965-1966, vol. 1, p. 446f.) has it, constituted a glorious chapter in the history of Nepal:

[He was] a builder, a devotee leading a pious life, a patron of art and learning and a ruler who had given peace and stability to the hitherto strife ridden country. In his time the Rama Vardhana feudatories were liquidated, and though certain others within the confines of the Valley were yet m a position to challenge the authority of the kingdom, he was able to curb them by persuading them to accept his plan of peace. Yaksa Malla built by himself many temples and shrines. His records are the most numerous for any monarch of Nepal for the age. These extend over the entire Valley of Nepal, and commemorating as they do inauguration of the completion of many water conduits, tanks and canals they bear testimony to his efforts to make Nepal happy and prosperous. During Yaksa Malla's time Nepal witnessed [the] flourishing of art and literature. In the list of original works written in Sanskrit and Newari we find that a majority of them belong to this period.

On Yaksa Malla's death the kingdom, after a period of joint rule among his sons, eventually became divided into three small kingdoms, Bhaktapur, Kathmandu, and Patan, each comprising a royal city and its hinterland. Around them in the Valley were other vaguely bounded tiny ministates which were variously related to and incorporated into the three larger units.

Now, as Gewali sums it up, these three "kingdoms of the valley were well-developed city-civilizations. The countryside surrounding them was fertile and large and they had a lucrative trade with Tibet, inherited from the ancient Licchavi rulers of Nepal. The division of the valley into three kingdoms was, therefore, the division of wealth, or [of] the potentiality of earning wealth by trade. This led to mutual jealousies and hostilities among these kingdoms and rendered them an easy prey to the lean and hungry invaders from the western hills" (Gewali 1973, 52). This denoument, looming large in the minds of modern Nepalese historians was not to occur for some 300 years, and Bhaktapur entered on its long period of relative isolation.

The chronicles and inscriptions of those next three centuries give some dim glimpse for Bhaktapur of successions, conflicts, the introduction of new festivals, and the completion of new buildings (D. R. Regmi, 1965-1966, part II, chap. III). We hear of the introduction of a dance cycle, the Nine Durgas (which will later concern us) at the beginning of the sixteenth century, of the introduction of aspects of the festival of the solar New Year in the mid-sixteenth century, of the development of temples, including in the seventeenth century, the building of a large new royal palace and an associated temple of the royal goddess Taleju as well as of a major temple of the Tantric god Bhairava and a complementary one, Natapwa(n)la, to his consort in an adjoining

square. The urban religious geography of Bhaktapur continued to be developed throughout the Malla period.

The additions were variously motivated. "Bhupatindra Malla built a three-storied temple, the length of which ran north and south, and placed in it, facing west,^[30] a Bhairava for the protection of the country, and the removal of sin and distress from the people" (Wright 1972, 194). Omens, dreams, desires for emulation, and desires for personal merit of the rulers, seemed to have played their part. But the additions were woven in one way or another into the ongoing present of the city.

We have one, at least, European view of Bhaktapur under the Mallas, contrasting it to the two other Valley cities in terms that would be reflected by later observers after the Gorkhali conquest. Father Ippolitio Desideri wrote in 1722 "Badgao [Bhatgaon, Bhaktapur] stands on a hill some six or seven miles from Kathmandu. The air is much better, and with its fine houses and well laid out streets it is a much gayer and more beautiful city than the other two; it has several hundred thousand inhabitants who are engaged in trade" (as quoted in D. R. Regmi [1965-1966, part II, p. 1013]).

The Gorkhali State, And the Submerging of the Newars in Greater Nepal

In the latter part of the eighteenth century Prthvinarayana Saha, the ruler of a tiny principality, Gorkha, in the western part of present-day Nepal, began a series of campaigns that were to lead to the fall of the ancient Valley dynasties and a transformation of the situation of the Newars. The conquest of the Valley was a result of twenty-five years of coordinated effort. Ludwig Stiller (1973, 104f.) has delineated the "phases" of the conquest:

Phase one, 1744-54 aimed at sealing off the northern and western passes, therby cutting off the flow of money into the Valley from Tibet. . . . Phase two, 1754-64, aimed at cutting the Valley off from the states to the south, and preventing any flow of help or supplies into the Valley. [This phase] was chiefly characterized by a stringent blockade that seriously weakened the Malla Kings and reduced the people of the Valley to a total dependence on the produce of the Valley itself. . . . Phase three, 1764-69 provided the coup de grace to the Malla Kings. With their isolation complete, the Malla Kings were forced to watch in morbid fascination as the Gorkhali troops pushed their outposts right up to the walls of their capitals and finally to see them break through [to] the final victory.

The combination of careful strategy, the determination of the tough invaders, and the internal division of the comfortable, long-settled Valley kingdoms led to the fall of Kathmandu on September 25, 1768 and of Patan on October 6, 1768.

Bhaktapur held out for more than a year, and was the last of the Valley kingdoms to succumb. "On the night of 10 November 1769 the Gorkhalis burst through the eastern gate [of Bhaktapur] and poured into the city. . . . The battle for the city lasted until 12 November, with the defenders gradually withdrawing to the more protected places in the palace and the Gorkhalis edging nearer and nearer. . . . Jaya Prakash [the king of Kathmandu, who had taken refuge in Bhaktapur] had taken virtual command of the defenses and it was only after he had been wounded by a musket ball in the leg that the defense collapsed" (Stiller [1973, 129f.], taken from the Bhasha Vamsavali, 887-892).

The old Nepal, the Nepal of the Newars was now to be radically transformed. This was not, as it had been from Licchavi times, to be a new dynasty fitting into and ruling from inside an established community, eventually to be integrated into it. For now the Newars—Malla kings, Brahmans and all—were considered to be just another of the many ethnic groups that were to be brought together in a greatly expanded territory and ruled over by the Gorkhalis and their allies from the western hills.

The historiography of Nepal now turns to the new, larger Nepal and to Kathmandu, its national capital. It becomes even more difficult to find in the available written sources the specific history of the now submerged Newars, deprived of their kings but to a considerable degree otherwise left to get on with their affairs in the traditional manner, with the new kings of the Saha line established (in Gorkhali perspective, at least) as the legitimate political and ceremonial heirs of the old dynasty. The situation in Kathmandu was special, for Prthvinarayana Saha chose it as the capital of his new kingdom, and it became his royal city. The other cities, Patan, and even more so the more distant Bhaktapur, were peripheral to the events at the center.

The general policy of the Gorkhali rulers toward the multiple ethnic and political units that made up their new state was, as Stiller (1973, 225f.) remarks, to rely on the existing structures in the annexed kingdoms:

It has been said by historians of Nepal, and very wisely too, that the Gorkhali conqueror did not introduce large-scale change because to do so would unnecessarily disturb the people of the conquered territories and lead to un-

rest and possibly m uprisings. This is basically true. But the failure of the Gorkhalis to introduce such changes goes much deeper than that. For the typical Gorkhali administrator of the time, limited as he was by his own experiences in his own tiny state, merely to grasp what was being done m other localities was an accomplishment. . . . He did not introduce changes, largely because he did not know how things could be done better, and this was true because he did not understand, at least initially, how things were done at all. The Gorkhali was thus forced by the very magnitude of the problem to rely at the outset on local administrative structures in the areas conquered.

Those traditional forms that assured some stability were useful to the Gorkhalis. As long as they maintained order and were able to collect revenues the internal structure of the various units, even in nearby Bhaktapur, seems to have been of little concern to them. They were, however, in closer contact with the Valley Newars than with the outlying tribal and hill people. A kind of division of function took place. The Newars were the farmers, the craftsmen, and the merchants. The Gorkhalis and their old allies were the rulers, administrators, and soldiers. In time, Newars were used as advisors and in lower-level government positions. Yet, Bhaktapur, although some few of its people had some business or position in Kathmandu, remained albeit without its king, a Newar city.

We now begin to have descriptions of Bhaktapur by foreign observers during the period of the Grokhali kings and their Rana prime ministers (who during a period of 100 years became de facto rulers of Greater Nepal). Colonel Kirkpatrick, on a mission to the Kathmandu Valley in 1793, noted that Bhaktapur (which he called "Bhatgaong") was the smallest of the three Valley cities^[31] but "its palace and buildings, in general, are of more striking appearance, and its streets, if not much wider, are at all events much cleaner than those of the metropolis" (Kirkpatrick [1811] 1969, 163). This was faint praise for he had remarked that the streets of the "metropolis," Kathmandu, were "excessively narrow and nearly as filthy as those of Benares" (ibid., 160).

Of the Newars, after noting that they differ from the other Hindu inhabitants of Nepal in character, customs, manners, features, religious rites, and language, he writes that they were "a peaceable, industrious and even ingenious people, very much attached to the superstition they profess, and tolerably reconciled to the chains imposed on them by their Gorkhali conquerors, although these have not hitherto condescended to conciliate them by the means which their former sovereigns . . . adopted" (Kirkpatrick 1969, 186). He also notes the stigmatization

that was beginning to be applied to the Newars by their conquerors, "their courage is at present spoken of very slightingly by the Purbutties [Parbatiyas, or "mountain people"]" and, he notes, "Instances of their being employed in the armies of the state are exceedingly rare. Their occupations are chiefly those of agriculture, besides which they almost exclusively execute all the arts and manufactures known in this country" (ibid., 186).

Ambrose Oldfield, writing of Nepal in 1880, has some notes on Bhaktapur. He echoes Kirkpatrick's favorable comparison of Bhaktapur's condition with Kathmandu and Patan, which he attributed to a relative leniency of the Gorkhalis toward Bhaktapur (Oldfield [1880] 1974, vol. I., p. 132f.):

The great majority of its inhabitants being Hindus, the Gorkha King—himself a bigoted Hindu—appears to have respected their temples, and to have restrained his followers from committing any flagrant or open violence against the public buildings with which the city abounded. Prithi Narayan may also have felt some sympathy for the fallen fortunes of his former ally, Ranjit Mall, whose applications for assistance against the Kings of Kathmandu and Patan had been the immediate cause of bringing Gorkha into the territories of Nipal. From these various causes the aged King of Bhatgaon was treated by Prithi Narayan with considerable leniency; his capital was respected, and though the Gorkhas . . . appropriated the entire revenues of the state, and the greater portion of those of the church, yet they fortunately spared enough of the latter to enable the Niwars to keep the majority of their temples in a state of very good repair. It is in consequence of this unusual moderation on the part of the Gorkhas that, in comparison with Patan or Kirtipur, Bhatgaon still presents a flourishing appearance; its streets and inhabitants have a cheerful aspect, and its religious edifices generally are, even at the present day, in fairly good preservation.

Nevertheless, he notes, "the ancient walls and gateways of Bhatgaon, like those of the other capital cities, are fast crumbling into ruin" (ibid., 133).

Forty years later, in the 1920s, Perceval Landon ([1928] 1976, vol. 1, p. 219f.) wrote:

A little apart from the main traffic ways of the Valley, and busy with its own concerns, Bhatgaon has retained an individuality and an aloofness that other towns in the Valley have to some extent lost in the ever-growing influence of Kathmandu—and naturally none has lost it more than Kathmandu herself. it is commonly said that m her daily life Bhatgaon resembles the outlying and, to Europeans, unknown parts of Nepal more than does any other town in the Valley. She rests upon the fold above her curving river cliff, adjusting herself to its couch-like shape, and cultivates her well-watered fields below,

remote—willingly remote—from her neighbors, and one of the most picturesque towns in the East.

The 1950 Revolution Against The Rana Regime

Soon after the death of Prthvinarayana Saha the Saha family, although continuing to be the nominal and legitimate dynastic rulers of Nepal, lost control of the governance of the new nation. A long turbulent period followed in which various families of the western mountain conquerors strove for control. In the mid-nineteenth century a family that was to take the name of "Rana" rose to power following the violent seizure of power by one of their members, Jang Bahadur Rana. The family provided the successive "prime ministers," the de facto rulers of Nepal for the next century. The Rana regime continued their predecessor's policy of isolation from potentially disturbing forces elsewhere in the world and of a quasifeudal rule of a decentralized nation. As the Nepali political scientist Rishikesh Saha (1975a , 164-166) characterized the Rana period:

The basic objective of the Ranas was to keep the power within the family by maintaining the status quo in every field. Even m the sphere of internal affairs, every effort was made to insulate Nepal from the impact of Western influence and ideas, which was being felt in Asia during the latter part of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. In accomplishing this policy of isolation the Ranas were aided by the geographical location and topography of Nepal. Nepali people were not merely deprived of the influence of Western ideas but were also discouraged from any contact with the neighboring people of India. . . . Change of any kind was suspected of weakening the foundations of Rana rule. Educational development was very slow, and the number of high schools and colleges could be counted on one's fingers. Public works programs during the Rana period were almost non-existent and were particularly deficient with respect to transportation and communication.

In the late 1950s a complex and complexly motivated series of events led to the loss of the Rana monopoly of power and the restoration of power to the Saha king, Tribhuvan. This "revolution" initiated experiments in modernization of the government and of the country, a series of tentative efforts at liberalization, followed by retreats, and yet again by new efforts. Old structures of political order, needs for modernization, new ideas introduced through travel and education, the need to survive the dangers and to try to make use of the rivalries of the border-

ing giants, India and China, all have made this period of modernization difficult and uncertain.^[32]

Although during the period following the Gorkha conquest the politics of national Nepal were Gorkhali, as was the language, the Gorkhalis in the Kathmandu Valley began to become influenced by Newar religion and culture, which they came to think of as being to a large degree the distinctive Nepalese religion and culture. Kamal Malla quotes the Nepalese historian Karidar Baburam Acharya, "Prthvinarayana Saha founded a new nation by defeating Jaya Prakash Malla and other kings. But he was unable to conquer Nepali [i.e., Newar] culture. The Gorkhalis had nothing except a common language in the name of cultural heritage. . . . So being completely overwhelmed by Nepali [Newar] culture, although Prthvinarayana Saha was able to defeat an individual called Jaya Prakash, he was defeated by Nepali culture."

Both Gorkhali and Newar began to be affected together—and to grow more like each other—in consequence of the tentative modernization of Nepal. Yet, as a major governmental development plan for the Kathmandu Valley of the Nepal government put it, Bhaktapur "has shown very little change throughout the last several decades and thus remains the purist existing documentation of historic Newar towns in the Valley" (His Majesty's Government, Nepal 1969, 76).

Which brings us to the time of our present study.