The Physical City

Bhaktapur (see fig. 1) at the time of this study had not, at first sight, changed very much in appearance from nineteenth-century descriptions and aside from a general weathering and decay, probably not much from its appearance at the end of the reign of the Malla kings. Built on the sides and summit of a broad hill rising from the valley floor, the city suddenly appears, clearly demarcated from the extensive farmlands around it. The city is roughly elliptical, about one mile in length and about one-half mile in breadth, with its long axis running from west to east with a slight southwest-northeast rotation. A main road enters the city from the west and meanders along the central axis running parallel to the Hanumante River, which borders Bhaktapur to the south. This road soon becomes the bazaar, a dense conglomeration of small shops that line the street for much of its extent. At intervals the road widens out into various public squares full of temples and shrines as is the case in many Newar settlements. Its inhabitants think of Bhaktapur as consisting of a lower city to the southwest and an upper city to the northeast. The bazaar street has two prominent large squares, Ta:marhi Square in the lower city and Dattatreya in the upper. The main axis is intersected by a number of routes that have bridged the Hanumante and entered the city from the south. It leads finally to a road leaving Bhaktapur to the east, once an important route to Tibet.

To the north of the central axis in the western part of the city is the former Malla Royal center, the Durbar square or Laeku. At its northern side is a prominent gateway covered with golden images of gods, the entrance to a complex of courtyards, shrines, and sanctums—the temple of Taleju, the tutelary goddess of the Malla kings. Adjoining the Taleju temple is the large palace, formerly the seat of the Malla kings of Bhaktapur, now administrative offices for a new polity. Around the Durbar square are the tall, tile roofed houses of many of the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, once closely associated with the court, as well as houses of descendants of the old court aristocracy.

In various parts of the city there are clearly differentiated neighborhoods. There is the potters' quarter with its potting wheels, its kilns and open spaces for the firing and sun-drying of pots; the dyers' quarters with various brightly colored woolen yarns hanging to dry near the dying vats; farmers' quarters with—depending on the season—rice, wheat, corn, peppers, and other crops being threshed, winnowed, dried. There are neighborhoods of Buddhists, mostly in the northern parts of the

city, surrounding their old monasteries, now centers of Tantric, non-monastic Buddhism. There are other neighborhoods not so clearly marked by external contrasts, but clustered around a central square with its temples or shrines. Toward the borders of the town are generally poorer areas with lower, simpler houses. But among them there are groups of taller, more elaborate houses, those of the butchers whose low status places them toward the periphery of the city, but whose comparatively high earnings have allowed them to build larger houses than their neighbors. To the south of the city, in an area that is said to be outside its boundaries, in squalid small houses, tightly grouped together, live the untouchables.

Along the Hanumante River at a number of places are clusters of shrines and ghats or steps leading down to the river. Here clothes are washed, and here and there are ramps for dipping the feet of a dying man into the river at his last breath. Along the Hanumante River, mostly on the far side, are cremation grounds. There is another river, the Kasan, to the north of Bhaktapur, which joins the Hanumante to the west of the city. This northern river has little to do with the life of the town.^[1]

Everywhere there is a bustle of activity, of people coming and going, of processions, of music, of business, of craftsmen working. Scattered here and there are new buildings in modern styles, offices and houses for officials, modern houses for some rich merchants, schools, a hospital, a cinema.

And everywhere are dirt and foul smells, the dust and wear of centuries, the feces of animals and children in the streets, of adults in the fields and at the riverside. There are houses cracked and fallen during the last of the series of earthquakes that regularly trouble the Kathmandu Valley. The fields and streets are full of scavenging emaciated dogs and of large carrion crows. Huge fruit bats hang in some seasons in the trees, and on clear nights jackals howl in the fields outside of the city and occasionally a predatory, hungry leopard snatches off the infant of an unwary farmer in a field bordering on the forest. All this is a reminder that Bhaktapur was and is still a clearing in h yet more ancient world.