Chapter Ten
Priests

Preliminaries: Priests and Kings—The Relations of the Symbolic Order and Power

Bhaktapur—with its hallucinatory memories of its Newar king, its persisting Ksatriya-like^[*] social segments, its continuing relation to the "new" centralized Saha royal dynasty, its elaborate collection of priests and quasi-priests, and of the other "nonpriestly" traditional social role players who may be contrasted with them, all placed within or in relationship to a traditional dharmic moral order—throws some light on the Hindu peculiarities, variously described and emphasized in the scholarly literature, of the relations of the conventional moral order and "power," of religious and political realms, of priest and king.

In this chapter we will be concerned mostly with details of the types and functions of Bhaktapur's priests and their auxiliary helpers, as well as with those thar -based social roles and functions that are priest-like in one or another more or less covert way. The priestly realm has not only its significant internal divisions but also external contrasts with non-priests which are essential for understanding how Bhaktapur's community life is organized. Those external contrasts are epitomized in the relation of Brahman and king.

It has long been evident to Western scholars that the realms and relations of king and Brahman in South Asian society were different

from those of similar functionaries in most other societies. As Kolenda (1978, 31) put it in a summary review:

As early as the eighth century B.C. , Hindu thought had separated worldly power from other-worldly power. Since then, the two realms have been in the hands of different specialists—worldly power in the hands of the king, other-worldly power in the hands of the priest. In the Hindu ideology, the ritual power of the Brahman priest was more important than the secular power of the king, who was expected to protect and depend upon the priest. . .. Indeed, it was the duty of the king . . . to protect the populace, to ensure conformity to the class system of the time, and to wage war—always under the guidance of his Brahman . . . preceptor. The king was carrying out the religious law (dharma) that was in the keeping of the Brahman priest.

The Hindu king and his fellow Ksatriya^[*] allies, counselors, and warriors protect and enforce the dharma , but their relation to that customary law was, and is, ambiguous. In Robert Lingat's (1973, 210-211) epitome:

The kingship . . . belonged to him who possessed ksatra^[*] ["warlike force," plus "sovereignty"] de facto, . . . i.e. the power to command, whatever might have been his birth and whatever might have been the circumstances which brought him to the throne. Ksatra^[*] confers on the king independence, the right to act to suit himself without depending upon anyone else. The king is independent of his subjects, as is the spiritual preceptor of his pupils and the head of the family of the members of his household. . .. By contrast, Dharma is essentialy a rule of interdependence , founded on a hierarchy corresponding to the nature of things and necessary for the maintenance of the social order. To break away from it is to violate one's destiny and to expose onself to the loss of one's salvation. The peculiar dharma of the king is the protection of his subjects. If he is free to act as he pleases without having to account to anyone for his acts, he acquires merit only when acting in conformity with his dharma . . . . So finally the destroy of the king depends on the way in which he has been able to protect his subjects.

Although it is recognized that some kind of moral responsibility, some kind of "meta-dharma," must guide the king's freedom, his activities as king must, if they are to be successful, violate and transcend, and escape from that "ordinary" Hindu community dharma that is, it is worth repeating, "essentially a rule of interdependence, founded on a hierarchy corresponding to the nature of things and necessary for the maintenance of the social order." In his warrior's relation to the city's external enemies, his manipulative relations to the city's allies, and in his use of violence and power to enforce those internal violations of the civic dharma which that dharma 's sanctions of moral disapproval and karmic retribution cannot in themselves fully control, he must ignore

the morality of interdependence and must perform acts which within the ordinary civic order would be sins.^[1] In contrast, the king as citizen and as person operates within the ordinary dharma and, importantly for our present purposes, within the ordinary civic religion.

In Louis Dumont's statement contrasting the Indian king with kings in other ancient traditional societies where the king was either at the same time the supreme religious functionary or else superior in his status to "his" priests, the Indian king (1970, 68 [emphasis added]):

loses . . . hierarchical preeminence in favor of the priests, retaining for himself power only. . .. Through this dissociation, the function of the king m India has been secularized . It is from this point that a differentiation has occurred, the separation within the religious universe of a sphere or realm opposed to the religious, and roughly corresponding to what we call the political. As opposed to the realm of values and norms it is the realm of force. As opposed to the dharma or universal order of the Brahman, it is the realm of interest or advantage, artha. . . . All [the implications that follow from this] can, m my view be traced back to this initial step. In other words, they would have been impossible if the king had not from the beginning left the highest religious functions to the priest.

These classic discussions of king and Brahman and the "realms" epitomized by their functions illuminate and yet at the same time tend to obscure the relations and functions of king and priest, and the actual internal divisions and interrelations of realms of "religion" on the one hand and "force" on the other. They obscure the different kinds of religion and priestly functions that in Bhaktapur and many places historically like it in South Asia were differentially related to "values and norms" and to "force," and they do not take account of the wider implications of "force" for characterizing a vertical social segment of Bhaktapur's society, within which the king and his paradoxical dharma is a special case.

The hierarchical system of thar s in Bhaktapur assigns roles and functions of two sorts. The roles are sorted into two hierarchical segments of the macrostatus system. One segment—ranging from Brahman to untouchable—is concerned with the manipulation and maintenance of the dharma -supporting symbolically constituted civic social system, whose central organizing metaphor is purity and impurity. This is the nexus of the interdependent life of the civic community. Its proper religion is the religion of the ordinary deities. Its functionaries, grouped as priests in an extended usage suggested by Hocart ([1950] 1960), are the subject of this chapter. The other segment, ranging from king down via farmers through the lowest-status craftsmen, have their representative

functions within another realm that may be disentangled from the symbolically constructed, hierarchical, civic dharma . They deal, in comparison, with a more material world, and with symbolic forms other than those characteristic forms that organize the dharmic community—purity and impurity, karma , and the moral imperatives of the dharma itself. These are the potters, farmers, traders, wood carvers, dyers, and so on, as well as the king and other political and military functionaries. The cultural forms and symbols that shape and give meaning to their functions (in distinction to their status as citizens) have some qualities and relations different from those of the primary symbol technicians. The relation of their roles to hierarchy, and their work to the dharma , is a secondary addition. As citizens, their religion (like the king's) is the ordinary dharmic religion. However, as operatives in a world that has its own independent realities, forces, and forms, and which is necessary for the support, maintenance, and protection of the city's realm of values and norms, they share, in part, the classic situation of the king. Insofar, then, as they deal in "power," in one sense, and not in "norms and values," their realm is complexly related to the larger "religious universe." In relation to the dharmic religion of the ordinary deities, they perform "secular" functions. However, their relation to the religion of the dangerous deities is different. Those deities have the same sort of relation to the civic dharma as do the activities of the king, farmers, and craftsmen. They, and their special worship and meanings, express the realm of value-transcendent power in which the king and others like him operate, and they can be and are used in attempts to augment and protect that power. We have discussed the function of the dangerous deities and of their worship in earlier chapters; the chapters on symbolic enactments that follow will further indicate what they do, and how they do it. But for now we must note that these deities are precisely not "in the realm of values and norms" but, like the city's segment of "material technicians," are within the "realm of force," a force put to the service of those values and norms.

Bhaktapur's priests, including its Brahmans, operate in both these realms, both as the exemplary pure (and, in fact, exemplary impure) priests of the ordinary moral realm, the world of the dharmic , hierarchical, civic order and also as priests of the realm of power, where purity and impurity and the civic values of interdependency are irrelevant. In these two worlds the relations of Brahman to king, of priest to client, are basically different—and, thus, so is the meaning of the priest and his function.

Preliminaries: Kinds of Priests and Priestly Functions

The priests of Bhaktapur's civic moral realm have a central concern with correct moral behavior and the structuring efficacy of purity and pollution; the priests of the extramoral realm deal with a more direct power, a power that transcends morality as well as purity and pollution. The extramoral religion dealing with powers which transcend that civic moral realm, while at the same time ensuring its protection, is the special religion of Bhaktapur's version of the Ksatriyas^[*] as Ksatriyas^[*] , but has its echoes and uses throughout the city.

The Newar Brahman, the Rajopadhyaya Brahman, is at the summit of both these religious realms. Within the realm of civic ordering he is allied with a whole set of manipulators of purity, and thus of social order and of salvation-producing dharmic order. These allies are auxiliary priests and what we will call "para-priests," as well as various pollution-manipulating priest-like functionaries—purifiers such as barbers and collectors of impurity such as, above all, the untouchables.

In his role as Tantric guru and priest the Rajopadhyaya Brahman presides over that other world in which purity is not an issue, where the priests and practitioners of the world of the dangerous deities manipulate through those deities the extramoral world of physical events—a world of rain and drought, disease and cure, earthquake and war. Such priests manipulate the deities through devices of power, and the deities, in turn, manipulate the nonmoral world. The Rajopadhyaya Brahman's essential priestly ally in this realm is the Acaju, the priest who performs in public those actions that the Brahman can do only in secret.

The two sorts of religion—the socially constructive dharmic religion and the religion of power—converge once again, as they had in the Rajopahyaya^[*] Brahmans, on the untouchable Po(n), and the near-untouchable Jugi. These are the ultimate collectors of impurity, facilitating the purity of all above them. Yet, their ability to do this, whatever the enormous stigma to their social status may be, is a sign of a power to transcend some, at least, of the implications of that impurity. This is clearest in the ascription of Tantric knowledge to the Jugi, but is also a latent aspect of the meaning of the Po(n).

We have been proceeding as if the term "priest" in itself were unproblematic. It was not problematic in the discussion of the priest's contrasts with the king insofar as the "priest" has been the idealized

figure of the Brahman. The Brahman in such discussions is subsumed comfortably under summary characterizations of "priests"—where the problem in characterization is usually to delineate the "priest" in contrast to other mediators with the "supernatural"—shamans, diviners, magicians, and prophets. Among these the "priest" is someone who "has a special and sometimes secret knowledge of the techniques of worship, including incantations, prayers, sacrificial acts, songs, and other acts that are believed to bridge the separation between the divine or sacred and the profane realms. . .. Because the priest gains his special knowledge from a school for priests, he is differentiated from other religious and cultic leaders . . . who obtain their positions by means of individual efforts. . .. As a member of the institution [the priesthood] that regulates the relationship between the divine or sacred and the profane realms through ritual, the priest is the accepted religious and spiritual leader in his society" (E. O. James 1974, 1007). Such an account emphasizes the social centrality and "routinization" of the institutionalized priesthood in making the priest the accepted "spiritual leader" of the community. In the terms of such a definition, we can discriminate among the functionaries who mediate between the sacred and profane and who belong to the central institutionalized civic order, certain "priests" who help the Brahman in conducting rituals or who act in lieu of Brahmans in rituals or who work for clients where Brahmans can or will not officiate. These are auxiliary priests . We are now left with one further distinction. In chapter 11 we will discuss activities, most particularly purification, that are "at the margins of the sacred." These activities are for the purpose of putting individuals in a proper state to enter into the sacred realm, the realm where priests operate, and do not in themselves entail "techniques of worship." The experts who perform these activities are not properly priests themselves. This is clear in the case of the vitally important purificatory work of the Nau, the "barber." The same claim may be made regarding the astrologers, the Josis. We will call those whose functions are to prepare people for their encounters with the sacred para-priests .

Bhaktapur's Brahmans

The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans

In the general perspective of modern Nepal the "Newar" Brahmans of Bhaktapur are a problematic group of Brahmans, in some sense second-

ary to those Brahmans associated with the ruling Gorkhali dynasty. In Bhaktapur, as in other Newar communities, the dominant Brahmans, who share the surname "Rajopadhyaya," must differentiate themselves not only from the Partya: or Khae(n), that is, the Indo-Nepalese Brahman, but also from two other kinds of "non-Newar" Brahmans—the Bhatta^[*] and the Jha Brahmans—who live and work in Bhaktapur. For the most part they identify themselves in contrast to other Brahmans by their thar name, Rajopadhyaya,^[2] which identifies their connection with the Malla dynasty as the "king's counselor" (see fig. 20).

In their own legendary history the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans came from the great ancient Indian political, religious, and cultural center, Kanauj (also called Kanyakubja), in North India, the same city that they believe to have been the earlier seat of what became the Malla dynasty. Kanauj was in the area of India from which successive Muslim invasions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries drove many Hindus into nearby Nepal.

The Rajopadhyaya's historical legend tells how in the distant past two Brahman brothers came to Nepal from Kanyakubja. Their names were "Alias Raj" and "Ullas Raj." Ullas Raj settled in the mountains, while Alias Raj settled in the Kathmandu Valley. Ullas Raj became a Partya: (literally, a "hill dweller") because he settled in the mountains. Alias Raj became a Newar because he settled in the Valley. Ullas Raj mixed with the Partya: people. As he had done farming in Kanyakubja he remained in the hills, where his descendants continue to be farmers.^[3] His children spoke the Partya: language (Nepali). Alias Raj mixed with the Newar people, and thus his children spoke Nepal Bhasa^[*] (Newari). Alias Raj and Ullas Raj had no more relations with each other because they now had different languages and customs. They did not keep up their family relations. After a few generations their descendants did not even know each other. When Harisimhadeva^[*] came to Bhaktapur he brought new Kanyakubja Brahmans with him. Harisimhadeva^[*] gave those Kanyakubja Brahmans who had been in Bhaktapur prior to his arrival a "substitute house,"^[4] which is now still used by the Rajopadhyayas^[*] . As the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans who came with Harisimhadeva^[*] from Kanyakubja and the Rajopadhyaya descendants of Allas Raj were the "same kinds" of Brahmans, they mixed very easily with each other. They both became Rajopadhyaya Brahmans.

However, the account continues, Harisimhadeva^[*] also brought other Brahmans with him, these were Maithili Brahmans from the nearby area of Mithila whose descendants are the Jha Brahmans (one group

[Full Size]

Figure 20.
Rajopadhyaya Brahmans in a purification ceremony at the river.

of Bhaktapur's "non-Newar" Brahmans). He brought them "because they came from a place close to his town of Simraun Gadh^[*] ," but his own royal priests were the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans from Kanyakubja. As the Kanyakubja Brahmans did not have enough Kanyakubja Brahman families to marry with in "Nepal" (that is, the Kathmandu Valley),^[5] Harisimhadeva^[*] repeatedly brought in new Brahmans from Kanyakubja. Even now, this particular account concludes, the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans have a barely adequately sized group for marriages.

The legend that we have paraphrased reflects some historical reality. It seems generally accepted by historians that the Rajopadhyaya are of Kanyakubja origin, that they were associated with the Malla court, that they were dominant in that court among other Brahmans, and that they were centrally associated with the worship of the royal tutelary goddess Taleju. As a result of the integration of the new Malla dynasty with the preexisting society of the city into the historical synthesis that Bhaktapur looks back on as "Newar," this group of Brahmans were to become the Newar Brahmans, the only one of the various kinds of Valley Brahmans to become the focal Brahmans of the integrated Newar caste system.^[6]

From the earliest records of the Kathmandu Valley communities who were to become the Newars, there have been reports of Brahmans. Thus in the seventh century A.D. , the Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang wrote that the Licchavi Valley society was ruled by a Ksatriya^[*] dynasty, and that it had so many Brahman priests that he was unable to ascertain their exact number (D. R. Regmi 1969, 271). Inscriptions from Licchavi times refer to the "leadership" or eminent position of Brahmans (ibid., 272). What happened to these earlier Brahmans on the advent of the Kanyakubja Rajopadhyaya Brahmans? It is tempting to think of them as having become some of the lower-status auxiliary priests of Malla Nepal, but our own materials are silent on this.

Bhaktapur's Rajopadhyaya Brahmans consider themselves to belong to one exogamous lineage.^[7] There are two major groupings of this lineage within Bhaktapur, named in accordance with the areas in and close to which they live or, in the case of now scattered households, once lived. These are the Ipache(n) and the Cucache(n) branches. The Ipache(n) group are those who live in proximity to the Laeku or Durbar Square, and thus to the Taleju temple (map 6; above). Both of these sections contain certain families who have the hereditary rights to be Taleju priests. These "Taleju families" also are the ones whose jajaman s include those upper-level Chathariya families traditionally associated with the royal administration.^[8]

The city's two geographically based groups of Rajopadhyaya Brahmans are partially separated lineage groups. They worship at the same Digu god shrine but at a different time. They have two different Aga(n) Houses for many purposes (but on some occasions make use of the same one). Their separation implies that they are not affected by each others phuki birth and death pollution, but the degree of relations they do have means that they cannot intermarry. Because there are no local Rajopadhyaya families into which they can marry, all Bhaktapur Rajopadhyaya men have to find their wives elsewhere, usually among the Rajopadhyaya women of Patan or Kathmandu. Similarly, all the Bhaktapur Rajopadhyaya girls have to leave Bhaktapur for marriages in Patan or Kathmandu.

At the time of this study almost all of the adult male Rajopadhyaya Brahmans of Bhaktapur did traditional Brahmanical work, in contrast to Brahmans elsewhere, whom they characterized as often being "only Brahmans through their descent."^[9] The Brahmans' internal religion is a variant of orthodox Brahmanical practices. In contrast to "Sanskritized" Brahmans elsewhere, the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans do eat certain meat, that of the goat and duck, but other kinds of meat and certain foods (such as garlic or mushrooms) are improper for them. They deviate from such Sanskritized Brahmans most markedly because of their participation in the Tantric aspects of Bhaktapur's religion, as we have described in chapter 9. Within their own group the Brahmans must provide their own priests, a situation they share with the lowest thar s in Bhaktapur, those below the level that one or another kind of external priest will serve. A Rajopadhyaya Brahman's family priest or purohita must be someone who is not a patrilineally linked member of the family, and thus he must be linked through marriage to one of the family's men, with the important exception that the paju , the mother's brothers, or their sons are also not acceptable.

Rajopadhyaya Brahman boys learn Sanskrit, the reading and chanting of the Vedas, traditional philosophical and scriptural aspects of Hinduism, and how to conduct ceremonies and the like from their fathers and uncles, beginning with a three-month orientation instruction at the time of their Upanayana initiation to full Brahman status. Until about fifteen years before this study, there was also a special school in Bhaktapur where the Brahman students received extra training in Sanskrit and the Vedas from scholarly teachers. Much of their training came more informally from observations, instructions, and discussion—first on the practice and meaning of the worship that took

place in their own houses, and later, after their Upanayana initiation, while accompanying and helping their fathers and uncles as they performed ceremonies for others.

The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans have various functions as priests in Bhaktapur. Some are narrowly related to specific client families; others to the religious and symbolic life of the larger civic system. They act as domestic priests, purohita s, to a wide span of unequivocally "clean" thar s; one definition of being fully "clean" is precisely that a Brahman will serve as the thar' s family priest. Those thar s whom the Brahmans will serve as purohita are generally those at and above the status level X, in our listing of social levels m chapter 5, that is, from the lowest levels of the Jyapu thar s and above. In another socially circumscibed function, they serve the Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya thar s, as well as other families within the Brahman group, as guru s in the transmission of Tantric knowledge and in the conducting of some kinds of Tantric worship.

In addition to these services for client families, the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans have public functions. These include their essential representative position in the city at the summit of the purity-ranked aspect of the status system. In the terms of this system they represent the exemplary highest position. They help define, by means of contrast, king, aristocrats, and technicians of the ordinary, physical world in one kind of opposition, and the maximally impure, the untouchables, in another.

In the course of the public symbolic enactments of the annual festival calendar two major "focal" festivals (as we will call them) have as one central reference the royal palace in association with its temple complex, the king's tutelary goddess Taleju, the Malla king himself (represented by Taleju's chief Brahman), and the king's Rajopadhyaya "Guru-Purhohita. " The Taleju Brahmans are focal actors in these two major festival sequences Mohani and Biska:. In Mohani Taleju's chief Brahman presides over the sacrifices and the rites that bring the Goddess to her full power at the time of the agricultural harvest for "the protection of the city." In the Brahman's association here with king, palace, and Taleju, he is a focus of attention for the whole city. This royal context of power in a sense protects and isolates him as he represents publicly his role as a priest of the dangerous deities, a role that, as we saw in chapter 9, he usually performs in private arenas.

Some Rajopadhyaya Brahmans work as temple priests, pujari s, a function that, as we will note below, they share with other kinds of priests. Some also earn part of their living as public storytellers, re-

counting the stories of the Hindu tradition that form an important interpretive background for many of the city's ritual and festival activities.

In his central roles the Rajopadhyaya Brahman is a complex priest. On the one hand he is the exemplary pure figure of a "Brahmanical religion"; on the other he is the powerful priest of an extramoral religion of power.

Lakhae Brahmans

There are three or four families in Bhaktapur who have the thar name "Rajopadhyaya," but are considered to be of a separate and somewhat lower category. They are referred to as "Lakhae Brahmans," and do not seem to exist in other Newar communities (see chap. 5). They are interpreted in the way that intermediate-level thar s are usually interpreted as being the descendants of improper marriages, in this case of a Rajopadhyaya Brahman man to a Rajopadhyaya widow (these widows are not supposed to remarry) or to a previously married but separated Rajopadhyaya woman. The Lakhae cannot marry with the Rajopadhyaya proper and must find wives, with some difficulty, among village Brahman families. Their own priests are the ordinary high-status Rajopadhyayas^[*] . They themselves are family priests for certain of the thar s at and just above marginally clean status—the Dwi(n), Nau, Gatha, and Kau.

Bhaktapur's Non-Newar Brahmans

As we have noted the Malla kings were said to have brought other Brahmans from India in addition to the Rajopadhyayas^[*] . Since the Malla period there have been two such groups of Brahmans in Bhaktapur, who have lived there in separation from both the Newar Hindu and Buddhist community life. In this they resemble other such cultural isolates in Bhaktapur—the Muslims and the Matha^[*] priests (chap. 5). These two groups of Brahmans do not consider themselves to be either Newars or Newar priests. They are the Jha Brahmans (whose family name is "Misra") and the Bhatta^[*] Brahmans. Some Jha Brahmans work as temple pujari s and public storytellers in Bhaktapur, but most of them are professional workers in the modern political and economic sector of Bhaktapur and Kathmandu.

The Bhatta^[*] Brahmans, whose origins were in Maharastra^[*] , are found

in many Newar towns and villages. In Bhaktapur most of them are teachers and professionals, while members of some families are temple priests. Some work as purohita s for other Bhatta^[*] families. Members of two Bhatta^[*] Brahman families, however, have a closer, and in some respects curious, relation to Bhaktapur's Newar Hindu community life. They act as auxiliary priests to one group of families, a section of the Chathariya Kayasta^[*]thar called "Nakanda." In certain Brahman-conducted puja s held to cure illness or misfortune thought to be due to bad planetary influences, a mixture of different kinds of grain are held to the head of the sufferer. The families in this group then have the option of sending the grain to a Po(n) untouchable so that he may absorb the misfortune (which is what families other than those in this particular group would do) or else to send it along with valuable gifts to a Bhatta^[*] Brahman as an offering, a dana . Although the transaction may be phrased as a gift, a dana , it resembles in nature and function the offerings to lowest-status thar s, offerings that signal the inferiority and dependence of those thar s, and which serve to transfer pollution, as is suggested in the option of choosing either a Bhatta^[*] or Po(n) here.^[10]

This equivalence of Po(n) and Bhatta^[*] Brahman here suggests the polluting implications of many priestly services, and is typical of the situation of the "auxiliary priests," to whom we will now turn.

Overt Auxiliary Priests and Para-Priests

Rajopadhyaya Brahmans in Bhaktapur in discussions of "religious work" identify a group of "Karmacari," that is, "workers" or in this context "religious workers," whom we will group as "overt auxiliary priests and para-priests." These make up an important segment of traditional Newar society. Their services as a group are to all the clean or marginally clean segments of that society. They perform services necessary in the performance of various religious rites, and usually do these services for hereditary patrons, jajaman s, as the Brahmans themselves do. The various types of Karmacari listed are all members of thar s whose distinguishing traditional and hereditary function are these services even though many of their members now do other things. They perform either priestly functions during the course of rituals, or in the case of the Nau and the Josi (in their major functions), activities that are preparatory and prerequisite to participation in rituals. The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans often describe those auxiliary priests who

perform ritual work (as opposed to the preparatory functions of the "para-priests") as "kinds of Brahmans," and often claim that their powers are, or were originally, passed on to them through Rajopadhyaya Brahmans as the guru s who provided esoteric teaching and mantra s. This group of workers assist the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans in three ways: (1) the preparation for rituals, (2) assistance in doing rituals, and (3) the performance of rituals or aspects of rituals that would be polluting to the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, and which would compromise their ideal status. We will call this group of religious workers overt auxiliary priests, in distinction to the very low polluting thar s, whose essential priestly function is relatively covert and submerged and obscured by the more salient symbolic meanings and actualities of their traditional roles. We also find it useful to distinguish "para-priests" whose functions, in the terminology of the next chapter, are at the margins of the sacred.

Josi

There are presently in Bhaktapur two thar s whose name indicates that their members' traditional professions were astrology. The thar s and thus their members' surnames are "Josi" (often written in Newari as "Josi"), a name derived from "astrology," jyotisa^[*] in Sanskrit. One of these thar s is in the highest segment of the Chathariya group. The other is at the Pa(n)cthariya level. As is true of most upper-level thar s, with the exception of the Brahmans, most members no longer follow traditional occupations. There are, however, a few families at each level, some of whose members perform astrological work for individuals, and who transmit professional knowledge about jyotisa^[*] to new generations within their family. Some families in the Chathariya group have members who traditionally serve the Taleju temple, working there not specifically as astrologers, but for the most part as assistant priests.^[11] As astrologers, the Josis serve middle-status and upper-status people.^[12] They prepare a written record (jata :) of the time of the birth of children, an indication of their relation to the Nine graha , or "Planets," at their birth. The jata : in later life will be used by Josis in the determination of the proper sait , or astrologically proper time span, within which important activities should be initiated or avoided. The Josi's advice based on his interpretation of an individual's jata : is of particular importance in the determination of saits for rites of passage and also contributes to judgments regarding proper marriage partners. The Josi can also advise

on procedures for mitigating the ill effects of astrological conditions, and can help supervise the proper ameliorative worship. Finally, Josis help in determining the proper positioning and timing in propitiating the disturbed local forces when a home, temple, or other building is to be constructed.

Bhaktapur's Josis make their predictions and decisions for individual clients by comparing the information on an individual's jata : with a patra , an annually published astrological calendar. This generalized calendar, used throughout Nepal, is a reminder, in fact, that the Josi is concerned with worlds that are beyond Bhaktapur's civic mesocosmic system. He is concerned with the macrocosm represented by the graha s and with the individual microcosm. His function is to adjust those two realms so that the individual starting from his idiosyncratic position is able to periodically realign himself with the macrocosmic forces. In so doing he can then successfully fit into the ongoing moral, social, and religious patterns of Bhaktapur, the middle world properly presided over by the Brahman. The Brahman explains unfortunate events in terms of improper relations to the city's deities, or to bad karma caused by some moral error in this life or a previous one. The Josi ascribes unfortunate events most characteristically to a dasa , an astrological condition that can produce good or bad "luck," usually the latter.^[13] This luck, being astrologically produced, does not derive immediately from moral sources as bad karma usually does,^[14] nor does it derive from relations to the civic deities.

In his function as an astrologer the Josi is not, properly speaking, a priest. He puts individuals into a proper relation with a macrocosmic world whose divine representatives, the "astral deities" (chap. 8), have the most minimal meaning as "gods," being rather impersonal forces, and he characteristically does this through advice on timing and choices, which is not "worship" in any sense, not an attempt to influence the divine. He advises corrections and adjustments that allow people to get on with their ordinary lives, one aspect of which is the timing of puja s and ceremonies, the realm of the true priests. In his rectifying and enabling activities, he is like another "para-priest," the barber, who "mechanically" purifies people in a nonsacred procedure and prepares them for worship. As astrologers, the Josis do have second ary priestly functions. When bad fortune, or the possibility of bad fortune, is produced by a violation of order of certain types—those having to do with some reference to an astral deity, or, in the construction of a house, with the preexisting order of the space around and

under the house (symbolized as a disturbance of the supernatural serpents, naga s), the Josis advise on and often lead special restituting worship. They also act as auxiliary priests in some elaborate Brahman-led ceremonies, such as ceremonies for the cure of illness of high-status clients, and they participate as auxiliary priests to the Brahmans in the major Taleju ceremonies. In such helping roles they are not astrologers, but simply assistant priests.

Rajopadhyaya Brahmans claim that Brahmans could do astrological work (as they do in many parts of South Asia), but that they "have given this right to the Josis." Josis are considered by Rajopadhyaya Brahmans to have been derived by some sort of downfall from the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans.^[15] It is pointed out that they belong to the same gotra as the Rajopadhyayas^[*] , the Bharadvaja gotra . This puts them into a more intimate relation with the Brahmans than some of the other priests who are distinguished as "a kind of Brahman" in terms of their function but not in terms of their descent. The theme of fall in status, for the Josis from Brahmanical status, recurs in a variety of ways, as we will see, in regard to other auxiliary priests.

Acajus

There are in Bhaktapur two thar s with the that name Karmacarya, one among the Pa(n)cthar^[16] and the other among the Jyapu. The traditional profession of the men of these thar s is as a kind of priest called "Acaju" in Newari (from the Sanskrit Acarya , "spiritual guide or teacher," plus the Newari honorific particle ju ). D. R. Regmi, in a discussion of the Josis and Acajus in Malla Nepal, gives a useful orienting account of their still persisting functions (1965-1966, part II, p. 715):

The Acaju functioned as an inferior priest in all Brahman led households. They accepted daksina^[*] (gifts m money) as well as food m their host's house. . . . But they could not chant the Vedic mantras and also could not conduct the [Vedic] rituals. These were done by the Brahmans alone. The Acajus and Josi, however, were indispensable for any ritual. The Josi was concerned with the task of finding out an auspicious time for any kind of rites to be performed. The Acaju helped to arrange methodically the requirements of the ritual performance. He prepared the ground work for the actual rite. It was left for the Brahman priest to use them.

As the Josis, in addition to being assistants to the Brahmans, have their independent function as astrologers, the Acajus also have an independent function. The Acaju are Tantric priests in public settings. This

has lead to an impression in certain accounts of the Newars that only the Acajus work as Tantric priests and that the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans never do. Like many of the auxiliary priestly performers, they undertake tasks that would be improper for the Brahmans, at some cost in status for themselves. However, in this case it is not the function itself from which the Brahmans are protected, but, as we have discussed in chapter 9 in the Tantric context, its public performance. The Acajus also serve as surrogates for members of upper-status households in Tantric rituals in those cases where household members do not have the proper initiation or, sometimes in recent years, the available time to perform them. They also conduct ordinary Tantric puja s for their clients. In elaborate rituals with Tantric and sacrificial components (for example, the major rites of passage and rituals for the establishment of a new house), the Acaju is required, for well-to-do upper-status and middle-status families, at least, as one of the priests in the ceremony. Here he is not only an assistant to the Brahman priest but also (in keeping with the public nature of the sacrifice) the performer of the sacrificial part of the ritual.

Among the Pa(n)cthariya Karmacaryas there are approximately eight groups, who are differentiated in part according to where in the city they live and according to the particular kind of traditional work that they do. The Jyapu Karmacaryas are unique in the Jyapu group in that they, alone, have the right both to wear the sacred thread and to have Tantric initiations and practices. In spite of this they are not ranked in the upper levels of the Jyapus, and the thar s that are in those levels (and cannot wear the sacred thread) will not marry them. When people in the lower levels of the status system were asked to rank Bhaktapur's thar s, they usually placed Brahmans, Josi, and Karmacarya, in that order, at the top, because of their priestly status. In fact, among their peers the Pa(n)cthariya and Jyapu Karmacarya both have what would seem to be a more depressed status than their priestly status accords them in the point of view of those well below them.

Like many other kinds of priests, including the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, members of the Karmacarya families also work as temple priests at many of the city's temples and shrines.

Tini

In Bhaktapur's status hierarchy there is one thar placed below the Pa(n)cthariya level and above the great mass of Jyapu or farming thar s.

This is the Sivacarya ("Acariya of Siva") thar , whose members are priests, in Brahmanical phrasing, "a kind of lower Brahman." The priests of these families (and their members in general) are called "Tini."^[17] It is said that the Tini exist only in Bhaktapur and in some surrounding villages. In the other Newar clues their special functions are performed by Karmacaryas.^[18] In Bhaktapur a Tini priest is required during two important rites of passage. He is necessary for the performance of a purificatory fire ceremony, the gha:su: jagye ceremony, among middle and upper thar s, performed (depending on the particular thar 's customs) on the eleventh or twelfth day after a death (app. 6). The Tini priest makes a fire on the cheli of the house. Offerings to the fire are considered as offerings to Siva (which is sometimes given in partial explanation of the thar name of the Tini, "Sivacarya"). In the course of this fire ceremony the Tini makes a meat-containing offering of samhae to the fire. It is believed that the smoke of the fire will penetrate the house and drive out the evil influences of illness and death.^[19] Members of the family and at least one representative from each household of the extended phuki (who have shared in the death pollution) hold their hands over this fire to purify themselves and the members of the households whom they represent. In the course of the gha:su: jagye ceremony the Tinis have (in contrast to Karmacarya priests) the right to read verses from the Veda, which they possess in a simplified version in manuscripts passed on in their families. They also have the right to transmit, know, and use Vedic mantra s. The other important general community use of the Tini is as one of the necessary assistant priests to the Brahman (the others being Acajus and Josis) during the mock-marriage ceremony, the Ihi ceremony (app. 6).

The Tinis are the purohita s, the family priests, of the families of the Bha thar , a thar of borderline clean status, whose members have, as we will see below, their own contaminating priest-like function. In terms of their right to know Vedic mantra s and read the Veda, their status, by traditional criteria, would approximate the Brahmans. Tinis are explained as being a "kind of Brahman" probably "fallen" because of some irregular marriage, although in contrast to the Josis with their Taleju functions, the connection to the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans themselves seems much vaguer. In contrast to the work of the Josis as astrologers, which Brahmans say that they could do but delegate to others, Brahmans say that they themselves could not perform the gha:su: jagye ceremony without losing their Brahman status. This is because that ceremony has to do with the removing of pollution, a pro-

cedure that always depresses the status of those who do it. This illuminates both the anomalously low status of the Tinis—they are lower than any of the other upper-status sections—Brahmans, Chathariya, and Pa(n)cthariya—and their protective or surrogate function for the high-status Rajopadhyaya Brahmans.

Purity Technicians With Limited Functions

The four Newar thar s we have considered so far—Brahmans, Josis (in the priestly component of their traditional functions), Acajus, and Tinis—are "priests" in the sense that they have the legitimate right and proper traditional knowledge to perform services for their clients that mediate for these clients in their relations with deities. Although, as we have argued, their statuses are depressed in their relation to the highest segments of the social hierarchy, their statuses are still high in the larger system and their polluting force and meaning for others is overtly simply the usual relations of higher and lower in the macrostatus system.

There are a number of other thar s whose traditional activities are necessary for the religious life of the city—both for that led by priests and for individual or household worship. Some of these are craftsmen, producers of objects necessary in worship. These include the Pu(n), painters of religious images and mask makers; the makers of images in metal (Tama: and the "Buddhist" Sakya), stone (Loha[n]ka:mi) or wood (Ka:mi); the growers of flowers for religious use (Gatha); and the potters (Kumha:). There are also shopkeepers whose shops sell supplies and equipment necessary for performing puja s. These craftsmen and suppliers occupy a span of statuses, and are not apparently differentiated from other craftsmen or suppliers—either elevated or depressed in status—because they happen to make or deal with religious objects as one of their services.

There is another group of thar s whose status is what we have called "marginally pure"; that is, they are all polluting to the highest thar s who will not accept water from them, although the middle groups will. They are in the same level in the macrostatus system (level XIII; see chap. 5), a level that is intermediate between the clearly clean thar s above them and the clearly polluting ones below them. There are miscellaneous justifications given for the low status of the various thar s in this level. Three of them, however, Bha, Nau, and Kata:, perform neces-

sary services for higher thar s that allow for the restoration of purity or in the case of the Bha a human form for the soul after death, and in so doing acquire pollution themselves. A fourth, Cala(n), carrying a torch and a pair of cymbals, walks at the head of funeral procession to warn people because of the danger of crossing in front of it.^[20] These four groups are included by Brahman informants as Karmacari, religious workers in contrast to the craftsmen and suppliers on the one hand, and the lowest thar s whose "priestly" functions are covert, on the other. Insofar as they may be defined as enabling , through their actions, the ritual states and behaviors presided over by priests, we may call them, as we did the Josi, "para-priests." In addition to the Bha, Nau, Kata:, and Cala(n), there was in the recent past an additional such group in Bhaktapur, the Pasi, whose function was to wash and thus purify the clothes of a family's "chief mourner" on the day of his purification after ten days of ritual mourning (app. 6).^[21]

The Bha

The Bha, or Bha(n), have the thar name "Karanjit." In the course of death rituals for upper-status thar s, during the first ten days following death a Bha acts as an instructor and assistant to the chief mourner (the kriya putra , usually the oldest son) in a bereaved client household, and constructs some of the objects used during this period (app. 6).^[22]

On the tenth day, the final day of the mourning period, the family makes a presentation of substantial gifts to the attending Bha for the special work he must now do on that day. During the ten days after death the spirit of the dead person, which has been in the dangerous and marginal form of a preta , has been forming its "spiritual body" piece by piece in a definite sequence, and by the tenth day that body is completely formed (app. 6). The relation of the Bha to this formation, and one of the reasons be is given substantial gifts on this day is not discussed publicly, in part to protect the public reputation of contemporary members of the thar and thus to ensure that the custom will continue.^[23] Chattopadhyay (1923, 468) quotes from Brian Hodgson's early nineteenth-century descriptions of the functions of the various Newar thar s that

The Bhat [Bha:] are also connected with funerals; they accept the death gifts made on the eleventh [now, for Bhaktapur's upper thar s, at least, the tenth] day after the funeral of Newars of any caste (excluding outcastes) [now in Bhaktapur only for Pa(n)cthariya and above]. In the case of the Ksatriyas^[*]

[Pa(n)cthariya and Chathariya] it is mentioned that a piece of the brain of the deceased is kept covered with sweetmeats, the rest of the body being burnt, and this is eaten by the Bhat on the eleventh day as he accepts the death gifts.

The death gifts that the Bha is now given include such substantial items as clothes, shoes, hats, mattresses, kitchen pots, drinking vessels, and substantial quantities of food. The Bha, it is said, is now often given a bit of ordinary food to eat, rather than a part of the dead body, but this "ordinary food" may, in at least some, perhaps in most, high-status cases, be boiled rice previously touched to a fragment of one of the corpse's bones. This ingestion by the Bha is said to ensure the preta 's eventual reincarnation in a human rather than an animal form. Another possible function (and alternate explanation for the Bha's action) may be to ensure that the spirit itself has completed its change from preta to human-like form (app. 6).^[24]

Brahmans say that if a Brahman were to go to the house of a mourner on the tenth day and were to eat anything, or to accept any offering, he would lose his status as a Brahman. In other parts of South Asia, similar ingestion is or was done by a Brahman himself on the death of people of very high status. The Brahman was then very highly compensated, but had then to live in exile outside of the community.^[25] The Bhas relieve the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans of such unpleasant responsibilities. The Bhas are said by Rajopadhyayas^[*] to be a fallen Brahman group, and they are, in fact, referred to in some texts as Mahabrahmana^[*] , "Great Brahmans."^[26]

The Cala(n)

Members of the Cala(n) thar are placed second in upper-status funeral processions where—carrying a torch in one hand and small cymbals, which they clang together, in the other—they warn people that a funeral procession is coming, and thus prevent them from crossing in front of it at a crossroads, which would produce misfortune for all concerned.

The Kata:

The traditional function of the Kata: for upper-status families, performed by women of this thar , is to cut and tie the umbilical cord after birth, and to remove the polluting placenta and bury it outside of the city boundaries.

The Nau

The Nau are the barber thar . The men of this thar work as ordinary barbers, but both the men and women of the thar are necessary for the major purification procedures required by the middle-level and upper-level thar s following periods of pollution (usually the result of death or births within the phuki ) or in preparation for some major puja or rite of passage. The Nau's functions, as we will argue in the next chapter, are outside of the realm of priestly ritual as such. However, they, like those of the other para-priests, belong to the larger symbolic context of purity and impurity within which those rituals exist. The Nau remove impurity as an essential precursor to ritual action.

Hindu Use of Buddhist Priests

The Newar Buddhist Vajracarya priests have sometimes been referred to as "Buddhist Brahmans" (e.g., Greenwold 1974), but this is misleading. The roles they play within the Newar Buddhist community itself differs from that of the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans for the Hindu community in important respects. The Vajracaryas perform many of the functions (astrology, Tantric sacrifice, aspects of death ritual, etc.) that the non-Brahman priests and para-priests do in the Newar Hindu system, and they also perform healing procedures done in Hindu Bhaktapur by special thar s of healers. The fact that the Vajracaryas can perform these functions without compromising their status indicates an important difference between the Hindu Newar system and the "Hinduized" Buddhist Newar system. The Hindu Newar opposition and interplay between the traditional system of purity, headed and symbolized by the Brahman in his protected public image on the one hand and the "nonmoral" supernatural transactions, particularly those of the Tantric system, on the other, is blurred in the Newar Buddhist system, altering, among other things, the comparative significance of Newar Buddhist Tantra and of the Newar Buddhist high priests.^[27]

There are various ways in which the Vajracarya participate in the Hindu-centered system. People in the middle and lower thar s may use Vajracaryas as astrologers or healers. Toffin (1984, 230) has reported of Newar communities elsewhere in the Kathmandu Valley that some thar s use Vajracarya priests in the purifying (and contaminating) gha:su jagye ceremony to remove the contamination of a death from a house, a ceremony that is performed by Tints in Bhaktapur. Some thar s in Bhak-

tapur (chap. 5) use Vajracaryas as family priests, either exclusively, or, in the case of middle-level thar s, in some combination with a Brahman purohita . These clients include both the more properly "Buddhist" thar s and marginally clean thar s. Some marginally clean thar s are served by the Vajracayas as family priests, as others are by Tini and Lakhae Brahmans. This service is, perhaps, in large part, an opportunistic profiting from an economic opportunity left open to Vajracaryas and these other priestly thar s by the purity constraints preventing the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans from working with families below the Jyapu level.

We must include one residual service of Buddhist priests to Hindu Bhaktapur. An important segment of one of Bhaktapur's major Hindu festivals, the climactic festival of Mohani, centers around the "living goddess" Kumari, incarnated in an upper-status Buddhist girl (chap. 15). Certain Vajracarya priests play a part in the selection and maintenance of that child deity.

Covert Para-Priests: The Pollution-Accumulating Thars—Po(n) and Jugi

The sector of Bhaktapur's symbolic civic order in which the Brahman has a supreme and ideal position is ordered through the idiom of purity and pollution. The auxiliary priests and para-priests in this system protect the Brahmans' position by performing the polluting and other unseemly actions that the civic ritual system requires. The ritual and enabling functions of these "religious workers" are clear, and centrally define their differentiated traditional thar duties. In contrast to this group are those lowest thar s in the city, whose polluting power is centrally and obsessively emphasized (see fig. 21). These groups, locally conceived in some contexts as the antithesis of the Brahman, can hardly be conceived of in Bhaktapur as "kinds of Brahmans" and in contrast to the other figures we have been discussing, including the Buddhist Vajracarya, are not included on Brahmans' lists of "religious workers." Their functions as "religious workers" are ideologically hidden. In an analytic view, however, they are clearly para-priests, essential enablers of ritual action.

It is now widely recognized, following Hocart ([1950] 1960), that an important function of the lower castes is to absorb pollution from the higher ones, and thus to maintain their relative purity and the hierarchical system dependent on it. Hocart notes the remark of a Tamil in-

[Full Size]

Figure 21.
Untouchable Po(n) children.

formant about the barbers' traditional function in cremations that the barber is "like a priest on the cremation ground." Giving other examples of such funeral functionaries, Hocart concludes, "The barber and the washerman, like the drummers, are not so much technicians as priests of a low grade, performing rites which the high-caste priest will not touch" (ibid., 11). Gould has called the whole class of low-status Sudra jati s "contra-priests." These were the groups "at the bottom of Hindu society who practiced such defiling occupations as washing clothes, barbering, sweeping, removing dead animals, midwifery, and cremating the dead. As it were, they absorbed the defilement in dealing with blood, death, and dirt so that the rest of Hindu society could be free of it and partake of the rituals that prepared the ground for rebirth into ever purer occupational categories" (Gould 1971, 11; see also Gould 1958). Gould notes Dumont and Pocock's remark that what is specifically Indian in the attempt to control defilement is "the employment of specialists who take upon themselves a part of the impurity, and to whom it remains permanently attached" (Dumont and Pocock 1959, 18; quoted in Gould 1971, 12).^[28] Such "contra-priests," "by virtue of their specialized ritual functions, live permanently in that state of impurity which they help others to abandon as rapidly as possible" (Dumont and Pocock 1959, 18).

Many of the auxiliary priests and para-priests perform polluting tasks, and this is related to their relatively depressed statuses. The polluting entailments of their tasks are secondary to the importance of those tasks, however, and seldom are salient; they are, in fact, usually muted in public discussions. If their statuses are relatively depressed, they are still found in all the clean ranks of the status system. The "impurity" of these people is simply the relative impurity that distinguishes each stratum of the macrostatus system from those above it. But there are some low thars whose "permanent state of impurity" is their major defining characteristic, their most salient meaning to others, and whose priestly functions are secondary or covert.

For all people in Bhaktapur the dramatically polluting thar s are represented by two, the Po(n) and the Jugi. There are other low thar s that are near them in status. The Nae, the butchers, are just above the Jugi in status, and in principle almost as polluting, and the remnants of some very low thar s—the Do(n), and Kulu—intermediate in status between the Jugi and the Po(n)—are also found in the city. However, these other thar s are almost never discussed in talk about the impure. That talk, often full of feeling, focuses on the Jugis and most emphatically on the

Po(n)s. People are deeply concerned (in ways that will be presented elsewhere) with the conditions of life and the nature of these two groups in an orienting and defining contrast with their own way of life and their own nature.

The Naes (like the borderline clean thar ) are unclean because of what they do, the necessary service they perform, namely, killing water buffaloes as the main source of meat not derived from family sacrifices. However, the central service that the Po(n)s (and, secondarily, the Jugis) perform is to accumulate pollution in particularly dramatic and—for the Po(n)—multiple ways, in short, to be unclean . The various polluting services that are assigned to them are in part justifications and attempts at objectification of their theoretical uncleanliness.

The Po(n)s in Bhaktapur have many of the functions that were classically associated with untouchables throughout much of South Asian history. They are fishermen; as the Naes kill water buffaloes, they kill fish, the fish being (traditionally) bartered and now often sold to other thar s for food The Po(n)s, in Malla times, were executioners, and thus also takers of human as well as animal life.^[29] Most saliently now the Po(n) are "sweepers." They clean the streets, which entails the cleaning of much human and animal feces, and they remove excrement from house latrines and from the special fields used in the city for defecation by people without access to latrines. Traditional Indian untouchables, the Candala^[*] , in addition to being executioners, had "as their main task . . . the carrying and cremation of corpses" (Basham 1967, 146). Bhaktapur's Po(n)s have a narrower funerary function. They must remove the mats and cloths with which bodies are covered during funeral processions from the cremation grounds, after which it is generally believed they use them as ordinary cloths and mats in their houses. As elsewhere in South Asia (e.g., Stevenson, 1920, 352) the Po(n)s are prominent after eclipses, when they go throughout the city receiving alms from anxious householders, thus drawing on themselves the bad influences associated with eclipses. Similarly, as we have noted in conjunction with the Bhatta^[*] Brahman, an offering may be made to a Po(n)—equivalently to the offer to the Bhatta^[*] Brahman—in order to remove astrologically produced misfortune.

The Po(n) have the vital function of making the city's organizing pollution system real , in the sense that they bring it into contact at its lowest point with a sensorially accessible world of real pollutants, and with the most dramatic of these, feces. In their degraded conditions of life they also make real the penalties of bad karma , and they thus vali-

date the whole system of community dharma and help motivate people's adherence to it. Uniquely among the accumulators of pollution the Po(n)s must, as untouchables had to in South Asia since very early times (e.g., Basham 1967, 146), live outside the city, the city boundaries being in part defined by their external residence. In Malla and Rana Nepal they were not supposed to enter the cities after sundown, and there were strict limits on the kinds of houses they could build and clothes they could wear.

The Po(n)s were clearly marked and distinguished as those beyond the community who helped to define that community. However, in contrast to other images of the outside and beyond—other kingdoms, non-Newars, wild beasts—the Po(n)s are integrated into and controlled by the city, they are part of the city system, essential for its symbolic ordering. They belong to the defining, bordering outside. When people variously placed in Bhaktapur's social system talk about the Po(n)s, it is evident that the Po(n)s represent in a fantasy augmented even beyond the unpleasant reality of their condition what would happen if one ceased to follow the sometimes onerous duties and restrictions of the ordinary daily religious and moral code. Life would be disgusting, impoverished, without decency. People sometimes say, "Without the protection of the dharma we would all be like Po(n)s." The Po(n)s, in their maximal accumulation of poverty and social disability, represent the realization of the important sanction of the bad rebirth resulting from violations of dharma , as well as the "state of nature" resulting from the rejection of social order. While people tolerate and understand and feel helpless to prevent other groups rejecting their traditional stigmatizing thar duties, there is widespread and passionate agreement that the Po(n)s must continue their work, and stay in their proper place. They are (as reflective citizens of the city articulate) as essential to the organized city order as are the Brahmans. Their function in this order is, then, not only in their particular necessary cleaning (and, traditionally, murderous) activities but also in the general meaning, value, and emotion, which accrues to them, which is strongly supported by the realities of their life, and which helps maintain and make sense of the city system. The Po(n)s not only are the "contra-priests" par excellence to the Brahman but also are joined with him in a special segment of Bhaktapur's symbolic order, the realm of the priests and the ordinary civic dharma .

"Po(n)," the ordinary term used to refer to this group, has a pejorative quality. The members of the group use the relatively neutral term

"Pore" (in Kathmandu Newari, "Poriya"; in Nepali, "Pode^[*] ") to refer to themselves. This term is also often used by others alternatively to Po(n). There is, as there is for almost all low thar s, an "honorable" and polite term that can be used in reference or in addressing them, namely, Dya:la. This refers to their activities at the Astamatrka^[*]pitha s outside the city. "Dya: " means "deity," and "la " is of uncertain reference for our informants.^[30] Members of the Po(n) thar are assigned by their thar council in rotation to attend the pitha s, where they gather remnants of food offerings made to the deity and bring them to their households for food. The Po(n)s here, as the Jugis do for some food offerings within the city (see below), join the other protective absorbers of food offerings to deities that must be discarded—crows, dogs, the goddess of the crossroads or chwasa , and the river. They also have a responsibility for caring for some of the mandalic^[*]pitha s and cleaning them.^[31] This has sometimes been interpreted as a duty in which the Po(n) is a guard or a "keeper" (e.g., Manandhar 1976, 222), or even a "priest" (D. R. Regmi 1965-1966, part II, p. 576), but now, at the least, it resembles the Po(n)'s other functions, the cleaning up and absorption of polluted materials.

The Po(n) is a para-priest in that he performs functions that permit the priest's activities, functions that are defined in the religious theory of the city. However, there is a final implication to his role, suggested, for example, by his alliance with the crows, dogs, the goddess of the crossroads, the river, and the Jugi in the absorption and rendering harmless of food offerings. In these functions the dogs and crows are often thought of as quasi-deified agents of Yama, the ruler of the underworld, and the river as the goddess Ganga^[*] . As some Po(n)s as well as others are aware the Po(n) is very much like that class of deities who operate outside of the realm of dharma and pollution, who operate through power. While degraded in the moral world, there is present in the ideas and emotions about the Po(n) the uneasy sense that he has the power to transcend it.^[32]

Inscriptions from the Malla period already indicate the presence of the "Jugis" in the kathmandu Valley society. The Jugis (Kathmandu Newari, Jogi), also known as "Darsandhari^[*] ," their thar name, and as "Kapali" and "Kusle,"^[33] are believed (by themselves and others) to be descendants of followers of the Natha yogi Gorakhnath who may have been members of the Kanphata^[*]yogic order (cf. Briggs 1938; Das Gupta 1969, part III).^[34] Bhaktapur's Jugis now consider Gorakhnath to be

their main deity, and their traditions and legends of their ancestry reflect something of these origins. Uniquely among Bhaktapur's Hindus they are not cremated but, in the ideal practice for Hindu renouncers, both men and women are buried in a sitting meditating position. Whatever dim remnants of their traditional practices still remain, they are an important part of Bhaktapur's craft and symbolic organization, and in the latter rank with the Po(n) as obsessively considered examples of pollution. One of their special thar professions within Newar society is that of tailors, work generally assigned to groups of very low status in traditional South Asia. They are also the traditional players of a musical instrument of special ritual and festival importance, the mwali , a double-reed instrument closely resembling the medieval shawm.^[35]

The Jugi's main traditional function for the city is in connection with the ceremonies that take place at the time of a death and also (depending on the customs and status of the particular thar ) on the fifth or the seventh day after it.^[36] Immediately after death while the body is being prepared in the family house for cremation, clothing is removed from the corpse and is brought, often by a daughter-in-law or a member of the funeral guthi , to the neighborhood crossroads, the chwasa . If a person is wearing only a small amount of clothing at the time of death, sometimes another article of his or her clothing is touched to the corpse and then discarded on the chwasa . A man of the Jugi thar^[37] must go to the chwasa and gather the clothes, presumably for his own family's use. On the fifth or seventh day after death a daughter of the bereaved household who has married out of the household returns. She boils rice on the cheli of the house. The rice is divided into three portions and worshiped by the household's chief mourner. One portion is placed under the eaves of the house and is later taken and thrown into the river, a second portion is offered to crows (messengers of the god of death) at the riverside, and a third portion is given to a Jugi, the same one who took the dead person's clothes earlier (see app. 6).

The Jugi's function here is clearly to receive and absorb death pollution and to dispose of problematic materials. As we have emphasized, in contrast to the "enablers of ritual purity" above him, he is, along with the Po(n), a focus for ideas and emotions about polluting thar s, whose person and conditions of life are disgusting. Upper-status discourse about pollution discriminates (or did discriminate in the years preceding this study) fine distinctions in the conditions in which Po(n) and Jugi could cause pollution, and the differences in purification procedures required.

The purifying workers above the Jugi and the Po(n) become polluted in the course of other activities. The barber, for example, in his cutting of hair and paring of finger and toe nails, helps separate those parts of the body, leaving the trimmed individual more "pure." The barber's low status is related to this work, but when he has finished, he discards the residues of hair and nails. The Jugis and Po(n), in distinction, must eat the polluted food that they collect and wear the death clothes. The pollution literally enters their being, accruing directly to their persons in a much more direct way than those above them.^[38] They are terminals for pollution.

The contrast between the Jugis and the Po(n)s, the classical untouchable, is, in part, quantitative—the Po(n) not only absorbs a part of the death pollution in taking the funeral clothes but also executes a wide range of polluting and sinful actions of use to the community. However, there are significant differences other than quantity. The Po(n) must live outside of the city (see map 4), which is an important part of his meaning. The Jugi not only lives within the city, but in contrast to many other groups who live in one or more enclaves in the city, the Jugis are widely scattered and distributed throughout the city (see map 10). Their contact with the clothes of a corpse is throughout the city at the chwasa s found in all the city's neighborhoods. In their outside/inside contrast the Po(n) and the Jugi reflect a difference we have seen in the placement and uses of the dangerous deities and, most particularly, the stone deities (chaps. 7 and 8). Some of those deities are located close to the outer borders of the city and represent the environing contrasts of the immediate exterior to the internal city as a whole. The pitha s of the Astamatrkas^[*] —where the Po(n) are, in fact, Dya:la—are the main physical representation of these outer deities. The other placement of dangerous deities is within the city as markers and protectors of many of the significant nested spatial units within which moral communities of various kinds—neighborhood, phuki , and household—carry on their dharmic moral relations. One of these is the neighborhood chwasa , the site of a goddess who moves pollution out of the area into some other realm, the place where the Jugi collects the death clothes.

The Jugi and the Po(n) also represent the ambiguous similarities and contrasts of the historical renouncer, as the Kanphata^[*] Yogis once were, and the outcaste. Both were beyond the civic dharma , beyond the differentiating system of pollution and hierarchy. It is not clear to ordinary folks at least (and that includes Bhaktapur's Brahmans in their attitude to visiting Sadhus from India, for example) whether the renouncer,

although he "transcended" pollution, might not be polluting to others. At the very least, people say in discussion of this issue, they are—as a result of their way of life—disgusting.

Po(n) and Jugi draw some of their meaning from groups that were "outside" the dharmic system but in different ways: the Po(n) from the untouchable groups beyond the moral pale of the traditional caste system, who became drawn into intimate and essential relations of service and meaning to it; the Jugis from the renouncers, who, rooted in the system, went beyond it, becoming ambiguous to those who remained "behind." The echos of these two contrasts to the city's ordinary citizens may be found in their contemporary similarities and contrasts.

The Jugis' main sources of income are as tailors and as musicians, playing instruments and music that are their thar specialties. Some families specialize in one or the other activity. Within the civic religious sphere the Jugis have thar rights and duties that are in contrast to their role as collectors and exemplars of pollution. The Jugis are thought to have their own Tantric tradition, knowledge, and initiation,^[39] and each year during a certain period (chap. 13) one Jugi dons a bone apron associated with Tantric "magicians" (both among the Newars and in Tibet) and walks around Bhaktapur accepting offerings and prayers as an incarnation of Siva as Mahadeva. Like the stone deities who accumulate and destroy pollution (among whom is the chwasa itself), the Jugi has the power to transcend the effect of pollution, and thus the system of ordinary dharma . At its lowest point, untouchable and renouncer become joined with king and Ksatriyas^[*] in opposition to those trapped in the interdependencies of the city.

Temple and Shrine Priests

At the time of this study there were approximately 119 temples and shrines in active use in the Newar Hindu system throughout the city.^[40] Thirty-five of these had no attending priests. The others had priestly attendants, pujari s, whose duty, for the most part, is to worship the deity twice a day, in the morning and the evening. Those temples whose deity may be the focus of an annual festival (chaps. 12-16) will have an additional image, a jatra image, which may be carried in a festival procession or otherwise shown to the public by the pujari . In the larger temples, above all in the Taleju temple, there may be a staff of priests with more elaborate responsibilities.

At the time of the study the pujari s included twenty-four Ra-

jopadhyaya Brahmans, one Lakhae Brahman, twenty-one Jha Brahmans, two Bhatta^[*] Brahmans, thirty-six Karmacaryas, and one Shaivite ascetic.^[41] The Karmacaryas are pujari s at those temples where blood sacrifice is required—the temples of Ganesa^[*] , and the temples and god-houses of the dangerous deities. The other pujari s serve the temples and shrines of the various benign deities in a seemingly random way as far as their relations to particular deities are concerned. The relations of particular priests to particular temples is a matter of the history of each temple—who built it, and for what purposes, and what happened subsequently. Shrines and temples built by the Mallas or Chathariya often have Rajopadhyaya pujari s, even if they are now of minor use. Some temples reportedly had Rajopadhyaya pujari s in the past, but as relations with patrons and the economic desirability of the position changed, were given over to one of the other groups. Some other temples were built by farming-level thar s, notably the Kumha:, the potters, and had Jha pujari s from the time of their establishment. Most of the temples with Jha pujari s are minor ones whose deities do not have jatra s. The most important temple they officiate at is the Dattatreya Temple, whose major importance is as a pilgrimage site for non-Newar Hindu pilgrims. The Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, although they serve many presently unimportant temples of the benign deities, still also serve most of the important ones—important in terms of either the status of their builders or their ongoing city-wide importance.

Some Remarks on the Status Of The Rajopadhyaya Brahman In Bhaktapur

For Newar Hindu Bhaktapur, the Rajopadhyaya Brahman is the Brahman. Other priests, including other kinds of Brahmans, serve to enable his functions in one way or another, and to protect his status. Most of these other priests and priest-like figures protect the Brahman's status by performing necessary services for the management of pollution and thus the restoration or protection of "ritual purity" (chap. 11). One priest, the Tantric Acaju, also protects the Brahman's status, but in this case not directly from pollution itself, but rather from the publicly visible performance of the morally equivocal act of blood sacrifice, an act that is permissible in esoteric Tantric contexts but not in public contexts where the Brahman must be the exemplary priest of the ordinary, purity-based dharmic civic system.

The civic elaboration of auxiliary and para-priests, both overt and covert ones, is derived in part from the Brahman's vulnerability to impurity. This vulnerability is reflected in an ambiguity and ambivalence regarding the Brahman's status both in his own view and the views of others, particularly upper-status people.

Lynn Bennett makes an observation about Indo-Nepalese Brahmans, which describes what is also a widespread South Asian pattern. When Indo-Nepalese Brahmans become economically and politically powerful, they "tend to give up their priestly work. They expressed the view that accepting dana and daksina^[*] [as purohita s] was somehow demeaning, like accepting charity" (1983, 251n.). It has been argued (and debated) that the acceptance of dana , a gift, is more demeaning or problematic than the acceptance of the ritually prescribed routine "offering" of daksina^[*] (see discussion and references in Fuller [1984, chap. 3]). Whatever the problems of the purohita , the salaried temple priest had, in other parts of South Asia, even lower status among Brahmans themselves. As Stevenson wrote of Kathiawar^[*] , although a temple priest in a big temple might become a wealthy man, "because he takes pay, he is not held in high esteem by other Brahmans" (1920, 377).

The reason why the dana or daksina^[*] may somehow compromise the Brahman is variously explained. Receiving payment for a service implies servitude. And what the Brahman may be paid for may be thought of as including the removal from the client of some substance-like sin and impurity, as well as simply guiding the client in that removal. This implication is clear in similar gifts elsewhere within the Brahman's realm. Why the Brahman is, or should be, somehow impervious to this is the subject of much Hindu apologetics.

All this has been taken to be problematic for statements that associate the Brahmans, "supreme rank" with their priestly function^[42] "For Brahmans themselves, as well as in the Brahmanical tradition as elaborated in the classical texts, the general notion is that priestly Brahman subcastes rank below non-priestly Brahman subcastes, and that Brahman individuals or families engaged in the priesthood are considered demeaned or degraded by their caste-fellows who are not" (Fuller 1984, 49). The argument (summarized in Fuller [1984, 62ff.]) is that Brahmans represent an ideal of purity that is, in fact, compromised by their priesthood, that the Brahman as priest is in a paradoxical position.

In Bhaktapur the Brahman cannot escape his priestly functions. The Rajopadhyaya Brahman, proud of his aristocratic historical alliance with royal power, boasts of his commitment and restriction to priestly

work in contrast to non-Newar Brahmans. In a traditional community such as Bhaktapur the Brahman must fulfill his priestly responsibilities, although when conditions change, motivated by the contradictions in his role he may try to escape them. But within that traditional context, in Bhaktapur's version of a climax Hindu community, the ambiguities and paradoxes in the Brahman's role help generate an elaborate system of social roles and of complex actions, ideas, evaluations, and symbols that are the very stuff of traditional Hinduism.