Chapter One
Introduction

The Background of This Study

This book is based on a study of Bhaktapur, a Newar city in Nepal, during the years 1973 to 1976, and it is the first of two projected volumes. My central interest has been in the reciprocal relations of the public life of communities and the private worlds of their members. I began working in Bhaktapur after studies in two small Tahitian-speaking communities in the Society Islands of French Polynesia ("Piri" and "Roto") in the hope that the enormous contrasts between the ways of life of that Himalayan Hindu city and of the tiny Polynesian communities might be illuminating in some unforeseen way.

My intention at first was to report on Bhaktapur in much the same way that I had on the Society Islands communities. I would write a short section on the social and cultural context of people's lives and follow it with an extended description and discussion of some individuals' private experience and of their "mental worlds" as those small worlds were related to their larger contexts. I collected, as I had in Piri and Roto, information on the social and cultural context and, with the help of lengthy tape-recorded sets of interviews, information on private worlds. Instead of the forty pages that were required to introduce the relevant aspects of the Tahitian context, however, it has taken me this large volume to present the relevant Bhaktapurian context. That, in a way, is the central point of this study. For it is the weight and complexity of its culture and society that most evidently distinguishes public life

in Bhaktapur from public life in Piri and which, in turn, powerfully affects many aspects of private experience and personal mental organization of people in Bhaktapur in comparison with people in the Tahitian communities.

But what is the relevant context? Bhaktapur is a repository of much of the cultural and social history of South Asia. What was to be studied there, and what included in this volume?^[1] The decision, as always in ethnographic reports, has been somewhat uncertain and a compromise. Thus some of this book is devoted to the commonplaces of the tradition of ethnographic description—sketches of history, economy, and, more elaborately, social structure. Most of it is concerned with the elaborate "religious" life of the city, the system of symbols that helps organize the integrated life of the city so that it becomes a mesocosm , an organized meaningful world intermediate to the microcosmic worlds of individuals and the culturally conceived macrocosm, the universe, at whose center the city lies.

The religious organization of Bhaktapur is of central interest for the theoretical ambitions of this study. One of the most striking differences between Bhaktapur and Piri is the enormous comparative elaboration of a particular kind of symbolism (which we will call "marked symbolism") in Bhaktapur and its miniscule importance, even its suppression, in Piri. As I will propose in chapter 2, this elaboration is a crucial resource for organizing a certain type of community and society, a certain type of city—an "archaic city." Bhaktapur represents a Hindu community in its full development, a "climax community" of Hinduism, and Hinduism so viewed is a symbolic resource that once served, and still anachronistically serves in Bhaktapur, to organize many such cities.

A final reason for emphasizing Bhaktapur's symbolic organization is that the striking contrast between Piri's emphasis on what it takes to be the mundane and Bhaktapur's emphasis on the dramatic theatrics of marked symbolism is intimately and centrally connected with differences not only, as one might expect, in the intimate experience of people in the two places but also in aspects of their "mental organization." It was as an essay in comparative "mental organization" that I undertook the study, and it is here that this volume has a problem. The understanding that I began to have during the course of this study of various people's private lives, of their ways of thinking and feeling, of their consciences and their motives, often motivates and shapes the sociocultural description presented in this volume. The neurophysiologist and cybernetician Warren McCulloch once entitled a paper "What is a

Number, That a Man May Know It, and a Man, That He May Know a Number?" (1965). These intimately interdependent questions, transformed to "what is Bhaktapur that a Newar may know it, and a Newar that he or she may know Bhaktapur" serve admirably to indicate what I am mostly after, with the qualification that "know" is too limited, and would need to be expanded to "act in, be secure in, be sane in, be human in," as well as "resist, struggle against, reinterpret" or whatever words we may find for those aspects of Man (who is, of course, generic Man) that turn out to be dependent on the forms of the community in which an individual lives. However, the materials on the mind and experience of "the Newar," or, more modestly and accurately, of sample Newars, must be presented in detail elsewhere. In this volume I have had to introduce as assertions with no supporting data ideas about some of the most relevant psychological and personal "resonances" (a useful word for deferring considerations of cause and effect, of direction of the flow between individuals and community) of the symbolic order, ideas, for example, about "sophistication," symbol hunger, special qualities of "self" and "person," the implications and resonances of the "purity complex," and of the special personal force of blood sacrifice. The apologetic and hopeful phrase "We will treat this at length elsewhere" is often used in admission that the reader might be uncomfortable with one or another obiter dictum .

I approached Bhaktapur from Tahiti with a different set of questions and with a different kind of competence and ignorance from those of an Indologist or Himalayan expert. I must ask the Indologist's indulgence for my errors and amateurism and the use of secondary sources and translations for South Asian history and for Hindu texts. The Indologist and the anthropologist working in South Asia need much mutual forbearance on the one hand and dialogue on the other.

My choice of Nepal, the Newars, and Bhaktapur for study was originally motivated by a growing conviction that the kinds of psychological forms that I had seen and reported on in Piri and Roto (Levy, Tahitians , 1973) were something more than the simple consequence of an historically derived "cultural tradition." The personal experience and psychological characteristics of individuals in Piri and Roto turned out to be in many ways similar to those reported elsewhere throughout Polynesia and Micronesia. This raised questions (Levy 1969, 48):

To what degree are the similarities artifacts of shared emphases of the common intellectual subculture of Micronesian and Polynesian specialists? To what degree are they simply a negative category, a lack of some peculiarly

modern urban trait, turned into a pseudopositive form? To what degree are these necessary structural psychological responses of all people who live on islands, or who have semisubsistence economies based on horticulture and fishing, or who live in traditional "simple" societies of any kind? To what degree are they universal responses to encounter with vastly more powerful societies, or to prolonged colonial experience? And finally, to what degree are the reported areal psychological sumlarities part of a shared and historically transmitted cultural tradition, in which personality can be viewed as an historical product?

With such questions in mind and with considerable curiosity about experience in different kinds of places that were exotic to me, I looked for a community that was as different from a Tahitian village as I could find, while still being "non-Western." I chose, finally, the Newar city of Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley. Piri, the Tahitian village that was the principal site of my previous study, was small (some 284 people living in fifty-four households), on a small island, with comparatively little differentiation of social and sexual roles, based on a fishing and horticulture economy, traditionally nonliterate, a variant of Polynesian culture and society, and, since the late eighteenth century, under increasing Western colonial influence. Bhaktapur was a very large community by anthropological standards, some 40,000 people living in extraordinary density in an area of less than one-half square mile; situated in a high mountain valley in the interior of a large continental area; socially highly differentiated into a hierarchical caste structure, with markedly differentiated gender roles; with an economy based on farming, crafts, and trading; traditionally highly literate, in fact, a traditional center of Himalayan and South Asian High Culture; and although under the political control of the Gorkhalisnce the late eighteenth century, almost untouched by Western influences until the early 1950s. It would be difficult to find two non-Western communities that were more different from each other. The usual strategy in comparative studies is to compare two communities that differ from each other in as few dimensions as possible and to try to trace the influence of those few dimensions. A strategy of maximal contrast is a different matter. One learns something from comparing a mouse and an elephant, something about mammalian universals and about the possibilities and limits of variation, and, concurrently, about gross differences in adaptation.

In this book the comparison between Bhaktapur and Piri (and of both with "the West") is sometimes overt, but for long stretches it becomes covert, informing the point of view and the emphasis given to the possible significance of certain phenomena.

In the description of the relatively simple life of an isolated village it is possible to achieve a considerable degree of accuracy. Whenever possible, many variants of an event can be observed, many informants can be queried, small but possibly significant details can be explored, contradictions can be exploited. Bhaktapur, in contrast to such villages, is not only large in size and population—full of events, crammed with symbolic forms, and highly socially differentiated—but also has a literate tradition that many of its inhabitants know, and that in itself complexities reports and interpretations as to what goes on. But what its inhabitants think Bhaktapur is and what this study claims it, in fact, to be in large part is a unified sociocultural system. If one is concerned with the organization of this system and its implications for those who live in it, it has to be approached in long focus, trying to keep in view the multitude of forms and events that are visible to all in the city's public urban space and time. This requires the gathering of masses of material—often necessarily based on one viewing or sometimes one glimpse, and/or on the reports of limited numbers of informants, all under pressures that often make it impossible to adequately check reliability, details, and mistakes. In short, there are undoubtedly more errors of detail in this book than would be seemly in the study of a small community.

How The Study Was Done

I worked in Bhaktapur from April 1973 to April 1976, except for a six-month period starting in September 1974, during which I returned to the United States. During the first year and a-half I lived in Bhaktapur and studied primarily the public culture and social system and the Bhaktapur dialect of the Newari language. Although I had learned a little Nepali, the linqua franca of Nepal, before going to Nepal, I was not able to begin studying the Bhaktapur dialect of Newari^[2] until I began work in that city. During the first several months I was dependent on English-speaking Newars for explanations, translations, and language instructions.

During the first year and a-half I lived in Bhaktapur. Because I would have been unable to live with any except a very-low-caste Hindu family because of my "ritual uncleanliness," and because living with a low-caste family would have made it very difficult for me to interview higher-status people, I had to establish my own household with Newar servants from Kathmandu. With the help of English-speaking assistants

in the first stages I began the survey of the aspects of city life described in the report. A variety of approaches and materials—mapping of local spatial features (e.g., shrines, festival routes and locations, the residential areas of different status groups) on aerial maps, study of city documents and records, and interviews and surveys of various kinds were used to work out the skeleton of city organization. The work of other people on Nepal, the Newars, and Bhaktapur^[3] provided me with essential information for orientation as well as with proposals to be checked, confirmed, or corrected. In the years during which this manuscript has slowly grown other works have appeared that have been of great use to me, particulary the recent extensive volumes of Mary Slusser (1982) and Gérard Toffin (1984).

After this first period in Bhaktapur I spent six months back at the University of California working with Kedar Rajjopadhyaya the development of interview schedules. On returning to Nepal I began interviewing in Newari. In an approach to private lives I picked eight people—six men and two women—in various positions throughout the caste system for extensive series of tape-recorded interviews. These interviews became the bases for further interviews and observations m pursuit of the differentiated experience of the life of the city to be presented, it is intended, in a second volume. With the help of two scribes (who wish to remain anonymous) all the interviews were transcribed from tapes as Devanagari text. The scribes were Bhaktapur Brahmans, one an expert on traditional religion, the other on history and linguistics. They were non-English-speakers, and starting at this time most of my work was conducted in Newari. The scribes soon became associates in the study, and many of the descriptions of religious procedures and of various aspects of the city's culture, often stimulated by issues or obscurities (for me) in the recorded interviews, started with their descriptions and explanations. Because of the major emphasis on secrecy and privacy in Bhaktapur the scribes and a few of the people being interviewed traveled to Kathmandu, some eight miles from Bhaktapur, to work with me. During this last year I lived in Kathmandu and traveled to Bhaktapur, where I had an office on the ground floor of an unoccupied house, to do several sets of interviews, observe festivals and various special events, and do some surveys.

Newari is a complex language of Sino-Tibetan provenance, with an enormous vocabulary derived from its complex history as the language of an ancient and complex society.^[4] It has many sociolinguistic and stylistic variations, many of Bhaktapur's major social units as well as

many geographic divisions of the city having distinctive pronunciations, vocabulary, and usages. Although I conducted interviews in Newari, and understood to a considerable degree what people were trying to tell me, I missed some of the sense and many of the nuances at the time of the interviews. The study of the Newari written transcripts after the interviews and again on return from Nepal helped clarify much of this. As a further and important step in clarification, however, I had all the interviews (including my own parts of the dialogue) translated into English on return to the United States. This was done mostly by two Newar scholars, Gautam, and Devi Vajracharya.

The penultimate stage in this long process, prior to the preparation of the final manuscript of this volume, was the joint reading over some months during 1979 of a draft manuscript of the sociocultural materials with Kedar Raj Rajopadhyaya. Many corrections and amplification were made during this reading. The final manuscript is the result of the slow reworking of the corrected draft manuscript to bring our descriptions and interpretations into relation with the South Asian and wider scholarly literature relevant to the study, and to which, we hope, the study is relevant.

Kedar Raj Rajopadhyaya is the chief Brahman priest of Bhaktapur's Taleju temple, once the temple of its Newar kings and still at the center of the city's civic religion. He is a member of a family that has held that post for many generations. The position passed to him in 1973 when his father, Upendra Raj, died. Upendra Raj had been chief Taleju priest for several decades and had known Bhaktapur in its time of Himalayan isolation, when upper-status people were still carried on the roads in palanquins and the forms of "medieval" Bhaktapur still flourished. Kedar participated in the work of his father and uncles and was taught by them and studied the Hindu religious tradition in a Sanskrit school in Bhaktapur. He works not only in Taleju with its Royal and Tantric activities and its various relations to wider civic religion and as a purohita , a family priest, with his family's traditional clients but also in the city's nascent modern sector as a member of the city's administrative council and of other urban organizations. He is fluent not only in Sanskrit, and like most upper-status people of Bhaktapur, Nepali and Newari (both Kathmandu and Bhaktapur dialects), but also English. Kedar, as he is known throughout Bhaktapur, came to believe that Bhaktapur would soon change into something else, and that an attempt had to be made to tell something about its old religious life to a wider

world. He was first an informant for me, but soon came to be much more, my collaborator in this book. From here on "I" becomes "we" for this book is a product of our continuing dialogue.

This volume is concerned with the symbolic ordering of Bhaktapur, and thus of only some of the many dimensions that make Bhaktapur an interesting place. This choice was made in consonance with the theoretical concerns introduced in the next chapter, above all because of an interest in Bhaktapur itself as the locus of the experience of its citizens. We have for the most part neglected economy, social dynamics, ecological relations, material culture, and so on. One neglected topic requires comment, however. We have had to neglect Bhaktapur's relations to its traditional hinterland. This would have been a major project in itself, and it is to be hoped that others will undertake it. Much of this would have to be an historical study, as the events of the last 200 years have caused Bhaktapur to draw into itself and at the same time—especially in recent decades—to be related to a wider Nepal in the external relations it did have. However, the neglect of the hinterland leaves out what would be the essential necessary next step in the analysis of the "kind" of city Bhaktapur once was. As polis meant, depending on its context, sometimes the Greek city within its boundaries, sometimes that city and its hinterland, so "Bhaktapur" once meant sometimes the city, sometimes the city-state or "little kingdom" of which the city and its privileged inhabitants were the royal center. There are a few remaining ceremonial relations with the Newar villages and towns of the hinterland recalling the old relations, and a few continuing economic relations with some of those towns and more especially with the surrounding non-Newar hill peoples. Now, and in a lengthening post, however, the hinterland of the city means for the most part only the rich farm-lands that immediately surround it, farmed by people who live within Bhaktapur. We cannot be sure how in the past integration into the city-state altered the indentity and experience of the Bhaktapurians of the little kingdom. We would guess that the change now is mostly for the dwellers of the peripheral towns and villages in their new self-sufficiency. But whatever the previous economic, political, and symbolic integrations of city and hinterland may have been it seems plausible—from what history and chronicles and tradition we have to guide us.-that the dwellers within the main royal cities always thought that the universe was most clearly and safely represented within their city boundaries. The dangerous deities who stand at the boundaries and

protect those boundaries against the dangerous and difficult world beyond the city have stood there since time immemorial.

One other problem requires comment—and a justifying argument. Our emphasis on the order of Bhaktapur is very liable to appear regressive, ideological, Orientalist, and various other unpleasant things in the contemporary climate of criticism of essays presenting "other" times and "other" peoples. We are, in this volume, describing a normative order, an ideal order. We have many questions to address to it—what kind of an ideal order is it in comparative perspective, what does it do, and what are its parts and relations and dynamics. As those questions show, we accept its "reality" as an essential focus of concern and analysis for understanding Bhaktapur. It is only against this ideal system, that our ultimate inquiry, the dilemmas, conflicts, understandings, and points of view of individuals in Bhaktapur—all of whom find themselves in vital interaction with the concrete realizations of the ideal system—can be understood. We have constructed our representations of the urban symbolic order from many sources. Much of it is from the material realizations of the ideal order in city space, the precipitate of the conceptual and building programs of past elites. Much of it is from obervations of aspects of action expressing that order, or the interface between that order and contrary problematic ones. And many parts of this book are based on the conceptions and descriptions of elite informants, specialists of various kinds, but above all Rajopadhyaya Brahmans.

The conception of a civic order is thus not just that of a sentimental Westerner, it is that of local specialists in symbolic order. The book is, in part, a presentation of their , their own, imagery. For Bhaktapur, that conception is not just the wishful ideological thinking and propaganda of precarious elites but a powerful force that in itself helps to create order. Whatever the untouchable, for example, thinks about it all, it is these conceptions which form the matrix of his life. Against the ordering interpretations of the elite, popular interpretations where they differ are either simply "wrong" when they are alternatives within the same sort of ideological domain, or else, when they are explanations of some radically different sort (as when a farmer, say, represents untouchability as a guarantee of social order), represent attempts at critical "demystifications" of the system, both alternatives illuminating the tensions, tasks, and dynamics of the dominating system of symbols and interpretations. How the ideal system is experienced, represented, and known by others in the city and its ontological status when "the peo-

ple" are the center of our concern are the intended subject of another work.

This coherent symbolic order is a peculiar attempt to order a community. It is not in itself adequate to represent "the life of the community." That life has many aspects, levels, and kinds of order and disorder. To try to make one aspect the "real" one is to engage in ideological polemics or, worse, tendentious and covert use of the exotic. However, to neglect order where it does exist is another and peculiarly postmodern ideological move in itself.